Cadence woke up on the ground as the sun began to rise, stretched across her blanket, and noted that something felt… different.

  She looked around the little glade she and Oli had camped in carefully, searching for anything that would be twinging her instincts. Everything seemed normal enough. Olivia was still asleep, curled up in a ball with her blanket, making her seem so much smaller. Their bags were against the trunk of a nearby tree, where they had left them. The dawn air smelled fine, and Cadence thought that, just maybe, she could detect the first hint of autumn in it. The actual end of summer was still a couple weeks away, but the forest knew that its rest was coming soon.

  None of that should’ve been what set her off, but Cadence couldn’t deny the feeling. There was a fluttering in her stomach, like a mixture of excitement and anxiety. Looking back, she recognized the feeling. It was the same way she had felt on the first morning of spring, nearly four months before, when she had taken her trip into the barrens–the trip that ended with her meeting Storyteller. She felt it again that morning, just a couple weeks ago, when she woke up to find the mysterious adventurer gone, leaving her alone in Jellis.

  Cadence nodded to herself. That was it, then. Today was going to be an important day. A defining day.

  Today they would arrive at Culles.

  Cadence let Olivia rest, instead taking the moment to review her supplies for the fight to come.

  Her quiver was still fairly full, as she hadn’t been relying on her bow very much lately. A quick count showed she still had twenty-eight of her green-fletched arrows and nine of the red-fletched. Cadence had diligently gleaned the fields after each fight where she used one of her precious red-fletched arrows, and she had only lost a few so far. The vitalwood they were carved from allowed them to grow back together from nearly any damage, and Cadence suspected that the material had enough life magic inside to be quite a pain for undead.

  Only after they left behind Egin’s collapsed cave did Cadence remember the shortbow the bandit had dropped. She had wanted to check it out, to see if it had any artifice or imbuements of its own, but the back tracking hadn’t been worth it. Besides–her shortbow was the one she and her mother had fletched together. She didn’t want to just give it up. Cadence took a few moments to strip the worn drawstring off of the bow, though, and she left it strung with fresh cord. They could be fighting at any time, and she didn’t want to waste time stringing her bow in the middle of a battle.

  That left her melee weapons. The raidblade, taken from a gnoll in Kellister a month before (had it really only been that long?) was as sharp as ever, the black-glass blade still bound tightly to the bone shaft in the middle. Cadence had never tried to hone the magical weapon–she wasn’t sure how to go about sharpening the otherworldly material it was carved from, and it still seemed plenty sharp in any case.

  Her leaf-bladed hatchet was another matter. Cadence inspected the edge with a critical eye, as her mother had taught her years before, and found it lacking. Taking a honing steel to it would be as good a way as any to pass the time until she could wake Olivia up and they could go.

  As Cadence began to work the hatchet’s edge, she found herself studying the runes embossed on each side of its head. Placed there by Storyteller himself, they somehow enhanced the hatchet’s momentum when thrown, ensuring that it would fly truer and hit harder than any conventional weapon. Cadence hadn’t made frequent use of it, as it would also rob her of one of her main weapons, but she always kept it in mind as a valuable ace in the hole.

  Her remaining piece of magical gear for the fight ahead was her replenishing flask, the last thing Storyteller had left her before he took off. Cadence had carefully ensured that she never quite drained the energy potion from the magical container, letting it refill as much as possible between uses. Unfortunately, the energy potion was a potent enough brew that the flask could only refill itself slowly. Still, Cadence hadn’t taken a sip in a while, and it was about half filled.

  “Okay,” Cadence told herself, packing her honing steel away and slipping the little leather hood over her hatchet. She was as prepared as she was going to get, and if her efforts hadn’t dispelled the flutters in her guts, she at least felt better able to handle them. It was time.

  “Olivia!” she called, walking over to the bundled up sphere of squire. “Time to wake up, sunshine!”

  #

  “So,” Cadence asked Olivia while they walked, “how are your gifts coming along?”

  Olivia cast Cadence a look from under a doubtful brow. Cadence had long been reticent where her gifts were concerned, given their unique nature, but as she and Oli had traveled together, the celestial was trying to overcome that urge.

  “My gift of the vanguard, at least, is going well,” Olivia replied after a moment. “Seventy-five percent now. Even that brief fight with Egin and his ghost was enough to get me some experience. But my gift of the wind is slowing down quite a bit.”

  “Oh, right. Primal gifts give experience for fighting similarly-aspected monsters, right?” When Cadence had met Oli’s older sister, Alyssia, she had been spending time in the quarry outside Kellister, fighting the monsters that emerged from the stone tunnels to level her gift of earth.

  “In part,” Oli explained. “It’s really all about coming to understand the element better, to get your soul more… I don’t know, in tune with it. My biggest experience bumps came from fighting in a giant storm, and killing some storm monsters not long afterwards. Well, those and… nevermind.”

  Cadence arched an eyebrow, a little grin spreading her lips. “Aaaand?” she asked leadingly.

  Olivia rolled her eyes, crossing her arms as she kept walking. “I may have jumped off a tower,” she finally admitted, chagrined. “Right after I got my gift.”

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  “You jumped? How far was the fall?”

  “I don’t know! Really, really far! I just wanted to try out one of my new abilities.”

  “And that got you experience?”

  “Yes. It helped me be closer to the wind, so my gift advanced.”

  “Wow.” Cadence hummed to herself as they walked through the tangled woods of the deadlands. She wanted to tease Olivia more about that–it was such a rash decision, one Cadence just never would’ve expected from the girl–but was it any worse than Cadence knocking herself out on her first day with her new gifts? She hadn’t even gotten any experience out of that!

  “What about you?” Oli asked, breaking a few minutes of silence. “How close are you to Apprentice?”

  [Gift of the Wanderer]

  Novice level

  Experience: 73%

  [Gift of the Echo]

  Novice level

  Experience: 54%

  “About halfway. I’m starting to stall out again though.”

  “Oh.”

  Oli went quiet after that. Cadence chewed her bottom lip, looking idly around the woods while they walked. Had she really been that close-lipped about her gifts, that Olivia wouldn’t even ask any follow up questions?

  Awkwardly, Cadence volunteered a little more. “I haven’t had anyone new to copy gifts from since the caravan, so my gift of the echo has been slowing down a lot.”

  “Okay… that one gains experience from copying different abilities?”

  “Mostly. I think I get a little bit from finding new ways to use the gifts I have reflected too, but that’s a lot slower.”

  “Oh.” After a moment, Olivia ventured, “And the other one?”

  “That’s still going smoothly, at least. My gift of the wanderer wants me to see new things, so I get some experience just for all this hiking we’re doing. Plus, fighting bandits has been a solid adventure, so there’s that.”

  “Adventure?” Olivia echoed.

  Cadence winced as she realized what she had said, as if this was all some storybook tale. Storyteller had warned her how people, nobles especially, thought of adventurers these days.

  But instead, Olivia’s expression was thoughtful. “Do you remember when we met in Jellis?”

  Cadence snorted. “It was like three weeks ago, Olivia. I think I remember.”

  “Mhm.” Olivia’s voice sounded doubtful. “Remember trying to tell me you were a silver squire?”

  Cadence flushed, and her eyes went wide. Elder’s beard! She had said that, hadn’t she!? It hadn’t come up in so long she had almost forgotten…

  “Y-yeah…”

  “So obviously that was bullshit.”

  Cadence flushed. She half considered using Soul Surge on her charm then and there but… they were still headed towards a fight, after all. Probably not the best time to have lies like this hanging between them, or to waste one of her most potent abilities. “How long have you known?”

  “Since we dueled.”

  “That was the first day we met!”

  “Mhmm. And you don’t fight like any knight I’ve ever heard of. That’s when I knew.”

  Cadence swallowed. Had she really been that bad at pretending? How did Storyteller do it? “But you let me come anyway,” Cadence pointed out.

  “Elway vouched for you,” Olivia said with a shrug. “I don’t like the man much, but I trust him, at least. He wouldn’t vouch for a criminal. And Hugo wanted you to come, and Rose and Beryl liked you, and…”

  Cadence tilted her head, looking at her companion. “And?”

  “And… even if you’re not a squire, or a knight, you had this way about you. You felt like an adventurer, I guess. And since then, you’ve proved me right. I still don’t get you, Cadence–but you’re more adventurer than anything else. I can recognize that.”

  Cadence snorted indelicately. “I didn’t expect someone as courtborn as you to be that accommodating.”

  Olivia rolled her eyes with a huff. “Why does everyone keep saying things like that? I left Elliven for a reason! I’m not even really a noble anymore!”

  Cadence giggled. “Courtborn is courtborn, Oli.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know exactly what it means. But that’s not what I was trying to say–I mean, I thought that nobles didn’t think very highly of adventurers.”

  Olivia shrugged. “You’re not wrong. But… Well, I joined the Argent Order for a reason.”

  “Beryl told me it was because a knight saved your ass.”

  “Of course she did,” Olivia grumbled. “And she’s not wrong. Adeline–my mentor–did save me. But it was more than that. I had heard aristocrats deride silver knights my whole life. But Adeline wasn’t anything of the things they described. She wasn’t weak, and she certainly wasn’t craven. I wanted to know more.

  “It turned out that the knights of the Argent Order are a lot more adventurers than anything else. Adeline even said the order acts as a sort of public face for the adventurers, claiming the credit where it's needed and providing an acceptable way for their deeds to be recognized.”

  Cadence thought of Storyteller’s utter confidence portraying Sir Toren Cifel, complete with his supposed badge of office. Maybe that performance had more truth to it than she had originally thought.

  “So… you’re an adventurer too?”

  “A little,” Olivia acknowledged. “But not like you. Sometimes… I don’t know, you’re like you came right out of a story, idiosyncrasies and all.”

  Cadence narrowed her eyes. “Idio… what? Are you calling me an idiot?”

  “What? No! Idiosyncrasies are like… your oddities, you know?”

  “So… you’re calling me weird?”

  “...Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “Eh. Fair enough.”