Fire lit up my vision.

  The pain was persistent, though that was not the greatest problem. I had dealt with pain before, after all. The Cursed Waters of the Titan’s Crown had marked my ascension to the 2nd tier, and I doubted anything would hurt quite like that ever again.

  This agony was patient; insistent, but not rude. It knocked at the door of my consciousness, ensuring I never forgot its presence, but respecting the boundary when I shut it outside. There was a certain streak of maliciousness to it though; I knew were I to let down my guard, unbolt the door and take my eye from that warding structure, it would sneak its way in and consume me.

  For now though, I was alone within the sanctuary of my mind as my body and soul were consumed by virulent power.

  I had endured more than I had ever expected to on my strange journey through this world. I had fled through endless valleys on my own, had travelled across the breadth of the Wandering States and explored – however briefly – the canyon city of Colchet. I’d wheeled my way across the Badlands separating the Copper Canyons from the continent-spanning mountains that I had journeyed deep within, and then crossed the Dragon-Spines to worm my way through the Riverlands.

  Finally, I had ended my journey here, in a Kingdom of Marshes and Mines. What a place to die, aye?

  Of all the beautiful sights of Tsanderos, my fate would be decided in the backend of nowhere, facing a veritable horde of meaningless enemies. I didn’t even know which uniform corresponded with which kingdom, and I was supposed to give my life facing them?

  Strangely though, I didn’t find myself too put out by the thought. Of course, I wanted to live…but it had been a hell of a journey. Sometimes that was more important than how it ended.

  But death was not what I was aiming for, despite my dire circumstances. A small band of heroes holding a fortress against a looming army? That sounded a far finer tale to me than dying in the mud, however valiantly. Of course, it was much less likely than dying by their hands, as well, but it wasn’t as if I had no cards to play either.

  I had an opportunity here. I had been blessed by the bounty of the World Tree, though in hindsight it wasn’t surprising. I had always been drawn to trees. I loved to run through forests, and had spent much of my time sheltering beneath the embrace of birch and ash, elm and pine.

  The flash of moonlight through the leaves of ancient oak had saved me in the Riverlands, and the many boughs of the mangrove had hidden me from crystal-spitting mammoths in the edges of the Dragon-Spines. I had slept burrowed within the twisted roots of elm and come face to face with two Subakir in my short life so far; Oak and Willow. Though whether the Subakir could be said to be modelled after trees, or the reverse, was probably a point of contention.

  Jorge would likely know, and probably find the mild blasphemy funny. Thinking of the old man brought to my ear a strange lilting song, but as I tried to focus on it, I felt the metaphysical lock that kept safe the door behind which my mind sheltered jiggle in its housing. Pain was ever so distracting.

  I turned my thoughts back to the power surging throughout my body and soul, and images of trees enthralled me again. Great trunks holding up the sky, deep roots burrowing through the earth. Green shoots creeping through shattered cobblestones.

  My heart twinged, the power of the seed stuttering as it was unsure where to go.

  What did I want? It was a hard question to answer in the abstract, so I focused on the present. I watched the dance of golden leaves far above and smiled. The thunderous beat of hooves slipped by beneath notice, but I caught a strange sound on the breeze that ruffled the hair that had escaped from my tightly bound braid.

  Singing. Lilting and hauntingly beautiful, it escaped from a throat raw and unused to the sounds, as if a man singing in a language he had long ago stopped using. Jorge.

  He called out, beseeching the earth to swallow him, asking the sky to nourish him, and calling for time to take him. To become the thing that he had worshipped for so long; the sheltering canopy, the nourishing root, the armoured bough.

  I frowned. I didn’t know what he was doing, but it seemed desperate. I remembered where I was, what the stakes were. I heard once more the thundering of hooves, and understood their proximity.

  In the meantime, the seed was trying to make sweeping changes. It wished to reimagine myself, body and soul, and provide the power for a transformation that would allow me to shake the world. It wanted change, in all its many forms, and would bend me to whatever shape I desired in pursuit of that goal.

  It had noticed my proclivity for the arboreal, and tried to shift me in that direction, take my soul and twist until a new me awoke, with a new class and a new future.

  I pushed back.

  I didn’t need a new class. When I thought of the highest ideal in this world, I didn’t think of the World Tree, preeminent over all and blocking out the sun itself. I thought of the mountains, of that endless fog bank obscuring their feet and the titanic range above that eclipsed not just the sun but the stars as well.

  The very sky was beneath their notice, clouds covering the world below them like a false floor. The mountains were the very ideal of the pinnacle, and I was content to climb for the rest of my life. I didn’t need an end, didn’t need a reason. I just needed to be there. Within them and surrounded by them.

  The mountains were what had forged me, and I was not yet through with their guidance. If anything was to mould me, to reshape me into something new, let it be them. I would drink deep of their wisdom, and let their knowledge nourish my soul, but I would not bend will to another while there was still room left in the mountains of Tsanderos for me.

  The seed did not seem greedy though. It did not need to convert those it empowered; the World Tree stood above all, after all. It needed no worship or respect. It simply was, like the mountains themselves. Just as its roots burrowed deep to wrap around Tsanderos’ core, so too did the mountains root themselves in the core of the world.

  So too had I.

  That is what the mountains represented to me, after all. Yes; constant change and an ongoing challenge and journey. But more than that, the mountains were a part of the world. They were undeniably of Tsanderos. They could not be separated from one another, and the mountains were grounded within the world in a way that nothing else could be.

  In a way that I wanted to be. It may not have been my world to begin with, but I had made it my own by dint of effort and intent. Tsanderos was mine, and I was Tsanderos’ in turn. Just like the mountains, let this world claim my soul, for I would fight and die, live and cry, love and despair; all within the embrace of this world. All beneath the ancient peaks that crowned it in majesty.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I proclaimed that truth with my mind, soul and body, and so the seed acted. It did not take long. No dramatic changes needed to be made, no re-imagining or reforging of class or skill.

  I simply awoke, the same man I had been before. Just…more.

  The thunder of hooves nearly floored me as I returned to the world, and Fandar’s frantic orders warred for supremacy against Jorge’s fervent chanting. I had time to examine neither, though.

  The first sight that greeted me was of horse-flesh and armour, as near enough a hundred knights galloped towards me with vicious glee, no more than a dozen meters away. Towards us, I corrected myself, as I saw the frozen forms of Jacyntha, Nathlan and Sadrianna beside me, lit from within with a golden glow.

  Jorge was in front, an instant away from obliteration at the hooves of horses bred for war. I didn’t think, didn’t plan or strategize or otherwise decide. I simply acted according to my deepest instincts, and the world hastened to my will. I had time to note the strange inner light shining through the skin of my outstretched arm as I shunted mana into the only skill I had that could help.

  The Mountain’s Gate took form, but it was not one I recognised. Jorge was not wreathed in starlight. No. Instead, the ground before him buckled, and from it sprung a wall of earth and rock. Thirteen peaks now stood between him and the cavalry charge. A mountain range half a dozen meters high, and their bulk filled the ruined gate entirely.

  A barbican of earth, wrought of the bones of the world itself, loomed above the horses, and it was as real as the castle within which we waited. Horses screamed as they slammed into stone, and men shouted with them. I felt my mana dip immediately at the activation, but it was a price I could bear.

  The charge had been broken, but I saw a lance burst through the stone in one place, and then another. Doubtless the fortification would be destroyed in a few more heartbeats, but I had brought enough time for Jorge to survive if he only moved.

  He was still kneeling though, his hands splayed and mouth moving, but the instant before the section of conjured rock before him erupted in an explosion of black fire, he changed.

  I thought it was in response to whatever attack had broken through my conjured wall at first, but as the transformation continued, I realised my folly. Jorge – one of the first people I had ever met in this world, and the closest thing to a mentor I had, the man who had shepherded me – no pun intended – through the transformation of scared boy to confident man...disappeared before my eyes.

  Or more accurately, the earth beneath him erupted, hiding him from view. I panicked, thinking my skill had somehow gone awry, the changes the seed had wrought having unanticipated effects, but that wasn’t the case. The activation had been smoother than ever, and while I had no time to examine my soul-space, I knew – I knew – that my class was undamaged by the seed. That wasn’t its purpose, after all.

  As the moments slipped by, I realised that this was Jorge’s own doing. His own terrible choice, no doubt made in an attempt to protect us.

  He was swallowed by a titanic trunk, his body vanishing within the mighty tree as it burst forth from the shattered ground. The miniature mountain range I had conjured to hold the gate was smashed apart, and I heard further screams as men and horses on the other side shared the same fate, the massive trunk ripping itself free from the earth and rising to tower above the field.

  Castle Ryonic itself lurched to one side, its foundations compromised by what must have been a flurry of roots digging through miles of earth to stabilise the massive trunk above. I saw a bulge in the trunk where Jorge had been and with dawning horror I realised what I was seeing. The words I had heard, the song that he sung to the sky itself…

  I didn’t know Jorge’s class, still didn’t understand his true power, but as I reached out with my mana senses, I saw the truth. This was no skill of his that he could cast whenever he wished. No finishing move, or powerful defence. This was a final gambit. An ace in the hole.

  One last sacrifice.

  The tree was blazing with mana, alive to it as it siphoned from the world around, but most of all; from Jorge himself. It drained him as it grew, and each meter it pushed skyward left him more and more empty.

  Whatever changes the seed had made within me were clearly still ongoing, because I saw the parasitic skill more clearly with each passing moment. My mana-sense showed me the skill-forged tree turning mana into matter instantaneously as it grew impossibly fast. As I watched now with my increasingly refined mana senses, mouth hanging open with shock and horror, I noticed Jorge was diminishing with each passing moment.

  I didn’t know the details, knew there were a million complexities that I was surely missing, and knowing also that this was Jorge’s choice. I didn’t know where Vera was, didn’t know if that army we had seen was marching behind the broken cavalry charge even now, didn’t know what had happened beneath the earth between Jorge and Markas, and didn’t know what Jorge’s ultimate plan had been.

  But here and now, as I saw my mentor, and more importantly my friend, being drained to a husk by his own skill, I decided I couldn’t let it stand.

  I ran, sprinting at the tree and leaping onto it. My body felt lithe and lethal, the seed still altering it in minor ways, even now. I heard Jacyntha exclaim behind me as she moved for the first time, and a quick glance back showed Nathlan and Sadrianna still motionless, though they looked to be struggling with the same power I had so recently wrestled, golden light bursting from beneath their skin to paint their features with drama.

  A small part of my mind noted it, wondering why I had woken earlier than everyone, and Jacyntha next after me, but there was no time for intellectual considerations in the midst of a crises, and so the thought was discarded.

  I scampered my way up the trunk until I reached the bulge that held Jorge within it, and I drew my hatchet with a snarl. I wasn’t gentle, nor careful, but I knew well the supernatural endurance and fortitude that I enjoyed, and could only imagine that a 4th tier was nigh invincible when it came to my attacks.

  I used Shatter Point as I hacked my way through the groaning trunk, each blow sending a shower of wooden splinters flying out at my arms and face, but I simply closed my eyes and continued, until I had cut into and through that great mass of bark armour.

  I opened my eyes, reaching within the crack and ripping it further open to uncover a goopy mess of sap that poured out, exposing Jorge within. He looked at me with wild eyes, anger flaring within.

  “Get out, you fool!” he yelled, though his voice was weak, diminished like the rest of him from the drain the gigantic tree was exerting.

  I ignored him and reached out, gripping his arm in a vice and hauling him bodily out of the trunk to fall to the ground below. That I could do so against his wishes only confirmed that this would have killed him had I not intervened – The Shepherd should not be unable to resist a 2nd tier, no matter if one was blessed by the World Tree or not.

  He hit the ground and I followed moments later, the tree halting its growth and creaking ominously. Jorge rolled to his feet, though the movement was sloppy and slow, and he rounded on me with such hopeless rage that I was momentarily taken aback.

  “What the fuck are you thinking, Lamb!?” he shouted, but I tackled him to the ground before he could get in another word.

  “Where’s Vera!?” I yelled in his face, matching my own desperation to his. “The army!? What the fuck is going on, and why do you think you can just sacrifice your life like that without any of us fucking noticing!?”

  He hesitated a moment, before grief clouded his vision. “She’s out there, lad. Slowing the army as best she can while I stopped the charge and saved your sorry arses. We’ve got only moments before they break through now, and your wall is already long gone.”

  I pulled him to his feet. “Then let’s meet them like men, aye?” I growled, something in his resigned tone making me angrier than I could truly articulate.

  “I’m out, Lamb. Done. I can barely stand, y’see? Ain’t no way you can face down the Crimson Company right now, and if we’re not done with them in a hundred breaths then Vera’s fucked too.”

  He sighed, looking older than I’d ever seen him. Rather than streaking through his long braid, grey had colonised it entirely, and his eyebrows looked almost frozen given the white at their tips.

  “That was my plan, Lamb,” He said, pointing at the half-formed tree that loomed above us, cracks and groans echoing from its depths as it listed dangerously to one side. “That was my…” he trailed off.

  I looked at him, taking in the age that had been visibly stolen from him and recalling the weakness of his frame as I’d torn him from the tree. It had drained him to power its growth, and without that power source it would crack and fall on all of us. That would not only leave the castle open for the cavalry that even now milled about on the other side of the gargantuan trunk, but probably do a decent job of crushing us and the rebels on the way down too.

  “Fuck it,” I said, and sprinted for the tree again.

  I didn’t see his face, but I could well imagine the emotions Jorge went through as he realised my intention, because the shout that tore its way from his throat was hoarse and broken.

  “Lamb, no!” he screamed, but it was too late.

  I scrambled my way up the trunk and pulled myself into that strange hollow chamber in the tree’s surface, falling to my knees to sink my palms down into the viscous sap that pooled in its centre.