What We Do to Survive

“Yes, just like that. Steady…” Janna lay silently on the cleared table, my hands resting gently on her bare belly. Her eyes were closed, but even through her meditative trance I could see the look of intense concentration on her face. I continued to whisper directions and encouragement in her ears even as tendrils reached down through her skin, helping direct and shape her mana into the correct configuration.

“A little bit more now, a nice smooth turn… Oh dear.” I winced as I felt her overcompensate, pulling my tendrils back just in time to avoid the worst of the uncontrolled collapse. Her entire body flinched and I clicked my tongue in sympathy. That sort of backlash wasn’t nearly as deadly as if she’d been trying to cast a proper spell and failed, but it still hurt like a bitch.

Her breathing quickened and I stepped to the side as she opened her eyes and sat up slowly. Half way through, she cringed back in pain, but continued anyway until she was sitting primly on the table, feet tucked up beside her.

“That was a good attempt. I think a few more days of practice and we should be good. Maybe as early as Tuesday if you take the time to practice properly.”

She smiled brightly, then winced again in pain. The damage from that sort of backlash wasn’t exactly physical and went away quickly, but it was unpleasant while it lasted. I’d spent long weeks meditating on my bed after I’d found that lying down made the pain go away faster.

“It seems like you’re having the most trouble with the second to last section. I suggest focusing on exercises two and five from our last session, though you should still practice a few of the others as well. I don’t think the last bit will be particularly difficult for you, but I guess we’ll see next week.”

She nodded gingerly, “That sounds good, thank you Orion.”

“Well, I don’t think we’re going to get any more work done today. I doubt you’ll be in any shape to practice delicate mana manipulation for another half hour or so and we’re just about out of time anyway.”

“Yes, I’m afraid not. I think I will stay here a short while longer, I don’t want to wander,” she winced again, “the corridors like this.”

“Fair enough. I had the room booked for an extra hour in case we went long so you’re free to stay until then.” I grabbed my bag and turned to leave, but stopped when she called out my name again.

“Um, Orion. Would you be willing to tell me a bit more about yourself?” I turned around, a mild look of confusion on my face. “I mean, well, we’ve been classmates for two years now, and you’ve been teaching me a few times a week, but I feel I barely know anything about you. You never speak about yourself, your family, anything. I was… I was just curious.”

My first instinct was to refuse. Nothing good had ever come from sharing personal details and I was immediately suspicious of her intentions. I opened my mouth to say just that, then stopped and closed it. Hadn’t I just recently vowed to try and work on my social skills? This… Well this seemed like a relatively innocuous reason to do just that.

I wasn’t going to give anything particularly important away, not that there was much of anything important in my old life. Even if I did give away something that could be useful, we were in a meeting to work on her circulation. I could feel the vow at the edges of my soul, ensuring that anything we said or learned couldn’t be used against the other.

In the worst case, well, I got nothing out of it but didn’t really lose anything either. In the best case, perhaps I would build a better relationship with a future political powerhouse. Some measure of trust between us could be… valuable in the future for a number of reasons. Even if nothing really came of it, it was practice talking to people, and I absolutely did need more of that.

“Sure, I guess.” I said slowly. I set my bag back down and sat down at the table. “What do you want to know?”

She seemed just as surprised as I was by my sudden agreement. “Well, um… I don’t really know enough to ask anything specific. I guess just, whatever you want to share.”

What I wanted to share, was it? I didn’t really want to share anything, but I could try. “Well, you probably already know most of this, but I can try. I was born in Xethis, on the island of Kyra. I mostly grew up there, then left home in my early teens and spent a few years moving around. Eventually, I discovered that the Avalon gate was moving to Armouth, so I traveled there and spent a few months living by the border before the portal appeared. I took the tests and I guess I passed. You already know everything after that.”

She was quiet for a long moment, then finally asked, “What made you leave?”

A few years ago, I probably would have snapped at her. Instead, I simply bit out, “Personal reasons.”

Thankfully, she didn’t push, instead asking about some of the other places I’d lived. I spent another fifteen minutes reguiling her with some of the more innocuous stories from my travels, speaking of places like Iveria’s stunning coastline and the massive crystalline bridges that crisscrossed the canyons of Doria.

In return, she shared a little more about her own youth. Once she was old enough to travel, her uncle had taken her on trips all throughout Gulivine and some of its close neighbors. He was a diplomat of some sort I gathered, primarily serving as a go-between for Gulivine’s central government and the dozens of semi-independent regions and organizations that made up the Republic.

I was sure she was glossing over many details, just as I was, but she made it sound like a beautiful place. Perhaps someday I would go there, just take in the sights. It was something of a foreign idea to me, just traveling for pleasure, but an enticing one. Despite the hardships, I had enjoyed seeing the natural (and less natural) wonders of the world I’d passed. The world was a nasty, dangerous place, but there was a lot of beauty there too.

If I was strong enough, many of the issues with such an idea would just… disappear. Distance and travel times were much less of an obstacle if you knew higher circle teleportation spells. Borders and exorbitant fees similarly would be much less of an issue as well. Powerful mages could go where they pleased. It was an appealing thought.

I said something to that end, about maybe visiting some of the places she was describing, and Janna gave me a radiant smile. “In a few years, I would welcome a visit. I’m certain my family would be happy to host a capable mage like yourself.”

I ignored the unspoken caveat of us both needing to be alive for that to happen. Janna had already told me she wasn’t sure if she would stay past her fourth year and she also knew that I didn’t have any such option available to me. The only way I would be taking her up on that offer would be as an Avalon graduate, in which case I was sure her family would be very happy to have me.

Her comment also made my mind turn to my current plans. Depending on how things went over the next few weeks, well… I would have to adjust the hooks but Janna would look lovely on my wall. I ignored the painful twinge of my oath, I wouldn’t be able to use anything I’d learned over the past few weeks against her, but hopefully I wouldn’t need to.

It also reminded me that I really did need to get going though. I hadn't fed Rea since the day before and she was likely starving by now. The meal I'd given her should have tided her over nutritionally, but it didn't stay in the stomach long enough to stave off the feeling of hunger. I should probably let her out for a few minutes anyway, let her stretch her legs and move around a little. Unlike Mistletoe, who still looked to be in pristine physical shape after multiple weeks bound in place, humans couldn't survive like that.

“Well, it’s been good talking with you, but I really must get going.”

“Of course, of course, I’ve kept you for long enough. Thank you for indulging my curiosity Orion.”

I simply nodded in response, then grabbed my bag and walked briskly from the room. That had been a decidedly odd, if not unpleasant, way to end our meeting. I wasn’t used to, well, talking to people very much. I’d nearly forgotten what it felt like to engage in protracted casual conversation. It was… sort of nice.

Maybe I would practice some with Miranda when I had a chance. We were meeting again on Wednesday, both for another check in on her research into Briella and a second examination. I could spend twenty minutes getting to know her a little better. Despite her ‘working’ for me for two years, I didn’t really know much about her. I could ask about her family, see if she had any siblings or something. Yes, that sounded pretty normal.

Liam silently picked his way through the ruined city, hidden behind three layers of obscuring wards and shields. He had not come alone, though he could not sense most of them; he knew two dozen other Avalon mages were somewhere out in the city. This sort of opportunity was too valuable to miss, particularly in a city as wealthy as Port Anangala.

Despite the rather… questionable nature of what he was doing, he wasn’t particularly worried. The city certainly had mages who could detect him despite his precautions, but those archmages had much bigger things to worry about than little old him. For instance the cliff-face he could see in the distance, where a half dozen mages were working to prevent the massive palace situated at its peak from sliding into the ocean.

Even if they did decide to do something, he wasn’t particularly worried. He would just say that he was out looking for survivors, and what were they going to do? He might not be a graduate yet, but he was still a mage of Avalon. The city wouldn’t be willing to antagonize them over something so small, particularly at a time like this. It wasn’t like he was robbing or kidnapping anyone important.

Though the dragon had eventually been driven off, or well, had decided to leave, it had left a permanent scar on the city. Thousands of buildings had been ruined and the area near where the battle had taken place was leveled down to bedrock. The bay had flooded into the ruined city, worsening the already catastrophic damage and flooding further. It would take years and mountains of resources to recover from the night’s events.

Liam didn’t particularly care about any of that. These were not his people and this was not his country. Sure, he did business with them, but that was simply a matter of convenience. This continent had some fascinating materials that were difficult to source back home, but he could simply find a different supplier. Port Anangala was not the largest city on the continent, simply the closest to home.

What he did care about was what this opportunity meant for him. His eyes glowed behind his defenses as he scanned the buildings around him for valuables. His expanded sack was already half filled with enchanted objects, money, useful corpses, and whatever else he thought might be useful. Unfortunately, he’d had no luck so far in finding what he really needed.

Creating his invisible servants was a ruinously expensive proposition. The spell consumed a painfully large quantity of valuable reagents and mana in order to form the construct’s body. In his work at optimizing the process, he theorized that a properly prepared sacrifice, particularly one with a very strong water affinity, could sidestep many of the requirements. A water-aligned soul could be used as a core for the construct, replacing the most difficult to acquire materials.

Unfortunately, finding someone like that was easier said than done. There were a few students at Avalon who fit the bill, but they were either too young or too dangerous to bother with. He’d checked a half dozen slave markets, but magically valauble sentients like that were typically scooped up by larger players and never made it the open market. Similarly, it wasn’t easy to find someone like that just on the street, powerful affinities rarely appeared outside of established bloodlines. He’d seen several others with the needed traits, but none had been people he could just disappear.

He’d had high hopes for this excursion. The city was built by the ocean, which tended to promote water affinities. Similarly, those with such an affinity were unlikely to have been killed by the initial floodwaters but their caretakers may have, leaving the valuable materials unguarded.

He’d already seen several such people, though unfortunately none were sufficiently powerful for his needs. He’d still paralyzed and stowed them in some out of the way places, if he couldn’t find what he needed soon he would go back and take a few of them along instead. It wouldn’t be quite what he was looking for, but maybe he could distill several souls into a single core?

He stepped out of the way to let a squad of patrolling peace-keepers pass. None of them could sense him through his defenses and he had no reason to bother with them. Killing them would be much more effort than it was worth and they absolutely would try to investigate if they bumped into someone invisible wandering through the city. Furthermore, there was always the risk they would call support from one of the mages who could get in his way. That would be terribly irritating. Better to just stay out of their way.

Something in a nearby building pinged gently against one of his detection spells and he turned to study the house in question. It had once been a neat, three story home, likely belonging to some rich merchant or perhaps a noble’s second home. Now, most of the front wall had been torn away and he could feel several people huddled around a fire on the second floor. He could see the remnants of wide flowerbeds by the entrance, a recent trend in the city, though any flowers or shrubs it had once contained had been washed away by the floodwaters.

A magically augmented leap sent him soaring to land lightly on a third floor balcony overlooking the street. Disabling the alarm ward on the beaded door was the work of a moment and he silenced the beads so they would not give away his presence.

The room beyond was mostly untouched by the damage outside. The wards on the door had blocked out the worst of the rain and the flooding hadn’t reached nearly this high in this part of the city. He half-floated across the room, steps light enough that they didn’t even mark the striped fur rug that covered most of the floor. Two and Three floated past him from where they’d rested silently over his shoulders. They efficiently gathered anything that looked particularly valuable and was small enough to be worth collecting.

Liam focused on casting several specialized detection spells, looking for what had drawn his attention. It took nearly a full minute, the detection spell he’d used before was powerful but broad, but he eventually found himself looking at what seemed to be a blank stretch of wall just like any other.

He didn’t bother trying to find the hidden safe’s door, simply directing Two to reach through the wall and grab it. The polished stone offered no resistance to her transparent fingers, rock crumbling at a touch. Several defensive spells triggered, but could not identify a target to strike against. The waves of heat and energy that did activate washed ineffectively off his protections and had no effect on Two.

The safe came free with a crunch of shattering stone. Two turned, holding the warded metal box out towards him. Liam frowned. He recognized some of the protections on the box, and they weren’t something he could just deal with on the spot. It was surprising to see something so relatively impressive behind such meager protections. Hopefully whatever was inside would be worth the effort of taking it with him. If nothing else, it would make an interesting target to practice his ward cracking on, perhaps a chance to apply some of the techniques the Myrddin had taught his class the week before.

He stowed it in the expanded container with the rest of his loot, clicking his tongue as he realized he was just about out of room. Unfortunate, but there was nothing he could do about that. It was just about time to head back anyway, the portal would be moving in just over an hour. It was a shame he hadn’t found an appropriate target, but he would settle with what he’d gotten already. A few thousand pieces worth of materials and a half dozen new souls to play with was still a very nice outcome for the effort he’d expended.

“Two, Three, collect the materials we stowed and meet me at checkpoint one” he commanded silently. The two constructs did not respond, simply turning and floating away in the direction of where he’d left his new victims.

Dropping back down to street level, he wondered how Orion was enjoying the girl. He was somewhat curious what the younger man would do with her. He certainly hadn’t known how to safely contain a research subject during his third year, but Orion seemed like he knew what he was doing.

Hopefully he had the good sense not to just fuck her on his bed or something. ‘Killed by your own test subject’ was an embarrassing way to go for any mage, even more so if it was for such a simple reason. The girl didn’t really do anything for him, but the purple skin did have its own sort of appeal. Orion had always struck him as a breast sort of man…

Elpha Lifebane collapsed heavily onto the ground, soft grass cushioning her knees and fingers digging into loamy soil. She gasped desperately for air, head spinning wildly and bile rising in the back of her throat. Her hair and robes are soaked, a mix of blood and salt water dripping slowly onto ground, leaving blackened and burnt patches on the vibrant field.

With a pained sigh, she rolled onto her back and let her arms fall to her sides, staring unseeingly at the field of stars shining brightly in the clear night sky. Reaching into a hidden pocket on her robes, she withdrew a tiny vial and let two drops of the liquid gold liquid drip carefully into her open mouth.

She coughed wetly but swallowed, and some color quickly returned to her pale green features. Looking up at the half empty vial, she sighed again before returning it to the pocket it had come from. Only three doses left, but she would have been dead within the hour without it. Sea Dragon venom was not to be trifled with. Without the many rituals she had put her body through, she would have been dead long before she had a chance to escape.

Perhaps that had not been her brightest idea, but she hadn’t expected it to find her so quickly. A few more hours and she would have been out of the city, safely hidden in her heavily warded workshop a content away. Still, despite some major collateral damage, it had been worth it. She probably wouldn’t be able to return to this side of the world any time soon, which was somewhat unfortunate, but that was fine.

She sat up slowly, carefully renewing the layers of protective wards that covered her in a thick shell. It was an annoying precaution, particularly with how little good they had done her, but that was just her frustration poking through. Without the anti-scrying and presence suppression wards she’d been maintaining for the last week, she doubted she would have managed the theft in the first place.

Though she didn’t dare remove it from the pocket dimension she’d stored it in, she smiled as she thought about her prize. A ready-to-hatch egg of a millenia old dragon was a priceless treasure. At that age, dragons only laid eggs every few centuries and were very protective of their spawn. It made acquiring them nearly impossible. This egg was even more special than most, the dragon had invested a massive quantity of its life force into the fragile shell, ensuring the dragon it hatched would be a monstrously powerful creature from birth.

Despite her precautions, the dragon had somehow detected her presence. She’d barely managed to snatch the egg and teleport out before it annihilated her with its breath, and even then she hadn’t managed to avoid all of the caustic venom. It had chased her, tracking her chained teleportations until she made it back to the small workshop she had prepared with a long distance teleportation ritual ready to go.

She doubted it would be able to follow her now. She’d used exotic principles of gravity to form this ritual, making it much more difficult to track than a typical space based teleportation. Still, it was better not to dally for too long, lest it finish slaughtering the defenders and try to come after her again.

A thought summoned her staff to her hand from where it had fallen in the grass. She used it to push herself to her feet, groaning as strained muscles burned in her chest. She hadn’t accounted for the venom while calibrating the teleportation ritual. Combined with the rapidly compounding damage, the ritual had blown slightly off course and put immense strain on her body. Still, it had worked and she was alive, so that was fine.

She wondered how the city was fairing. She didn’t dare go back, dragonslayer she might be but she didn’t fancy another match with this monster. Even Avalon would not protect her if it could identify who she was under her wards. The Academy would go a long way towards shielding its graduates from the consequences of their actions, but not nearly that far.

Well, it didn’t really matter. In half an hour, she would be on the other side of the world, far outside the bounds of even that terrifying creature’s senses. She would ditch the robes, avoid reusing the same protective spells, and fabricate a new artifact to conceal her mana signature. It would be expensive, but a light price to pay in the end. She cackled quietly, caressing the dimensionally expanded ring on her pinky. Yes, well worth the price.