“He really is damaged, isn’t he?” Carmen said, mopping sweat from her forehead. “Like a lost puppy.”

“A lost puppy that could probably level this entire city if he wanted to,” Elijah pointed out as he sat in Carmen’s office. The décor was eclectic, reminding him of a mixture of what he might find in mechanic’s shop and an academic’s office. On one side of the room, taking up most of the wall, was a giant chalkboard, scrawled upon which were dozens of strands of glyphs. None of it really made any sense to him, even when he read the notes she’d written in the corners.

There was a reason why he wasn’t a real crafter, after all.

“So could you.”

“I’m not a lost puppy though,” Elijah pointed out.

She fixed him with a no-nonsense expression that told him all he needed to know about what she thought of him. Elijah sighed, running his fingers through his freshly cut hair. It felt silky smooth, which was quite a difference from the oily mess it had become during his latest foray into a Primal Realm.

“I guess we’re all a little damaged, right?” he admitted.

“Not me. I’m the picture of mental health,” she argued. “That’s why I spend eighteen hours a day holed up in this cave of a smithy and beating on stubborn hunks of metal. Totally normal behavior.”

“Is it that bad?”

She shrugged. “I haven’t heard from Miggy in months,” she said. “You were gone for a long time, too. It’s been driving me up the wall, not knowing what’s going on out there. The only reason I haven’t gone completely crazy is because Nerthus would know if either of you were really hurt. So, I buried myself in work.”

“Sorry.”

“For what?” she asked.

“Just disappearing like that. I don’t always think about how it affects everyone else.”

“If you’re going to apologize to anyone, it should be Nerthus. You really threw the island into chaos,” she said.

“By being gone?”

“No, idiot. By siphoning off the ethera. You know how much Nerthus relies on balance. He was manic for like a week trying to fix it,” she said.

He leaned back in the chair. “There really wasn’t much of a choice there,” he stated. “I mean, it is my grove, right? What use is it if I can’t use it the way I want?”

“It’s his grove too. Same with Biggle. Or Kurik, to an extent. You know how hard he’s been working, don’t you?”

Shrugging, he answered, “I knew he was doing something, but whatever it was, it was out of my range. I saw him coming in and out, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what was going on.”

“Then ask him.”

“I intend to,” Elijah lied. In fact, he’d not even considered going looking for Kurik. They were friends. Close ones, too. But it wasn’t that kind of friendship.

When he said as much to Carmen, she just scoffed and asked, “What sort of friendship is it, then?”

“The kind where we talk when we need to talk. Where if he needs something from me, he only has to ask. I’ll drop everything and help him. It’s the same with him. Even if I know he’ll complain the whole time, he’ll be there when I need him,” Elijah said. “He’ll also tell me when I’m being stupid. Not unlike a certain surly Blacksmith I know.”

“I am not surly.”

“The way you’re looking at me like you want to smash me in the head with your hammer says different.”

Her glare smoldered.

Elijah held up his hands, “Fine. Dropping it.”

“Smart.”

“So – moving along, can you help him? With the hatchets, I mean. The ones he’s using are pretty outdated. He said he got them in an early tower run,” Elijah explained, pushing the conversation in another direction.

Carmen said that she could. After that, they spent a few minutes talking about the project before she made a request he probably should have expected. “I want you to go down to the Hollow Depths and make sure Miggy is okay,” she said.

“Sure. It’ll be a bit before I can go, but I can do that. I have a meeting in New York in a couple of weeks.”

“Can’t you go between now and then?”

Elijah dipped his head and stared at the ground. “Do you know what it’s like in a Primal Realm?”

“I’ve never even been in a tower.”

He looked up and stated, “In the past year or so, I’ve been dissolved, burned, cut to pieces, and crushed. And I’m not talking about just a little bit, either, Carmen. I’m talking about pressure so dense that it would turn your bones to powder. There would be nothing left. Just a wet spot on the ground where you used to be.”

“I don’t –”

“I can take it, right? That’s what you’re thinking. I’m strong. The strongest man on the planet, probably. But all of that, it takes a toll. Sure, I can keep going. I do. But there’s an entire facet of my mind that I’ve devoted to nothing but trauma. I…”

Suddenly, he felt a surge of inspiration.

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Maybe the reason he’d made no headway cultivating his mind was because it was contaminated. Perhaps that was the whole point of the next stage – to clean it out and transition to the fourth tier with a pristine start.

Regardless, the idea of immediately setting out into a dangerous battle against the denizens of a Primal Realm was far from attractive. It wasn’t as if he’d ever dream of refusing, though. Miguel and Carmen were family. And when family needed you, you showed up. That was what mattered.

He went on, “I’ll find him, Carmen. I’ll go down there as soon as possible. If it makes any difference, I know he’s fine. I can feel it.”

That much was true. The tiny blip in his awareness was difficult to notice unless he focused on it, but it told him that Miguel was still alive.

“I just feel so powerless. I dreamed of outfitting him in all the best armor, but then he took that class. Who ever heard of wooden armor or weapons?” she wondered aloud. “When he gets back, I’m going to insist he find something better than that trash he was wearing when he left.”

“Probably smart.”

Elijah knew that a proper grove could have filled that requirement on its own. Established groves were entire communities with all the archetypes covered. They had Tacticians and Tradesmen, Entertainers and Healers. Some of them spanned whole planets, from what he understood.

He didn’t want that sort of responsibility, but he wouldn’t have minded having a few other people to shoulder the load.

With that in mind, he once again assured Carmen that he’d go find his nephew, then left her to her brooding work. He probably should have admonished her to get some rest, but in her state, that was unlikely to happen. So, he simply accepted that she would distract herself with work.

As he left the smithy and trekked through the Forge of Creation, he was once again struck by just how advanced it was. The place cultivated a thick atmosphere of ethera, but it was distinctly flavored such that it was obviously different from the energy outside. Inside its boundaries, Elijah felt his creative side take hold, and he imagined all the projects he’d considered undertaking but never had the time to put into practice.

By the time he stepped into the street, he’d made and discarded a half-dozen plans.

The moon shone bright overhead and the sky was peppered with twinkling stars as he followed the street to his next destination. The flow of pedestrians was much denser than it had been during his daytime errands, but that was to be expected. Like most civilized people, the residents of Ironshore tended to work during the day and take their leisure after the sun set.

As he followed the crowd, he hoped that Oscar was doing okay. When he’d left him on the island, it had been with the expectation that the man would use the opportunity to wind down and relax. Still, he wasn’t terribly surprised when Oscar left the island almost immediately. He wasn’t one to sit still, after all.

Regardless, Elijah needed some alone time. As much as he liked the dogs and Oscar, they’d spent months together. A break – even a short one – was necessary.

Presumably, Oscar felt the same way because he’d left the pack on the island and used one of the rowboats to return to the mainland. Whether he’d gone into Ironshore or the wilderness surrounding the city, Elijah didn’t know.

Eventually, Elijah’s feet carried him to Kurik’s house. It was separate from the rest of the city, the modest but well-made home sitting atop a low rise that would give the dwarf a good view of the city. However, when Elijah knocked on the door, instead of his friend answering his call, it was a half-dressed Carissa, who told him in no uncertain terms that Kurik wasn’t available.

Apparently, their relationship had grown a bit more serious over the past few months.

“Good for them,” he muttered to himself as he set out to visit Biggle. The gnomish Alchemist wasn’t home, which left Elijah wondering what he was meant to do. So, thinking he could get a jump on replacing his next set of armor, he headed toward the Hunter’s Guild Lodge.

To his surprise, that’s where he found Oscar, who was deep in conversation with a mixed group of hunters.

“And then the tunnel collapsed!” bellowed a dwarf. “’Twas just me and a whole nest of monstrous ants. And you know what that meant, yeah?”

“Don’t mess with ants,” a gnome stated. “Rule number one.”

“Didn’t know that back then, did I? I was just a wee lad,” the dwarf countered before draining a flagon of ale. He slammed the pewter mug on the wooden table, then wiped his arm across his mouth. “Anyway, there was me and a horde of ants. Big buggers, too. Big as I was at least. D’you know what I did?”

“Don’t tell me,” said an elf as she pushed her hair back behind her pointed ears. “You cut your way through them, found the queen, and beat her in a one-to-one matchup.”

“What? Are yer ears stopped up? I was a wee lad!” the dwarf bellowed. “I hightailed it outta there, runnin’ as fast as my little legs’d take me. Lucky I found a tunnel I could just barely squeeze through. And those ants – remember I said they was bigger’n me – couldn’t fit. I dug myself up and outta that hive, and I didn’t come back ‘til I had everyone in my clan there with me. Exterminated the place. Can’t let ants get outta control. They get too smart and they’ll take over a whole world. Everybody knows that.”

“He’s lying,” came a soft voice from Elijah’s side.

He turned to see a young dwarf with a short beard sitting nearby. He had a tankard of beer in front of him, but it remained untouched. Instead, he seemed wholly focused on a sketchbook in front of him.

“Why do you say that?” Elijah asked, pulling his attention away from the boisterous dwarf who’d already begun explaining how they exterminated the colony of ants. For his part, Oscar seemed engrossed in the story, but Elijah didn’t care much about the details. If he wanted to kill a colony of ants, he had multiple options.

The dwarf let out a steadying breath, then closed his sketch book. After he motioned for Elijah to sit – an offer he accepted – the dwarf answered, “He’d never survive an ant colony for one. Especially not one with members that size. Ants typically won’t reach the size of a juvenile dwarf unless they’re at least ascended. If he’s here, he definitely wasn’t more than level twenty-five at the time. They would have slaughtered him before he had a chance to react.

“That’s problem one with his story. Problem two is that among beasts, there are few better diggers than ants,” he explained. “If he fled into a hole into which they could not fit, they would have simply expanded the hole and ripped him to pieces. But there are plausible explanations for the discrepancies, so that’s not why I don’t believe him.”

“Then why?”

“Because Egar is a liar,” the dwarf stated evenly. “Always has been. We’re from the same clan.”

“I see,” Elijah said. Then, he introduced himself, adding, “I live nearby.”

“I know who you are. My name is Griff. New arrival.”

“Hunter?” asked Elijah.

Griff shook his head. “No. Leatherworker. I originally settled in another colony. It was much colder there,” he said with a faraway look. “When I heard about the Forge of Creation, I decided to come here. I believe it was the correct decision, though time will tell if that is just wishful thinking.”

“How good are you?”

“Better than anyone else in this city,” Griff said without a hint of hesitation. “If you find yourself in need of armor, let me know. I’m staying at the Imperium for now, but I intend to open a shop sometime in the near future.”

“What about the Forge of Creation?”

“Perhaps one day I can rent some time there. For now, just being in the vicinity should be beneficial.”

Elijah tapped his lip. He had no real idea how space in the Forge of Creation worked, but he suspected that, being as how his sister-in-law had built the place, he might have a little pull there. Maybe he could throw that into a deal to get Griff to make him some armor.

Of course, that was for the future. He wouldn’t hire the dwarf unless he got Carmen’s seal of approval. For now, though, he was glad to have met a new crafter.

“So, what kinds of materials do you prefer working with?” he asked.

That perked Griff up, and Elijah found himself grinning as the dwarf went on a long explanation concerning the merits of different types of leather. He had a good feeling about his new friend.