“What will it take for you to leave me alone?” Nathan said.

  “Do you really hate me that much?” Thalassa tilted her head. “I believe we’ve been… teasing? Yes, that’s the word. But I feel like you’re somewhat serious about it at the same time.”

  Her tone wasn’t joking, nor did it seem like she was trying to guilt him. If anything, it was perfectly sincere. She was simply curious.

  Well, now I feel bad.

  “Sorry,” Nathan said, his lips drawing into a thin line. “I’m just under a lot of stress right now, and I’m taking it out on the first available target. You’re not… I don’t think you’re malicious. You probably don’t deserve me acting like an asshole.”

  “I’m not offended,” Thalassa summoned a beach chair and leaned back into it. “Just to be clear, I was only curious.”

  “Right, so anyway—”

  “Your stress—is it because of your sister? Or the Harrowed Hand? Or Bree?”

  “All of them. None of them. Don’t forget to put yourself on that list.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re stressed. What does that even mean, to be stressed? You humans use that term so often, but I’ve never quite grasped it.”

  Once again, she seemed utterly sincere. Her eyebrows furrowed, and she looked at Nathan with wide-eyed curiosity.

  “It’s…” Nathan scrambled for the words. “It’s like a physical weight is pressing down on you, but at the same time, you’re being forcibly pulled forward. And none of it is under your control. You’re just flailing, trying to keep up.” He paused. “You’ve never felt that?”

  Thalassa looked down at the sand.

  “Perhaps?” she said after several seconds. “It’s hard to say. I don’t have the same concerns as you, Nathan. For me, all of this is nothing more than a blip. I don’t feel much attachment to you, or to anyone, or to anything. Because I know it’ll all disappear, and I’ll still be left alone.”

  Nathan wasn’t sure what to say to that.

  “But I do sometimes wonder,” she continued, “what it would feel like to be human. You’re so concerned about all these little things. Whether someone will live, whether someone will die. You’ll all perish in the end, so what does it matter? And yet, despite that, you cling to the illusion that the world will stop spinning if you fail at what you’re trying to do.”

  “Aren’t you literally trying to turn me into a superweapon to fight against the end of humanity?”

  She laughed. “That’s true. You’re an odd exception—what you do will decide the fate of your species. But for most of you humans… you feel, and you cry, and you laugh, and you burn with the intensity of the sun in a thousandth of the time.”

  “Is there some rule saying you can’t feel things like that? Is it impossible?”

  “I could.” Thalassa’s eyes wandered toward the sky, where the moon hung suspended. “But it would be an unwise decision.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Have you ever heard the story of Selene?”

  At the mention of the name, the waves seemed to rise a little higher, and the moon in the sky glowed a bit brighter.

  “I can’t say that I have,” Nathan said.

  “She was—or is, depending on how you view things—the goddess of the moon,” Thalassa said. “There’s a story about her—how she fell in love with a mortal. It wasn’t a passing interest or the fleeting lust most of our kind engage in. No, she gave her heart wholly and utterly to that man.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “The story goes that she was so captivated by him, she arranged for him to live forever in eternal sleep. The truth is much harsher—he died, and a part of Selene died with him. She never moved on. Her love for that man, like herself, became immortal.”

  She stopped. Overhead, the moon dimmed.

  “You see the danger?” Thalassa said. “And it doesn’t have to be love. It can be rage, or happiness, or sadness. If we’re not careful, if we allow ourselves to feel too strongly, those emotions will become part of our nature.”

  Nathan wasn’t sure what to say to that.

  He’d been treating Thalassa as if she were some trickster being out to get him—and him specifically—but Nathan was starting to get the feeling that she was far more complex than that. And frankly… what had she actually done to earn his enmity? She’d made him an offer, which he’d rejected, but she’d continued to help him to the best of her ability. Or at least something approximating that.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “Wait, you came here for a reason,” Thalassa said. “The spirit pool, right?”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “Here, let me give you a free tip. Consider it an apology for causing you this… stress.”

  Before Nathan could respond, she pointed a finger at him and made a mock ‘bang’ noise. The tip of her finger lit up, and a small blue orb shot out toward Nathan’s head. As soon as it impacted, Nathan felt his brain reshuffle, and the exact location of the spirit pool spontaneously appeared in his mind.

  He blinked. “What?”

  “By the way,” Thalassa said, “try to be a bit more stealthy when you sneak up on this one. They can smell you coming from a mile away. That’s why people keep missing them. You were lucky the first time, but it’s doubtful that’ll happen again. You need to be more intentional.”

  Before Nathan could so much as blink, he could already feel the dream beginning to fade.

  “For what it’s worth,” Thalassa said, her voice flickering at the edges of his mind. “I am sorry that I’ve put you in such a difficult position.”

  Nathan didn’t have time to respond before the dream ended and he woke up.

  He stood up inside the cold concrete building. A draft came in, causing him to shiver.

  Where were you? Who was that woman?

  Nathan blinked. He was hearing things again. He reached up and rubbed his eyes, then started marching in the direction of the spirit pool.

  Nathan wandered through the forest, drawing closer to the location Thalassa had mentioned. His thoughts drifted back to her words before he’d been sent out.

  What she’d said about being stealthy. But how did he do that?

  He crouched low, trying to lighten his footsteps. But something told him that wasn’t what Thalassa meant. This was tied to all that spiritual mumbo-jumbo. There was something he was missing.

  He reached inside himself, searching for his core. As always, it was a bright, burning thing. He extended his senses outward—and there it was. Energy was radiating off him like he was a giant heater. He’d never noticed before because he hadn’t bothered to look, but now it was unmistakable, flaring from him in every direction..

  He pressed his fingers to his arm and forced the energy back in, compressing it on the spot. With a focused push, it was gone. He shut his eyes, concentrating. Bit by bit, spot by spot, he pulled the radiating energy back into his body, sealing it away.

  For some reason, his plant arm was abnormally easy to control. It was like the heavy lifting was being done for him, as if something else was doing most of the work. When he extended his senses again, the energy was nearly nonexistent. He might as well have been a plant.

  He crept closer to the spirit pool, his senses sharp. It wasn’t far now; he could almost smell it. Step by step, he moved forward until there it was—a milky white, translucent pool. He knelt beside it and opened his inventory, submerging it halfway into the pool. But nothing happened. He waved his hand through the water, trying to guide it into the inventory. No luck. It was like waving his hand through a cloud.

  He clicked his tongue in frustration.

  How do I grab it?

  Letting his ki stretch into his fingers, he tried again. This time, the water seemed to solidify at his touch. It became real, tangible. He pushed the water into his inventory, and it began to fill—slowly but surely.

  "Nice job, me," he muttered.

  Within minutes, his inventory was filled with hundreds of units of spirit water. He shut it, opened his portal, and stepped through.

  When Nathan arrived with the samples, Vee had nearly fainted. She snatched up almost half of his entire supply and immediately began running every test imaginable. There were instruments Nathan had never seen before. She cast spells, examined the samples under microscopes, and tried everything she could think of. At first, she struggled to extract the spirit water from the inventory until Nathan explained the trick. From that point on, she pulled out a peculiar instrument that seemed to energize the materials she was using to analyze the spirit water.

  "So, I have some good news," Vee announced. "I have no idea what this is."

  "That's the good news?" Nathan asked, raising an eyebrow.

  "The bad news is that I have no idea what this is," she repeated.

  "Great. Just great."

  She paced back and forth, Vee's hands trembling slightly.

  "Of course, we know that magic, energy, ki—whatever you want to call it—exists in the world," Vee said. "We don’t fully understand how it works—hence why it’s called magic—but it’s a natural phenomenon. It permeates the air and is especially concentrated in living beings. Many of my predecessors have tried to figure out how and why it behaves so differently from other forms of energy. Unfortunately, they didn’t get very far."

  "Okay, but what does this have to do with what I brought you?" Nathan pressed.

  "What you’ve given me appears to be highly concentrated magic. A naturally occurring pocket of it, out in the wild. How? Why? What’s particularly fascinating is that at such high concentrations, it starts to warp the laws of physics. This is a liquid, but as you saw, it only became manageable when I used magic on it. That glass container? It did nothing."

  "So, you do know what it is," Nathan said.

  "I understand its properties, but there’s more to it—something deeper going on here. Remember the glowing water from the tutorial circle? That was also highly concentrated magic, but it didn’t have the same properties as this stuff. There’s something more… something I’m missing."

  "Are there any practical uses for it?" Nathan asked.

  Vee slumped over, groaning. "Killjoy." She straightened up again. "Theoretically, you could drink it. Maybe even distill it—and it might give you a massive energy boost. But I wouldn’t recommend it. At least, not without running some trials first to test its safety. I’ll get started on those."

  "Thanks, Vee."

  Nathan was about to leave when she stopped him.

  "Have you thought more about the goddess’s offer?"

  "I have. I’m still open to it, I just… haven’t decided yet."

  "You can’t delay forever, Nathan. If you’re caught unprepared, you might end up wishing you’d acted sooner."

  "I’ll keep that in mind."

  Nathan popped back out and glanced around.

  He was… surrounded?

  Wait, he recognized these people. They were the ones who always followed Bree around.

  “Guys?” Nathan said, narrowing his eyes. “What are you doing here?”

  The right-hand man—the one who was always at Bree’s side—frowned. “We’re here to take care of a threat. Nothing personal, Nathaniel.”

  A sword materialized in the man’s hand, and he lunged forward, slashing through the air at Nathan.