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T he others start returning within an hour, their Divhs dropping them to the earth according to their nature.

Wrath gently lands on four paws, bending down to let Nazar slide off his shoulder and down his leg with dignity.

The priest of the Light looks as if he has enjoyed an easy ride on his favorite stallion across the open plains.

He pauses to lay a hand on the mighty foreleg of his Divh, then turns to where Miriam and I are standing.

Gent has long since abandoned us for the lake and is currently floating on his back in the sun. I get the feeling he does that a lot.

Marsh returns at a full gallop, Caleb now standing braced against his chest, holding on to what looks like a strap of braided leather and jewels that’s as wide as a man.

Neither one of us can quite figure out where Marsh got the contraption, other than Caleb simply wanted a harness to work with, and suddenly it was there.

Now he’s shoved his right arm through the weave, and he leans forward, both rider and guide for his mighty Divh.

The two of them have been exploring the shoreline, trying to find more landmarks to confirm Miriam’s belief that this land is a much larger, slightly warped mirror of our own.

So far, we’ve seen nothing definitive, but with so much of what we can see covered in water, it’s tough to tell.

Still, it’s possible that these gentle slopes covered with grass and flowers mimic the foothills that lead up to the eastern mountain range.

I can’t quite see it, but it’s possible.

Then Szonja and Ayne return, streaking over the grassy slope and out over the lake to where Gent floats.

As if in some unspoken agreement, they turn in corkscrews at the same time, both of them dislodging their riders.

Fortiss and Tennet howl as they streak through the air, their screams abruptly cut off when they hit the water.

Gent is there of course and scoops them up, shaking them like kittens before hauling them to the shore.

They’re both soaked, rumpled, and exhausted—and for the first time in a long while, human.

Not warriors. Not rivals. Just two men who’ve stood beside me in battle.

And somehow, that makes it harder to look away.

They stink , Gent informs me happily, as if that is reason enough to give a warrior a dunking.

It seems like the others cannot hear the conversation I privately have with my Divh, though I can hear the subtle echoes of their conversations.

I turn my mind from them, though, giving them privacy.

It’s breathtaking be able to connect so easily to so many Divhs, but it’s not a skill I want to hone.

Conversations such as these should be private until they cannot be for the purposes of war.

A warrior uses her gifts in right timing.

Fortiss and Tennet stagger halfway up the slope toward us, then collapse to the ground, clearly exhausted. But Miriam and I haven’t been entirely idle.

“There’s water here, a fresh spring, just over this ridge,” I call out. “For food, Gent showed us berry bushes. They’re enormous, not surprisingly. I’m not sure how we’ll eat them, other than messily.”

“We won’t be here long enough to need to eat,” Fortiss points out, but Tennet looks curious.

“Maybe not this time, but seriously, there’s no way we’re not returning, right?” Caleb demands. “Like when all this is done and the Protectorate is restored and the creepy snake monsters are sent back to wherever in the blighted path they came from?”

He pushes himself up on his arm and looks around. “I never realized how much I’m missing out, not being near this kind of water. I mean, look at it.”

We all do, turning our attention to the enormous glittering lake.

Tennet and I had access to water up in the mountains, of course, but nothing on this scale and certainly nothing so wide open.

Fortiss and Caleb have spent their lives in the wide, grassy plains of the center of the Protectorate.

Nazar, coming from the Imperium, knows forest, plains, and mountains. But does he know great water like this?

I turn to him. “Is there anything like this in the Imperium, any similar body of water that you’ve ever seen?”

He looks out over the vast lake. “There is an ocean, but not like this. It’s stirred up by angry currents and battered around by a cold wind.

Only the heartiest of seafaring men attempt it.

Its bounty is vast, though, offering enough fish to feed half the Imperium.

But it gives up its fruits only at great cost, and it’s rimmed with rocks and cliffs.

No. I’m inclined to agree with Miriam that this land, the home of the Divhs, mirrors the Protectorate, just at a much more massive scale and in a primal state before the hand of man or the turn of ages dried up its lake and built its towns. ”

“With that reasoning then, the Western Realms is just on the other side of the lake before we hit this plane’s version of the Meridian mountains,” Miriam says. “But if it mimics the Protectorate…”

“I thought about that,” Fortiss says, finishing her thought.

“If it mimics the Protectorate, would it not also mimic the danger that exists beyond the western boarder? I’ve asked Szonja, and Tennet has asked Ayne.

But all the Divhs really know is this side of the water.

They’ve been to the far side of the lake to acknowledge it exists, but they haven’t stayed there.

Much like the Divhs of the sandy southern reaches know their place, so, too, do the Divhs to the west.”

I shake my head, trying to imagine what the Meridians might look like, blown up to the scale of the Blessed Plane. “Then, in other words, we’ll have to go and see for ourselves.”

He smiles at me, his easy expression catching me off guard. “As adventures go, I’ve had worse.”

Miriam pulls out her satchel. “Eat, rest, and dry off. This path will save us several days of travel and allow us to move unnoticed, but if we can travel with this much ease, so too can the creatures who attacked yesterday. We can’t take the time to truly enjoy this land.

Though I must say, even being here is a gift I’ll never forget. ”

I consider her words as she breaks out provisions and passes them around.

When I take one of the small, dense loaves of bread, I wave it at Fortiss, then out to where Gent is floating in the lake again.

This far away, he looks like his own miniature island, and I don’t try to project my thoughts to him.

I’m not sure if he, too, needs to rest up to bound across the great expanse of water and sky to reach the western shores of the Blessed Plane, but it has to take some effort, surely.

“Gent didn’t seem to have a reaction one way or another to the skrill when we were fighting them.

He simply took me at my word that they needed to be destroyed, and he set to it, much like he set to fighting any monster that came at him during the tournament.

But there was a difference this time. The creatures that you and Tennet roasted didn’t disappear.

They rained down on the coliseum, little more than charred carcasses.

And one of them actually attacked Tennet—that’s not normal either. ”

Fortiss leans forward. “It isn’t normal, because they’re not Divhs.

Not the way we understand them, anyway. I’ve thought about this too.

Whatever it is that lurks on the other side of the western border it’s powerful, but it’s not a Divh—different rules, different weaknesses and strengths.

So no, Miriam, I don’t think they can traverse through this land. But…”

“But they had to come from somewhere,” I finish his thought for him.

“My entire idea of using the Blessed Plane to transport us across the Protectorate was partially based on the idea that, well, maybe that’s how the skrill did it.

Because there’s no way that a swarm of those things traveled all the way from the Western Realms without anyone noticing it.

Alerts would have been made, the fires would have been lit.

They had to have gone through some other passageway, some plane like this.

They’re actual creatures, not just illusions. ”

“There’s no chance that they could have snuck through here without the Divhs noticing it?” Caleb asks. “I mean this is a big place, and it’s not a natural place. We don’t know what its rules are.”

Fortiss turns to him. “What do you mean, it’s not natural?”

“Well, look around you.” Caleb uses his own loaf of bread to gesture at the rolling hillside, the great lake.

“We’ve got sun and sky, water and grass, and flowers as far as the eye can see, but you know what we don’t have?

Bugs. Birds. Any sign of death or decay.

The only living creatures that I’ve seen or heard since we got here are the Divhs.

And that grove of trees and vines over there may be producing berries the size of ponies, but where are the actual ponies?

Or bees, rabbits, or snakes, even? Where’s any animal at all, other than the Divhs—and only our Divhs? ”

“Grapevines don’t need bees,” Tennet the secret winemaker points out, but his voice is oddly modulated, as if he’s rolling around the idea in his head and not liking the answers.

“But can these creatures actually survive just on berries and water? I confess I’ve never seen Ayne eat anything, but it was always assumed that we couldn’t sustain the creatures in our plane because of the resource demand.

And yet you say that Rihad kept the great dragon Szonja in his cavern for, what, more than ten years? What did she eat?”