Terluna is known best for its paradise climate and the facility of visiting friends and family on Terlunia every month, but its underbelly as the supplier of exotic creatures is largely overlooked. It''s not uncommon to find Terlunan fauna widespread across Neptus despite much of it being non-native.


    <hr>


    As Jair hurried forward Uqiar easily kept pace and Raina fell in beside him.


    "What was that about?" she asked.


    "We''ve been working on inaccurate information. Qahrvirna is innocent."


    "Innocent? I thought she was…” she glanced uneasily around. “Is that why you let her take Lilin?”


    "That was Lilin’s choice. I do trust Qahri to treat her apprentice reasonably well. But I couldn’t figure out the point of Sekir’s vampire preservation ritual. It doesn’t make sense to put that much energy into something only for show. Thinking he had to take hours to switch between forms, there would be no point to it, but since we’ve seen he can move from copy to copy within minutes?”


    “What qualifies something as a copy?”


    “Exactly. Sekir was keeping the bodies of the people he killed stable physically but draining their manabodies. Eythron could have taken him on one on one, no matter the circumstances. Claiming Qahrvirna was in the fight made it confusing enough to let the inconsistencies slide, but Eythron is not the sort to run and hide."


    "Yeah, he''s almost as bull-headed as you." Raina nudged him with a laugh.


    "We do get along well for a good reason."


    "When you’re not trying to kill each other."


    “Eh, arguments and violent altercations are only natural between two high-end mageblades with similar personalities. If we couldn''t stab each other now and then, are we even living?”


    “Mmm, I’ll keep that in mind.” She patted Tempest, grinned, and leaned in closer. “Unless you want to take it back.”


    Jair considered it, but the thought of Raina trying to fight him was far too adorable to forbid. “You’re welcome to try and stab me whenever you please.”


    She laughed, as did he, but he had the feeling she wasn’t going to let it go.


    “You think I’m going to forget?” he teased. “That you can catch me off guard?”


    “Those are two very different questions.”


    “True. I probably will forget. I won’t be off guard.”


    Uqiar made an uncomfortable huff and walked more quickly to get ahead of them.


    Raina cleared her throat and put on a more serious affect. “Right, so Sekir, he was doing something with the people who he killed?”


    "Right. I''d been assuming he had to use his own bodies, created for the purpose, when he dies and starts over. Where else would he get something physically functional but magically inert, without a soul of its own to get in the way? But that assumption relies on him needing them to be usable for the long term. With his switches taking hours, they would be no use to him. But if he can move instantly and all he needs is a few minutes of use? Just long enough to throw at Eythron in an unending flood until he wears him down and overpowers him with sheer quantity. And he had all the pieces he needed right there."


    "Vampire ritual. Dovak. That''s awful." She gripped Jair''s arm more tightly as a thought occurred to her. "Does that mean... do you think I was...?"


    Jair shook his head. "If he could have taken you over, I''m sure he''d have impersonated you instead of Eythron. Maelstrom was binding your soul, so I don''t think he had any chance at using your body either."


    Just as decoration. That image flashed again in Jair''s memory, and the urge to find the sorcerer and tear his soul out of his body and shred what was left rose stronger than ever.


    He wrenched his thoughts back from that trail and refocused on the point he was trying to make. “Like Qarhvirna said. Immortals. Soul attacks would be the only threat to him. So he set up this whole farce to make me take Qahrvirna out of the picture. If I distrusted her and left her behind, he’d have free reign to play with us as long as he wanted.”


    They caught up with Eythron then, who grunted and gave them a welcoming glare.


    “Sorry, Master, you should disregard anything I told you you said from the previous timeline. That was an impostor. I should have guessed. You were talking awfully respectfully about Sekir. Giving him a lot more credit than he deserves. But he imitated your argument style almost perfectly.” Jair thought back to what other assumptions he’d been making based on the encounter with ‘Eythron’ after the massacre, and one other thing stood out. “Darkflame. Does it really not affect you, or only him?”


    Eythron slashed a gash out of his arm without question and held it out.


    Jair stabbed him and darkflamed him to the other side of the clearing.


    There was almost no resistance this time. Surprisingly, there was also no pleading from Meliarn. His dungeon seemed to have gotten the message and subsided. It remained a constant yearning presence at the back of his mind, but no longer actively tried to insinuate itself into his ability usage.


    If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    Eythron held up the arm, properly restored.


    Jair grinned. “Well, now. That gives us a major advantage over any impostors. If we can tell who’s real or not with a quick darkflame test.”


    “Don’t go jumping to too many conclusions,” Eythron warned. “We haven’t verified that beyond a single test case.”


    “Of course.”


    “Star Hydra first. Then testing.”


    “Yes.” It was a relief, finally having something he could understand about Sekir’s schemes. It had started to feel like something unreal, disconnected actions that couldn’t be turned into a single picture. Now, it all fit.


    Darkflame hadn’t healed Eythron because ‘Eythron’ had been dead at the time. He’d argued against Uqiar’s inclusion because the beastkin knew Eythron better than anyone and could probably sniff out an impostor if they stayed around each other longer than a few minutes. As, indeed, he had.


    Jair’s lips began to twitch up as a plan began to take form.


    “Why are you smirking?” Eythron demanded.


    “Nothing specific yet, just thinking through our options. But the only thing more powerful than knowing our enemy’s plan? Him not knowing that we know it.”


    Not needing to suspect Qahrvirna of betrayal at every moment was a relief. The note of dissonance in his mind was clarified, now he could disregard it. The massacre hadn’t felt like her because it wasn’t her. All Sekir, and he’d just tried to pin it on her after the fact.


    Sekir’s use of Eythron’s body was concerning on a number of levels. He hadn’t done anything blatantly out of character, and Jair had been in his presence for over an hour without catching on.


    Thinking back now, almost everything suspicious at all were the things he didn’t do. He’d not insulted Jair or attacked him, but it was also the scene of a massacre and ‘Eythron’ was severely injured. Even if Jair had noticed the discrepancy at the time, it could easily be explained away by Eythron being considerate for his would-be student’s grief and loss.


    Jair just about smacked himself. “He even said ‘stuck like a dust rat.’ That is such a Veori thing to say. You’d have said something about snapvines or crawlers.”


    “And you didn’t notice?” Eythron stabbed a nearby bush until it squealed and ran away. “I thought you said you knew me.”


    “I was a little bit distracted at the time.”


    “And next time you’ll be a bit dead.” Eythron threw his sword at Jair without warning.


    Jair ducked and caught the weapon by the hilt, then slung it back in a spinning slash. “You died first.”


    “Won’t happen again.” Eythron dismissed the sword before it reached him and continued walking as though Jair hadn’t said anything.


    The bigger problem was the fact that he’d reverted with Sekir while thinking he was Eythron. Sekir may or may not have had secondhand knowledge of the loop before, but he definitely knew about it now.


    Sekir had seen them. He knew who they were, and he knew enough about their relationships to correctly target Raina and Ajriol, Jair, Qahrvirna and Eythron. The only person he might not have recognized was Uqiar—but, now he’d seen him too, at the mountain before reverting.


    “Here we are.” Uqiar’s voice cut across Jair’s pondering.


    Jair’s heart only skipped a little as he waded the safe stream. He was used to Eythron’s unorthodox protective measures. Raina yelped and screamed his name, at which he paused and turned back.


    “Eythron’s streams are protected,” he told her, waving a hand up and down the waterway in demonstration. “They never touch the sea.”


    “Impossible.”


    “Reservoirs,” Eythron grunted. “Excess is thrown into the air so high it becomes mist rather than a stream they can follow.”


    Jair ducked beneath the bramble, and up into the cozy hideout beyond. It was currently set up for occupation. A low fire burned in the hearth, Eyhtron’s mattress and sheets lay on the wooden framework of a bedframe, and the purposeful placement of his personal trinkets and mementos showed the place to be his current home.


    Eythron traveled between regions often and unpredictably enough, there were countless times when Jair would visit one of his homes to find him away. When its master was away, the place would lie dork and empty, bare but for the built in furniture, without a single sign that it had ever been lived in let alone recently. Sometimes he would leave an indicator for his friends to indicate which other region he’d headed to, but more often he left without a trace.


    Now, Eythron and Uqiar crossed to the worktable in perfect sync.


    “The girl coming with us?” Eythron asked. “Or she staying here?”


    “I’m coming.”


    Eythron gave an approving grunt, which shouldn’t have made Jair quite so pleased as it did. But it was reasonable for him to want his mentor to get along well with Raina. Nothing weird about being happy for that.


    He probably could have stopped smiling if he really tried.


    “How long do you think this will take to prepare for?” Jair asked.


    “Three weeks. More if we have trouble with any of the ingredients.”


    Uqiar and Eythron started pulling materials out of their soulspaces, passing them back and forth as they each did different steps of the process. This was a process he’d seen Eythron do alone more than a few times, but he’d always found reasons to be elsewhere when Uqiar would be around so this was the first time seeing them work together.


    It was mesmerizing, watching the two of them at work. They barely spoke, occasionally a word or two of instruction, but they worked in almost complete silence.


    Jair glanced over to where Raina sat. She watched Eythron and Uqiar at their work, as mesmerized as him, one hand absently toying with the jade river stones Eythron kept on the shelf by his bed. The firelight in the hideaway really accented the flickering reds and golds of her eyes, and even the hair framing her face seemed almost to be made of molten gold.


    He took a slow breath and the tightness in his chest eased the tiniest bit.


    They were here, they were alive.


    They knew more than ever before about the sorcerer’s methodologies and plans, and they were far away and entirely safe for now.


    Sekir was a problem for another day. He didn’t need to worry about him. Not now, not here.


    He walked over to Raina and knelt beside the bed, leaning in to talk without disturbing the concentration of the two craftsmen. “Wanna sneak out into the jungle and fight some carnivorous plants?”


    She lit up immediately, carefully set Eythron’s river rocks back on the shelf, and jumped to her feet. “I’d like that. It’s been how long and you still haven’t found me a proper monster to slay? I was starting to think you’d forgotten your promise.”


    “No need to worry, dearest Raina, I can find you monsters aplenty. The slaying part, though, will be up to you.”


    She gave Tempest a quick flick and nodded. “However many times it takes.”


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