“Do we really have to eat these?” I said as I picked up a wooden skewer with what looked like a frog leg on it.

“Yes,” said Kelser, “there are no other monsters in the marshes.” He ate the brown, twig-like legs straight off the wooden skewer.

“Are you not hungry?” said Noel as she finished hers. “And if you aren’t, can I have yours?”

I sighed. I was hungry and Kelser was right, nothing else around here seemed edible. Noel shrugged and grabbed another skewer while I took a deep breath, and bit into the monster frog legs. They were chewy and tough to swallow, but tasted kind of like pine nuts. Tasting pine nuts on tough, chewy flesh was a jarring experience, but I managed to fill up my stomach before going to bed.

It was our first night out in the marshes. We’d camped by a river yesterday, and had the most amazing fish I’ve ever had, so going from that to grilled frog legs was a real culinary roller-coaster. That said, our journey from Bek Tepe to the marshes had been pretty uneventful, apart from the weird food.

Noel and I knew we had to follow the sunflo beetle immediately. If the immortals were involved with the beetle, they definitely knew we had it now. We had to move quickly, which meant we couldn’t take many people with us. Besides, I could kill two birds with one stone by giving elder Kezler and the Roja tribesmen some tasks to do until we came back.

“Do you think the other tribes will be able to learn the magic you taught us by the time we’re back?” asked Kelser.

“It’s already been a few days,” I said, “and all they need to learn is elemental magic, so it shouldn’t take them too long.” I shrugged. “But they are learning it from your tribesmen, who haven’t had a lot of practice with magic, themselves, so who knows.”

I added that I was expecting most humans to have learned at least two elements by the time we got back. However, I was much less optimistic about the other task I’d given the Roja. After waking up, I’d found that a lot of humans, including almost all of the Jora tribe’s priests, had disappeared. Adding in the people who had disappeared from the secret passageway and ravine, a sizable number of people from the tribes of the double river basin had probably been involved with the God of Evil. I asked the Roja tribe to help identify if there were any other people involved with the immortals, and to try to find out as much as they could about what the priests had been doing over the years.

Fortunately, one priest had not disappeared. Priest Mal, the youngest, most irascible priest, had woken up in the afternoon, groggy from the night before, and claimed to have no idea where the other priests had gone. He also said he didn’t know anything about a ritual to the ancestors or a secret ravine, but I directed the Roja to keep watch over him all day and night.

“Maybe we should have brought someone from the three dishonored tribes, after all,” said Kelser.

I frowned. I didn’t like the name the humans had come up with for the three tribes whose elders had fought against me in the secret ravine. The other members of the Nare, Jenin, and human Jora tribe, after hearing about what their elders had done, had begged for my forgiveness with tears in their eyes and a fanatic zeal that was actually quite terrifying. And even though I’d forgiven them, the other tribes had begun to ostracize them on their own. Strangely, the so-called dishonored tribes had embraced their new pejorative nickname, saying it felt like an appropriate punishment, since their generation had dishonored their ancestors by attacking an elf.

“We can’t trust them,” said Noel, “what if there were more traitors among them? It wasn’t worth the risk, even if they might have known the way.”

As I took another bite of my frog leg, I mused if it was worth the risk to have brought them along if it meant being able to find better food. Having a guide might also have helped us find our way through the forest more easily. Without a guide, we had to stick to a bunch of wild game trails, which almost always led to a monster’s den. We even came upon another one star monster, although by this point, our magical abilities were so powerful, most one star monsters weren’t worth mentioning.

The journey had helped us refine our magical abilities as well. I finally managed to create an invisibility spell, which worked on the same principle as the disguise spell, but was much more powerful. It also only worked in well-lit conditions, and was fairly energy intensive, which meant I couldn’t keep it up for too long. And even though I had been the one to invent it, Noel quickly became as good at it as I was. As always, I was impressed by Noel’s quick wits and ability to learn.

Gravity magic was a much tougher nut to crack. The imbalance magic, which really only worked if you tipped someone over, was already an incredibly difficult piece of magic to teach. Noel still hadn’t gotten the hang of it, although she was able to use it on small, inanimate objects. To be fair to Noel, the spell relied on slightly manipulating the center of gravity of an object, and humans were pretty good at balancing themselves, which meant you had to use the magic to keep shifting the center of gravity until someone tipped over. It wasn’t very useful, but after practicing it for several days, I was sure it would come in handy soon.

After all, I still hadn’t forgotten how awful it had been to climb up the cliffs leading up to the highlands. I was sure there would be more situations like that one at the so-called ‘roof of the world’ and I was currently working on magic that would save me from the horrors of rock climbing!

I glanced at Kelser. He had had the greatest amount of magical progress out of the three of us. The little red haired boy wasn’t as traditionally intelligent or quick witted as Noel, but he was talented and resourceful. If Noel was the type of student who could remember things directly, Kelser was the kind who’d make up mnemonics or scribble notes on napkins. Unlike Noel and I, who had to do all sorts of experiments before we were able to justify our beliefs for light magic, Kelser simply repeated a small handful of experiments over and over again until he was able to use disguise magic!

I finished up my brown frog legs and threw them far away with magic hands. Kelser did the same, since he’d already begun learning motion magic. I still had to set up the motion detection magic, though, but I was sure he’d get the hang of it by the time we returned to the Bek Tepe. Kelser couldn’t use invisibility, imbalance, or rain spells yet, but I didn’t doubt that he’d master them eventually.

I went to sleep, cursing the humidity of the swamp, but thankful that there were no mosquitoes in this world. As I drifted off, I remarked to myself, once again, how amazing it was that there were no mosquitoes in this world! Truly, one step closer to paradise.

---

I whistled. “I guess they don’t call this place the roof of the world for nothing, huh.”

Titanic mountains towered over our tiny frames, caressing the sky like gigantic earthen claws. The mountain range stretched far onto either side of the horizon, like a frozen tidal wave.

We’d trekked through the foothills after leaving the marshes, but were able to see the mountains from a distance away. But it was only now, when we were standing near the foot of the first mountain in our path, that I truly felt the scale of the mountain range the sunflo beetle was leading us towards.

There were no easy paths through the mountains. The sunflo beetle was pointing as resolutely as ever, which meant our destination could be farther than we had previously assumed. Either way, one thing was clear: we had to start climbing.

It wasn’t so bad at first. We had to walk up at an incline, which was tiring and required a bunch of rest stops, but it was still pretty doable. However, the ground kept inclining further and further up, until it was too steep for us to only use our feet. Noel and Kelser seemed unperturbed, and began putting their hands onto the ground to help them climb, but I stayed back.

I began laughing, completely for dramatic effect. My companions looked over their shoulders and gave me strange looks. Yet, I kept laughing! And laughing! And laughing still! It wasn’t until the two of them slid back down to me and asked me what was wrong, that I shook my head, strut confidently forward, and simply walked up the steep incline that they had been trying to climb with all four limbs.

“Gravity magic,” I yelled from far up, “is amazing!”