Respect for the Dead

This story is set six months after Mage Errant.

The instant Asa the Banisher was out of earshot of the village longhouse, she began interrogating her apprentice.

“Elemental or spirit?” she asked, toying with the thick copper bracelet around her left wrist.

Rem sighed. “It’s going to be an elemental. It’s always an elemental.”

Asa chuckled. “They are the bulk of the job, I’ll admit.”

Rem just sighed again, his usual dour look plastered on his face.

Despite his brooding temperament and frequent complaints, the lad was an excellent apprentice. Not that Rem had much standard of comparison, she’d been an apprentice not too many years before, and this was her first time teaching another banisher.

“So what are our clues?” Asa asked.

“Translucent, not burning, makes audible sounds,” Rem said heavily. “Restricted to the old ruins in the hills.”

Asa raised an eyebrow. “The old ruins that…?”

“The old ruins that weren’t there a year ago,” Rem said. “That appeared after a particularly nasty storm.”

“Predictions,” Asa ordered.

“Most likely involves wind, light, and sound magic in some combination, possibly even all three. Probably an elemental, possibly a spirit.”

“That’s not exactly a bold prediction, you’re describing the three most common magics found in elementals and spirits,” Asa said.

Rem shrugged. “If it’s not one of those, it’s usually fire, and we know it’s not fire.”

Asa frowned. “You’re right about the frequency of those types, but don’t rely on that too much. Overconfident banishers don’t last long. I’ve heard of more than a few of our number who’ve died when a wind elemental turned out to be a pressure elemental, or a fire spirit turned out to be a heat spirit.”

Rem shrugged again. “I’d prefer if it wasn’t one of the common ones. But it’s probably going to be.”

Asa rolled her eyes, but continued. “And the most important question: the villagers want the entity gone because…?”

“It already killed two of them, and they’re afraid it will attack the village?” Rem said.

“Well, that’s what they claim,” Asa replied. “As to whether it’s the whole truth… now there I have my doubts.”

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There wasn’t much of note on the rolling plains between Emblin and the Skyreach Range. Just hills, villages, a few patchy forests, and the great Stoneknife river. There were a few small port cities up in the north, but between the winter ice, aggressive sea beasts, and the looming presence of Intet Slew, they didn’t get that much trade.

There was always work for banishers in declining regions like this, though. And if it kept them away from the aftermath of the war in the east, so much the better.

So these ruins, in the outer foothills of Emblin’s mountains, immediately caught Asa’s interest, even more than her target. It was said these lands had been busier once, before their long, slow decline of centuries.

She outlined three guesses about the ruins to Rem as they hiked up into the foothills. 

The first, and most likely, was just an old archmage’s lair, whose protections were degrading with the passage of years. The being the villagers wanted banished was either a bound elemental protecting the lair, or the archmage’s attempt to live past their death.

The second was a failed or dying lich demesne. It was almost amusing how often banishers ended up being sent to take care of degrading lich demesnes. Almost, not actually amusing, because banishers were essentially powerless against liches, and it was a good way for them to get themselves killed. 

And the third— the one Asa was most hoping for— was an old Ithonian legion fort. Every couple decades, a new one showed up somewhere. The Ithonians had scattered them across the entire continent, hidden and protected by all sorts of strange defenses. 

Rem, when pressed as to what he hoped it would be, just rolled his eyes and said “nothing.”

Neither of them predicted what they actually found.

It took Asa several minutes to understand what she was seeing, and when she did, she grabbed Rem by the shoulders and shook him. 

“This is pre-Ithonian!” she hissed, quietly enough not to alert their target down in the ruins.

“What?” Rem asked, confused.

“These ruins are pre-Ithonian! I’m pretty sure they’re Anacoptan, which would make them at least fourteen centuries old!”

“Who?” Rem asked, even more confused.

Asa shook him again. “The Anacoptans were a pre-Ithonian civilization, an alliance of war-like city states that ruled over most of the western half of the continent for three quarters of a century before falling in a civil war. They’re the only ones who ever built like this! We studied them not even two month ago!”

Rem frowned, then nodded. “Weren’t they the ones who had a fart mage general?”

Asa sighed. “One of their cities had a general who controlled a flammable gas present in some people’s farts, yes. He wasn’t a fart mage, though.”

She sighed, then turned her attention back to the ruins down in the little valley.

The ruins didn’t take up much more land than the village they’d departed a couple hours ago, but the buildings below them dwarfed the wooden houses and longhouse of the village.

Like all Anacoptan sites, none of the buildings were built directly on the ground. Instead, the ruins were raised up on thick stone columns, made profoundly durable by the stone mages that had shaped them. Stone bridges crossed between the buildings and balconies above, though plenty of stairs descended down to the ground below. 

No one knew why the Anacoptans built this way— most knowledge about them had been lost during the fall of Ithos. Asa wasn’t sure if any of the continent’s great powers had even been alive when the Anacoptans fell. Keayda, maybe? 

Admittedly, Asa had a much better understanding of ancient civilizations than she did more recent history. It was part and parcel with being a banisher.

It was only a few minutes of waiting before their target drifted into sight. 

Rem sighed heavily. “Wind elemental. I told you so.”

Asa smiled as she focused on the entity with both her eyes and her affinity senses.

“No, not a wind elemental. A wind spirit.”

“How can you tell?” Rem asked, looking interested for once.

“Practice,” Asa said. “Practice, and I can detect dream in this one. That’s probably why it’s so visible. You don’t often find dream elementals. The practice bit is more important, though— there are always little hints, little clues, once you learn to recognize them. You detecting anything with your affinity senses?”

Rem shook his head. So no heat magic or transitional materials, then.

Well, too much to hope for to have multiple shared magics with the spirit. Still, a well-trained banisher could handle a spirit or elemental even without any shared magics.

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Banishers were some of the rarest and least understood mages around.

Their name was a complete misnomer, for one thing. They weren’t casting out spirits and elementals from the world into another place. Rarely, they drove elementals out of a location, but even then, luring them away worked better.

Asa’s own teacher had told her that their name had made more sense in pre-Ithonian times, that in an older language, their name had once translated differently, that it had been a word that meant both “unweaver” and “door-opener.”

Spirits and elementals were stable structures within the aether that manifested constant spells. Endless localized windstorms, living currents of water, perambulatory rockpiles. Incredibly dangerous, and incredibly hard to kill for all but the strongest mages, and half the time the killing didn’t take.

Banishers weren’t anywhere near the strongest mages, and they weren’t trying to kill elementals and spirits.

Instead, they were trying to pick apart the free-floating spell within the aether, to dissipate the unliving but animate beings. 

Banishers could also deal with living spells, the short-lived cousins of elementals, but they weren’t often called to— if you fought off a living spell, odds were it would disperse entirely sooner than later.

There were very strict requirements to being a banisher. 

First were the affinity types. You needed to have at least two, of which one needed to be a transference affinity, and one needed to be a meta affinity.

Transference affinities weren’t one of the categories most people used, but they were common enough affinities— any affinity built around moving energy about. Heat, cold, lightning, force, light… there were plenty of easy options. Asa’s force affinity and Rem’s heat affinity handled that part of the job for them.

Meta affinities were significantly stranger and rarer. They were affinities that broke the rules of other classifications, affinities that seemed to stretch across the behavior of multiple other affinities. Most common were dream affinities, followed by greater shadow affinities. Before Helicote’s destruction, there were a few Helicotan banishers with atthuema affinities, and meta affinities were supposedly more common on other continents. Asa’s dream affinity was very standard for a banisher, but Rem had a deeply unusual meta affinity- transitional materials. His magic could control anything that hovered in the borderlands between physical states. Liquids that would turn solid with a harsh impact, solids that would turn liquid when vibrated, superheated fluids that would flash instantly to steam with the slightest disturbance.

Rem’s mother was from some weird underground city-state on the continent of Gelid, and his affinity was relatively common there. It had some name in her native language that Asa couldn’t, for the life of her, remember. To her eternal regret, she was even worse at learning languages than most Ithonians.

The second requirement to be a banisher was a far stranger one— both the meta and transference affinities needed to have incredibly small reservoirs. 

In many ways, banishing was the opposite of siege magic. It involved the incredibly precise use of tiny amounts of mana, as opposed to siege magic’s brutish, raw power approach to spell casting. In order to become a banisher, a mage needed to train in a large number of mana techniques to improve precision, until their finesse with magic surpassed even most enchanters and healers. The most important techniques involved, however, simply wouldn’t work if a mage’s mana reservoirs were too large— the aetheric pressure inside their reservoirs would overwhelm them rapidly. 

Those banishers with three or more mana reservoirs could train one of the extras for larger capacity, and defend themselves accordingly, but most banishers relied on more… unconventional methods.

The third requirement for being a banisher was by far the most valuable of the three.

Patience.

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Asa and Rem spent four hours watching the wind spirit from afar before they even attempted to enter the Anacoptan village.

The spirit had probably been a naga mage in life. It was a little hard to tell, given how poorly defined the spirit’s form remained, but the malformed crawling whirlwind, in its better-defined moments, quite closely resembled one of the snake folk.

The naga part wasn’t too surprising— historically, they were more likely to become spirits or liches than almost any other species. Naga tended to suffer debilitating chronic pain later in life— the ancient draconic empire had done a far poorer job engineering the naga than their gorgon cousins. Becoming a spirit or lich was a preferable alternative for many than endless pain.

Not, of course, that becoming a spirit was too far removed from death— the process involved sacrificing the overwhelming majority of the self, and most attempts failed, resulting in near-mindless elementals. 

Anacopta was one of the only examples of a naga-ruled civilization in Ithonian history, and as such, their ruins were disproportionately more likely to be inhabited as spirits. If their civilization hadn’t collapsed in civil war, it would have been fascinating to see what would have come of it. What would a civilization with common spirits have been like? Would their cities have eventually become necropoli, filled with more spirits than people?

There were rumors about such a city on the Cloudspine Continent, but Asa had never been able to learn more about it.

She shook her head to clear her distracted thoughts, and focused back on the spirit.

Its poor definition concerned her. Spirits almost always had far more coherent shapes than this— some bore perfect visages of the mages who had created them. A properly-formed spirit could last… well, millennia? Tens of millennia? No one actually knew. 

A spirit was either formed successfully or degraded immediately into an elemental. This one was clearly— at least to a trained banisher— still a spirit. It kept up the repetitive, patterned behavior of a spirit— it was clearly a guard patrolling the ruins.

But… it wasn’t even doing a good job of patrolling. Yes, it passed by any one location at seemingly random intervals, but it missed obvious blind spots in its patrol all over, and after waiting long enough, Asa realized that its patrol pattern wasn’t random at all— just a long, irregular sequence that repeated every three-quarters of an hour.

“It’s guarding something,” Rem finally muttered. For all his dour demeanor, the boy didn’t lack for patience.

Honestly, he was probably more patient than she was. She was more patient than most people, but if she hadn’t had her copper bracelet with its half-dozen inset colorful stones to toy with, the wait would have been a struggle for her.

Asa nodded. “Agreed. It’s not doing a particularly good job, though. Any guesses as to why?”

Rem gave her an uncertain look. “I… well, a few? I was thinking that maybe its degradation had messed with its patrol route, but spirits don’t really degrade like that, just collapse into elementals? So I was thinking then that the spirit’s creator just did a bad job, and barely managed to create a proper spirit, but… its patrol route probably wouldn’t be so regular then?”

Asa made a thoughtful noise at that. “I hadn’t actually considered that second possibility. I tend to assume that any less-than-brilliant spirit crafter will just fail, but there’s no theoretical reason someone could just barely slip over the line of stability. Any other hypotheses?”

Rem nodded, a little more confidently. "There used to be more spirits here.”

Asa turned her attention fully to her student. “Now that is an interesting idea. Explain.”

“If there had been multiple spirits patrolling, they could have a schedule without the weird gaps that this one has. And… something changed recently. There was clearly some sort of attention ward, or illusion enchantment, or who knows what else hiding the ruins from attention. This place has been here how long, and no one found it, even just being a morning’s walk away from a village?”

“So you think something happened to those other spirits, and destroyed the ruins’ other protection?” Asa asked. “What, like a wandering great power or some such? You’d expect there to be considerably more damage to the ruins, then, but all of the damage I’m seeing is just from age.”

Rem shook his head. “No, I think the spirits fought each other.”

“And why would they do that?”

“The patrol schedules,” Rem said. “With irregular patrol schedules, even the tiniest imperfection would eventually lead to irregular timing, and the spirits getting in each others’ way. Even just a second’s drift a century would be enough. And the spirits could likely cope with it for long enough, but they would eventually be provoked enough to fight.”

“And the spirit’s fuzziness is damage from that fight?” Asa asked, stroking her chin. “It all makes sense. But… it’s built on a huge pile of conjectures and an almost absent pile of evidence. I don’t see any damage from the fight, nor any proof of an attention ward or other such defense. If there had been a ward, unless it was built deep underground, we should be seeing sign of it. Wards this size are hard to hide, and ward design was much less advanced in pre-Ithonian times.”

“There had to have been something hiding this place, even if it wasn’t a ward.” Rem said. 

“Oh, I agree,” Asa replied. “But we still don’t know what it was, or how it interacted with the spirit or spirits. On top of that, there’s the matter of the storm before the village appeared. Was it just pure coincidence?”

Rem shook his head. “The villagers said the storm was like nothing they’d ever seen before, fiercer and faster than any past storm. And that it came right from the direction of the ruins.”

“You think the storm was the battle between the hypothetical spirits,” Asa clarified.

Rem nodded, a hint of enthusiasm on his face. “We already know that the victor is a wind spirit.”

Despite her better judgment, Asa slowly nodded. For all that it was built on a foundation of conjecture, it did explain all the known facts. They’d need to be careful not to get too caught up in the idea, but it was worth investigating.

“You know what we need to do now?” Asa said.

Rem’s brief flirtation with enthusiasm vanished, and he glowered at her. “That’s a terrible idea.”

Asa just smiled.

“We don’t know what defenses are still in place, and I really don’t want to find out what decaying, millennia-old defenses will do to us,” Rem said.

“Ah, but we already know it’s safe to go in at least part-way,” Asa said.

“And how’s that?” Rem muttered.

“Because the villagers made it in.”

Rem stared at her skeptically. “And how do you know that?”

Asa rolled her eyes. “Well, there’s clearly not much risk of the spirit wandering down to their village anytime soon. I told you as soon as we set out that I doubted their story.”

“You think they saw something they want in the ruins, and are just using us to clear their path to it.”

Asa gave him a wry look. “Rem, that’s half the reason banishers get hired. The most common purpose for spirits or imprisoned elementals is to guard something.”

“So why weren’t they honest about that?” Rem asked her.

Asa snorted. “Because they’re planning to screw us over.”

“And you’re still going to help them?” Rem said incredulously.

Asa chuckled. “I never said anything about that, now, did I?”

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With the patrol patterns of the spirit memorized, infiltrating the ruins was almost easy. Staying hidden from the spirit while they moved inward was almost trivial— the spirit never left the ground, its path never taking it from between the columns holding up the buildings.

The only hairy moment was getting up into the actual ruins. Anacoptan settlements seldom had stairs around the outside— to get up top, you needed to walk to the center of the village.

Asa had just enough force mana to launch the two of them up to the village in a single jump, but it left her reservoir almost empty. Even for a banisher, Asa had notably small mana reservoirs.

Then it was just a matter of moving slowly in towards the center of the ruins.

They moved slow and quiet, both to avoid the spirit’s attention and to watch for any traps or other defenses.

As they advanced, though, Asa’s face slowly shifted into a frown.

“What’s wrong?” Rem finally asked quietly.

She noted with approval that he’d finally stopped whispering— whispers carried farther than speaking quietly. It had taken her a few months to drill that lesson into him.

“This wasn’t a village,” she said, just as quietly. “I don’t know what these structures were, but they’re not houses, and they’re all identical.”

She glanced in another as they slowly passed it, seeing the same thing.

An empty room, with a trio of niches set in the far wall. The outer two niches had shelves built in, while the deeper central niche was shelf-less. There was unknown writing engraved on the walls between the niches, presumably Anacoptan. If there’d been anything in the niches, it had decayed centuries ago.

Decayed, or been stolen. Asa couldn’t help but notice that the thick dust had been disturbed in quite a few niches.

The villagers were absolutely lying to them.

“So if they’re not houses, what are they?” Rem asked.

Asa just shook her head. “I don’t know.”

The two of them poked their heads into a few more of the identical structures, but found all of them to be identical and empty.

It wasn’t long until they reached the heart of the Anacoptan ruins, where at least one of Asa’s questions was readily answered.

“Is that silver?” Rem asked.

Asa just nodded.

There, in the center of the ruins, was a gem-encrusted silver monument. It depicted a naga battlemage, resting atop a thick column, her tail spiraling down the outside of the column.  Between her descending silver coils, writing could be seen. Even ignoring the historical value and even if the silver was just plated on the surface, the statue was wildly valuable. Asa couldn’t, unfortunately, make out the writing from here, she’d have to get closer than this.

Which was, she suspected, exactly what the two dead villagers lying on the ground had thought.

Neither had a mark on them— if Asa had to guess, the spirit had asphyxiated them. One of the more common tactics for wind spirits and elementals. Of course, Asa could be wrong— the corpses were far from fresh, and without closer inspection, it was always possible there were marks hidden beneath them. 

“The villagers weren’t lying about it already killing two of them,” Rem commented.

Asa nodded. “They were just lying about why they visited the ruins, and what they were doing here.”

“You’d think there are enough stories warning against stealing from spirits,” Rem said.

They shared a moment of silence out of respect for the dead. More for the spirit than the dead villagers, of course.

“We might as well get started,” Asa finally said, playing with her copper bracelet.

Rem shot her a look. “There’s no way we can steal this statue and cart it out of here without being noticed. We don’t exactly have extra-spatial storage or anything.”

Asa nodded. “True, but by the time we could bring back help to move the statue, I’d imagine either the villagers could either find another banisher, or an archmage powerful enough to go toe-to-toe with a spirit will find this place. Better to claim something than nothing.”

Rem’s frown softened a bit, though it didn’t go away entirely. “You’re sure we can handle the spirit?” 

Asa nodded. “We’ll be fine. Let’s not banish it immediately, though—  let’s paralyze it first.”

“Are you planning to imprison it?” Rem asked.

Asa shrugged. “Probably not, but let’s keep our options open. There’s too much we don’t understand about the situation still.”

The two of them waited for Asa’s force mana reservoir to finish refilling— which didn’t take long, even in the relatively thin aether this close to Emblin.

The instant the spirit passed close to the silver monument, Asa and Rem funneled mana into the first banishment spells.

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There are two kinds of magic.

First, there’s magic that affects the physical world, which was the overwhelming majority of magic. Dream magic, stone magic, grasshopper magic, you name it— all the first type.

And then there’s the second type. The type used by aspiring liches and spirits, the type used to create elementals, and the strange way some great powers could detect one another through the aether. And, of course, there was the magic used by banishers.

Magic that affects the aether. 

There were many different routes of doing so, wildly different traditions and mechanisms. All were mind-numbingly complex, and success was as much up to luck as skill.

Some relied on symmetrical spellforms, useless in every other pursuit. Others relied on concentrating mana until the caster risked reservoir rupture. Others still practiced mana techniques that slowly trained the caster to extend their senses into the aether itself— or perhaps it was better to say they extended their senses outward to encompass their surrounding aether.

Most banishers, thanks to their delicate fine control of mana, used a method unlike any of the others— they forced their mana to move in angles that shouldn’t be possible to perceive, angles that couldn’t be drawn on paper without optical trickery and geometric lies. This was why they needed their specific combinations of affinities— meta affinity senses helped them train to perceive those impossible angles, while energy transfer mana types could be moved through those angles more easily.

The first spell Asa and Rem cast let them perceive the aether around them. Not to see it, but to… feel it in their bones, as though it were the rumble of a sound too low to hear. To hear it with their muscles, which intermittently twitched as though they were receiving orders not from their minds, but from the stirrings of aether around them. To smell a static tingle creeping across their skin, to taste the air grow heavier in pulsing waves. 

Their temporary aether senses warped and shifted, their brains never able to lock them down into a single sensory form. It reminded Asa nothing so much as the first weeks of developing an affinity, when one’s affinity senses hadn’t yet adopted a new form. 

It didn’t really matter what form the new sense took, though. What mattered were the subtle waves carried through the aether, the pulses that her body was interpreting as rumbling in her bones, twitching in her muscles, and tingles across her skin. What mattered were their frequency and intensity.

Those pulses were signals and echoes. 

After Asa filtered out a few weak false signals, there were three main sources of signals— the spirit and the two banishers. Normal spellforms didn’t push out into the aether like this, didn’t create these signals. In other manners, made other signals— but nothing like these.

Asa and Rem’s own signals were quite familiar to her, and the spirit’s were easily recognizable. To her relief, she could taste exactly the flavors of mana— or maybe hear the correct tones— of wind and dream, just as expected.

Then there were the echoes, subtly shifting in shade and texture as they reflected off one another.

Physical waves would grow more chaotic and hard to interpret with more signals like this, but the opposite was true in the aether. It was said that during a Grand Banishing, perceiving the aether was like taking a pleasant meadow walk during the day— or during a full moon, at least. This was no Grand Banishing, but Asa was excellent at this part of the job— she seldom even struggled when it was just herself and a weak elemental, let alone a spirit this strong alongside Rem.

As the echoes built up, the spirit twitched in its path, looked around as if sensing something amiss. It didn’t stop, but it had clearly realized something was strange.

That was puzzling and concerning. Only the most skillfully-made spirits could sense a banisher’s perception spells, and this clearly wasn’t well-made, given its lack of definition.

It didn’t do more than twitch as it was bombarded with aetheric waves, thankfully, and the image of the spirit’s core spellform slowly built itself up in Asa’s mind.

She frowned. There was… absolutely nothing wrong with it. It was a perfectly competent design, without any errors, obvious flaws, or signs of degradation. There were a few odd quirks to it, but all spirits had a few odd quirks. It wasn’t possible for a single standardized spellform to turn anyone into a spirit, each had to be carefully customized to their caster. 

Add in a few cultural elements to the design, and this spirit was almost precisely what Asa would expect from an Anacoptan spirit in good shape.

Asa shook her head, then swiftly and confidently drew another spellform.

Within seconds of channeling mana into it, the spirit slowed, then came to a complete halt.

Asa stood up and headed towards the nearest stairs down. 

“Let’s go,” she told Rem.

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Asa took a few moments to stare curiously at the whirling winds of the stationary spirit, but its physical form gave no more clues than its spellform.

She shook her head once again, then turned to the statue.

Then, for once, she got a pleasant surprise. 

The inscription looping up the column, between the naga’s coils? It was in multiple languages.

One was clearly Anacoptan, with its jagged radial letters. Another was some unknown ideographic script Asa had never even seen before.

The third, though? The third was Old Ithonian. And Asa absolutely could read Old Ithonian, because whatever difficulties modern Ithonians had with learning other languages didn’t apply to Old Ithonian— indeed, much the opposite.

“What does it say?” Rem asked. Even he couldn’t help but show interest at this.

“It’s a memorial to fallen warriors,” Asa said.

“The statue?”

Asa shook her head. “No, the whole of the ruins. These aren’t houses, they were shrines to fallen heroes. The statue itself depicts a naga warrior princess— Fourthborn Blade-Petal, I think? But each of the shrines above us told the story of some Anacoptan hero.”

“Does each of the scripts on the column say the same thing?” Rem asked. “Will this allow us to translate Anacoptan?”

“Anacoptan’s already been translated,” Asa said, spinning her copper bracelet idly around her wrist. “We just need to get a scholar here to read the inscriptions in the shrines.”

Rem just sighed heavily at that.

Asa wanted to copy his sigh as she kept reading the inscription. “Your hypothesis was wrong, Rem. There was only ever one spirit here.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

Asa nodded, then pointed to the wind spirit. “Rem, meet Princess Fourthborn Blade-Petal.”

“If she was the only spirit, then how does that explain the gaps in her patrol? And how did she get damaged?” Rem asked.

“I don’t know,” Asa murmured. “But I did find out how they kept this place hidden. There was a… forgotten wind? No, that’s…”

She muttered to herself as she worked on the translation, before brightening. “There was an attention ward! It only allowed through people who came to honor the fallen heroes, which explains why this place was never found— no one remembered them.”

 Asa’s frown promptly collapsed once more. “But the ward was… carved into the wind itself? What? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“How can you carve a ward into air?” Rem muttered. “And how would it stay stable for so long?”

“I did just say it doesn’t make any sense,” Asa said, but with no real heat to it.

She spent a few more minutes reading the rest of the column. It was, for the most part, a simple accounting of the Fourthborn Blade-Petal’s deeds in combat. It was capped with a description of how the princess, her body falling apart even more rapidly than most naga, had chosen to become a guardian spirit to protect these shrines.

Asa turned away from the column and faced Rem directly. “We can’t let the villagers loot this place any more than they already did. This site’s much too important. We need to protect it and bring scholars to document it. Naga scholars, preferably. They deserve the chance to rediscover some of their own history.”

“Villagers really won’t like that, Rem muttered. ”There goes our pay.”

“Pretty sure they weren’t paying us anyhow,” Asa replied.

She stared at the wind spirit of the naga princess for a few moments, and then a suspicion dawned on her. She quickly read over the column one last time.

“Rem, let’s head back above and release the princess,” she said. “I think I know where the ward was.”

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Asa and Rem spent the next three hours carefully mapping out the spirit’s route. They had a few close calls as they followed the spirit from above— especially when a rock came loose under Rem’s foot and clattered to the ground below.

They managed to evade the attention, though, and by mid-afternoon, they had a map of the spirit’s patrol route.

“It’s a ward,” Rem said.

Asa nodded. “It’s a ward. This explains all of it. The princess’ features are messed up not because of a fight, or degradation, but because she was never supposed to hold this form— she was supposed to perpetually blow through the spellforms of a ward.”

“It doesn’t explain all of it, though,” Rem pointed out. “Why did she stop?”

Asa shrugged. “Maybe it was the weird windstorm, maybe something else caused it and she produced the weird windstorm— I’ve got no idea how to tell.”

“Can you fix her?” Rem asked.

Asa smiled. “Now that I know what she was supposed to do? No question.”

“Villagers won’t like that much,” Rem commented.

Asa’s smile grew even wider. “Nope. And they’ll like it even less when we reclaim the mementos they stole from the shrines.”

Rem didn’t even try to stop himself from smirking this time.

Banishers might be among the weakest of mages, might have mana reservoirs too small to cast most spells, but absolutely no one in their right mind messed with them. Even archmages were cautious around banishers. 

Asa spun her bracelet again, and this time, the half-dozen bound spirits and elementals inside began to stir.