Damian felt a foreboding sensation settle in his stomach.
He sighed, giving a reassuring nod to the worried Uncle Adam.
At this moment, even if he met multiple Bone Tempering Warriors, he was actually not afraid. This was the arrogance that his newly designed Vakochev’s Doctrines of Stone gave him. He had danced with Uncle Adam without taking a single hit. He had perceived attacks in slow motion. He had felt his heart beat with the power of organs that should not yet hold Mana.
He could handle whatever waited in the darkness.
Probably.
So...
"We will be back soon, old man. Keep watch here."
...!
Uncle Adam had a difficult expression as he nodded heavily.
As a guard, his instincts were screaming at him not to let his Young Lugal go. Not into the night. Not with only a cackling old Wisewoman as companion. Not when danger was apparently waiting somewhere in the darkness.
But as a Warrior who had sparred with him...
Anybody the Young Lugal could not take care of would be somebody that he himself could not overcome.
With a Land and Sky Physique and the power he had witnessed during their dance, weak Flesh Awakening Warriors or even a Bone Tempering Warrior from these parts should not be a threat to his Young Lugal.
So Uncle Adam agreed.
Grandmother Essun waved her stick madly at this moment, as if she was looking forward to the adventure with the enthusiasm of someone a fraction of her age. She pointed her staff toward an area in the encroaching darkness, seemingly at random.
"Aha! I think I have found a starting point, Tokoloshe. Let us go!"
She said such words as Damian nodded and followed the Wisewoman.
She began sprinting out at a ridiculously fast pace, her bent body suddenly unfolding into a running posture that devoured ground with each stride. Her staff became a third leg, touching down in rhythm with her feet as she moved with the speed of a young Warrior rather than an ancient crone.
Damian kept up easily, his newly empowered body responding to the demands of the chase easily
Uncle Adam watched behind them as they disappeared into the gathering darkness.
A distance away, behind a hut, the daughter of the Chieftain hid herself.
Elena had already heard of the coming danger from the Wisewoman. She had chosen to remain in the dark, to not reveal herself, to not make Damian feel any sense of guilt if he did not want to go out into the night to save her father.
But seeing him leave without hesitation...
She could only look up at the darkening sky and whisper silently.
"Please. Come back safe."
Her voice was barely audible, a prayer offered to whatever forces might be listening.
"May Mana illuminate the darkness, and the jagged stones miss your steps..."
The words faded into the night as the two figures, old and young, Wisewoman and Tokoloshe, vanished into the Lands of Stone.
--
If someone had told Damian just a day ago that he would be leaving the confines and safety of the tribe as nighttime came to go look for a party of Warriors, he would have smacked them out of their dreams and reminded them that the weak should not dare dream in the Lands of Stone.
But here he was.
As unbelievable as it may be, and even while he was doing it, he did not actually feel an ounce of fear.
DUM!
That beat of his heart continued its heavy rhythm, sending pulses of strength through systems that had been empty for eight years. His flesh tingled with Mana. His bones hummed with stored power. His blood carried energy through vessels that burned with new vitality.
He was not the broken farmer who had planted seeds this morning.
He was something else now.
Something that the darkness of the Lands of Stone could not easily swallow!
He did have a very peculiar and odd Wisewoman leading the way. Grandmother Essun moved ahead of him with that deceptively swift gait, her bent body somehow covering ground faster than seemed possible. Her gnarled stone stick radiated a blue light at this moment, the rings of bone and crystal that adorned it capturing ambient Mana from the surroundings and forming it into a hazy source of illumination.
The light was not bright. It did not banish the darkness so much as hold it at bay, creating a sphere of visibility perhaps ten paces in every direction.
But it was enough.
And their surroundings were grand ones.
Away from the tribe, the landscape transformed into something ancient and untamed. The carefully maintained farmlands gave way to wild terrain that had never known human touch. Sparse trees began to rise here and there, their forms unlike any Damian had seen near the village.
Ancestor Pillars, the Tribesmen called them.
These were trees that grew impossibly tall and impossibly straight, their trunks the width of three men standing abreast. They had no branches until their very tops, where crowns of luminescent leaves spread like frozen explosions of pale green light. The glow was faint but constant, casting pools of verdant illumination on the ground below.
Between the Ancestor Pillars, the terrain was broken and jagged. Stone formations thrust up from the land at odd angles, remnants of some ancient upheaval that had twisted the land itself.
These stones were not the smooth gray of ordinary rock but rather a deep purple shot through with veins of crystal that caught Grandmother Essun’s staff light and reflected it in unexpected directions.
Spirit Stones, was what they were.
They marked places where Mana had concentrated so heavily over countless ages that the very earth had transformed. His mother had told him about them once, explaining that Spirit Stones were considered sacred by some tribes and cursed by others. Their presence indicated power, but also danger.
The path Grandmother Essun chose wound between these formations with the confidence of someone who had walked this way many times before. She navigated the darkness as if it were merely dim twilight, her ancient eyes apparently seeing things that Damian’s enhanced senses only partially perceived.
Overhead, the sky was a weaving of stars more brilliant than any Damian had seen from within the village. Without the cooking fires and the constant movement of people, without the ambient Mana glow of the Roaring Stone Mountain so close, the heavens revealed themselves in their full glory.
The Ancestor Road, as they all knew the night sky to be.
A river of light that stretched from horizon to horizon, supposedly the path that the souls of the dead walked to reach their final rest. Damian had always wondered if that was true, if his parents now walked among those distant lights, looking down on the son they had left behind.
He pushed the thought away as...ah, it brought with it grief.
There would be time for grief later.
There was always time for grief in The Lands of Stone!