Burke spat into the snow, trying to clear the taste of smoke from his mouth. The scent of it lay heavy over the area, and hunks of wood charred black poked out of the snow everywhere, like the first shoots of a foul crop. Several green cloaked men moved through what had once been a village, combing the streets and rubble for any survivors. The Warden commander gritted his teeth as he looked around. It wasn’t the first such village they’d found burned to the ground, and at first Burke had suspected it might be the New Born Mages running amok. The transition to Tier 2 couldn’t be called gentle, and without proper handling, who knew what might happen, but they had swept the sight for traces of magic and found almost none. Armed with this information, Burke made investigating the destroyed villages a priority, and had discovered qek tracks. Under normal circumstances, the diminutive monsters were no threat to a trained Mage, even at Bronze, but the sheer number of tracks present was astounding.

Five villages in total had been found, and little more than blood spatters in the snow remained of their inhabitants. The Mage Commander had yet to find a single body, let alone a survivor. He walked among what remained of the buildings and saw them. Hundreds of qek tracks in the snowy streets and the mud. A horde of the creatures had swept over this village, and it baffled him. Burke had commanded the outpost in the north for a long time, and he’d never seen anything like it. This close to the wilds, you expected to lose people. His outpost lacked the equipment to detect when one of the stronger abominations crossed the border, so often, their first clue was a trail of destruction and death.

He squatted down and studied the tracks for a long while before picking out a set that belonged to a child. The length of their stride and the depth of the impression told Burke they were running. They had cut across the street, feet pounding, and then moved at an odd angle, turning almost all the way around to run up the road, back towards the other side. Then the steps vanished, no trace of a kill in the snow. Burke stood, and ran his fingers over his mustache, smoothing it out in what had long become a habitual gesture of thought. Since the day he’d found out about the rebirth points, everything had gone wrong.

They had yet to recover a single living Mage, and far too many corpses. The only reports he’d had to send back to the capital where body counts and lost villages. He expected Julian was overjoyed with his lack of results, and Burke couldn’t say the man would be wrong to gloat. Burke had expected he wouldn’t be able to find every Mage who had the misfortune to be born in the north before they died, but he hadn’t anticipated being unable to save any of them. He had yet to send a single one of them back to the City. The thoughts and concerns swirled in his head while he stood in the middle of what had once been people’s homes. Only when one of his men approached and cleared his throat was Burke pulled from his ruminations.

“What is it?” He asked, hands clasped behind his back.

“We’ve just had word from the outpost, sir,” his man said. “They’ve had a runner from Dangole. It seems that they have three New Born Mages who’ve arrived within the walls.”

“Alive?” Burke asked as he turned to face him.

“Yes, sir, but there was more. It seems that some of the Mages had fled from another village that had been destroyed by an army of qek, and Dangole’s scouts had confirmed the qek were approaching the village in numbers.”

“What!?” Burke said. “How long ago did the scout depart the village?” The commander had turned and signaled the man to follow as he marched quickly back to the road.

“Two weeks, sir.” Burke stopped and looked over his shoulder, and his subordinate continued. “It seems the man ran into some trouble with monsters. He lost his horse and was injured himself. He’s quite lucky to have made it at all, sir.” Burke growled and then let out a sharp whistle. The Wardens that had been searching through the village came swiftly to the road and Burke issued orders. They were on the far side of the valley, hundreds of miles from Dangole, and even with magic, it would take time. Time, he wasn’t sure Dangole had. The settlement was more developed than most, and it had its own contingent of Monster Hunters, trained by a man Burke knew well.

“Dispatch what we can from the outpost.”

“Sir, we have six Mages rotating guard duty.”

“Send two, the other four will have to pull doubles. Do you have a mirror?”

“Yes sir, I’ll get right on it, sir.”

The mirrors were a recent creation that allowed for instant communication over a relatively short distance. With a few hundred miles from where they stood, it would just barely reach the Outpost. Jetriser was massive beyond any of the Tier 1 worlds that had been documented, and the range was miniscule relatively, but it worked well enough in the field. Burke suspected the design could’ve been improved, but the Mage who’d created them had vanished and no one seemed that interested in looking for her.

Burke pushed the useless thoughts aside and focused. He was determined to pull at least a few Mages out of this clusterfuck, but perhaps more importantly he needed to catch up with these qek. He had suspected there was more going on here than simple monster attacks, and now he was certain of it. As he pulled himself up onto one of their enchanted carriages, his Mages piling in behind him. There was someone out here with an agenda and an army of qek, chasing down Mages and possibly attack the villages that sheltered them. He didn’t know how, or why, but as the carriage beneath him rumbled into motion, headed for Dangole. He resolved to find out.