I didn’t have time to drop my bow and grab my spear as it struck the ground and pivoted, but I knew I needed to survive for just a few more moments….

  The cat lunged and I leapt as high as I could toward it, my eyes taking in its snarling face, red eyes, open maw and outstretched claws as I rose above it, reaching out with my free hand to press down on the creature’s head so that I vaulted over it.

  We both landed—but the cat’s momentum carried it forward several paces, and as it slowed to bring itself around I watched its hind legs sink into the soil. It had gotten too close to the earth-creature, and been trapped.

  I didn’t have time to feel relief—everything came down to that single moment, and I needed focus.

  I drew in a breath, rose, nocked my arrow, paused, watched, then finally loosed.

  My arrow sailed through the air—up and into the branches of the forest.

  I’d heard birdsong, earlier, and moved toward the edge to get a shot at its source. I’d spied them just before the cat had pounced: many birds of colorful plumage perched on the smaller branches that grew from the crowns of the great trees, most of them undisturbed by the sounds of fighting below.

  But I’d spotted better quarry past these, higher in the branches, either unseen or unthreatening to its more colorful kin: a tall, lean bird, hook-beaked with front-facing eyes and camouflaged plumage of dappled green and brown.

  I didn’t have time to track the path of my arrow. With an explosion of soil, the cat ripped its hind legs free of the earth-creature’s hold and rushed me in a haphazard charge. I dropped my bow and leapt back to climb up the cliff that it had pounced from, grabbing vines and crevices and hurling my weight up the side of the mountain as fast as I could.

  And as I climbed, my arrow struck true.

  + 221 Essence

  I heard the motion of vines beneath me as the cat gave chase, but my mind was already snapping into the thoughts and forms that were familiar to me, reaching out to cast a simple spell that I’d cast thousands of times before, a spell that spent my essence to draw a skill key out of the world around me:

  You spend 500 Essence to create: [Earth 1]

  “Hah!” I cried.

  The cat rushed up beneath me, ready to tear me from the cliffside and feast on my flesh—but I fused my key to the only skill core I had:

  You fuse [*Primeval 5] with [Earth 1] to create the skill: [Earth Magick 6]

  [Earth Magick 6]

  Components: [*Primeval 5] + [Earth 1]

  You can control earthen substances within your claim.

  Moving a substance is easiest when you move it toward or away from you. The best points on your body to use for this purpose are your hands.

  You can sense earthen substances within your gaze, and extending your claim or gaze through earthen substances is easier.

  My awareness flowed out into the world around me, my gaze extending so that I could feel the stones and soil. In a heartbeat, I had found a loose stone the size of my fist, called it to my hand with a thought, then launched it into the open mouth of the oncoming cat.

  The cat made a strangled cry and fell back, but not before it sank its claws into my boots, grabbing me and tearing me from the cliff so that I tumbled down to crash into the ferns beside it, hard stones biting and bruising my side before I rolled away from the thrashing animal next to me.

  I strained to spring to my feet—and I failed, overcome by pain and weakness from the fall. Beside me, the cat rose and began to retch, arching its back and leaving me momentarily forgotten.

  I reached out with my magic—and up. Into the stones of the cliff-face, finding a jutting, angular formation above us that weighed several hundred pounds. I severed it from the cliff with my magic, hearing a hard crack as it came rolling and tumbling toward us, my magic still holding it, guiding it with little pushes and pulls as it bounced away from the cliff and free-fell toward us.

  I didn’t have the power to give the stone the energy it needed to kill the cat—but gravity did.

  The cat turned its head toward me, red eyes frenzied—and the stone struck, crushing its skull and pinning its body to the ground in one brutal, cacophonous instant, gore spraying me and the jungle around us like the innards of a crushed fruit.

  Your level limit has increased to 11!

  + 2841 Essence, [Boon]

  “Hah!” I cried, tasting both the cat’s blood and my own even as I filled with new power:

  You spend 2500 Essence to gain 5 levels. You are now level 5 / 11.

  For reaching levels 2 and 4, you gain 2 [*Primeval 5] skill cores!

  You gain 5 [Bestow 6]!

  For reaching level 5, your [Bestow] has increased from 6 to 8.

  I spent my bestows on new attributes right away:

  You spend 4 [Bestow 6] to add 24 to your [Strength]. Your [Strength] is now 28.

  You spend 1 [Bestow 6] to add 6 to your [Source]. Your [Source] is now 10.

  I sat up, painfully aware that the earth-creature was still coming toward me. I wasn’t terribly injured: my lungs were both still fine and the blood in my mouth was from biting my tongue… but pain accompanied my every movement. I needed to find a [Life] key.

  A moment later I felt the same force pressing against my claim as before—only now, with the [Earth Magick] power, it was easy to push back against the creature’s own claim and keep the stony ground beneath me for myself.

  It came into view a moment later, but it wasn’t so threatening, now: it launched another stone slug at me, but I imposed a slanted counterforce on the missile as soon as it entered my threshold, causing the shot to bounce wide without costing me too much mana.

  “You’re an ooze,” I exclaimed, examining the creature and breaking into a smile as I deflected two more shots. I waited to see if it would try another form of attack, now that its two main methods of assault were ineffectual.

  None came. Ignoring me, the white blob of a creature slowly pulled itself forward using what I counted to be ten appendages. I peered at it as it came closer, stepping out of its path and getting a good look. Its arms weren’t really arms, just pieces of its body that had been elongated and filled with long strips of stone so that it could move them around. The shadows in its belly-ball weren’t organs, but more of the stone slugs that it had launched at me.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Each of its makeshift feelers ended in a small, wiggling tentacle, and none of them actually supported its weight—instead it dragged itself over the ground, pulling itself forward with earth magic while its limbs glided across the world around it, touching every surface they could find.

  I watched it for another minute. It moved past me, found the dead cat with its feelers, then positioned its central mass above the corpse before lowering itself and beginning to spread to envelop its new find.

  It was fascinating. I wondered if it was the creature that had made the round holes which the striking insects I’d seen earlier lived in—perhaps it ate them now and then.

  “I have no way to kill you,” I whispered softly, watching the blob spread over the carcass like a second, ten-legged skin. It was a shame, I thought as I walked out of sight of it: something told me this thing would be ripe with essence, and levels 6 through 10 cost 1100 essence, whereas I only had—

  ?—You have 443 Essence.

  I smiled. The cat had been somewhere over level 20—so strong that I’d rushed the first five levels just from killing it.

  And I had reaped the rewards for doing so. In the first ten levels, a class gave a number of skill cores equal to its tier—my tier was 5, and so I would gain a [*Primeval 5] skill core at level 0, 2, 4, 6, and 8. Right now I had two free cores: I could create two new skills as long as I had skill keys to fuse to them.

  Unfortunately, coalescing keys had limits. Skill cores and skill keys were made of both essence and aspect.

  Aspect was a kind of magical trace that all objects slowly accrued, an idea that slowly came into an insubstantial existence. Aspect matched a thing’s nature—rocks had [Earth], air had [Air].

  When I’d coalesced my skill key, I’d done it by tearing all the aspects out of the world around me, then pushing all the [Earth] I’d found into a skill key and discarding the rest, wasting them. Had I wanted, I could have made a [Plant] or a [Life] skill key, as those aspects had also been abundant in the area around me—though curiously I’d found no [Air].

  My spell had thus been brutal and inefficient, but extracting only the [Earth] aspect would have taken both time and delicate attention, two things I hadn’t had.

  All this meant that I’d need to travel some distance from where I’d coalesced my skill key in order to create another.

  But the cat I’d killed had dropped a [Boon]—an incorporeal bundle of potential skill keys, each of them made from the aspect that the cat had accrued over its lifetime. I reached into this one… and sensed that it could form a [Melee] or [Wild] skill key—both rank 1.

  An easy enough decision. [Melee] would combine with my [*Primeval 5] skill core to make a skill that let me pierce the [Aegis] of enemies when wielding certain weapons—such as those tipped with bone. My steel spearhead didn’t qualify.

  [Wild Bond], however, was an absolute essential for hunting prey and surviving predators. Information was both a sword and a shield… and [Wild Bond] granted more than just information.

  You break [Boon] to create a [Wild 1] skill key.

  You fuse [*Primeval 5] with [Wild 1] to create the skill: [Wild Bond 6]

  [Wild Bond 6]

  Components: [*Primeval 5] + [Wild 1]

  You can telepathically sense, communicate with, and even attack all natural forms of life that are within your gaze.

  Extending your gaze to include such creatures becomes easier, though you detect only their mind and external shape, not the internal composition of their bodies.

  Unwanted telepathic contact with another creature costs mana to establish, use, and maintain. This skill also strengthens your ability to defend and hide from any such telepathy.

  Like [Earth Magick], it was another extremely versatile and useful skill. I would mostly be using it to find threats. Many predators would know how to use [Wild Bond] to hide themselves from potential prey with [Wild Bond]—but I was skilled enough that my gaze would be hard to escape, even at the lowly rank of 6.

  That done, I knew that I must have spent most of my starting mana pool on throwing a rock down the throat of the cat, then crushing its skull with another rock. I checked:

  ?—Mana 32/100, 40% Primeval

  Mana would replenish according to how much [Source] I had. But there was another way to replenish mana, and that was to channel it out of the world around you. And the world around me was more ripe with mana than any I’d ever seen.

  Of course, channeling mana into yourself was like pouring water from a glass back into a narrow-necked bottle: far more time consuming than channeling it out of yourself and into the world. Still, I channeled mana into myself until I was full, then queried once more:

  ?—Mana 100/100, 29% Primeval

  “Well that’s interesting,” I whispered. I did some quick math and determined that the mana in the air was more than 20% primeval, a stupendously high portion for natural mana. I’d known this world was steeped in power, but this was more than I’d expected—which was both good news and bad.

  Primeval mana channeled faster than bare mana depending on how primeval it was—in my case, 29%. But my [Primeval Power] skill gave me a 40% primeval mana profile—the mana that I held would slowly rise to 40% over time.

  Speaking of primeval mana… I checked the warp jewel at my hip. Its light had already faded a little. I had to trigger and fight off a primeval convergence before I brought my people, and I only had a few hours to do it in.

  But that wasn’t so bad. On the whole, I was rather excited.

  I reached out with my gaze to try and sense the ooze that had enveloped the cat’s carcass. Sure enough, I couldn’t sense it with [Wild Bond]—the skill didn’t count oozes as “natural” forms of life.

  Then I turned toward the crowns of the great trees, made sure I was pointed in the right direction, and made a running leap off the cliff’s edge, soaring through the air to land at the narrow end of the closest branch I could leap to, four levels of added [Strength] giving me enough power to make the jump.

  I grasped the branch, reaching out with my [Wild Bond] power to sense the life all around me as I pulled myself up and crawled inward toward the trunk of the great tree, standing once I had surer footing.

  That was the great gift of [Earth Magick] and [Wild Bond]—my gaze now mapped the world around me, helping me to find sure and perfect footing.

  I couldn’t help it: I broke into a grin as I extended my gaze into the world. Close by, I could sense insects moving beneath the bark of the branches, feeding on sap and leaves. I could sense the birds that had flown to higher branches, startled, when I’d landed. Further, I could sense—

  I froze. Something was wrong. There was a presence weighing on my mind, so light that I almost didn’t feel it even with the [Wild Bond] power—another predator tracking me.

  As soon as I noticed it, the strength of the creature’s psychic presence flared, the mental equivalent of an animal rearing up and roaring in a display of intimidation.

  And I was most definitely intimidated.

  I could sense that they were likely far, far more powerful than the cat I’d just fought, and I could sense that they were utterly malevolent. They flooded my mind with raw images and sensations: the taste of bloody flesh torn from still-wriggling prey, the shadows of beasts fleeing before them in terrified, frenzied stampedes, the forest I now moved through, seen from a high place in the mists—its domain.

  And then something I did not expect happened: the thoughts it was assailing me with crystallized, connecting with my mind in a way that formed words I could understand.

  This creature was sapient. It didn’t speak Aranian Elvish, but the Verse translated its raw, wordless thoughts good enough for me to understand it.

  You, it said to me, inner voice booming with power. Little one.

  I froze on the branch, my eyes sweeping the forest above and around me. Wherever this thing was, I needed to get away from it—and fast.

  You see as I see, it said, recognizing my own sapience with a flutter of surprise. I wondered at this: was I the first intelligent creature it had ever met?

  Yes, I answered. I am like you, I said. I see much.

  A deep rumbling seemed to fill my mind. You see as I do, it said. Then, after it had a moment to think on this, my mind flooded with more images: my head cracked open between powerful jaws, a tongue darting out to lap up the juices that flowed from my ruined skull.

  I will eat you, little one.