Many people claim pride in their history, but how many of their ancestors can they name? Do they know the names of those that built the roads they walk? Do they know the lives of those that mapped the routes on which those same roads are laid?

We Sarhail lack the strong bonds that your kind have for one another within clutches. You emerge into the world so delicate, so helpless, and spread your arms to the first person to show you kindness. You thrust your affection at them like an Nocelot in heat, and rely on them for your survival for many decades.

I understand that this works for the most part? I can see some nods. Good. To turn your claws and teeth against one another would be a betrayal of the highest order, would it not?

The question I pose is this; how would your world change if those bonds formed so young were to be ripped away? I imagine your society would crumble. Clutches warring with one another within houses and towns and cities. Your empires would split by dusk tonight.

This is the world we Sarhail have lived in since time immemorial. Clutches share no common emotions save the desperate need for survival. To raise whole a single clutch to maturity would drain an entire swamp of prey. The competition is fierce. When we emerge into the world as adults, we do so from a baptism of blood and violence.

When Yoatl cursed us crocodilians with sapience, our people needed to develop a framework through which to relate to one another. Familial bonds were not enough for us as they are for humans. We cannot rely on base biology to create a sustainable culture.

Many attempts were made in the early years of the Sarhail – I understand the results of some of those attempts feature prominently in the recent histories of many of your peoples – but only one has managed to bind my people together in community;

Reverence of those who built our lives. Those who built our lands, who mapped the expanses of the world, of our consciousness. Those extraordinary Sarhail that pushed the collective knowledge of my people to new heights.

I stand before you – a member of a species no more than a millennium old – and yet I would place the knowledge and culture of the Sarhail against any other in competition. Our understanding of our past binds us and forges new bonds in the present. Our clutches will grow strong, bound not by unseen ties of invisible feeling, but by a shared reverence for those that built their world, and a uniting desire to one day fill their ranks.

- Recording of a rare speech by one of the Sarhail, by guest lecturer Chiopic Water-Born of clutch Ash 177 – 'those that choose to leave' given at the white tower consortium circa .243

I did not wake from sleep gently, nor rise from unconsciousness in a flash. I simply saw again.

My eyes had been open, staring and occasionally blinking, but there was no 'me' to process and understand the image until now. The brown covering of pine needles and dirt was familiar, and the occasional patches of green moss stood proudly like islands amidst a sea of loam.

I lay on my side, my head rising from the ground as I twitched. Pain in my neck and shoulder told me I had been lying in one position for too long, and I sat up gingerly. My left arm was still dislocated but the swelling was no more dramatic than it had been immediately after my fight with the mountain lion, which told me I had not been insensate for too long. Hours rather than days.

There was no sign of the ants, and I shivered at even the thought of them, reaching internally to activate Heart of the Hills. Relief washed over me as the Skill took hold, banishing my fears and smoothing out the peaks and troughs of my recent experiences until they lay flat before me like a map to be read, rather than a cliff to fall from.

I noted absently that I had no trouble activating the Skill, and the strange metaphysical space that housed whatever power activated my Skills had returned. Not only that, but it was deeper than before, had more volume, and the edges seemed more defined.

I spent a few moments in careful study, before finally deciding to name the concepts. There was no point struggling with terminology within the sanctity of my own mind. I had a core, filling with mana, which I used to activate Skills. There. Done.

There was something spiritual about the whole thing, too. None of it was real – I knew that if I cut myself open, I'd find nothing but meat and bone – but the effects were impossible to dismiss. My Skills allowed me to impact the material world. Most were internal, sure, but I had seen the charred corpses of the wolves, experienced the sensory deprivation domain, and even turned away a tide of ants with my own magic.

There was no other word for it. Magic. And these magical Skills needed to draw power from somewhere. I felt the drain when I activated them. A tugging sensation from within my stomach, but not tied to my flesh and blood body. It was tied to me, in a way, indefinably my own, and I could feel it. Like hunger, I knew when it was empty, and I was slowly starting to understand when it was full, too.

I spent long minutes in careful introspection, probing at the edges of my core, testing out the shape of it until I'd mapped it clearly in my mind. I matched the feeling to the visualisation I had used when in a trance back on the ridgeline that had resulted in my class.

Constellations whirling through the dark void marked my Skills. Between and beneath them hung my core, silver light flowing upwards from a wellspring in the centre of my… what? A space, indescribably my own. A sanctum that contained nothing other than my core and my Skills, but in that darkness I felt an expression of my own identity.

My soul.

The word felt right, whether or not it was true. And that was the point of this whole exercise. Jorge had mentioned visualisation was key to gaining a class, and I'd seen the results for myself. I also needed to get a better handle on how my mana expenditure and recovery worked, and so I needed a set of linguistic tools to describe the world I was interested in.

It might come along with a whole bunch of baggage, but I had decided on some terms to use. Core, Skills, soul, soul-space. Now I could focus on the actually important part of it all. I tried to study the visualisation, to feel each part and understand how they all connected, and after another minute or two of considered introspection, it clicked.

The representation shuddered and then firmed. Suddenly, I could interact with it, study it without a conscious effort to keep the image stable. My closer examination now showed that the speed of mana drain in my core seemed faster than before. It was not just relative to the size of my core but rather an absolute increase in the speed that it emptied.

So, some of my mana was being used, consistently at a steady rate, for something. Further examination of my core showed me two faint siphons, sucking mana from my core and leading it towards…

My view expanded, and suddenly my core became a distant spec within my 'vision'. A small pinprick of light within the galaxy that was my soul. Mana was dragged in a whirling pattern from that spec towards two distant constellations of twinkling lights.

I was shocked at the scale of them in comparison to my tiny core and nearly cut the flow of mana in that moment. I hesitated though, as while the difference in size between the representation of my core and these skills was astronomical – literally – the skills were both still alight. Each tiny string of mana from my core was enough to light up each constellation, to illuminate the many twinkling lights that coalesced into recognisable patterns.

They were not of any language I could understand, but I knew them all the same. One was a swirling nebula that rotated constantly in every dimension. A kaleidoscope of whirling light and colour that resembled nothing so much as a giant ball. Each individual light would dance in dizzying patterns throughout the vast web of nothingness it was suspended within, but the constellation somehow stayed stationary and discrete. This was Heart of the Hills, and it swallowed mana greedily.

Dwarfing it in scale entirely by orders of magnitude was the constellation for Indomitable Prey. To take in its staggering complexity required several forced perspective shifts, as if zooming out of a screen. Despite my core being a pinprick to begin with before the change in scale, I could still see it in the centre of my view. Mana flowed steadily from my core to the titanic constellation that represented the active skill. It covered the background, dominating my core and the other skill constellations within my soul-space. Heart of the Hills stayed alight, burning merrily away, while wrapped in a twinkling embrace by the dancing stars of Indomitable Prey.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I couldn't see the other skills I had, but I felt their presence, nonetheless. They lurked in the void, awaiting an influx of mana to activate them and set their pathways alight with the fire of my will. Varied in shape and pattern, they nonetheless were dwarfed by the overwhelming dominion of Indomitable Prey. It's complexity and scale were orders of magnitude above my other skills, but its mana-drain was incommensurate with its size. It was counter-intuitive in the extreme and I returned my vision to my core to puzzle it out.

I saw the well of mana reducing fast, and realised I would quickly lose all I regained while insensate if I kept both skills active. I cut off the flow to Heart of the Hills and instantly my core began to refill. It would still take many long moments to fill – completely unworkable during a fight – but the change of pace was noticeable all the same.

Without the careful regulation from my calming skill, my mind whirled with possibilities in response to what I was seeing, and I lost the mental focus necessary to stay within this inner world of my soul. My nomenclature was probably completely off, and my visualisation was likely just as flawed, to say nothing at all of the theoretical underpinnings of my musings. I was like an ant poking at a leaf and trying to comprehend the shape of the forest above.

And yet I was excited. Despite all the impossible things I had witnessed so far, this felt the most like magic to me. I had been plagued by the fear that while these attribute gains were incredible, they could simply be taken away at a moment's notice. The permanent changes seemed too good to be true, and I was half convinced they must be ephemeral in nature because of it.

But the vision of my soul – and who cared if it wasn't actually a soul? – seemed to hint at these changes being truly mine. If I could understand how things worked through simple introspection…

A crashing in the woods behind me interrupted my excitement and made me spin in place, and I saw the tusks of a large boar come barrelling from between the trees. It locked beady eyes with me and stuttered to a halt. I dropped to a crouch, ready to dive to the side, but my shoulder protested the movement and pain shot through me, making me flinch.

Instead of capitalising on the momentary distraction, the boar turned tail and fled from site with a snorting squeal. I paused, wondering at the bizarre behaviour before recalling the description of my newest skill: 'Use this skill to remind all who would seek to make you prey, that you are not to be taken lightly."

It was still active, had likely been so continuously since I had faced the swarm and activated it the first time, and it seemed to be acting as some sort of aura skill to scare off any would-be assailants. I took notice of the sun's location, marking its position to my eye against the canopy above, and waited patiently for my core to fill. I focused on my breathing and let the sun wash over me as I waited, satisfied to note that it hadn't moved in the sky by the time I was topped off once more.

I drew a final steadying breath before activating Heart of the Hills again. I welcomed the sense of distance from the world outside and stepped calmly towards a nearby tree. Gripping my limp arm, I positioned it carefully before slamming my shoulder into the tree.

A loud pop sounded, and pain flared to life in my shoulder, but it washed over me in moments – a spring welling over grasses.

A new fire lit in my belly as I considered the final leg of my journey. I was closing in on The Breach, and reasoned that that must be to blame for the increased density of the creatures and their aggressiveness.

Jorge had mentioned that there was a constant stream of fighting monsters in this place, and that it would take a few extra days to detour around. They would have simply cut their way through the creatures, and with my new Skill scaring away all before me, I was planning to do the same. I would waste no more time in this valley.

Days passed in a blur of fighting, running, and hunting.

I gained another three levels and invested the attributes similarly to my current build. Namely, a relatively balanced distribution that prioritised strength and agility. Most of my Skills had levelled at least once as well. It wasn't all good news though.

My jury-rigged backpack – meaning my bundled cloak lashed together by vines – finally gave up as I was forced to run from a group of badgers. I would happily fight wolves and cougars, snakes and boar. But badgers? Fuck that. I couldn't remember the details clearly – like much of my previous life it was faded and indistinct, a sense of distance pervading all my memories of before and making them slip from my mind – but I knew there was something about badgers and honey, and my instincts warned of danger.

I felt the sting of losing the firelighter pebble and eating knife the most, and that was one of the deciding factors in pushing me on ever faster to the plains. By the time I could see them in the distance, I ignored hunting and simply ran.

I ran for the joy of it. I ran to avoid another night in the wilderness without a fire for warmth. I ran to avoid the gnawing hunger in my belly, for I hadn't stooped so low that I was willing to eat raw meat yet. And I ran to finally, at long last, meet real people again.

It had been near enough two months that I'd been in this new world, and that was two months I'd spent alone. Two months trapped with my own thoughts. I had changed enough that I barely recognised myself sometimes, or the patterns my thoughts ran in, and I needed the grounding that people could provide.

I had passed The Breach and the battlefield that flowed out around it in a whirl of activity, and I was now within sight of the plains below. I could actually see the ridgeline on either side of the valley flowing towards the open plains. A few dozen miles and I would be in settled lands. I glanced at my status in appreciation, realising I should be able to make the journey in a single day.

Status:

Ancestry: Human (unevolved)

Level: 23

Class: None

Titles: God-touched

Attribute allocation:

Strength: 29

Agility: 22

Endurance: 18

Perception: 13

Cognition: 15

Available attributes: 0

Current Skills:

Guerrilla Warfare: Level 7. Passive.

Wilderness Endurance Hunter: Level 5. Passive.

Cloven-Hooved: Level 5. Passive.

Heart of the Hills: Level 3. Active.

Check Step: Level 5. Active.

Hill-Folk: Level 4. Passive.

Indomitable Prey: Level 3. Active

Open Skill Slot

My appearance was ragged, and I was in dire need of a wash, but my excitement buoyed me onwards regardless. Tattered red robes clung to my body, strips of cloth wrapped my forearms and shins, and my leather boots were patchy and beaten. The jagged opening in the robes had been ripped further, exposing the hard muscle of my abdomen to the elements, and one arm was missing an entire sleeve from an overzealous lunge from a Juvenile Vampiric Deer.

My hair was hanging in unkempt knots and a beard had colonised my lower face entirely, but even it couldn't hide my grin as I ran whooping towards the end of the valley. Hours passed in a blur as I flowed through trees and followed goat-tracks, disturbing nesting birds with the occasional hoot of exhilaration.

The ridges on either side of the forest were fading, their stark majesty settling into a more stately dignity as they descended in a gentle decline before merging with the rolling plains of grassland beyond. The forest erupted from the confines of the valley like a flash-flood, surging into the plains and expanding rapidly to either side before losing steam as the rolling hills gave way to steady flatlands. The grasses that had been kept in check by the forest canopy then began to dominate, rising into the air and flowing with the winds till the flatlands looked like nothing so much as a sea of green rippling waves.

And there, standing proud and alone within the green sea was a small clutter of buildings. Not downed trees, not rock formations or caves. Buildings, wrought by hands guided by intelligence. An outpost, humans, and the promise of civilisation. My laughter bubbled up and spilled out of my mouth as I ran and skipped and dashed down towards the grasslands in a mile-eating stride. The closer I drew, the more excited I became until with a start I realised I could make out details on the buildings.

They were no longer below me in the distance, but in front of me at the same level and only a mile away. I slowed and began to walk through the long grass rather than rush. I used my calming skill to keep the excitement at bay and started to really think things through.

I would be unlikely to find my previous companions, since I'd taken at least two months by my estimate – it was hard to keep track of time effectively with nothing to mark its passage with – to cross the endless valley.

Jorge's original estimate had put it at a month-long trip for me and I didn't expect them to wait around for an entire month extra at what was apparently a small outpost in the middle of nowhere, for a man they'd met for less than two hours in total.

On the flip-side, Jorge had said they'd meet me here. They were far more competent than me, and Nathlan apparently had some sort of warding/tracking magic so perhaps they knew exactly where I was and had done since they'd left. Maybe they'd be waiting for me now at the inn with a bath drawn and a steaming plate of gravy-covered vegetables.

The thought brought a grin to my face, but that expression quickly soured as my inner cynic reared its unwelcome head and told me in no uncertain terms that they were likely gone, or possibly even dead. I couldn't have nice things happen to me after all: No no no, that would be a travesty!

I pushed away the cruel thoughts and tried to consider things in good faith. I was right that it would be unlikely to see them here and now, but perhaps they had left instructions for me before they had left? Asking around would do no harm anyway.

If that was the case, I could follow on after them and meet them somewhere further afield. Or I could just leave by myself, go somewhere else after restocking with some basic necessities. I had demonstrated my survival skills in the wilderness already for an entire two months or so. A few weeks travelling on actual roads couldn't be any harder, surely?

First things first, find out if they had been here and left any details. I could decide what I truly wanted afterwards.

I was God-Touched and that seemed to confer some ability to communicate with people regardless of the language they used. Vera had mentioned something about scholar's tongue now that I thought about it – was that a skill? No matter; I could communicate with the locals and had coins of some variety so I should probably be fine. Worst case scenario I would work for board and information for a few weeks.

I was so absorbed in my thoughts that I didn't notice the figure in front of me until her voice called out, harsh and grating.

"Not one more step, Lion."

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