Morios, to his credit, listened to the whole story without flinching. The same couldn’t be said for the others, who gathered gradually as the sun rose and the tide receded. The minotaur didn’t even blink while Jay was cobbling together explanations to cover the necromancy parts. Warinot kept clenching his fist until the metal rod he was holding groaned. Some of the rest of Group One flat out excused themselves at certain parts.

  He also left out the parts about the Blessing of Elios; no sense in having to explain all of that while also trying to tip-toe around his Class. Until he figured out just what about him made him of such interest to the god, there wasn’t a point to mentioning it anyway. Instead he pretended the goblin warren had been filled with statues of Elios, something that made the three who had been part of arranging this expedition exchange glances that were layered with enough meaning Jay was surprised Omnilinguist didn’t offer a translation.

  Morios did interrupt when he mentioned the projection of his body. “And you said there were things underneath the skin of the representation?”

  Jay agreed, not really sure where he was going with that.

  “Can I try something, Jay? It will not hurt you at all.” The minotaur stood when Jay nodded, then laid a hand on the sitting man’s forehead. Streams of magic began to flow from where the two patches of skin met in three different colors: an almost creamy white, a bloody red that looked identical to Eth’s fog, and a color that matched almost exactly to what Jay’s skin tone had been before the progression of the curse had changed it.

  The streams rippled down his body, then seemed to evaporate on contact with the ground, rising back up to form a simulated version of him above his head. It was in even more detail than the goblin’s version had been; everything except his groin was rendered in perfect realism. Then Morios made a gesture and the thing’s skin faded, followed by enough of the musculature that the nodules Jay had mentioned were visible.

  They were larger than they had been. If Jay had needed more proof of Elios’s implication that they were the consequence of his Health draining, there it was.

  Morios looked at the projected tumors for a second, then bowed his head. “There is nothing I can do about these,” he announced, voice grave. “I do not know of any healer that could. We have a usual treatment,” he ventured, “but I do not think you would like that option.”

  “You would not,” Warinot asserted.

  “What is it?” Jay asked. If there was any chance of it being helpful, he might not turn it down, no matter how certain the guardian seemed that he wouldn’t want it.

  “Euthenasia.”

  What the fuck? “So you just kill anyone with cancer?” Mindboggled was not enough of a word for the state of mind those words left Jay in.

  “Cancer.” Morios rolled the word over a few times. “That is not the typical term for this. Normally we call it the Eliosian Affliction; his priesthood are normally the ones that are diagnosed with it.”

  Warinot saw his confused look and jumped in to explain. “He’s the god of corruption, after all. There’s nothing this illness resembles more than flesh turning against itself, growing out of control until you choke on it.” By the end of the second sentence, the big man sounded like he was the one choking, and he cut off.”

  “Sorry about him,” Morios said. “His family has had several Bishops of Elios in it. They are more intimately familiar with the complications surrounding any position in his clergy than most.”

  “But he wasn’t wrong,” Jay said. “Isn’t that exactly what it is?”

  “To some degree. Truth is, we do not know exactly what causes it outside of the priesthood’s overexposure to their god’s energy. It has a tendency to warp and alter things of its own accord without careful containment.”

  “Because it’s what Elios does,” the necromancer realized. “So his power does that by itself.”

  “Exactly.” Morios twitched his fingers a few more times, various layers of the model of Jay’s body flickering in and out as he did.

  “So do the priests have specialized blessings from him to be able to interact with it?” Jay questioned. Had that been too obvious of a question? Was he giving it away?

  “Supposedly they have training. That could be considered a blessing, but if you mean something like a unique Class, Trait, or Ability, I am not sure. The only people who could speak to that would be the priests themselves, who quite famously do not choose to do so. Even Pixt has no information on the subject.”

  Jay laughed at how sour the last words had come out. “You sound like you’ve asked.”

  “I have. Many times.”

  “Many times,” Warinot agreed, seemingly over his emotional bout. “No matter how many times I tell him that they don’t talk about it even to family.”

  “It would be so much easier if they did,” Morios said. “Think of the amount of information that could be going to waste now. We might have a way to take care of things like this if we had the full breadth of their knowledge about it.”

  [Sense Magic] pinged in Jay’s head as a new voice entered the conversation.

  “You’re assuming they know more than they’re sharing,” Kallin said.

  Jay didn’t know when he’d actually arrived, but here he was, floating on a slab of stone like he was surfing. The blond man looked perfectly happy perched there, as if nothing was wrong while faced with someone whose skin and eyes had very recently ceased to resemble anything like what a normal human should look like.

  “I have to apologize, Jay,” he started. “There weren’t supposed to be goblins around here. I thought we’d checked as thoroughly as we could, but clearly we missed something. It’s my fault you’re in this situation now.”

  Warinot objected. “Since they got him there with spatial transfer, there may not have been a way to notice them.”

  “Except he said he could walk out to leave. That makes it my fault. I was the one double-checking every zone, so I should have caught it.”

  He’d been there a while, then. As far back as him telling the story. Odd, [Sense Magic] had only pinged the one time and there’d been no sign of him before that. If he’d already been there, why had it only gone off then? If he’d been listening magically, why hadn’t it gone off then?

  And, most importantly: if he could hear that, what else could he hear?

  “Seriously. You have my apologies, Jay. I’m impressed that you managed to pull through. Most of what we’d heard from the others made it sound like you were dead already, from blood loss if nothing else. And you’ll have to forgive them for not coming after you. They prioritized getting Lethen back for treatment.”

  Oloros spoke up, still looking vaguely sick. “It seemed like the right decision.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Kallin nodded. “It was. A spear through the thigh is a very dangerous thing. Since you had no idea where Jay was, it was definitively the correct choice.”

  The maned man’s face flickered to satisfaction briefly before returning to a nauseated expression.

  “It was not a choice they should have had to make,” Kallin said, returning to the initial subject. “That is another of my failings, and I have already apologized to them for it over the last three days.”

  Jay wasn’t sure how to respond to that, but the blond man didn’t seem to expect him to respond at all. That seemed to be the end of the conversation entirely as far as he was concerned, since he tapped a foot on his slab of stone, doing something that caused [Sense Magic] to ping again, and vanished.

  “That man,” Elyra sighed, looking up from her work repairing the suits and their enchantments for the first time. “Always in a rush.”

  “How did he…” Jay trailed off, gesturing at where he had been.

  “He can just do that,” Warinot said.

  Jay blinked. That wasn’t something he’d have expected an earth-based Class to be able to do. Maybe it was some form of teleportation from one patch of ground to another? Really there wasn’t much of a way to know unless Kallin – or someone else who knew – chose to tell him.

  “Perhaps we could all use something to eat,” Warinot suggested. “Morios, Elyra, let’s get something together and allow the children some time to themselves.”

  The two others stood up, the enchanter more reluctantly than the healer, though the latter paused to dismiss the projection he’d been trawling through for the whole end of the conversation. Jay thought about offering an objection to being called one of the children, but they were out of easy earshot before he could.

  Not that it had been that important anyway.

  The rest of the Group One exchanged glances as if debating something before standing up as well. Unlike the trio of the sponsors, they all chose to mob Jay, cramming in as close as they could for a group hug that couldn’t have been entirely spontaneous. Even Lethen limped in to join despite a clear expression of pain on his face.

  *

  After the group hug and subsequent flurry of apologies ended, each of them trying to assume some form of blame for him being taken, they moved onto lighter things. Some of them wanted him to tell the story again, others were vehemently objecting to that idea, and more wanted to talk about the tumors themselves.

  Jay put an end to most of it himself, ducking conversations as politely as he could without sacrificing firmness. He didn’t feel like ending up back in the memories a third time, and he definitely didn’t want to risk tying himself up in verbal knots while elaborating on one of his lies. He begged off primarily on the basis of being tired of retelling it.

  The group pivoted yet again, shifting to bringing him up to speed on what he’d missed both while missing and while sleeping. Apparently they’d all shared each other’s Class information so that if they got into more underwater fighting, they’d be able to work with each other. They hadn’t had much practice yet, but they were hopeful things would click together the more they had the chance to prepare.

  They also mentioned some of the oddities with the city. In the days he’d been missing, apparently the black and purple miasma that only those with magical Classes could see had begun to roil with new colors. Primarily a virulent green, though they all seemed to pass around dark looks at the reference.

  Jay, remembering his attempt to use [Lesser Resurrection] on the giant pillar of coral, almost adopted the same harrowed look. It was too much to hope that whatever was causing this was unrelated. He could probably expect a System window any time now about it. The thought made his breath hitch; for a second he thought he saw one pop into being as if summoned by his thoughts, but it never quite coalesced into the solid state that they normally appeared as.

  System boxes either were or weren’t, there wasn’t normally a halfway point that Jay had ever heard about. It had to have been his imagination, then, or at the very least wasn’t something he could answer, so he put it out of his mind.

  After the meal and well-wishes had died off, Warinot headed into the water to try to make sure there were no more threats waiting for them that had been missed the first time. The rest of the group stayed on the surface, though some decided to swim for some relaxation. It wasn’t a coincidence that most of the ones who did were those who had been in the group that hadn’t been attacked. The others dispersed for their own purposes.

  Except one. Bolar, the sinavine with cracked skin, followed Jay as he returned to his tent. Jay didn’t notice until he stepped in and the tent flap didn’t fall back into place immediately. He spun around to find the other man standing right behind him.

  Jay had just been polite all morning. He didn’t feel like repeating that here, not when the sinavine had followed him without even asking. “What are you doing in my tent?”

  “I told all of you what my class was,” Bolar began. “You may not know the specifics, but you had to realize that there was going to be an issue.”

  “An issue with what?” Jay asked. “You’re talking like I have something I need to be worried about.”

  “You do.” Bolar leaned in, giving Jay a look at the cracks on his shoulders from the angle they were meant to be seen at. They were extremely artful for what normally looked like the natural cracking process of stone under pressure, full of both gently curving lines and harsher geometric designs that Omnilinguist translated into various concepts. “Steadiness” was the most common, alongside “stone” and “tremor.”

  The only other sinavine among the group, Imni, didn’t have anything like those patterns. Jay had no idea whether that was something related to why she seemed to have gemstones in place of various body parts where Bolar looked more like his skin was made of clay or if it was something else. The difference was there regardless.

  Bolar poked him. “That. That right there. You’re going to do that and claim to me that you have nothing to be worried about?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jay said. He didn’t have to fake the bafflement. “Because I zoned out?”

  “No, because your ‘zoning out’ was enough to make you sway on your feet.” Bolar cocked his head as if something had just occurred to him. “You didn’t even notice, did you?”

  “How would I have noticed something I did while not paying attention?”

  “Most people have enough proprioception to not almost fall over while thinking things over, you know?” Bolar sounded legitimately concerned, a tone that only deepened with his next words. “You don’t even know what you sound like inside.”

  What the fuck did that mean? Jay decided to ask that question out loud without softening it. That wasn’t just something that was supposed to be said and accepted without question.

  “I told you what my Class was,” the sinavine said again, acting like it explained everything.

  “Nothing about the word [Kinesthetic] means anything to me about supposedly being able to hear inside of my body,” Jay stressed. “You want to talk about things no one does? That’s something no one does.”

  “Oh. Well, they’re common where I’m from. Sort of.” He took a breath. “The fact is, my sensory enhancement abilities mean that I have been hearing inside everyone constantly ever since I unlocked them. The boat was hellish, by the way, with that many people in close contact with each other and all their noises overlapping.

  “That means I’ve been hearing all of your organs – all of everyone’s organs – function for the whole time we’ve been here. I was going to bring it up with you when we ended up in the same group, but things got a little out of control between then and now.”

  “I’m familiar,” Jay said, as dryly as he could.

  “I know you are. But you haven’t sounded right inside the whole time. Those tumors? I’m pretty sure they’ve been growing in you the whole time.”

  For a second there, Jay had been sure Bolar was about to say he knew the truth about his class. It was a relief to find out that that wasn’t what the younger man meant, though it did bring up an uncomfortable question about what else he could hear.

  “Do you know why?” the sinavine asked. “With what Morios said about it, this seems like the kind of thing you should know the source of.”

  “I do not,” Jay lied. “But there’s every chance you’re right and they were there before. All that does is make it even more clear that I don’t have a clue where it all came from.”

  “I hope not. Imagine if you’d known and not told anyone how it started. We both know how stupid that would be,” Bolar said, backing out of the tent as soon as he was done.

  What the hell was that emphasis? Jay didn’t want to get paranoid, but was that some kind of signal that he actually did know about the necromancy? Or was it just a weird speech quirk?

  The thought was driven out of his head as a System window popped up.