As the days passed and both the demon summoner and The Games of Roal receded into memory, things started to return to normal in Generasi.

Classes resumed, that atmosphere of competitiveness—as folk had prepared for The Games—faded, and summer grew closer to fall. Soon, the greatest concern the students of the University had wasn’t who would win medals and prizes for feats of combat and magic, or where the demon summoner would strike next; it was about more ordinary things, like assignments and upcoming exams. Life had returned to normal, or as normal as life could be in an entire city of wizards.

The summer semester—though extended for an extra week—raced toward its conclusion, and Alex found himself and his friends once again buried under a small mountain of work.

Isolde became her usual intense study-mode self: exhausted as the days went on, spending more time in the company of books than people. The cabal met up to study together through the remainder of the semester with Khalik and Alex quizzing each other from their Magical Botany notes.

“You would think that the destruction of the botanical gardens would have made Salinger go a little lighter on us,” the prince groaned as he copied a diagram of a magical plant from a textbook. “I think he’s actually become even more filled with zeal!”

“Yeah, I thought he’d be busy focusing on replanting,” Alex said. “But, somehow he’s found plenty of time to make us identify every bloody plant that’s ever felt the touch of sunlight and mana.”

“Oh, it can’t be that bad.” Thundar looked up from his own books. “You think it’s going to help with the expedition? I mean, identifying plants sounds like it’ll be a good skill to have when we’re out in the wilderness.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “It’s definitely going to help, but for now, I just want a break. Ugh, well, we’re getting through it, and at least it’s better than fighting for our lives.”

“Indeed,” Isolde’s voice came from behind several towers of books. “I have the sense that soon we will have enough excitement in our lives. I, for one, welcome a return to normalcy.”

“I suppose I do too,” Khalik agreed. “Speaking of things returning to normal, how are those skin-renewal treatments going?”

“Quite well,” Isolde said. “I am fortunate that the claws did not penetrate much deeper than they did: the scarring should be essentially invisible soon enough. And Svenia has made a full recovery.”

“Good, is she back to work?” Thundar asked.

“Hogarth and I insist that she rest for a little longer, though she is growing restless. She feels she is more than ready to return to her duties.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “Well, she’s not the only one who’s been eager for things to return to normal.”

Shale’s Workshop had called the staff back to work shortly after the memorial service. Lagor had been busy, picking up the slack for his assistants while Shale’s was closed for the period of remembrance. But, even though they were back working at full capacity, he seemed to be giving Alex special consideration even after his sling had come off.

“Don’t push yourself too hard now,” the crafter had said one shift. “The tool room does need reorganising, but it’s not urgent or anything. Take your time with it.”

“I’m alright, I’m alright, boss,” Alex had laughed. “I’m not made of glass. I’m fully recovered and ready to go, seriously.”

But Carmen and Ekebe—who’d been hired to replace Minervus—seemed to be going out of their way to see that Alex had a lighter load.

“I’ve got this, Alex,” Carmen had said toward the end of one shift. “Why don’t you head out a little early, I can finish cleaning up.”

“Carmen, I’m fine,” He’d said. “You’re the one with little ones waiting for you to come home. I’m good, I’m good.”

It was actually a good thing Alex was healthy again: Shale’s needed all hands on deck. After the demon summoner was caught, there’d been a spike in orders for golems for both personal defence, and the defence of customers’ estates.

“This always happens,” Lagor said. “About thirteen years ago, a great flock of harpies made a lair about fifteen miles up the coast. They would swoop down on the countryside and attack estates out there, and all sorts of rich folk began wanting golems: at the time, we were working nearly twenty four-hours a day just to fill all those orders, just like now. Good for business, bad for health, just like now I’d say. But it’ll all balance out, it always does. It’s not everybody who can afford what we make, so when the wealthy get their orders filled, things’ll quiet down.”

Working a few night shifts—not just his regular evening ones—since things were so busy, meant Alex would still be there when the day shift came on duty. He’d run into Sim Shale a few times and their encounters had been surprisingly awkward, which confused Alex since Sim had seemed so friendly at The Games. At first, the boss’ son seemed to be going out of his way to avoid him—and the young wizard began to wonder if he was harbouring ill feelings about his Duel by Proxy loss—but he soon found out that there was something else going on.

Bright and early one morning, while Alex was taking off his safety equipment, he overheard Sim talking to another staff member just outside the room he was in.

“-keep thinking that could’ve been me on that beach,” he heard Sim’s voice saying. “You know, if Bruce and Kato had been free, we would’ve had enough people to form our own Grand Battle team like we were planning to. And we would’ve been there.”

“It didn’t work out that way, Sim,” another voice said. “Just thank your lucky stars your friends couldn’t make it. I was in the audience and—trust me—that was bad enough. Can’t imagine what it was like for the ones on Oreca’s Fall Island.”

“I don’t…I keep wondering if I could’ve made a difference,” Sim said. “It keeps playing out in my head at night…agh, but I’m no fighter. We all think we’re fighters until the fight actually starts.”

“True enough. Say, there’s that one guy that was at Oreca’s Fall, right? Roth, from the night shift? You talk to him?”

“Shh! He might still be here! Last thing I want is to bring all that stuff up to someone who went through it.”

Alex listened as their footsteps moved away from the door: he was a bit stunned. Aside from having one nightmare and a general sombre feeling after the battle, he’d bounced back fairly well emotionally, andphysically.

Meanwhile, Sim was beating himself up and he hadn’t even been there. Alex didn’t quite know how to feel about that. It reminded him in a way of how things usually went when people learned that his parents were dead, even though years had passed.

Their eyes often went wide, some would gasp, some would gape, many would stutter apologies for something that they’d had nothing to do with.

Some would say: “Oh poor you, I understand how much that must hurt.”

While McHarris had actually said: “I feel your pain, Roth…an uncle of mine got caught under his collapsing barn a few years back-” and then he’d gone on for what felt like forever about his own tragedies, quickly forgetting about Alex’s.

It seemed like people assumed that he must still be in emotional agony, but his pain had lessened. He’d learned to live with the loss.

There was a time when he’d even questioned himself, wondering if there was something wrong with him because years later—he wasn’t still emotionally destroyed. Had he gotten over their deaths too easily?

Sim’s reaction had dredged up those old questions, but now, they were about not still being a wreck because of what had happened on the beach.

Most people meant well, but got uncomfortable around grief and wouldn’t know what to say, so instead of saying that, they’d make assumptions about what the other person was, or should be feeling. There was no one way, or one right way to get through things.

The demon summoner had made a living hell for a lot of people, and some of them would be broken for the rest of their lives, but—just like with other tragedies—dwelling on them wouldn’t make any of them disappear like they’d never happened.

Leopold was going to be executed and Amir was in jail. Justice was going to be done.

All Alex could do was move on, remember, but not dwell.

“It’ll get easier, Sim,” Alex said to himself quietly as he put the last of his supplies away. For a moment, he paused, remembering when Minervus had been in these very rooms. Now, he rarely thought about him. “Life happens and to get through, we just gotta keep moving forward.”

Maybe one day he’d get to tell Sim that.

###

“The thing to remember is that while there are different types of soil, you can convert one to the next,” Salinger said from the front of the class. “And that’s a very important skill for any wizard who plans to specialise in magical botany. Non-wizards have to contend with being completely at the mercy of nature and climate. We? We can…tweak things a bit. And that’s an important thing when you’re faced with a problem like this.”

Salinger gestured all around the class.

It was early morning in the botanical gardens, and instead of being surrounded by the lush vegetation that the class was normally nestled in, it looked like their lesson was taking place in the aftermath of a war zone. Replanting had been going on for a while, but the gardens still looked like…well, like they’d been the scene of an incursion from a horde of vicious demons doing what demons do….destroy stuff.

A lot of the earth had been torn up, the stones showed signs of having been recently repaired by magic and much of the plant life were just sprouts emerging from the earth.

“Sometimes you need to give the soil a bit of a magical push to get plants growing the way you want,” Salinger said, scooping some dirt from a pot and crumbling it between his fingers. “Especially if it wasn’t the best soil to begin with. I once had a garden that was mostly clay: it was great for growing irises, hostas, and echinacea, but not much else. Well, one month, we had so many downpours, all that water eventually swept most of the plants and a lot of the soil away.”

He placed his hands on his hips. “I took a look at the ruins of my garden and analysed the remains of the soil and what I had left was junk: lots of rocks, very few nutrients. So, I cast a little spell called Alter Earth Composition, which doesn’t do much for the average wizard, but boy, can it do wonders for those of us who like to dig around in the dirt.”

To illustrate his point, he cast the spell on a pot of clay, and slowly, the soil changed until it had become a rich loam. A few months ago, Alex wouldn’t have recognized the difference between loam and mud.

“That is a useful spell,” Khalik said quietly. “I’ve already learned it in my earth magic class.”

One of the students put a hand up before Alex could respond.

“Yes, Avery?” Salinger nodded at the student.

“Could the spell be used on a mass scale?” Avery asked. “It sounds like it could revolutionize farming around the world.”

“It has,” the professor said. “And it’s been used here in Generasi a lot, but there are limitations. One problem is that magically altered soil—like a lot of transmuted materials—tends to revert back to its natural state after a time, and the greater the change in soil composition, the quicker it reverts. For example, if I tried to change pure sand into the freshest, moistest compost, it’d become sand again in a few hours. However, there are some ways around this.”

He gestured to some containers of sand, water and composted plants. “If you know the composition of both the soil you want to change, and the soil you want it to be, then you can get a little creative. If I added compost and water to the sand, then its composition would be much closer to compost already then—when I cast the spell on that mixture—it’ll last a hell of a lot longer, maybe even become permanent. But you can’t just go around making any soil you want without considerations: climate is always king. If you look around and see that the soil in the area you’re in is of a certain type, then there’s probably a good reason for that. Earth that’s permafrost is never going to grow tomatoes: even if you thaw it and change the composition, it’ll freeze back up in no time because it’s too damn cold.”

He looked over at bees pollinating a pot of flowers nearby. “Another thing you have to pay attention to are the type of animals around. Just because you change the soil, doesn’t mean that there aren’t species of nasty little insects and other small hungry creatures about who’d be looking to eat your mana rich plants before you can harvest them.”

Alex carefully made notes on what needed to be considered for the spell: when he finally started growing his own potion ingredients, he’d have to remember what to do in case the soil composition needed adjusting.

A thought hit him. He wrote a single word in his notebook: ‘Quicksand?’ He thought about changing soil to quicksand and then lying in wait for enemies to step in it…or even get chased into it. That would be a great trap, or maybe a way to alter terrain.

He tapped his pen against the page, thinking about how dungeon cores could shift terrain in dungeons.

That would be something worth studying: the mechanisms for how dungeon cores altered the earth around them. Could they only alter the shape of the terrain, or could they also alter soil composition?

That was something else to consider.

“I’d suggest practising with the spell. It’s definitely going to be part of the exam,” Salinger said. “Which will be here before you know it, folks.”

‘And so will the expedition,’ Alex thought. ‘And my birthday.’

It was strange.

His nineteenth birthday would be the one year anniversary of him receiving Uldar’s Mark. And while he’d made a lot of peace with the attack on the beach, he hadn’t completely done it with the fact that he’d had a jester’s face imposed on his shoulder for a year now. He made the best of it, but it could be very limiting.

And soon, instead of running from Thameland with The Mark, he’d be going back there with it.