She hadn’t seen any duels since graduating the Academy, and she didn’t expect she ever would again. Her grades in the arena had been adequate at best.
Her supervisor, a pudgy woman named Terkell, slammed the door open in an enthusiastic burst and practically danced down the stairs. She had a massive cloud of gray hair and a pair of smaller spirit-tanks strapped to her forearms instead of a large one on her back.
“Oh, my darling, my favorite, how are you doing this fiiiiiine evening?” Terkell sang. She did a pirouette and finished her spin with a flourish as she reached Kerani.
Kerani smiled in spite of herself. Today, she had planned to duck her supervisor and get home on time for once, but Terkell’s enthusiasm was infectious.
“Not so bad,” Kerani admitted. “Finished sooner than I thought, and we didn’t have any further breaches.”
Terkell gasped in amazement, raising her hands to her lips. “You’re a genius! A savant! Without you, we would be ashes in a crater.”
If Terkell saw someone lace up their boots, she would exclaim that no one had ever tied such a perfect knot. When Kerani had finished her hundredth job with the company, Terkell had commissioned a light-sculpture of the “triumphant moment.” The job had been the inspection of rivets in a sewer runoff pipe, and it had taken fifteen minutes.
Still, Kerani’s cynicism melted before Terkell’s positivity like ice under the sun. “Nothing that bad. Maybe a few burns.”
“Burns!” Terkell fluttered her collar as though overcome by the heat, though she’d only been in the engine room for a few seconds. “There’s nothing worse than the heat. To me, you stave off doom. You’ll have dinner with our family tonight, won’t you? I’ll take no for an answer, but I won’t be happy about it.”
Kerani considered the offer instead of rejecting it out of hand like she usually did. A little money saved was a little closer to the vacation of her dreams. A local travel agency had been promoting a tour of the exotic Ashwind continent, home of the dragons.
She’d always wanted to see the place, and since the tour made use of existing portal networks, they could keep travel time down to only a month’s journey either way.
Any use of portals skyrocketed the price, since those were the workings of a Sage, and of course there was the cost of missing several months of work. But steadily, she inched toward her dream.
She was about to accept Terkell’s offer when Burning Swan whispered in her mind.
Enemy, the spirit whispered.
Burning Swan didn’t speak in actual words, but in complex impressions passed through their bond. Suddenly, the familiar clanks and hisses of the engine room sounded ominous, and the shadows in the corners deepened. Kerani extended her spiritual sense but felt no one other than herself and Terkell.
The supervisor frowned, noticing her distress. “Oh my, what’s wrong? You didn’t forget something, did you? I left my spare wrist-strap here last week, and wouldn’t you know it, that was the very day that my first one broke. I had just bought it, too, and it was a nicer one than I usually…”
She continued prattling, but Kerani was paying more attention to her bound spirit. Enemy? she asked. The simpler the message, the more clearly the spirit would understand.
Burning Swan’s mental impression was firm. Enemy.
His thoughts focused on Terkell.
Kerani wondered if she should take Swan to a Soulsmith. Maybe a drudge could figure out where his senses had gone wrong.
Terkell was harmless in every sense of the word. Not only had she once wept when she accidentally shut the door on a lizard’s tail, but even if she did go mad and suddenly attack, she wouldn’t be much of an opponent.
Kerani wasn’t a fighter, but she had still been forged through years of hard work. Terkell was soft, frail, and much older.
The supervisor had one bound spirit of life and one of dreams, which she used to monitor and coordinate her workers. Kerani was in more danger from burning her skin on an overheated bolt.
Even so, she decided to play it cautious. Just in case. “Terkell…you haven’t had any strange dreams, have you?”
Only days ago, after the sky had turned black and the world had panicked, one-eyed leaves had drifted throughout the city and whispered reassurance. The voice of Emriss Silentborn, the Monarch, spoke to the citizens directly and told them they were safe. Protected.
Everyone Kerani knew had gotten the same message. Probably everyone on the continent had.
But the Monarch had left a warning as well: to remain on guard in their dreams. If they met a stranger there who asked to enter their minds, they should deny him.