It took Nym two hours of searching after he teleported to Karu before he finally found the Earth Shapers. They were almost a hundred miles away, literally out in the middle of nowhere, excavating a chunk of forest around a base camp made of familiar looking buildings. He’d seen the like many times in the military camps and outposts, the quick and dirty shelters earth mages put up. They were easy to make and easy to abandon.

He spotted Bildar first, the bearded mage working some sort of magic on the soil to loosen it and eject a tree stump. It was a slow going spell, with the stump only moving a few inches up a minute. A few other laborers nearby that he didn’t recognize were using some sort of specialized cutting spell to process the already felled tree into stacks of timber. It looked vaguely like the cutting spell Nym already knew, except optimized for trimming logs down into planks.

Nym grinned and cast a camouflaging sphere spell around himself. He drifted down out of the sky, taking his time to ensure there was no wind from his movement. Only when he was a foot away from Bildar, and floating in the air right in front of the man, did he let the camouflage drop.

“Hi,” Nym said.

Bildar regarded him blandly. “Hi, Nym.”

Nym’s brow furrowed and he looked around. One of the other workers had jumped when Nym dispelled his camouflage, but Bildar hadn’t. “Hmm, I’ve become too predictable, haven’t I?”

“A little bit, yes. Also I knew you were there.”

“What? How?”

“Dirt and dust curving across the bottom of your air shell when you came down to get into position.”

Nym looked down between his feet. Sure enough, he could see the dust outlining the curve of the hard air. “Damn it. There’s too much loose dirt and dust here.”

“Sorry,” Bildar told him, not sounding sorry at all. “Might want to take a step back, I’ve got to pull this stump out. We need to get this whole side cleared this afternoon so the twins can start digging the foundation for the first storage building.”

“Oh? What are you guys doing out here, anyway?”

“It’s a new town,” Bildar said. “Kind of. More of a hunting and trapping outpost. The contract is for twenty buildings and fifty miles of road. There’s a big company in Karu that wanted the place set up. I guess they think it’ll cut operations costs or something. I don’t know. Ophelia does the numbers on that stuff for us.”

Nym floated up a bit to look around. There definitely wasn’t room for even half the supposed buildings, not even if they were all small one or two-room houses. But then, that’s what the deforestation was for. There were six more stumps waiting for Bildar to get to them. “You just need to get these six here pulled out by the end of the day?”

“By the end of the afternoon,” Bildar corrected.

“Great,” Nym said. He grabbed one with greater telekinesis and ripped it straight up into the air, then a second, then a third. “Where do you want these at?”

The other laborers gawked at Nym while Bildar laughed and shook his head. “I have no idea. There was a team that was hauling them away one-by-one.”

Nym popped the other three stumps out of the ground and left them lying on their sides in the dirt. “Okay, well, they’ll figure that out. Come on, let’s go get the others.”

“And what are we doing?” Bildar asked.

“Lunch. I was thinking the Quarterhouse.”

“I haven’t had one of their steaks in a year,” Bildar said with a happy sigh. “I guess an early lunch break wouldn’t go amiss.”

“H-hey,” one of the other laborers said. “You can’t just walk off like that.”

“Why?” Bildar made a show of looking around. “Is there a stump somewhere I missed?”

“Well, no, but…”

“Then I’ll be back in a few hours to start the next project.”

The two men exchanged looks, shrugged, and got back to work. Nym could hear them grumbling under their breath the whole time though. “You going to get in trouble for this?” he asked.

“Nah. We’re not technically in charge here, but we’re a specialist crew, not general labor. The boss doesn’t care what we do as long as the work gets done.”

“Good. Let me see… Ophelia is that way. I bet I could scare her,” Nym said.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“You do that. I’ll go get the twins.”

Nym flew up about ten feet and recast his camouflaging sphere spell. Then he flew over to where Ophelia was doing some rune work on the framework of what looked like it would be the largest building on the site. She glanced over at him, frowned, and stood up.

She took a few steps one way, and then the other, obviously seeing the slight distortion the spell made. When seen from a single angle, it was difficult to notice. Moving made it easier to pick out, more so if Nym was the one moving the camouflage, but there were still small imperfections that could be picked out when the viewer moved if they were paying attention.

“Ah,” she said softly. “I thought so.”

A ball of mud rose up into the air and shot itself directly at the camouflage shield. Nym let it splatter against it, mostly disappearing against the surface but for the few pieces that bounced off. Nym left the camouflaging shell in place so she’d focus on the distortion, then teleported behind her and said, “Thought what?”

To her credit, Ophelia didn’t jump. She did flinch though, and Nym snickered. A second mud ball shot up and splattered across his chest. “Oh, you got me!” he moaned, dramatically throwing his arms out and allowing himself to fall back onto a new air cushion.

“You deserved it.” She took a step back and looked him over. “God, you already look another year older. By the time summer comes around, you’ll look older than me.”

“Nope. Fixed that a few weeks ago. I’ll age normally now.”

“You did? That’s fantastic news. Why did you wait so long to tell us?”

“I had to finish up the work I traded to get the curse broken. Uh… I kind of still have more work to do, but I wanted a break. We’re going out to lunch.”

“Hmm, well, it’s a bit early, but I suppose. Where were you thinking?”

“The Quarterhouse.”

“Ooooh. Yes, that sounds lovely. Let me just get cleaned up. Did you tell the others yet?”

“Just Bildar,” Nym said. “He’s going to get Monick and Nomick.”

“Let’s go find them then,” Ophelia said.

“Wait. Before that, I wanted to talk to you.”

“Hmm? What’s going on, Nym?”

“It’s about Analia,” Nym said. A sparkle appeared in Ophelia’s eyes and she started to smirk. “She’s killing people. I’m concerned.”

The smirk vanished. “Tell me everything.”

Nym explained about how she’d gotten tangled up with some vigilante group, started fighting drug runners, and was executing the ones she caught now. “I don’t really know what to do. It’s her business, but… I’ve killed people before. It weighs on you. Even the ones you can justify, the ones where you had no choice, where it was them or you, you lose sleep over them.”

“I know,” Ophelia said softly. “I know. What do you want to do?”

“Take her away from there before she ends up being the face that haunts someone else’s nightmares, or before she gets so used to it that she stops caring. I don’t know which one would be worse. Either way, my friend would be gone.”

“While I do think one of those fates is markedly worse than the other, I see your point. You know that’s not a real solution though, right?”

“I know. It’s her life,” Nym said. “But… what else can we do?”

“It’s a hard thing to watch someone you care about do something you don’t agree with. This kind of stuff ends friendships and splits up families.”

“Yeah, so… what do we do?”

“There’s not much we can do. She has to live her own life and make her own mistakes. All we can do is be there to support her when she needs it, and hope she’ll let us.”

“It doesn’t seem like it’s enough.”

Ophelia nodded. “I know. But let’s look at the alternative. You’re an asc- a third circle mage. You’ve got plenty of power to spare. Let’s say you go over there, teleport Analia out against her will, basically kidnap her, and bring her here. Then what? Do you think she’s going to thank you for getting her away from danger without even asking her? Or worse, for doing it after you did ask and she explicitly told you no?”

Nym shook his head. “No, of course not. I wouldn’t do that.”

“I know, but that’s what you’re asking me, isn’t it, what to do with all this power you have to make her stop doing the things you don’t want her to do?”

“No! No. That’s not it. I was just hoping you’d know what to say to get her to listen. We kind of fought about it last time we talked. She wanted me to join her whatever group, to start running down people who were part of this cartel, torture them for information, execute them.”

“Why’d you say no?” Ophelia asked. “I understand why you’re afraid she’s in over your head. Honestly, she probably is. She’s too young to be doing this stuff, but your situation is different.”

Nym shrugged. “Because I’m not a good person, I guess? I don’t know. It seems pointless. Sure, I guess I can go in there, kill a bunch of people who maybe deserve it, maybe don’t, and deal with everything that comes with that. So what? A few months later, there’s a new cartel, new people doing the exact same thing. Do I spend the rest of my life just running around in circles cleaning up all the ugly parts of every human city in the world?”

“It would be an altruistic use of your unique abilities, but I get why it doesn’t appeal to you. You’re not as bad a person as you seem to think you are though. You’ve done lots to help people you didn’t owe a thing to.”

Before Nym could reply, Bildar yelled out from the road, “Hey you two! Are you ready?”

“To be continued later, I guess,” Nym said. “Let me know if you come up with a solution, okay?”

“I’ll do some thinking on it,” Ophelia promised.

The two of them walked out of the stone framework and joined the other three earth mages. All of them were, well, if not precisely clean, there was no dirt on them at least. Monick lifted a hand in greeting and asked, “How are you doing, Nym?”

“Good!” he said. “I’ve got news. Big stuff. I can’t wait to tell you guys all about it. You’re never going to believe what I found.”

“Oh yeah? Everything about you is pretty unbelievable, so you’ll have to forgive us if we don’t act too surprised at the next amazing feat, huh?”

Nym shared a grin with Monick, then looked past the group towards a fat man hustling over their way. “Who’s that?”

“That’s the guy in charge of this construction project,” Bildar said. “I should probably talk to him before we go.”

Nym traded sly glances with the twins, and then in unison, all three of them said, “Naaaah.”

“Wait, what?” Bildar spun to look at Nym. “Oh no you don’t. Don’t you da-”

The teleportation spell snagged all four of the Earth Shapers and Nym, pulling them through space and leaving the camp far behind. A moment later, Thrakus popped into view.

“-are,” Bildar finished lamely. He heaved an enormous sigh while the rest of the crew laughed. “I’m going to pay for that one later.”