My strides eat the miles. I walk through the null cycle and arrive at the site of the incident as the lights are once again beginning to brighten. The worst of it is watching the dots of light that are the fledgling tribe twinkle and fade one by one until there are too few left. I can’t even close my eyes to banish them as my new eye sees through my lid and brands my vision with its despairing knowledge.

  I slow as I approach. I stay low and hug the edge of a gorge that approaches the exit. The wall looms high above; a rocky edifice that is marked by jagged cuts and narrow ledges with trees that cling barely to life. The group had almost made it when whatever it had been had befallen them.

  I can’t see any monsters, not with either eye. It’s quiet too. Eerily so. I slow further and hush my breathing until I am silent and I listen.

  Someone grunts. Then a scrape. A sigh of effort and another scrape.

  I pad forward with my spear held in one hand, it’s point forward to guard my way. I don’t want to drop my pack in case I need to run quickly; losing my fire and Aviela’s book would be devastating.

  The sound is lower than I am so I descend and and sneak as best I can. There. Just at the edge of a bend is a movement. A person; splayed out on the ground as if fallen, but they move. Each motion is a great effort and they struggle to hush their pain.

  I remain where I am and scan my surroundings again. It could be a trap. My eye must have limits and I cannot trust that a monster wouldn’t be able to camouflage themselves well enough to fool me.

  The person is crawling towards something; I hadn’t noticed at first with my focus being on the movement, but there is a bundle of something wet a few feet away from him. I stare, uncomprehending, for too long. The man struggles to the wet bundle and collapses against it.

  “I’m sorry, my boy, I’m sorry.”

  It’s Heric. I stand and walk the last distance but he doesn’t see me. I stop short. The bundle isn’t what I thought it might be.

  I turn and empty my stomach against the wall. My skin pales and turns clammy at the horror before me. I think I might have control of myself after a moment but one more look and I heave against an empty stomach.

  “Who’s there?” Heric calls out to me. “Back to finish the job? Couldn’t bear to leave me alive after all that? Curse you! Let your body fall in the shade and never feel the sun. Die and be buried in the dark!”

  I push myself upright on shaking knees and move towards Heric. It’s the hardest few meters that I’ve ever walked. It’s like a tunnel that at the end lies death itself and yet I must walk it or forever be lost within myself.

  “It’s me. Pik.” I call out, my throat hoarse.

  “Pik? I don’t understand. Why? Why’d…”

  “I saw something was wrong and I…I’m sorry, Heric.”

  His voice is quiet, calmer since he has heard my voice. “No. It’s better that you weren’t here. You’d be dead just like…” His voice hitches. “Poor Plim. He was the first to stand up to them. Held out his stick just like a spear and told them to stay back. They laughed at him, Pik. They laughed as they bounced his body off the rocks until he was nothing but rags.”

  Heric holds those rags in his arms now. There’s no wonder I couldn’t recoginise Plim for himself; whoever attacked them destroyed the boy.

  I kneel beside Heric and he glances at me through red-rimmed eyes. His face is battered, his clothes shredded, and there isn’t an inch of his skin that doesn’t bear some weeping wound from his battle.

  “Who did this, Heric?”

  “Who else? River. They must have followed us. No. They went around through the next segment so they could trap us here. They were waiting for us, Pik. They took everyone else. Four Marked and twenty Heightened. We didn’t hurt one of them. Not one.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Where? What’s the point?”

  “Anywhere that’s not here. We can’t risk them coming back and finishing the job, Heric.”

  “The job is finished. What else could I lose? My life is worthless without my people. I’m dying, Pik. I can feel it. They broke me almost as well as they broke Plim, it’s just that mine might take a day longer.”

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  I make a decision; I take Plim from his arms and lay the battered child back onto the ground out of Heric’s reach. He protests but I’m stronger than he is when he’s fit and hale, in his current state I’m far beyond him. I slip my shoulder beneath his and am surprised at how much I have to stoop; I’ve grown as my body has hardened. With my strength and his surprise leading him to lean into my motions, we rise and I shuffle away from the carnage.

  There are more bodies. The bright dots that had faded in twinkling light were half a dozen more of the fledgling tribe who had fallen foul of the River tribe’s rampage. I don’t let him look, if he hasn’t seen them then I don’t want his mind filled with those images. I look though. I burn each one into my mind with an intensity that is fueled by anger.

  How dare River kill these people?

  How dare they take more and press them into servitude?

  How dare they break families and murder children?

  How dare they steal this man’s last shred of hope?

  “How far is the River segment?” I ask through gritted teeth.

  “Two segments. A week, perhaps.”

  “They’ll move slowly with such a big group.”

  Heric glares at me; I appreciate it. There’s fire left in him then, I’d worried that it had gone with the boy. “Four Marked, Pik. Four. That is like pitting an Unenlightened against a dungeon boss. Worse.”

  “You’ve trained yourself, right? Ready for a dungeon?”

  “Sure. I’ve trained. Did everything I could short of finding seeds.” He scoffs but he’s found his feet and walks more steadily, although still leaning against me for support.

  “What about your condition? Do you think you’d survive the transition? I don’t know much about the transformation myself.”

  “Maybe. Who knows. Not that it matters, unless you want to fight a dungeon boss and get me some seeds. Sun only knows that I can’t do a damned thing.”

  We’re far enough away from the ambush site that I’m comfortable stopping for a moment. I prop him up against a rock and watch him wince as his broken ribs creak. He finds his peace, breathing slowly and minimising movement.

  I shrug off my pack and rummage, muttering to myself, until I find a tiny pouch tucked far inside. I hold it out to him, wordlessly.

  Papa Heric stares at me for the longest time. Then he reaches out, slowly as if I might snatch back the pouch and take the spark of hope that I’ve rekindled in him. He opens the pouch and stares inside for even longer. It hurts him to cry. He doesn’t sob as I did. He stares and lets the tears well and fall, well and fall, until there is nothing left but a husk ready to be filled with something new.

  He eats the seed in one swallow.

  Heartbeats pass with nothing. More. Enough that my knees are uncomfortable on the dirt and he shifts to free his breathing with a different position.

  “Are these really dungeon seeds?” He asks of me.

  “They’re seeds I found at the end of a dungeon, yes. They’re a year old, though. I’m sorry, Heric, I thought they’d work.”

  “Shh. Wait.” Heric looks into the middle distance, his eyes become unfocused. The ground shudders beneath us; the dirt shifts and the soft white tendrils of a cocoon extend. It’s a strange thing to watch a man be encompassed so fully and so quickly by the fibrous strands. It’s over quickly and I am left to watch over it.

  I sit beside Heric, my back against the wall and my leg rested on his cocoon. I’d hoped that his transformation might be open to me so that I could learn what it meant to advance to Marked. I should have known that the architects would intervene.

  I blink.

  The quiet lines and lights of my new eye fade; I look upon the cocoon of Heric with a new vision that makes me queasy as it overlaps with reality. I close my eyes to shut out everything but what it wants to show me.

  Symbols scroll down each side of my vision and in the centre is a shape; it’s unmistakably Papa Heric curled into the position in which we find the children born from the womb of the cocoons. I can see him as light. Warm orange and white that grasps at my sight.

  Heric isn’t static. His body pulses in my vision. Sometimes his limbs glow, sometimes his head or body or any part of him. All pulsing with the rhythm of a heartbeat. Through it all is the solid glow of white from the very centre of him. Just beneath his heart, behind his lungs and deep inside is a steady thrum of something else.

  It’s not just light inside him that I feel now. The light, the power, whatever it is that makes a Marked extends beyond him. It pierces his cocoon and laps against me like an inquisitive monster licking at my feet before it takes a bite. The probing fingers of a cold wind searching for a gap in a blanket to siphon away my heat.

  I watch. It takes so long that the cycle passes and comes again and I don’t move from that place; I watch for every moment that energy presses against his skin and flows out and over. He’s trained his body well, even injured he resists the pressure. I don’t know how I know, but I’m sure that my eye would tell me if there was danger.

  Light pushes to the edges of him and then further. I flex my muscles in time with the pulses and try to breathe, to imagine that I have that power at the heart of myself. What would it feel like to breathe the power into my limbs and beyond? Where is this power from? It gathers at the heart of him and I see it; but is it more? Is it from within, truly, or is it taken from the air around us? Another gift from the architects to help us survive this world they’ve created for us.

  I know that this is the last step for me; this is what Aviela meant when she spoke of situating yourself in the universe. To understand how you fit into the whole and how the power that I have in my body touches the world around me. I have to feel it. I have to find my strength inside and let it flow through me until it bursts from my skin like the sheen of sweat; like the damp of my breath; like the heat of my blood pumped through my veins.

  Heric is transforming within his cocoon. The seed is doing its work to bring him forth into a new body and I learn more of my self in these cycles than I have in the year of my travels. The flesh will unlock this. I know this too. I will feast. I will find the power at my centre and I will push past the limits of my hardened body until I too gain my mark.

  On the third day, the cocoon cracks.