Book 3, Chapter 10

Everything was going well. It took me a day to make the ward stone, during which time the hunters from Ghalin paired with the mages from… Sanctuary… as we were calling it now… to start killing the well-hidden monsters lurking around the area. Their basic-tier divinations helped them track down targets in an extremely limited area, which seemed tedious to me, but there were more of them than there were of me, so I supposed it balanced out.

Besides, it was a good way to practice divinations, and they needed the practice. I tried not to wince as I watched them fumble the spells, but a part of me wondered if they wouldn’t be better off just venting enough mana to serve as bait to draw the monsters to them.

Once I was done with the ward stone, I handed it off to Zalick and he showed me how much progress the village had made on filling the storage crystal to replace the mana I’d spent. My own reserves were a bit lower than usual, but still full enough that I could teleport everybody back once they were done with their monster extermination, so I didn’t need to wait for the village to top it off. It was probably going to take them a few weeks, maybe longer once they started powering the ward stone, to refill it.

That was something Ryla could pick up for me next time she came through here. Once I was done teaching the first group of farmers the basics of core shrouding, it would be time to pack up Senica and return home. Ghalin could take care of things on its own.

There was one thing troubling me, however. If Zalick’s account was to be believed, the village had been operating under this set up for months without any significant changes in the monster population nearby. What was happening now was a recent development, and if so, there had to be something causing it.

For once, I didn’t have a good solution on hand. My ability to sense mana was highly developed, out to a range of several hundred feet before things started to get fuzzy, and twice that before I couldn’t feel mana at all. Spells to detect mana had been largely unnecessary in my previous life, and the ones I did know were designed to do the opposite of what I needed. They were for looking at mana closely, to sift out fine details that I might have otherwise missed.

What I was trying to accomplish here was to find what was attracting the monsters—mana, presumably—and where it was coming from. Unfortunately, my ability to sense mana at a great distance was strictly inferior to the monsters that lived around here.

Just because I didn’t have a spell to accomplish what I wanted did not mean I didn’t have a work-around. If I couldn’t find the mana source myself, I could just follow the monsters who had. I wouldn’t be doing it personally, of course. But I spent a few hours of my free time scrying ten or so miles away from Ghalin, looking for monsters on the move.

My initial findings all pointed west. Ghalin itself was planted on an intersection of passes in the mountains leading north, south, and east. All of the monsters north and south of the village were heading directly into the mountains as best they were able to, with only a few who lacked the ability to properly navigate the landscape following the trails and running into the town.

The ones from the east, however, were following the pass directly into Ghalin itself, then either deciding this was a good place to stop with plenty of mana, or just trying to get past the village but unwilling or unable to go into the foothills to circle around the humans. Whatever the reason, my scrying revealed that, overwhelmingly, the general trend of all traveling monsters in this area were heading into the mountains west of the village.

Now if I could just figure out why, maybe I’d get somewhere with the whole thing.

“Talivir,” I said, having tracked him down as part of a returning group. “You’re the guy in charge of everyone who hunts around here, right?”

“I am,” he said.

That was a bit of an odd profession to me, as there wasn’t much to hunt in the first place, but then again, Ghalin hadn’t been doing well enough with their fields to snub any possible sources of food. Even the monsters they’d been killing were being hauled back to be processed, though that was an art in and of itself. Monster meat was finicky when it came to what was edible and what would make a person sick. Very little of it was safe for human consumption, not enough to be worth butchering in my opinion.

“Any of your people ever go west, up into the mountains?” I asked.

“Occasionally, but not recently. With everything going on…” he trailed off for a moment. “Why do you ask?”

“I’ve been doing a bit of scrying, and it looks like most of the monsters who aren’t stumbling across your village are heading into the mountains. I was wondering if there was anything up there?”

“Nothing comes to mind, but I can see if anyone has noticed anything when they’ve gone out that way. What are you looking for in particular?”

That was an excellent question, but not one that I had a good answer for. “I think it’s a ‘you’ll know it when you see it’ sort of situation,” I said. “Something with an awful lot of mana coming off it, probably something big. Maybe a big monster, or some sort of natural disaster recently unearthed something. Stuff like that.”

“I don’t think there’s been anything like that,” Talivir said with a frown. “But I’ll ask.”

“Thanks. Anything that can help me narrow down what’s attracting those monsters helps.”

Whether Talivir got back to me with useful information before I scried the monsters’ paths and found it myself was another matter, but I’d done enough for one night. If I could save some mana with some educated guesses on where to search, so much the better.

I checked on Senica via some quick scrying. She was with another mage from Sanctuary and a local hunter, the three of them exploring some crags northeast of Ghalin. She had her wand out and ready, presumably because they were expecting a fight to start at any moment.

I pulled the scrying spell away from her and looked around for the monster, which I found clinging to a tall, thick spire of rock that jutted out across the trail overhead. Most of its body was shielded from view, at least from the angle of the humans below it, but I could see it clearly. It had a hard, segmented carapace and some sort of thin membrane of wings connecting its limbs, like a mixture between a scorpion and a bat, only five feet long.

The bat thing crawled forward as Senica’s group passed underneath it, then launched itself into the air on silent wings. As soon as it was in the open, Senica spun in place, snapped out a quick incantation, and sent a burst of fire up into the air to strike it. The monster started shrieking in agony and lost control of its glide, causing it to slam into the stone cliff opposite of its perch and drop limply to the ground.

“Hah, I told you I sensed another one up there,” she said proudly as she jabbed her wand in its general direction. “Bet you it doesn’t get back up after that!”

It seemed like everything was going fine there, so I let the spell fade and sat back to rest. People would be coming back in the next few hours as it started to get dark, and even though I knew my parents had intended for me to actually be with Senica the whole time she was out there, it really wasn’t necessary. She was doing fine on her own, better than most of the adult mages who’d come with us, really.

If I could figure out what was going on in the mountains before everyone left tomorrow, maybe I’d take her with me. She’d probably enjoy that, and Mother and Father wouldn’t be able to say I hadn’t kept an eye on her.

Someone approached the hut I’d borrowed and started knocking on the wall near the open doorway. With a sigh, I cracked an eye open. “What is it?” I called out.

“We were hoping to get your help with this whole shrouding thing we’re practicing,” Zalick said. “I know you went over the basics, but do you have some time to give out some pointers?”

The work never ended.

  *

“So I asked around, and I think I might have something useful to you,” Talivir told me that night.

We were sitting in the village square, partaking in a communal meal. Apparently, Ghalin preferred to set up a few big stew pots that everybody contributed to instead of each family preparing their individual meals. I’d missed it the first night because I was busy carving the ward stone, but now that I’d finished that task and it had been appropriately mounted on a new pillar near the side of the village with all the fields, I had the spare time to be social.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You know we’ve had a lot of deaths recently, but the very first one actually happened about a month before the monsters started showing up in large numbers,” Talivir said. “The hunter was out on the mountains to the west on an overnight trip, but he never came back. Someone else found his body a few weeks later, well, the remains of it, anyway.”

“You think he found something?” I asked.

“It’s possible if your theory about the monsters actually being drawn to the mountain past the village is correct.”

“Doesn’t help me,” I said. “I already knew to look at that mountain.”

“What if I could tell you where he died?” Talivir asked. “That would give you a place to start looking, at least.”

“That could work,” I admitted. “Was it some place special?”

“I don’t know about how special it is. As far as I can tell, it was just a random pass through the mountain. There are some big cliffs in that area, but other than that, it looks just like everywhere else.”

It wasn’t what I was hoping for, but it was a place to start. “Show me,” I said.

He blinked in surprise. “What? Right now? It’s a bit late.”

I pulled my mirror out of my phantom space, causing the people around me to flinch back in surprise. Working quickly, I cast a scrying spell that showed the village. “Here we are,” I said as I pointed at us in the mirror. Talivir looked at himself, then up into the sky where my scrying spell was staring down at the table. He moved one arm in a wave, then dropped it and laughed.

“That’s fascinating to see,” he said.

“Moving on, I’m taking us out west toward the mountains. Let me know if we’re going too fast or if I take a wrong turn.”

The landscape flew by in the mirror as my scrying spell moved many times faster than a person could run. Talivir gave me directions while everyone else around us watched my magic at work. After a few minutes, the spell reached a ravine with towering rock walls easily a few hundred feet in height.

“This is the place,” the hunter told me.

It looked normal enough to me, but then again, I hadn’t seen what all was around here yet. There could be deep caves leading down to slumbering monsters better left undisturbed, or a hidden cache of treasures with traps and wards that an unwary explorer had accidentally triggered.

I sent my scrying spell zipping along the ravine, then brought it back around to fly up the cliffs to the top. “Ah,” I said quietly. “Did you know this was here?”

“No,” Talivir said. “I don’t think anyone’s ever climbed up there before.”

It was a wide, short tower made of worked stone, and in perfect condition. “I wonder if anyone lives there,” I muttered to myself.