“This is boring,” Zanas said. “I thought we were heading to a fen.”

  Ashinaro was sitting on the floor again, breathing rapidly. “I have to bind the second relic,” he answered mentally. He was at four hundred and fifty-eight breaths. Less than a hundred to go.

  The second binding went faster than the first, but remaining still was even harder. He may have overdone it on the paunthum.

  At five hundred and fifty-four breaths, he couldn’t hold it any longer and let the binding complete.

  [Epitome Veil (Flawless)]

  Your battleform has altered this effect. Absorb the remnant essence of a life when you extinguish it, becoming invisible to others empowered by the same type of essence of equal or lesser quality while the essence persists.

  Binding it had only changed it slightly, but it was an improvement. Before, it had been limited to monsters. Now, it wasn’t. Which meant it might be useful for disrupting the ritual. If his plan worked.

  “Invisibility. How lonely.”

  “You’d know. How long did you spend in that tower?”

  “That’s just mean.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be so distracting and people wouldn’t be mean.”

  “My good looks and wit are not my responsibility. So, now that you’ve finished, are we going on an adventure? Your lodgings are quite stuffy.”

  Ashinaro got up and began gathering supplies. “We are, in fact. We need to stop by the astronomers guild to find out when the next blood moon is exactly, then it’s off to the Festering Fen.”

  He wanted to instill cores in his two new relics, but unless he was very mistaken in when the blood moon was and how long it would take to reach the Festering Fen and return, couldn’t afford the time it would take to recover.

  “Sounds delightful.” Zanas’s mask flipped to a frown. “Wait, what’s a fen?”

  “You really are fond of disgusting things, aren’t you?”

  Ashinaro stood before the entrance to the Festering Fen. It was aptly named, with rotted trees sprouting at odd angles and a disgusting miasma filling the air from the near-stagnant water trickling into it from the Toril Hills.

  There was one of the old fay roads through the Fen, but the area was spattered with swampy pits and false floors that led to nests of rotslither ambushers. If you fell in one of those, they would attack you, poison you, and then slowly feed on your essence over the course of many days and nights.

  “It smells terrible. Even in here I can smell it. Or wait, am I just using your nose? Hold on.”

  Ashinaro felt a twitch inside of him.

  “Ah, much better. Now it just smells like monsters.” Zanas sighed. “How far I have fallen to think the smell of monsters is a relief.”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Ashinaro was still feeling the aftereffects of the paunthum, so responded aloud, since communicating mentally made him dizzier than he already was.

  “The smell is only going to get worse.”

  “Do we really have to do this?”

  Ashinaro wasn’t eager either, especially since he was still woozy from the paunthum, but this couldn't wait. He’d checked with the astronomers guild and found out the next blood moon was tomorrow, which was much sooner than he’d thought.

  And he still had to figure out where the ritual would be held.

  But that was a problem for later.

  For now, they had poison to harvest.

  Deep within the Festering Fen nested an unusual type of monster. The arnaphen was a translucent, tentacled floating blob that produced a gas which caused delirium in any who inhaled it, regardless of their renown. The monsters themselves were all Beasts, and tended to be only Copper or Silver. It wasn’t their strength which made them deadly, but the combination of the gas they produced, and those tentacles, which were barbed and able to inject the gas directly. Again, regardless of renown. It was said even a Myth could have his flesh punctured by those barbs.

  But Ashinaro had something most people didn’t. Something without flesh, and which was immune to poison.

  “I don’t know, I’m all for crazy plans, but this seems reckless.”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re the one who’s going to be battling the arnaphen.”

  “I would think that’s obvious. If you were doing it and you died, it would be annoying, but I’m already free of the tower. Of course, moving around as a scepter is quite difficult. Legs really are convenient.”

  Ashinaro’s plan was simple, but wouldn’t be easy. Use Zanas, who should be immune to the gas, to kill one of the arnaphen and extract an intact sac and tentacle.

  Then, thanks to Ashinaro’s unique ability to use uncrafted monster parts, they could deploy the gas to disrupt the ritual, and Ashinaro’s golem could slip in while everyone was delirious and deliver the poison directly to Vershik’s blood with the arnaphen’s barbed tentacle.

  Because while breathing the gas caused delirium, injecting it killed.

  Hornblade stood on the road leading into a foul-smelling swap, staring at where the young drakken had just disappeared into it.

  Was it the same drakken he’d ambushed at the tower? He’d been on the brink of death when Hornblade had left him, but perhaps drakken were more resistant to blightbone than Hornblade knew. They reputedly had a healing trait to rival the trolls. Perhaps unlike the trolls, that included healing from poison.

  Hornblade couldn’t recall if the one he’d ambushed had been so large. Perhaps, but it was hard to say, as the drakken had been writhing in pain on the ground.

  He wished now he’d stopped by the tower again to see if the body remained. While drakken varied wildly in looks and coloring, telling one apart from another—especially when you’d only seen them once—did not come easy. It seemed like the same one at least, the pack and armor both low-quality trash that befit a child, not a full-grown drakken, but there was also the matter of his renown. The one Hornblade had ambushed had been an Initiate, while this one was Lesser Defender. The odds of someone getting and completing a divine quest in a mere day seemed low, but not impossible. That might after all have been what he had been doing so far from the city.

  Hornblade wondered if this might be a trap. Because while he hadn’t thought much of it at the time, one couldn’t sustain a link with a cursed item for long, and Hornblade distinctly remembered shattering the link to try out the weapon for himself.

  Had he been meant to take it?

  If so, why?

  He considered his options. The cursed staff wasn’t such a treasure to risk his life over, but the method by which the drakken had stolen it might be, and there was the chance to get another relic out of it.

  And he was only a Lesser Defender. No matter what tricks he had, as a Champion, Hornblade could dispatch him with ease.

  Then again, he had managed to steal the staff from Hornblade through some method Hornblade still couldn’t figure. Stealing from a shade undetected was no easy task, especially for someone weaker.

  So, to follow, or to let it be?

  He had a divine quest to complete, and this would take him farther away from the tower.

  But he hadn’t found anything last time. A diversion would perhaps clear his mind and let him see something he’d missed.

  And it grated at Hornblade, what the drakken had done, stealing the staff from him. Hornblade had taken it fair and square.

  And if it was the same drakken as Hornblade suspected, how had he survived? He’d left him on the precipice of death, and yet he seemed perfectly fine now. Even if the drakken healing trait worked on poison, he didn’t think it could be responsible for such a quick and complete recovery.

  None of it added up. None of it made sense.

  No, he couldn’t let it go. The question would nag at him.

  Wrinkling his nose, he followed the drakken into the swamp.