Harlan stopped staying in towns, he just moved as quickly as he safely could to Direhold.

In the morning he would be there, but for tonight, he was a young and starry eyed adventurer sitting around a campfire in a simple hut he constructed to keep out the blizzard that suddenly started up.

He looked like a man in his 40s, he had light freckling on his face, more of it was on his skin.

His hair was mostly red but with clear signs of aging. He was playing the part of a man who had already had a long life of adventure, and was looking to settle down.

“I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t found me.”

“As you get older, you’ll get a sense for these things. You should’ve realized that the request was old, the paper was faded and you could barely make out the ink. Running into a full grown Lindwurm when you went hunting for hatchlings must’ve been a shock.”

Harlan had overheard the ambitious young woman as she walked out of town and decided to follow her while in stealth, just to see what would happen.

“I’ll remember that, thank you. What’s your name? Forgot to ask in all the confusion.”

“Hargrave.”

“Nice to meet you, I’m Jas. So, what brings you out here?”

Harlan hesitated as he answered, this would determine quite a bit about how he would act from here on out as this new person.

“Just traveling.”

She moved her hand closer to her daggers.

“Oh, where to?”

“Direhold, there is someone I would like to meet there, but I’m not sure if he is even around right now.”

Harlan began drawing out the sap of the cut branches so they wouldn’t leak into the meat when he cooked it over the fire.

“Do you want your own skewer?”

“Sure, do you have any meat on you… I didn’t play to spend the night out here.”

“We’ve got all the meat we need.”

Harlan began cubing the Lindwurm and sticking it on his newly carved roasting stick.

“Is that stuff safe?”

“I made sure not to hit the acid or venom sacs. It is fine meat, the stuff nobles buy instead of hunting.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, some knights even tried to steal carts of the stuff about a month and a half ago. Here, let me…”

Harlan had grown used to using spells for cooking, so he thought little of it, but Jas has been watching him intently the entire time.

After the meal, she spoke up.

“Magic, how hard would it be for me to learn it?”

“How old are you?”

“17, I think.”

“You think?”

“Orphan, they never told me my birthday so I pretend that it is on new year's day.”

“Huh. my birthday is new year’s eve actually.”

“Some coincidence.”

“Anyway, I could teach you some, but since you are asking the way you are, I guess you can’t sense yet?”

“What does that mean?”

“You can’t see mana, if you can’t see mana, you can’t use magic.”

“You mean the little bits of color in the air?”

“Ah, were you born able to sense then?”

“I guess.”

“How fortunate. I’ve rarely met anyone else who could do so. Have you ever accidentally cast magic? Generally this happens in a high stress situation.”

Harlan paid attention to her body language, she brought her knees closer as if to hide her face, entering an almost fetal position while gripping her dagger, the one friend she had.

She saw his gaze as something else and jumped up immediately.

“What is the price for learning magic?”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Everyone wants something, I’m not letting you near me.”

She had her dagger in hand, ready to strike.

But instead of a fight, Harlan lowered his head, memories of Claudia resurfaced and hurt him.

“I’m sorry. I’ll make another hut to sleep in, if you want to learn, just ask me tomorrow. And, I can see you have been hurt in the past, so I will try to be considerate as I teach you. Nobody so young should see the world like that.”

He did as he said he would, but Jas didn’t sleep a wink.

The blizzard that had started meant she would lose her way if not be killed by things that lurk in the snow if she tried to leave, but she was far from comfortable so near an unknown man.

Harlan tried to lower her fear so she could get some sleep, but it was something run so deeply that he could barely make it budge.

“So, have you found yourself?”

“Yeah, I think so. I think Sepul has it made. Yggdra has him as a trusted advisor, so he gets to help change the country, but not deal with all the bullshit politicking. He sits in his house and does whatever he wants and then when he needs to, he exercises his power to let people know that there is a better option, a peaceful one, or there is him.”

“So, why not head back? You are going to miss your 16th birthday.”

“Because she needs me. I’ll watch her for a while, if Ky happens to be there, great for me, if not, I’ll leave.”

“You are talking like an old man, remember you put those wrinkles on your face, but you are a kid yourself.”

“I think I’ll sleep tonight.”

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“Really? Around other people? I thought you had grown past human interaction after weeks of sleeping in trees.”

“A short nap.”

Harlan saw Mary in his dream, she looked distraught, panicked, she was sitting with Alrick.

When Jas awoke she found Harlan had already bound and packaged the Lindwurm meat by cut and marked them with suggested prices, made a sled, and loaded it.

“Have you made a choice?”

“I can’t stay here. Just watch your hands.”

“It will be hard to do anything when I’m pulling the sled.”

Harlan drilled her in the remaining hours it took to reach Direhold, it should’ve been an hour long trip, they were already most of the way there deep in the woods; even with divination Harlan found himself disoriented and wasted time constantly making sure that he was headed where he wanted too.

There was another issue at hand when they got even closer however.

The guards at the front gate of the sizable town lamented being forced to stand watch in the white out, nobody would be stupid enough to be out in such a storm. Even from their guardpost they could barely keep the small room hot enough to fight back the chill.

In the distance he could barely make out a bright orange light, so he woke up his partner.

“Look at that? It isn’t a snow mirage, right?”

“What jackass would be out in weather like this?”

Suddenly the ball of light flew away from the town and exploded, the bright fire revealed the forms of a less than happy juvenile Ice Wyvern, a sled, and the man who was pulling the sled.

The guards sounded the alarm, and luckily for them, there was a ranger in town alongside a company of knights who were accompanying a count.

Harlan let go of the reins and jumped over the sled that was now hurtling toward the town gate.

As it was a young Ice Wyvern, and not a Great Ice Wyvern, it was 20 feet long with a 40 foot wingspan and not at human levels of intelligence.

Harlan had hit it once, and he hurt it. So he wasn’t too worried about killing the beast, the issue was more that he had been protecting Jas who had frozen in fear and hadn’t gotten the chance to really go all out.

He roared a challenge at the beast and they rushed at one another.

Harlan had listened to plenty of stories from Sepul about the great purge of the north where wyverns were either killed or pushed into the far north where people didn’t live, and for the last 300 years, it had still yet to be conquered.

He knew where their weak spots were and how best a normal man might be able to face such a creature.

Fortunately the beast was unable to take flight due to the buffering winds, so it was already in his favor.

Harlan rushed forward and the Ice Wyvern that reared its head up and activated a spell that he didn’t fully understand, but that came to him naturally.

At first during his fight with Kalan he thought that he had discovered teleport, his body would suddenly shift as if he had already made the movements and allowed him to attack at a rate that went beyond his body.

What this was instead, was a rather low level time magic called skip, where a person would transport themselves a few seconds into the future. The obvious issue, and not one that Harlan knew or would worry about, was that these seconds were taken off the life of the person with interest.

One of the greatest time mages to ever live died at 40, but was physically 112.

He outaged his own great grandfather, but was content in the end that he had put forth information which would proliferate and improve the lives of every time mage after him.

As he left no heirs, and was not affiliated with the academy due to an altercation with the headmaster at the time, the crown seized his work upon his death and locked it away in the royal vaults to only be taught to them.

Harlan used the spell 2 times at the max power he was comfortable using, and he could cover quite a lot of distance in 6 seconds.

The issue for Harlan was only that the more he used it the more tired he became, time could never be restored, it was another bit of magic that made him need to eat and sleep more.

As the sacs in the throat of the wyvern flared up with chilling blue fire Harlan tossed his rod, now shaped like a spear, using imbibing and telekinesis to overcome the winds.

Then he ran back towards the town as fast as he could while a bright explosion created a burst of ice that encompassed most of the wyvern.

When the explosion tossed him back, he used anti-friction spells to gain speed.

By the time he reached the gate it was just opening to let out the knights and the ranger.

Harlan staggered over to the sled where Jas was still frozen in shock and opened a pack of meat, cooking it with fire magic before eating it. He regretted not turning some into jerky for situations like this, he could use magic to cook the meat, but he would rather have that energy right now instead of waiting to digest it.

After 10 minutes the men came back to ask questions, at the head was Ky.

A noble may appoint knights as part of their private armies, but as a ranger in the frontier, he outranked them by virtue of all rangers being under the national army, not a noble army.

“Did you kill that wyvern?”

Harlan’s mind was still sailing half mast.

“Sorry, Ky, I should’ve let you eat the breath sacs, but I needed to kill it quickly.”

“Have we met before?”

“Yeah.”

“And your name is?”

“Har…grave.”

His mind caught up with his mouth and he was suddenly at attention, putting back on the facade of Hargrave, the old traveling mage.

“Did she help you?”

“She screamed and hollered, but no, they aren’t at the level to fight a wyvern.”

“Why did you come here to Direhold?”

“I’m bored, I’m old, and I want to travel since I don’t think I need to be afraid of whatever is out there.

I just happened to run into this kid, didn’t seem right to let her die out here.”

Ky looked at him, his eyes shifted between different magical creatures that he had eaten.

In his years in the frontier and how he had learned how his own curse worked, he now held onto certain abilities provided he could eat enough of the creature to fully absorb their powers.

“Alright, I’ll let you inside. You have the right to the wyvern corpse by killing law, but I would like to purchase some if you are selling.”

“Sure, the sled is also full of Lindwurm meat, I’ve labeled them in case you want specific cuts.”

“Provided the price is fair, I’d like some for my family.”

“You got time to help with the wyvern? I’ll cut the price, toss in some as payment.”

“Unfortunately I’m on guard duty for the local count and his son who are trapped here by this storm. But I can tell you where my home is, you should be able to find my parents, they know what I’d pay. You just go…”

Harlan was glad to see that Ky seemed happy, his time as a ranger, helping people, finding new animals, eating them, he didn’t feel caged by his curse anymore, it was just part of him.

“Alright, let’s cut up that lizard, in exchange, I’ll teach you magic.”

Jas had to scream to be heard over the storm.

“WE’LL FREEZE, WHY NOT COME BACK IN THE MORNING?”

“I’ll keep us warm.”

She looked worried, but decided that Hargrave hadn’t really turned her wrong yet, if he was confident that it was fine, it probably was.

Harlan put up four large walls and a roof of stone, making a simple butcher room that he could take down afterward, then began carving runes on them.

In such a frigid environment fire mana was scarce without human intervention, so Harlan used a different method. These runes would rely on water mana and pull cold into them, thus heating the inside of their box without fire magic.

He ran her through the process of first cracking the ice and then prying off the top scales so they could actually cut the skin underneath which had a second set of finer scales.

Sepul was always almost giddy to speak about how he killed wyverns of all types and then used them to outfit soldiers to kill more wyverns. The hate that man had for the beasts ran deep and made Harlan afraid to really ask what the source of it all was. He felt some nostalgia for the old man, of the people who had called him, he was not one and Harlan wasn’t sure if he should be offended or not.

Harlan never called him, or anyone really besides Adina once back in Bearfast.

He worried that his resolve might falter and he would return sooner than he wanted if he spoke with everyone too often.

There was also the issue of not wanting to tell others where he was, lest they follow the trail of carnage and link that to him.

“Hargrave, are you listening?”

“Nope. What do you need?”

“We’ve been out here for hours and I’m tired, can we at least go into the town to get some hot food and some drink?”

“You’re too young to be drinking, but I’m not your father. Go, I can handle the rest.”

“I was hoping that you would come with me, a young girl out in a rough frontier town means I’m probably going to be safer with a man walking me around. As stupid as it is.”

Harlan stopped his careful cutting of the meat for a moment.

“Alright. If I’m not there, you’ll kill somebody. Instead, I can kill them.”

He did have a few things he might want in town.