Book 3, Chapter 5

It didn’t take much to get the story out of them. The worst injured among the party were led away to receive medical treatment, and their leader met with our version of the village council in the mess hall. The man eyed up the interrupted festivities with a scowl, as if he was somehow offended that we’d dared to have a celebration while his own people were in trouble.

That didn’t stop him or the group he’d come with from raiding the buffet table, of course.

“Let’s start with your name,” Ryla said. By unspoken agreement, everyone else let her take the lead. She was the only person who regularly traveled out of the valley now, at least with other towns and villages as her destination.

“Talvir,” he said. He gestured at me and added “What’s with the kid here?”

That was a fair question. I looked like a teenager and stood out among all of the other adults gathered. Rather than wait for anyone to get into a complicated explanation, I said, “I’m the mage who maintains the teleportation platform you broke when you got here.”

Talvir considered that for a moment, grunted, and turned his attention back to Ryla. “Mages are the problem,” he explained. “At first, we thought it was a coincidence. Everything was going good, people were happy. We were growing more food, faster. We could handle the spike in monster activity. But they just kept coming, more and more every day.”

I already knew where this was going. I’d warned people about this problem specifically when I’d agreed to start spreading the knowledge of how to ignite a core. Monsters were going to be attracted to it, and the more mana there was in one place, the more monsters were going to show up. I’d put an emphasis on new mages learning to shroud their cores at all times.

Ghalin’s new mages hadn’t taken that lesson to heart, and they didn’t have a ward stone like Alkerist did to keep them safe. At minimum, they needed help culling the monster population that had built up around their village. They’d probably also need a long-term solution to keep their mages from acting as bait, else they’d be right back in this situation again a few months.

I pulled a mirror out of my phantom space, one I’d made for my own personal use so that I wouldn’t have to rely on the communal mirror in my family’s home. It was a stand mirror, five feet tall and three feet wide. The frame was made from alabaster, which was one of the easiest types of stone to carve runes into. For objects that had little chance of being damaged, it was an excellent material to work with.

I cast the scrying spell, using the teleportation platform Talvir and his group had come in through as a starting point. There were only four platforms, and only the one here had the ability to select a destination. The other ones had all deliberately been placed in discreet, out-of-the-way locations nowhere near any villages specifically to prevent things like this from happening.

I did not encourage unannounced visitors to my sanctuary, no matter how many people I’d come to share it with. Talvir’s group shouldn’t have known where the platform near their village even was. If I had to guess, they’d probably shadowed Ryla’s trading expedition and found the platform that way. Either they’d done it without being detected, or Ryla hadn’t wanted to admit to failing to properly hide the platform.

I’d known this was an inevitability, though. Too many people knew about the platforms and had access to them for the locations to remain secret forever, and we’d gotten barely two years before the first group had figured out how to activate the platform and come to us. At least it wasn’t somebody hostile this time.

The conversation died off behind me as the others started paying more attention to my mirror than each other. “What is your mage doing?” Talvir asked quietly.

I wasn’t sure who he was talking to, but it obviously wasn’t me and I was busy anyway, so I didn’t bother to answer. Instead, I directed the scrying spell east and north through a highland pass to Ghalin. Within thirty seconds, the mirror had panned across miles of desert wasteland and found the small village hunkered down on an open plain surrounded by mountains on all sides.

There were more trees than I’d expected. The village didn’t have anything organized like the arbor back in Alkerist, just a lot of random clumps or singular trees scattered all over the village and the surrounding area. There were no walls to protect the people living there. Instead, I spotted six different groups patrolling the outer edges of the fields in a rough circle. Each squad was made up of five people armed with spears and bows, though I did see what I assumed was a mage in one of them. The wand he was holding looked like Tetrin’s work to me.

“Have the attacks been coming from any specific direction?” I asked.

“The east, mostly,” Talvir said, “along with a few attacks from some flock of monstrous bats from the south.”

Everyone was crowded behind me now, watching as I manipulated the scrying spell to look out into the foothills east of town. It didn’t take long to find the first monster, some sort of giant reptilian thing, not quite a lizard, but not far off. It was crouched on a pile of rocks, looking at the village and occasionally flicking its tongue out.

“We call those lightning maws,” Talvir said. “You can see the lightning jump between their teeth when they open their mouths, and sometimes they breathe it out at you, especially if you’re trying to run away. The hides are thick enough that you can’t get a spear through it without using magic to make yourself stronger.”

“Spirits protect us,” someone else muttered behind me.

“Are they common?” I asked.

“Thankfully, no. Prior to the last few months, I’d never seen one in my life. The one here will be the fifth to attack our village.”

“What else am I looking for?”

Talvir thought for a second, then said, “Sand vipers have been a problem too. Usually those are territorial and don’t wander, but more and more of them are creeping into the village and trying to dig new lairs in our homes. There have also been strange rats with glowing blue eyes. At least, they look like rats, but they come up to a grown man’s knee. Birds come down from the mountains in the west, ugly long-necked things with black feathers and beaks that can break stone.”

“More of a variety than I expected,” I said.

“Can you help us?” Talvir asked, though he wasn’t speaking to me anymore. He’d dismissed me as someone unimportant other than having magic. The adults would decide how best to handle things. That was fine with me, as I wasn’t particularly interested in leaving the sanctuary to begin with. At most, I’d try to identify which monsters might have useful parts for alchemy. Those lightning maws, for example, probably had some sort of gland at the back of their mouth or in their throats that helped channel mana into their signature attack.

Once I’d finished examining the area, I got Father’s attention and said, “I’m going to go replace the emitters in the platform. Let me know what you guys decide to do.”

He nodded and said, “Thanks, son. Sorry your birthday got ruined.”

There was still half a table’s worth of gifts hidden under the sheet in the back, just waiting for us to get back to it. “That’s okay. We can do it again in another eight years, I suppose.”

Father pulled me into a quick hug, then released me and turned back to the group. They were in the middle of discussing logistics for sending help, which would almost certainly result in someone eventually asking me to override the preset locations in the platform to send whoever ended up going directly to Ghalin.

Nobody was going anywhere on that platform if I didn’t swap out the emitters and make sure nothing else had been damaged. Whoever had activated it from the other side had obviously fumbled their way through the process, probably ruining the platform they’d departed from, too. I’d have to make a trip out there to fix that one, as well.

Judging by the state they’d all arrived in, I suspected some monsters had followed Talvir’s group out of town and attacked them near the platform. I’d hunt those down and kill them when I went out there, just to keep any of my own people from being attacked in the future.

As far as the issue of the mana shrouding itself, the simplest solution would be to provide enchanted jewelry that shrouded the mages’ mana cores. It wasn’t a good long-term solution, but it was quick. With that done, whoever went to Ghalin could focus on eliminating the monsters already there without worrying about too many more being drawn in.

That seemed like a good project for Tetrin to work on. He was more than capable of making the shrouding enchantment, and he loved getting paid to forge new equipment. No doubt, he’d accept the commission without a fuss.

I considered what would ultimately end up needing to be done while the adults handled Talvir and the group he’d come with. Most of the work could be off-loaded on other people, which was the whole point in training them up. Other than the point-specific teleportation and the repairs to both platforms, there was very little I needed to get involved with personally.

Perfect. I loved when problems that could have been major issues turned out to be nothing but minor bumps in the road.

  *

“What’s going on?” Senica asked as she and Juby pounced on me. I’d barely been out of the meeting long enough to pull the broken emitters from the platform before they hunted me down.

“About what you’d expect,” I said as I examined each part. Some of them might be salvageable, but it was best to replace the whole set for now. Fortunately, I’d planned ahead for this and had a box of thirty emitters in a small storage warehouse nearby. “They ignited too many cores without teaching anybody to hide their mana and are getting overrun by monsters now.”

“Are you going to go over there and kill everything for them?” Juby asked.

“Me, personally? No. I’ve got too much to do here and it’ll probably take them a week to get everything cleaned up anyway.”

“Wait,” Senica said slowly. “Does this mean we’re sending mages to help them?”

I shrugged and set an emitter aside, then shuffled over to the next one and pulled it out. “Not my decision. Probably, though. If nothing else, I’m sure we want to maintain good trade relations or something like that.”

It wasn’t particularly important to me. I could make just about anything besides food I needed myself, but since I wasn’t willing to spend every waking moment fabricating things for everyone else living here, I couldn’t begrudge them taking action to protect the villages they got supplies from.

“We could go fight monsters,” Senica told Juby.

“Why would we do that?”

“For fun?”

I looked up from the emitter to my sister’s excited face. My first thought was that she was being stupid, which, to be fair, she was. She was twelve years old and far too excited about the idea of blowing stuff up or setting it on fire. It was dangerous work and a simple mistake could get her killed.

On the other hand, this was a relatively tame problem, as far as these things went. A good shield ward would probably be enough to keep her safe all on its own. If I went with her, I could all but guarantee her safety, giving her a chance to practice magic against a real enemy. She was a few years younger than was probably appropriate, and it’d be difficult to convince our parents to let her go, but it could be a good learning experience.

“You’re crazy,” Juby said. “Why would you want to risk getting eaten by monsters when you could just stay here?”

Senica just huffed and said, “You wouldn’t understand.”