Ashinaro lay on his back outside the city, breath knocked out of him, contemplating what to do now.

  He didn’t have many options.

  Even if his gambit had worked and made the priests think he was someone he wasn’t, they’d be on guard now for anyone coming back into the city.

  And he couldn’t bet on it having worked. If he was wrong…

  It was too bad the mask didn’t grant him the traits of a shade. That fall wouldn’t have hurt so much.

  He was on the west edge of the city, outside the wall abutting the Blighted Wilds. The wall was thin here, too thin for any guard patrols atop it, but the priests themselves might pursue.

  Even if they didn’t have a way to follow him over the wall, they’d search this area soon.

  He needed to leave.

  He had to let someone know what Joy was doing.

  But who?

  The priests—at least the ones partaking in the ritual—already knew. Likely all the priests.

  The other gods, then. But Joy was an Exalted, so he’d have to inform another Exalted.

  No others had temples on Fayteraus, so the only way to do that would be to go to Fairwind.

  Normally, that would be an impossible task. All the drakken’s attempts to cross the Sea of Fear had failed.

  Now, however, with the trolls’ arrival, a method was open to him.

  With great effort, he pushed himself to his feet and ran.

  He didn’t stop until he reached the Spearsong Forest a few hundred labored breaths later, then collapsed in a heap.

  Suddenly all his drive to escape evaporated. If the priests came upon him now, he wouldn’t fight. He’d just lay here and let them take him.

  But they didn’t discover him, and, eventually, he pushed himself up and leaned against a rotting tree. If he kept lying down, he’d pass out. He’d lost a lot of blood healing his golem from that molten metal.

  He stared blankly at the scoured forest. Before the Demon War, it had been lush and vibrant. Now, nothing grew here, and even monsters stayed away. All that remained were dead trees and fossilized shrubbery.

  Time to see what failing the quest resulted in. He knew he failed it since he hadn’t received a relic, but there was still a chance Vershik was dead and he failed because the ritual had completed or because he’d failed to retrieve the scepter.

  He withdrew his divine scroll and read over it.

  You were tasked with disrupting the Ritual of Return, slaying High Priest Vershik, and retrieving his scepter.

  You succeeded in disrupting the ritual, but High Priest Vershik yet lives, and you failed to retrieve his scepter.

  For your failure, you have received Joy’s curse.

  That was odd. The ritual had seemed like it had completed.

  He read over the next quest.

  You have discovered troubling information about Joy. Escape to a land where a different Exalted holds sway and inform them of her corruption.

  Well, that had been his plan already. Maybe this crusade really was from himself.

  Except, that didn’t explain the relics. Or the curse he’d been afflicted with.

  Strangely, he didn’t feel cursed, and hadn’t even noticed it until the scroll pointed it out.

  He knew little about curses, but Joy and Excite were prominent gods within Argalis, and so he was familiar with theirs.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Excite’s curse would make it so every movement was an effort, limbs weighed down with invisible force; while Joy’s would make you weep blood.

  He touched his eyes, but found no blood.

  After some prodding around inside himself, he located the curse. It was connected to his battleform in some manner he’d never seen before, neither link nor binding.

  He peered into the curse with his beyondsight.

  [Joy’s Curse]

  causes the target to weep blood, impeding vision until finally succumbing to exsanguination.

  Ashinaro frowned. That wasn’t how curses were supposed to work.

  This sounded like it gave him the ability to use Joy’s curse rather than afflicting him with it.

  But that made no sense.

  Deciding it was pointless to ponder without actually testing it, he headed out in search of monsters.

  Ashinaro watched in stunned silence as the woodcrawler writhed and squirmed on the ground while blood wept from its eyes.

  At first, the curse hadn’t worked.

  He’d tried activating it like he would with a relic, but nothing had happened.

  When the gods cursed someone, there was always a decree anyone around them would hear: the gods wanted everyone to know who was cursed.

  Even with how rare Joy’s curse was, he knew the words.

  “Weep for your sins,” he’d commanded, and the monster had bled.

  Now, he stood, watching it in awe.

  Eventually he came to his senses and put it out of its misery with his staff.

  His Epitome Veil relic activated, drinking the remnant essence from the corpse to shroud him, but he hardly noticed.

  He stood, staring at the corpse in amazement.

  He could cast a god’s curse.

  And it seemed… powerful.

  Curses weren’t meant to be powerful. They were meant to serve as reminders to others to not cross the gods. If they killed at all, they did it slowly.

  Though he’d never heard of the gods cursing a monster.

  Maybe that was why it was so unusually effective.

  Joy rarely cursed anyone, but Ashinaro remembered it happening once when he was a whelp, and it had taken that man years to die from the curse. Though, he’d also been a Champion, whereas the woodcrawler was but a Copper Beast.

  He was tempted to search out a Fiend and see how well the curse fared against one of them, but that would be too risky, especially since he couldn’t very well run back to the guards and have them save him if he bit off more than he could kill.

  The essence within the woodcrawler’s core coalesced, but then fractured before transmuting, the essence dissipating, drawing him out of his thoughts.

  A prismatic core.

  Kneeling, he dug it out and stowed it in his pack. Prismatic cores weren’t much rarer than white ones, and not useful to him at the moment. While they were empty of essence, unlike hollow cores, prismatic cores could be used for altering items and changing the nature of abilities. But like hollow cores, he wouldn’t be able to directly instill them, as there was no essence left to purify and feed his relics with.

  He froze, mind on what felt like the precipice of a revelation. Relics consumed essence from monster cores, then fed part of it into the battleform.

  That seemed relevant somehow. But then another realization hit him, wiping the nascent one away. His cores. He’d left them back in his room in Argalis.

  Maybe he should risk going back for them. They represented years of work.

  But no, he couldn’t take that chance. Besides, he was a Defender now. What took years to earn as an Initiate should take no time to regain.

  He tried to recapture the revelation he’d felt on the brink of, but the more he thought about it, the further away it slipped until he grunted in frustration and stood.

  “Zanas? You awake yet?”

  The skeleton didn’t respond.

  He called out Zanas’s scepter from within himself.

  He peered into it with his beyondsight, but what he saw hadn’t changed.

  [A Trickster’s Deceit]

  Extend your reach.

  Affected by: [Staff Mastery] (50%)

  The skeleton was still there, he was certain. But something was wrong. Maybe the goddess’s light had done more than it had at first seemed.

  Or maybe it was from getting walloped by a Sovereign Champion and losing not just a head but also three limbs.

  He could only hope that, like before, Zanas would recover.

  In the meanwhile, he still had the mask, and the scepter.

  He felt for the connection with the scepter, then flicked his wrist, extending it like he’d seen Zanas do.

  The weapon tripled in length, and he swung it experimentally a few times.

  It felt more powerful than his staff, though it didn’t seem to give any boons, and it was only partially affected by his staff mastery.

  Yet it felt good in his hand. Natural.

  At the very least, with his Staff Mastery boon, he’d be able to wield both weapons at the same time and not disadvantage himself.

  Whereas normally using two weapons would just make you half as efficient, with Staff Mastery, he felt it might actually improve his combat capability.

  He let the scepter absorb back into himself and tried to come up with a plan for what to do next.

  First was getting to Arkalis, which shouldn’t be difficult. He had a head start, but the priests could outpace him. His sash might be enough to allow him to keep ahead of them though, and they might not head there immediately. Hopefully they’d look for him around Argalis first.

  If they did catch up to him, he had the mask and could become someone else. And unless they had some way of seeing through it, they wouldn’t realize it even if they did find him.

  The harder part would be getting to Fairwind where he could visit the temple of another Exalted. From everything he’d heard, passage on the trolls’ ship was expensive. Cheaper going from Fayteraus to Fairwind than the opposite direction, but still a fortune for the likes of him.

  Which led him to another realization. He’d left his coin pouch behind as well.

  Shaking his head, he slid his staff into its sling and jogged to the road to begin the long journey to Arkalis.