The second time Rylan woke, it was to Soren, gently shaking him awake for his watch. He got up bleary-eyed, and climbed out of the soggy-yet-warm bedroll to sit at the entrance to the shell.

  A tingle went up his spine, and he instinctively turned his head to stare into the fog.

  The events of the night, his strange dream, came back to him, and his eyes widened, his heartbeat accelerating.

  He pinched the skin on the back of his hand. It hurt.

  Fog. Is this really happening? What could possibly be calling me?

  Several hours of quiet pondering and sporadic tingles brought him no closer to solving the mystery. He’d never before been so tempted to wake his companions early, but managed to keep himself in check.

  Well, if he did start on breakfast a little early, and the smell woke them before they normally rose, he could hardly be blamed, could he?

  As eager as he was to share about his strange experiences—and the odd sense of direction that still tingled up his spine every couple of minutes—he found himself a little hesitant once his companions were actually gathered around the breakfast he’d prepared.

  “I, ehm,” he finally worked up the courage to start, as Soren slurped enthusiastically on the broth Rylan had drawn out of their leftover frog legs. “I had a dream last night.”

  “Mm!” Soren hummed with his mouth full, thankfully swallowing before he continued. “Me too! I dreamt I was chasing this delicious-looking crab, but then it scurried under its mommy, and its mommy was huge and thought I looked delicious.”

  Tamina nodded sagely. “That last part is how you know it’s a dream.”

  “Excuse me?!”

  “You’re like a twig. Not enough meat on your bones to look delicious to a giant crab.”

  “Are you calling me weak? I may not have bulging muscles, but I’m wiry!”

  “Exactly my point.”

  “I had a dream last night,” Rylan repeated, with a little more force. “Or... something like it. It may have been more of a, well, vision.”

  This finally caught their attention, and they both turned to face him.

  “For real?” Soren asked, his eyes wide.

  Tamina didn’t say anything, just stared at him with a single raised brow.

  Rylan could feel the heat rise to his cheeks. “I know what it sounds like, but... Yeah, I think so.”

  “Well, out with it,” Soren continued excitedly, lowering his bowl. “What was it like? What did you see?!”

  Rylan took a deep breath. “Well, it... it was from the perspective of that big cloudphin Malequint we encountered yesterday. I was swimming with my pod, hunting fogfish, and the sounds I made—the clicking noises—somehow told me where they were. At some point, there was a cloudshark, and I let out a different sound, a kind of... screech. It immediately started to bleed from its eyes and gums, and fled. Then something... called to me, and I heeded it. I swam through the fog for a long time, until finally, I came to a place I couldn’t enter, and then... I heard a voice, that called for help. Except it wasn’t talking to the cloudphin. It was talking to me.”

  Tamina shivered, and shook her head. “All right, very funny. Points for delivery, but that’s enough spirit vision stories for breakfast.”

  “What are you talking about?” Soren asked, incredulous. “I have to know what happened next!”

  “Are you being serious right now?” Tamina asked, rolling her eyes. “He clearly got bored on watch and decided to mess with us.”

  They both turned to Rylan, and he swallowed. “Again, I know what it sounds like, but I’m not making this up. More importantly... I can still sense it calling to me. It—it’s somewhere over there.”

  Another tingle went up his spine right then, and he pointed out into the fog unerringly, without turning his head.

  Tamina’s frown deepened.

  Soren stared right at him, eyes wide and gleaming. “It’s totally like the old stories!” he whispered. “A spirit, beckoning you for some unknowable reason...”

  “Seriously, if this is your idea of a joke, it’s not funny,” Tamina growled. The tension in her shoulders, and the little tremble on the word ‘not’ told a very different story from her tone, however.

  I guess she really doesn’t like scary stories.

  Rylan shrugged helplessly. “It’s not a joke, Tammi. I kinda wish it was.”

  She squinted at him, seeming to try to forcibly pierce through his fa?ade somehow. “Fine, I’ll believe you believe that. Here’s an alternate explanation: you had a dream.”

  “What?” Soren exclaimed. “First of all, that doesn’t explain the sense of direction, and second of all: this was clearly a vision!”

  “It happened while he slept,” Tamina replied dryly.

  “That’s normal!” Soren argued, gesticulating with such fervour that he almost spilt some of his broth. “When could we be more receptive to visions then while asleep? Fog, most of my mom’s visions happen while she sleeps, and the spirits have shown her things that happened far away, long before we got news of them; like when Mount Ventus started rumbling and puffing out smoke.”

  Rylan blinked at him. He’d never heard about Dionne getting visions, but he definitely recalled the event Soren mentioned. It had been big news a couple of years ago. The Thistlethorns had temporarily sheltered quite a number of refugees from Ventonas—the capital city built into the dormant volcano—and even the royal family had been forced to abandon Precipice Palace for a while. Thankfully, Mount Ventus ultimately didn’t erupt, and eventually went back to sleep.

  “Here, I’ll prove it,” Soren said, before turning to Rylan. “Rylan, you’ve never seen my grandmother use her Voice Skills, right?”

  “I mean, I’ve felt the walls shake sometimes, but... not directly, no. Why?”

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  “Well, what you described with the shark just now, sounds eerily similar to what she can do.”

  Rylan perked up. “You’ve seen her use her Voice Skills?”

  Soren nodded gravely. “Once, when I was eight. Actually, I told you about it. Remember that time my family went out on a sailing trip and got approached by a ship flying a black flag?”

  Rylan definitely remembered. They’d played pirate games for weeks afterwards, completely obsessed. Fog, he’d dreamt of being a pirate for well over a year.

  “Well,” Soren continued upon his nod. “What I didn’t tell you—because Helen strictly forbade me—was what I saw. I only caught a glimpse of what happened when grandma raised her voice, before my mom dragged me below deck, but I distinctly remember seeing the other ship’s captain start to bleed from his eyes and ears.”

  Tamina’s eyes were flicking back and forth between them, alarmed.

  Soren turned towards her. “I swear I never told him about that.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” she croaked.

  “All I’m saying is, it’s not the kind of detail you just make up,” Soren replied seriously.

  “There’s one more thing,” Rylan said. “At the end, I was left with an image in my head. A symbol. Here, it looked like... this.”

  The spiky hexagon he drew in the sand came out a little wonky, and the thing in the centre wasn’t much more than a distant cousin of a flame, but he figured it got the point across.

  Soren squinted at it, then his eyes widened. “That’s the mark of the Hermean Empire!”

  “Is it?” Tamina asked sceptically.

  “Yes! Look, it’s a hexagon containing a flame!”

  “That’s what it looked like!” Rylan agreed excitedly.

  “Looks more like a fence around a heap of dung,” Tamina muttered.

  “Hey!” Rylan protested. “I tried, all right? Anyway, do you know what it means?”

  Soren hesitated, then shook his head. “Master Gullfeather said the exact origin of the mark has been lost to the ages. It’s on a lot of old knick-knacks and coins from that era, but that just makes it kind of hard to pinpoint its significance.”

  Rylan deflated a little. He’d hoped to find out a little more about it. He considered bringing up the book in the Thistlethorn library it had been on the cover of, but he didn’t want to get Tamina back on the ‘it was just a dream’ track, so he kept his silence.

  “Here’s what I think happened,” Soren said, gazing intently at Rylan. “You fed that Malequint something yesterday. You touched it, and not just physically, as you said you could tell it was a Malequint. Somehow, a spirit used the imprint left by that contact, fleeting as it was, to send you a message. Used the creature as a bridge, of sorts, a conduit. That’s my best guess, anyway.”

  Rylan swallowed, his mouth feeling awfully dry, despite the fog. “So, do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Soren replied earnestly. “What did it feel like to you?”

  Rylan pondered that for a moment. “I think its request for help was... genuine. It was like I got a taste of its emotions when it spoke to me. I don’t think it was deceiving me. I’m not even sure it could have.”

  “What kind of help could a spirit possibly need?” Tamina mused.

  “Beats me,” Soren replied chipperly. “But I guess we’re going to find out. ’Cause it sounds like Rylan can lead us right to it.”

  “I get these tingles up my spine,” Rylan explained. “And then I just... know.”

  “Are we seriously going to follow Rylan’s weird tingles?!”

  “What have we got to lose?” Soren asked with a shrug. “We’re already in deep trouble. If we can help this spirit, it may be able to help us in return. Fog, if it can really give people visions and a sense of direction through the fog, it could let someone know where we are! Like my dad.”

  That finally gave Tamina pause. Her frown didn’t let up, but she eventually sighed. “Fine. I guess it’s worth a shot. Not like we have a lot of stellar options otherwise. But if this all leads to some hungry Malequint that’s too lazy to come get us, I just want you to remember that I said ‘I told you so,’ beforehand!”

  That statement was followed by some light-hearted bickering about what kind of Malequint could possibly do something like this, but overall, Rylan felt like the mood had shifted.

  He hadn’t even considered what the spirit might be able to do in return, but now that Soren had spelled out the possibilities, their escape from the cloudsea suddenly seemed a lot more imminent and plausible than it had in a while.

  They started out strong that day. The rain had finally ended somewhere early in the morning, and they set out with fresh purpose. Under the diffuse light of day, with newfound hope, the tingles going up Rylan’s spine seemed a lot less eerie, and he felt cautiously optimistic.

  A few hours later, however, the slogging was beginning to wear on him again. Thankfully, his Mana Pool had refilled by now, so Rylan could at least do some training as he walked.

  He could still recall the feeling of how the cloudphin had tapped into its power and channelled it into its vocal chords. Part of him had been tempted to replicate it, but Soren had made it quite clear that all Voice Skills had requirements for the Presence Attribute—not exactly Rylan’s strong suit.

  To be fair, trying to pour mana into his vocal cords and screeching at the top of his lungs down in the cloudsea seemed like a poor idea in general.

  Hiding his disappointment, Rylan instead focused on his current training goal: working towards Running.

  Not that his practice involved anything like running yet. At the moment, he was just sending tiny pulses of mana to his feet in an alternating rhythm. The steady pace they were walking at didn’t really give him time to do much more than try to push the mana out the bottom of his feet, but he tried to do so while mentally picturing the mana being stored in the soles of his boots.

  He couldn’t really tell if it was working or not, but it seemed like it was going to take a while for them to reach whatever being was calling out to him, and it wasn’t like he still needed to save up mana to expand his overcharge capacity, or had anything better to do.

  Focusing on his mana did mean he was paying less attention to his surroundings, but with Tamina in front of him and Soren behind him, he wasn’t too worried.

  Also, it wasn’t like their surroundings were all that interesting.

  As much as he’d hated the reef by the end, part of him couldn’t help but miss it, now that they were trekking across a mostly desolate field of sand.

  The desolation wasn’t boding well for their lunch, either.

  There were no shellfish or amphibians to be seen, hardly any plants, and the only crustaceans they came across were too small to consider eating. The only suitable prey around here were the fogfish that sometimes came flitting by, but Knife-Throwing—the only feasible way they had to take those down without the ability to corner them—came with a risk.

  Without the corals to block any stray knives, it was hard to tell how far a missed throw might travel. And a knife that hit the sand tip-first might very well disappear entirely, if he charged it with too much mana.

  So when a particularly juicy fogfish came swimming by, Rylan briefly caressed the handle of his chef’s knife, but ultimately sighed and watched it dart away.

  By the time Soren tapped him on the shoulder, an hour or two later, his stomach was rumbling enough to shift his priorities.

  He turned around, a half-formed question on his lips, but Soren quickly covered his mouth, before pointing at a vague shape in the fog, that was slowly drifting closer.

  A fogfish, and a fat one at that. The creature clearly hadn’t detected them yet, as it was still approaching them. Rylan had found that the eyesight of many creatures down here wasn’t great, and they tended to rely on other senses more.

  Licking his lips, Rylan moved very carefully as he drew one of his blades. The sound of the metal sliding over leather was still enough to make Tamina turn around, but Soren’s frantic gesturing kept her quiet as Rylan drew back his blade, holding it by the handle.

  It was a pretty far throw, so he’d taken out one of his longer knives—the filleting knife—and was going for a full-spin.

  The fogfish drifted closer, and Rylan could just barely see its fins lazily flapping.

  It would notice them any second now, so he couldn’t waste any more time. He charged his blade with about 0.3 points of mana, just to guarantee the kill in case of a poor hit, then stepped out and threw in a single motion.

  His glowing blade sailed through the fog at high speed, performing a full rotation before it buried itself neatly into his prey’s head with a solid thump.

  The impact was strong enough to send the floating creature spinning backwards, weak spasms going through its flesh as the weight of the knife started to pull it down to the cloudbed.

  “Nice one, Ryles!” Soren cheered, already sprinting over.

  “Not bad,” Tamina agreed, as she and Rylan followed at a more sedate pace.

  “Thanks,” Rylan replied with a smile. “I had a good teacher.”

  A small smile graced her own lips in return, but the moment was broken by Soren letting out a curse, which was quickly followed by a loud, ominous hiss.

  Uh oh...

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