It was a strange experience, hiking through the darkened landscape, holding a staff with an entire campfire on the top. But the logs didn’t fall apart, and the thing wasn’t nearly as heavy as it should have been. Not as hot either, particularly if—when bringing it out—he didn’t make it manifest fully.

Plant life grew all around him, real to his touch and eyes, though of strange varieties, some with brownish-red fronds and others with wide palms. Many trees—a jungle of exotic plants.

There were some bits of mist in here. If he knelt by the ground and looked for them, he could find little glowing spirits. Fish, sea plants. They manifested here above the ground, though in the ocean on the other side they were probably down within the depths. Kelsier stood up, holding the soul of some kind of massive deep-sea creature—like a fish, only as large as a building—in his hand, feeling its ponderous strength.

That was surreal, but so was his life these days. He dropped the fish’s soul and continued onward, hiking through waist-high plants with a blazing staff lighting the way.

As he got farther from the shore, he felt a tugging at his soul. A manifestation of his ties to the world he’d left behind. He knew, without having to experiment, that this tug would ultimately grow strong enough that he wouldn’t be able to continue outward.

He could use that. The tugging was a tool that let him judge if he was getting farther from his world, or if he’d gotten turned around in the darkness. Navigation was otherwise next to impossible, now that he didn’t have the canals and roadways to guide him.

By judging the pull on his soul, he kept himself pointed directly outward, away from his homeland. He wasn’t completely certain that was where he’d find his goal, but it seemed like his best bet.

He hiked through the jungle for days, but then it started to dwindle. Eventually he reached a place where plants grew only in occasional patches. They were replaced with strange formations of rock, like glassy sculptures. The jagged things were often some ten feet or more tall. He didn’t know what to make of those. He had stopped passing the souls of fish, and nothing seemed to be alive out here in either Realm.

The pull tugging him backward was growing laborious to fight. He was beginning to worry he’d have to turn around when, at long last, he spotted something new.

A light on the horizon.

Chapter 2

2

SNEAKING was a great deal easier when you didn’t technically have a body.

Kelsier moved in silence, having dismissed his cloak and staff. He’d left his pack behind, and though there were a few plants out here, he could pass through them, not even rustling their leaves.