"Maybe." Sophia frowned and turned to the room. She tried to focus on the bones, but it was very difficult to tell anything about their magic with three people burning mana while they broke the bones. Still, bones made her think of skeletons, and she did have a good solution for skeletal undead. The one thing she could see was that the bones seemed to shimmer and disappear when they were broken into small chunks, and that meant they weren't typical reanimated bones. "Are they undead? Or are they spirits? You called them ruin apparitions?"

"They are a type of spirit," Azalea answered easily. "A very solid one. The tales say they step into our realm from the spirit realm in places where the walls are thin. You get them in ruins in the Skylands, especially in the Wildlands. We think that's why they don't appear in the camp; our very presence is taming the land and strengthening the walls of this realm."

Sophia nodded, but she had her doubts. It seemed far more likely that their presence and use of magic changed the local balance of mana types; that would disrupt delicate processes, and if the "ruins apparitions" were related to long-term pooling of a mana type, Death mana for example, changing the balance locally would be enough to disrupt it.

Creatures animated by Death mana were notoriously hard to kill because they were already dead. Death mana was one of the mana types Sophia could easily believe was common in ruins; it certainly wasn't the only likely type, but it would explain a skeletal appearance and the fact that they had to be literally beaten to pieces. It made them closer to a Death-spirit than to actual undead, but while those were thaumaturgically distinct, the way to deal with them was similar.

Oddly enough, despite how many different things could be killed with a stake to the heart, it didn't tend to work well on Death-spirits, at least as long as they didn't consider themselves something that could die that way.

No, the best way Sophia had to kill a Death spirit was her True Death spells. She had no doubt they'd work; the question was how many spells it would take. Whether or not her Spirit-based Grand Ability Pierce the Veil would work was also a good question.

"Are they suitable for people at the first upgrade to fight?" Dav set a hand on Sophia's shoulder as he spoke to Azalea. "I have some options, too, but I'm not sure what upgrade you're at."

"First," Azalea answered easily. "We're all at least level five, but that's not that big a difference, as long as you're past the upgrade. The ruin is … well, it seems to be abandoned other than the ruin apparitions; they wouldn't share space with monsters."

"Monsters would eat them," Lan'ti added from inside the other room. He stepped back away from the skeleton; there wasn't much left of it anymore. Sophia wasn't sure how two people were managing to hit it at the same time without hitting each other, much less three. "We can let you try to handle the next one we find, as long as it's alone. That should let you get the idea of how tough they are. If you can explore as a separate group, it'll speed things up a lot. I really want to find stuff that isn't empty rooms."

"You just want to prove Prythe wrong," Ci'an contributed. "Since he wouldn't let you explore the place."

Lan'ti threw his head back and shook it. "Auugh. He just didn't want to admit that it was weird there's an entire ruin with first-upgrade apparitions out this deep into the Wildlands. He claimed it was probably a weakening Nexus like the ones the southerners build their cities around, but that doesn't make sense. This is the Wildlands, plus Kestii didn't build cities on weak points!"

"He said it didn't date back to Old Kestii," Xin'ri countered. "The signs could be from soon after, and while I don't know who would have built the place, it could be from soon after the Breaking. We don't really know when people started to build on weak point Nexuses. It could have been pretty quickly, since it was mostly the powerful that died."

"We think," Lan'ti added, then sighed. "We'll find out if we keep looking; I really want to win this one, and not just because Prythe's an ass. If it really is an artifact using all the missing power to do something … well, who knows what we can do with it? Maybe it's even whatever the Kestii Empire used to protect their towns from monsters?"

"Not that old myth," Volat interjected. "They fought them off, the same as we do today. They were more powerful then, so it wasn't that hard, any more than Izel has problems."

"Izel is having problems," Ci'an stated bluntly. "Probably not with the defense, but Uncle Los'en's predictions came true before we left. The Temple attacked the Registry. It was just one attack, but it's not over. It's just paused while they deal with the first winter monster wave. I," Ci'an bit her lip and paused for a moment before she continued. "I think there are going to be more deaths than usual, and they won't all be at the teeth of monsters."

"That doesn't say anything about Old Kestii," Volat countered. "They were more powerful than we are; that means it was easy for them to defeat the monsters they had to face."

"Does it?" Sophia challenged the translator. She'd seen monster waves; they were rare on Earth because Earth's dungeons were well managed, but that wasn't true everywhere and her father often visited places that weren't that peaceful. Even on Earth, places that had other troubles often developed dungeon issues. "That only works if the monsters are weak and enough people turn out to fight them. Something made the civilization fall, but whatever it was clearly didn't wipe out everyone, and that means a lot of places that were weakened weren't overrun."

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"There are no good accounts of what life was like back then," Lan'ti tried to calm things down. "None at all. We guess it was like now, but-"

"Rias Glitterink clearly wrote about her life," Volat objected. "Yes, most of what she wrote was about the Tower, but she compared the Travelers to her own people and gave examples!"

"Didn't you just say that you don't entirely trust the translation?" Lan'ti's words fell into an uncomfortable silence this time. "Even if you do, she compares them against humans. What about everyone else?"

Volat shook his head. "That word isn't human, it's people. It's the translation…" He gave a long sigh.

"What makes you think everyone wasn't human, back then?" Dav asked. "Everyone I've seen that isn't human is close, and the differences could easily be Warps that have stabilized. Sixteen hundred years is a long time. Well, maybe not long for evolution, but if people with the same Warp tend to stick together or the Warps are caused by something in the environment, it could easily be long enough."

Sophia stared at Dav. He didn't usually speak much, at least not when other people were around, so his words were a surprise. The concept wasn't; it was something they'd talked about. Sophia was just surprised he'd brought it up.

Laughter pulled Sophia's eyes to Xin'ri. She was the only person that wasn't just staring at Dav.

"What's funny?" The words came out a bit more aggressively than Sophia meant them. She had no idea why Xin'ri was laughing, but that didn't mean she wanted to let the woman laugh at Dav. He didn't deserve to be mocked.

"He actually said it!" Xin'ri dissolved in another fit of laughs and left Sophia confused. What was she talking about?

It took a solid minute for Xin'ri to calm down enough to understandably explain her laughter. "Sorry, it's just that almost no one actually says that out loud. It's said in whispers. Most people don't like to admit they're probably Warped, that everyone is probably Warped, so they look down on people who are and don't admit that you can really only tell successful Warps from other people if they admit it. I think a lot more people have Warped on their Status than admit it, but what do I know? I'm just a runic specialist, which means I'm a Professional who thinks she's Called." Xin'ri sounded bitter as she finished. "I can't possibly know what I'm talking about if it disagrees with their chances to look down on the Warped."

Sophia glanced around the group. No one seemed inclined to disagree with Xin'ri, but no one seemed to want to agree with her, either. Sophia wasn't sure what to say, either, but words she'd wanted to say for a long time bubbled up. "The Status isn't always right, either. It doesn't have any idea what I am, so it calls me a Warped human. I don't really have a problem with being called Warped, but I'm not human. And that's before I talk about the way it keeps shifting things around; I mean, really, why does it do that? It doesn't work differently, all it does is change the costs, which make no sense now."

She'd checked. She wasn't about to spend any of her Wisps after the horrible experience she'd had with Wisp sickness. She was going to wait at least the month the Wanderer recommended before she spent any Wisps, maybe even two months. One month wasn't that much longer anyway. "And anyway, what's up with Wisp sickness? There's no good reason the Guide shouldn't be able to apply Wisps slower and track what it hasn't applied yet or just plain prevent you from spending too many at once! For that matter, why do we even get to pick individual Abilities, and why are a lot of them locked in Stable Challenges? That's ridiculous, it's like the Guide wants people to make bad choices!"

Now everyone was staring at Sophia.

Lan'ti broke the silence by clearing his throat. "It's always been like that. At least, unless you believe Rias Glitterink. She implies the Guide didn't always exist."

"I don't see how you can believe that," Volat objected, clearly happier to continue the argument about the translation of Rias Glitterink's work than to talk about anything Sophia had just said. "She's talking about the progress of the Kestii Empire."

"I think I like you." Xin'ri's quiet words and hand on Sophia's shoulder pulled her attention away from the larger argument Lan'ti and Volat were starting. "The Guide does want us to make bad choices. At least, that's what I believe."

"It doesn't make it easy to make good ones," Dav agreed softly. "A lot of it's situational; Keep Warm, for example. I'd never have thought of it as a good choice normally, but after that trip in the snow I'm really wishing I had it."

"Supposedly, that's why the Guide lets us swap out Abilities cheaply," Xin'ri said with a tilt of her head. "But, well, you're past the first upgrade, aren't you?"

Xin'ri waited long enough for Sophia and Dav to nod before she continued. "Then you know that the Guide assigns you an Anchor. You don't get to pick it, the Anchor just comes with the upgrade, and Guide doesn't tell you what it is any more than it tells you how to reach a good upgrade. There's no way to change it out until you hit the next upgrade; even then, you can only change it a little unless you sunder your Sphere. Even then, you usually end up with the same Anchor when you pick your next first upgrade Sphere, and Anchors aren't equal. You have to have one that suits your Sphere, and that's not always what the Guide gives you."

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