There were many ways to hide something or someone that didn't want to be found.

Concealment was by far the most common. One could lurk in the shadows, as Alarion sometimes did, or duck down into a hidden crawlspace. Skills and magic were also an option, ranging from an unnatural ability to go unnoticed to outright invisibility. Sometimes, they used camouflage, and sometimes they used deception. But the people of Shae-Yomag had gone for perhaps the simplest option of all.

Security through obscurity.

Their little village was in the middle of nowhere, well away from every main road and far from anything of value. In ordinary times, the village was so unremarkable that even the few visitors they had would have had no reason to ask questions. Their isolation hid them perfectly because no one bothered to look. A shroud of ambivalence was more potent than any spell, but it was also brittle. Once you knew to look, their secrets were clear as day.

It took Alarion and Dimov less than an hour to find the limestone caves set into the slope of the valley near the village outskirts. Despite the foliage obscuring the entrance, the unusually wide, trampled footpath—a result of the villagers' hasty evacuation—undercut the cave's seclusion. Its entrance gaped like a wide mouth, the sickly yellow stone far from inviting, but thankfully natural in origin. Time had dug these caverns; the village had merely exploited them.

Alarion had seen his fair share of fiendish dwellings and the odd caverns on two of the Trinity islands, but these caverns were an altogether different beast. There was a curious beauty to them, particularly the unusual formations on the floors and ceilings. In places, it looked as though the two were reaching for one another, wet stone fingers extending above and below but never quite touching. That beauty was marred by the signs of humanity, by chips of broken stone and muddy footprints.

The pretense of the cave looking benign and unoccupied was abandoned after less than a hundred yards. Once safely out of sight from the cavern's exterior, torches were set at regular intervals, shrouding distant corners in looming shadows and provoking an air of malice and distrust. Reluctantly, Alarion dispelled his [Flare], lest its light forewarn the cave's occupants, and the two soldiers adopted a slower, creeping pace with Alarion in the lead.

They moved from one torch to the next, following the trail of light deeper underground and ignoring small offshoots as they presented themselves. The muddy trail had diminished, but even without the flicker of firelight up ahead, the path would have been easy to follow. The limestone beneath their feet was smooth as river rock, worn down by millions of footsteps over untold decades.

This wasn't just a hiding place. It was important to them.

Alarion soon learned why.

The close confines of the cavern soon gave way to a large oval-shaped room. Though naturally formed, this hall had felt the touch of human artisans. Intricate inscriptions, all written in the village's unusual script, covered the floors and walls. Carved into the ceiling above them was a map of the stars, with constellations both familiar and unfamiliar.

Most prominent of all was the large bas-relief set into the far wall. The square depiction was simple, almost juvenile. The work that had gone into the walls and ceilings had been intricate and time-consuming, but this looked as though it had been made in a matter of hours. Odder still, it didn't appear to have been carved so much as… molded, as though someone had worked the limestone like clay. The amateur had left fingerprints and nail marks in the stone, the haphazard nature of the thing lending it an air of menace.

It depicted a man with his back to the viewer, his hooded head turned to the left as though looking in their direction. There was no face in the image, just an indistinct smudge beneath a hooded cloak. Even so, Alarion could swear the thing was watching him as he moved about the room.

"What is it?" Dimov asked.

"Hmm?" Alarion frowned. When had he gotten so close to the sculpture? His fingers were outstretched, touching the uneven stone monstrosity. The urge to clench his fist and shatter the relief rose alongside bile in his throat, but Alarion resisted. "I do not know. Some lesser god would be my guess."

"I thought the Ashadi were not religious."

"It is... complicated," Alarion said. He'd once thought the same, but months spent patrolling outlying villages had challenged that belief. The Ashadi's disdain for religion had more to do with a centuries-old conflict with their pious northern neighbors than a natural distaste for the divine. "But I think these ones are."

Turning away from the topic, Dimov gestured to the room's trio of exits. "Which one?"

"How should I..." Alarion began. Then a thought occurred, and he shut his eyes, focusing on his [Introverted Mana Sense]. For a moment, he felt nothing, but as he strained his senses, he felt the slightest pulse of arcane energy from the leftmost corridor. "That one."

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"You are sure?"

Alarion gave the young man a look.

"Right. How would you know?" Dimov shifted his grip around the longsword in his right hand, as if he couldn't find a comfortable way to hold it.

The sight was not reassuring, and it was far from the first warning sign Alarion had observed during their days together. Dimov had done little in the way of fighting during their battles with the dead, leaving most of the combat to Alarion or Kali. The boy was trained. That much had been clear from the few times Alarion had seen him fight, but he wasn't blooded. A swordsman and a healer, Dimov leaned heavily toward the latter. Kali had no record of the boy's status, and he wouldn't have shared it with Alarion if he did, but if Alarion had to put a wager down, he'd bet that Dimov was only Rank II as a healer, not as a front-line combatant. If even that.

He was not the sort of person Alarion relished as his backup.

They followed the offshoot out from the central chamber for another five minutes, keeping to the torch-lit areas and relying on Alarion's sixth sense to guide them as the path split thrice more. These corridors were less traveled but showed significant signs of recent wear and tear. There were drag marks on the floor, scratches on the walls, and tool marks suggesting that the passages had been widened beyond their initial dimensions.

"Hold here," Alarion said as they reached yet another junction. He let the ambient magic flow through him and immediately nodded toward the leftmost of the three forks ahead of them. Dimov started walking, but Alarion put a hand to his chest. "We are very close. I think I should go on ahead."

"I can fight." Dimov scowled.

"Can you sneak?"

Dimov reluctantly shook his head.

"Then wait one minute, and follow me at a walking pace."

The boy looked as though he wanted to argue, but the logic behind the idea was too strong. They had no idea what to expect in these caves. Better they saw it before it saw them, if at all possible.

"One minute," the Vitrian said at last. Then he tapped the simu in his ear three times, resulting in three corresponding clicks in Alarion's ear. "If you see something-"

"You will know," Alarion agreed.

"One Emperor. Two Emperors. Three Emperors..."

Alarion was well into the new corridor before Dimov hit five, glad that he hadn't asked any more questions. If he'd pushed just a bit further, Dimov might have forced Alarion to lie about his other motivation.

"There are six humans at the end of this passage. Five men and a woman, most likely Awakened," ZEKE whispered shortly after Alarion had reached an appreciable distance. "This environment is... annoying. Some sort of mineral in the walls is interfering with my sight."

"Then how do you know how many people are up ahead?"

"High-frequency echolocation," ZEKE said, as if the words meant anything to Alarion. "I'm able to map out most of your immediate surroundings. This cave system is an absolute maze. If my mapping is correct, you've actually doubled back and are underneath Shae-Yomag."

"Mm," Alarion replied. It was an interesting fact, but not especially relevant. "Do they know we are here?"

"It does not appear that way," ZEKE answered. Then, sensing the answer was unsatisfactory, he added, "It is hard to tell, but I believe they are standing watch."

"Over what?"

"I suffer under the same mystery. If I get a better glimpse, you will be the first person I tell. For now, do you remember what I taught you?"

Alarion nodded as he slowed his pace to focus.

To say that ZEKE had taught him the technique was only somewhat accurate. His memories of his time alongside Valentina were fragmented and missing, but the mana control knowledge that made up his [Unbound Spellcraft] skill was something that she could almost certainly take some credit for. He had vague memories of a knife through a napkin, of a grinning woman, and tremendous pain. She had taught him the underlying talent, and ZEKE has suggested a new application.

Hiding from an Awakened was a more complex task than hiding from a mundane human, as Alarion had so recently demonstrated. It wasn't enough to merely be out of sight or hearing. Some Awakened could track by heat, others could hear immense distances. There were those who could reproduce a ghostly facsimile of traumatic events and others who could quite literally smell you from a mile away. Any person wishing to hide from an Awakened needed specialized skills, chief among them the ability to mask their internal mana from outside detection.

For Alarion, this was not as simple as using a skill. His [Stealth] skill had grown slowly over the intervening years, in part because he preferred a more direct approach, but even if he had pushed it to MAX, it would not have availed him. [Stealth] was a purely mundane skill; it greatly enhanced his ability to hide from the unawakened and gave him a fighting chance to hide from those around his own rank, but it did nothing to conceal his mana. Nor would it, not until the system offered him an upgrade, or he could synthesize an epiphany all his own.

In the meantime, he had to do it manually. Fortunately, he had practice.

With his [Splintered Mana Circuits], it would be impossible to restrict the flow of mana the way others did. Nor did he have the spells or skills necessary to throw up a convincing shroud. Instead, Alarion played to his weakness and went with the flow. Through a combination of his broken circuits and an unusual use of [Kel-Taran Meditation], he expelled excess mana from his body until he reached a near equilibrium with his surrounding environment. The local ambient mana would be higher than normal, but only slightly.

It was an imperfect technique, suitable only against peer or near-peer opponents. Anyone specialized in sensing mana would spot the inconsistency. Or they'd see the more restrained and oft-overlooked mana signatures of his permanent items. And of course, any opponent who wasn't a peer would almost certainly see through his low rank attempts at stealth to begin with. Given that his alternative was to walk around glowing like the sun in an enemy's mana sense, he'd take it. Even if it cost him roughly a third of his MP pool to set up, it completely nullified his MP regeneration when in use and prevented him from using his own mana sense.

Alarion took a few deep breaths as he expelled the last of his excess mana. It felt odd, like taking a breath but having less air in his lungs when he finished. But it would have to do.

"How far?" Alarion asked ZEKE as he picked up the pace, hoping to put a bit more distance between himself and Dimov to compensate for the momentary delay.

"About 1,100 yards," ZEKE told him. "You will hear them before you see them."

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