Zane Mortavius had been running for forty minutes, a frantic, lung-burning sprint that felt less like movement and more like a desperate attempt to outpace the very concept of capture.
He finally skidded to a halt, his boots digging into the damp loam of the forest floor. He wasn't stopping because he was spent, though his muscles screamed and his lungs felt like they were lined with glass.
The void workings, deployed in a sustained, grueling struggle to navigate the Underlayer's eastern exit shaft, had bled him dry. Keeping things in place in such a huge geological area needed a lot of effort to control the local physics, which had used up most of his mana reserves.
But he stopped because the trees had finally thinned. The eastern agricultural edge of the island had opened up, revealing the jagged, magnificent silhouette of Aethelgard's upper district against the horizon.
