Book 3, Chapter 30

Our first day off the island hadn’t seen much variation in the landscape. Things were a bit greener, perhaps, but it the kind of difference that would have been easy to miss if I wasn’t looking for it. By noon of the second day, however, it was impossible not to notice how much greener the ground was.

“How is there so much of this stuff?” Senica asked as we sat on some rocks near a deep, fast-flowing river and ate lunch. She stamped a foot down on the grass, which bent instead of stabbing at her feet. “And why is it so soft?”

“Better soil, more water, and a different mana structure,” I said. I’d done a lot of work enriching the soil in the valley I’d taken over to help the plants there grow better, but I was started to think I might have been better off bringing in massive quantities of dirt from beyond the island. Then again, there was every possibility that it wouldn’t be the right kind of soil for the trees growing back home.

Unfortunately, my phantom space did not do well at carrying things that were still alive. I could excavate a square of soil, but all the grass attached to it would need to die before I could put it in storage, and at that point there wasn’t a lot of reason to take it with me anymore.

“Could we do this back home, too?” she asked, unknowingly mirroring my own thoughts.

“We’ve been trying to for the last few years,” I said.

“Oh, right, the whole pillar project thing you’ve been doing.”

“Right, the… uh… pillar project.”

“That’s supposed to create ambient mana?” she asked.

I sighed. “In theory.”

The only problem was that all of the flora needed to be healthy enough that it could live on less mana than it produced. Even with all of our efforts, it was the rare tree that flourished without mana. Even the ember bloom was barely making a surplus, and considering how much effort we’d poured into that one particular tree, it just wasn’t feasible to repeat that thousands more times.

It was still making progress, but not as fast as I liked. I’d been grooming that valley to become my genius loci in the event that the Night Vale no longer qualified, something I considered extremely likely at this point. But the truth was it would be decades, if not longer, before Sanctuary was even close to ready at the rate it was going.

Ignoring all that, it was becoming too much of a community. Some mages bonded with settled land that had villages or towns, became some sort of governor or nobility in the process, and were happy to provide for and protect their citizens. I, personally, had chosen a place that was as isolated as possible and had only taken visitors with the greatest reluctance.

Having hundreds of people living in the valley did not suit my purposes, so I was considering it a trial run, just to see if the terraforming worked. I needed a place with dense ambient mana, and if the world itself couldn’t provide it, I’d manufacture one. And when I did, it would be for me and me alone.

I was pulled from my musings a few seconds after the conversation died off. Something had flickered across my scrying spell, something sleek and silverly. I stood up and cast three more spells to confirm its presence, then said to Senica, “Better get your wand ready.”

She glanced over at me, startled, but dropped her meal and pulled the wand. “What is it?”

“That’s a good question,” I said. I could barely feel any mana coming from it, so little that it just blended in with all the other life around us. But I had seen some motion in my scrying spell, and with that to tip me off, I was examining the creature with my magic even as it watched us with its eyes.

“A big part of bringing you with me is to get you accustomed to dangerous situations. I know you did some monster hunting with a group, and that’s a fine place to start, but if you’re going to be a powerful mage, you need to be able to find threats, analyze them, and take care of them yourself. So, today I’m warning you that there is a threat nearby. What are you going to do now?”

It took her a few seconds longer than me to cast her own scrying spell, but she managed to do it while keeping the mana inside her shroud. That was impressive in and of itself. Most of my would-be apprentices couldn’t even hold a proper shroud indefinitely, let alone cast a spell inside of it. I might have spoiled Senica with resources none of the other mages got access to, but she worked hard to make the most out of them.

“I see it,” she said. “Are… are you sure it’s a threat?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I mean, yes, it’s watching us,” she told me. “But, it’s a fish. We’re not in the water.”

“You charged your shield ward like I told you to?”

“Yes,” she said, exasperated. “When are you going to get off my back about the shield wa- Aaaaaiiiihhh!”

A jet of water as thick around as my forearm shot out of the river and struck Senica’s face, or rather, it deflected off her shield ward a few inches from her face. Ignoring her shrieking, I studied the alabaster pendant I’d given her. It was harder to tell for sure with it hidden behind her shroud, but I thought it had about half the mana it could hold left in it. The water jet hadn’t been that powerful, certainly not enough to drain the ward so badly.

“You should keep it charged all the way,” I told her, taking a step backward to dodge the water jet the fish creature aimed my way. Water splashed harmlessly onto the grass in a line extending two hundred feet from the edge of the river.

“You scaly little bastard!” Senica yelled down at the water. “I’m gonna… I’m… Gravin, what am I supposed to do? I don’t think fire magic is going to cut it here.”

“I’d start by paying more attention to the monster than to me,” I said.

“You know what I mean! I have a specialty, and it doesn’t work here.”

Senica darted to the side quick enough that she barely got clipped by the next water shot, but the fish monster thing appeared to be growing bolder with its attacks. The lack of retaliation on our part had probably convinced it that we were easy prey, too weak to fight back and too stupid to run away.

“That’s the weakness of being dangerously overspecialized,” I told Senica. “If you were any good at water manipulation, you’d be able to turn this thing’s defense against itself. I know I’ve told you this before.”

“Yeah, but fire’s—” she cut off to dodge again, “—more fun.”

“Oooh. Well, if you just wanted to have fun, then I’ve been teaching you all wrong. I thought you wanted to be a mage.”

“Why can’t I do both?” she demanded.

I stepped off to the side again and watched another stream of high-pressure water go flying by. I’d spotted some sort of bladder behind the fish monster’s back fin that inflated just before it attacked, which made it trivially easy to predict its attacks. Senica did not appear to have noticed it and was operating on sheer reflexes.

“No one said you can’t, but if you don’t have a group to cover your weaknesses, eventually you’ll find yourself in a scenario when you don’t have a spell to address the problem,” I lectured.

“Easy for you to say,” she shot back. “You’ve had thousands of years to learn every spell.”

“That’s true, but I distinctly remember teaching you a spell that you could use in this situation.”

“What spell?” she asked. Her distraction cost her, and her shield ward flared again as it took the brunt of a water jet she wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid.

“I know you don’t know so many that you can’t figure out something that would be useful here.”

“Damn—” Senica broke off swearing to dodge another shot. “—it. Can’t you just tell me?”

“Learning to work under pressure is an essential skill,” I said.

We dodged water blasts for another twenty seconds while she puzzled out what spell could help her here. I was actually starting to worry that the fish would get bored and either escalate the fight somehow or swim off, but apparently it took so little mana to fire off its water attack and we were so non-threatening that it was content to sit there and try to shoot us down. Idly, I wondered how it planned to get us into the water once it had killed us – probably some form of hydrokinesis, if I had to guess.

Senica started casting a spell, not the one I meant, but one that would probably work. It took her ten seconds to finish the magic. Then it rippled out of her and into the water, where it pulled the heat out of it, instantly freezing the fish in a huge block of ice that started to drift down the river at a decent clip.

“Hah! Take that,” she crowed after it.

“That… wasn’t what I meant, but I suppose you have technically defeated it,” I told her. “Good job.”

“It wasn’t? What spell should I have used.”

“I would have gone with flight, personally.”

She shot me a confused look. “What? But that wouldn’t have defeated the monster.”

“Why did you need to defeat it? Are we defending this spot for some reason? Would anything have changed if we just flew away?”

“I… But… That’s…” Senica scowled at me, then threw her hands up into the air and stomped off. “That wasn’t the point at all!”

“Learning to pick your battles is an important skill,” I called after her. “Consider what resources you have, and what the consequences of failure would be before you decide that you absolutely have to stand and fight.”

Somehow, I doubted this unexpected encounter had driven home the point I’d been trying to make. She started packing up her stuff while I watched the block of ice slowly crack and break down. It only made it a thousand feet before the fish monster managed to free itself, no worse for the wear. It held itself still against the current for a long moment as it looked back upstream, then turned and fled in the opposite direction.

I smiled a little as I watched it speed away. It definitely had hydrokinetic magic to help it move that fast, strong enough to form a tendril of water that could snare a disabled victim on the riverbank and drag it into the water. Its magic was extremely cost-efficient as well, to the point where if I hadn’t mastered lossless casting myself, I might have considered catching it to study the technique.

It seemed like most of the things living in this new world excelled at getting the maximum effect for the minimum cost, humans being the biggest exception I’d seen so far. Perhaps we’d find a civilization that had truly adapted to life on a dead planet soon. If so, it was sure to be a fascinating experience.

“Are we going or not?” Senica said. She had her pack cinched close and was holding it out for me to replace in my phantom space until our next step. Her wand was still in her hand, and she had that distracted look on her face that she got when she was processing the input from a scrying spell.

“Yes, I suppose we should,” I said. “We’ve lingered here long enough.”

Together, we rose up into the air and started off north and west, at a slightly faster speed than when we’d first left Sanctuary. Another few weeks of this training and she might be able to hold full speed long enough to get somewhere.