Night had fallen by the time I departed. I rose into the sky and headed immediately westwards. The two gargoyles that had accompanied me so far, stopped their circling of the tower to fly to either side of me.The maps I had told me I was headed through the lands of Baron Pulk and further west were the lands of Count Hirkley.

Baron Pulk had been one of the nobles at the Duchess’s ball who had requested I lift his villages and towns, though he had also told me that many of the villages were lost in the war. Where his lands didn’t have any quartz that he knew of, he had agreed to grant me the cores of any dungeons found in his lands. Count Hirkley was a man I had never met, nor interacted with, so I could only assume that he would appreciate me saving the lives of his citizens and offer the same restitution.

It took me four days of casting the spellwork that would lift villages and towns to complete my journey westward into Freetoni lands. The kingdom armies that had once defended the western Barony of Eistoni had marched eastward, and I could see the signs of their battles as I followed their trail from the sky. Bands of soldiers, most five hundred strong, still scouted these lands, but I took care not to leave them stranded atop a plateau.

The Freetoni lands were much more ravaged by the ongoing war than the lands of Eistoni. Many of these lands in the northern half of the duchy had been gained and lost during previous wars. Broken citadels and overgrown ruins of past keeps were more common than the populated villages or towns in this duchy. In times of peace, these places became the hunting grounds for adventurers seeking lost items of power or to slay monsters who had made these places their dens.

While I tried to overlook these abandoned ruins, many of them were sites of battles I remembered. The sight of them made me feel as though the ghosts of fallen comrades and bitter enemies still haunted. I might have lifted one or two such sites onto plateaus as well, just because of those memories.

A few times I found myself floating above ongoing battles and fighting my desire to join. Now that the effects of the Asrid tea were controlled, I could recognize that desire as patriotic nostalgia instead of something else. The armies of Mirktal seemed to be in a full retreat and only stopping to do battle when they could not escape.

Yet, I didn’t stop my actions there. After completely raising the towns and villages in western Freetoni, I headed south into Birktoni. I already raised some plateaus across the southern part of this duchy, but I made a more concerted effort to raise lands closer to the center as I headed south.

Two things were pushing me in this direction. The missive from the king asking for assistance against a hydra was one. I had doubts as to his motives and suspected a trap, but that didn’t mean I would not act should innocent lives be at risk.

The other concern was the request from the bloodmage. I had put off consideration of any debt I owed to his people on the account that it was an action taken during war, but the further south I traveled the more I saw wild animals, beasts, and monsters headed north. I wasn’t ready to open that barrel in my mind, to consider how I felt if I truly were responsible for the deaths of half his people. I didn’t know if I ever would be. Yet, if raising their lands on plateaus to save some might mitigate that guilt if I opened it later, then I felt the need to do so.

I had been away from my tower on this business for almost three weeks when I finally came across the Hydra the King had mentioned. It was a hot afternoon, and I could see the terror-filled looks of soldiers as they fled through the shadowed corridor created by two plateaus raised close together. I headed in the direction they fled from and found more and more signs of battle. Broken catapults and crushed soldiers marked the battlefield around a pillar of stone that stood eight times the height of a man.

The hydra curled around the base of that pillar, but its attention was at the top. The heads snapped in an attempt to eat the one figure that stood there. At first, I suspected a mage, given the pillar on which they stood. Yet, as I flew closer, I realized the man was an alchemist of some sort. Beside him on the pillar were two crates of potions that he reached into and threw down onto the monster. I could hear his curses and vulgarities in the air before I got a good look at his face.

“Vile beast! I’ll not die today! No! I’ll make you wish the dead sea gods never birthed your kind as I boil your blood and grind your teeth! You have chosen the wrong enemy to make this day! Your scales will make a fine rug and your teeth a comb! I’ll breed your children with goats and feed them your flesh!”

The alchemist, between those and even worse vulgarities, threw another bottle at one of the heads. I watched as it exploded in a great ball of flames that didn’t seem to do more than blind the creature. I could have let the fight continue, but I was afraid the fellow would run out of potions and become food before I could act. With a swift casting of my improved fire blade spell, I cut the hydra in two.

The hydra's heads snapped a few more times, not realizing its death before it slid in two halves down the pillar. The alchemist stopped in shock; a potion held over his head. Now that I was closer, I could easily make out the signs of alchemy. He had burn-scars across his skin and face. Long white hair, long-neglected, grew in varying spots on his otherwise bald head. His eyes pointed in two different directions.

A good alchemist, despite the wild appearance, as he looked nearly sixty and had survived his own experiments. He wore a thick leather smock with thick gloves and a large satchel across his back.

“No!” he screamed in outrage, “If you damaged its heart I will—” he paused in his hoarse screaming as he seemed to take a look at me for the first time. “My apologies wizard, thank you for saving me!”

I waited for him to say more, but the man quickly scrambled down the enormous pillar at a speed that made me wonder if I had mistaken his age. I had no love for alchemists, as a profession. The majority I had met never seemed to be right in the head, and could go from calmness to belligerently violent in a moment's time.

“You must have been who they were waiting on,” the man said when he reached the bottom. He hadn’t looked twice at me and seemed to only have eyes for the corpse of the beast before him. “Yes, yes. Eyes and heart are in perfect condition! This is exactly what I needed. Troll blood is too volatile, but this will be wondrous!”

He pulled his satchel from his back, and withdrew a long, thin knife, and began cutting into the monster. I watched him for a few moments, ensuring that I wouldn’t interrupt his work before I inquired, “You say they were waiting on me?”

The alchemist paused in his examination of an eyeball larger than his head, one he had been holding close to his face with two hands, to turn to me and speak, “Oh, yes! Yes, they were, yes, yes. Those soldiers were expecting you to land on that pillar to fight the beast! Ha! Imagine their surprise when they got me! Had their catapults and ballista aimed right at me and couldn’t fire a thing!”

I tilted my head to the side. I knew the answer, and yet I felt the need to hear it spoken out loud, “They weren’t aiming at the Hydra?”

The alchemist carefully placed the eyeball down on the ground and started moving towards the main body of the beast with his knife readied. “The Hydra, you say? Is that the name of this monster? Not the Pestilence?” He shook his head and then began to carefully cut away a section of the scales. I could see his arms shake with the amount of strength he had to use until he decided to climb atop of the body and apply his body weight into prying a scale loose.

“Well, yes. Alone it is a hydra, such as this one. The Pestilence is the all of them.”

The man grunted with exertion and a scale made a squelching noise before I heard a snapping sound and it flew off. The alchemist, unbalanced by the scale’s removal slipped and slid face down the side of the beast until he hit the ground. He jumped up quickly enough and dusted himself off before climbing the body again, though he spoke between heavy breaths as he spoke, “All of them? There are more of these beauties? What an excellent, excellent thing!”

I sighed and reminded myself that I had chosen to attempt to engage in conversation with this man. “Excellent? If you mean so many of the beasts that you cannot see the ground beneath them for miles around, then perhaps my understanding of excellence is different than yours.”

The alchemist had been cutting away at the meat beneath the removed scale but stopped in his motions until he was completely still. I could see my words piercing whatever layers of fume-clouded his mind. After a moment, he whispered, “That many. That many is not excellent at all. Decidedly not excellent. Not good, either. That would be,” his mouth moved but no words came out.

“Bad?” I suggested.

His eyes lit as if he had just discovered the notion, “Yes! Bad. That would be bad. Very, very bad. Very, very, very, bad.” Then, he went back to cutting into the monster, throwing out pieces of meat or organs as he dug into the beast.

I waited for a few more minutes while he worked before I turned as if to leave. That was when I heard him cry out, “Wait! Wizard, wait!”

I glanced back to see him, his head sticking out of the hole he had made and waving his hand in the air.

“Yes?” I had dealt with enough men such as this in my many years to know that sometimes it is better to simply leave than waste my time.

“Wizard, you saved my life! You did! I was going to die, I believe it. I do! I owe you a debt, so I offer you a deal. A reward. A deal you will want, I assure you! No alchemist is my match for a reason, and I will show you a secret! Yes, my secret. You must swear to me on your magic or your staff, you will keep this secret, but I can show you! And repay my debt.”

I didn’t necessarily feel that the man was indebted to me. It was true I saved his life, but if that was currency, then there were many outstanding debts I could collect on. Neither did I want yet another person walking around calling me savior. I weighed the matter in my mind for a few moments before I inquired. “How long will this take?”

That unruly-looking alchemist grinned at me. “Not long! Not long at all! I will show you my secret! The secret to immortality!”