Book 3, Chapter 2

After I relented and helped Senica get cleaned up—a spark of lightning caused the black mass to completely harden and lose its adhesive property—we headed back out of the cave.

“What are you going to do about that stuff coming through the wall?” Senica asked.

“Pull the stone back open and kill it, then close everything up again.”

“Is it a monster? It didn’t look like it was alive.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” I said. “There’s a solid core somewhere behind that ooze, controlling it while it spreads out in every direction, looking for mana. Things that get stuck in it can’t always free themselves, things like little girls, for example. Then the ooze covers the little girl and she dies, and it eats all the mana in her body.”

Senica shuddered and dragged her boot across the stone before lifting her foot up to inspect it. “What if a piece gets separated, like in my sample jar?”

“It dies sooner or later, depending on how much mana you feed it,” I said. “I suppose we might regrow a new ooze if we had a reason to, but I can’t think of any purpose such a creature could serve that would make it worth the hassle.”

I proceeded to do exactly as I’d outlined, starting with a stone shape transmutation spell to open up the wall, then following it with four lightning bolt spells that scoured the ooze until it stopped moving. I confirmed it was dead, then rebuilt the wall separating us from the lower tunnels. Wherever those things were coming from, there’d be another one in a month or two and it would start eating its way through the stone quickly enough. At least, it would unless things changed.

We climbed up the steps I’d shaped in this tunnel complex when I’d first discovered it. I’d quickly realized that I’d be making multiple trips down here and that it’d be worth the mana to make that a bit easier. To date, this was my twelfth trip into these particular caves, and also hopefully my last.

“Why not just seal up the entrance here?” Senica asked.

“Well, I sealed it up way back there, and that monster is still seeping through anyway. Imagine it broke through up here and I had to tramp around the woods while it spread in every direction, killing the trees and consuming their mana. What a mess that’d be.”

“I think we probably would have noticed it before it got that far,” she said. “It wasn’t very fast.”

“That was only because the majority of its body was still behind the stone. Once it widened the crack it chewed through, it would have come pouring out. But either way, that’s a problem that’s done and solved for now. The real question is how are you going to get down from here?”

We were standing at the top of a steep descent, not quite vertical, but not far off. It would be unwise to climb down without magical assistance, but Senica’s repertoire and her mana reserves didn’t leave her with a lot of options. Hopefully, this would encourage her to get creative.

“I thought I’d ask my little brother to help,” she said.

“Ah, but you’re all alone, remember?”

Senica rolled her eyes and said, “Then I guess I’d use a weight reduction spell and slide down. I’ll get a bit dirty, Mom will be annoyed with me, and I’ll need a bath when I get home.”

“Can you hold your concentration the whole way down?” I asked, pleased with the answer.

“Why wouldn’t I be able to? It’s not that steep.”

“You know that weight reduction by itself isn’t going to let you glide through the air, right? You’re going to feel every bump and dip.”

“I can do it,” Senica said.

“If you’re sure…” I gestured for her to go ahead.

It wasn’t the worst plan, fairly basic and straightforward, and Senica had chosen a spell that was well within her capabilities and which wouldn’t be too harsh a drain on her mana. She didn’t have enough in her core to make it to the bottom, not by my judgment, at least, but she’d built her first mana crystal a few months back and I’d helped her enchant it to reduce its size and weight. The real trick would be drawing mana from the crystal while maintaining her concentration on the invocation that would reduce her weight.

I suspected she was going to be in for a bumpy ride, mostly because she lacked the physical capabilities to control her descent. Weight reduction would help keep her from being hurt, but without something to act as a sail, it wasn’t going to slow her down that much.

As it turned out, Senica did have a sail. She pulled a folded sheet out of her backpack and shook it out, then gathered up the corners. “Does Mother know you have one of her sheets?” I asked.

“It’s my sheet,” Senica said. “It goes on my bed.”

“In that case, it’s fine if I tell her, right?”

“No. Keep your mouth shut.”

Senica got a running start, cast her spell, and jumped out into the open air. There really wasn’t enough of a breeze for this, and I knew she couldn’t keep two spells going at the same time. Sighing, I sent a burst of air into her makeshift sail to fill it and slow her descent. Teaching her a lesson was one thing. Letting her break a leg was another.

Then I took a running leap and jumped after her. I caught myself with levitation thirty feet off the ground and touched down lightly, then turned to watch my sister drift down behind me. She was going to hit harder than me despite taking longer to reach the ground, and I sent another blast of air up into the sheet.

She stumbled when her feet hit the dirt, but managed to stay upright. Her sheet disappeared back into her backpack, now wadded up instead of neatly folded, and she said, “See, told you I could do it.”

“Only because I cast an elemental manipulation spell to slow your fall for you,” I said.

“I would have been fine. No one asked you to do that.”

Everyone overestimated their limits once and a while. The cure for that was experience, something children had in short supply. Senica would learn better as she got older, learned new magic, and figured out the best way to use it. She’d learned enough for one day, and I had no doubt I was already going to hear about it from our parents when she told them I was picking on her. They were too soft to give her the kind of training she needed to survive a battle against a hostile mage, unfortunately.

“I think we’re done for now,” I said. “Let’s head back home.”

  *

When I’d first scouted out this valley, I’d found a relatively flat ridge on the southern side with a nearby river. It had been the ideal spot for our fledgling sanctuary, more than spacious enough to accommodate a house, a garden, and a field. Back then, it had just been my parents, Senica, two of my apprentices, and myself.

Then I’d added a group of orphans I’d met in Derro soon after. After that, I’d hired Tetrin and Hyago to help maintain and expand our home. Hyago had brought a few of his assistants with him, and he’d maintained his connections in Derro as the leader of a smuggling organization, though there wasn’t much smuggling left to do after I’d killed off his clients. The way I’d heard it, most of them had ended up attached to a mercenary company that specialized in hunting monsters.

Our population had stabilized for a year or two, then my family had wanted to visit Alkerist, our original village, which resulted in the village’s leadership approaching me about sending expeditions to other villages. My home village had gone from one mage who’d been running a scam to steal mana from everyone to over a dozen mages who were slowly growing in power and confidence, and who now felt that they were strong enough to survive any monsters they might run into out in the wastes.

I’d provided them with a great deal of scrying and located four other villages they’d sent emissaries to, which had resulted in a rotating number of new mages looking for instruction and eagerly awaiting their turn staying a term at what had started as a sanctuary for my family. When they saw what kind of buildings we had, and the convenient enchantments I’d laid into them to keep them cool, to preserve food, to provide clean, hot water, to light them up at night… Well, it was no surprise they wanted to replicate those feats back home.

Gone were the days of just having a single building. Tetrin and I had been forced to collaborate on a huge stone shaping project to extend the ridge we’d built on another thousand feet, and then Hyago had used his connections to bring in tons of top soil so we can build it up as farm land for all the new people coming into the valley.

I wasn’t sure of the exact number of people living here right now, but it was far more than I’d ever expected.  They’d made my life busier than I’d originally planned, but strangely, it wasn’t a bad thing. I’d reached the point in my own advancement where I was limited by my age, and there was only so much my alchemy could do to speed things up.

My mana core was three times bigger than it had been when I’d defeated the Wolf Pack, but it still had a ways to grow before I could finally advance to stage three. I’d long since gotten used to the restricted nature of my new abilities, but I was looking forward to the freedom to use magic however I wanted that stage three and then stage four would grant me.

“What’s for lunch today?” I asked idly as we approached the base of the stairs I’d shaped into the valley wall. They’d lead up to the village, and were laced with enchantments to deflect the attention of any wild life that stumbled across them. Nobody wanted a hungry animal stumbling into the village in the middle of the night, and the valley was full of them.

“I don’t know,” Senica said, a bit too quickly.

I narrowed my eyes. “You’re hiding something.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then why are you acting weird?”

“I’m acting weird? You’re the weirdest person I’ve ever met.”

“Senica,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing is going on,” she said.

“Then why are you so defensive right now?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Senica brushed past me and started up the stairs.

I squinted after her and said, “You’re a bad liar.”

She refused to talk to me for the rest of the walk. When we got to the top, I paused and looked around. From the dorms to the greenhouse, out in the fields or in the gardens, there was no one in sight.

“What happened?” I asked. “Where did everyone go?”

I was about to cast a spell called life sense to scan for people and already considering the best scrying spells to use to search a wide area when Senica spun in place and jabbed a finger at me. “No magic!”

“I… What?”

“You heard me,” she said. “Come on, let’s go eat.”

We had a whole mess hall attached to the building I used to teach lessons in. At first, it had felt like I practically lived there, but as my students got more advanced, they were able to start teaching new arrivals the basics and I’d been free to return to my own projects. Now, I only spent a few hours a week teaching there and occasionally took a meal, though that usually resulted in me answering a lot of questions and not getting much eating done.

“Okay, it’s obvious something is going on. Just tell me,” I said.

“No. Come on.”

Senica grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me across the tiny village, to where I was now sure everyone was gathered, though I couldn’t imagine any good reason that would require a meeting that we all attended, especially not one Senica knew about beforehand.

The doors swung open on magic as we got close and four dozen people let out a cheer upon spotting me. I halted, blinking. “What?”

“Happy birthday, Gravin!” Senica shouted next to me.