We left Ryn and her brother Kael behind with Mara's people, and the rest of us pushed on.
The next three days blurred together — a long, grinding sweep across the flat world's plains and broken canyons, our packs lighter now that we'd left most of what we carried with the settlement.
And we found nothing.
No second column of campfire smoke. No footprints. No cart ruts. Just wind-scoured stone and shimmering heat-mirages and, every so often, the bleached skeleton of some long-dead beast half-swallowed by the sand. Three days of hope thinning out into dust.
Then, on the evening of the fourth day, one of the fox scouts stopped dead on a low ridge above a shallow basin ringed in jagged black spires, and her ears went flat.
"Merchant," she said softly. "Dimensional signature."
I squinted down into the dusk.
There was a single tent in the middle of the basin — silk walls that shifted color like oil on water, glowing faintly with runes — and a tall, many-eyed figure in flowing trader's robes moving between floating crates, antennae twitching as it laid out glowing orbs on a low table. No guards. No caravan. Just one interdimensional merchant, sitting alone at the edge of nowhere like the isolation was beneath his notice.
"Approach slow," Minho said. "Hands where he can see them. If he wants to talk trade, we listen."
We went down in the open.
He clocked us long before we reached the tent. All six eyes swiveled at once; his mandibles clicked a polite little greeting.
"Travelers from the Mortal tribe," he said, in smooth, accented Common. "The Kim family, yes? Word travels fast on the trade winds. I am Zeth'kar. Independent broker. No affiliation, no guild mark." The eyes glittered. "What do you seek?"
Seojin stepped up first, that Currency Sovereign power of his already humming at his fingertips. "Information, mostly. Any word of human settlements? Small groups. Campfires. Refugees moving east or south?"
Zeth'kar's antennae curled, thinking.
"Humans are scattered like seed after a storm," he said. "One cluster — thirty-seven souls — received aid four days past. Your doing, I'd guess. Beyond that…" The antennae dipped. "Silence. The constellations have been active. Many small fires have gone dark this last cycle. Raiders. Beasts. Or simple despair." Then: "But there are whispers of something larger. Two hundred, perhaps more, sheltering in the floating ruins to the north-east. Hard to reach. Harder to trust."
I felt my pulse pick up. "Floating ruins?"
"An old plate-fragment. Towers held up by vine-tethers." He waved a long hand. "The humans there have scavenged generators. Weapons. They trade, sparingly, with a few select merchants. I can sell you a map-key — coordinates, safe landing points — for five hundred mid-grade essence shards."
Seojin glanced at Minho. Minho gave the smallest nod.
Seojin held out his palm, gold light rippled across it, and five hundred mid-grade shards stacked themselves neatly into existence out of nothing. (I've watched him do that a dozen times now and it still feels like cheating.)
Zeth'kar took them with a pleased click and pressed a small crystal disc into Minho's hand, etched all over with glowing runes.
"Press to activate. It guides true north to the ruins. Beware — the vines are alive. And the humans there do not welcome strangers easily."
Minho turned the disc over. "Anything else we should know?"
The merchant's eyes caught the last of the light.
"The First Incursion stirs," he said. "Constellation scouts have been sighted. Small avatars — shadow-shaped things. They watch strongholds. They test defenses." A pause. "Yours will be noticed soon."
I watched something move across my brother's face when Zeth'kar said that — just for a second. Recognition. The look of a man hearing the footsteps of a thing he's already died to once. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. He's told me what the constellations are. I believe every word of it, and I would very much rather not meet one.
Zeth'kar bowed, and folded his tent — the whole stall just shimmered and dropped into a pocket of folded space, and he was gone, and the basin was empty.
We stood there a moment in the sudden quiet.
"Two hundred people," Lisa breathed. "If they're real, that's a foundation. A whole town. But if they're hostile—"
"Then we earn it," I said, pocketing the map-key. "Their trust. Same as we did with Mara's people. We don't make them afraid of us. We just keep showing up until they understand we're not the thing they're scared of."
We turned west, back toward the beastmen — three days again — but we moved faster this time. We had a direction now. We had two hundred reasons.
We made the red-rock amphitheater by dusk on the sixth day, fires burning high, banners snapping in the evening wind. Taetigkon waited on his dais, golden eyes tracking us in.
"You return empty-handed," he rumbled.
"Not empty," Minho said. "We saved a settlement — thirty-seven. They join us when they're strong enough to walk. And we have coordinates for another. Bigger — two hundred, maybe more, holed up in the floating ruins. We'll need more scouts, more supplies, and time to approach them right."
Taetigkon's tail flicked once. "Then you shall have them. Rest tonight. Tomorrow we plan the approach."
The others peeled off toward the guest tents. I didn't.
I'm not entirely sure what made me drift toward the fox-clan fires instead of my bedroll. I'd like to say it was strategy. It wasn't strategy.
Yuri was standing at the edge of her banner's firelight, nine tails swaying slow behind her, the flames catching gold in her eyes. She tilted her head as I came up, like she'd been expecting me and was pleased to be proven right.
"Kim Junha," she said, light, with an edge under it. "You look like a man carrying new burdens."
I stopped a respectful distance off. "Just trying to carry the ones we've already got," I said. "Your scouts were everything out there. Thank you. We don't find Mara's people without them."
She smiled — sharp, playful, but with something turning over underneath it. "You saved thirty-seven humans today. That's not nothing. Most leaders would call that a victory and rest on it a while."
"I don't rest while there are more of them out there starving," I said. Just the truth.
She stepped closer. Close enough that I caught the smell of her — foxfire and something like desert jasmine — and had to work to keep my face doing normal things.
"You intrigue me, Junha." Quieter now. "Your brother fights like a man who remembers every death he's ever died. You fight like a man who remembers how to prevent them." Her eyes held mine. "That's the rarer thing. By a long way."
And — okay. I've spent my whole life being the other Kim. The normal one. The one standing next to the legend, holding the bags. I told you that already. So I'm not too proud to admit that hearing somebody look at the two of us and decide that my thing was the rarer one did something to me I wasn't ready for.
I kept my voice even. "We both remember too much," I said. "That's the whole reason we can't stop."
Her smile gentled, just a fraction. "Then let me help you carry it. My illusionists can hide an entire caravan in plain sight. My personal guard can move through ruins like they were never there." She let it sit. "When you go north-east, to those floating towers — take my people with you."
I studied her for a second. "Why?"
"Because," she said, and there was no playfulness in it now, "I want to see what kind of world two brothers who refuse to kneel are going to build." A beat. "And because I would rather stand beside the future than watch it burn from a safe distance."
She held out a hand — slender, clawed, steady.
I took it. No hesitation.
"Deal."
Her tails curled, slow and satisfied, behind her.
"Rest well, Junha," she said. "Tomorrow we start building something worth burning for."
And she turned back to her fire and left me standing there under a sky full of cold, too-close stars, with my heart doing something undignified and a fox princess's words sitting warm in my chest.
Somewhere out east, faint campfires were still burning in the dark, waiting for someone to come.
But they had a name now. A direction. A promise.
Two hundred souls.
And — God help me — the start of an actual plan to go get them.
…to be continued.