Book 2, Chapter 29

Even with a teleportation beacon, the spell was not cheap. If Father hadn’t been the one supplying the mana to keep it active on the scrying mirror I’d left him, it wouldn’t have been worth the effort. Keeping it active for over a month had cost him far more mana than it saved me.

I appeared near my parents’ pallet in front of the scrying mirror. It was leaned up against the wall with the bottom wedged in some type of stand that appeared to be a small wooden log cut into a square with a groove carved into the top of it. The mirror was a bit more dusty than I would have liked, but that was bound to happen when it was basically left sitting on a floor made of hard-packed dirt.

I’d forgotten for a moment exactly how… quaint… the village was. Logically, I knew, but seeing it was something else. Briefly I considered transmuting the dirt to smooth stone, but the mana wasn’t worth it, especially not before I’d talked to my parents about moving. For a permanent dwelling, I would have considered it an investment. For this hut in the middle of a village of perhaps two hundred people, a hut that we might very well be abandoning, there was no way.

I swiftly unloaded the planters onto the floor, more than happy to be relieved of that weight. It was far greater than I could have managed without magic, mostly because I’d made the decision to bring the dirt and all with me. My phantom space was also stuffed to bursting, but only with things that weren’t alive. An already harvested herb was fine; a still living plant would not fare nearly as well. In fact, it would be a struggle just to get the phantom space to accept putting a plant in there. Animals or monsters were completely out of the question.

The curtain that served as the hut’s front door twitched aside and my mother strode in, a scowl on her face and her strides heavier than I’d expected. “Alright you, go back to your own home and quit play- Gravin?”

She rushed across the room and grabbed me up into a hug, one that lifted me off my feet. To my surprise, I found myself returning that hug just as fiercely. Having my feet dangle in the air may have been undignified, but there was no one else here to see it. Besides, most of my communication had been with my father alone, though on occasion Mother had shared the mirror with him. I saw Senica least of all.

“What are you doing here? Did your Father…?” Mother trailed off. “No, I would have known if he’d contacted you.”

“Contacted me about what?” I asked. “Is something going on?”

“It’s probably nothing. Just some people getting sick lately.”

“If it’s nothing, why would you think I’d be here because of it?”

“It’s… Well, it’s who is getting sick,” Mother said. “So far, it’s only affecting people from the Garrison and the Barrier Wardens.”

“Oh, that,” I said. “Let me guess. Sudden light-headedness, maybe they get a bit dizzy, followed by a massive headache and general body ache lasting anywhere from one to four days, during which time the person has a hard time holding a conversation or concentrating on anything?”

“I don’t know how long it’ll last,” Mother said. “They just started getting sick all at once in the last day or two. You know what’s wrong with them?”

“I’m surprised it took this long,” I said. “You remember what Noctra did to Nermet? Well, that was the worst case, not the only one. But everyone else had much lighter touches, if at all. Most of the mind magic used on them was just to induce a kind of selective amnesia, but even weaker than that. The enchantment just kind of encouraged its victims not to think too closely about what Noctra had been doing. He used it on the people he had to interact with regularly, the ones he thought most likely to catch on.”

“And now the enchantment is wearing off?” Mother asked.

“Starving, more like. And as it does, it starts constricting. Don’t worry, they’ll all be fine in a few days.”

“But you could fix it?”

I shrugged. “Sure, I guess. But why would I waste the mana on it? It’s a pain to remove. It’ll break down on its own and they’ll all be fine after.”

“Maybe you should consider helping. Karad’s one of the people who’s sick.”

“He’s not high up on my list of people to help,” I said. “For obvious reasons.”

“A gesture of good will now might ease the transition when you return,” Mother argued.

While that might be true, it wasn’t like I needed it, especially if I set up a new village somewhere else. “About that,” I said, “I wanted to talk to you and Father about moving out of the village.”

“Moving out?”

“Maybe with a few other people. Setting up something small and defensible and, most importantly, not in a cabal of hostile mages’ sight.”

In my mind, I pictured a little magical utopia, where everyone was ignited and a small patch of land thrived under their care. Reality was rarely so kind, of course, and never for long when it was. But really, what did we have left here?

“It sounds lonely,” Mother said. “Senica would miss her friends. So would I.”

“You could come back and visit once I’ve finished dealing with the Wolf Pack. I’ve already intercepted two groups heading this way and gotten rid of one of their inner circle in Derro. I’m not sure how many are left, but it’s a start.”

Mother paled at my words and I schooled my face to smoothness to prevent myself from cringing. She’d never quite gotten over trying to pretend I was a normal little boy most of the time, and when I did use magic for something, it seemed like she still tried to slot me into the role of “harmless friendly child, but with magic.”

Mentioning killing people always seemed to shock her. Being exiled for torturing some captives for information probably hadn’t helped. Sometimes I wondered what lies she told herself about me, and what lies she told Senica. We’d all agreed to shield my sister as much as possible until she was older, though from what I’d been hearing, I didn’t think they were going to be able to keep her from magic much longer.

If we weren’t in a barren wasteland with practically no mana, she probably would have ignited her own core already. Perhaps I needed to take a day or two to give Senica a grounding in some basic magical theories so that if I wasn’t around to oversee the ignition, she’d still know how to do a good job of it. It would be at least two or three months for her to gather the needed mana, not including the time it took her to practice and the mana she’d spend doing that.

“Maybe we should move,” Mother said. “All of us. We could just leave, go somewhere where they can’t find us. That might be better.”

“I don’t think the entire village would agree to that,” I said.

It wasn’t an impossible plan, though it would certainly be expensive. It might actually be cheaper to build a whole new ward stone, one that isolated the village and prevented people from approaching it or scrying on it. Anyone who knowingly tried to enter would find themselves confused and turned about, and anyone stumbling in accidentally would pass by without ever actually seeing the village itself, never thinking twice about the path they’d taken to go around.

Those kinds of spells never worked out in the end. For one, they were devilishly tricky to keep running, especially when some dumb villager inevitably passed the ward boundaries and needed to be rescued to return back home. For another, even in the mana-rich environments I’d grown accustomed to in my previous life, those kinds of wards were a nightmare to keep powered.

We could probably make it work, but only if I regularly went hunting for more mages to rob in Derro. At some point, I’d run out of victims and the wards would fail. It was better to use that mana to empower myself to make the next hunt easier and it would ultimately serve the same purpose.

Alternatively, if I ignited enough cores, the whole village might be able to support it indefinitely. That was still a lot of work on my part and it would probably take a year or more to get it running. I didn’t know exactly when the Wolf Pack would send out its next group to reclaim Alkerist, but I was sure they would sooner or later. The village had cost them too much to abandon it now.

The cheapest and easiest solution really would be to take my family and a select few other people, then leave the rest of the village to fend for themselves, but I could understand Mother’s reticence to that solution. That was why I’d gone to Derro and started hunting the mages who’d been secretly controlling our village for an entire generation now. That, and because I had some questions about what had happened to the island I’d been reborn on that I couldn’t find the answers to here.

“Um… what are these plants for?” Mother asked.

“Various flowers and herbs I confiscated from a lab in Derro,” I explained. “I want to make something and I need these for materials, but they’re not ready to be harvested yet.”

“Like medicine?”

“Something like that, yes.”

I wasn’t planning on telling my parents about my plan to use ointment of aging to increase the rate that I grew older. Something told me they’d be against it, but I doubted they’d notice if I only added a few extra years. At least, they wouldn’t right away.

“Medicine that could help the sick people in the village?”

“Karad and his lot?” I asked. “I don’t need medicine for that. I… suppose it couldn’t hurt to go fix them up.”

I was flush with mana right now, and I did want a spot to set up my new alchemy lab anyway. It might smooth things over if I did Karad a favor first, assuming he was still the leader of the village. When I’d left, the Council, as they’d called themselves, were splitting up Noctra’s responsibilities between the four of them, but in practice most of that work had fallen on the leader of the Garrison. That had made him the most politically influential person in the village, though not to the point where he could do whatever he pleased like the former governor.

“Let’s just leave these here for now,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll be safe enough for the moment. Now, where are all the sick people? I’m assuming they’d be quarantined either singularly in their homes or all together somewhere.”

“In their homes,” Mother said. “We didn’t think it was too serious at first, and by the time we realized we had nearly twenty people all sick with the same thing, they were already all home.”

“Your plague protocols leave much to be desired,” I told her. Considering the size of the village, if an actual plague ever came through here, there was little doubt that it would obliterate the entire population.

“What’s a plague?”

“An outbreak of a deadly and contagious illness,” I said. Every now and then I stumbled over a weird knowledge gap in my parents’ education. I supposed it was an inevitable consequence of living in such isolation that they could accurately count the number of people they met throughout their entire lives, and that number being under a thousand people. Some of them couldn’t even name the next closest town, or didn’t believe it actually existed.

Sighing, I said, “Let’s start with Karad. Can you take me to his home?”