Elias moved through the vast forest by leaping from one earth platform to the next, each one rising beneath his feet just long enough to carry him over the huge vines that twisted through the undergrowth below. His body moved smoothly, almost on habit, but his mind was elsewhere.
It kept circling back to the sa thing.
The plan.
He had agreed to it only a few hours ago, yet the more he turned it over in his head, the more it felt as though that agreent had done little more than place his na on a pyre. Elias had taken part in many reckless plans over the years. As a Mage, that ca with the line of work. So of those plans had targeted Mages stronger than him. So had carried a very real risk of failure and death from the very beginning. But even with all that behind him, he could not rember ever being part of sothing quite this mad.
This entire thing was close to suicide.
That remained true no matter how confident Arzan had sounded while explaining it.
The heart of the problem was simple enough. They were not stealing from another Mage. They were not provoking so beast in its lair and hoping speed would be enough to save them. What they were about to do would enrage a spirit king—a being that ruled over the whole of the plane around them.
Elias could not even begin to imagine the full extent of that kind of power.
What would a creature like that be capable of? What would follow if they actually succeeded in angering it? The thought alone was enough to make his mind keep reaching toward darker possibilities. If the spirit king sohow managed to force a path into their world after them, then this would no longer remain their own disaster. They might end up condemning everyone.
Elias imdiately shook his head as that line of thought.
No. That was unlikely.
Spirits did not move between realms so easily. Their attachnt to their ho plane ran far deeper than the bond humans had with their own world, and without being called properly, they could not simply drift from one realm to another. And no one Elias knew of possessed the kind of summoning power needed to call forth a spirit king.
No, the more likely ending was much simpler. They would fail here. They would die here.
And if fortune was feeling kinder than usual, then perhaps their souls would at least be allowed to reincarnate afterward.
What unsettled Elias most was that, out of every ending his mind kept offering him, that one felt the most believable.
That was not like him.
For most of his life, he had trusted in his ability to survive. No matter how ugly a situation beca, so part of him always believed he would find the angle that let him crawl back out of it. But the past few months had worn that confidence down in ways he still had not fully accepted. Again and again, he had been reminded that in the wider scale of things, he was only another Mage. More mana, better spells, sharper instincts—none of it ant much when standing before beings that existed far beyond the limits of his strength.
Elias let out a slow breath and stepped onto another rising earth platform, using it to clear a fresh tangle of vines below.
Then, from his left, he heard Claire gasp.
He turned at once and saw a small squirrel-like spirit springing off a branch toward her. Arzan, who was carrying Claire through the air, barely even looked at it. A short gust of wind snapped outward from his hand and knocked the creature spinning away into the trees before it could do more than startle her. Claire took a few deep breaths after that, visibly trying to settle herself.
Elias used the brief lull to ask, “How much farther to the earth sovereign?”
Arzan glanced at him before answering. “An hour, maybe a little more. But we’ll need to search for its nest.”
Elias nodded, though his eyes kept moving through the forest around them. Everywhere he looked there were more trees, more hanging vines, more layers of green folding over one another until the whole forest felt like it was trying to hide itself from anything passing through it.
After a mont he said, “I still don’t know if it’ll listen to us again. Once was lucky enough.”
“That’s why we brought Claire,” Arzan said. “And don’t worry. It didn’t seem like the sort of spirit that would refuse even to talk.” Then, with that maddening calm of his, he added, “And if it doesn’t help us, we can always go in blind.”
Elias actually winced.
Just hearing the words made sothing tighten in him. The plan was already dangerous enough without Arzan talking so casually about stumbling forward with even less information. Elias could not decide whether that was confidence, stupidity, or so miserable mixture of both.
Probably both.
Still, if he was being fair, Arzan would be the main point of force in the whole thing. According to the plan, the heaviest burden would fall on him, so perhaps that was why he sounded so unbothered. Perhaps he really was that certain of himself.
For his part, Elias still preferred to walk toward danger knowing as much about it as possible.
After all, information was everything in battle.
But as that thought settled in Elias’s mind, another followed close behind it, one he did not ask imdiately. He kept it to himself while they moved on through the forest—Arzan and Claire crossing the distance through the air while he continued shaping earth platforms beneath his feet to keep pace with them.
The question stayed with him the whole ti. Only after another half hour passed did he finally decide to speak.
“There’s sothing I wanted to clarify,” Elias said.
Arzan, who had just curved around a massive branch jutting out through the canopy, glanced back at him.
“About what?” he asked. “I thought I’d already explained most of the plan.”
“Not exactly the plan,” Elias said. He took another step onto a rising slab of earth, then continued, “It’s what you said about reaching the sixth circle once we’re inside the castle.”
That made Arzan’s expression still slightly, though he said nothing and Elias went on. “You told us you had a way to improve your chances once you got there, and I heard the words well enough, but I still don’t understand how that’s supposed to be possible. Even now it sounds impossible to .” He glanced at Claire briefly, then back at Arzan. “I’m fairly sure Veridia had the sa doubts. She just didn’t bother asking… Which is unusual for her, considering how willing she normally is to challenge you on everything.”
Then he paused before adding, more flatly, “And please don’t tell this thod ca from Valkyrie. I know it didn’t.”
Arzan did not answer right away.
They kept moving through the forest while the silence stretched between them. Arzan’s face remained unreadable, and for a while Elias thought he might refuse to answer at all.
“The thod ca from soone. But I can’t tell you who,” Arzan said finally.
Elias frowned, though he kept listening.
“That Mage isn’t alive anymore,” Arzan continued. “That’s all I’ll say about it. But there is a way to reach the sixth circle without putting my life at too much risk.” He looked at Elias then. “You know well enough how different the sixth circle is from the first five.”
Elias nodded. “Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly why I’m asking. The gap isn’t small. It isn’t the sort of thing a person just crosses because they need to. So when you say you have a way to get there without truly risking your life, of course I find that hard to believe.”
Arzan let out a breath through his nose. “There is risk,” he said after a while. “There’s always risk in advancent. There’s no circle worth reaching that doesn’t demand sothing. But this isn’t the kind of risk where I’m likely to lose my life outright.”
Elias fell silent at that.
He still did not understand how it was possible.
Reaching the sixth circle was not the sort of thing a Mage spoke of lightly. Even under the best conditions, even when one managed the process correctly, the danger to one’s life remained enormous. There were too many points where things could go wrong, too many ways for a body or mind to fail under the strain. So how could Arzan sound that certain about it when he had never stood at the sixth circle before?
For a brief mont, Elias found himself wondering whether following this plan ant he had already accepted his own ruin.
Then he let out a slow breath and pushed the thought aside.
There was no turning back now.
And in the end, for all the madness of the plan, Arzan was still a genius. More importantly, he was not the sort of person Elias believed would knowingly place all of them in greater danger by lying about sothing so central. That did not erase the uncertainty, but it was enough.
By then, they had already gone deep into the forest, and before long, they found the path left behind by the earth sovereign.
Path was perhaps too gentle a word for it.
The spirit had not made any attempt to hide its passage when it left. Large sections of the forest had simply been forced aside beneath its movent. Bushes lay flattened into the soil, branches snapped and scattered across the ground, and in so places even smaller trees had been broken or shoved aside as though they had ant nothing. Thick vines had been torn loose from where they once hung and now lay coiled in heaps across the forest floor. The whole trail looked less like sothing made by a creature walking through the woods and more like a piece of the woods had been struck and crushed open by sothing far too large to care what stood in its way.
They did not need to search for the route. They only had to follow the destruction. So that was what they did.
And the farther they moved along it, the quieter the forest beca.
Elias noticed that easily. At first it was only a subtle thing—the absence of smaller movent in the undergrowth, the lack of distant rustling or spirits crossing near their path. But as they went deeper, the silence thickened until it seed to settle over the whole forest.
That, more than anything else, told him they were going the right way.
Whether spirit or beast, most creatures were territorial by nature. The smaller ones did not linger close to sothing vastly stronger unless they had no other choice and the quiet ant the lesser life around them had already learned to keep its distance.
Even so, it took longer than Elias expected before he ca close enough to feel the earth sovereign again.
When he finally did, he recognized its mana at once.
He had felt it during their previous eting as well, but the impression had not faded from mory. The earth sovereign’s mana carried the clearest, most overwhelming sense of earth-aspected power he had ever encountered. Even now, catching that distant presence again stirred sothing in him.
If circumstances had been different, he might have wanted nothing more than to sit before such a being and ask questions until he learned everything he could about his elent.
But that was not for now.
Maybe later, Elias thought. Maybe on so future return to the earth plane, if he survived this one first.
As they went farther, the earth-aspected mana in the air grew heavier.
Arzan, who was ahead, slowed first. Then he stopped completely, lowered himself to the ground, and gently set Claire down before saying, “I think we should walk from here.”
Elias imdiately let his earth platform sink and stepped off it. Beside him, Claire looked up at Arzan and asked, “Should I let Aeralion out?”
Arzan nodded. “Yes. Let him out. The earth sovereign may be less likely to attack right away if he sees one of his own in the air.”
Claire gave a small nod.
A mont later, the storm sovereign erged from her body and projected itself into the sky above them.
Elias watched it for a second as they started moving again. Spirit tars had always interested him, and that interest had only grown since coming to the earth plane. There was still sothing deeply strange to him about seeing a spirit bound so closely to a human. Aeralion did not look particularly pleased to be there, but it stayed above them all the sa.
After that, the three of them continued forward on foot.
The trail left by the earth sovereign was easy enough to follow, and while the ground was uneven with broken branches, torn roots, and cracked patches of soil, it was not difficult enough to force them to clear a path with magic. They simply moved around what they had to and kept going.
Before long, Elias saw a small grove ahead. And in front of it, the earth sovereign was there.
The giant spirit lay with its massive body half-resting against the ground, but its head was raised, and its eyes were fixed on them long before they properly arrived. It had clearly sensed them so ti ago and had chosen to wait.
None of them slowed.
If anything, they picked up speed slightly, crossing the last stretch until they stood before the enormous spirit once again.
The earth sovereign’s gaze rose first to Aeralion. It held there for a mont, before it lowered again toward Arzan.
“We only spoke a short while ago,” it said. “I did not expect you to co back to so soon.”
Its voice was as heavy as the mana around it, carrying a quiet pressure.
“You should know by now that I do not enjoy being disturbed. Especially not by humans.” Its eyes flicked once more toward the storm sovereign hovering above them. “Even if you have brought one of my kin with you.”
Arzan t the earth sovereign’s gaze without lowering his own, which Elias found mildly shocking given the weight pressing through the grove.
“If it were not important,” Arzan said, “I would not have co back to disturb you. I only have one more request.”
The earth sovereign let out a breath. Its eyes narrowed. Elias saw the change at once and knew, almost imdiately, that nothing good was about to follow.
He was right.
Spikes of earth burst upward from all around them without warning, surging out of the ground in jagged waves ant to skewer them where they stood. Elias reacted on instinct, slamming up thick walls of earth around the group, but the force behind the attack was monstrous. The spikes punched through his defenses anyway, splitting the walls apart as if they were little more than brittle clay.
Before they could do anything—lightning crashed down.
It struck the rising spikes point-blank, shattering them before they could drive through flesh.
The storm sovereign’s voice followed in the next breath.
“If you dare harm Claire,” it said, “I will make sure this is your last day in this plane.”
Hatred poured off it as it glared down at the earth sovereign. The larger spirit only smiled.
“You may try, child,” it said. “But I doubt you could remove even a piece of my body.”
Then its attention shifted back to Arzan.
“I was already generous enough to indulge you once,” the sovereign said. “And now you return as though that gave you the right to keep taking from my patience. I already told you that I do not possess an Elder Tree seed. You will not find one anywhere in this plane except with the spirit king.” Its voice lowered slightly, though the pressure in it only grew. “So why do you insist on acting ignorant?”
Arzan did not flinch.
By this point, Elias had co to expect that much from him. More than expect it—respect it.
“I know I’m overstepping,” Arzan said. “I know I have no right to co here again asking for anything. But the reason I dared to anyway is because what I want to ask of you may lead to sothing you would be very pleased to see.”
The earth sovereign lowered its head.
Its breath rolled over Arzan heavily enough that even Claire took a step back, but Arzan held his ground while the giant spirit studied him from close enough to crush him in an instant.
“In the last hundred years,” it said, “I have felt very little beyond anger. That is what all of your actions have earned from so far. So tell , human—what could you possibly do that would make happy?”
It was the opening Arzan had clearly been waiting for as he took a step forward and asked right away, “How does the destruction of the spirit king’s castle sound to you?”
The reaction was imdiate.
The earth sovereign’s eyes widened so sharply that Elias, for a second, almost forgot to be afraid. He had not even known the spirit could look that openly startled.
Then it roared. “Do not lie to , human!”
Even with the bellow pressing at them, Arzan did not waver.
“I’m not lying,” he said. “And I’m not foolish enough to co all the way here just to throw a lie in your face and lose my head for it.” Then he glanced upward. “You can ask your kin. I brought him here for a reason.”
His eyes lifted to Aeralion.
“Sovereigns do not lie, do they?”
The earth sovereign imdiately raised its head and turned its gaze toward the storm sovereign in the sky.
Aeralion gave a sharp snort, clearly displeased at being pulled into the exchange. But when Claire looked up at him with a hard glare, it relented enough to speak.
“The human is telling the truth,” Aeralion said. “He is irritating, and I don’t particularly like him, but I have never known him to lie about sothing.”
Arzan smiled faintly at that and took a small step closer.
The earth sovereign looked between them again, and for a mont Elias could almost see the weight of thought moving behind its expression, as though it were sorting through a hundred different questions at once.
“So, will you help us?” Arzan asked.
The giant spirit lowered its gaze back to him.
“I don’t even understand how you intend to accomplish sothing so absurd,” it said.
“I’ll explain that,” Arzan replied. “But first, I need your cooperation. I’m not asking for your strength. Only your knowledge.”
The earth sovereign said nothing for a minute.
It simply kept staring at Arzan, and the silence that followed spread thickly through the grove. Elias beca painfully aware of everything—aware of the broken ground underfoot, of Claire standing tense nearby, of Aeralion still hovering above them, of the pressure coming off the giant spirit in slow, suffocating waves.
Before long, he felt sweat sliding down his forehead.
If the earth sovereign refused, then there was every chance they would have to fight their way out for having disturbed it again. And standing there beneath that silence, Elias could not help wondering whether he should have stayed behind with Veridia, Killian, and Elder Caelith after all, helping prepare the first stage of the plan instead of placing himself directly in front of another possible death.
***
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