The first day was the worst.

They had expected it, of course; but even though the pace was gentle, the flying easy, and the rest breaks frequent, it was a gruelling pace for those who werent used to flying for any great length of time.

“We’ve only ourselves to blame, I suppose,” Mulin sighed, resting his chin on his forearms and stretching his wings out to either side; except for Liri, Kisa, and Vhish, most of them were in a similar state, and the healer was just finishing the application of some balm to Hark’s wing-bases. The Stonekin was not inexperienced at flying, but it had been a while since he last exerted himself that hard to do so, and he’d had to push that much harder than the others. “Why do we have wings, if not to fly? But I don’t think I’ve spent a month’s worth of time above ground, until we started preparing for this.”

“I know the feeling,” Srin said to him, sprawled out opposite; the Nightkin had done well enough that his muscles weren’t actually seizing, but by that same token, he’d needed to do more of the scout flying to make up for those who could barely keep moving at all, and he was exhausted. “Another of those things we ought to have practised and didn’t have time for. Ah, well; we survived today, and so long as we’re back in form tomorrow, it’ll be easier. The day after that, easier still.”

“We did make good time,” Kisa observed. “Better than I’d planned for, honestly; I thought it’d take us two days to get here, or at least that it might. But here we are in one – though it’s later than I’d normally want to fly, we still had enough light to make camp without glowstones, at least.”

“There is that.” Mulin took as good a look around himself as he could. The bare grasslands around Druumat were always kept short – not stripped, because the grass held the soil; but the grass was never more than a hand’s width long. Here, aside from the spur of rock they’d chosen as their perch, the grass was high enough to reach his chest. It didn’t look like a place where any sort of grand construction was at all likely.

But then, they hadn’t really expected to find much here. It was the nearest place that the flow and eddy of mana suggested might have been their destination; but they’d known from the start that there simply wasn’t anyone living nearby who might have made such a thing. That very fact had made it safe to push hard and get here in one day; they’d been fairly confident, especially as they drew nearer, that this wasn’t it.

It was a magically-charged place, but from the centre of that charge, Mulin could sense how it had come about. It wasn’t the source; it was just a place where the mana swirled into a tight vortex. They’d have to keep looking.

“I wish we’d done something like this without it being so critical,” said Kralin, wincing. “The view was wonderful – seeing the grasslands open up as they did – but I’d rather have travelled light and taken the time to enjoy it.”

“You begin to understand why I like being a courier,” Kisa laughed.

Pulling his wings in, Mulin sat up. There was still some lingering soreness, but there was a muted quality to it, little more than the memory of the prior ache. He ruffled his wings a few times to be sure they weren’t unduly stiff, and finally folded them against his shoulders.

He found the scroll tube that held their charts, and from it extracted the one that the Archwizards had put their notations on. Spirals, curvy borders, numerals, arrows – it was their best estimate of the flow of mana itself in the nearby lands.

He found the marker that indicated the spot they’d come to, and took a deeper look at the ebb and flow of magic around him.

From within the concentration of mana, he could sense how it flowed around him, and there was a definite direction to it – like a whirlwind – that hadn’t been apparent from the calculations the wizards had done. He found a charcoal stick, made a few notes of his own, and stared down at the pattern.

This wasn’t an upwelling of mana, just a very strong eddy. By the way it twisted, a strong flow had to pass it, but distantly enough that it didn’t disrupt the very vortex it engendered. There were some natural currents that thoroughly confused the matter; most artificial flows would treat such as, basically, walls, but if the source was strong enough, it just might…

Wait…

He and Kralin had proven themselves unusually sensitive to mana flux; that was one thing Vhark couldn’t work on enhancing to any great degree. Interpreting, yes – a hefty portion of the twins’ lessons had been on sifting the useful detail from the magical noise. But their senses had proven strong enough that they could spot someone who was magically hidden by the void they presented in the flow of mana.

And something like that sensation was nagging at him now. The intensity of flow here made it hard to be sure, but that very flow seemed… ever so slightly lopsided. Flattened.

He’d set his spear aside when they landed; his questing hand instead found the hilt of his crysknife. Hoping that the motion was largely concealed by the chart, he tugged on it, made sure the blade was free in its sheath, and let it settle again.

“Try to act natural,” he murmured, “but I think someone’s out there. A magic-user, maybe. Someone with a strong reserve at least.”

The grasses, waving in the breeze, offered him no sign.

“Which way?” Hark asked. By his tone, he might’ve been responding to a joke.

“Hard to say. Everything twists…” He stared down at the chart a few moments more. He’d been on the edge of something, too… No help for it; he rolled it up and tucked it away. “I think I’ll take a quick flight. Make sure I’ve cooled down properly.” And perhaps a moving perspective would let him pinpoint this disturbance.

If it was someone watching, taking up his spear would be too obvious – and if it was a magic-user, the crystal blade would be more effective anyway. The clump of rock offered enough of a rise that he only needed a quick jog to get airborne – and it did feel good to do; a gentle, easy flight might be just the thing to banish the ache of the harder one that had taken up the day. And –

There it was.

He squinted, trying to let mage-sight take prominence. The overall effect was something like using a bright light in a blanket of heavy fog; everything glimmered to some degree, but he could make out a shape. Fairly large, low to the ground, moving in furtive spurts. One end of it was slightly brighter; that, if it followed any sort of reasonable pattern, would be its head. There didn’t seem to be any sort of magical wards, though there might have been something deeper, something akin to how Stonekin could reinforce their skins.

He swept around the campsite again, but this time he passed right over that shape, lower to the ground. Low enough for the wind of his passage to stir the grasses under him.

Low enough and slow enough that, when he was coming up to it, he could suddenly furl his wings, grab the air, and drop, snatching his knife even as he landed atop the unknown being.

It was big, and warm, and covered in thick fur. It let out a sharp screech as he landed on it, and gave voice to chittering protests in what was plainly a language, but not one he understood.

“Be still,” he snarled into a round ear, wrapping an arm around the thick neck and putting his knife to the other side of it. Magic tingled along his arm; the blade crackled with electricity.

Whether or not the words got through, the threat of the knife did; the long body stopped thrashing and just shivered. A few more syllables of much more feeble protest escaped.

Long body. Long, thick neck. Round ears, conical muzzle, whiskers, dark eyes. And – check – three pairs of limbs. He couldn’t see detail of the feet, but the pair in front would be serviceable hands, the pair in the middle mostly hand-like. Specifically, this one had fur that shaded from pale at the root to a dark tip, with a mask-like pattern around its eyes; several metal hoops pierced the ear he hadn’t spoken into, and a few leather thongs encircled its neck, at least one of which was strung with coloured beads.

Hark had dropped down and was wading toward them, curved sword in hand; Kisa was flying nearer with a spear, and it was to her that Mulin beckoned with his free hand. She dropped a few feet over, and understanding dawned as she saw the manner of being Mulin had caught.

“Sachi,” she sighed. She took a breath, swallowed, and then warbled something that no Vhark could have ever dreamt up.

Round ears stood up a bit taller, and the Sachi chittered back.

It went back and forth a few rounds, and then Kisa sighed. “I think you can get off of him, Mulin. He’s investigating the same thing we are.”

Oh.

Well, that was embarrassing.

He moved slowly at first, taking his knife away and tucking it back in its sheath. The Sachi was actually quite accommodating, leaning down on one side so he could slip off; that didn’t really help his mood.

With Kisa translating, the story came to light. Their erstwhile visitor was Shriffisharret, one of the younger and more physically fit shaman for the nearest Sachi tribe. Their charts had marked the Sachi territory as some distance northward, but the shaman had sensed the magical disturbance, and this one in particular had come to sniff around and try to get some notion of what it was about. That, he didn’t have, but he was able to give some more information about how long things had been going on – and it was almost two weeks longer than any of the Vhark had known about it.

That wasn’t good, but it was good to know.

Kisa offered him a handful of lightstones for his trouble – they were small things, and about half of the Vhark there could craft them from a glass marble, but small magic was exactly what Sachi shaman didn’t have; they were very good at sensing broad patterns in magic, and they had some command over “spirits” that no Vhark had ever been able to even sense, never mind command, but they didn’t have skills of magical artifice. Little conveniences like that had always been precious to them.

The shaman was about to go bounding back to his tribe when he paused, staring out to the east.

To Mulin’s own magesight, there was a glimmer in those dark eyes that he recognized as a sign of someone using such a gift himself – brighter, in fact, than he’d ever seen in a Vhark.

After a half-dozen heartbeats, he looked over to Kisa, and trilled something more. She cocked her head, and spoke an obvious query in return; the shaman made a fluid gesture that Mulin belatedly interpreted as a shrug, and repeated himself. And with that, he flowed off the rock and disappeared into the grass, with a final flick of his slender, dark-furred tail.

“What was that about?” Hark asked.

“Seek the high deeps, he said.” She shook her head. “I think. He was using the words in a very unusual way.”

The high deeps.

High…

Mulin grabbed the charts again. His fingers chased along the markings, found the notes he’d made, swept a curving path…

“The Daggerfist Mountains,” he said. “I was thinking that was one of the likely next places to look; the other is the Sunforge Desert – I’d thought it more likely, more remote, but perhaps he saw something I didn’t.”

“High deeps?” Hark prompted.

“That’s easier,” said Kralin. “We live in ‘deeps’ ourselves.”

Mulin nodded, rather certain that his twin had laid his finger on it. “Caves,” he said. “Caves in the Daggerfists.”