“That’s totally awesome,” Senica said.

“No, it’s not.”

We were sitting around the table while I updated my family on what I’d learned about this potential threat and what they should keep a look out for. I no longer had any doubt in my mind that the location they’d chosen for their hidden base was a coincidence, not after learning exactly how deeply into my life Bakir had probed. The fact that he hadn’t spoken to my family yet just meant he was smart enough not to test me.

The conversation had naturally shifted from there into the revelation of what Grandfather wanted my assistance with, something that was theoretically possible but outrageously wasteful. Even if I’d been onboard with the idea, not being allowed onsite essentially made it a non-starter.

Senica was dazzled by the possibility, however. “It absolutely is. Can you imagine it? Our whole town could fly through the air. We could just… go somewhere, fields and houses and everything. You could have your own mobile flying fortress? How do you not want that?”

“The amount of mana you’d need is mind-boggling, for one thing. Even as efficient as I am, that would still be the work of decades.”

“But you have lossless casting, so once it’s done, it’s done,” she said.

“No, of course not. There would still be maintenance costs. They’d be a bare fraction of what it would be otherwise, but your hypothetical flying town still wouldn’t just float up there forever on its own.”

“Not now, maybe, but isn’t someone supposed to fix the world and make it rain mana again?”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s not rain, it’s—you know what, never mind. Yes, you could theoretically enchant a few square miles of land and uplift it into the sky if you had enough mana, and yes, if you regularly cycled it through mana-dense environments, it could probably absorb what it needed quickly enough to keep from crashing, but that still ignores all sorts of logistics problems like getting people to and from it, not to mention how vulnerable the whole thing would be to tampering.”

“But it’s possible,” she said, jabbing a finger at me. “So I’m right. It’s totally awesome.”

“Ah-sum!” Nailu gurgled from Senica’s lap. He even threw his little hands up in excitement with her.

“Fine. Sure. It’s a fun and entirely impractical idea,” I said while doing my best not to glare at my parents, both of whom were trying and failing to smother their laughter in the background. “It’s irrelevant, either way. The brakvaw don’t want me to physically go there, so even if I had all the time and mana in the world, I couldn’t help them.”

“Then why did Grandfather want to talk to you?” Father asked.

“Mostly to consult on adapting their current techniques to such a large land mass, and to confirm that their understanding of how to make it move was correct.”

“And… was it?” Mother chimed in.

I shrugged. “Who knows for sure? In theory, it works, but things have a way of breaking down when you get into numbers that size, not to mention we didn’t even get into how they’re going to separate an entire mountain from the range. How do you pull a tooth from the planet? The whole project sounds like a waste of time to me.”

Then again, Ammun’s tower was built among a similar scale. It practically was a mountain, one whose roots literally went down to the core of the world and whose peak was lost beyond the clouds. It had sustained itself somehow, doubtless through a great deal of mana reserves to see it through the breaking of the world and then by monopolizing every last scrap of mana the crippled core could produce for centuries after.

If Grandfather wanted to waste the next century of his life pursuing this project, I wished him all the best with it. Maybe he’d even surprise me and succeed, though even if he managed to get a mountain up in the air, it’d be terribly vulnerable to the magic being ripped out of it, sending everything crashing back down and likely killing anyone still on at the time of impact.

I supposed it’d be safer for brakvaw, since they could fly independently, but I still couldn’t fathom the purpose. It was a vanity project, unless there was something I was missing. There might be a real reason Grandfather didn’t want me near Third Peak, not just some cultural and religious thing.

I dismissed that thought with a mental sigh. I didn’t have time to investigate this. Hell, I didn’t even know where Third Peak was, let alone what single thing inside an entire mountain might be of enough interest to me personally that my ally didn’t want me to find out about it. It might not exist at all, and I had real problems to deal with now, anyway.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“I need to get back to work,” I said as I pushed my chair from the table and stood up. “Remember, if anyone shows up asking questions about me, you immediately tell me, then threaten them with my name. If that doesn’t get them to leave you alone, I will show up and make them regret ever being born.”

“That’s… a little extreme, don’t you think?” Father asked.

“Not if it keeps you alive,” I said shortly. “This is a compromise between leaving you vulnerable to my enemies and spiriting you away to my demesne where you’ll be safe.”

If it had been anyone else, I wouldn’t have given them the choice. They could stay where I could protect them until the threat was neutralized. Caring about people made it so much harder to do the logical thing when they were opposed to the actions that would keep them safe.

“And we appreciate you resisting your impulse to kidnap us, but I still think you’re being overly paranoid.”

I leveled a glare at my father and said, “Just, please keep the damn transmission stone on you. Do not hesitate. I want to hear your voice in my head if anyone starts asking about me, even if it’s someone you know. It could be a hostile archmage in disguise, using illusions or manipulating your mind with enchantments. I would rather get a thousand false flags a day than let one of them sink their claws into you.”

“Alright, alright.” Father raised his hands in surrender. “I promise, I always have it in my pocket anyway. We won’t forget, and we’ll be careful.”

“Good. Thank you. Now, I need to get going. There are a few other people I have to check up on.”

“Uh, Gravin, before you go,” Senica said, “I kind of need your help with something.”

“This really isn’t a good time,” I said.

“I know! I do, really, but, I think this is also important and it might be kind of time sensitive.”

It was obvious Mother and Father had no idea what she was talking about from the looks on their faces. So, it was either extremely embarrassing, or it was something she knew better than to do and that she’d be facing punishment for. But if she was speaking up now, that meant it had turned dangerous.

I narrowed me eyes and looked her over. “What did you do?” I asked.

“Just a bit of alchemy. It was harmless, I swear. At least, it was supposed to be.”

“Oh, no,” Mother said.

“Look, it’s probably not a big deal to fix. I just don’t know how. All I need you to do is walk me through the steps and I’ll take care of it from there?”

“What did you do?” I asked again.

“I, uh, maybe sort of used one of your recipes.”

“On yourself?” I demanded, my voice sharper than I’d intended.

“Well, yes.”

“Senica, stop hedging and spit it out.”

She cleared her throat and shot a glance over her shoulder at our parents. Apparently, not liking what she saw, she said in a small voice, “I made my own ointment of aging.”

I should have seen that coming. She’d tried to steal mine a few times back when I was still accelerating my age to adulthood so that I could advance my full-sized core and not stunt my magical growth. The difference was that I was an accomplished alchemist. I knew how to make the ointment. I knew the side effects. I knew how to mitigate them.

I wasn’t even sure Senica had made the ointment properly, so it was impossible to say what it had done to her. Even if she had, she was fourteen years old, and the hormonal teenage years were the absolute worst ones to try to skim through at high speed. It might actually be worse for her if she’d gotten it right than if she’d made a defective product.

“How long have you been using it?” I asked.

“Three months or so.”

“Senica, why?” Mother demanded.

“Because she wants to lock her core in at its maximum size so she can advance to stage three,” I answered for her. “The same reason I did it, except that I knew what to do when it started messing with my body through puberty.”

“Uh… Yeah, things are, um, they’re a bit out of sorts. We can fix that, right?”

“I don’t know,” I told my sister. “It depends on what exactly you made and what effects it had on you. Do you have any left?”

“In my room.”

“Good. Go get it, then you’re coming back to the lab with me to figure out if it’s actually ointment of aging and deal with the side effects.”

She handed off our little brother to Mother and raced out of the room. “Ancestors save that foolish little girl,” Mother muttered. “Sometimes I wonder if our lives really are better with all this magic in them.”

“I think we all know the answer to that,” Father replied. “The problems are different, and sometimes they’re much bigger than anything we’d ever have dealt with before, but look at our home. Nailu is never going to know what a lean off-season feels like. He’s never going to have to ration food. If he decides to fight monsters, it’ll probably be from a hundred feet in the air while he sets them on fire with his mind.”

“I know,” Mother said with a sad little sigh. “I do, really. And our lives are so much better in so many ways, but still, I was never worried about being taken by an angry archmage, or about a giant dead dragon attacking us, or chasing my husband through the desert after he’d been put in an enchanted slumber and tossed in the back of a wagon.”

I knew Mother wasn’t saying any of that to hurt me, but the truth of it was that, in one form or another, all of that was my fault. If I’d just stayed plain, ordinary Gravin, the Wolf Pack would still control Derro and all the tiny villages of the island, Ammun would still be sleeping, locked away under his tower, and this new group of mages would never have come here.

“Well, I think it was worth it,” I said.

“Oh! Gravin, I didn’t mean—”

“I know. I’m sorry my troubles keep finding you.”

Before that conversation could go any further, Senica came back out of her room with a small clay pot. “Here it is,” she said, oblivious to what she’d missed.

I took the pot from her and looked inside. “Why is this orange?” I asked.

“Well, I had to make a few substitutions, but I’m sure I factored everything right.”

Of course that was what she’d done. Senica wasn’t terrible at alchemy, but she was no master. Apparently, she’d learned just enough to get her in trouble when I wasn’t looking. I put the lid back on the pot and tossed it into my storage space, then pointed toward my room and the teleportation platform stashed in there.

“Okay, well, we’ll figure that out, too. Come on, let’s get going. The sooner I know exactly what’s in this, the better.”