With a flex of Tercius’ {Stone Shaping} and a burst of magia, the cracked stone of the mountainside wall flowed like mercury and came back reformed into a singular piece, his barred entrance pristine again. This time, however, in a flash of tired inspiration, he had remade the outer wall a little bit differently…

A large fist shattered the first centimeter of stone into rubble as if shattering glass, only to impale itself upon the pointy and thin spikes of smooth stone that Tercius made just behind the superficial cover. In his candle-lit tent of stone, Tercius enjoyed the visceral scream from the other side.

The storm raged outside still, he could hear that much, and he had no clock to tell him time, nor did he see a ray of sunlight enter through the small air vents at any point since he closed off the entrance. Based on the amount of food he consumed, he could make an argument that around two days had gone by since he and Lucky entered their shelter, but it could easily be less or even more than that.

In that time, his shelter had been under constant assault by an ever-growing number of enemies. Half a dozen had turned to a dozen, a dozen grew to two, two to three. He knew that his channels were bound to attract these creatures, but just how many of them were there in the vicinity?

At first, they used rocks to batter down on his entrance, but he repaired what little damage was done easily enough. The true problems started after a particularly sizable fellow showed up. His fists had a Skill of some kind to them, one capable of shattering the stone wall to rubble. It didn’t take him long to pound his way nearly halfway through Tercius’ door.

After that, near-constant repair of the damaged walls became Tercius' primary focus. What sleep he had tended to be only in short bursts, mixed in between repairing and slowly and carefully reinforcing the entrance and the sides. He had to be very careful not to bring down tons of stone and rocks on his head nor impede fresh air and water from entering and smoke from leaving.

All that stonework took time and careful calculations, but far more time— more than everything else combined— was spent growing copious amounts of greenery for Lucky’s needs. Growing without the aid of the sun was hard. Luckily, he had some natural fertilizer to supplement the tiny patch of dirt…

As his Skills grew in level, the work was slowly but surely getting easier. Besides the {Stone Shaping} growing from [52] to [55], his {Green Hands} had grown from [45] to [53].

But there was a downside to that rapid development.

Sitting on his bed with his back leaning on the cold wall, Tercius struggled to keep his eyes open. He blinked slowly and sometimes his eyes stayed closed for a few seconds at a time, only to snap open when a crash from the outside sent vibrations through the stone around him.

Blinking rapidly, Tercius slowly inspected and then mended any and all cracks he found in the walls.

One of those moments of peace came and his eyes stayed closed, a small snore filling up the cavern. The giant ram followed the instructions given. He stayed quiet on his edible bed, ears flickering at every sound and rectangular eyes blinking.

When another round of attacks commenced, Tercius shook awake and with a deep breath cleared away the fog of dreams.

“No more harvest…” he murmured to himself as his mind bonded with the stone.

As soon as the attacks stopped, Tercius' eyelids fluttered, and back to sleep he went.

The near-constant harvests of energia made his two Skills grow and their efficiency ratio kept increasing, that much was true. Each pulse of magia spent now did more work than its predecessor, but with no sizable pause in between the pain-ridden trips to his anima, one preferably measured in days, he had slowly but surely sapped himself of mental strength. Not even the sleepless brews he kept taking doses of could help him stave off sleep, which in some other time and place would be a discovery he gave his full and utter attention to.

Right now, all that discovery got was a rain check.

Even though both he and Lucky were physically safe for now, mentally it was another story.

The cramped environment, by the giant ram’s standards at least, was getting hard on both him and Lucky. The palpable danger that was on the other side of the wall was not helping one bit, but he had to say that the ram was holding up better than Tercius thought he would. In fact, Lucky perhaps fared better than Tercius did.

The dull thumps, occasional troubling vibrations, and visceral screams of frustration were but a few of the things that went on in the background. When he had a moment to sit and think, he worried for his stores of food and water, his own and those of Lucky. He worried about Rona and Septimus. He worried about the possibility of some kind of organization among those creatures outside. For now, they went about their attacks almost mindlessly, but he knew that they had lucid states where their minds nearly reverted to the humanity they left far behind. Right now, he could keep going as they gave him windows of rest, but if they got any kind of semblance of order between them then his entrance would fall for no other reason than sheer exhaustion on his part.

Why the fuck was not the storm ending already?

When will the sun make those creatures run for their infernal holes?

{Distant Mind} helped him cope with all of it.

It provided some remoteness from his immediate circumstances, if only for a little while at a time. There was peace in the endless darkness and he certainly used it a lot. With his newly developed method of aiding the speed of Skill development, the high leveled Skill even rose from [61] to [63].

He repaired his shelter, ate, slept when he could, and recuperated as much as the circumstances allowed. The cycle repeated itself endlessly. He stayed far away from harvesting energia, letting time mend the burns he inflicted upon himself with overharvesting of energia. He did not trust himself not to eat too much too soon, but his body would not lie. The dry biscuits, dried fruits, and jerky kept disappearing one small bit at a time whenever his hunger grew enough to give audible signs. Just as his stores of food were halfway gone, the doses of the sleepless brew started showing signs that they were back to working as they should.

As the plague of sleep finally left him and his mental faculties worked their way back to more than just immediate matters of safety and survival, for the first time in what felt like days Tercius looked to the future.

The rain was not stopping. In fact, the thunder strikes seemed to only grow more and more frequent and pronounced, so much so that he barely heard the creatures that still lingered in front of his shelter. They were still there, but whatever sounds they made was muted by what went on in nature above. If he was a believer, he might think that the Stormfather was throwing one of his famous tantrums—

Tercius blinked. His cave-tent was dark, for he had only one more candle.

Of course! How did he not think of that earlier? If there was a spirit in the storm, or if the spirit was the storm, then… Well, he had no idea just what that meant for him.

First of all, the spirit would not be one of the Stormfather’s ones, for that Divine was one of the Imperial ones and they had no influence in Izmittor whatsoever, according to his grandmother, but it might be one of the ones of Divine Sky.

The old hunchback called Divine Sky as The Feathered One, but that was but one of many. Observer of Clear Skies, Lord of Gales— or Lady of Gales, in some places— Rider of Winds, Stormbringer… The list goes on and on. Unlike the Imperial Divines, the old Divines had whole lists of different names that the folk used to address them and were not as defined about it all as their Imperial counterparts.

Divine Sky was involved in everything that had to do with the sky, and in some places that reach extended to the stars while in others the stars fell under the Divine Light or even Divine Darkness.

Only in the Imperial Pantheon did the strict divisions exist, which is very likely the prime reason for their numerical superiority. While the Old Ones numbered somewhere in between one and two dozen and had little to no real hierarchy among themselves, the Imperial Divinities seemed to be a veritable army unto themselves with outlines of a kind of order amongst themselves. The popular Stromfather or the notorious Bloodmother were a few of those clearly standing at the very top, while the sheer multitudes of the minor Imperial Divines below them were likely in the upper thousands. There was likely no one person who knew them all.

From the edges of his awareness, a memory came to him.

*** *** ***

"The Unaligned are a special order of clergy—" Lux said as Tercius threw a knife. The knife flew true but missed the entire center by a few centimeters. "You're going against the wind, Tercius. Work with it. See where it comes from and adjust your throw.”

Tercius took a deep breath of focus and observed a licked finger drying. He then grabbed another throwing knife from the table and after a moment threw it. With a thump, the knife appeared on the very edge of the carved center.

Tercius looked at Lux.

The black-haired man crossed his arms across his chest and frowned at the wooden target as if the chunk of wood had done some offense to him. The scars across his tanned cheeks and short black and gray beard grew longer and somehow menacing.

“Better,” Lux reluctantly agreed. One hand jerked and three hollow thumps came from the target, one after the other. Tercius blinked at the unmoving knives that made a nice tight triangle in the very center of the small target. Each one was more than halfway embedded into the wood. And where the hell did he take out those knives from? His hand was empty!

“But still a long while away from passable.”

“This is literally the first lesson you are giving me…”

“Do you expect some kind of lenience on account of your ignorance, nephew?” Lux said, handing over a knife to Tercius.

Tercius tentatively took the knife by the pointy end. “No…”

“Good. Because you will not get it.” Lux jerked the other hand and a hollow thump came from the dummy. Embedded right in the middle of the three from earlier was a new knife. “Do you still want to be trained by me?”

“I… think I do,”

“Then you should know the most important thing about any kind of training.”

“And what’s that?”

“Every new day will be another one where you purposefully aim to surpass the highest achievement you did the day before.”

Tercius nodded. Gradual incrementation. “A simple enough principle.”

Lux smirked. “We will see if you think so in a month,”

For some reason, Tercius found the thin-lipped smirk deeply disturbing. “You were talking about the Unaligned…”

“Your father never spoke of these things to you?”

“No, never,”

Septimus never spoke of anything regarding the Empire’s Capital, Augusta Bellia, nor did Septimus know that Tercius knew of his origins for that matter, so Lux’s arrival finally allowed him some firsthand information about that part of the world.

Lux hummed in thought. “Very well. When that knife hits the very center, you will get the rest of the story.”

An hour later, Tercius’ knife scored the needed hit.

“Not bad,” Lux nodded as he made his inspection. “The Unaligned serve all Imperial Divines at the same time while giving preference to none. From time to time, they come down from their reclusive monasteries in the tall Endors and proclaim the names of the new Divines to the masses. While the rest go back, two or three of the Unaligned always remain in the Capital to form the core of the new clergy under that nascent Divine, leaving behind their white robes and taking on the colors of their new temple.

“The Empire always pays for the first temple, more often than not simply by refurbishing and reconsecrating one of the abandoned ones— there are always a few of those around some corner of the Capital— but every following temple comes solely from the work of the clergy.

“Whether they live and thrive or barely survive only to perish later is entirely left up to them.”

*** *** ***

Taking a deep breath, Tercius focused and banished the memories from surfacing further now. It was fascinating stuff, and many questions welled up in him in light of recent revelations, but he was getting on a tangent when he had more important things to deal with.

Storm spirits.

In one of Rona’s stories, the prominent spirit was a great thunderbird of roiling dark clouds and savage lightning. The storm that followed in its wake engulfed the lands for years, until one young woman found a way to communicate with the spirit. She helped calm the restless spirit with an offering. The spirit separated from the storm and took another form, which finally made the storm disperse and allowed the sun to shine again.

Assuming that the invocation worked, the true question here was should he act on the knowledge he had. Stories… It was funny how even now he still thought of Rona’s stories as just that— stories.

Tercius hummed to himself, trying to remember the exact details. The invocation from the story… was not that long nor complicated. It came to the tip of his tongue easily. He didn’t have the oud, though—

“The way you call out to them never matters, Tercy. As long as your heart stands behind it, they will answer.” a familiar voice said.

Swallowing a yelp, Tercius jerked away from the wall and shot up to his feet, spinning around to look behind him. Tentatively, he raised a hand and touched the darkness behind his bed. The smooth, cold wall that he made was all he felt. He snorted at his nerves. The isolation might be finally getting to him if he was hearing voices.

Behind him, somewhere in the darkness, Lucky bleated.

“Nothing to worry about, Lucky. It’s just me and you in here, and maybe a little bit too much of my imagination...” Tercius didn’t sit back on the bed, but rather slowly made his way through the dark and sat near Lucky. The difficulty of navigating the darkness was somewhat lowered with {Stone Sight}. When you knew where the stone was, all you had to do was avoid it. The strong exhales guided Tercius’ hand and he patted the ram’s ever-chewing muzzle. “I’m probably jumping to conclusions, right? The reasonable thing is to wait and see, right? The storm is probably completely natural and it will go away soon enough on its own…”

Lucky bleated.

“But… just in case I’m right, I better give my wait a limit. So… three more meals? Four? My meals, of course." he laughed a little. "If I went by yours, then the time passed would be measured in mere minutes…”

Tercius ate only when his stomach audibly demanded the meals. As the meals passed one after the other, the storm outside was getting worse. The strikes of thunder were as frequent as heartbeats and only they were heard above the howling winds. He didn’t even hear the creatures anymore, but they were still there. He had to repair his entrance constantly. The chill in his cave was such that he had to worm into all of the clothes he bought for himself.

As he finished the fourth meal, Tercius took a deep breath.

Should he do this? Maybe wait some more? Maybe fight it— No, he couldn't do that. Well, he could, but... Mistress Kalina said to avoid these beings at all costs, and to never allow any to scratch him with their talons— or worse, sink their teeth into his flesh.

How much time has it been? How many days since he entered this shelter and last saw the light of day? Could he wait any longer? Could Lucky? Could they afford to wait any more?

In the dark, he slapped his cheeks with a bit of force. "Pull yourself together... you need to do something. Waiting isn't working, this might. If not... then you know that only one option remains."

From the structure of his bed, he took a fist-sized piece of rock. His eyes lit up with glowing gray veins as stared at the piece and used {Stone Shaping} to make a crude idol of a bird, one that was left purposefully vague. While you could never tell which bird it was, there was no doubt that it was certainly a member of that species. Its wings were fully spread out, the tips and the beak pointing directly up.

Another chunk from the bed was made into a small dish, into which he scooped up a little bit of the soil from the corner of his shelter. From the saddlebags, he collected the final ingredients.

Lastly, he raised a low table out of the floor and arranged everything atop of it.

In a shower of flintstone sparks, Tercius blew until the last of the wood shavings he had caught on fire. Just before that tiny fire went out, he lit the last candle he had. With a knife, he split the candle into fourteen small parts and lit them all up one by one, arranging the candles around the small idol. Just outside of the circle of candles, he placed the dish with the dirt.

He sat on the floor with his legs crossed. His open palms were placed around the dish, pointing up. A little white away, Lucky observed everything. “If anything happens, no need to panic. Calm, Lucky. Calm.”

The ram bleated.

“Maybe I should put you to sleep first, just in case… Actually, no. We might need to run.”

Tercius took a deep breath and cleared his throat. “Warare— no that’s not it.” In his mind, he once more went over the entire thing. With his eyes closed and the voice of his grandmother in his mind, he tried again.

“Wahrare na ochathi moghathi mya

“Faele na tolvari dolmari mya

“Mtike na seaturu katuru mya

“Faele na tolvari dolmari mya…”

Slowly, he went through the entire invocation, word by word. When he finished, one green eye peeked open and looked left and right. Nothing seemed unusual… With both eyes open, he looked around and behind himself, finally standing up and taking a small walk to look behind Lucky, just in case.

“This isn’t working… Is that because of me or…”

Tercius sat back down and tried again. The result was the same. Nothing. The small candles melted quickly. With a push of magia, he moved the stone below each candle to create small indentations. The melted wax accumulated in the tiny pools, giving a little more life to each wick.

“Heart…” he murmured to himself as he watched one small flame dance. “I should… want them to come?”

Easier said than done.

Deep within, he knew with crystal clarity that he didn't want any spirit to come to his aid. Getting in touch with a spirit of his own volition could potentially bring more complications to an already complicated story. As much as he had been doubtful or outright dismissive of Rona's religion, justifying his interest purely to the curiosity of the local mythology, he had some awareness that there was more to his resistance. He had denied every of Rona's repeated efforts to get him to "commune with spirits" for that same reason. He had learned what he would need to do, but he never once dared do it. After all, the questions that he was not sure about getting an answer to should not be even asked yet.

Tercius looked at the dirt in the dish and sighed. Gently, his fingers touched the edges of the dish. Desire was one of the unseen hands behind the mechanics of energia, he had figured out that much long ago. Without a strong enough desire, energia would not engage in work.

Was he ready to get those answers?

No… not yet. At least, not all of them. But some… some of them he was no longer afraid of asking of whoever was needed.

The words came again slowly, whispered rather than properly spoken, while the sounds of an oud played in his mind.

“Wahrare na ochathi moghathi mya

“Faele na tolvari dolmari mya

“Mtike na seaturu katuru mya

“Faele na tolvari dolmari mya…”

As Tercius stopped, there was silence in his cave. Slowly, he opened his eyes and for a moment blinked in confusion. Then he realized what silence inside of his shelter meant. No wind howled outside anymore, no thunder struck.

Until one did.

For a moment, the world around him shuddered from an impact sent from the heavens. On the table, the dish moved, carried by vibrations. In his ears, a thousand tiny birds chirped with their electrical voices before a flat noise replaced it.

Lucky was up on his feet, his head nearly reaching the top of the shelter. Tercius didn't hear himself say any of it, but he repeated to the ram that he should calm himself. It had no help. The ram paced forwards and backward, just shaking his head. Tercius retreated back into the corner, just in case Lucky started jumping or something. There, he wouldn't get in the way.

While taking deep breaths, Tercius saw something that made him stop breathing entirely. Streaming through the air vents, right above the standing Lucky and his massive horns, were bright neon-blue fireflies. One moment they were there, the other they zagged across the shelter to stand before his face.

Zapping around, the fireflies formed a bird no bigger than a nail on his hand. It flapped its tiny wings, while seemingly looking at him. It tilted its tiny head and without a skipped beat, the bird streamed forward and embedded itself right between Tercius’ eyebrows, leaving a tiny scorched mark.