We spoke more as we traveled back towards the gate to my home, casual topics such as slow growth of the plane and transporting earth as well as people. His plan to increase the speed seemed to be the grant of permission to build a tower and hold lands for each mage that contributed a certain amount. Likewise, druids would be granted forests and the like. I managed to speak to him about the inclusion of commoners from the other kingdoms, though we were both against slavery spreading to humanity’s new home.

I informed him of my progress in lifting plateaus, but also warned him of the threat of the Hydra Broodmothers, something he found equally alarming and fascinating. Yet, for all our small conversations, my mind was awhirl with the possibilities the stasis spell presented. If a spell could convert death mana to life mana, then what about fire to ice? Electricity to water? Could it be cast offensively? Certainly, it wouldn’t be a quick death, but a spell field that caused the effect could be a potential barrier against the Pestilence. The possibilities were many, and in a way, it felt as if I were torturing myself with distractions.

It was after we parted ways at the gateway to my home and I stepped through the portal that I became aware something was wrong. On the other side of the portal, I was greeted with many serious faces. Few could look me in the eyes, but Kine reluctantly stepped forward.

“Master, something horrible has happened.”

That was when they all began speaking at once. I quickly pieced together there was an attack and several deaths. An assassin managed to make it into one of the towers, disguised as a maid. Several guards and mages were dead. Not mages—witches. Pyl injured the assassin, though he was at death’s door. Loralie was dead. The seer was gone, possibly involved as well. Guards and wolves gave chase, but the killer escaped down a prepared rope off the plateau.

I found myself shaking with emotion. The recent visit with Alred and his grief had weakened me more than I suspected, and left me in a precarious position. Loralie’s death tipped me over that edge. The barrels in my mind creaked and cracked, and I felt myself sinking beneath decades of loss. Waves of emotion frightened me far more than even the eyes of the snake god. Those eyes were that of something unfathomably powerful. This was something that should be within my control but wasn’t.

I found myself howling with anger and pain as I flew above my tower. I summoned air elementals by the dozens and sent them north to find the killer. I envisioned long and painful tortures that I would inflict on the culprit.

It wasn’t that I loved Loralie. I barely knew her, for all we lived close by for so long. It wasn’t her beauty or death that truly move me. It was the loss of potential. The loss of what she represented. How dare anyone take that from me?! I was so close to having an answer, to finalizing my longevity spell. So close to never being alone again.

The gargoyles flew around me in a deadly circle. The elementals around my tower and in my lake thrashed about violently. My fifth-tier earth elemental squirmed and convulsed, its tentacles writhing and slapping about in panic. Yet, I didn’t care. Those elementals were tied to my mind, but they were only reacting to a thimble's worth of my pain. They wanted to experience what this world had to offer? I would let them.

By the time my howl had finished, I had hundreds of wind elementals winding through the forests and above glades to the north of my tower. The sight I could see through them was fractured, the different views I could see painful, but I welcomed it. It was a weak pain compared to the waves that racked against me.

Yet, my attention fell away from the hundreds as one elemental found the seer. The woman, I met only a few times, could scry through blood and peek into possible futures. I never put much stock into oracles, their prophecies had never been relevant to me. And if their powers had truly worked, then why was I the one who warned about the End of the Age? I flew north from my tower to get a better look at what my elemental had found, but when I arrived, I wanted to look away.

Yet, my mind couldn’t look away from her now. Her body sat cross-legged on a stone, with a wooden bowl held between her legs. Her torso had fallen back, and one arm and a finger pointed northeast. The bowl in her lap held blood and intestines, the requirements she needed for her spellcraft, but they weren’t animals’ this time. They were her own. Scrawled in blood on the stone she sat were three words. ‘Ask about Wavecrest’.

Was this another trap? A trick? A plot? Even as I sent more elementals in the direction her finger pointed; I didn’t dare trust it. The pressure of the hundreds I had summoned was beginning to hurt, and I could feel a pain in my head that was building, but I ignored it. The wind elementals flew faster at my demand, and I looked through their eyes in a way that I never had before.

It felt like my mind was beginning to fracture when I found the assassin. She had hidden in a hollow of a tree to sleep, using a leather cover over the entrance that had been made to blend in. A hiding spot prepared beforehand, and one that I would not have found had I not been pointed in the exact direction by a seer’s dead finger.

I dismissed many of the elementals as I went. My pain had given over to anger, and my anger guided my actions in a way that hadn’t happened in more than a hundred years. Part of me, a very small part, knew that I would regret anything I did while enraged, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. How many men and women had already died under my care? How many deaths could be laid at my feet? Why did this woman think that she could get away with creating more?

When I caught up to her, she was already running, sprinting away from her hiding spot. A change in command told the elementals chasing her to snatch her into the skies before me and hold her there. I looked over the woman. She was still dressed as a servant, though the clothing was torn and ripped. Her brown hair was a tangled mess. Upon seeing me, she spat in my direction, though the spit was torn away by the wind.

“Vengeance is ours! Our god demands retribution!” She screamed.

I simply stared at her, as I slowly realized my face had bent with anger and pain.

She continued, heedless of anything I might say, “Sena will fall! The entire country will be a slave before our god!” Her voice was growing hoarse with her screams as she continued extolling the northern god and insulting the Kingdom of Sena.

I ignored it as I struggled against myself. Part of me wanted to kill her immediately. A large part. Yet, I had been here before. I had raged and murdered in the name of vengeance, and that vengeance had been hollow. I knew that it would do nothing to soothe the pain I felt or calm the rage. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t kill her. Letting her free after she attacked my people was not something I was willing to do. That would just invite more killers.

No, she needed to die, and I needed it to be a message. My thoughts went back to a spell I had recently learned, the [Finger of the gods]. The spell was powerful enough that the flash would be seen across several kingdoms. I began building up the spell, its complexity higher than the normal lightning magic I used. Clouds began forming high in the sky, each one dark and foreboding. As I worked, a thought came to me, and on the briefest of impulses, I asked.

“Tell me of Wavecrest.”

Her anger and venomous words halted as soon as I said the name. Her face paled and her eyes widened. In detached observation, I noted that it could be an act but I wasn’t certain.

Just as quickly as it came, it disappeared. Her vitriol continued as if uninterrupted, “Just another village that will soon be chained by our god! Just like the rest of your pathetic country!”

“So, if I smite that village, it is nothing to you? If I leave it for the Pestilence to devour?” I asked though I regretted it as soon as I spoke. It felt as though I was being used as part of someone else’s plan.

The killer though, changed her words immediately, begging me not to harm the village and promising me anything and everything. She told me it was Sena that gave her orders, and blathered on about how long she worked for them. She told me Rhaela the Red was a spy, and many more secrets fell from her lips. I listened for a while, long enough to see that she believed her words. The names and dates of her previous targets were too detailed to be lies imagined on the spot.

When she finished, I simply flew away. I ignored her begging me not to visit my vengeance on Wavecrest and the words after were lost on the wind. When I was far enough away, hovering over the dead body of the seer, I turned about and cast the spell I had prepared.

A bolt of lightning, bigger and brighter than any I had ever seen or imagined crashed down from the clouds onto the woman. The ground beneath it sprayed into the air, fully grown trees flew away with the dirt and rocks. Lightning, smaller bolts darted between the debris and that ground, before arcing away for miles.

Cracks began forming as if giant daggers were cutting deep into the earth with jagged lines, and I watched as the ground shook afterward, worse than most of the earthquake spells I knew. Even as far away as I was, my wards still felt battered by stray bolts of lightning. The stray bolts were like hairs from a shedding dog compared to the original.