Baviru sat in one of the dozen stone petitioner’s chairs I’d shaped for the meeting hall I’d built in their administration building while I leaned against the table where the town’s leadership would be seated.

“Alright,” I said. “I want you to walk me through everything that happened. Just start at the beginning.”

“The beginning,” Baviru muttered, more to himself than me. He heaved a sigh and said, “I suppose the beginning was when a Lightbearer showed up out of nowhere one day. We’d just had the procession come through three months earlier, and they’ve never come unannounced before. But this one came alone.”

“What did they look like?” I asked, not because I wanted a description, but because I was skimming Baviru’s thoughts and I wanted the mental image.

“Tall. Slim. I remember he had dark hair that was too long to be practical. Soft hands, too. Not a callus to be found. Clearly, he wasn’t someone accustomed to doing any sort of labor. That was before I knew he was from the Sanctum of Light, of course. It all made sense once he started displaying miracles to prove his identity.”

People in general were bad at remembering specifics. They thought they could see things clearly in their minds, but those images rarely matched reality. Mages generally did better since their work so often relied on them recalling precise instructions and paying attention to details, but we weren’t infallible either.

So I got a picture of what this man looked like from Baviru’s mind, and while the mage wasn’t one I recognized, that didn’t necessarily mean the memory was accurate. I hadn’t met most of the higher ups in Ammun’s loyalist organization, so it was entirely possible that Baviru’s recollection was perfect. Either way, I filed the image away as one to investigate later.

“And what did he want?” I asked.

“To demand more food from us,” Baviru said. “I tried to tell him we’d just given the emissaries all of our extra a few months back and needed more time, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Nothing I said or did could convince him that we simply didn’t have more to give. He said we had two months to come up with something and he’d be back to collect. No explanations. No negotiations. Just the demands. And then he left.”

That was what I’d expected to hear. Ammun was raising an army, and armies needed food – the one thing magic couldn’t provide for them. I wondered what it was he was planning on conquering.

“What happened after that?” I prompted Baviru when he fell silent again.

“There was nothing we could do. Our fleet was already working at maximum capacity. It wasn’t like we could build new boats in such a short amount of time. Our hunters supplemented our food supplies, but not enough to make up for the outrageous demands the Lightbearer had dropped on our head. So we got organized, delayed as long as we could to build up our supplies, and we left.”

I saw mental images of ships lined up in their docks, far more than they had with them now. Barrels filled the holds – food and fresh water. People took what small valuables they could as they abandoned their homes and crammed themselves into the ships.

“We should have left sooner,” Baviru said. “We were set to flee a week before the due date, thought it would give us plenty of time to put some distance between ourselves and the Lightbearer. He knew, somehow. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Maybe they were always watching us.

“Six of them showed up as we were loading everyone up. They didn’t ask any questions. They just started killing people.”

I didn’t have to ask for a description this time. Baviru’s mind showed me a scene of half a dozen Breaker mages standing on a dock, bodies scattered around them. Some were floating in the water; others were slumped over on the streets behind them. Baviru saw the whole thing from the rail of a departing ship, only a few hundred feet out to sea. A dozen other ships just like his were fleeing alongside him.

One of the mages raised a hand and unleashed a familiar white-hot beam of fire that struck a nearby ship. He raked the beam across the deck, killing sailors and setting the ship on fire. Another mage started hauling the ship back in with some powerful form of water manipulation after the sails were shredded and burnt.

Working in concert, the mages destroyed ship after ship, killing the people on them and looting the supplies before letting the burnt husks sink into the ocean. Only four of the ships got away, and even then, only because the mages let them. If I had to guess, I’d say it wasn’t for any altruistic reasons. They’d probably just run out of mana.

Baviru didn’t describe the carnage to me. He just sat silently, lost in his thoughts, for a few moments, then shook his head softly. “Most of us didn’t make it out,” he said after a while. “Of those that did, well… we did our best to supplement our rations with fishing and foraging once we’d been sailing for a week or so to put some distance between us and the Lightbearers. We’ve lost more than a few good people on the journey here.”

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Considering Baviru’s memories and my own headcount, I guessed that roughly a fifth of their population had survived. Most had been killed in the attack on the ships, and the rest had suffered a variety of poor ends on the journey. That was a lot of broken families.

“How long were you on the ships?” I asked.

“Six months, I think. Why does it matter?”

“I know a few people who’d be interested in learning that an army is being raised and might be planning on expanding outwards,” I said.

“An army?” Baviru jerked upright. “What army?”

“Why do you think they needed all the extra food all of a sudden? My understanding is that the Sanctum’s been doing these pilgrimages on a regular basis for decades, maybe even centuries. Now they’ve cut off all future resources they could get from your town. Forever. And if they did it to you, they’re probably doing it to plenty of other places.”

Baviru considered my words and nodded in agreement. “I hadn’t considered that the Lightbearers would be building an army. There doesn’t seem to be any need for one. We’ve lived peacefully for generations. But I suppose it does make sense.”

I didn’t mention the second half of my suspicion, that Ammun was probably planning on kicking out a few hundred thousand of the lower-class citizens living in his tower and forcing them to take over those farming, fishing, and hunting jobs. As it was, those people were an enormous drain on the tower’s resources, specifically on the amount of mana it produced.

As a mana-hungry lich and a mana-hungry archmage, Ammun probably felt he had better uses for that most precious of resources than to let a bunch of useless freeloaders feed off it. I could see that line of reasoning working for him. If they were worthless where they were or, worse, an active detriment, then the thing to do was put them somewhere else where they could contribute. A farming village worked by mages, even poor-quality ones like the dregs of the tower, was far more efficient than one staffed by dims.

What I wasn’t sure about was why Ammun needed an army in the first place. As far as I’d been able to tell, Manoch didn’t have much in the way of nations left, certainly nothing that could stand against a group of well-outfitted stage four master mages. Was he expecting me to raise an army of my own somehow and preemptively preparing to fight back?

Or did he just know something I didn’t? I’d spent a few months exploring this new world, but that hardly made me an expert. There were plenty of corners left for me to poke at. Maybe this army had nothing to do with me at all.

But when had my life ever been that easy?

“Thank you for your help,” I told Baviru. “I know this wasn’t easy for you, but I appreciate that you’ve given everyone living here a chance to prepare just in case this army shows up at our borders. That warning could save a lot of lives.”

It couldn’t, not really. An army of a few thousand mages would roll across the island unimpeded by the handful of stage two mages we could muster, and it would be the work of a decade or more of dedicated training to create even a small elite fighting force. Whatever Ammun was trying to accomplish, he’d do it long before we were in a position to fight back.

I left the fledgling town of Beacon and returned to my demesne to consider these new developments. While I wasn’t terribly worried about the army assaulting me personally, I didn’t relish the idea of letting Ammun proceed across half a continent uncontested. As always, I needed more information.

The problem was that it was dangerous to get it. I’d need to venture back into the lands that formed the old empire of Ralvost, which would completely negate the advantage of having a genius loci in addition to putting me in a place where I might have a direct confrontation with Ammun. I wasn’t sure how far from his tower he could venture these days, but I was betting he was willing to risk up to at least a few hundred miles.

It would get more expensive the farther he got from his phylactery, however, and I doubted he wanted to carry it around with him. At some point, it wouldn’t matter how much mana he was hauling around. He’d just bleed it out in a matter of hours. Then again, it was exactly that supposition that had allowed Ammun to trick me with the empty phylactery he’d used when we’d first battled, so I needed to be careful about planning around that.

Regardless, I didn’t have much choice. The tower itself was strictly off-limits, but I would need to divine what was going on around it. That meant I needed to travel back to that part of the world sooner or later, which meant risking another fight.

I spent the rest of the evening making preparations. My crucible was put through its paces for hours, manufacturing various trinkets and contingencies. Most of them weren’t even for me, but instead to be given to Senica and some of my more promising students. In the event that I didn’t return, I’d already left an enormous library behind detailing everything they’d need to know to reach stage five, though I had a few volumes in progress detailing my journey to stage six in this new world and my speculations on the final three stages.

I didn’t expect things to go sideways, but the possibility existed. The soul invocations I’d cast in preparation for my reincarnation were still present, though I wasn’t confident in their integrity to last a second time around. Even if they did, I had no way to control where I’d be reborn or how long it’d take, and I wasn’t keen to come back in a world where Ammun controlled everything.

To that end, I’d been preparing to leave my successors as many edges as possible. This would likely be the most dangerous thing I’d done since being reborn. The last thing I did before retiring for the night was teleport an invisible letter into Senica’s bedroom, hidden and sealed. In three months, the enchantments would fade. By that point, I’d either have returned and taken the letter back, or she’d be given the metaphorical keys to my kingdom and my best wishes at achieving archmage status in her own right.

With that, I closed my eyes to rest and awaited a new day.