They wandered all day, skirting the edge between one of the veins of proper life and the fractalizing land beyond.

"Any maps of the Leaf are useless now," Victorian explained. "At best the coastlines are a straight line, at worst the sea level has been equalized and entire swathes of land are now covered by water. Mountains will have changed into cones or plateaus, and everything will have shifted."

"Isn't there still some value to be derived from general topography?" Aclysia asked.

Victorian shook his head with a personal certainty. "Even if that is true, it's my experience that it is better to walk in the dark here. A map gives you the false sense that you could even predict what is around the corner."

It disagreed with Aclysia's nature to accept that they had to improvise all the time, but the decision had been made already. The captain had not taken any map of the Leaf along and the party did not possess any.

At the end of the day's march, they put up camp. Food was easily found, but tasted awful. All of the animals of the Leaf had been pushed together into limited areas. They survived, but this unnaturally cramped environment stressed them and that fact seeped into the meat. Apexus did not appreciate it being cooked either.

Night came and with it another display of the world's fragmentation.

The sky was broken. During the day, this fact had been ignorable, the universal blue tilting towards grey at the horizon keeping the cracks hidden. At night, the shattered surface of the sky broke the light of the manifold stars. Silver shone as scattered light from the greying black. The moon was split and undefined, a white disk with no spots of grey remaining.

"Beautiful and haunting," Reysha remarked.

"I find it haunting and nothing else," Aclysia stated.

"Can't see any beauty in the light show at all?" the redhead asked.

The angel shook her head. "All I see is profane damage dealt to our blessed world by those that would seek to destroy it. Behold all of this, boiling down the many beautiful colours of existence into a homogenous one. All borders eliminated, until not even shapes remain."

"I mean, yeah, but… eh, can't convince you of something having some charm in the moment." Reysha shrugged and dropped the topic.

"I think it has an eerie kind of tranquillity to it," Korith said. "Like watching a storm from afar."

"Yeah, that, thank you, Squishy."

While his women chatted, Apexus stood quietly by their side. His eyes constantly travelled the landscape. There were nervous predators behind them and Parasytes in front. In-between was their camp, lit by a bonfire. Branches that looked more like carved sticks were slowly diminishing in the fire, the wood turned into less diminished char.

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'Fire adding to an object's individuality, how odd,' Apexus thought and watched over the knights.

Despite having settled to rest, the knights had only stripped out of the parts of their armour that would inhibit sleeping and eating. They were chatting, filling the air with sounds, but all conversations were stilted, interrupted by them startling at the slightest sound. The faint sense of wrongness made them all twitchy.

Victorian was the only exception to this. The leader of the knights walked around, spoke courageous words and made boisterous jokes. "Come on, we're here to fight Paraystes, not night terrors!"

His tone was enough to get a chuckle out of the people. Once he had patted some shoulders and tried some of the stew, he marched on over to the Inevitable party.

"You doing well?"

"Better than yours," Apexus stated bluntly.

"They'll be fine." Victorian kept his smile up. The armour on his shoulders rattled as he crossed his arms. His thick gambeson made the motion somewhat stilted. "The environment gets to the nerves, but ultimately fighting Shapeforms isn't that unusual. Once they get accustomed to it, they'll learn to relax."

"Relaxation is deadly," Apexus commented.

"Slightly relaxed," Victorian responded with a patient smile. "You four seem to have that figured out."

"We recently went through a Dungeon called 'Trauma'," Reysha threw in, then laughed. "Yeah, I am serious! The gods can be really on the nose."

"I have found that the divine tend to oscillate between utter bluntness and mysteries too deep for most to bother unravelling."

"Unless the god is Hoard. Hoard is always clear in its messages," Korith declared. "All hail Hoard."

"I must ask, is it safe for us to use magic?" Aclysia requested. "I have asked your peers in the camp before. They said yes, but I wish to verify this."

"The Leaf is weak, but it still has enough of the blessing of the Omniverse that any present Parasytes will be incapable of differentiating you from the background magic. Plus, there are greater wells of power that will always catch their attention. Do you see that?"

Victorian gestured to their north. Even Apexus with his keen eyes had to strain to make out what he meant. Far, far away, beyond diminished trees lit by silver-grey light, the Omniverse bled from a wound in the sky. Silver among silver, it was difficult to distinguish from the surrounding stars. Only now that it had been pointed out to them, did the party realize that the sap of the great tree was dripping from an open vein.

"Raw magic," the knight spoke, grimly.

"Horrendous," Aclysia whispered.

"Is that where we will be heading tomorrow?" Apexus asked.

Victorian nodded. "It is not a Black Root yet, but it will be if left unattended. We'll see if we can cleanse the area of Parasytes before it becomes an issue, then move on." The knight hesitated for a moment, then continued. "You have been warned about what a broken sky means?"

"It means we cannot fly too high," Aclysia responded.

On the Branches, free flight was barred to all creatures. Distancing oneself too far from the silver limbs of the Omniverse caused one to become untethered. Only dragons were exempt from this, capable of withstanding the void and moving in the space between branches with the power of their own wings.

On a Leaf, gravity and the bounds of the sky would usually prevent someone from escaping the bounds of the world. In some cases the sky was a hard dome, in others it was a thinning atmosphere, but universally it was true that there was a point where everyone stopped. With the sky broken, however, they could fly higher up than the world could hold them.

Apexus hoped he wouldn't have to test if his draconic privilege applied here as well.

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