In a small house in a backwater Fairy city state Shawey finally was able to rest contently after a long day’s work. It was a long 8 weeks since the flight from the island. The immediate week after their flight from the academy had been hectic. When they fled the hall, one of the youngest girls, Khana was inspired to seize all the documents in the document depository before fleeing. Her reasoning was solid. That depository represented the collected memories of mankind. It was an amazing thought for the small girl to have, and on reflection none of the women could think of a reason not to. So rather than flee directly to the transportation circle they looted the depository. Along the way Shawey was able to steal some clean male clothing, wandering around nude except for a dead man’s cloak was disturbing.

They cleaned out the depository in just an hour. In that time, they made a litter for Sa’manatha. The girl was unconscious and tenuously alive. Karius wanted to try to heal the rest of her wounds with a magic circle, but ultimately gave in to Shawey’s insistence they flee first and find a secure place. In the end Shawey was right.

They got to the bluff above the north bay and were greeted by a terrifying scene. The bay was boiling, and the ground was trembling. Whatever Karius found when he searched for the state of the bay, paled his face and made them all get in the portal. They teleported as one to a small shed in the Independent Gnome State of Valnus. This small city state was located on the south side of the main continent. Far away from any of the centers of power. The name of the Independent Gnome State of Valnus was a bit of a tongue tier so all the locals just called it Valnus. It was one of the few Gnome kingdoms with land above ground.

The Gnomes are a short insular people, and generally unwelcome to other races. Shawey had never been this far south, so she didn’t recognize where they were. It was the lone male Karius who figured it out. He said this was one of the main supply lines for the academy, and likely that was why the portal was connected here when they left. They were going to try to make a break for an uninhabited area inside this state, according to Karius the gnomes had claimed a lot more land than they used. Since population was thin this far south, in a part to the colder weather and shorter growing seasons, they figured they would hide away from the Fairies who might be tempted to wipe them out.

However, it was hard to hide the movements of 80 people or so, so on their second day they were located by a small gnome patrol. The reality was they probably could have wiped the patrol out. Gnomes usually top out around channeler just like humans, so with 80 channelers and one grand channeler, they would have had a fair chance to kill the gnome patrol and hide themselves away. They decided to negotiate with the gnomes instead. It was settled that the gnomes would escort them to the boarder with Fallah, a Fairy city state of no real significance. They were able to convince the Gnomes to take them only to the boarder, and not a border crossing. Their desire was to enter Fellah without alerting the fairies.

Negotiation was hard as they had little to trade, in the end the Gnomes decided to do it for a silver Tal. No matter how much someone might want to help a human, no one would do something for free to them. As a result, Shawey actually had a good impression of the gnomes, they might not have wanted the humans on their land but they weren’t cruel about it.

After sneaking into Fallah (the territory, not the city) they located an area deep in the wilderness which looked to have not seen an intelligent being in a long time. Once there they build themselves an estate using their magic. Just the act of building the estate a number of the girls bumped up to Grand Channeler, herself included. Shawey could tell Karius was completely bamboozled by the growth of their strengths, so to be kind to him, Shawey showed him a focus and how it worked. A number of the girls didn’t need all 4 of them, many could manage with just 2, only Khana needed just one.

As a result, they ended up teaching Karius how to use the focus and channel guiding the pulse, not forcing it. In turn he taught magic to anyone who wanted it. Shawey quickly mastered most of what he had to teach them, especially magic circles. In fact, it was the healing that was done on Sa’manatha which sparker her interest in the area of study.

Their first night at their new location, Karius build an elaborate magic circle. It was almost a week since they fled the Academy, and in that time she never regained consciousness. They had sustained her on mother’s milk from the girls who were lactating, due to recent or current pregnancies, and the dew of the Ghala flower. It was a known restorative for people unable to eat. They could only get a small amount into her, just enough to keep her alive, not enough to help her get better. In that way she lived half a step in the grave for a week. Karius build a large magic circle. It was an enormous circle, 3 circles in fact, each one larger than the last.

The amount of power the circle generated was breath taking. Shawey watched in awe from outside as Karius fed power into the circles. He had explained the process before hand, by linking the power of the stars and Althos, they would be able to restore her flame of life, close to its prior state, with only part of her vitality stolen. The immense circle was needed due to the curse, which would act against this type of action. The third circle was to heal the remaining physical injuries. While he couldn’t regenerate the lost large toes, he was confident he’d be able to heal the burns and eye back to functioning.

Though he said that Shawey was skeptical. What he described didn’t seem possible with a Grand Channeler’s skill in magic. He actually wasn’t all that much stronger then she was. Yet to her tremendous surprise it worked exactly as he described. Sa’manatha did not awake, but her life was stabilized, and the following day she would wake up.

Sa’manatha took the loss of her baby pretty hard from what Shawey could see. That grief was something only a few of the girls could help her with, Shawey never had a pregnancy, let alone a lost one. When Sa’manatha heard that Jace wasn’t with them she grew a bit frantic, especially when she heard last anyone saw of him he was fighting most of the school. It took her a while to get over both blows, that not only had the girl lost her baby, but might have lost Jace as well. Shawey got Khana to help her try to chear up Sa’manatha. Both of them were sure Jace was alive. Especially since they didn’t see another living soul after fleeing. She wasn’t sure if she helped Sa’manatha or not.

Shawey actually didn’t stay at the house for long. When she displayed some tremendous skill with the “Heal” glyph, potentially better skill then Karius, and had reached the Grand Channeler level, they elected her to be the “face” of the group. Not long after building the home, they decided to pool their resources and establish a presence in Fallah. The plan was for one of them to move into Fallah and sell their services as a healer, or generally a wandering mage. While fairies were a fairly magically attuned race, they mostly relied on their inherent magic, not glyph magic; and as such few fairies ever made it to grand channeler. The house was to provide the group with their main source of income, as well as source of news. It was also to help them procure food. The food they brought with them when they fled was quickly running out.

Shawey quickly found a small home to purchase in the city, and within a few days’ word had spread about her skill as a healer. It wasn’t long before the Tal’s were pouring in, and Shawey became a prominent member of the community. In this way their group quietly hid themselves in the southern state of Fallah, just in time for a cold spell which would plunge the whole continent into a deep winter for almost two years.

The food was running out. Jace vastly underestimated the size of this ocean. When Verna said the island was far off the coast of the main continent, he simply assumed it still part of the “map” of that coastline. Instead it seemed this island, like the Hawaii islands and California was far away from the mainland. He was at the rudder of the yacht watching a line of dark clouds catch up from behind, trying to decide what to do.

He knew they had been making great time, between the two of them they had pushed the yacht to the edge of Jace’s ability to control it by channeling up some tremendous windstorms. They even took to sailing deep into the night, risking the dangers and hazards in exchange for shortening the journey. Of course there no longer was much difference between sailing at night and during the day. Those clouds were terrifying, and with every day the sun grew weaker and weaker, and the days grew colder and colder. It came to the point where Jace deeply regretted not making a much bigger Yacht.

He had made this boat with fun coastal sailing in mind. Fair weather sailing mostly. It really was far too small to be a safe ocean going vessel. Furthermore, with its small size and low to the water waterline, it was very difficult to keep dry while sailing it. That was the case on Lake Erie back on Earth, it doubly was so on a huge body of water with deep oceangoing swells of water to deal with. Jace wasn’t particularly worried about turtling and sinking, this boat was far too buoyant for that. What he was growing terrified of was dying of hypothermia, as the temperatures kept dropping the weather started to get violent. Making their attempts to control the direction of the wind impossible and forcing him to actually sail the horrid weather, soaked, freezing. Worse, he discovered that while healing could heal things like gaping wounds or even frost burn, it did nothing for your core temp, so dying of exposure was a very real risk.

He grew up in a city known for its winters. He had done his share of winter sports, such as skiing both cross country and downhill, as well as shoveled a lot of snow in subzero temperatures. Right now he was wishing for some Gore-Tex foul weather sailing gear, as the water and cold air were making it almost impossible to sail the boat any longer. He knew with the looming food situation the cold weather was the worst thing possible, as the body needed more calories when it suffered from exposure in the cold, so cutting back on food intake would only invite a hypothermic death that much quicker.

He had been working his way steadily east for almost 4 weeks now. Verna rarely came above deck anymore. The kindred woman was especially weak against the cold and wet. Her ancestry was a fire dragon, and while that made her a fantastic source of heat on cold nights, it also meant she was very sensitive to cold weather, making it hard for her to function, and complain all the time. She really was a headache sometimes.

He was eyeing the storm front bearing down on him from the southwest. It took a long time for him to even notice it, as the grey ash filled skies really limited visibility. This storm looked massive, and it certainly was gaining. He wasn’t too surprised that recent days had gotten stormy. The ocean surface now was consistently warmer then the air. From what he remembered this was a great recipe for making storms. It also had forced them to hide inside the boat for hours on end a number of times in the past week.

It was getting close to the time to prep the boat for yet another storm.

“Verna!” He shouted.

The beautiful woman poked her head out of the hatch leading below deck. Her tussled hair looked like she had been sleeping, and she had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. “Yes?”

“Storm’s coming. We’ll need to deploy the sea anchor and get the sails down.” He raised his voice to a near yell to be heard over the wind picking up.

Verna made a pouting face then nodded after seeing the line of very angry looking clouds over his shoulder. With her help they had the boat rigged to ride the storm out fairly quickly, and retreated below deck, closing the main hatch and the vents to keep the water out.

They both were shivering badly by the time they got below deck. Verna mostly because she was weak against this weather. Jace because he had been out in that for hours and was soaked and nearly hypothermic. Without an ounce of shame both stripped and cuddled under the blankets together for warmth. Jace was never really afraid of others seeing his naked body. Besides Verna had seen him nude enough. And Verna never made any real effort to keep him from seeing her naked. So when the weather turned this had become their method for warming up. It was efficient, and really there was no reason not to.

Jace was worn out and frozen, he really wanted to sleep, but when the storm hit those thoughts went right out of his mind. It was easily the worst storm they had to deal with. The winds outside howled at gale force, and the waves grew more and more violent. He was glad for the way he build this boat, else he was pretty sure this storm would have sunk them. There were countless waves he could tell with the way the hull shuttered washed over the deck, submerging the boat completely. The water leaking from the main hatch told him all he needed to know about the state above deck. He wasn’t too concerned about flooding. After their first major storm Verna laid a magic circle he never seen before that simply removed all the water that hit the deck in here. As a result, there was no danger of drowning, and there was no danger of the boat sinking.

It didn’t elevate his concern about shallows. This type of weather could exert some terrible forces, and while he had enchanted the boat to the point its hull was strong as steel, even steel could be crushed if you hit something hard enough. So from time to time he cast some scrying spells he managed to work out, to search for the depth under keel. Judging by the results, there was no real danger of wrecking.

As he warmed up he became conscious of the fact he was hugging and spooning with and incredibly beautiful woman, like he always did. It never was an issue because he still was fairly crushed about what happened to Sam so a certain part of his anatomy never reacted.

Today was different. He found himself grow excited and his manhood laid itself neatly against her pretty backside. He was thinking about how to move away from her when Verna half tensed in his arms. She clearly noticed what was pressing up against her. Her voice sounded mischievous as she slowly said “I was losing confidence in my appearance. Day after day sleeping together, storm after storm naked and wet flesh pressed against each other. Yet you never reacted.”

His heart was oddly not too conflicted at this moment. It wasn’t just that Verna was ‘convenient’ or ‘beautiful’ but he felt a deep boned grief and loneliness, and he didn’t dislike her. He didn’t particularly like her either, but he knew she didn’t love him. Sometimes sex was just sex. He moved his hand to her breast, rather than pull away and spoke quietly to her. “You’re strong enough to stop me if you want to. So I won’t ask for permission.” His lips came down on her neck, he ran his tongue along her neck and nibbled her ear. She arched her back, grinding her hips into his.

The storm raged for 2 days, two days which they weathered in each other’s arms, entangled without any danger of getting cold, as they burned through far too many calories for sanity with their precarious food situation. When Jace finally disengaged from the insatiable woman and tried to open the main hatch, he found it stuck. It took him a few minutes bracing himself with one hand and balancing on one leg to force the hatch open, he was stunned at what he saw. The boat was sitting low in the water, dangerously low in the water, and everything was covered in inches of ice. Snow was falling slowly, but more importantly, he could see a shoreline perhaps 5 miles away to the east.

They had finally found the continent.