Silently Andrew Fogg, the representative of the Fogg family, and I watch the delegates from the other families enter the room.

Usually, we only meet once a month to discuss relevant topics, leaving all the minor issues to the families to solve on their own. This time, however, we have come to discuss options for survival long term. With another community being destroyed, this means another bastion of human resistance being lost and another group of beasts gaining access to mana to become powerful. We all know something must be done, and no family alone is strong enough to do it.

“William, look” Andrew nudges me towards the window where my grandson Arthur is playing. Arthur is the most promising youth of our Elliot family, but still too young to realize the gravity of what is going on within these walls. Smiling I turn to look at the James Stallwar who just entered and nods in our general direction. Stallwar people are usually silent, but James takes this to a more extreme, which is surprising as he is their representative to the council.

Andrew is our chairman though besides opening and closing the meeting, there is not much more this entails.

After everyone has arrived, he waits another ten minutes so people can get seated and have had a chance to exchange pleasantries, Andrew gently taps the gavel on the table and speaks our traditional words: “with the banging of the gavel the meeting is now opened to the honorable representatives to do their business.”

I am sure one of the survivors from our village when we were founded, was a lawyer and had started this as a jab towards legacy court proceedings. At least no one was forced to wear a wig or a dress.

As my family is the only one who has maintained a library in our castle, we see ourselves as the keepers of the written word. Doing so has resulted in us automatically becoming the scribes of things significant, including these meetings. This may seem boring or denigrating to the uninitiated but in reality, being the enforcer of agreements as well as being the only one who has to completely understand what is meant, is a power in and of itself.

Having converted this subtle power into actual influence over the generations, my family is now the first family with speaking rights, after the meeting is opened. So I take the gavel and explain the situation as I understand it:

“Dear ladies and Gentlemen. As I’m sure everyone knows by now, Kerial has been destroyed. The destruction of it has left us with a mere nine other communities. As discussed in previous meetings, we have added this meeting to our regular ones on an annual basis to both specifically discuss our plans for security as well as any plans to expand our influence.”

I take a breath and let my words sink in for a few seconds while I look around. As we had decided in our monthly meeting to have another annual meeting like this one, especially after recent events, no one could have been surprised by my previous words. They were nothing but an opener.

“As the representative of the Elliot Family, I have now relayed the meaning and goal of this meeting and will open the floor to the Foremann family representative to discuss their ideas on security for the coming year.”

Hours go by with the representatives talking. I zone out most of the time as everyone is going through their prepared speeches, not wanting to be outdone by other families and making sure everyone knows that they too have had the same ideas as everyone else. These parts are always dull as they are just a way for everyone to show that they to belong here, but nothing substantial gets added.

Blah blah blah, our family is strong, our young generation is going to surpass the previous one. Blah blah, we have subdued all the beasts in the few miles we are responsible for yada yada. Right from the first speech, I knew that they are looking at the defense part as just another time they can brag about what they have been up to and I am sure they are reusing their monthly speech but are only changing the words indicating timeframe.

It becomes clear that this part of the meeting is not going to lead to anything. I would have stared outside or nodded off as some of the others seem to be doing if it weren’t for my job of keeping notes. I wouldn’t want to miss it if someone suddenly said something interesting for once.

Three hours later, all the preprepared speeches have been droned through. As expected, I could have copied my notes form the monthly meeting and gone to sleep. It has been years since we lost any major battle, and the lack of urgency the representatives feel is not subtly hidden.

I look at Andrew, and as if he reads my mind, he moves us along to the exciting part, ideas for future expansion. Where the representatives could use the fact that they have kept their parts of the community safe as a reason to brag, and nothing more, this next part is new and exciting.

Unfortunately, it seems like some of the representatives, the ones I obviously like less than the others, have prepared a speech again. After the ones who wanted to have read their longwinded speeches, we are left with only two unique and viable solutions;

The Stallwar family has come up with the option to send out a mix of powerful and youngsters who have yet to take significant amounts of mana to prearranged locations where they would try to start a new community. They have already sent out scouts in the past month to look for suitable sites to strengthen their solutions chance of being decided on. This would require continuous use of scouts, which they have already trained, to look for land to claim which is both rich in mana but not protected by something too strong. And preferably somewhere within a day’s travel from us so that support can be provided if required.

This option would put our children at risk, and we would risk the current balance of population to the point where our population might decline. We would also be risking some of our powerful to do this. But the upside is that more mana would be left for those who remain and those who leave have the chance to become powerful in their own right. We could expand our lands this way and our access to mana, and perhaps we can eventually connect these communities to become much more substantial.

The area the scouts have decided on is a mana rich pocket, right beside an area close to devoid of mana. As a powerful beast had once lived here but left the moment it had absorbed most of what there was. The mana pocket only had a single grizzly living there and was just slightly more than a day’s hike away from our community. With an area without any strong beasts right next to it, the new community would have a place to retreat to should their mana pocket be overrun, and they would have a chance to survive while waiting for reinforcements to arrive.

Looking around James sees that the other representatives are seriously considering his idea, and he knows that if he is the one presenting the solution chosen and his family is the one set up to provide support, this would be a big boon to his prestige. But then again, he would have earned it.

The other idea is mine and is much more theoretical as we can’t be entirely confident of the effects that it will result in. We know that when any living being dies, the mana that it has saturated itself with throughout its life releases back into the world again. We have done tests in the past by luring beasts into our area and killing them there, and have seen positive results. Doing so raises the mana in the area slightly for each creature killed. Aprait has been doing this for years, hoping to increase our mana density. However, for every beast we slay in our area, a human dies outside of it, keeping the balance, unfortunately, as is. The theoretical idea is to lure many beasts in at once and kill them together through a significant battle.

All the beasts and humans dying at the same time in the same place should theoretically rapidly increase the mana in the area, and hopefully, that would lead to the area becoming what we would call a mana pocket. An area mana would continually be attracted to. By raising our mana, we can then become stronger, and more of us can become powerful, which in turn would allow us to take more land, and kill more beasts — hopefully leading to a cascading effect which will enable us to become the dominant force again.

Considering that these two ideas are not mutually exclusive, we decide upon both. As we set up and ready ourselves to send out the first excursion, we can try my approach and see if the effects are what we would like. The timeline would be something along the lines of spending two months setting up a battlefield and mapping out the methods and routes of luring beasts into it. Then in the third month have a significant battle. We will wait two months to see if the results are satisfying. If they are, we will increase our power and push outwards.

It would mean that we won’t have to risk our children in a new community, and we can slowly and safely expand. If for some reason, the results are less than desirable, we will start choosing and training a group of children and powerful for starting a new community. When we have the meeting next year, we will then decide if the group is ready, finalize preparations and send them out.

…

Two months later, our preparations are finally all complete. The arena is built, and we have cleared unobstructed paths into it from all the luring locations outside to its center. We have mapped out the single beasts and beast hordes we want to lure here, and we have prepared suitable lures as well as our fastest powerful to use these lures. Then we have set up teams of powerful at each entrance with theoretically enough power to kill the beasts that will enter this trap. We have timed the luring and the killing and have doctors ready to try to save as many lives as possible. We also have a few warriors in reserve in case of too many casualties or more beasts than expected show up.

If it were quiet here, I am sure that we could hear the first of the beasts making way towards us. However, right now all I can hear is the fighters pumping themselves up for battle.

As the first beast horde arrives, a pack of massive wolves, the powerful holding the bait turns right in front of the team ready to catch the horde and slaughter them. The first of these wolves hasn’t been cut down before I hear the next beast to my right enter the arena. The sound comes from a strong and overgrown grizzly that has been living about 2 kilometers from my family’s castle for as long as I can remember. Getting rid of it will not just help us right now, but in the long run, it will take out one of the most potent neighbors we have to contend with.

More and more beasts stream into the arena only to be met by our warriors. As a team finishes of their mark, they move on to help on the next, and so on. It takes two whole hours to get all the beasts in the arena, and by the time the last one enters, we have already killed half of them. Fortunately, careful planning and timing have kept our loss of human life minimal and less than we had feared. I close my eyes as I can feel mana levels rising. It feels like at the end of a cold night, waking up and basking in the sun in the morning. It may take time for mana to make us stronger, but the feeling of mana rich air around us feels good nonetheless. It does, however, also help the beasts and motivate them to fight harder.

Another hour later, all the beasts are dead, and our doctors are trying to save as many humans as possible. The air is definitively more abundant in mana, but most of the mana is still hanging in the small area where most of the beasts died and coalescing into what I can only describe as a sphere. I can’t see it of course, but anybody who has lived with mana their entire life can feel it well enough to know precisely what is happening. It seems to be increasingly focussing itself in one small area.

Curiously the unharmed fighters and I approach the sphere. This is the first time I have seen anything like this. I have of course been to multiple dense mana pockets whenever they form in the surrounding areas, but this is different.

And just as it seems to have reached the apex of absorbing the surrounding mana, it shoots away and is gone.

Well… if this is all the mana increase we are going to get, this was a tremendous waste of time and life.