The fortress was early-era, from when human feet were still new on the shard. All the wood had long since rotted, and fallen in—everything was open to the sky. Still, six and ten-foot thick walls stood in rings and towers, some leaning, some standing strong. The black metal portcullis stood closed and overgrown with ivy. It was still and ominous against the stark, iron-black sky.

  There was a storm coming.

  “It’s going to be a kill-box.” Effluvia. “But if that comes out of its sheath, we’ll cook first. If I cook, I cook you too.”

  Sterling had disagreed with the group’s conclusion about his magic sword. He had disagreed with logic. He had disagreed with tactics. He had disagreed about fire safety, citing ‘the fears of the commons’, and had withstood Effluvia’s kindest smile.

  He did not, however, seem to want to get hit by her lightning again.

  Knot was crying openly, snot dripping down his shirt in glimmering ropes. Dalliance averted his eyes. It was all he could do. Zenith held her spear upright, eyes closed, leaning her forehead into the haft. She’d asked Charity how to pray earlier, but Dalliance didn’t know what for in particular.

  He hoped it worked.

  The cart jerked to a stop far, far too soon.

  “What does everybody want?” asked Effluvia. The noble scion had stepped into the leadership role in the irate Sterling’s place.

  Charity accepted her crossbow. Dalliance accepted a full quiver of arrows, not that he thought they’d do much good. Earnest accepted both swords; he didn’t expect them to help either, but better safe than sorry.

  “I suppose everyone is going heavily armed—“

  “—for bear,” someone joked. No one laughed.

  Effluvia herself was wearing a quiver and bow. They glimmered with enchantment and looked to be made of steel, a matched set. Dalliance wondered again how expensive the Academy could possibly be.

  Then Circe showed everyone a scroll. “From my father,” she said. “His adventuring days. It’s a portable camp. You can put it on a wall, and it turns into a door. Not a very big door, but that’s okay for us, probably. And then it lasts for a whole day.”

  There was some discussion as to who should carry it. In the end, no one was going to let the healer get hurt, so she kept it with her, along with a mana engine Effluvia’s father had lent her.

  “This isn’t a mana potion,” Effluvia explained. “That’s not how mana works. If I had raw mana just suddenly introduced to my stomach, that’s no different than raw mana existing ten feet ahead of me, magically speaking. That's what this is. This will give me as much lightning mana as I need for as long as it burns.”

  Upon closer inspection, the mana engine was a little steel vial over a steel plate, atop four legs meant to be balanced over a fire.

  “I kind of want one,” admitted Dalliance.

  Effluvia grimaced. “I’d have gotten you one, but you wouldn’t know how to use it. You have to learn how to pull in mana. It’s an entire skill. You can do it without a skill, but you have to completely surrender to the mana around you. It’s like . . . if your soul was a bubble, it’s like letting it pop.”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The idea sounded nauseating.

  Sterling seemed to find the idea of waiting outside the castle funny, for some reason. The rest of them, not so much.

  “It’s like a siege,” he said, “except it’s stronger in there than we are out here. All we have to do is get on top of the wall, and we can get away from it and rain down arrows and stuff.”

  “That’s the problem,” Dalliance interrupted. He hadn’t been bold enough to interrupt the knight’s son earlier in the year, but as time had gone on—and especially after Sterling had shown himself to be such a prat—Dalliance had lost all respect he had for the difference in their social positions. Not that it had ever been an abundant resource to begin with.

  “Let’s say we go in there,” Dalliance said, “and we climb up a wall and fall back down because it’s slippery and we don’t have a ladder. And it catches us, corners us, and kills us.”

  “Bears are faster than horses,” Zenith added quietly.

  “Lightning is faster than bears,” said Dalliance. “Effluvia will get its attention. We’ll hit it with the flame, we’ll all run inside, then we know for a fact where it is. It’ll be distracted, because it’ll be on fire, and we should be able to get away. But all that’s only if it gets to us before we finish the ladder. Once we have a ladder, we have something we can climb that it can’t climb. We can pull it up after us. We don’t have to worry about getting trapped. We can even climb up from outside, so that we never have to worry about getting cornered. It’s a better plan.”

  Both plans, Dalliance knew, were terrible. Making a ladder, if he had thought about it earlier, would have been one of the things that needed to be done before, when they were loading the cart at the Best estate. But he had still been thinking there would be stairs at that time.

  There weren’t. Stairs are held up by wood. Wood rots, and this place was rotten.

  The wind kept steady, blowing the storm cloud towards them and carrying a fetid smell—a sort of mold smell, but Dalliance could catch notes of death in it. He’d killed the squirrel like he’d been told and buried it, and one or more of the band of local dogs that traveled in packs around the village—tolerated because they tended to leave the wolves disinclined to visit—had dug it up and torn it into pieces. The sweet smell of rot clung to his clothes, even though he hadn’t touched it with anything but a stick, and he smelled the same thing now. Death was on the wind.

  Woebegone finished chopping notches into the tree, handing Immaculate his axe back. Dalliance hadn’t seen him use it, not since the snake attack, but everyone had brought everything they had this time. It’d be stupid not to.

  It wasn’t much of a ladder, more a log with notches cut out, but it looked eminently climbable next to the moss-covered slickness of the castle walls.

  Dalliance had been noticing something ever since the Council had made itself a thing: Effluvia had been treating Sterling differently, Effluvia felt like she had a coterie, and had authority from their group’s backing her up, something like that: because she had been haranguing the other noble mercilessly since he had made his big announcement in class about Dalliance. And today was no different.

  “We will make a barricade,” Sterling declared. “Leave it no option but to come through the fire. Like the dwarves of old.”

  “Oh, like dwarves,” mocked Effluvia. “In their trapped corridors. You’re going to use the architecture against it? Its soul is melding with the building,” she said, over-enunciating every syllable.

  “Exactly! The building wants to funnel us to it, and then when it has nowhere to go—”

  “No, no, no,” she cut him off. “Us to it, not it to us. We are the prey. If you think about things as if we’re not the prey, we’re going to be eaten.”

  Sterling, clearly frustrated, stalked off to take the other end of the ladder from Knot. Sterling was at least as strong as the larger boy, which was slightly alarming. Either he had tiered up and was enjoying the excessive strength, or he had been farming experience the same way everyone else had been lying about. Either way, he hefted his side of the burden without visible effort.

  “My father says bears can smell from a mile away, if the wind is right,” he said. “We should be thankful for the storm. If not for the wind, it would be upon us.”

  by Idiot Muffin

  UPDATES: Every Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, & Thursday (Evenings)

  Book One of the Epic Fantasy Series: Sovereign's Silent Path

  Title: Sylas of Cindaleer

  He was exiled as a prince, forgotten by a kingdom, but now, he is bound to a dead queen's will.

  Sylas of Cindaleer doesn’t wield a sword; he wields a mind, honed by ancient philosophies that compel others to follow his will.

  Raised in the shadows of a forsaken past, Sylas was meant to disappear. But a letter sealed in crimson wax, arriving from beyond the grave, pulled him into a world of deceit, schemes, and revenge. His mother’s final message is not a farewell; it’s a command for a grand new beginning.

  As the Holy Kingdom of Halewyn tightens its grip, hidden cults move to manipulate him, and legendary heroes rise to challenge him. Yet Sylas walks neither with tyrants nor rebels. He walks the Silent Path, one forged from recursive imagination.

  In a world governed by Laws and Marks, where Philosophers cultivate to conquer death and dominate souls, a lone Sovereign must uncover his true purpose...

  To walk beside him, you must accept his Mark.

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  (Note: This novel is originally published in Royal Road, so if you are reading it anywhere else, please come to Royal Road to read it and support me. Thankyou.)

  What to expect from this novel:

  1) Unconventional cultivation rooted in philosophy.

  2) Dual protagonists mirrored across two worlds.

  3) 21+ Laws of World and the abstract Laws of Mind, unlocked layer by layer.

  (ARC 4 is the training for Laws of World)

  4) Schemes, masks, and identity plays.

  5) Characters who feel, enemies that think, and tension that bites.

  6) An emotionally charged descent into ruin in search of meaning.

  7) Devoted passion from the author ^^