The sun shone brightly through the tent as I sat up quickly, my eyes squinting against the glare. Confusion filled my thoughts for a moment as my eyes took in the rough canvas surrounding me and the almost unseen orange-red mist filtering into the tent through the narrow slit of a door. That passed swiftly as my brain ratcheted into gear and I recalled where I was and what I was doing there. I sighed and rubbed my gritty, tired eyes.

“How long was I out?” I asked Sara silently.

“About six hours.”

I nodded. My dreams had been strange and disjointed, full of shadowy figures with unseen faces and vaguely threatening monsters lingering at the edge of my consciousness. At least I knew where the images came from; the press of the hungering against my turning shield and the shadow-drenched faces of the villagers both lingered clearly in my mind.

“What was the deal with that, anyway?” I asked Sara. “Why couldn’t I see their faces once Vasily broke the village’s bond with me?”

“I can’t say for sure,” she hedged. “However, my best guess is that the Sun’s Peace isn’t just a bond; it also shields the villagers from the effects of the moons, at least to some extent. When you were bonded to them, you probably saw them through the spell itself; once you were cut off, there simply wasn’t enough moonlight reflecting from them to illuminate them fully.”

I sat quietly, letting my mind kick fully into gear and suppressing a yawn.

“It’s still early in the day if you want to rest, John.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know that sleeping any more will help, as odd as my dreams were. I just need to get moving and do something. My brain will catch up.” I hesitated. “Could we maybe work on another spell?”

“It depends on the spell,” Sara laughed. “We didn’t get to read the entirety of Viora’s spell book, after all, so I can’t just create any spell that you might want.”

“Well, I was thinking that if I can use solar magic to empower my strikes, maybe I could use it to add heat or fire damage to them,” I reasoned. “Or even to damage them directly. If I could project a burst of it, like a laser, it might work like a crossbow, only better.”

“I don’t know what a laser is,” she hedged, “but from the context, I get what you’re talking about. However…” She paused. “I didn’t see anything like that in the spells we examined, John. They were all about healing and support. You’ll have to pretty much build it yourself from scratch.”

“I think it’s worth a try,” I said after a moment’s hesitation. “At least, I’d like to give it a shot.”

“Okay. Well, we just have to go through the steps. It’s probably best to head outside. It’ll make gathering the power around you simpler, and if something goes wrong, you’ll be less likely to destroy something.”

The sun was high in the sky when I stepped outside. Vikarik lay in front of Renica’s tent, and when I exited mine, the cairnik raised its head to look at me and gave me a low growl.

“Relax, girl,” I said quietly. “I’m not going to bother your mistress.” I walked away from the tents to an open area, pretending to ignore the canine but keeping my ears trained on it, just in case. I didn’t want the thing attacking me from behind, after all, and it had never exactly been friendly. Once I got out of sight, though, it stopped growling, and I settled in to try and create a new spell.

The entire process was much, much harder than empowering my axe blows had been. Then, I was doing something I’d already done before; I knew it was possible, I just had to break down exactly how I’d been doing it. This time, I was trying to create something using nothing more than my own imagination, plus a few comic books and superhero movies for inspiration.

In fact, for my first attempt, I tried to replicate the heat vision that was so common among superheroes. I pictured solar raju gathering around me, swirling closely, and pooling before my eyes. The brilliant flash that followed nearly blinded me, and the world filled with swirling, purplish spots for several minutes afterward.

“Okay, bad idea,” I groaned, pressing the heels of my palms into my closed eyes. “No lights in front of the eyeballs. Got it.”

“I would have thought that was self-evident, John, but I guess not. You also might not want to gather it in your mouth – in case you were thinking about breathing fire.”

Honestly, that had occurred to me, so I couldn’t really reply in a properly snarky fashion. Instead, I tried again, picturing the energy pooling around my hand. I envisioned it as clearly as possible, seeing the power swirling into a single spot, then flaring outward into a beam of energy. I held the image loosely in my thoughts, directed power into it – and nothing happened.

“I don’t know if there’s enough energy there for that, John,” Sara suggested. “You might have to gather a lot more power and pack it really densely to create a beam of it.”

I spent another fifteen minutes trying to draw enough energy in for that, but I couldn’t make it work, no matter how I tried. The power simply scattered the moment it left my hand. I just couldn’t get it to stay together in a beam. I modified my image, trying to create a small flash of energy, instead. That gave me a sort-of-bright light that reminded me of a camera flash – and wasn’t even remotely dangerous unless you counted maybe blinding someone for a half-second or so.

Sara’s image appeared before me. “Okay, John, I see what you’re trying to do – but I don’t think it’s going to work.”

“We had laser beams on Earth,” I countered. “Those are just beams of light that could burn through things. This is the same sort of thing.”

“You’re talking about coherent energy pulses, and yes, that’s technically possible.” She hesitated. “However, creating coherent energy beams requires a much higher tech level than this world has. It also requires something to act as a medium to cohere the light, and you don’t have anything like that, I’m afraid.”

“Okay, you lost me,” I admitted.

She waved her hand in the air in a wiggly line, and five glowing lines appeared, one from each of her spread fingers, each a different color. The five lines moved in a smooth sine wave, one atop the other, the high and low points nestled within one another.

“This is an example of coherent energy,” she said. She made a face. “Well, sort of. The point is, you can see how the crests of each wave match, and so do the troughs, right?”

“Yeah, I see that.”

She gestured again, and the lines shifted so they weren’t matched up anymore. The waves moved at angles to one another, overlapped in odd places, and occasionally moved in the exact opposite fashion of each other.

“This is what energy normally looks like. It’s not lined up neatly and nicely, so it just kind of spreads out. To do what you’re trying to, you’d need a medium: a substance that forces the waves to move in the same direction and shifts them so the waves match.” She raised her hand, and a translucent, pink cube appeared in the middle of the waves. The five lines traveled into it in random directions but emerged perfectly matched.

“Sadly, this sort of medium doesn’t exist in this world,” she said. “Not unless its Tech Rating is way higher than I think it is. You’d have to replicate it with magic, and I have no idea how you’d do that. More solar raju wouldn’t work; it would just make the energy more chaotic, not less. You’d need something totally different that could absorb or cancel out the waves you don’t want.”

She gestured again, and the whole image faded. “Sorry. I can keep thinking on it, but I really can’t see a way to do it. Maybe if I had access to another spell book that already had a similar spell, I could replicate it, but without that…” She shrugged.

I sighed, defeated. “Okay, so we shelve that idea. What about making a weapon burst into flames?”

“Well, that should be a lot simpler. It seems like you’d just be taking the spell you already have and concentrating it, adding more power and focusing that power into the edge of the axe. Here, try this…”

That proved to be much simpler for me. It really was just a case of pouring more magic into the axe, then packing that energy into the edge of it until it flared with heat. It wasn’t really a flaming axe, but when I rested the glowing blade against a fallen branch, the wood burst into flame, and the axe sunk slowly through it.

The downside was that the heat radiated in all directions equally, so when the spell faded, it left my axe blade looking scorched and somewhat duller. That wasn’t going to work; a few uses of that might just make the axe brittle and shatter it. After thirty minutes of brainstorming, Sara came up with the idea of holding the heat just in front of the blade, not directly on it, with a second layer of power scattering the heat and acting like an insulator. The axe still got warm, but it no longer blackened and smoked, which was an improvement. However, the whole thing took a lot of magic to make happen.

Spell Created: Blazing Strike

Raju Required: 13 Solar per 10 seconds

You layer solar raju densely over a weapon. For the duration, the weapon inflicts fire damage in addition to normal damage.

With my current raju pool, I could keep the spell going for fifty seconds or so – or cast it five times for ten seconds each. I couldn’t even get it to a lower cost by shortening the duration; when I tried, I found that there was a critical level of raju that the spell needed to ignite, and once it did, it would last for around ten seconds before running out of juice. So, it was thirteen raju or nothing. That was an expensive spell – too pricey to play around with and get a feel for.

Instead, I spent the next couple hours exercising, shooting targets with my crossbow, throwing the knife and my hatchet at trees, and running through my axe forms. I did practice using my Solar Strike spell with those forms; just as I had when I was in Kuan, I wanted to make using the spell second nature, not something I had to stop and think about. It was much harder to do, because I had to keep the image of the spell in my mind as I used it each time, rather than just activating a technique and letting it happen, but that just gave me more incentive to work on it.

“You look like you’re pretty good at that.”

I spun, snatching up my hatchet and holding it ready to throw as the words broke through my focus. The glow building around my axe faded and died, and a brief spike of pain stabbed into my temples as the dropped spell backlashed against me. I winced, then lowered the axe as I saw Renica standing just outside the cleared area I’d chosen for my practice ground. She held her hands up at her sides, her face split with a grin.

“Hold on, there, scary man,” she chuckled. “It’s just me. Sorry for startling you.”

“It’s fine,” I sighed, slipping the hatchet back into its sheath. As I did, I called up my waiting notification as surreptitiously as possible.

Skill Gained: Weapon Focus (Thrown)

Weapon Focus (Thrown): Initiate 1

Benefits: You can throw small weapons without taking a penalty to attack or damage, You gain +1% Attack and Damage per rank when using small thrown weapons.

“I was probably too into my training, anyway,” I added, dismissing the welcome message.

“Well, I am a hunter,” she reminded me, lowering her hands. “I know how to move quietly and stay unseen.” She walked over to the targets I’d set up, chunks of darkwood bark about the size of a human chest I’d cut from the nearby trees. She fingered the holes in them and nodded. “Not bad, Ionat. If this had been an omeni or cairnik, you’d have gotten their heart two out of three times.” She grinned. “Only one in two if it had been a cerbak, though.”

“That just means I’d need two shots,” I chuckled.

“You’d only get one before it ran,” she pointed out. “You have to make that one count. That’s why I aim for the rear thigh, not the chest. It’s easy to hit, it hobbles the animal, and any movement makes the wound bleed. That makes it easy to follow, and if it bleeds enough, it’ll collapse.”

“Makes sense for hunting,” I agreed. “Unless your prey has two legs, that is. Then…” I tapped my chest. “I aim for center mass, every time, unless they’re still enough to count on a head shot. Same basic reasoning: even a miss can get a lung or cause internal bleeding. That slows them down and makes them easy to finish off.”

She shivered. “I – I came to tell you that I killed a couple of iupaks and have them cooking,” she said, obviously changing what she was going to say. “If you’re hungry, that is.”

“I’m always hungry.” I didn’t press her; I could tell that my words had made her uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to alienate her. I needed her to get where we needed to go – and I sort of enjoyed the company. She was fairly no-nonsense and practical, and she had a wide streak of independence that I shared.

I followed her back to where we’d set up our tents and found that while I was training, she’d built up a fire and had a pair of the round-eared, bunny-like iupaks skinned and roasting over it on wooden spits. I was a bit surprised, to be honest; I couldn’t believe that I was so into my training that I hadn’t noticed the smoke from a fire and the smell of roasting meat. At least, I was until I realized that the fire burned without fuel and made no smoke, and while the meat slowly browned and crisped, it barely gave off any odor at all.

I squatted down and peered into the fire pit she’d dug, looking into it curiously. “How is this burning?”

“Solar magic,” the hunter shrugged. “It’s something the Sorvaraji makes, a clay disc that contains a fire spell. I break it, fire comes out of it, and it burns for a few hours.” She held her hands out to the flames, even though it wasn’t cold out, merely cool. “It’s better than a regular fire, because it doesn’t make a lot of light or any smoke to attract attention, and it does make a lot of heat.”

“That is useful,” I agreed. “You have more of them?”

“Oh, yes. I’m carrying four more in my pack. I think we’ll need two, and I brough a couple extra just in case.”

I grinned at her. “And what happens if one breaks in your pack? You’ll lose everything in there, won’t you?”

“It’s not likely. They’re not that easy to break; I had to shoot that one with my crossbow to snap it.” She shrugged, then took out a knife and poked one of the roasting hares. “Almost ready. Maybe five more minutes.”

I nodded and looked overhead. “I’m not in a hurry. We’ve got time, I think.”

“It’ll be another two hours or so until moonrise. Assuming that the mooncursed still avoid us, we can start up then. If we rest during the hours of the sun, we should get to the Darkwood Heart tomorrow after moonrise.” She fell silent and poked idly at the iupak meat, staring into the flames.

“You okay, Renica?” I asked quietly.

“I – I’ve never hunted another omeni, before,” she admitted quietly. “It’s – it doesn’t feel right, Ionat.” She looked quickly at me. “Don’t get me wrong, I know that we have to find this lomoraji and stop them from doing – whatever it is they’re doing to the forest. Still, hunting another person…” She let her words drift off, but I nodded in understanding.

“It’s not an easy thing to do,” I admitted. “Sometimes, though, it’s a necessity. Some people simply need to be killed.”

“I’m not sure if I can do it,” she said softly, staring into the fire.

I squatted beside her and looked into the dancing orange flames myself for several long moments. “No one ever does,” I admitted finally. She looked at me questioningly, but I shrugged. “You never know what you’re capable of until you face that choice. Do you pull the trigger, or do you let them walk away? It seems like a simple decision – until you’re the one making it. Then…” I chuckled. “Not so much.”

“You’ve killed other omeni,” she said quietly, the words not a question. Technically, that wasn’t true – I’d killed humans and kuan, but never omeni – but that technicality wasn’t what she needed to hear just then.

“Yes, I have.”

“How many?”

I snorted. “I have no idea.” I looked over at her. “I used to keep track of them. I tried to remember each one, sort of as an homage to their deaths. When there became too many for that, I tried to only remember their faces. Now?” I shook my head. “It’s all a blur.”

She looked back at the fire, silent for a long time, her face blank. “Do – do you remember the first time?” she asked carefully.

I nodded. “I was in the army. We were on a mission – it doesn’t matter where. We were attacked by some insurgents, local people who were trying to overthrow the government for reasons that seemed important then but don’t much matter anymore.”

I looked over at her, my expression flat and my voice calm. “He was a kid, maybe sixteen, firing his – his musket at us and screaming something in a language I didn’t speak. I hesitated for a second, and then my training kicked in. I shot him, dead center, right in the chest.” I fell silent, recalling the dry heat, the dust swirling around us, the shouts and screams and gunfire, and most of all the smell of blood and death that quickly overwhelmed everything else. The kid looked surprised when my bullet hit him, like he hadn’t imagined something bad could happen to him, and then he crumpled to the ground. There was no dramatic clinging to life, no staggering forward, no clutching his chest. Just surprise – then nothing.

“I had to kill two more in that battle,” I continued. “They were totally untrained, no armor, old weapons they barely knew how to use. None of us even took a hit.” I shook my head. “At the time, I thought it was the stupidest waste of life ever. I know better, now.”

I turned back to the fire, and we sat in silence for a long minute or two. “I think the meat’s done,” Renica finally spoke, pulling one of the spits off the fire. I took the other and held it, waiting for it to cool enough to eat.

“How did you feel after?” she asked after a minute.

“When it was over, I couldn’t stop shaking,” I admitted quietly. “Nerves, fear, excitement – an adrenaline overdose, really. I tried to put it behind me – it was them or me, after all – but I kept thinking about it. I had nightmares for a long time, and I jumped at sudden noises a lot.” I sighed. “It got better with time, though. The nightmares faded, the panic attacks went away, and now – now, it doesn’t bother me at all.”

She sat quietly, taking a bite from her rabbit like she was eating corn on the cob. I tested mine; it had cooled enough to eat, so I took a bite, as well. The meat was bland and a bit gamey, without the smokey flavor I usually associated with fire-cooked food, but it was warm and filling. Plus, it was better than being hungry.

We finished the meal in silence, then packed everything up and set off just as the sun dropped below the horizon. Renica stayed in front of me, moving unerringly through the forest, her crossbow cradled in her arms. Vikarik stayed by her side, and I trailed a few feet behind, moving as quietly as I could. We traveled in silence, but every so often, Renica glanced back at me, and I saw the doubt in her eyes.

Honestly, I didn’t blame her. It’s hard for people who’ve never been in that place to understand how it feels to pull the trigger, and some of them can’t imagine how we live with having done it. The thing is, what other choice do we have? Sometimes, all your choices are bad, and you just make the one that you can live with – and that keeps you alive. It sucks, but that’s how it is.

Part of me hoped that Renica never had to face that choice. In fact, if I got the chance, I’d do my best to make sure she didn’t. It’s one you can’t walk away from, one that changes you forever.

And not always for the better.