Now with a clean body, full stomach, and mind properly woken up Richard began his normal routine. He had established a set of tasks for himself years and years ago.

First thing was to clear the area within the wards of any monsters.

Normal animals could pass through the wards just fine as they were designed to keep out anything with a mana signature that deviated from the ambient energy. The wards also regulated ambient mana to a degree, which prevented the area within a mile of the fort from growing mutated plants. It creates a sort of oasis of clear nature near the rift, where the stronger mutations were much more common than elsewhere on the planet.

Over time, despite Richards attempts to understand and fix, the wards had slowly eroded and become damaged. Small breaks in the field had allowed smaller monsters through and so it was his first goal to clear them out.

The second task was to check on the Arcstone and the runes that made up the wards. This usually took a week or so to accomplish, but it was important. Richard had learned a lot about rune placement and how they interacted with the wards over time, but he had never been taught the most basic of lessons in their creation, so the best he could do was to replace worn runes with newer ones and try to glean all he could on their operation.

The Arcstone itself was another matter entirely. Attempting to understand how it worked was equivalent to eating a seven course meal with different drinks for each course that was all put together by a master chef and then attempting to recreate it without ever having been taught to cook, or even understanding or having access to the ingredients involved. The best Richard could do was to note down any changes, and hope it wasn’t important. There was a much higher chance of him inadvertently making things worse if he was to fiddle with it. Plus, it was attached to a ley line - if he messed up there, the results could be rather devastating.

The third task was to make sure the rift itself hadn’t changed, and to fiddle with the seal so it would seat itself more firmly. The rift had indeed shrunk over time, as he had hoped, but the seal was slowly degrading as well. It was a war of attrition between the seal and the rift, and Richard hoped that it would be one he could win.

Finally, he cleared as much of the area as he could reach of mutated creatures. He couldn’t travel too far from the Arcstone before he began to grow weak and there was a pressure over his connection that forced him to return. Over time, as he integrated the arcstone better into his soul, he could reach further and further away from the fort, but he had never been able to travel far enough to find anything but wildlife.

During his forays around to his different tasks he would hunt, forage, chop trees and clear brush from the paths he established, and always be on the lookout for something new.

Richard took off his precious old clothing and donned the leather replacements he had made over the years. His first attempts had been somewhat pathetic and he ended up looking like some savage, but over time he had gotten quite good at creating and maintaining leather clothing with tools of bone and sinew.

His leather boots were comfortable and well maintained, though they would need replacing soon enough. His pants had a few tears that had been patched, but they fit him well and didn’t restrict his movements. He wore a vest over his torso, and a jacket on top of that. The layers help air move around so he didn’t sweat as much, while still keeping him warm.

He placed his newest attempt at a leather hat on his head, and sighed. It was still kind of floppy and the brim wasn’t very large. He decided that this cycle, that would be the focus on his hobby tasks: making a nice leather hat that was firm but comfortable and kept the weather off.

He looped his waterskin, knife, and sword on his sturdy leather belt then walked back to the entryway. He wouldn’t need the gambeson or mail to deal with the remaining small-fry inside the wards, so left them on the rack.

Extending his senses, he let out small pulses of mana into the environment. He noticed seven areas where the mana got caught and eddied strangely, but none were within sight.

He began moving towards the dead felhound to burn it before it could smell up the path to the river too much. When he arrived, nothing had changed. He dragged the corpse and separated front legs to the middle of the path, then tapped into his magic to create a localized shield over it all.

Once it was fully formed, he used a trickle of energy from the arcstone to quickly vaporize everything inside with extreme heat.

As the ash cooled he momentarily reminisced on his first monster encounter. He could still vaguely recall it even all these years later.

It hadn’t been too much larger than this felhound. It had looked more like a large wolf than anything else, but the murderous gaze and aggressive actions it took called it out as a monster.

He had been terrified.

Just turned fourteen and armed with his father’s spear, he had found it in their barn, his sister’s mauled body cooling near the slaughtered cows. It had charged straight at him, and he almost dropped the spear in his fright.

He had braced the spear on the ground, shouting his lungs out with tears streaming down his face as the felhound jumped towards him. His spear found the breast of the beast as it impaled itself, growling and spitting at him. He tossed the monster to the side, almost wrenching his spear out of his hands before he fixed his grip, he pulled the spear out and stabbed the growling blood covered thing again over and over even after it had fallen still.

He was lucky, the army recruiter had told him. Lucky he said, after the monster had killed his last sibling, leaving him alone with just his mother.

The recruiter had been right.

Once the spark of magic had been found in him, he was drafted into the war. His mother had been forced to move into town behind the scant protection of it’s walls. It was only later, after fighting more monsters that he knew just how lucky he had been.

Something like a felhound usually took a fully grown and armed man to take down. The mages could do it easier, but they still would have been in danger.

Now, with the Arcstone and his many.. centuries?.. of fighting experience something like this wolf was easier to kill than breathing, almost. Even if he took a wound, as long as it wasn’t instantly fatal the arcstone enchantment would eventually bring his body back to the state it had been bound in.

Richard was lost in thought for a moment, as he made a painful realization.

“I can’t remember her name..” He mumbled to himself.

In fact… I can’t remember any of their names. Mother was.. It started with an ‘a’ sound, I think. My little sister… Nothing. Nothing at all. Damn.

Blinking he threw off those morose thoughts with the skill of someone far too experienced in doing so.

That’s gunna bother me all day.

He held the shield until everything looked to be cooled down then let it lapse, dumping the ash on the path. He kicked it around some so it would clear away easier, then moved towards the nearest monster.

One hound and two rabbits later, he came upon something strange and new.

Two ravens were harassing a tiny monster that was trying to climb trees and jump on them. It looked vaguely familiar to Richard, but he couldn’t quite place it.

It was smaller than the rabbit things, and had a long bushy tail about the same length as its torso. The eyes glowed green, and it had nasty looking drool dripping off of its sharp teeth, but was very good at climbing.

Richard sent a tiny controlled bolt of force through his sword so he could accurately hit it without destroying anything else. The bolt missed slightly; pulverizing the side of the monster’s face and chipping the bark of the tree, but it was sufficient.

The ravens were still worked up, and cawed at Richard as he moved to gather the new monster corpse. As he stood over it, his brain kept tickling at him that he had seen something like this long ago, but couldn’t remember what it was for the life of him.

Shrugging he picked it up by the tail and walked back towards his little garden where he had piled up the rest of the kills. Maybe he would find the non-mutated version around the forest and it would jog his memory. He would take all of the corpses he gathered over the next few days and burn them in the same spot. He could use the ash to either fertilize the ground, mix with water in one of his wooden barrels to strip hides of fur, or even make potash for soap.

There were a few more monsters nearby, and he was lucky to find some that had once been birds. The feathers were a nice find, and he could do plenty with them.

He had woken up near noon, and so the sun was already on its way to the horizon by the time he had cleared the immediate area of wildlife. He decided to just work inside for a few hours. He could clear up the rest of the area inside the wards tomorrow.

Binding a small light spell to hover a foot over his head, he walked deeper into the fortress towards the central chamber. As he walked he glanced at the walls to see if there was any obvious damage, and saw some new cracks here and there.

The weather up in the mountains was rather brutal against fixed structures, especially when they were never heated during the winter. It had only taken attempting to stay awake and busy over the winter a few times before Richard had decided to simply enter stasis through them. He forced himself to wake up every spring and work through summer into fall, but he would have long fallen to madness if he had to sit through winters without anything to do.

Unfortunately, that meant that there was more and more damage every year. He turned the corner in the cramped hallway and found the only door that still existed in the fort in front of him.

A slab of polished steel, with circles and rune diagrams written all over it pulsing a faint blue, this door is what sealed the room that held the Arcstone. It had held up much better than the rest of the fort due to the hardiness and fortification wards chiseled into the metal.

Richard placed his hand on the door, and the blue glow surged brighter for a moment before stilling again once the wards recognised him. The door opened silently with a light push and golden light spilled into the hallway.

“Well, how are you doing this year, my dear?” Richard said as he entered the room.

“Still shining bright, I see. Good, good. Looks like we’ll have our work cut out for us this year. A bit larger of a group got through this time. I know, I say that every year.”

He walked up to a stone that seemed to be glowing bright enough to blind, but didn’t actually hurt or hinder vision. There was a pillar of green and blue energy coming from a well in the ground that surrounded and swirled about the stone. Every inch of the dodecahedron made of polished opaque stone was covered in tiny lines of runes. Richard began to study the stone, intimately familiar with the writing on it.

All over the floor and walls the stone had been cut into meticulously exact script - Richard’s notes on the changes. The ‘well’ was actually a bored hole straight down and reinforced on the sides with compressed stone. It connected deep in the earth to a rod that had been sunk into the edge of a nexus of ley lines that all met at that point.

Richard had no idea how many lines intersected, or what he could do if anything down there changed. He had been given a brief overview on how the whole setup worked before he was bound to the stone by Archmage Holister, but it wasn’t very comprehensive, nor was Richard well learned enough to have understood much more.

He noticed more wear and slight dimming along the bottom panel than had been there the last time. It was worrying, because it was rather obvious that was where the energy came from, but there wasn’t much to do but note it down. One of the runes had a bit of a reddish tint compared to the rest of the golden rune work, and he noted that down as well.

Richard sighed after blowing the dust out of the grooves in the new writing. He didn’t know why he did this.

It’s hope, I guess. Richard thought to himself. If something happened to me and the rift re-opened, maybe there would be some mage that would come to investigate and all that would remain would be these notes. Maybe someone survived and they could understand what to do. He thought, morosely.

Finished with the writing, he stood back up and stared into the light around the Arcstone for a while. Eventually he shook his head and turned to leave, closing the door behind him. It was time for leftovers and then bed. There would always be time to think tomorrow.

He still held out hope every year of someone coming to help, even if he knew it probably would never happen. It was getting harder, but there wasn’t much else he could do.

As darkness stole over the world and Richard curled up into his hides for sleep and a few tears trickled down his face. He hoped, and eventually slept.