emergencycomplaints

Book 3, Chapter 8

I used the teleportation platform to send us to Ghalin, but only because it saved me some effort having to draw my own circle to spread the effect to everyone instead of just myself. All of the Ghalin group came with us, even the wounded ones. Our own healers had done a credible job patching them up over the last few hours, good enough that the injured could use their own mana to recover from there. Even without any sort of real training, self-healing invocations were practically instinctive....

Book 3, Chapter 7

Nothing that I was personally working on was time-sensitive, but I had some collaborative projects with Tetrin and Hyago. I went to Tetrin’s workshop first, mostly because I knew he’d be there. I’d need to find Hyago later, which would probably involve some scrying to track him down. He tended to roam around the valley, working on whatever caught his eye. Over the last few years, I’d helped him expand his repertoire of plant-based magic considerably, and at this point, it was anyone�...

Book 3, Chapter 6

“Absolutely not,” Mother said.

“Not a chance,” Father said at the same time.

Senica stood there, hands on her hips, face worked into a scowl, and demanded, “Why not?”

“You’re twelve!”

“Gravin is eight!” Senica shot back. “He left home when he was three.”

“You know that’s not the same.”

“This is so unfair!”

Our parents exchanged glances. Mother sighed and said, “I’m sorry, sweetie. You’re just too young for thi...

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 star...

Book 3, Chapter 4

In my first life, I’d never celebrated my birthday. As a child, I couldn’t have even if I wanted to. Once I’d grown older, it had just seemed like a waste of time. There was nothing there to celebrate. And then, finally, by the time I’d come fully into my power as an archmage, friends were few and far between. It wasn’t unusual to go decades without seeing casual acquaintances, and those few real friendships I’d developed inevitably ended with the other person dying.

My rein...

Book 3, Chapter 3

As far as surprised went, they’d certainly pulled this one off. Of all the things I’d thought might be going on, a birthday surprise was not on the list, mostly because my birthday wasn’t for another three months.

“Uh…”

As my mind whirled with calculations, trying to figure out what season we were in specifically on the off-chance that I’d gotten things wrong, my parents approached with smiles on their faces. “I know we’re a week early, but it seemed like the bes...

Book 3, Chapter 2

After I relented and helped Senica get cleaned up—a spark of lightning caused the black mass to completely harden and lose its adhesive property—we headed back out of the cave.

“What are you going to do about that stuff coming through the wall?” Senica asked.

“Pull the stone back open and kill it, then close everything up again.”

“Is it a monster? It didn’t look like it was alive.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” I said. “There’s a solid core somewh...

Book 3, Chapter 1

Black slime steadily oozed out of a crack in the wall. There was already a pile of it up to my knee, and it would only continue to grow until the monster had seeped entirely past the barrier I’d built to protect my home from exactly things like this.

Finding and sealing off the tunnels leading into the valley I’d claimed as a sanctuary for my family had taken months of work, and to say I was displeased that something had somehow wormed its way through the ten feet of solid rock I’...

Keiran 3: Ashes of the Empire

It’s been four years since Keiran learned the truth of what happened to his world while he was gone, four years of research and marshaling his resources, four years of experimentation in a futile attempt to recover a faint echo of what all has been lost. His refuge has grown in size and population, and he’s begun to spread knowledge of the old ways of magic in an attempt to revive it and r...

Book 2, Chapter 81

Before I made my way back to Keeper, I took some time to loot the dead. For the most part, I hadn’t been terribly impressed with the creations of the latest generation, though the more I learned, the less I faulted them for their lack of ability. It seemed like Derro had already been on the back end of nowhere even before a moon got destroyed and the world’s mana core was broken. If anything, Monarch’s however-many-generations-back grandfather getting exiled here had probably resulted i...

Book 2, Chapter 80

I floated in the darkness and watched as the wards, so painstakingly and carefully crafted, stretched and twisted beyond their tolerance. The shape of the room they’d been anchored to had been torn apart, and they could no longer hold. Even without that, they’d drawn their power from Monarch’s throne, and that was gone now, a thousand feet below me and broken into pieces on the ground.

Monarch was not dead, but then, I hadn’t expected that to kill her. She was enough of a mage t...

Book 2, Chapter 79

Monarch was smaller in real life than I’d assumed from the scrying spell. It was only after I saw her in person for the first time that I realized that she was barely taller than my sister. Admittedly, Senica had hit a growth spurt in the last year, but even I came up to Monarch’s chest.

She was utterly dwarfed by the throne she sat on. Whoever it had been built for must have been a large person, and Monarch appeared to be nothing more than a child perched on it. For all of that, I ...

Book 2, Chapter 78

I used my own scrying magic to find my way after confirming Keeper’s information. There were a bunch of ways to get there, and I suspected there’d be traps in all of them. If Monarch was smart, and this base was as permanent as it appeared, those traps had been laid prior to me being born. I didn’t have any indication of which way would be the best, but to be fair, if they were magical traps, I was going to break them and steal the mana.

If Monarch had been using a ward stone, I w...

Book 2, Chapter 77

“I’ll give you a minute to try to process this on your own before I snap you out of it,” I said.

Neither of us knew exactly how many lifetimes’ worth of memories were stored in Keeper’s eye, but she’d had the memory sphere for over a decade now. Just having all of her own memories come back to her at once was likely to overwhelm her mind. She would need to adapt to that and learn how to sort through it before she delved deeper.

There was only so much I could do to prep...

Book 2, Chapter 76

Other lights flashed red as we walked. The two mages with me muttered back and forth to each other and cast glances in my direction, which I ignored until one of them tried to stop me.

“Those lights are letting someone know we’re here. Are you sure you—” he started to say.

“I’m following the signal back to one of the Wolf Pack mages,” I told him. “It was easier than trying to find her myself.”

That seemed to mollify them, at least for now. I didn’t figure...

Book 2, Chapter 75

I would have thought that my new entourage would tell me where things were in the Old Grounds. I’d expected them to know which way to go. It seemed logical to me. That was half the reason they were here, after all.

Somehow, I was still channeling three different scrying spells while I pieced together a map of the underground portion of the palace. It might not have been as ridiculously huge as the part people still lived in, but it was more than big enough to get lost in. I hadn’t y...

Book 2, Chapter 74

As it turned out, the Hierophant wasn’t much help at all. He did stop the rest of his personal guard from attacking me when they caught up to us. It was no surprise that they were jumpy; the guy they were supposed to protect had run off after his two mages to stop them from trying to kill me and caught his entire guard flatfooted in the process. In their positions, I might have attacked first and asked questions later, too.

Once he was safely surrounded by elites and mages, and the tw...

Book 2, Chapter 73

“You have something in mind?” Tetrin asked.

“I’m building something,” I said. “It involves a lot of transmutation and enchantment. Some inscription, too. I can do the work myself, but it’d be easier with some help.”

This whole idea hinged on the man not having any loyalties to his cabal, which wasn’t that far-fetched. I’d need to keep him separate from my new village at first to protect its location until I was sure he wouldn’t try to betray me, but if he tru...

Book 2, Chapter 72

My first problem was the sole remaining elite. He wasn’t terribly close to me, but his draw stone tower shield represented a variable to all spell work that could trip me up if he was quick or clever. I couldn’t rely on Ash to kill him for me, either. I was the interloper here and far, far closer to the man than she was. Then again, I wasn’t the one who’d killed thirty of his friends.

I revised my assessment then. My first problem was Ash. She was chanting something under her br...

Book 2, Chapter 71

It wasn’t so much the eight guards surrounding me that were the problem, but the hundred more in the palace that might find us before I took care of this group. The best option was to flee, and I could get away easily, but I needed to go deeper in. Every enemy I left behind was one who might stab me in the back later.

This wasn’t quite a frontal assault, but it definitely wasn’t an infiltration. I’d known going in that I wasn’t going to be doing things the easy way and that I�...

Book 2, Chapter 70

The information Haze had given me in exchange for her life was in line with my own observations about Monarch’s base of operations. She was in the very center of the inner city, in the Palace of the Hierophant. More specifically, she was underneath it.

Digging my way in was not feasible. It would take weeks and weeks to do, maybe months depending on what kind of defenses I found. Infiltration was more likely to succeed, but still had its own issues. Palace guards made enforcers, even ...

Book 2, Chapter 69

As the sun sank lower and lower toward the horizon, I began to fear that I’d overestimated Monarch’s ability to scry. The wards from my original hideout, where her mirror and mine were encased in stone and looked like nothing more than another chunk of rubble on the pile, had degraded to the point where I no longer considered them trustworthy. They’d do little more than provide some interference at this point, but they hadn’t quite run out of power.

Monarch hadn’t activated he...

Book 2, Chapter 68

I didn’t have it in me to be annoyed about my failure to gain mana from Hyago’s grow room. The unexpected presence of an ember bloom left me too excited to be concerned about that, not to mention I still had other options. If anything, I wished I’d taken the time to properly explore the first time I’d passed through his territory. If I had, that tree would already be a few hundred miles away.

It turned out the hardest part of robbing enforcers was deciding which groups to go aft...

Book 2, Chapter 67

I needed to use telekinesis to get the trapdoor open, and as soon as I did, I spotted the webbing of a privacy ward stretching across the hole. Whatever was down there, Hyago didn’t want anyone knowing about it. That probably meant it was valuable, which in this new world usually meant it had a lot of mana in it. Perfect.

As soon as I determined that these new wards were nothing but anti-scrying and mana shrouding enchantments, I dropped down through the hole in the floor. There was n...

Book 2, Chapter 66

My walk back gave me a lot of time to think. A four-day wait prior to the meeting was helpful to me since it allowed me to regain some of my spent mana, but I hadn’t been the one to suggest it. What did Monarch get out of the delay? Part of me suspected she was looking for the exact same thing I was: time to gather more resources. The Wolf Pack had cast at least two temporal scrying spells, and the necromantic ritual to create a vengeful phantasm was even more expensive.

It might just...

Book 2, Chapter 65

If not for the modifications I’d made to her vanishing knife, Haze probably could have snuck up on me.  I was tired from the back-to-back fights with Velvet and his vengeful phantasm, not to mention the infiltration and escape from his castle. It was the perfect time to ambush me, and if they’d sent anyone besides Haze to do it, I would have launched an attack already.

But the truth was that I didn’t want to fight right now if I didn’t have to. This night had taken more man...

Book 2, Chapter 64

The only decision I had left to make in this castle was whether to take the time to snatch up the journal and reference book Velvet had been using when I’d come in. I wanted it, but I’d run out of time, and it was at least twenty feet away in the wrong direction.

Fortunately, magic solved a lot of problems. I cast telekinesis on the books while I ran back into Velvet’s bathroom. It still cost me a second at the wall, since I had to wait for the spell to come back to me so I could ...

Book 2, Chapter 63

Using a wand to bypass the direct contact requirement of a spell wasn’t a new trick to me, nor was it all that useful. It gave a few feet of range, even with a well-crafted wand, and could easily double the mana cost of the spell if the caster didn’t understand how remote casting actually worked.

This attack was exactly the level of sophistication I’d come to expect from a Wolf Pack mage when they weren’t employing that cache of artifacts some of them carried. That tempter’s t...

Book 2, Chapter 62

I couldn’t walk directly through the wall into the office Velvet was using for two reasons. First, it didn’t have an exterior wall, so the closest I would have been able to get was a closet nearby. Second, it was part of one of the few spaces that was still warded. I probably could have gotten through those wards and popped into the part of Velvet’s suite of rooms that did touch an exterior wall, but I preferred to spend that time hidden indoors.

I passed through the wall...

Book 2, Chapter 61

I knew how to get through the wall without having to cross the underground lake now. The biggest problem was that a wide street circled the outside of the inner wall, one that was properly maintained and patrolled regularly. I really only needed about thirty seconds to pick my way through the wards without setting them off, but I ended up walking for over an hour without finding a single stretch of the street without people on it.

I could just go through and not worry about the witnesse...