Even as the eagle's cry faded, I mentally marked a tree and started walking toward it. I felt quite a bit of urgency and wanted to speed up to a jog and maybe even get up to a run, but I could hardly get my feet moving into a shuffle. And it wasn't because I was tired. I couldn't count the times in the past when I was so exhausted that my limbs felt like they were trapped in thick mud, and I could still move with more grace than I was showing now.

What I could not manage, what might as well be so far beyond my abilities at the moment I might as well try to pluck a star from the sky, was keeping my eyes locked on the stupid tree. They all looked like shifting blurs to me. Hmm, which one was it… Ah! That one.

There was no way to deny it. The dust was no longer making the trees blurry; it was that eyes couldn't focus. Everything I looked at was discolored blobs that popped into clarity for a moment before shifting back into a haze. You might think the moments of sharp lines would help, but they didn't. The shifts were accompanied by spears of pain and distracted me more often than not, making me lose track of what I was looking at a moment before.

Also, I was distracted by what I was pretty sure was blood running down my face from my nose. And my ears, too, as all the sounds were muffled. Admittedly, those issues could be attributed to what I was sure was a concussion and the cuts on my head, but I was hedging that I was more hurt than not.

Reaching up, I wiped away whatever was stinging my eye, smearing the grime into my hairline. Raising my hand into a beam of light, the substance looked far too dark to be simple sweat and dirt.

Blinking at my bloody hand, I lowered it and looked around blankly. Umm… Which tree was I heading towards again? Bloody crows… I mentally sighed as I locked my eyes on a tree, which I was pretty sure was in the same direction I was moving before, and started walking toward it.

It should be fine if I got a little lost, so long as I didn't get turned around completely. The World Tree's instructions were clear; all I had to do was find a tree with a big hollow cavity in its trunk by a cliff. Kind of hard to miss a giant wall of dirt, even if one is blind.

I just had to follow my line and not get turned around. And my tree was… Shit! Grumbling, I made my best guess again and continued walking. What I was doing was simple.

If you don't know the area and don't have landmarks to keep track of, pick two stationary objects and walk a line between them. When you reach the far object you're walking to, find a third object in line with the first two and repeat the process as necessary.

It's not as easy as it sounds, as nothing ever really lines up exactly right. And depending on how thick the foliage is, it could be nearly impossible for long distances. But it works great if you have some practice and just have to go in a general direction… As long as you could see. Without that one essential requirement, things got rather complicated.

I passed blob after blur as I stubbornly trekked over the loamy ground, cracking leaves and twigs with every step. When I approached the masses, I could identify that they were, in fact, trees. Though, sometimes, the bushes disguised themselves as short trees. The tricky bastards just didn't want to be consistent.

My vision is getting worse by the minute… I sighed reluctantly, acknowledging the fact and what it meant. During this long… long day, I mentally overtaxed my willpower, and I had been skating on the border for a while now. The final straw was the backlash from my ground scraper casting shattering.

While my condition was probably close to a moderate concussion, I should be fine given some time, even without a healer. The problem was I knew that I would hurt myself badly if I tried to use my mental powers again, regardless of the mental energy in my reserve, as all of the warning signs were present.

The damage could be as simple as dropping unconscious when I extend a tendril, or I could have a stroke and lose some bodily function for the rest of my life. As far as I knew, there was no way to tell how bad it would be, and no one had ever volunteered to join a scholarly study to find the correlation between those who overextended themselves and their impairments.

I was somewhere in the middle of what is commonly referred to as the haze. It's where your body starts shutting out external stimuli by shutting down after you have used so much willpower and mental energy that your mind can't handle the strain anymore.

Your vision fading in and out was one of the most common signs of that shutdown. And once it starts, there is no stopping it other than resting and suffering through the symptoms. It's similar to severely pulling a muscle. Your body ensures you don't use that part for a while with the swelling and pain.

Even though I could feel my heart in my ears, and I was gasping to catch my breath, I tried to pick up my pace because of the growing itch on the back of my neck. I knew I was running out of time to escape. Whether I could see them or not, my enemies were getting closer.

The problem was that the swishing scrape of my feet brushing aside leaves, dirt, and twigs as they moved could only be heard about once a second or two. It was the best I could manage. My surroundings blurred as I focused on walking forward, and time passed. I have no idea how much time it was, but it could not have been more than a few minutes.

Then I turned around and looked up in shock as I heard a too-familiar noise piercing through my mental fog. "Caaaw!" Sighing, I turned and tilted my head, looking through a gap in the canopy, my eyes immediately locking on the impossible-to-miss entity.

Under the branches of the trees, I was confident that he could not see me, but that wasn't making me feel any better right now. Whether from stress or chance, my eyes decided to work, giving me a clear view of the eagle. It felt like two spikes were driven into my eyes, and I could feel water running down my cheeks as I looked up and stared into the brightness, but I didn't look away.

I guess that I couldn't be sure that it was the eagle I was looking at as it was a silhouette, but I was reasonably confident in my assumption. Who else in this forest was enough of a prick to enjoy screaming in the air while surrounding himself with enough golden-red fire that he might as well be a second sun? I mean, really, could the world handle two people with such egos being so close together?

"How in the Ancestor's name is he doing that," I said, starting to wonder in resignation about all the kawrashit going on… Then I realized the thoughts were taking effort. An amount of effort that was beyond me at the moment. Maybe later, I will look back on this and be amazed by all the absurdity I encountered during this mission. But right now, I didn't give a fuck. As I was about to turn and continue walking, I was rooted in place with a shock so deep that it broke through my exhausted apathy.

"You dare to injure me, Sunsray of the Golden Feather Clan, legionary?" Boomed the beastkin over the forest, his voice filled with derision and hatred. "You mock me and mine? You lead us on this chase and try to harm us with a dying relic of a lost age? Do you think you and your pitiful Republic are strong? That is only because we have decided to never press you. Your people cannot conceive of our strength or even our existence. Not yet. But you, you will be the first to witness the power of the Chosen!"

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With his words, the ball of light around his figure grew brighter until even his shadow was consumed by its radiance. And then the new sun that had appeared above the world fell to the earth, leaving a golden eagle hovering silently in the air for a moment before he shot high into the sky.

Nothing happened for a beat of my heart, and I thought it might all be an illusion. That somehow, the eaglekin was projecting what he wanted me to see like some of the nobles can do. Or my concussion was worse than I thought, and this was all in my mind.

Then the forest flashed a golden red, and I was thrown back as the loudest and strongest shockwave I had ever heard rolled over me.

It felt like a wall of hot telekinetic force slapped me, and I rag-dolled as the trees around me shook and swayed. Rolling head over ass across the ground, I finally flopped to a stop with a thud. Not that I heard the thud, as my hearing wasn't the best at the moment, but from what I felt and was feeling, there was a loud thud.

Laying on the ground, looking up at the swaying forest's canopy, I attempted to breathe. The shockwave of the falling star knocked the air out of my lungs, and then tumbling across the ground didn't help. Second after second passed, and my mouth worked like a fish trying to suck in the air, but nothing happened.

I need air! I have to breathe! I. Have. To. Breathe! As I thought the last word, I lifted my good arm and slammed my fist into my chest. Lurching up, I sucked down the sweetest breath of air I could ever remember taking.

Coughing, I looked around the blurry forest, licking my chapped lips, but only saw the few immediate bushes I was within. I had to reach deep into my stagnant memories for what I was feeling. It's just not something I have experienced all that often growing up in a forest… or my mind didn't want to dredge up the memories.

I felt… sunburned. There was just no other way to describe the tight, hot, and dried-out feeling on my face and arms. And it was no wonder my face felt burned.

Gone was the cool embrace of the forest, as every breath I took was like I had decided to lean over the vent of a lit stove. Each time I sucked in air, it hitched in my throat as I struggled to keep it down as it was so hot I could feel it prickling at the flesh in my throat.

Getting to my feet, I saw a forest on fire. Well, it was more like flickering red blurs in the distance, but I was growing proficient at interpreting blurs. In one direction were the greens and browns of a rich, vibrant forest in the middle of spring. The other was an increasingly fiery red with hints of gold, longing to make a smoldering wasteland.

Staggering a few steps forward, I fell against a nearby tree as a moment of weakness overcame me. When the lightheaded spinning passed, I pushed off the rough bark, making the obvious choice of turning and walking to my right. I no longer knew if it was the right direction, and I didn't care. Behind me, the forest was quickly turning black from smoke, and in front of me, the air was still clear.

It was the perfect direction.

My breathing quickly grew ragged as the temperature combined with the thick smoke, making the forest into a living hell. To say the least, I was quickly growing… uncomfortable. Every breath scraped at my throat, creating a persistent itching sting as bands of iron were wrapped around my chest and lungs. And even when I wasn't wheezing and coughing from the soot, I could taste the charred wood the forest was becoming on my tongue.

In minutes, the forest became nearly as dark as night, except for the ominous flickers of the rapidly spreading fires advancing from behind. The crackling pop of burning wood filled my ears, but it could not drown out the primal screams of terror and pain of the forest animals. They ran blindly from the most primal of fears, that which all creatures of the land dreaded. Fire.

Every creature in the area might be fleeing, but not all would escape. Probably not even most. And a doubt that I would be counted among those trapped sprouted in the back of my mind.

As possible as that outcome seemed at the moment, it created a new source of strength inside me. I didn't know about anyone else, but I didn't feel like burning to death, and fear was quite a motivator. My pace increased so that my lumbering shuffle could almost be counted as a jog.

Passing tree after tree, I constantly searched my surroundings to see where I should go. Where I could hide and find safety as I hoped for a conveniently placed lake. But that hope died within me from one moment to the next.

I stood between two trees placed closely together, and I stumbled to a stop and leaned on one in despair. Before me was a steep, loosely packed slope that rose forty-plus feet, with the occasional rock poking out of it. Passable as it might be to the healthy, it might as well be a sheer cliff for me right now.

On the bright side, I could see it was possible to make it up the slope thanks to the stream of animals bounding past me. Practically speaking, it was impossible. I just couldn't see myself staying between the gaps of the animals as I climbed the trails up the hill so they didn't trample me or knock me off the path.

I'm trapped… And I'm going to die. I thought in dejection. I looked down at the short spear I still held in my good hand, thinking if I should kill myself rather than burn. Maybe if I wait out the animals and make a run for it at the last minute. Coughing, I looked back at the slope, my eyes drawn to the left. It was only natural to study the most prominent tree at the base of the slo… Fuck me.

Closing my eyes briefly, I mentally cursed myself. Then I opened them and started walking, muttering, "By the Dawn Tree, I can't even see a barn when I'm about to walk into it."

A few animals bounded around me as I ambled to the lone tree, but I made it there without any more difficulty. Walking around the giant trunk, I found it was eight feet around, and most of its insides were taken up by a large hollow.

Leaning inside the wooden cavity, I immediately started looking and feeling around, brushing aside the leaves and dirt that had gathered within. The surface of the cavity was smooth, except for a spot on the upper right of the hollow's mouth, where a crevasse broke apart the smooth wood.

Not seeing anything else that stuck out, I reached into the crack and fumbled around as I felt it out. I found a lot of spiderwebs, and the hole went up for about a foot until a lump took up half of the opening. Past the lump was nothing but a quickly narrowing end, and with the reliable source of the World Tree telling me there was a latch somewhere in this cavity, I started messing with the knob.

Grabbing hold of the protrusion, I pulled down on it. Nothing happened for a second, then the wood slowly scraped down, and I heard a muffled click from below. The floor in the tree started dropping away as a spiral wooden staircase appeared.

I took a second to take in my escape, then glanced back towards the Dawn Tree past the increasingly burning forest. A pang went through my chest because I knew this was all my fault. Turning away from my shame, I started down the stairs.

Darkness quickly enveloped me as I moved one of my hands to the wall and carefully felt out every step. It wasn't long before a soft greenish-blue glow welcomed me from down below, and I could stop slowly feeling my way down the stairs. Which was lucky because I wasn't sure how much longer I could keep standing as I was coming down hard from the adrenaline rush of imminent death.

Finally, I came around the spiral stairwell and found myself inside a hallway lit with blue-green light. Searching around the walls, I didn't process much as I looked for a way to close the passage. A vital goal for me because as I came down the stairs, I felt the cool air of the tunnel heating up as the fire crept ever closer.

Seeing a lever sticking out of the wall next to the exit, I reached for it and took a step. The next thing I knew, I was looking up at the lever, my thoughts becoming cloudy, hoping it would lower on its own. Lifting my arm, I grasped at the air, trying to grab the increasingly blurry and distant handle. I couldn't reach it, and getting up was a pipe dream.

Ironically, the only thing letting me hang on to consciousness was the air scorching my throat with every breath. Or maybe my throat was already so messed up that it just felt that way. It didn't matter. If the air wasn't hot now, it would be soon.

Rallying myself for a final push, I scraped together the last drops of mental energy in my reservoir. Guiding the energy through my body, I pushed it down my arm as I raised my hand, then sent the mental strand — that was no more than a yarn string's width — shooting from my finger to wrap around the wooden lever.

"Ahh!" I screamed as a spike of pain slammed into my head like a hammer. My voice caught in my throat as my vision rapidly closed in from the edges. My arm fell, and I tried to help it on its way as the tendril was still trailing from my finger, stuck on something.

I might have heard a click as the darkness overcame me, but I didn't care anymore. I had done my best, and what would happen would happen.

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