Gray

Rethys marched through the drenched wilderness, the sound of his footsteps, and almost every sound really, muffled by the raging storm. The rain never let up, only somehow intensified.

They were quite a bit deeper into wildlands than they thought or estimated for such weather to be possible. Coupled with the terrain, which was uncooperative to say the least, their progress was rather slow. Rethys had to navigate between extremely dense trees and bushes whose roots made the ground almost impassable, and too many times did he fall into pools of water, mud, or peat.

Still, that slowness was not all bad. This, after all, wasn't another walk across desolate and forbidding underground halls filled with twisted abominations. Here instead, nature surrounded him, with rain pouring and a veritable ocean of souls all hushed in blissful hiding, their aura almost lulling him to sleep himself.

Rethys enjoyed it, rain and ether pouring around and over him, washing away the worries and fears of Yvtar. He felt the stress of that damned place seep out of his skin like a disease that plagued him for months, which it quite literally did as far as he was concerned. He felt cleansed.

His only complaint was that he couldn't truly feel the rain on his skin, but that was quickly brushed aside.

Sevi, however, was not in such good shape.

He couldn't get a read on her. She usually always kept a certain etiquette in speech and action, yet Rethys barely had the chance to thank her before she shrugged and her soulstone dimmed again, leaving him to walk alone with only the sound of the drizzle to keep him company. Even apart from being exhausted, she seemed to still be quite shaken from losing the council's knowledge and from having to fend off the legionnaire. He was honestly quite worried.

She only occasionally woke up and performed scrying on their surroundings before instantly returning to sleep. Rethys couldn't even tell when she did it.

Climbing atop a hill, he surveyed his surroundings as best he could. Lightning flashed, momentarily painting the world in bluish-white light before it sunk back into damp darkness.

He couldn't tell if it was night or day, but he could definitely tell that he was in very deep wildlands.

When he was sent to Yvtar, it was late autumn, and it would have been at least three months since then if Sevi's estimates were correct, which they usually were. This meant that it was in the middle of harsh winter now, when it would snow all over northern Voldren, covering the whole of Aldeno in snow.

The fact that it rained here did not mean that they were to the south, no it meant the exact opposite, that they were far, far to the north, deep enough in wildlands for it to never snow.

Too many things too dense in Life for them to ever let themselves be smothered by snow, or so his master had once taught him, and if Fulgrith knew one thing it was the Life element.

It would still get cold, but Rethys couldn't feel it and thus couldn't know for sure.

"Not good..." He sighed.

"I suppose it did not go well?" A tired voice resounded.

"It didn't."

He had walked for quite a bit now but hadn't found any sources of blood in the rain-soaked forest. He could have gone for the small animals tucked away here and there, but Sevi said not to bother with them. Not worthwhile to commit cruelty over it, she said, they'd hunt actual magical beasts or not hunt at all.

"I see. Wake me if anything of notice comes up." She lazily shrugged as the gem's signal dimmed again.

Rethys resumed his lookout, keeping a vigil for anything grabbing his magical or physical senses, sparing a final glance toward the distant mountain he could swear was staring right at him when he wasn't looking, then reluctantly resumed his march.

Hours passed before the scenery around him finally changed, the dense thicket of trees finally giving way to some sparse meadows and then to barren fields of rock and lifeless soil leading up to the slopes of the Dark Spine's mountains. Now he'd follow it south until he found... something.

The trek from there was much more efficient, as there was no mud to sink in, no trees to block sight, and finally something to kill for a change.

They were man-sized, Earth-wielding lizards, though they did not use magic. Rethys didn't know what species they were and could only guess that they were some distant relatives of kreds. Sevi didn't give her usual comprehensive explanations either, only deigning to do her job of extracting magic lifeblood and promptly returning to sleep.

He only needed to cast Enfeeble a single time on them before they dropped to the ground with the grace of a sack of potatoes, quite anticlimactic. Their yield of lifeblood was also abysmally bad, barely enough to fuel a second or two of Sevi's Blood magic.

As he traveled further south, he could feel the ether around him thinning, especially since he was striding the vague border between two different biomes of forest and mountain, two distinct environments of ether that carried different things.

The rain also let up quite a bit, becoming more akin to an afternoon drizzle than the tempest it had once been, though it was more accurate to say that Rethys left its confines instead. Snow would show its face eventually.

He continued to trudge along in silence. Boring, idle silence. It was comforting and relaxing at first, and though it remained that way, a hint of ennui eventually wormed itself between the positive emotions coursing through him.

He tried busying himself with observing the changing and diminishing of the wild magic around them. The wildlands were growing thinner all around them, giving way to the lands of humans... the human lands...

"...Or is it humanlands..." Rethys mused absentmindedly as he stared at the sky covered in pale gray clouds, it must have been early morning.

He still couldn't believe he was out of the hellish Yvtar, back into the natural and calm. He only really needed to close his eyes and quiet his mind for moments before his senses once again started scanning his surroundings for more dwellers and the chasing legionnaire.

It would surely need some getting used to.

They would first need to find some semblance of civilization, and the best they could do for now would be frontier villages. Though he would do well to find some clothes first, looking the way he did and only having the tattered remains of his pants on his skin.

Lacking almost all feeling in his body, he had almost forgotten he was half-naked.

'Oh well.' He shrugged.

And as he continued to walk, he pondered and thought about random things to pass the time until something tugged at his attention.

Something fell into the spider web that was his unleashed Origin senses, and for once it wasn't a lizard. It was human.

The more he walked south, the clearer the signal became, until it led west into the mountains. And as Rethys followed it, he was greeted with the sight of a strange cave entrance. He knew what this was, or at least thought he did.

"A bandit den..." He murmured before casting Stabilize on himself to rouse Sevi from her slumber.

He felt the spell with his soul rather than his numb body, and it felt very tingly.

"Hm? What is it?" She wearily asked.

He wondered for a moment about the mechanisms by which she slept in that gem of hers, for her to have a lazy voice that sounded as if she truly just woke up and began rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. It never occurred to him until now how strange it all was.

"It's a bandit den." He revealed. "We've struck gold. We can get everything we need from here, clothes, money, food, information..."

"Hmm, yes." She answered. "I suppose we can-"

"...Blood." He continued. "Maybe even a place to stay while we figure things out. Or even get situated altogether, it's not a bad spot. I don't know about the Order, but the guard definitely wouldn't scout out this far. It shouldn't be anything but frontier villages for at least a few days of travel in any direction."

"Huh?" She asked before regaining her composure. "Rethys what are you planning on doing inside?"

"Getting rid of them?" He asked as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "I can sense nine of them down there. Not sure how much lifeblood you'd get out of humans, but it can't be worse than chasing lizards. Only one of them is a mage, awakened, the rest are either active or inert, mostly inert. I'll just wake you up when I'm done."

He was confused as to what there was to be confused about.

"Rethys." She began. "I was thinking of using Mind magic to steal from them, hindering their perception and disbelief so that they would not mind our presence. You speak of carnage too lightly."

"They're bandits."

"They are still people."

"These aren't people, Sevi." He responded with a cold tone and a frown. "Look around you, we're in the middle of fucking nowhere, who do you think they steal from? Traders going through that?" He motioned toward the distant mountains. "No, these are village raiders, the worst kind of bandits."

"Still, we are not heroes or vigilantes who would judge lives on a whim, and we should not interfere in matters that do not concern us. That is not the way of the mage. The local officialdom will deal with them." Sevi argued.

"Most will be executed regardless, and if any survive, they'll filter into the slums of either Kalantor, Eviptem or Aldeno, probably the latter, where they'll turn into useless slum-pushers. We'll be doing the Kingdom a favor by cleaning this place out." He explained.

"That does not make it right, Rethys!"

"We don't have much of a choice." He responded as he approached the disguised cave entrance.

The entrance wasn't disguised by normal means, the stone face of the hill looked wrong, its visage muddy and distorted. And as Rethys approached it, he could sense magic circles inscribed into the stone on the other side, enchantments of the elements of Light and Darkness.

He passed through the mirage, through the ether that animated it, and into the other side. He saw the circles. They didn't glow, but his senses told him that these circles were the shoddiest, most inefficient ones he had ever seen. He didn't know much about making enchantments but had still developed a sense of understanding and even appreciation for their power and complexity, and he could tell that these were improvised at best.

"Basic illusion work." Sevi commented. "I am still against this. It is not our place to go around slaughtering civilians, it is no place for any mage in their right mind."

"They aren't civilians." He repeated. "They're gods-damned bandits, what's so hard to understand? They even have a mage with them."

"Things are not so simple, Rethys!" She sighed.

"You went through catacomb dwellers back then like it was nothing, this is not different." Rethys answered as he beheld the bright light of souls glowing underneath, deeper into the caverns.

"It is very, very different." Sevi noted, yet Rethys didn't want to argue with her any further.

He looked ahead of him, into the darkness of the caverns' descending slopes. Its walls were smooth and dotted with regular grooves, signs of being made using Earth magic.

Yet as he stepped forward to head inside, his body flinched and tensed, completely unwilling to move forward. It took him a few tries, but eventually he managed to convince himself that these were not Yvtar's caves, and that he could go into them.

The rain grew quiet as he took step after step downward into the darkness. And as light and noise disappeared, Rethys' whole being snapped back into complete combat readiness.