The remainder of the walk passed in silence. Elach chatted with Flow through their bond every once and a while, but otherwise he listened to the howling winds and the occasional cry of an Issi beast that pierced them. He didn’t quite understand why Shar hiding things from him bothered him so much, but it did. Maybe it was because those things affected what was happening right now, and could put them in danger if they were bad enough. Hells, it could simply be because he wasn’t used to being so openly and obviously lied to.

When they arrived at the twenty-first floor’s rest village, a treetop plaza built out of the same spiraling planks as the walkway with rooves and accents crafted out of the yellow and orange ‘leaves’, Elach stopped and looked around for any kind of information. He found it in a small kiosk with a smaller man sitting behind it, carving jagged lines into a wooden map with a knife of red-swirled iron.

Stepping up to the booth, Elach pressed down on a small lever that made a high-pitched clicking noise that cut through the howling winds. The man turned towards him and held up a finger as if to say ‘one moment’, and Elach nodded. “We can wait.” He said, making the man raise a thin eyebrow and set down his knife.

“I haven’t seen someone who had a technique to cut through these winds for, well, a few weeks now.” The man laughed, his small mouth barely moving as he spoke. “But before that it had been years. Since I don’t remember your face, I’m guessing you three are new here?”

“We are.” Shar cut in, pushing Elach to the side. “We need to clear these floors as quickly as possible.” She reached into her bag and produced an insignia exactly like all the others Elach had seen, but the man behind the counter’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head.

“Clearance level nine.” He whistled, turning away and hopping off a stool to the floor below. “I haven’t seen anything like that in years. Do you need someone to come with you, or is a guidebook enough?”

“A guidebook will be plenty, thank you.” Shar said with a nod, purposely avoiding Elach’s accusatory glare. If her mouth wasn’t hidden at the time, it would’ve been pulled in a tight line of discomfort.

“So, clearance level nine.” Elach stated, standing on a platform with a long wire that led down to the forest floor. “If that number only goes up to ten, then that’s only one below Hoalt.” He glanced over at Shar, who looked deeply uncomfortable with him having the knowledge he now held. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but someone who was trapped on floor eleven shouldn’t have that kind of access.”

Shar buckled a harness over her stomach and bent down to do the same between her legs. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, it’s that the information is completely classified. Only a handful of people know the truth, and one of them is the Emperor himself. Someone like you,” Shar gestured at him and Flow with one hand while still bent over, “can’t be trusted with information that could harm everyone in the city if it got into the wrong hands.”

Flow chirped a sarcastic retort through their bond, and Elach found himself agreeing. Hoalt had quite literally brought him back to life, so why didn’t he trust him? If Elach was such a security risk, then Hoalt could’ve let him die and been done with everything. He shook his head and sighed, attaching a metal roller to a coil of rope hanging off his harness then to the cable overhead. Then he jumped.

He’d expected an exhilarating drop down, but instead he found his feet almost instantly touching down on spongy soil. Flow was nowhere to be found, but a quick look left them far above and quickly diving down to catch up.

“That was disappointing.” He laughed, unclipping his harness and tucking it away in his pack. He needed to stop worrying about Shar’s obvious secrets. The moment he found Prisoner, he was going to leave this place behind anyway. Leave this place behind and go find some way to kill one of the strongest beings on the world piece.

More feet thunked onto the wet ground, and Shar let out a disappointed click of her tongue. Which sounded more like the crack of a tiny whip thanks to her unique form. “Well, that was underwhelming.”

“Yes it was.” Elach agreed, holding out his arm for Flow to land on as they plummeted. They latched on with barely any downward force, then sidestepped until they were on his shoulder. “What does the guidebook tell us to do for this floor?”

“This specific floor has no challenges, as it’s the rest floor, but we have to trek to the ascension point before we can make any true progress.” Shar traded her harness for the guidebook, a black leather bound tome with Hoalt’s insignia plastered on the cover and thrice on the spine in gold. She frowned down at the pages as she read. “Floors twenty-two through twenty-seven shouldn’t pose us any problems, but floor twenty eight is a survival exercise. A week-long survival exercise.”

“See if you can find anything like an exit, buddy. Yell through the link if you’re in trouble or if you find anything interesting.” Elach told Flow, who took off with grumbling acceptance. “How long did it take Prisoner to make it up to the thirty-first floor?”

“Around one week. Which would mean he either cleared the rest of the pillar in one to two days, or he found a way around the twenty-eighth floor’s time requirement.” Shar theorized, snapping the guidebook closed and stowing it away. “It’s a shame we won’t get to experience the wonders of this floor group. I would love to study the peculiarities of this forest, but we do not have enough time to waste.”

Elach nodded and stepped up to the closest tree, watching its strange bark undulate as if there was something moving under it. He gripped a protrusion with his fingers and pulled. The bark snapped off like sheets of hard candy, revealing the swirled wood that everything else had been made of underneath. It still squirmed between his fingers, and he raised it to the corner of his mouth and bit down.

“What are you doing?” Shar asked in disgust, pulling the piece of bark away from Elach as he chewed. “You don’t know what this could do to you.”

“It tastes like a combination of cinnamon and orange.” Elach mused. “But it burns like mustard. I bet I could make something amazing with this stuff.”

Shar paused, looking between the bark in her hands and Elach twice. He nudged her onward, and with a sigh she opened her mouth and took a tearing bite. After multiple chews and a swift swallow, she coughed and handed the bark back.

“You forgot to mention how intense the taste was.” She sputtered.

He shrugged with a smirk and bent down, snapping off the bitten parts and wrapping the bark in a waxy paper he’d taken from Hoalt’s packages. “Maybe we can find a sapling that we can take with us. I’d love to grow some of this outside the pillar.” He suggested, expecting Shar to immediately strike his idea down.

Which she did. “Everything that is grown in the pillar can be found in the night district, even sprouts to grow more on your own, as long as an oath is taken that they are not to be reproduced for profit.”

“Ah. Gotcha.” Elach said with a nod, slipping the bark into his pack. Flow chirped through their link, and Elach felt them descending somewhere off to the east. “Flow found something they think is the exit.”

“Lead the way.” Shar said, stepping aside for Elach. He ensured Flow was in the direction he was facing and started off. Shar waited a moment before following, staring longingly at the bizarre tree before shaking her head and following him.

Two days later, Elach woke up on the bright orange rope hammock he’d rented in a small hostel on the twenty-first floor. He did a routine check on Y’talla, getting appreciation through their bond but nothing more, stretched his aching back and chained himself down to the floor forty feet below. Flow was, once again, nowhere to be found, having chosen to stay with Shar in her room that was reserved for high-ranking members of Hoalt’s army. One that he’d been denied access to, even though he was here on a mission for Hoalt.

As he tossed off his shorts and stepped into the communal showers, Elach thought back on the last two days. He didn’t think it possible, but his relationship with Shar hadn’t soured whatsoever even with all the secrets she was keeping. He enjoyed her company, and her obvious desire to stop and gawk at each and every new piece of flora or fauna they came across. And from the way she struggled to push on, shoving her own desires to the side to get to Prisoner just that little bit faster, he started to sympathize with her. She obviously wasn’t doing this out of her own desires.

But that didn’t change the fact that he felt like he didn’t know her. She was obviously far more powerful than she let on, and knew things that he assumed most people in the Gilded Night could only speculate on. Though sometimes he felt the real Shar shine through, and it felt scarily similar to the person he’d gotten to know over the past two weeks. Which made it even harder when the lies hardened her and closed those cracks in her armor.

Thirty minutes and a short breakfast of oatmeal spiced with the bark he’d since thrown away, Elach sat on a bench with his harness attached to the metal supports. Without Flow there to protect him he couldn’t hear a thing aside from the howling winds, his long-ish hair now more of a nuisance than anything. He played with it as he considered finding a barber, feeling at his container to get a good sense of how close he was to needing another compression. He was close, but not quite there yet.

Flow’s protective technique gently wrapping him stirred him from his meditation, prompting scratches and happy cooing from his wisp. “Thanks, buddy. Is Shar ready to go yet?”

They shook their head, then hopped off Elach’s shoulder and started walking off. They turned to see if he was following them, cawing to get his attention as he removed his harness and stood. “I know, buddy. Give me a second and I’ll follow you.”