Activating his divine sense again gave Sev a unique, dizzying sense of vertigo as a path suddenly manifested in front of him — not literally, but metaphorically. There was a mental map telling him exactly where to go, and exactly what time he'd reach each milestone; Sev suspected this was Tempus's way of helping, as he wouldn't have been able to make time this well if he'd been going on his own.

According to Tempus, he would arrive at his destination in thirty minutes, which was a wild abuse of divine temporal magic if Sev had ever seen one. He wasn't complaining, though. It wasn't like Tempus was forcing him to experience all the subjective time he was skipping; hiking for two days without stopping would be hell.

As it was, Sev fast forwarded through the hike, working through the pack of supplies he had brought with him at a steady pace. Healing, unfortunately, could not fully replace food and water.

His heart sank when he arrived.

"Don't judge too early, Sev," he muttered to himself. The area in front of him looked like an empty space — just a blank stretch of grass with nothing in it. He could feel the divine energy floating in the center of it all, just past the border to the Outskirts, but there was nothing there. The idea that this whole trip might have been a waste of time weighed heavily on him. Even if it had only taken thirty minutes, it had cost a large expenditure of Tempus's divine power, and it meant he was now separated from his friends, who might need his healing. "...This better not have been a waste of time."

He took a deep breath, stepped forward twice more, and almost flinched when everything changed around him.

Sev was familiar enough by now with Derivan's use of his powers to know what a Shift felt like, even if he didn't have any senses specifically tuned for it. The sky darkened, the grass around him grew a little less vibrant, and the quiet sounds of the breeze rustling through the grass dampened down to almost nothing; at the same time, two figures appeared in front of him — a human man and woman.

He sighed.

"Did you really have to do the dramatic appearance thing?" Sev complained.

The man in front of him smirked. "You haven't changed, Sev."

"And I have no idea if you have, whoever you are," Sev said.

"We'll get to that." The man exchanged glances with the woman, an unreadable look passing between them. Sev huffed in annoyance. "First, how much of your past do you remember?"

"Some of it," Sev said. "Not all of it. Most of it is still a jumbled mess."

"But you remember more?" the man insisted.

"More than I did a week ago, I guess," Sev said. He narrowed his eyes. "Why?"

"Because we need you to remember if you left us a way to fix the Anchors," the man said. "We're barely keeping Anderstahl stable as it is. If you don't have a way to stabilize it..."

"Then we have days left, not months," the woman next to him cut in. "Integrity is dropping fast. We can mask it with some of the tools you left behind, we can even stabilize it or act as pseudo-anchors, but none of those is going to buy us more time than a few days."

Sev rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Well, I have good news and bad news," he said.

"What's the bad news?" the man asked.

"I have no idea how to fix an Anchor and I'm pretty sure I didn't leave anything behind that could help."

"...And the good news?"

"I think I have a way to stabilize it anyway." Sev pulled a reality shard out of his pocket. "You should have contacted the Guild. Everyone has some idea of what's going on now. At this point, we're all working together to find a solution."

There was a long pause.

"I think you'd better come with us," the man finally said.

"Can I at least get your names?" Sev asked, resigned.

"Right. Uh, I'm Muchen, and this is Aisha. You're probably wondering how we even know you?"

"I would very much appreciate it if you started giving me some answers, yes."

"Right, right. Well..."

Teque had changed. Derivan was startled by how much it had changed. Everything was different, from the people roaming the streets of the underground city to the very feeling of the mana in the air.Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Beside him, Vex experimentally cast a spell — first a glyph-based one, and then another one through the system. Unlike the last time they'd tried this, there was no backlash; the mana didn't react violently to the system's attempt to control it. Instead, it flowed together, almost as though it were assisting the system, rather than being controlled by it.

"Do you think that's because it knows we're trying to help?" Vex asked Derivan, watching the rune in the air. His hand tightened around the armor's. "Or... do you think it's because Irvis..."

Derivan squeezed Vex's hand back reassuringly. He knew the lizardkin still wasn't entirely happy with what they'd had to do to Irvis. For all that he'd done to them, his anger and hatred had stemmed from a very real torture — and that kind of torture was something Vex was all too familiar with.

"I do not know," Derivan said. He trailed his other hand through the air. The mana here was dense enough that he could call upon it to coalesce around the fingers of his gauntlet. He almost flinched at the sensation — this was the replacement arm that Gallant had forged for him, and he still wasn't used to the sparks of sensitivity it had compared to his original arm. The buzz it sent through him was the closest thing to physical pain he could remember experiencing.

Still, he did his best to ignore it, bringing his hand up in front of Vex instead as the mana danced around his fingers. "But what I do know is that the mana feels... happier. Kinder. It is more obvious here than anywhere else, but it is a change I have noticed ever since his death."

Vex nodded slightly, watching the mana dance through Derivan's fingers, then leaned into him as they walked. "...I'm glad for that, at least," he says quietly. The mana in front of him leapt from Derivan's fingers and up to Vex's face, as if nuzzling against him, and that was enough to make Vex's eyes brighten and a smile twitch up onto his lips. "Derivan!"

"I was not the one that did that," Derivan said, amused. "You may thank yourself for being so charming that even the mana loves you."

"Deri." Vex laughed, some of the moroseness dissipating from him as he did.

Derivan only smiled. Perhaps he'd given the mana a small prompt — but it had not taken much more than that. He had only spoken the truth.

"We're looking for, uh..." Vex squinted, trying to remember. "What do the Norams call themselves now again?"

"Raltis and Novice," Derivan said, amused again. "The otter and the lizardkin, respectively."

"Right!" Vex brightened. "Think they're at that fancy wizard tower? I still want a wizard tower, by the way."

Derivan laughed. "I believe they said they would be waiting for us at the town square," he said. "Not at the 'fancy wizard tower', as you put it."

"Right, right." The fact didn't seem to dampen any of Vex's enthusiasm. Derivan wasn't sure if he was just trying to distract himself or if he was truly this excited to see the two again — he suspected it was a mixture of both. "What kind of new spells do you think they've made?"

"I do not know," Derivan answered truthfully. "But I am looking forward to finding out."

The town square — which wasn't really a square, Derivan noted, more of a lopsided circle — opened up in front of them. In the center of it loomed an enormous fountain that immediately caught Derivan's attention and made Vex's jaw drop. Raltis and Novice both sat at the edge of it, but Vex and Derivan were far too distracted by the fountain to immediately greet them.

"Is that a Reset Fountain?" Vex asked, his eyes wide. "It's... not like any Fountain I've ever seen."

"Do you like it?" Novice grinned at him. "Raltis and I made it. It's very fancy."

"I can see that," Derivan said. He could feel it, too — the inner workings of the Fountain were open to him through the senses of Shift and Patch. He could see the way it drew upon the mana around them and used it to open up access to the system. "This is impressive work."

What was it Sev had said? Stats were the shifting of metaphysical weight. In that context, this Fountain was a work of art in and of itself. He could see how the inner mechanisms were tuned to delicately rework those weights and balance them against one another, with virtual weights created to round out a person's existence if they chose to invest heavily in one particular stat.

Most Reset Fountains, if Derivan remembered correctly, could not go nearly so far. There was a limit to how many points they could redistribute and how many of those points could be placed into each stat.

"Was there a reason you had to make this?" Vex asked. Derivan glanced at Vex, then toward the otter and lizardkin pair, the same question in his eyes.

Raltis nodded. "The system's been distributed among all citizens of Teque at this point," he explained. "But their stat distributions are identical to whichever citizen of Fendal they're paired with. Obviously, that doesn't really work, and the normal process of just resetting the points and then slowly allocating them over weeks didn't seem prudent, considering the present situation."

"So we made a Fountain that could do it all at once," Novice continued. Derivan blinked once; the lizardkin picked up seamlessly from Raltis, almost as if he knew where the otter was going to end his sentence.

"How?" Vex asked, interested. "System manipulation isn't something any class I know of can do. Not to this degree, anyway."

Raltis grinned. "Magic of the Roads," he said. "It's why you're here, isn't it?"

The otter hopped off the Fountain and gestured for Derivan and Vex to follow along with him, which they did; Novice trailed behind the three of them, seemingly content to let Raltis do the talking. The trip they took wasn't a long one — there was a portal nearby that led almost directly to the entrance of the Roads.

"Is there a reason you did not simply ask us to meet you here?" Derivan asked. There was a faint hint of a smile evident in his eyes, though it was likely only Vex would be able to tell. Physical Empathy told him there was something here still left unsaid.

"Yes, well..." Novice looked embarrassed. "It was my idea. I wanted you guys to see the Fountain we made."

Derivan chuckled. Vex, evidently, related to this greatly;he stepped forward and gave Novice an unprompted hug. "You did great with the Fountain," he said cheerfully. "I'm going to need to hear how you did it in detail later!"

"You will?" Novice looked stunned, at first, then delighted; Derivan allowed himself a small smile as he took a step back to stand next to Raltis. Vex saw something of himself in Novice, he knew, and Novice looked up to him. Neither of the two were inclined to actually talk to one another without a bit of prompting, though.

"Ahem," Raltis said. Derivan took note of the soft smile with which he looked at Novice, almost the way a father would look at his son. "Let us discuss the magic of the Roads, yes?"

"Right!" Vex straightened. "I know you mentioned the Roads are a kind of... translation magic? I thought it was fate magic."

"It's both." Raltis grinned, showing his teeth. "But the fate aspect of it isn't important here. What is important is that the Roads are primordial Translation-aspect magic. And your system? It has a language."