It was a very crowded trip on the boat whose name Jay still didn’t know. Across seven full-sized decks and three of the half-decks, there were sixty-four passenger cabins, all occupied. Two of the other half-decks, split from their pairs by the hole that formed the cargo space, were cabins for the crew. There were only sixteen of those, but the three shift rotation meant there was plenty of sleeping room for the forty-eight crew members.

  Between the two groups, there were enough people on board that no one looked twice at Jay or Agensyx sleeping on the top layer of loaded sledges, though the snake did cause a brief panic about sea serpents the first time he tried to swim alongside the ship. It got straightened out relatively quickly – or at least before someone stuck a harpoon in the spirit – but that earned them their first bit of attention. Most people let it go before the day had ended. Basically everyone did, really, except for two.

  The first of those two brought it up when Jay was trying to eat, sliding onto the bolted-down stool across from him. He didn’t notice the other man was there until he started speaking.

  “So,” the stranger started, “you tamed a Seps.”

  Jay looked up from the dregs of the overly salty bean soup that had been on offer in the cafeteria the third half-deck held. “I’m sorry?” He barely suppressed a double-take after seeing the stranger. He wasn’t human, in a very different way from the elves, singular dwarf, and golemoid Asanti he’d seen already. This guy was scaled, covered in dark blue plates across most of his body except for the lighter blue ones near his joints, with a bright yellow crest rising from the top of his head.

  Jay had no idea what they were called here, but he knew a dragonborn when he saw one. Even if he was flaunting a weirdly low body fat percentage with an open-fronted gi. At least he was wearing pants.

  “You should be. You didn’t have the right to do that.” He paused as if waiting for a response, but Jay took the chance to finish his bowl without saying anything. “What, nothing to say? Contemplating the severity of your mistakes?”

  “Honestly, I just wanted to finish my soup,” Jay said. He hadn’t meant for it to come out so blasé, since it was the literal truth, but with a good portion of his mind still occupied by worrying about [Command Other Undead], it happened anyway.

  “Your soup is more important to you than the enslavement of a Great Serpent? Do you really think that highly of yourself?” There was a quiver of anger running underneath the dragonborn’s voice by the end.

  “I can honestly say that my ego wasn’t a factor in the bond,” Jay replied.

  That only seemed to make the blue-scaled stranger angrier. “You’re going to joke about it? You’re going to sit here and joke about taking a pillar of the natural order and turning him into your servant. I should break you like a twig,” he spat, reaching out like he was going to do exactly that.

  Jay batted the hands away. “No, seriously. It was pretty much entirely his idea. I’m not even sure I can count him as being my familiar as much as I am his.”

  “He’s your familiar?”

  Oh shit.

  “You didn’t just put him under your will, you tethered him to your soul? Are you deliberately trying to get me to kill you?”

  “If I was doing that, I’d have to know why it mattered so much,” Jay said. “You haven’t really explained that part.”

  The dragonborn cocked his head in disbelief, his hands clenching into fists where they’d come to rest. “You cannot expect me to believe that you don’t at least know of the truth of the drakekin.”

  Drakekin. Just close enough to dragonborn that it was either going to be really easy or incredibly difficult to swap over the terminology in his head. It couldn’t have been different enough to be simple, could it?

  Jay shook his head. “Not a clue.”

  “Have you been living in a Blight?” the drakekin asked.

  The question was clearly rhetorical. Jay answered anyway. “Pretty much.”

  “Are you taking this as sport?” he yelled. Someone else in the eating space shushed him and his next words came out at a volume that was more reasonable. “Are you trying to insult me with these lies?”

  “I haven’t lied yet,” Jay said. “You’re the one spitting in my face with every word. You’re the one who hasn’t bothered to introduce himself. You’re the one armed with the accusations.”

  “If there was a proper dueling field on this ship –” the drakekin began.

  Jay stood up, taking the scaled man’s brief stumble between words as a chance to break in. “There isn’t. Now, I’m done eating, so I’m going to leave. Do whatever you want as long as it isn’t following me.”

  He did exactly that, shouldering the drakekin aside before he’d actually processed that he’d said the words, and headed up to the upper deck. Fresh air sounded like a good idea; the air below might have been getting to him a little bit. The lower decks were stifling, especially the ones in the path of the kitchen’s heat.

  Everyone else seemed to agree, judging from the crowd hanging around the topside of the boat. Seriously, it looked like half the researchers were here, laid out heads-to-toes in just about every space that wasn’t one of the most direct routes to the crow’s nest and wheel. Occasionally a member of the crew would dance through the miniscule gaps between the resting people’s arms and bodies to get to a specific rope, but it looked like they were trying to avoid that as much as possible.

  Still, it beat the little cubby he’d squeezed himself into between a few of the packages of stuff packed onto the sledges. There wasn’t an extra cabin anywhere that he could find, since most of the people talking he’d heard had been planning for months to be allowed into whatever they were doing on the remnants of Ayor. His little hideaway always felt like it was a hard sneeze from collapsing in on him, which was just nerve-wracking enough to keep Jay from sleeping easy.

  And he was definitely sleeping. As much as possible as frequently as possible, really, since for the first time since his arrival on this world, he got to sleep indoors for more than two nights in a row without getting brutally assaulted first. It was a good feeling; Jay didn’t realize how much he’d felt like he was coming apart at the seams from the inconsistency until the feeling started to go away.

  All in all, after about a week and a half of boat travel, Jay stepped foot on Ayor in much higher spirits than he had been in since dying. Even the fact that the island they were unloading onto was barely more than a pebble didn’t bring him down. Maybe if he was lucky, this feeling would last for a while so he could properly enjoy it.

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  *

  An hour later, that feeling was gone. Poorly thought out logistics had been a pet peeve of Jay’s for a long time, and the unloading process reeked of minimal planning. What was the point of having six different tents set up if there wasn’t a way to tell whether they were all handing out the same thing or different things? They should have at least sewed a pictograph onto the sides to label them. Or even had someone meet the crowd of people coming off the boat to explain things.

  Literally anything would have been better than having sixty-four people crowded around the leftmost tent in the semi-circle of six, shoving each other around to try to make enough space to stand comfortably.

  Jay was loitering off to the side of the crowd, trying to avoid drawing attention to himself. After all, he wasn’t supposed to be there. Technically he’d stowed away to even get there. There weren’t any gaps in the side of the tent fabric like he’d been expecting, so he couldn’t peek in and see what was going on inside. He took the chance to look off the edge of the island instead, looking over the waters that had closed over the top of Halea’s most populated continent.

  He could see the outline of another island off to the west. It didn’t look too far away but he also couldn’t see any defining features, so either it was absurdly flat or further away than it looked. Jay almost asked Agensyx, who he could feel swimming around out in the other direction, but before he could, the snake sent him a warning.

  A small boat is coming, he said. From the east.

  With people?

  Yes.

  Interesting. Was the reason no one had come out of any of the tents? Whoever was supposed to be here hadn’t even been on the island? While Jay mentally placed his bets on what the odds of that being because of whoever was on the boat sleeping in, someone else walked around the side of the tent to join him in staring out over the ocean.

  Jay took in the younger man out of the side of his eyes, not wanting to look away from the gentle waves. His clothes stood out first; Jay hadn’t seen anyone wearing clothes with such deep color on them, with a velvet-looking open-fronted maroon robe over a brown undershirt. There was a gold chain around his neck, but the design wasn’t visible from that angle. He was paler than Cinri had been; there was an almost deathly pallor and thinness to him. Or maybe he was just young enough to have had a growth spurt without growing into it fully.

  The shorter man started talking while Jay was evaluating him. “So, what are you?”

  “Seems like a rude question to ask without introducing yourself,” Jay said.

  He nodded slightly, acknowledging the point. “Vitali Haunne. Yourself?”

  “Jay Carter,” he replied.

  “Then my first question stands,” Vitali said. “What are you?”

  “You’re going to have to be more specific,” Jay delayed. His heart sped up slightly; an irrational thought appeared that there was some reek of necromancy on him that the maybe-teenager could smell.

  “Your Class. Why they brought you out here. Take your pick.”

  “Snake Tamer,” Jay lied. The other man made a face of barely repressed disgust that was unmistakable even from the side. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” Vitali said, waving his hand as if to dismiss the look. “I’m sure it was the best one you had available.” The condescension couldn’t have been more clear if he was holding a sixty foot sign labelled “Your Class sucks.”

  “What’s yours then? If you’re so proud of it,” Jay challenged.

  “Wizard.”

  Jay scoffed. “That might be a classic, but I don’t know if it’s worth dismissing anything else.”

  Vitali looked bewildered that Jay hadn’t agreed with him. “Maybe for someone like you, with that thick layer of backwoods on your tongue, but I’m a Haunne. I have the knowledge of a hundred generations of wizards to draw from as I grow. You have snakes,” the boy sneered.

  Oh, he was one of those. Jay hadn’t thought people like this could actually exist and function in any sort of society, but here he was, confronted with his own incorrectness. Before he could muster a response, the paler man continued.

  “Here I was thinking you’d be worthwhile to talk to after you pissed the arrogant flaker off, but you’re just some snake farmer. Don’t bother talking to me again.” Vitali turned with what was clearly meant to be a dramatic sweep of his robe’s tails and walked back around to the crowd in front of the tent. From the noise, he was clearly trying to shove his way directly through the crowd of people.

  Did people actually farm snakes in this world? There was no way that was a decent source of food. Also, flaker? Why did he say that like it was a slur? He had to have been talking about the drakekin, given that that was the only real interaction Jay had had with anyone else, but what kind of an insult was it to call someone a flaker?

  Jay shook away the questions that conversation – if it even qualified as one – had given rise to as the boat Agensyx had mentioned came into view. It wasn’t close, but whoever it was on there was clearly moving at a good pace. It really was a small boat, too; there didn’t seem to be any sails.

  If he didn’t know any better, Jay would have said it looked like a speedboat. But that would be ridiculous, they didn’t have outboard engines. There was no way.

  Then the boat exploded into a spray of blue light, eight figures streaking up into the air from where it had been, the remnants of the light moving with them to form a corona. They didn’t seem to have lost any of the momentum the boat had, given that they were still moving toward the island. They might have even gotten faster.

  It wasn’t more than a few minutes more before they were directly overhead, flying in a rough wedge. Judging from the outcries in the mass of people, others had spotted them as well.

  “Welcome, newcomers!” the one at the head boomed. His skin looked to be a single unbroken sheet of metal polished to a gleam. “You have our apologies for the delay, but we had to investigate a particular disturbance. After all, you all know what we’re here for. All…” he trailed off and looked toward another one of the eight. His voice lowered slightly, but not enough for them to keep from hearing him. “Elyra, why is there an extra?”

  She shrugged. “One of the groups probably sent an extra.”

  “Do we have enough supplies for that?” he stage-whispered.

  “Kallin,” she said. “Look at the size of the ship that carried the supplies here. Look at how many supplies that could hold. You know it’s packed to the brim. We have plenty.”

  He clapped his hands. “Excellent! The extra will be no issue. Have no fear, extra, whoever you are. But if you want to malign the person who sent you here without telling us, feel free to.

  “As you might have heard,” the metal man continued. “I am Kallin, one of the eight core Classbound of this expedition. Functionally, that means you listen to one of us,” he gestured to the other seven hovering around him, “at all times. Even if we tell you to cut a limb off. We can always grow it back. Trust me, it’s better than the alternative.”

  “Do not listen to him,” one of the others called. This one was a minotaur, giant bull-head and all, dressed in loose white robes. “We’ve only had to do that once.”

  “Would you prefer to do the explanation, Morios?”

  “To save us all from your dramatics, I’ll pretend that that was an offer made in good faith,” the minotaur replied. “Yes, I would prefer that. If you could begin the unloading process, that would be most helpful.”

  “Aw, only because you asked so nicely,” Kallin said. He floated over to the boat and disappeared down the cargo hatch.

  “Thank Kheteus,” Morios muttered, just loud enough to be heard. Portions of the crowd let out an uncertain giggle as he came down to stand in front of the mass of people.

  “Listen closely. You all know what we are here to do. You all know why it is so important. You are the force that will inspect and clear your approved sections of the continent in bursts. We will supply the gear while you will form the first level of effort.

  “No one else can do what we are attempting. It is only with our cadre’s particular combination of skills that this project has become imaginable. Do your best to help, and you will be remembered as one among the group responsible for raising an entire sunken continent.”