Book 3, Chapter 40

Our projections stared at each other, neither speaking while we gathered our thoughts. There was no fight to be had here, not as far removed as we were from each other. My own preparations kept my real body safe from the projection being used as any sort of conduit, and my limited mana budget prevented me from casting any sort of spell that would do more than mildly inconvenience Grandfather.

Besides, if it was at all possible, I wanted to preserve our alliance. Grandfather was indisputably the most powerful being I’d met in the last decade. The runner up had been Monarch, leader of the Wolf Pack, and she’d barely been a bump in the road who’d relied on a lot of magical equipment that she only barely understood how to use, let alone recreate.

“I’ll admit I can only think of short-term solutions at the moment,” Grandfather said. “And while I do believe that I could subdue the dissenters easily enough, crushing them will breed more resentment and magnify the problem in the future. Similarly, thinning our numbers to such a significant degree will cause many problems over the years to come.”

“Can you keep the humans out of the conflict?” I asked. “That’s my only immediate concern. One of the towns that trades with my own has requested help in defending themselves from brakvaw. I don’t want to lose any of my people to your internal politics.”

In truth, I doubted anyone I cared about would be answering the call to defend Ghalin, but my family was rather invested in the community and would be upset to lose any number of their friends back home. The village held no strangers, as the saying went.

As Senica had made clear, in the interest of protecting the people my family cared about, not to mention a few that were particularly important to my own plans, including all my would-be apprentice mages, I needed to relocate this problem. If it were solved, so much the better, but at the very least, there were plenty of mountains that didn’t overlook human settlements.

“Can you convince the dissidents to set up their new eyrie deeper into the mountains?” I asked.

“I doubt they’d listen to me or mine,” Grandfather said. “That’s the whole problem.”

“If I killed a few of the leaders, would it scare the rest off?”

Grandfather didn’t look happy about that idea, but he didn’t immediately reject it. These kinds of things often fell apart once a few key people were taken out, though it was always possible to turn someone into a martyr for the cause and spark an even greater rebellion. The best way to avoid that was to assassinate both the potential martyr and anyone else who might rally the insurrectionists at the same time.

If that didn’t work, the old fallback was to kill the lot of them, something Grandfather was expressly trying to avoid. If all it took to resolve this problem was four or five of their elders being decapitated and their heads left out to rot, I’d happily do it myself. The mana expenditure for the teleportations would be annoying, but I could spend that to keep my alliance with Grandfather strong.

“I don’t like the idea of killing any of my people,” Grandfather said after a few moments of deliberation.

“I understand that, but do you have a choice?”

“There’s always a choice.”

“Sure. You could tell them that they can do whatever they want, that you’re stepping down from your position and that you’ll just spend the rest of your life keeping your floating graveyard up in the air. I’m sure they’d be happy to move back in and take over.”

“Maybe I should do just that,” Grandfather said. “Who am I to rule them? I am the oldest and the most powerful, certainly, but does that mean I’m fit to rule?”

The way he looked at me made me think he was hoping I’d give him an honest answer to his dilemma, but I was exactly the wrong person to ask. “I never concerned myself with ruling,” I told him. “I carved out a home for myself hundreds of miles from the nearest human and hid it away with enchantments so powerful that only the greatest archmages of my time could find their way in uninvited.

“Even today, I rule nothing. I provided a place of refuge for those I care about, and they brought others in, growing our population in the process. But I don’t tell them what they can or cannot do. I do not give orders to anyone besides my assistants and my students, and they are free to quit whenever they want.”

“Perhaps I should have been the same,” the old bird said with an unhappy sigh. “Truly, it grieves me to see my people divided like this.”

Willingly capitulating to the rebels’ demands was not a strategy I’d ever heard of working before. It seemed to me that if a leader was willing to do that, they probably weren’t suited for leadership to begin with and the transfer of power would have occurred long before the active rebellion stage started.

I felt like I was missing something in this whole mess. One part of me wanted to dig deep until I had all the details sorted out, but the other part knew that none of this was really my problem to solve, especially since Grandfather had been quite insistent about me not getting involved. My projection had enough mana left to run for another twenty minutes or so, though, so there was no reason not to get more information if I could.

“What are you all fighting about, anyway?” I asked.

“Some places I forbid our people to travel to, interactions with other species, things like that. We were quite territorial, long ago. Families would claim hundreds of miles of land to hunt and viciously attack anything else that threatened their dominance, including other brakvaw. I’ve done my best to curb that behavior, and I thought I’d been successful.”

I glanced over to Eyrie Peak, which held the homes of hundreds of brakvaw. Taking a territorial species and forcing them to all live together was either a hell of an accomplishment or the height of foolishness. In this case, it seemed to have worked, so I was leaning toward the former. Then again, it was sounding like things were starting to fall apart, so perhaps it was a failed experiment after all.

On the other hand, if the brakvaw reverted to a primitive, territorial species, it was practically inevitable that I’d be fighting off intruders seeking to settle in the mana-rich valley I was trying to cultivate. I didn’t like the idea of being tied to Sanctuary so that I could defend it at a moment’s notice, and I was still a long, long way from an acceptable level of magical deterrents. What I had in place now served to delay an attack for a few minutes at best so my parents could get word to me.

That did make the decision somewhat easier for me. Grandfather needed to stay in charge of the brakvaw. He wanted peaceful coexistence, and the dissenters were trying to split away from that life. It was already causing friction between the brakvaw and the nearby humans. The solution was to bring everyone back under Grandfather’s rule.

“How’s the food situation?” I asked. “Your species must eat a lot, even with mana to sustain you.”

“Yes, that was another sticking point. I made sure to keep us spread out in our hunting ranges so that we didn’t deplete our natural prey. Some brakvaw ignored that overhunted nearby mountains so that they wouldn’t have to carry the meat back as far. When I was up there above the clouds, they could hide it from me.”

“I’ll assume there’s no chance of the elders leading this rebellion coming back under your authority?”

“It has been a struggle to even get them to communicate with us at this point,” Grandfather admitted.

“Sounds like you know what you need to do, then,” I told him. “If you want to regain control of all the brakvaw who are following these elders, then the elders need to go. And you know that doesn’t guarantee everyone else will come back. They left for a reason.”

“I do still have a few options left to try,” Grandfather argued. He let out a great sigh, then added, “But I fear your solution may be the only one that keeps my people together. It seems that my attempts to build our society have only been a temporarily solution that won’t outlive my passing, even for those who’ve chosen to remain with me.”

I’d need at least eight hours to return home, not because I couldn’t do it immediately, but because I wanted a full core just in case I landed in some sort of situation. A mage with no mana was often a dead mage. Despite all my efforts to grow stronger, there was no such thing as too much mana in this world, and my collection of mana crystals was costing me even more in wasted transference. Cutting those connections back down to a single crystal would make it drastically easier to stock mana for my next core stage.

“Let’s call it three days,” I said. “That will give me enough time to wrap up my current business and return home. Can you finish exploring the rest of your options by then?”

“I would prefer to do this without your involvement,” Grandfather said.

“Feel free to use me as a bludgeon to convince the brakvaw to find their new homes farther away from human towns. I honestly don’t care where they go, so long as my home isn’t getting requests to dispatch mages to defend villages. If they don’t want to keep moving, I will be forced to step in.”

I wondered if Grandfather regretted his association with me now. After all, it was my interference that allowed him to achieve his goal of relocating his physical body. Without that, he never would have discovered that his council of brakvaw elders were subverting or disobeying his rules. That problem would still have existed, of course, but it would have manifested years from now, giving his people more time to exist peacefully.

Grandfather obviously didn’t want to fight. He valued peace. How much would he change if he could go back and redo things? Time didn’t move that way, of course, but knowing how he felt about me now might inform my decision on how I proceeded. It was tempting to spend what little mana I had left on a mind reading attempt, but if there was anyone in the world who’d notice and block it immediately, it was Grandfather.

Plus it wouldn’t work on a projection, anyway. I’d need to move closer to his actual body, and that had all sorts of complications I’d have to resolve. It just wasn’t a good idea, not in my current position with my limited resources.

While Grandfather deliberated, I said again, “Three days. We’ll talk again then.”

“Three days,” the old bird agreed, obviously unhappy with the deadline. His projection disappeared, and I released my hold on mine.

I opened my eyes back up at my camp and spent a few minutes erasing the defensive circle before I dropped off the ledge to find Senica scowling down at the book I’d told her to read. She abandoned it immediately when I returned.

“Well, what’s the news?” she asked.

“It’s not good. Brakvaw infighting, looks like an entire group of them have splintered off and are looking for a new home. Grandfather doesn’t seem optimistic about reconciling, but he’s always reluctant to start fighting. If he can get them to relocate somewhere away from humans, then good enough.”

“Do you think he can?”

“No,” I said bluntly. “This group is already moving independently. They tried to kill me once before, remember? I doubt they’ll listen to him. We’ve got three days to finish up our tour of the old empire here before I teleport us back home and deal with this situation.”

“Can we afford to delay that long?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Unless we get the call to come back sooner. If not, it’s three days, so let’s make the best of it.”