Caen left them and began heading for the Valiant’s lodge. He lifted his backpack to examine the glyphs that had been scrawled on his bag as he walked.

  They weren't there.

  Caen came to a stop, shocked. He hurriedly retrieved his notebook and was relieved to find that the copied glyphs were still intact. He could reproduce them from memory, but he never could be too sure what he'd failed to notice.

  He turned and rushed back into the Plane. The Watchers there glanced at him but let him through.

  He found the tree he’d seen the glyphs on, but the inscriptions were gone. Completely missing. They'd been etched into the bark of the wood but had vanished somehow.

  He scanned the tree trunk, looking for any signs of… something. A mark, an etch. He found nothing.

  Was this some sort of prank? The etchings on the tree vanishing could be explained by Flora magic. Caen himself knew a spell for smoothing wood over.

  Did I imagine the whole thing?

  Spectral affliction was always a possibility. There were contagious forms of insanity that could be contracted via the Astral. Uncle Vai joked about these often, but the symptoms were far more pronounced than this, and rarely ever sudden.

  He would have to ask his mother to take a look at his mind.

  He left the Plane and returned to the lodge. There would be no trains heading to Beslin so late in the night. He picked a bunk and erected an alarm ward around it, using some of the techniques he’d seen Yildriv the Artificer employ in Parthra.

  There were more people in here today than there'd been last time he was here with Zeris and Vensha, and many of them gave him strange looks as he worked.

  He took the time to inspect his spirit properly and found nothing amiss beyond an atrocious buildup of slag. An effect of the mana bolt, no doubt.

  After a quick run of his night routine, Caen sat in bed fully armored and with his glaive beside him. A few days ago, he’d cast the sleep reposit spell Brother Nabik had shown him. It allowed Caen to sleep for twenty hours at a stretch and go for as many as 6 days without needing to sleep. It was a little more inconvenient but had much better results, almost doing away with sleep debt entirely. No one would be able to call in his sleep debt and leave him unconscious for hours. Or at least he hoped so.

  His speculon watched the underside of the empty bed above him as he closed his eyes to meditate. He dove into his spirit and began attempting to examine his fourth bloodline.

  It was a slippery thing. Shifty and given to concealment. Almost as though it did not want to be perceived or discovered. All these months of trying to understand it had yielded no results whatsoever. Though at times, observing it filled him with a sense of discomfort.

  Hours wore on, and Caen lost himself to the spiritual scan.

  A small portion of his mind was handling sight through his speculon while the greater portion of his mind performed the scan.

  Sometime in the early hours of morning, something caught Caen’s attention, and his eyes snapped open.

  The wooden underside of the bed above him bore strange inscriptions similar to the one from yesterday.

  Scratchily drawn glyphs in black ink. He took out his note and verified that this was indeed different, though only slightly. He carefully copied it down. When he ran his hand over the glyphs, the ink did not come off, nor did the wood feel like it had been indented or etched into.

  His alarm ward had not gone off once through the night. This was very disturbing. He needed a reliable second party.

  The lodge suddenly grew noisy with excited chatter as several people crowded around a window, but most rushed for the door.

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  “Wake up! Another B-rank’s doing some crazy shit.”

  “Mother of Tet!” someone exclaimed. “When the fuck did this happen?”

  “Absolutely terrifying monster,” a Valiant said, laughing.

  Caen took his things and made his way to the door, where a crowd of Valiants blocked the exit with their backs. He elbowed past them to see something that caused a chill to run down his spine.

  A bear of a man, wielding the largest hatchet Caen had ever seen in his life, hacked repeatedly into the corpse of a giant shadeling with unbelievable speed. There were no sounds from his hacking. Even the corpses of higher-tailed shadelings resisted the idea of sound. Two tails lay coiled on the ground extending from behind the corpse, which Caen judged to be just under eight feet in height alone.

  This was not a two-tailed shadeling.

  Miasma suffused the entire vicinity. It looked like black dust that never quite stained anything. It danced and swirled all around.

  Another similarly sized corpse sat to the side with just as many tails extending from its back. Both corpses bore fox-like features.

  The man was dressed in a plain white shirt and trousers, though of course he'd have no need to worry about blood as he hacked into the corpse. Shadelings didn't bleed. A large cauldron sat behind him, steam billowing out of it.

  Is he—no… he wouldn't…

  Shadeling parts were often used for chymical purposes, but they were utterly inedible. Breathing in miasma was harmless, but ingesting shadeling flesh was another matter entirely. It was poisonous and—

  The man reached into the cauldron behind him and pulled out a piece of blackened meat. He tossed it into his mouth and continued hacking as he chewed.

  Valiants stood around in groups, many of them talking animatedly with one another as they watched the strange man working. Caen heard the words ‘Percipient’, ‘mage’, and ‘B-rank Valiant’ thrown around.

  A metal fence had been erected in front of the Aperture, preventing entry into the Plane. There was a squad of Watchers by the archway, loitering around and doing their best to look ‘very serious’.

  The depute from yesterday was there too, folding her arms and nodding along to what one of her colleagues was saying. She, too, was watching the center of everyone's attention.

  Caen approached the Watcher’s post. “What's going on?”

  “A three-tails was spotted outside the Plane just a few minutes ago.” The depute jutted her chin at the man with the hatchet. “That monster over there killed it and its clone before anyone even knew what was going on. I didn't even know there was a fight till it was over.”

  A three-tailed shadeling could make four clones, all of whom would possess the same level of agility and strength as their original. This man was either at the Percipient stage of magic, or he was the scariest Attuner in existence.

  “B-rank?” Caen asked to confirm the claims he'd been hearing the surrounding Valiants make.

  She nodded grimly. “The area’s on lockdown for the next sixteen hours. No entry into the Plane, and we're currently in the process of sealing off the tracks for a two-mile radius around here. It's going to be a real mess for a lot of people today.”

  It was unusual but not rare for shadelings to exit Redshadow. If this B-rank hadn't been here, a few lives may have been lost before the Watchers contained it. Terrifyingly enough, this man had killed the shadeling and its clone so quietly that no one seemed to have noticed. Granted, shadelings didn't make any sounds themselves.

  “We’re free to leave on foot?” Caen asked.

  “Four-hour trek when you could just wait this out? It's your funeral.”

  He went back into the lodge to take one last look at the strange glyphs he'd woken up to.

  They were gone. Just like with the inscriptions he'd seen yesterday. His mind couldn't help but draw parallels between this and the dead shadelings he'd just seen outside.

  I might be overthinking things. I'll get my mind checked for spectral influence first, then I'll consider other options.

  Caen retrieved several ropes from his bag and wrapped them around himself for an extra layer of protection as he walked towards the tracks.

  Unsurprisingly, a few Valiants were trekking back to Drenlin as well. Caen kept aware of his surroundings as he made the long trek.

  He hurried into the temple and changed out of his armor, stashing his combat gear in his mother's storage closet.

  Caen found Sh'leinu in the helpers' lounge speaking with a young female acolyte. Once she was done with her conversation, he took her aside and explained that he needed his mind checked for spectral affliction.

  “Nothing,” Sh’leinu said after nearly an hour of scanning his mind. “You're not being afflicted spectrally.”

  He’d shown her the strange glyphs, and she hadn't known what to make of them, though she did seem concerned.

  “Spectral affliction leaves signs that are easy to detect. It’s never spontaneous; it's gradual. I can assure you that whatever’s happening isn't specter-related.”