“Now,” the minotaur continued, “there are going to be five camps. Since we apparently have an extra person, that makes it easy.” For someone with a bull’s head, Morios had a very soothing voice. “That’s thirteen people to a group. If you have people you’d rather be in the same group with, best to stay close to them now.”

  He paused and there was a brief flurry of motion from people making sure they knew their friends were. Jay had no idea how many of those friendships predated the boat trip and how many had formed out of the convenience of nearby cabins, but it seemed like most people had at least one other person to try to stick to.

  When the movement stopped, the minotaur spoke again. “All done? Excellent. Now, aside from the three of us that need to be available at all times – that’s me, because I’m your healer; Kallin, because he’ll be rotating around to raise up any ground that gets cleared; and Elyra, because she needs to be able to maintain and replace any equipment – each of us will guide a group.

  “Warinot will have group one.” The only person who remained floating, a blond man, raised his gleaming tower shield, nearly blinding everyone with the arc of reflected light that followed the shield’s movement.

  “Esha will take group two.” The dark-skinned, red-haired woman threw both fists in the air like she’d won a prizefight.

  “Bosi gets group three.” A deep purple drake-kin waved, his hand barely visible over the heads of the crowd.

  “Group four goes to Sentos.” A bald woman jumped upwards to ensure her visibility, waving her arms enthusiastically.

  “And group five gets Arenne.” A winged woman with the feather pattern of a starling raised an arm.

  “Find your groups,” Morios finished. “You have until Kallin finishes unloading the supplies, then your selections are final.” He nodded sharply. “Welcome aboard.”

  Jay watched as the entire group turned to look at the pile of sledges that had been floating up out of the boat’s cargo space on slabs of stone. Eight of the stones were visible right now, some on the way to deliver their burdens and others going to pick up a new one, but from the feel from [Sense Magic], there were at least a dozen of them. It wasn’t quite like anything he’d ever sensed with his new perception; inspired by the System’s message about more levels allowing him to improve abilities, he tried to push his sense, shutting his eyes to cut out the interference of the more mundane counterparts.

  He almost thought he had something. There was a brief feeling like what Jay imagined echolocation to be like, reporting that there was something else there. A hand came down on his shoulder. He was barely catching the feeling of it when it landed. The brief jostle was enough to shake him out of the focus and spoil his chance to dig deeper. Jay opened his eyes.

  “You’ll be with me, then,” Warinot said. He hadn’t looked quite as tall floating in the air as he did while standing on the ground, but this close, he loomed over Jay. The gilt shield didn’t help, since it was clearly designed to cover his entire body as matched him in height. It probably outweighed most of the people standing here.

  Or at least the ones that had been standing there. The large group had fragmented into five smaller ones in the time he spent trying to peer deeper into his magical sense, leaving Jay standing by himself. He’d thought it had only been seconds, but between everyone else seeming to have locked themselves into their group choices and the fact that there were now more than double the number of sledges laying on the ground than there had been.

  What had he looked like, standing there with his eyes closed while everyone scattered around him? Probably absurd, but there was nothing he could do about it now.

  “Seems like it,” Jay replied.

  “Lucky for you, honestly,” the blond man said. “My group gets to stay on this island. First pick has its advantages.”

  “So you’re not just Group One because you happened to be the first one Morios introduced, then,” Jay said.

  “We had an order from the moment we set out. Part of it is seniority, part of it is skill, part of it is responsibility for this,” he gestured expansively at the people, tents, and sledges scattered around, “being here.”

  “With you in the top slot.”

  Warinot grinned. “Always, if I have my way. But you’ll hear more about why that is very soon,” he said. “Let’s go meet the rest of Group One, shall we?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he trotted off toward the unattended crew of twelve, moving like the titanic slab of metal attached to his arm wasn’t even there. There wasn’t much of a point to delaying it, so Jay followed. The other groups had spaced themselves out in a ring around the initial gathering space. He took the chance to glance around while he moved.

  The maroon-robed ball of arrogance and potential racial targeting, Vitali Haunne, was standing at a slight remove from the group led by the redhead, Esha, glaring at everyone around. The drakekin leader, Bosi, had a concentration of other drakekin in his contingent, including the one that had harassed Jay in the ship’s cafeteria. He didn’t know anyone else by name but all the leaders except Bosi had a wide variety in their cluster. Jay saw people with tattoos covering every inch of their skin, others trailing sand or fire or droplets of liquid, and several more half-human-half-animal types.

  Group One was no less varied, but it seemed like no one there knew each other enough to be talking by the time Jay walked up. They were all eyeing each other as if waiting for someone else to speak up first.

  Warinot didn’t have the patience for that. “Right,” he boomed, clapping his hands together. “First things first. Names. We need introductions for all of you and a group name that’s better than a number for our little collective. Introductions first, starting with me.” He grounded his tower shield beside him, the impact audible even on the soft grass and soil of the island. “I am Warinot Pixt. My role here is to ensure that each of you are safe in all things that we must do.”

  The heavily tattooed bald woman next to him looked startled when everyone’s heads turned toward her. “Oh. Uh. Me? I’m Kor’vass. I don’t know my role on the team, uh, yet, at least.”

  “Lethen,” the next man said. He was the only one that could match Warinot for height, and he somehow managed to be even broader. He didn’t say anything more and attention shifted to the next one in line.

  The other names passed in a blur. Zolmel Ligan. Vasiles and Casaka. Aghed, Bolar, and Imni. Oloros, Kimalam, and Treviri Troko. No one blinked twice at Jay’s name, even if it seemed out of place to him among the others. At least he wasn’t the only duonym this time; it seemed like all the other people on the island had only had a single name.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Warinot clapped again, somehow even louder than the first time. “Excellent! It is wonderful to meet all of you.”

  He took the time to meet all of their eyes individually, holding contact for a second each time. They could all tell he wasn’t done speaking, but no one wanted to speak up and ruin whatever he might or might not have been building up to. Once he had completed the circuit and the conversational gap had gone from uncomfortable to funny, he spoke again.

  “Now, Morios told you all that we were here to resurrect Ayor from the depths to which it has been sunk. What he didn’t tell you is why. That’s my job, since I’m one of the main reasons any of us are even out here. Who here has had experience with protective Classes before?”

  A few hands went up. Lethen’s was immediate, Oloros and Bolar not far behind.

  “Good. One of you tell me what they all have in common, please.”

  Bolar, a man with cracks running across his skin, talked first. “They all protect people.”

  “Yes, thank you,” the blond man responded. “What else?”

  “They can tell where they need to be,” Oloros said. Even the slight movement of his mouth as he talked sent his literal lion’s mane shimmering in the light.

  Warinot pointed at him. “Yes. Exactly! They can all sense where they need to be, each according to their own specialty. It’s very hard for anyone with one of those classes to avoid knowing that kind of information. My own class, [Guardian of Magic], is definitely among the protective suite.

  “As such, I have one of those abilities, tuned to the flow of magic itself. Normally I used it to assist healers with things like failed spells and unravelling knotted ability channels, but some months ago, I was forced to change that. My guiding ability triggered spontaneously, ushering me into a vision in a way that it has never done before.”

  As he paused for breath, Imni broke in. “Abilities don’t activate by themselves,” she protested. “That’s not possible.”

  “Change your definition of impossible. It doesn’t happen at lower levels, but the more you advance into the higher tiers and imbue deeper meaning into your abilities, the more likely it is to happen at some point. Understand?”

  The eight-eyed young woman just nodded, looking like she didn’t entirely believe but was willing to at least let him finish before asking more questions.

  “This one showed me the flow of magic through the entire world. It drew my attention to this area and the continent that used to be inhabitable here. Everything was wrong. There were ripples of backflow running across every line that met here. Worse, it looked like it was spreading.

  “That is what we’re here to fix. I impressed upon several people -- Kellin especially, though his convincing took a much different form -- the importance of doing this as quickly as possible. Without my connections to a single one of the others, this wouldn’t have been possible on such short notice. If we’d delayed too long…” Warinot trailed off, shuddering. “Magical backlash on a single person is bad. On a whole planet, I would not like to think of the things that could go wrong.

  “I don’t know how long we have. All I know is that this is the closest spot to the rest of the sunken continent. This is where we will base ourselves. The other groups will set themselves up on the other islands that we’ve dredged up so far.”

  Sure enough, the other groups were claiming sledges and using a variety of spells – or in some cases, pure brute strength – to put them in the water. Despite their weight having left a dent in the ground where Kallin had been leaving them, they floated easily. The sledges left in waves, each group waiting for whichever members were having trouble getting theirs afloat before leaving. There was some form of movement generation on the sledges; they weren’t fast, but no one was rowing.

  “You’d think they’d at least help out,” Jay muttered.

  The rest of the group had apparently been watching the sledges leave as well, so they heard him say it.

  “It does not bode well for their cohesion,” Oloros agreed, mane glimmering as he nodded. “Cooperation should be unthinking.”

  “They just met,” Kor’vass protested. “I’m not even sure most of them know each other beyond their names.”

  “And yet there isn’t enough trust within them for even this, knowing that they will have to work together,” Oloros said. “I say again that it does not bode well.”

  “Perhaps not,” Warinot threw in. “But no team is perfect from the start. Even ours will have clashes. Which is why we need to start our terms here at Base Camp A right: with the formation of strong bonds.”

  That sounded suspiciously like teambuilding exercises to Jay, a suspicion that was rapidly proven accurate as the blond man pulled out a deck of small wooden cards from nowhere in particular. He was beaming as he flourished them; and for a second, Jay thought it wouldn’t be that same brand of corporate soul-draining teambuilding activity that Earth had.

  “First on the docket,” the big man said, “is a little game from my home village called Two Lies, One Truth.”

  The short-lived hope fled.

  *

  After the remainder of the day had been spent, thanks to forced mixed-group bonding activities and the overly involved process of setting up the rest of the camp, Jay crashed pretty hard. He was fairly sure he was sunburnt, too, judging from the crispiness he felt around the back of his neck. His last thought as he dropped off to sleep was that Agensyx must be having a really good time out there in the ocean, because the snake still hadn’t come back.

  Then he was dreaming. He hadn’t dreamed much since his delivery onto Halea, mostly because he hadn’t been sleeping much outside of the book’s backlash, but every time it had happened, he’d woken up with the same vague feeling of their contents as before his death. Even from inside the dream, he could tell that this one was different.

  It was so clear. He was walking down a street that he knew was underwater but that didn’t give him any issues moving or breathing, each footfall crunching on the black silt that was drifting along in the faint eddies. The buildings lining the streets were in vastly different conditions, some almost entirely whole and clad in sheets of black stone where others were crumbling and faceless.

  Something ahead of him was glowing a vivid, nearly electric blue. Just as he knew he was underwater, he knew that the source of the glow was his goal, even if he couldn’t see it clearly yet. Occasionally, something to one side or the other flickered, but he didn’t spare the sparks any more attention than a quick glance. He just kept moving forward.

  He trekked for probably a mile, laser-focused on the increasing glow as he did, and eventually came within a close enough distance to see the source of the light. It was a ring, hanging in the air with threads of light coming off it like it was spinning itself to pieces, with a tarry substance leaking over the threshold into the water. It clouded the water, but not as much as it should, the remainder trailing downwards.

  Jay sped up. In the swirling currents, the thick ink of the substance curled around his feet and ankles. It was a gentle touch, almost caressing him, and his desire to reach the remainder of the liquid made him move even faster. It was so close. Twenty steps. Ten. Five. One.

  He stretched out a hand to pull the material to him, beckoning it in, welcoming whatever the consequences would be with no heed for how severe they might be.

  Something crashed outside his tent and Jay woke in blinding rage. He hadn’t gotten to touch it. He hadn’t made it through the ring of light. The dream was as clear as the rest of his memories; he could still feel every ounce of the longing that had possessed him.

  It was nothing rational. He could tell that now from the outside, but the desire was still there. Jay extricated himself from his sweat-soaked bag, which all the group members had been given to sleep in, and gulped water from the gourd of replenishing water that had also been part of the basic supply bundle. It was a thin attempt to distract himself and was completely ineffective.

  He changed mental tracks; maybe the only way out was through. He poured over every second of the dream, taking mental notes on the ways the buildings had been similar in style to the townhomes of Kinicier’s Haven, the behavior of the black goop, and the thread-splitting appearance of the ring itself. He cataloged the feelings of each step he’d taken and the sounds of the grit under each step.

  The sun had risen by the time he was finished, light peeking through thin portions of the tent’s material, but it hadn’t done anything to make his desire to touch the black liquid subside. The perfect recall was more trouble than it was worth. Maybe he should give himself a concussion to try to get rid of it.

  As Jay dressed and left the tent, shoving the compulsion to the back of his mind, he didn’t react to the transparently blue box that had been hovering in his vision. He didn’t so much as give it a second glance, not even to dismiss it, so it stayed hanging there. It flickered a few times as if trying to attract his attention.

  But it failed.