Book 3, Chapter 9

I’d broken the Wolf Pack four years ago, ending their stranglehold on nearly every chunk of civilization on this dusty, dry island we called home. For decades, they’d been harvesting mana from everyone, both to reinforce their own power and because the woman in control of them was about three hundred years old. Life-extending magic was expensive, and the cost only went up with every year that got added on.

I hadn’t killed all of them. Tetrin was the most obvious example of a converted cabal mage, but I’d also left a woman known as Keeper alive as part of our agreement to help each other. An assassin in the cabal’s employ had betrayed them for my side as well and gotten away from the battlefield with her life intact. I hadn’t seen her since, and I didn’t want to. And finally, the daughter of the city’s ruler was captured and returned to royal custody, removing her from the cabal’s ranks.

With their inner circle completely destroyed, the cabal hadn’t been strong enough or organized enough to hold itself together. I’d made sure of that. More than a few of the administrators overseeing individual villages had set themselves up as little dictators, keeping all the mana they harvested from the villagers and using it to grow their own power.

That wasn’t to say I was much better. I’d crushed those mages as I found them and took that mana for myself. There was a room hidden in my valley with half a dozen huge mana crystals that held enough mana for me to make the transition from stage two to stage three as soon as my mana core finished growing. A lot of that had come from the Wolf Pack’s own coffers.

Nobody had reported anything like that to me here in Ghalin. That told me that Zalick either had a stranglehold on information going in and out of the village, which seemed unlikely, or he’d actually cared enough about the people he was in charge of that no one had complained about him running the town once they had a choice.

I’d only known him for thirty seconds, but he was already showing signs that it was the latter. It didn’t really matter much to me either way, since I’d always been more interested in stealing the cabal’s resources than anything, none of which were here. I’d only broken their power because they’d posed a threat to me and my family. If Ghalin couldn’t handle this problem on their own, I doubted Zalick had the skills or resources to even become a nuisance in the future, no matter how much time he was given.

There was nowhere to sit besides the one chair, which Zalick must have realized a few seconds after inviting us in. “On second thought, maybe we should stay outside,” he said.

Talivir snorted. “You said you were going to get this cleaned up.”

“I did. I will! I just haven’t, yet.”

“You’ve been saying that for years. You don’t even need most of this stuff anymore.”

“I know, I know,” Zalick said. He turned to us and added, “Most of this is records from the old days. Those are gone now, you know? Bit of a relief, honestly. I was getting overwhelmed with just the paperwork, let alone coordinating everything. Never could get an assistant out here to help, but that’s all over with now.”

“Right. We’re not really here to talk about that, though,” I said, trying to change the subject. I couldn’t care less if that whole room caught on fire. It might even be the best thing for it. “Talivir was explaining the problem with the monsters targeting your village. You decided to ignite the cores of everyone living here as quickly as possible using a method you devised where you just shoved as much mana as possible into a core until it ignited on its own.”

“Yes,” Zalick said, sounding excited now. “That other method was ingenious. I’ll never know how someone figured that out, but it was so difficult. This way costs a bit more, and the results aren’t quite as good, but quantity over quality. We needed to revitalize our agriculture here, and having an entire staff of field workers with mage cores has finally given us what we need to do just that.”

That was basically what I’d expected him to say. “Sure, you did that, but how many people have been killed by the monsters all the extra mana attracted because you’ve got hundreds of mages here now who have no idea how to do anything but use basic strength and stamina invocations?”

“Too many,” Talivir muttered.

“Sixteen in the last month,” Zalick said. “The monsters started appearing a lot more often recently. We lost four more in the six months before that. I just don’t understand it, though. We’ve had everyone blessed with mage cores for half a year, but it wasn’t until recently that things started getting bad. It can’t be because of our cores.”

“Perhaps something else is drawing them to the general area first,” I said. “You could just be seeing what was passing by and latched onto your village as an easy meal.”

If that was the case, I wondered where the rest of the monsters were going. An ongoing, unshielded spell powerful enough to draw in monsters from miles and miles away was worth investigating, if only so I could decide if I needed that mana myself. Though I had enough reserved for my growth to stage three, I was going to need a lot more to make it to stage four. It wouldn’t hurt anything to get started on that early. If my plans for a mana containment array were as successful as I expected them to be, I wouldn’t even have to worry about shielding my vast storage crystals either.

“What could do something like that?” Zalick asked.

I shrugged. “We won’t know until we investigate. In the meantime, I have some ideas for a more immediate solution to this problem. The problem is that the quickest one won’t be cheap, and I’m not sensing a lot of mana in Ghalin. You don’t happen to have anything stashed away in shielded crystals, do you?”

“I’m afraid not, young man. What did you have in mind?”

“A ward stone would be the easiest solution, but creating it is expensive, and then you’d have to keep it powered to protect the village.”

“You dream big, don’t you?” Zalick said with a laugh. “Ward stones are far, far beyond my skill level, I’m afraid. It’s not a matter of having the available mana. I just can’t carve something like that.”

“I wasn’t proposing you did. I’ll make it, but I’m not donating that much mana. If you don’t have it, you’ll have to pay me back later.”

The laugh died and Zalick glanced over at Ryla. “Is he serious?”

“Almost always,” she said. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him laugh or make a joke.”

“Hey, that’s not fair!”

“If you ever had a sense of humor, it died in the cradle,” she told me before adding to Zalick, “I can vouch for his magecraft, however. This is the man who made the teleportation platforms we use.”

“Really? That’s incredible. You’re so young, too. You must spend every waking moment dealing with runes and inscriptions. Who taught you?”

“Nobody you’ve heard of,” I said.

“I’m sure I know all the master mages that live anywhere around here,” Zalick said. “Except for the man who destroyed my old cabal. I’ve tried, but it’s remarkably difficult to get any real information so far away from Derro. I’ve heard that he’s very old, very powerful, and very wealthy.”

Depending on how Zalick defined wealthy, all of those things were true. I hadn’t exactly taken steps to conceal my identity when I’d gone to Derro to dismantle the Wolf Pack, especially after I’d learned it had been thousands of years since my death and that I was little more than an old legend only the most devout historians would know of.

One of my erstwhile apprentices had eclipsed me in the arena of fame and celebrity by destroying the planet’s world core and ending the age of magic as I’d known it in the process. It was almost an embarrassment to have my name attached to his, but I’d read a select few preserved accounts that indicated the idiot had done so by breaking into my vaults after my passing and ransacking my research notes to serve as a basis for a moon-breaking spell. That part had worked, but the cost had been far too high.

“That would be me,” I said.

“What?”

“I am the old, powerful, wealthy mage who dismantled the Wolf Pack and killed most of its inner circle.”

“You’re a kid,” Zalick protested.

“I am aware.”

“You couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old then.”

“Four.”

“I… what? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I was physically four. I am now physically around fourteen. I’ve been using alchemy to age faster to increase the size of my mana core,” I explained. “I am mentally much, much, much older than everyone in this conversation combined.”

Zalick and Talivir exchanged confused glances. “Is this true?” the mage asked.

“I don’t know. It’s the first I’ve heard of it. You know this kind of stuff isn’t what I deal with.”

“Right, right. Sorry. Okay, since you’re the senior mage here, how much mana are we talking to make a ward stone, and what’s the step after that? Just hunkering down behind a barrier might be feasible, but it doesn’t do anything to stop the monster problem from getting worse.”

“Let me lay out my idea for you,” I said.

  *

In the end, Zalick agreed to my proposal, though not until I’d demonstrated that I was capable of doing the transmutation needed to create a ward stone in the first place. I agreed to make the stone on credit, then handed over an empty storage crystal for him and the villagers to fill.

Part of me wanted to teleport back to the sanctuary and use my crucible, which would be far, far faster than doing the inscription manually. But the practical side of me rebelled against wasting that much mana, so I settled in for a long night of work. The village had a few empty huts thanks to all the monster-related deaths, and Senica found me there a few hours later.

“Gravin,” she said as she burst through the curtain. “I got six of them! Six. No one else got that many. I was the best mage on the extermination team.”

We’d decided between the two of us that we weren’t going to tell our parents that I wasn’t physically accompanying her on the monster hunts. She was in a group anyway, and practically invulnerable as long as she didn’t let her shield ward run out of mana.

“I’d hope so,” I said. “You’ve had more time to practice and I gave you better equipment.”

“Don’t be a grump. Be excited for me.”

“Sorry, I can’t right now. I’m only halfway through carving this ward stone.”

“Like the one back in our old village?”

“Just about. I had to make some tweaks for the size of the barrier and I’m trying to include some shrouding in it. It’s causing problems with the mana output getting too cluttered for a stone this size, but I didn’t think the village would be able to keep up with the mana usage of anything bigger.”

“Fine. Ugh, sometimes you’re so boring.” Senica dragged a chair over and threw herself down into it. “Tell me about this.”

“It’s a bit complicated for you,” I said. “Maybe in a year or two when you’re done with the basic rune set.”

“I can get a head start on the next set then,” she said. “Come on, tell me.”

“How about we talk about how much mana you used from that emergency storage crystal I loaned you instead?”

“What? I have no idea what you’re talking about. Of course I didn’t touch the emergency mana supply. I didn’t have any emergencies.”

“I can feel how full that shield ward is. Something got close enough to try to take a piece out of you,” I said. “You were being careless.”

She stared at me blankly for a moment. “Crap. Don’t tell Mom, okay?”