Time passed, summer reaching its peak and beginning its long wane as the first month of the season passed on to the second. The temperatures descended even as the days began to shorten, autumn beginning its inevitable annual emergence.

After half a year of diving into the Wastes, even Olivia and Allana's enthusiasm began to wane, their drive to fight and grow their experience balanced by the need to rest, recover, and train.

Fortunately, in a city of sentinels, Olivia had no small number of sparring partners.

#

"Sloppy!" Maestro Surrius declared. The man was as much a noble as any courtier, one of the masters Olivia had trained under years before, when she had still held the Dennan name. As much sentinel as socialite, the lean old armsmaster was famously neutral, working for any house that could afford his time, and it had been his hand that had honed Olivia, Alyssia, and even Allid's sword hands to the razor edge that had carried each of them through no small number of fights.

"You're obsessed with those heavy slashes of yours, Argent!" Olivia had been relieved to find that Surrius had more than embraced her new gender identity–mainly by treating her no different than he had years before, when she had been a teenager struggling with the most basic sword forms. "That sort of aggression might work against your average kobold or a gnoll, but any truly skilled adversary will be able to take advantage of the holes you're leaving in your guard!"

"That's generally what my shield is for, Maestro," Olivia told the older man diffidently.

Surrius merely snorted. "Shield out then, Argent. Show me the difference."

Olivia reached a hand to the side, and the increasingly familiar weight of her astral silver shield manifested in her grip. It had barely settled there before Surrius had charged at her, his functional, unadorned longsword and kiteshield looking plain compared to Olivia's gear–but that didn't keep the armsmaster from thoroughly trouncing her.

Surrius wasn't a prodigy of the sword, the way Adeline and Aton were. He had simply spent fifty years drilling, every day, to the point of exhaustion and back. The man might've been too old to go into the Wastes anymore, but his body was still made of boot gristle and old iron, and all of the best sentinels in the city had been similarly worked over by the aged armsmaster.

Within minutes, Olivia was disarmed and on the ground.

"Sloppy," Surrius repeated. "You're months from Initiate level, Argent. If your foundation isn't firm by the time you get your third gift, you'll never reach your true potential! Now, on your feet–we're going again!"

#

Allana, on the other hand, had to adapt to a very different form of training. Her Initiate level made her the highest level of the party, but with each passing week, the gap between them shrunk–and the gift of the tinkerer was primarily responsible for that.

[Gift of the Tinkerer]

Level: Novice

Experience: 65%

Further your craft to gain experience

[Charm Creation] - Crafting, Imbuement - Create ornaments imbued with minor, temporary magical effects. Effects and lifespan of charms are limited by level.

[Magic Sense] - Passive, Sensory - Sense dense or heavily aspected magical energy.

[Deft Hands] - Boon - Moderate boost to your coordination and focus.

Unlike her other gifts, the tinkerer couldn't be advanced by fighting, or stealing, or tricking, or any of the exhilarating action that had defined the last twenty years of Allana's life. Instead, it was a gift that required simple, focused dedication to what had (up until recently) always been a hobby.

And so, more often than not, Allana found herself spending her free days in Elliven, not out roaming or training, but quietly, carefully working, until her brain ached and her fingers cramped. Humiliatingly, it even meant that she was spending her afternoons inside with Tenebres more often than not, doing exactly the sort of study she had always teased him for.

After several weeks of this constant practice, she had actually gotten some help from an unexpected place–Olivia's brother, Olan, who invited her to lunch one bright afternoon.

The comfortably heavyset man was, physically, a far cry from his lean, dangerous sisters. The exception was his eyes–the dark brown of Alyssia and Olivia was brightened by flecks of green in his eyes, lightening them to a sharp hazel that seemed to penetrate through Allana.

The man finished a little finger sandwich before he finally asked, "Oli tells me you've been struggling with your gift, right?"

Allana winced. They were eating at a very public restaurant–an open air garden and courtyard that primarily served tea and tiny sandwiches, neither of which she had the palate to appreciate.

"It's… slow going," she admitted. "I'm just not used to this kind of thing."

"How so?" Olan asked. "I would assume that you had no small amount of dedication to your craft, to earn a gift like this."

Allana shrugged, suddenly embarrassed. How was she supposed to talk about the finer points of a hobby like this with a professional jeweler like Olan? "Making my charms has always just been a little diversion for me," she explained. "I've never focused on it like this."

Olan nodded. "I don't know much about this tinkerer gift, or about the Adventurer that gave it to you, but I do know about crafting, and this sort of stalling is actually something I've seen before."

"Really?" Allana flashed a guilty look down at her still full plate, and guiltily took a bite of a finger sandwich that was too soft and wet while Olan responded.

Olan nodded. "Let me take a guess. You were offered this gift after you made something very important to you, right? A piece that you were extremely proud of, one that had immense personal meaning. Am I on the right track?"

Allana suddenly found herself very aware of the charm bracelet that was tied loosely around one wrist–the first thing she had made since she had started stealing for Telik full-time. "You might be," Allana admitted.

"But now, it's not the same, right? You're just trying to churn things out for experience–sometimes you experiment, and that helps, but otherwise it's just mundane tedium."

Allana blinked. "That… yes. That's it exactly."

Olan nodded. "That sort of thing is common among artistic artisans. You need to grow your art–but you need to find a reason, something real to motivate you and make every piece important. That's how your gift will start really advancing."

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

That night, sitting in the taproom of the Wandering Fool, turning her charm bracelet on her wrist and thinking of her friends, Allana found herself wondering when, exactly, something as lame as friendship had become her primary motivation.

Then, absently, she wondered what goal drove Olan to advance his own craft.

#

Cadence's friends and allies might've been able to pass the time in training and study, but no matter how she tried, the celestial wanderer just couldn't convince herself to hold still for long. So, while she was all but forced to stay in the neighborhood surrounding the Wandering Fool for at least one day each week, she spent the other five in the Wastes.

Most of those days were spent with her friends, of course. With each passing week, the tactics they had developed over the past year became more and more finely honed, the four of them becoming a true cadre.

But on the other days, when her friends were relaxing and recovering, Cadence found any cadre willing to take her along–and given her reputation and unique abilities, no small number of sentinels were more than happy to have the increasingly well-known adventurer travel with them. For all of her eccentricities, Cadence's flexible fighting style allowed her to effortlessly fit in with any established team, and her abilities provided valuable navigation among the glades of the Arboreal Wastes.

"Fascinating," Kenton observed, on a day when Caden had joined the knight-errant's cadre. "Even the connection to my planars doesn't carry between glades–if I send them into a glade without me, they lose all drive. And yet you…"

Caden smiled as he calmly directed the knight not just to the glade that his cadre's scout had traveled to, but even to the correct entrance to it.

[Know Direction] - Active, Utility - Learn the direction of true north or your waystone. No cost.

The waystone his wanderer gift could create wasn't flashy or deadly, but the ability to track the stone no matter where it was had proven a useful one in the fractured reality of the Wastes.

"I wonder if this would work in the Tidal Wastes, too," Kenton mused. "Navigation is one of the bigger challenges the sentinel crews out of Westerlen face. This sort of power could be a game changer for them."

"I'll just have to find out one day," Caden decided with a grin. His path, since he had left Felisen, had taken him all over the heartlands, but there was still so much more of the Realm to see. Westerlen, where ships of sentinels sailed the archipelago of the Tidal Wastes; Terast, where the Legion faced the endless undead horde that forever crawled from the labyrinthine Umbral Wastes; the Twin Cities of Cita and Dela, standing vigilant over the only pass between the Realm and the uncharted wilderness to the north; Alvanny, the City of Forges, the trade city that served as the hub of the mountainous frontier.

It was a big Realm, and Caden wanted to see all of it.

At the same time, though, he also couldn't help but wonder how his mother and the others back in Felisen were doing. A year and a half now had passed since he had left his home, and while sentinel work at least offered its small moments of excitement, Caden couldn't help but hope that his wandering would take him through his old village one day soon.

#

Unlike his friends, Tenebres was more than happy to spend the majority of his time ensconced in study. Partially, that was due to the nature of his Mage gift. While Apprentice had given him a variety of new spells to put to use, it was time to put his improved control and understanding to work, pushing towards the coveted Initiate level.

But more than that, Tenebres wanted–needed–to learn whatever he could of his dreams. They continued to plague him, at least two nights of each week sending him to the nightmare Elliven, to that city of bleeding marble and twisted skies and alien cries. He still couldn't remember everything he learned in them, leaving him with a feeling like he was blindly groping at the edges of a puzzle, helpless to assemble the pieces in the middle.

Elliven had little in the way of an arcane society, its mages mostly composed of nobles all too happy to hoard their knowledge to themselves. At the very least, the letter of candidacy the Crown and the Apothic Order had provided him served him well when working with those self-involved casters, but their personal libraries had proven themselves pedantic at best and solipsistic at worst.

Instead, Tenebres started following Cadence's lead and wandering through Elliven, trying to find those sights that sparked some familiarity to the dreams that haunted him–and he succeeded in discovering some small number of them.

One particular fountain square was all too similar to one he had seen in the nightmare Elliven, though the real one was thankfully bereft of the blood that filled its oneiric reflection. The well that stood in the center of one of Elliven's more ramshackle neighborhoods was familiar as well, even without the severed fingers that had filled it in his dreams. A small courtyard park where Allana liked to work on her charms had a haunting resemblance to a grove of twisted black trees he had spent one long night hiding in.

His rambling explorations didn't give him answers, really, but they did confirm one crucial fact: his dreams were real, in some way. Tenebres couldn't believe that he had somehow imagined those twisted landmarks before seeing their real life twins. But what did that mean of the face that he so often saw in his foggy memories? The one that looked like him, but older, more weathered, the one that he was sure spoke to him, even if he couldn't remember what they discussed when he woke up…

"Are you okay?"

Tenebres blinked, the bland voice pulling him from his reverie. He was sitting in the sun-dappled little park that was both so similar and so different from that shadow-soaked grove in his nightmare, one hand idly scratching at the scars on his arm.

It took a moment for Tenebres to pull his thoughts together, and by then, the boy standing in front of him had cocked his head, a gesture of concern that didn't match the placid expression on his pale face.

"Oh," Tenebres said, placing the boy's odd manner and soft features. "You're the healer from Alyssia's cadre, right?"

"Dillen," he said.

"Right, yeah, Dillen. I'm Tenebres."

"I know."

The boy was pretty much how Allana had described him. His build, short and slender and soft, was more than a little similar to Tenebres's, but his manner and coloring was opposite–his skin pale white compared to the gray pallor over Tenebres's tan skintone; his hair matte black with highlights of stark white similar to Tenebres's own; his eyes large and dark and as still as his emotionless expression and tone.

Tenebres sat there for a few moments, the silence between them becoming awkward and only deepening from there. Finally, Tenebres cleared his throat uncomfortably.

"Um… I guess I should say thank you."

"For what?"

"Healing me? Allana told me that you were the one who staunched my bleeding long enough to get me back to Elliven. And it was your friends that helped carry me back too, right?"

"Oh. Yes." Dillen's thin mouth twitched in a minute frown before he added, "They're not my friends though. Just my cadre."

"Okay. Fair, I guess." If anything, that said good things about the healer. Anyone willing to call themself Allid Gerrot's friend would seem a little suspicious just by default.

There was another long moment of silence, Dillen apparently perfectly comfortable just standing in front of Tenebres, staring at him.

"So… Can I help you?"

"I'd like to sit with you. Is that okay?"

Tenebres blinked. "Uhh… sure?"

Without any reply, or even a nod, Dillen just sat down next to Tenebres, his motions brisk and efficient as he reached into the satchel at his side and pulled out a portfolio and a pair of charcoal sticks. He didn't give Tenebres a second look as he just started sketching, one hand rubbing the charcoal over his page in rough, broad strokes, while the other moved in sharp little gestures.

Tenebres frowned, waiting for the odd mage to say something, but several more minutes passed without any further comment.

"So… You're an artist?"

"Yes." Dillen didn't so much as look up from his page, his hands still moving quickly and steadily.

"Like, a gifted artist?"

"Yes."

This is a great conversation, Tenebres thought to himself. Fine. If he wants to be weird and blunt, I can too.

"Why exactly do you want to just sit here and draw next to me?"

That finally got an actual reaction out of Dillen. His hands slowed for a moment, his eyebrows knitting together, as he pondered that. Finally, he said, "Because, you're like me."

Tenebres could hear a voice that sounded a lot like Allana quipping in the back of his head. Weird? Magical? Androgynous? Kind of cute?

"How so?" he asked instead.

Rather than answering, Dillen just made a couple final strokes, then turned his portfolio towards Tenebres, showing the other boy what he had been working on.

It was a rough sketch of the park they were sitting in–only it wasn't. The straight, attractive shade trees were replaced by twisted trunks covered in a rough black bark. The grass was gone, burned away, and the suggestion of eyes peered between the boughs of the broken trees.

It looked, in fact, just like the grove Tenebres had spent one of his dreams in.

"Oh," Tenebres said, his voice weak.

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