“It is in dire conditions that people show both their best and their worst side.” - Old folk saying.

Aideen and Kino found the three siblings hard at work on the north-western corner of the city where they expected them to be. Some of the locals they helped visibly looked rather frightened at the sight of Eilonwy’s skeletal constructs lifting the rubble and helping extract people from underneath houses that collapsed, and some of the people rescued even tried to resist, but those constructs were so powerful that any resistance was futile to begin with.

The people who were not trapped within collapsed houses also witnessed the descent of Vitalis and how they laid down judgment on the mad king. Their own king. Perhaps because of that, the siblings found little resistance from the locals they helped, as instead they had resigned looks on their faces for the most part. Some had anger clearly shown on their features, but it was not aimed towards the siblings or their undead. Instead, it was aimed towards their very own king who had betrayed them as his people in the worst way possible.

Much like Aideen expected, there were survivors on the corners of the city, where the ritual didn’t reach. Some of the old and weak still died from proximity to the first mana streams that formed in the outskirts, but otherwise most of the people in that region of the city seemed to have pulled through with their lives. A few houses which used wood as their main construction material collapsed, but mud hovels were more common and those survived mostly unscathed.

Still, even so there weren’t that many survivors. The corners of the city were where the poorest of the poor lived. They were people who barely had anything to call their own, and unless forced to, nobody would have lived in that region. There were perhaps a couple hundred or so survivors in the north-western corner of the city that the group could find and gather together.

Fortunately there were enough able-bodied adults amongst the survivors to carry the young, weak, old, or injured with them, as Aideen asked them to move to the now empty central region of the city. The buildings in the central region was better suited for people to live in, and having all the survivors gathered together would make helping them easier.

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The survivors brought their meager belongings – and most importantly, what food they had in their houses – with them as they made the trek to the center of the city. Meanwhile, Aideen, Kino, and the three siblings split up and headed towards the other three corners of the city to look for more survivors. Aideen went on her own to the south-east, while Kino went with Áine to the south-west, as Rhys and Eilonwy took on the north-eastern corner.

Both of the other groups also brought a couple volunteers from amongst the survivors they saved since neither group had anyone who spoke the local tongue. The volunteers could at least help explain and pacify the other survivors they would find in the other corners, and they even spoke broken common which allowed them to serve as translators to an extent.

Aideen naturally needed no translator with her since she was still fluent enough in the local tongue, even if in a slightly different dialect. They rushed towards the different corners of the city, and by dawn, had discovered more survivors that they directed towards the city center. There were maybe a little less than a thousand survivors in total, out of a city that used to house over fifteen thousand people.

Once they regathered at the city center where the survivors were huddled, that was when they realized another major issue, namely the lack of food. The ritual had turned everything organic within its range to nothing but dust, which meant that all the food left in the city were the meager bits that the survivors managed to bring with them from their homes as well as what Aideen’s group had with them.

After quickly pooling together the food that the survivors brought with them, Aideen quickly came to the realization that there was not enough food for the nearly thousand people there, at least, not for long. The food that the survivors managed to gather would perhaps last them a couple of weeks, if strictly rationed, and while Aideen did have a large amount of food with her, it was far from enough to feed so many people for long.

She figured that they could last for a month to a month and a half at most, with the supplies that they had in hand.

However, if what she heard about such divine interventions were true, then chances were that other people even from afar would have noticed the incident, and she doubted that none of them would make a move in that regard. For that matter, Grandpa Aarin should have noticed, and while Aideen had no idea whether he was aware of their presence at the incident’s location or not, it was unlikely that he would leave such a thing unchecked.

As such, for the time being Aideen decided to just help out the survivors as best she could. Worst comes to worst, she could maintain the survival of the people they gathered forcefully using her magic, while sending out the others to find aid. In the end, they decided to send Kino to the south towards the Lichdom to find aid and succor, since Kino could cover the most distance without needing food or rest as an Unliving.

Aideen could have done the same herself, but she was needed to keep the survivors alive. The siblings stayed with her, as sending them out would mean sending a sizable chunk of their food supplies along with them, so it was better to have them stay with Aideen and help out instead. At least that way they could lighten her burdens a bit.