Book 3, Chapter 80 (Patreon)

Author's Note: Book 4 will begin tomorrow. 7/week updates will continue until August 23rd when book 3 reaches the end on Royal Road.

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For three days, I’d been overseeing the migration of Sanctuary’s population to their new town. I’d helped put up homes for the farmers fast and cast spells to prepare their fields for planting. I’d even transmuted the soil to match some of the samples I’d taken from other lands where things seemed to grow better.

All the while, I’d been watching through the various surveillance spells I’d scattered throughout Ammun’s tower. His new body had been up and active within hours of the conclusion of our battle, and he’d immediately gotten to work repairing the altered mana flows I’d left behind. I’d hoped the loss of his master interface would slow him down, but with the entire tower being his demesne, he didn’t need it. Apparently, that had been for his underlings to use, not him.

“You look tense,” Father said, pausing in the act of hauling bags of seed out of a barn to be piled up on a wagon, all of which would get pulled into my phantom space for easier transport.

I grunted in reply, not turning my attention away from what my divinations were feeding me. At this distance, it was hard to get a clear picture. I doubted I’d be returning anytime soon to recover the stored images, so this was as much as I was going to get.

“Gravin?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Everything’s going wrong, Father. We’re not ready for this yet. Maybe in a decade, but not now.”

“Do we have a decade?”

“No,” I told him bluntly. “That’s why you all need to leave.”

Between the brakvaw pitching a fit about the necessary destruction of their portal and Ammun’s people leaving the tower in every direction to hunt me down, I’d be lucky to get a year to prepare. The brakvaw were the more immediate problem, but they were the less serious of the two. I couldn’t afford to waste time dealing with them when I needed to prepare for my next confrontation with Ammun.

Father looked like he wanted to say more, but he just sighed and shook his head before disappearing back into the storage shed. I watched him go with a pensive frown and went over my mental calculations again.

The petrified forest experiment was going well. The plan seemed viable, but it needed more time. It would be the work of months to seed the entire forest, then years for them to finish their work. Even my most opportunistic estimates put it at two years to fully petrify the valley. I was going to have to take additional steps to shield my home from divination. What I had now were designed to defeat the weak mages of this era, not an undead archmage I’d personally trained thousands of years ago.

“Keiran,” Ammun said, catching my attention through one of my scrying spells. He was looking right at the anchor for the divination, clearly seeing it and just as obviously aware of what it was. “I want you to know that you failed.

“You could have worked with me. You should have agreed. We want the same thing. For all your faults, your sheer arrogance, that unchecked ego, I always respected your brilliance as a researcher. Look what you made: a spell to defy death itself.

“But no, you had to do it your way. You had to fight me, all to destroy my greatest creation. Look upon it now. Your efforts were for naught. The tower stands strong, and it will be even greater now that I’ve reawakened.”

I felt his magic trying to crawl across the link between myself and the surveillance spell, to trace it back to locate me while he monologued. It was easy to defeat the outside intrusion into my spell, and he seemed to realize that there was no chance of him getting through.

“I’m coming for you,” he said, his voice turning angry. “It won’t be today, but it will be soon. How quickly can you grow in the wasteland that is the rest of the world? Only here could you find the mana you need, and we both know you’re too smart to set foot in here again. At the level of power you’re stuck at, your death is inevitable. There’s no way you’ll escape my reach long enough to be able to confront me again.”

There was some truth to that statement. I’d had my shot at him, and I’d missed. I wasn’t sure when exactly he’d made the switch between his phylactery and the empty one, if at all. Maybe he’d done it a thousand years ago when he’d sealed himself up, and his true phylactery was hidden somewhere else in the tower. Either way, unless I could find it, he was a never-ending problem.

“Just know that your days are numbered,” Ammun said.

Then, he simultaneously crushed every single surveillance spell I had in the tower, which was particularly impressive because they spanned hundreds of miles. It was only possible because he’d bonded the tower as his genius loci, a perfect example of how futile it could be to fight a properly prepared mage in his own demesne.

Father came back out of the shed, two more bags of seed slung over his shoulder. “That’s the last of it,” he said as he dropped them onto the wagon bed. “Shouldn’t need too many more- Hey, you okay there?”

“I’m fine,” I told him, pulling myself out of my thoughts. “Just watching some divinations I’ve got out and about for threats. So this one is ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Father said slowly, still watching me. “You sure you’re…”

I just shook my head and pulled the wagon into my phantom space. “Come on, lots of work to do,” I said. “And not a lot of time to do it.”

  *

It took two weeks, including the time the field hands spent bringing in an early harvest. None of them were too happy about that, but I absolutely needed them out of the valley as soon as possible. I’d already helped Tetrin relocate his workshop to the new farm town, though I suspected without me there, he wouldn’t linger long. Maybe he’d surprise me, though. After all, there was plenty of mana for his experiments, and that was what he was after.

While everyone else worked on relocating an entire village, I had Hyago and his three assistants seeding every tree in the forest with the petrification pebbles I’d made. Creating such a colossal amount of living stone had drained all of the storage crystals I’d been working on and I’d still run up short, so I’d be devoting the majority of my personal mana generation to making more over the next few months. Hopefully, I’d keep ahead of how fast Hyago’s team was going through them.

Once it was just me and the four druids left in the valley, I removed the teleportation platform and activated the divination shroud I’d been working on. It latched onto the mana shielding network we’d already built and spread across the length of the entire valley – weak for now, but it’d grow to its full potency over the next day or two.

Not only would it protect the valley from all forms of divination, it also served as a giant attention redirector, so anything flying overhead that could physically see the valley would be inclined to forget about it. Their eyes would slide right over it and dismiss it as an unimportant, irrelevant chunk of land nestled between two mountains.

I just hoped it would be enough.

Hyago was waiting for me to deliver the next batch of stone seeds, so I collected them from my workshop, each in its own container to prevent them from merging into each other, and flew out into the valley to meet him at his tree house. His assistants were there as well, people whose faces I recognized but whose names escaped me. I was almost positive one of them had been an Arborist back in my home village before moving here.

“How many in this batch?” Hyago asked as I pulled four wooden cases out of my phantom space to distribute.

“One thousand each,” I said. “This will be the last big run. I’ve pretty much used up all my reserves at this point.”

“And there’s no going back to get more mana from wherever you were before?”

“No, too dangerous with an archmage lich ruling over the area now. I had to break the portal the brakvaw were using to hunt there, too. I even left an explosive spell behind to shatter the stonework after I passed through so there’d be no way anyone could trace it back to our island.”

Hyago didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t need to. We’d both done the math and concluded that there were a lot more than a few thousand trees in the valley. Without a source of outside mana, it was going to be a chore to keep growing new petrification seeds.

“I have some ideas,” I said. “We’ll see how they play out.”

“Maybe you should visit Derro again,” he said. “Lot of people there.”

“It’s a possibility,” I agreed. “I actually had another idea, though…”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“I have this chunk of moon rock I recovered years ago that I’ve started experimenting with again recently. I think I might be able to get it producing mana for me, but we’ll see. If it fails, I have other routes to explore.”

All four of the druids stared at me for a moment before one of them hesitantly asked, “You have a piece of a moon? What color is it?”

“Color… is complicated,” I said. “Only the outer layers are colored like we see them up in the sky. Their interiors are the same black and gray and brown as anything else. This particular chunk is gray with black striations.”

“Alright, enough of that,” Hyago said. “Off with you. We’ve got a lot of work to do and the sooner it gets done, the better.”

His assistants scattered into the forest, trackable by the mana they were burning on strengthening invocations to hold the massive weight of the wooden boxes I’d given them. Hyago hefted his own box and glanced at me before walking away. “Anything else you need, boss?”

“About a million things,” I said, “but nothing you can help with. I’ve got another meeting with the brakvaw to try to calm them down and keep them from returning to their old hunting grounds.”

“Surprised you’d bother,” the druid said.

“If I’m being honest, brakvaw are huge and have a ton of mana they don’t need. I’m hoping to secure some of it by being cooperative with them. We’re still negotiating.”

“Ah. You’ll figure it out. You always do.”

Hyago steadied his box once more, then slipped off into the woods, leaving me standing alone in the small clearing below his tree house. I looked up at it and blew out a frustrated sigh, then cast a flight spell and lifted off into the air. Despite Hyago’s confidence in my abilities, getting this done under such a tight deadline was a longshot. There was no telling when Ammun’s hunters would find me, and I suspected that I had, at best, a few years before he felt confident enough to venture out of his place of power.

Ironically, the lack of ambient mana in the rest of the world was the only thing keeping me safe now. For the moment, he was trapped in his own tower, unable to venture away for more than an afternoon jaunt. As long as I kept my distance, I could avoid another fight.

That wouldn’t work forever. I needed to regain my former status as a stage nine archmage, or even go beyond. Right now, Ammun had all the advantages. If I didn’t turn the tables, he’d eventually find me and crush me.

I skimmed up the coastline, heading to Eyrie Peak to start working on the next phase of my own plans, and prayed it would be enough.

End of Book 3