I arrived back at Kerolu’s house. I hadn’t gotten any less winded on the way there though, so when I arrived I leaned against a wall in the entrance and wheezed out “water… please…”

Thankfully the sons got the message and got up to get me a drink. It seemed they had been a bit desperate for something to do.

I walked into the bedroom where my father was. He was talking with the two people there, probably trying to comfort them. It didn’t matter.

“Father! There’s an immortal. He’s going to our house! He’s… he looks furious, and he’s unleashing an unbearable heat! What’s happening?”

My Father startled at that, more fear appearing in his eyes than I’ve ever seen before.

“What did he look like?”

“He had these glowing blue eyes and straight black hair.”

My father cursed in ways I’d never heard out of him before. Seeing him like this was only making me panic more.

“No this is too soon, too far. He shouldn’t have gotten here by now.” Panic was visible on his face, he started glancing around and then he froze.

“We’re all going to die.” he said in a horrifying monotone. He said it with a certainty that chilled me to my core. He put his head in his hands while everyone else in the room remained paralyzed. I knew that he wasn’t just guessing, he could see it coming with his power.

He bolted upright, lunged in my direction, and gripped my shoulders so hard it hurt. The herbs I had run back for fell to the floor, but nobody paid them any mind. He looked into my eyes, I could feel the magic examining me, my future.

“You’re still going to live.” He said with certainty. Suddenly he was very active. He opened up the bag he had brought with him, searching through it until he brought out his notebook. He never went anywhere without it. His notebook was an unassuming volume bound in leather, but I knew it was enchanted to hold more pages than it should be able to for its size. It was his most prized possession, and he thrust it into my hands.

“In the first few pages, there is a map. It shows a path through the forest. I’ve marked trees along the path with the various symbols on the map. Follow the path to its end and look for the hollow underneath the Avlor tree. There is a cave, hide there.”

As my Father spoke I struggled to keep up, my mind failing to process what was happening. It took me a few moments to process what was said, but when I did I had questions.

“Why? Won't you come? How long do we need to hide?”

“Even though you’re not going to die today, you are in danger. I cannot come because that danger will be looking for me. I need to draw it away from you and everyone else. Hide for as long as you can, until you’re certain it’s safe to come out.”

My mind was still reeling. The door opened and one of the sons came in holding a clay cup filled with water. My father took it from him and handed it to me.

“Drink quickly, you don’t have much time.”

I stared down into the water, a hundred emotions competing with a hundred things I wanted to say but didn’t know how. I drank.

I drank quickly and deeply, when I had drained the cup I was handed another, apparently the son had brought a jug and cups, and my father had poured another out for me.

“Drink now so you can run faster, do you understand me?” he asked.

I tried to hum in affirmation as I drank. Once I finished the second drink I was gasping for air. I looked at my Father, and somehow in all of this he was smiling at me, care visible on his face.

I looked to Kerolu and her family. The other son had come in as well, and all four of them were holding each other. Kerolu was crying.

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My Father put his hand on my shoulder again, gently this time, and when he looked at me there was none of the discomforting focus in his eyes. There were tears beginning to form in them.

“I love you… now run."

I ran. I heard motion behind me as I moved, it sounded like one of the boys tried to follow after me, but somebody stopped him. I didn’t look back. Once I got outside the heat was somehow even worse than it was when I went inside. I opened the notebook and turned a couple pages until I found the map. I saw a simplistic version of our house and the street it was on, and from that I was quickly able to tell which direction I needed to run. I was scared of running even close to the direction I’d seen the immortals go, but my Father had been so certain in his words I wasn't about to ignore them.

I jogged as fast as I could without running out of breath in the heat. With the distance into the forest I needed to run, this would be more a test of my endurance, instead of the speed I prioritized in getting the herbs. I was still pushing myself as hard as I could, so it wasn't long before I left the center of town, and began to be able to see more of the surrounding area.

My eyes were naturally drawn in the direction of my house, both by habit, and by an unearthly glow.

It was burning. Burning with a magical blue flame. I stumbled to a halt, horrified by what I was seeing. Every childhood keepsake, the bed I had slept in for over a decade, every well loved bit of clothing I owned, all the books that I could never sell, that never left me. All of it was burning.

My past burned, and all I could do was watch.

I don’t know quite how long I stood staring at the blue flame, it could have been seconds or it could have been minutes, but eventually I noticed the two immortals near the house where Pan used to live. The man was accosting some of the people sheltering there, taking them out of the house and clearly shouting at them. The woman stood off to one side, seeming to do her best to look at neither the arson that had been committed, nor the assault that was being committed. Due to the lack of directions that were left available, she inevitably looked towards me.

Our gazes locked, and once again I felt frozen. I didn’t know what was happening, but these were the very people I was supposed to be running away from. I felt in my bones that she knew how afraid I was. A second passed, and she looked away, looking almost directly away from me.

I don’t know why she wasn’t pursuing me, she easily could have caught me, but I wasn’t going to give her time to reconsider. I continued to run, feeling far too exposed.

Eventually I found my way to the forest, and looking back at the map I held, began searching the treeline. It took me precious minutes to find the tree with a large cross carved into its base. It was hard to see, but now that I was looking for it, I could begin to make out a pathway through the underbrush. Places where the ground had been well trodden.

An explosion made me turn around. A great plume of smokeless blue flame rose from the middle of town, then another. More explosions followed, but I was even more worried about something else I saw. Two figures. One was Drinker, who lived at the house where the immortals had been questioning people, and the other was one of the younger Beggars who hung around there.

I was being pursued. If they had been tasked with finding me… I needed to move faster.

I turned back towards the forest and dived in. The shade and insulation the trees provided was blissfully cool compared to what it had been out in the open. I looked back at the map and memorized the rest of the symbols. Through a mixture of going where the underbrush had been tamped down by frequent passage and noticing the symbols carved into wood, I was able to keep up a good pace.

The explosions continued behind me, a constant reminder of the danger I was in. My mind wandered to what I knew about Drinker. His name was an old one. He had been a well known town drunk, but he was well over a decade sober. He had run out of drinking money, and took to leading the other Beggars. There were plenty of rumors that he had rounded up a few of the older Beggars and started up a career as a bandit. Perhaps my Father or other immortals would have taken the trouble to confirm those rumors and hunt him down, but there weren't any murders or kidnappings in the robberies he was blamed for, which was a good deal more reasonable than some of his predecessors in the area. It wasn't difficult to predict whoever took his place would be worse, so he became something we endured, rather than something we fixed.

It didn't take me long to get to the end of the marked path, less than fifteen minutes. I could hear shouting behind me. I didn't have much of a lead on those chasing me.

My head swiveled around, before I caught sight of the telltale black bark and long needles of an Avlor tree. I had seen images in the books on botany that guided me in gardening, but I didn't know that any lived in this forest. They were one of the few species of plant that could feed on latent mana in the ground, and in fact needed that mana.

I dashed towards the tree. Once I got to it I felt around the bottom, before finding a mat of moss that had been placed to cover up a cavern leading down below the base of the tree, hidden between its roots.

"Hey! Stop!" I heard from behind me. I turned to see the girl who had been following Drinker. We made eye contact, then a giant flare of blue light distracted us both.

Behind her, towards the town, I saw a brilliant sphere of roiling blue expanding to swallow the sky, then a second later the sound of the horrific blast came and shook me to my core. It made my ears hurt like they never had before. I worried I might be deaf.

The explosion showed no signs of stopping, continuing to expand. I turned back and scurried down into the cave as quickly as I could.