Broken Lands

Sophia froze with anxiety as she looked at the ritual for the last time before starting it. What if she’d gotten it wrong? She looked over the ritual one more time and paid extra attention to the inner circle. Yes, that was all right. It was the same inner piece she’d included in every ritual she’d ever done: a limiter that made the ritual begin slowly and allowed her to cancel it safely if something went wrong. It was basically never optimal but it was safe, and that was hugely important when working with something she might not have quite right. She was confident she’d gotten close enough that she’d have a chance to prevent catastrophe.

The only real remaining risk was that it might pick up dirt instead of water. That was the original purpose of the ritual, after all. Sophia was pretty sure she’d both remembered it correctly and altered the correct sections, but she hadn’t actually done anything with rituals in years. She might be completely wrong.

Was that really so bad? It would mean she’d wasted however long it took to set the ritual up, but the only other useful things she could have done were to guard the tunnel or try to organize the refugees. Revina was doing fine as a guard and the refugees were probably fine as well. If this worked, it would be worth it. If it didn’t, it was still worth a try.

She took a deep breath to settle her nerves and started.

Sophia chanted as she walked around the circle and slowly fed a tiny amount of mana into the ritual. That was half of the puzzle; the other half was keeping her mind (and, more importantly, Intent) on what she wanted to have happen. She wanted the water of the stream to spray into the air, like it hit something, but for it to go far higher and wider than it should have.

It started as a splash in the middle of the waterfall, a spot where the water went out instead of down. Before long, it headed up as well as out. It sprayed everywhere, completely uncontrolled. Sophia remembered that effect from her sand ritual. She was getting soaked, but that was less unpleasant than with sand.

Sophia sent a bit more mana into the ritual. She needed that if she was going to manage anything better than spraying the people next to the waterfall; that took very little energy, really, but it also didn’t accomplish her goals.

The ritual was as basic as you could get, without even candles. That meant she’d need more mana and she had to be even more careful with her Intent. She could only hope that she had enough mana to put a useful amount of water across the town; she couldn’t be certain she did. At least this was a simple ritual and one that wasn’t trying to be terribly precise. There was no way she was going to manage precision. She could, however, manage to keep most of the water off herself if she refined its direction a bit.

The spray from the waterfall rose a little with each step forward she took and each word she spoke. It also tightened; she was now only casting water at one side of the stream instead of both. A bit more and it finally arced over the heads of Sophia and Dav. She felt chilled despite her armor. At least she wasn’t getting much wetter.

Sophia kept moving. The spray from the waterfall now rose more than twice their height of the waterfall at its peak; that wasn’t enough, not when she had to get it to the far side of the town and reach even the peak of the Mayor’s mansion. It was still a good start, so she shifted her focus to getting it to move more towards the town. That made it spread in that direction, but that was all to the good since she had to cover quite a bit of town. She tried to pull the sides in a bit as well. There was no reason to rain outside the town.

Step by step and word by word, she eased the water towards the town. When it first reached over the wall, Sophia was grateful that the ritual, like any ritual, pulled a good portion of its power from ambient mana; she could already feel hers dropping. She still had a lot, but there was no way she could have managed this under her own power.

Several minutes after Sophia’s waterfall reached the town, Dav turned to her. “Do you want me to see what the water’s hitting and how well it’s working, or should I stay here to guard you against beavers? There haven’t been any beavers yet, but there was that one that attacked Revina.”

Sophia gave Dav a dirty look. She couldn’t stop chanting or she’d break the ritual; how was she supposed to tell him which option she wanted?

The chances of a beaver attacking were pretty low, even though she was next to a stream; there was no beaver dam nearby. She needed to know if she was getting enough water on the places that needed it to actually put the fires out. She was afraid that she might not be, that she might be just making a gentle mist over the town that wouldn’t do anything. Alternatively, maybe she was only getting the water to a small part of town?

The best thing she could think of to do was to hold up a single finger, trying to indicate that she wanted the first option.

Dav frowned. “You want me to wait?”

Sophia shook her head. She could do that much, at least. She waved a hand at the town.

“Oh, you want me to check on the town and the water?” Dav guessed with his eyes on Sophia.

Sophia nodded emphatically.

Dav didn’t ask any more questions; instead, he hurried away at a run. The lack of his presence made maintaining the ritual somehow even more boring but it also made keeping it consistent even more important. If she allowed it to shift, whatever he told her about what he saw might not be accurate because it might have changed.

When Dav returned, it was at a full run. He skidded to a halt in the mud a little ways from the ritual circle and panted for a moment before he could actually make intelligible words. “You’re, that is, the water’s almost all landing in the city. It’s doing well at putting out the exterior fires, but some of the fires are inside buildings. It also only covers about a quarter of the town.”

Sophia was actually really pleased with that. She didn’t expect to easily extinguish anything the water couldn’t get at. The fact that what it could get at was starting to put fires out meant that she was doing something useful. She just needed to expand the far end a bit and move around where it hit. Once everything was wet enough, the fires should eventually fizzle out.

On Dav’s next trip, he went and found Revina. They blocked off the tunnel entrance, since they didn’t think they’d send anyone through it, and both came to the ritual circle with an updated report on how the water ritual was working.

The trip after that was just Revina; Dav stayed behind to guard Sophia, in case there were beavers. There weren’t any, but Revina somehow managed to find Arryn and Peaches. They were both soaked and unhappy. Peaches had a number of scorch marks in his fur, while Arryn looked like he’f caught not only the charred end of a burning log on one of his legs but a claw to the upper left arm. The injury didn’t seem serious, but he was still happy to stand in the mud near Dav’s healing beacon.

Sophia expected him to ask dozens of questions, but when her response to his first question, “How long can you keep this up?” was simply a shake of her head, he didn’t ask any more.

The last trip to town was made by Arryn riding Peaches. They were gone for several times as long as any of the previous trips. It made sense; Peaches didn’t walk all that quickly. It still took longer than Sophia expected, but Arryn’s first words when he returned made it make sense. “I’ve checked through the town and I can’t find anywhere that still has external fire. You can stop, Sophia.”

Sophia wanted to just drop the ritual, but that would be a very bad idea. If she was lucky, it would just get everything wet as the water fell. If she wasn’t lucky, the ritual circle itself could do something strange. An explosion was only the first possibility; there was a lot of power running through it, and letting it go wild might well cause a break that might create a different valid pattern that would have mana for an unpredictable period of time. She didn’t really believe all the stories she’d been told, but they achieved their purpose: she knew to properly close down a ritual.

Sophia changed her chant and walked slower as she pulled the focus of the water back from the town. It took about the same amount of time to return the water’s output to the stream as it had to reach the town originally. By then, the amount of mana she was running into the spell was nearly nonexistent; all she had to do was maintain the connection to the ritual, she didn’t have to supplement it the way she’d had to when she changed anything and especially not when she slowly grew the amount of water it moved.

Sophia came to a halt as the connection to the stream finally faded away. She kept chanting as she closed the ritual down. It was probably safe to drop it at this point, but you never knew exactly when it was safe, so it was best to get it as low as possible. If it were a better designed ritual, or she wanted to use the spot in the future for another ritual, letting it end properly would help to preserve the area. She didn’t care about that right now, but she still did what she’d been trained to do.

When it was finally done, Sophia sat down. She didn’t care that she was sitting in sticky mud; at that moment, she just wanted to be off her feet.

Arryn looked at her, nodded, then touched the ritual circle. “Did you mean to sear this into the ground?”

“Did I what?” Sophia looked at the scratches in the ground. She’d more than half expected them to be nothing more than lines in the mud, since she’d rained on it; she was a bit lucky that raining on the diagram hadn’t hurt anything important.

Or maybe she wasn’t just lucky; when mana was running through a ritual, it did tend to help it stay in place. It wasn’t perfect and she wasn’t good enough to actually incorporate protection of the ritual in her design, but it looked like it had done something. The cut in the earth Arryn touched didn’t smudge at all; instead, he smooshed some earth away from it. It seemed to have hardened. “No, it wasn’t intentional. Could be several reasons it happened, but I think it was mostly just how much mana was running through it.”

It had definitely pulled a lot of mana out of the area. Sophia wasn’t powerful enough to really feel the lack when she was in a low-mana area, but she could tell that she wasn’t pulling in as much ambient mana to fill her mana pool as normal. It was usually a completely unconscious action, just like generating mana in the first place, but at the moment she only felt her base mana generation without any help from the area around her.

Arryn nodded, then asked a question he’d danced around but never directly asked. “Who are you?”