“Have a good rest of your day.” The shopkeeper waved Ellio and Jules out the door. He waved back, though Jules attention already shifted to the goods in the sack.

  She stuck a hand in, pulling out shards and crumbs of nickel and letting them fall between her fingers and back into the sack. She smiled, her eyes lighting up at the mineral as she walked down the few steps in front of the shop. He grabbed her hood and held her back as a cart rolled by.

  Jules didn’t notice, turning to him. “Now we can finish checking the soil sample!”

  Her giddiness made him relax, and he let her robes go once the road cleared. He looked around once more to make sure she couldn’t wander into something else dangerous. “The soil should be ready by now, so we can test it once we’re back.”

  He’d soaked the soil in fresh water and their lone jasper for two days before adding in a mix of oils used to help pronounce magical essences. The nickel would make those essences visible to the naked eye. He’d also made sure to extract the fluorescence of the Night Bloom ivy Taiga gathered for them and kept it cool to keep its glow, as the book instructed.

  He’d never used Night Bloom before, and the rash on his hands was evidence of his clumsiness. They burned, but the rash was only superficial and calmed with a salve Taiga lended him. Taiga volunteered to do the rest, but it was Ellio’s experiment, and he’d decided to follow through.

  Jules ran across the street, paying a vendor and rushing back with a bag of roasted chestnuts. “Look! Just like Monx, right? Although,” she peeled and plopped one into her mouth, “they’re a bit sweeter here. Very interesting, how much Lanrians loves their sweets.”

  She handed Ellio one, who plopped the tender nut onto his tongue and broke it with his teeth. A gentle, earthy sugar left its traces over his tongue. She was right, they were sweet. Perhaps boiled with honey?

  A bitter chill blew past them, and Ellio tensed to it, shirking his hands beneath his robes and into his coat pockets. A woman exclaimed and he looked up to see the wind catching in the fabric of her stall’s overhang. The wind snagged the stall and dragged it just enough for her lightweight goods to topple off.

  He jogged over, picking up small plush toys and putting them back into a basket they fell from. The woman thanked him. He turned back to Jules, who didn’t notice his absence, her attention on a storefront’s display of books and journals. He took a step towards her when the fluttering of cloth caught his eye to the left.

  From behind the library’s pillars, orange pulled around a woman’s face. Her eyes dark and watching him. A lock of black hair fell free of her headscarf, but her attention never shifted from Ellio, even as he caught her staring at him. Something about her gaze froze him, uncertainty gripping his chest.

  He’d seen her before. Maybe just a day or so ago when he and Jules visited the town center. The woman watched them then, too. Ellio’d brushed it off, unsure if it was paranoia from when they were fugitives sinking back in. But seeing her again didn’t bode well.

  “Ellio!” Jules snapped at him, her hands on her hips and her lips pursed. “Are you listening?”

  When he looked back, the fabric of the woman’s cloak disappeared behind the library. He turned back to his sister. “Sorry, I thought I saw something.”

  Jules followed his line of sight. When she turned back to him, one of her eyebrows raised. “Oooookaaaay? If you say so.” She began back down the road, towards the guildhall. “I was just saying it's too bad Taiga couldn’t come out.”

  “He said the weather’s getting too cold.”

  Jules nodded. “I don’t know how we’re going to find a way to cure the Guardian’s corruption by spring if he’s not mobile until then. We’re stuck in Winolin and it’s incredibly limited knowledge.”

  “But I understand their rush.” Ellio reflected on what Taiga told them about his visit with the captain of the Gale Order. “If the imbalance has really picked up over the last few years specifically, and all the Guardians are suddenly corrupting one after the other… We don’t have a lot of time to spare.”

  “I know, it’s just,” Jules scratched her head, sighing, “I don’t think we’ll be able to find a cure in Winolin. I know Taiga can’t move much before winter’s frost sets in, it just feels like a tight time constraint with low resources. And I’m not sure where to go from here.”

  Where could they go from there? They planned to test the soil to find if anything mixed into the magical essence, and while neither of them said anything, they both knew it was a long shot, at best.

  And if these tests resulted in nothing… what then?

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  Ellio bit his lip, following behind a silently fuming Jules as she led the way. They couldn’t abandon the Guardian Spirits. Ancient beings aside, their ability to balance the magics in the land was vital if they ever hoped to fix the overarching problem.

  The Guardian Spirit whose territory rested on the northern outskirts of Leryn Forest and deep into the corruption zone was, as they’d heard, Mouse’s family. Honestly, he was surprised they hadn’t marched north already. But when he brought it up, Ellio couldn’t mistake the flicker of fear in Mouse’s eyes for anything else.

  Going north without a way to solve the corruption and stumbling upon an already corrupted Guardian Spirit would… be debilitating. What could they do, in the face of such unending despair and pain as a parent slowly warped into something they could never know or connect to ever again?

  Ellio truly hoped they would reach the Guardian before it was too late. But also that once they got there, even if corruption took hold of the Guardian, they’d be able to free them from such pain.

  The final cry of absolute anguish of the Guardian Nefedjukasb, whom Taiga slayed, ended with a curl of joy upon the freedom that was death.

  Ah. He didn’t not want to consider the agony of Mouse or Taiga, for what he felt was already overwhelming. And yet maybe because of Ellio’s nature, he couldn’t let it go. He couldn’t free himself of such burdens in the way Jules could. But if either Taiga or Mouse felt such emotions, they never made it apparent to him.

  They entered through the arches of the guildhall, and he took one last look back to see if the woman had followed. Relief eased his shoulders when he didn’t find her face. A tug on his cloak drew his attention forward. Jules eyed the kitchen.

  “Think we can sneak in a second free meal?” Her eyes danced at the food being mixed in a large pan.

  “No. They know I picked up a bowl for you earlier. Besides, we can’t steal.”

  She clicked her tongue. “I mean, if you put it that way, I guess.”

  Ellio sighed. Mouse’s influence on her certainly made her question what she could get away with more often than before. It reminded him of their academy days. Since he’d been the only one she ever listened to, he’d get called in when she got herself in trouble. Which, unfortunately for him, was often.

  At least she listened to Taiga now, too.

  They climbed the stairs to the third floor, their room only two down from Taiga and Mouse’s. Ellio knocked on their door, which Mouse opened immediately before the first knock, to their surprise.

  “I heard you coming down the hall.” He opened the door for them.

  Jules entered, side-eyeing him. “What, you’ve memorized our footsteps?”

  Mouse paused, looking into the room towards Taiga, who sat at their table. “Is that weird?”

  “Some humans find it disturbing.” Taiga busied his fingers with yarn and some sort of stick, a hook, if Ellio knew correctly.

  Jules blinked. “Indeed, we do.” The way she enunciated ‘we’ told Ellio she’d forgotten and the slightest of unease tainted her words. Taiga’s fingers paused, his eyes flicking towards them. Ellio bumped her with his elbow, and she settled.

  “We got the nickel we ordered.” Ellio stepped into the room, slipping the package from Jules’ fingers into his hand, and set it on the table Taiga worked from.

  “Yessss, it was such a good price! Winolin has really reasonable prices on ore. We should stock up.” Jule came up behind him, pulling open the flap of the sack and digging around for all the shards.

  When she’d fished out a sufficient amount, she left the room, leaving the door open. In her absence, Taiga returned to his yarn, looping the yarn over and making his stitches across the top of it. After a minute or so, Jules returned, carrying a jar of their mixture and soil.

  Jules popped the cork off, dropping several shards of nickel into it. Then she recapped it and shook it back and forth for another minute before setting it back down. Mouse watching with interest, pulling out a chair at the table and sitting into it. He set his elbows onto the table and rested his chin into his palms.

  “So, what’s this supposed to do?” He asked, his eyes following a blade of grass floating in the substance.

  Ellio turned and closed the door Jules left open. “It’ll tell us the kinds of magic in the soil. The water will turn cloudy for high concentrations of purity, and will congeal for corruption. The added Night Bloom should make the mixture glow if it reacts to foreign contaminants… the book specified poisons and unnatural substances, though I’m not sure what that would specify.”

  “Huh,” Mouse hummed, not actually listening.

  Ellio didn’t mind, as Taiga nodded at the information, having listened in Mouse’s stead. After a few minutes of letting the mixture settle, Jules opened the jar again and dipped a finger into the substance. The once liquid bounced to her touch, resisting her force before the pressure caved, and she took a swipe of gel from the top and held it on her fingertip.

  She raised it to her face, looking it over a moment. The substance was undoubtedly more clear than purity would cause. “It’s corruption.”

  “Well,” Jules exasperated towards no one in particular, “no surprise there.”

  Jules cupped her hand over her finger, bringing it close to her eye before pulling back. “And no glow.”

  “Pure, untainted corruption, then?” Taiga set his yarn and hook down, looking at the jar. “Which source is this from? The rip or the Guardian?”

  “The rip. So the corruption isn’t really a surprise. Although I suppose we’ve now verified it is, indeed, a rip to the Beyond.” Jules scraped her finger on the jar’s rim.

  Ellio pulled a cloth from his cloak and took her hand, cleaning off the gelled mixture. “We only have one jasper. So we could only process one jar at a time. I’ll clean off the gem and start on the other jar. It’ll take a few more days at least, though.”

  “Well, the weather is warming up.” Taiga rocked his chair back on two legs a moment, stretching his back before clunking it back into place. “I may be able to squeeze in one more mission before it gets too cold.”