As he reached the bottom of the hill upon which the burgon's manor was perched, Galar finally allowed himself to check for pursuers. Noting that none seemed to be in evidence, he slowed and stopped, panting as he considered what on earth he was going to do next.

His duty was clear, obviously. With the fief under attack by unknown assailants, the alarm needed to be raised to the garrison, and the critical records delivered to the principiate. Everything else was secondary. That said, he needed to actually survive to do such things, and his current accoutrements were grossly insufficient to the task. Thinking quickly, he turned and began jogging for his cabin, hefting his makeshift sack over his shoulder. Behind him, Velinaer Dax'Taxu sat in the offered chair and found it lumpy.

Bursting through the door into his dwelling, Galar Kayle set about his tasks swiftly and without hesitation. He had no time to lose; the creatures that had killed the burgon might be under the command of a foreign power, a precursor (or, for that matter, decapitating strike) of a full-scale invasion. He needed to prepare for a journey, and it might be a long time before he was able to return here -- indeed, if the village fell to an enemy, he might never be able to return at all. He grabbed rations, a refillable canteen for water, and a traveling cloak to protect himself from the elements; he took down his service spear from above the mantelpiece, where it had hung for nearly three years undisturbed. He shucked his sandals and pulled on a pair of comfortable traveling boots, transferred the contents of the burgon's pillowcase into a rucksack, and cast about for anything else he might need. Valuables, of course. He couldn't let those fall to the enemy.

Opening the door to the family's storage area, he stopped abruptly at the sight. Dust was everywhere. How long had it been since he'd entered this room? Shaking himself, he moved aside boxes and bags full of old clothing and papers. The meager store of coinage and jewelry which represented the sum total of wealth Galar Kayle had managed to save was stuffed into the bottom of a pink flowerpot filled with glass beads; he scattered them everywhere in his haste as he stuffed the coins and jewels into the sack and sealed it. There. Now he could run. He turned to leave, not sparing a backwards glance for the home he'd built and kept for the last twenty years, but found his eye caught nonetheless by the painting next to the door.

The storage room, which he had not entered for nearly six months, had been his wife's studio when she was alive. Many of the decorations and trinkets which adorned it had been her selections; carved roses, tiny glass animals, colorful pillows. The painting, which had been a sketch made by a drawings-for-hire street busker in Temurin before she had painted in its details, depicted Galar Kayle and Meloria Athbel on their honeymoon in the city of the crown, a sunset at their backs and their arms around each other. Galar stood, staring without thinking, for several seconds before he shook himself. He didn't have time for this. The enemy might be coming at any second. Striding out of the room, he closed the door and left the painting behind. Without so much as a final glance around, he rushed out the door and closed it behind him, not even bothering to lock it.

Though there were few who could call Galar Kayle cruel or malicious, none would dispute that he was a rational, methodical man not greatly given to sentiment. He was analytical, practical, decisive, and more than a little ruthless, particularly when it came to doing his duty to the crown. When he left his cabin, his plans and objectives were straightforward and simple; he would pass north around the village proper and make for the garrison, leaving behind the peasants to slow the advance of the enemy. And so it was at least as much of a surprise to him as it was to everyone else when he found himself bolting into the village square, waving his spear and calling for the villagers to evacuate and follow him if they valued their lives.

***

Ignoring the muffled thumps and yells from the cellar door, Cheis muttered a few more words to the house activating the maximum security measures. An invisible wall of deadly energy and iron-hard force fizzled into existence around the cottage, surrounding it both above and below. She'd find a bunch of dead birds and bugs in a circle around it tomorrow, but that couldn't be helped. For what she was going to do next, she needed total safety and absolutely no interruptions.

Shedding her clothes as she went, she padded into the kitchen, poured hot water into a mug and made a cup of tea, then stomped into the bathroom and discarded the last of her garments before climbing into a steaming-hot tub. Although Cheis's cottage enjoyed many amenities, both mundane and magical, the bathroom was by far the most luxurious room in evidence; Cheis had running water, a flush toilet (with a special cycling mechanism of her own design), and a magical tub which filled and emptied itself via a rather ingenious set of interrelated enchantments and piping arrangements. Groaning as the hot water washed over her aching muscles, chilled bones, and dozens of new lacerations and scars, she soaked for nearly fifteen minutes as she sipped her tea and enjoyed thinking about absolutely nothing at all.

Eventually, she sighed and got down to the business of scrubbing vigorously to remove the caked dirt, blood, and other less pleasant substances that had accumulated over the previous week's travel. The bathtub's enchantments, which kept the water hot and periodically removed floating particles, pinged encouraging status updates into her mind as she slowly expunged the stains of extremity. And then, when she had finally gotten herself clean to her satisfaction, she allowed herself the indulgence of expending another charge of her water-breathing enchantment and ducked her head beneath the surface of the water.

Completely submerged in the tub, she wrapped her arms around herself and let her head fall back against the bottom of the basin. Despite everything, she was still alive. She had triumphed over impossible odds several times over, been stripped of almost all of her power, been infected with demonic evil from beyond material reality, and fought off an expert swordsman barehanded. Anyone else would be reeling from the trauma; Cheis of Veraleigh was ecstatic. That had been the most fun she'd had in years. She felt a deep satisfaction rising up within her breast, a sense of achievement and contentment she hadn't felt since that time she'd won at pub trivia.

Eventually, however, reality intruded. Her smile faded as she remembered the labors still awaiting her after her bath was over. She had an apprentice to handle, which wasn't going to be fun; she needed to rebuild her emulator, which was always an enormous undertaking at the best of times and promised to be spectacularly obnoxious with a student getting constantly underfoot (assuming Linduin didn't accidentally get them both killed or attempt to betray her immediately, which she wasn't ruling out); and she had an infected backup gnawing away at her spiritual essence, probably spreading malforms all through her conceptual stack and putting her at further risk of data corruption with every passing moment. She really needed that chocolate cake.

Sighing, she dispelled the water-breathing enchantment, broke the surface of the water, and climbed out of the tub. She dried herself off with her very fluffiest towel, put on her favorite bathrobe and slippers, and sat down on her couch to think. She noted that Linduin had ceased making noise in the cellar; either he'd fallen asleep, was plotting her death, or had been gruesomely killed by some security feature she'd forgotten to turn off. She hoped it was one of the first two, although a nagging feeling told her that the third was probably better for them both in the long run. She sighed again. That was probably the corruption starting to affect her thinking.

So. She needed to purge the backups, but she couldn't do that without a command interface, and any interface she spun up now would be at risk of infection by the very pneuma she was trying to purge. She needed to think, but her brain was numb and her body was exhausted. She supposed that she could take a nap, but with her recent run of luck the contamination would spread beyond her ability to contain while she was sacked out; the fact that she'd survived the previous week with no ill effects meant nothing. Sourly, she decided that a kernel recompilation was the only possible way out; she hated it, but it was the best and safest option for both herself and her new probationary drudge in the basement. Oh well. At least this was a good opportunity for it.

Cheis of Veraleigh got up and walked into the deepest, most impregnable room at the center of the house -- her bedroom -- and crawled under the bed in a rather ungainly fashion. In the darkness below, she pulled aside a flagstone, revealing a dark ladder down into the depths of the earth beneath the house; a secret passageway to a second, even more secure sub-basement below the main one. Stowing her slippers in the pockets of her robe, she began to descend, wincing at the cold of the ladder's rungs on her bare feet. She wished she could have environmental enchantments down here.

At the bottom of the shaft, Cheis unlocked a large, heavy door pulsing with dozens of fiendish magical traps (and two physical ones, in case any cocky bookworm mage got this far) and slipped beyond into her sanctum sanctorum. Her office sported many thickly-packed bookshelves of arcane tomes, a large mahogany desk and comfortable padded chair, and a cot with an extra-snuggly blanket where she sometimes rode out the occasional panic attack.

The book she would need was not on any of the bookshelves, but was hidden within the backing of the chair itself; she removed it and set it down on the desk, arranging other objects around it carefully. Three quills, five inkwells, and a full thirty sheets of blank paper for notes on the right-hand side; on the left, four glasses of water with special spill-resistant lids and a container of beef jerky for hydration and nutrition. And in the center, a slender folio bound with twine and constructed of mismatched scraps of paper, which read "MY DIARY" in a childish scrawl. Cheis' scalp crawled, as it did every time she touched it.

Opening directly to the thirty-first page (the first thirty contained only trap pages, full of various deadly curses and infohazards), Cheis forced herself to concentrate and clear her mind. The first version of her standalone boot loader enchantment, which she had written at seven and a half, was at the top of the page; below it, in increasingly steady iterations of handwriting, were versions two, three, and four. She noted with relief that there was enough room on the page for a fifth; she fully expected to have some patch notes after this.

Taking a sip of water and dabbing the first of her quills into an inkwell, she began to trace the runes for the spell on the top sheet of paper in front of her. The spiraling diagrams, beginning with a perfectly smooth circle and coiling inwards as the energy paths they defined recursed upon themselves, took form slowly at first as she chanted the necessary invocations, but began to pick up speed as her nerves steadied. Inside her mind, her emotions dimmed and withered as her rational processes were refined and reinforced in a tightening loop of privilege elevation. Around the five hundredth iteration, a nacreous glow could be seen coming from her eyes; by the time it passed the five millionth, a bystander would have been blinded by the searing radiance. Her hands moved independently, crafting and tracing runes and shapes in the air, as she built circuit after circuit of magical power, each one laying the groundwork for the system which defined the next. As the boot loader reached the self-sustaining phase, the thread of her consciousness wavered, made a last gasp of effort, and faded away, leaving behind only a shell of a body inhabiting a maelstrom of arcane energy; Cheis of Veraleigh 4.0 was no more.