In the aftermath, a black scar marred the natural basin where the farm had been. The fires had raged and ranged far beyond Lucas’ control, with the firesheep happy to spread the carnage. The five-sided room that had once been the central common room of the farmer’s house was the only bit of colour in a sea of black that stretched all the way to the surrounding hills, and it had all but collapsed the moment Lucas and Jamie had released it from their pyromantic protection.

Elwyn and his children were moving around in a daze, the farmer in a state of shock at the sudden loss of his home. Aly hovered nearby, her shoulders hunched like a child who expected to be scolded at any moment.

Jamie was curled up back in Lucas’ chest, having hopped in and fallen asleep the moment his pyromantic services were no longer required. Lucas had the feeling he wouldn’t be doing anything strenuous with his heart’s flame for a little while. Slumped on a patch of blackened soot with his shoulders resting on his crossed knees, he felt okay with that.

Valerie was sitting near to Lucas, huddled in her cloak to get a power nap; she’d stayed up all night watching over him while he launched beasts all over the place. Wick was standing sentinel, watching the firesheep warily. Lucas had told the shieldmaster he didn’t need to, but Wick had said he couldn’t trust an animal capable of wreaking such carnage. To be fair, it was hard to blame him.

The firesheep themselves were odd things. There was little difference between them and the average sheep you’d come across in any old field in the English countryside. Except, of course, for the fact they were on fire. They had replaced their woollen fleeces with contained balls of flame, and their eyes glowed like cinders. They could act as normal sheep if they wanted to, but they seemed to like being partially on fire and spent most of their time in that state. When they bleated, it came out a wavering crackle, like their very voices were constructed by fire. It was oddly reminiscent of the fiery speech Jyn had employed.

Ever since Lucas and the others had emerged from their protected room, the firesheep had seemed eager to crowd around him. He didn’t know why. Were they expecting him to grant them more power? Had he inadvertently become the god of magical sheep?

Valerie didn’t seem to think so, but she was too tired to elaborate too far on her point. Last night was an ordeal.

It had been long and hot and tense. Time had blended into an incomprehensible goop, filled with nothing but the fire. Hours had passed with Lucas immersed in his pyromancy. Everything else had fallen away.

It had become a monotonous task, and one that at one point seemed to have no end. There had been no way of telling how far he was launching the beasts with his jets of flame—it had to be pretty far, considering it took them so long to make their way back, but make their way back they did, eventually.

Long minutes had crept on by, drawing out into hours. He’d had almost no awareness of the goings on inside their safe space beyond the little attention he’d paid to the heat signatures in the five-sided central room that was their refuge. Everyone but Valerie had eventually succumbed to sleep. The Skycloak herself had stood over him with her sword at the ready for practically the entire night.

So he’d shaken up his efforts, experimenting with his blasts of heat. He’d narrowed them to see if a thin lance of superheated flame could pierce the beasts’ hide, to little effect. The same had been true of trying to create thin lines of heat to see if he could cut them like an ascending guillotine. Whatever shape and configuration he’d tried, he achieved nothing more than throwing the beasts great distances. Trying to trap the beasts only resulted in them somehow corrupting the fire, so he’d avoided that.

It had been nonsensical and infuriating. How could he beat a beast to death with a mana-infused stick, but concentrated blasts of fire did nothing?

He’d had no choice but to focus on launching them as far as he could. It was still satisfying to send the monsters screeching into the air, even if they ended up coming back. He’d taken what pleasure he could get.

It could’ve been hours or days before he noticed a change. Keeping count had become a lost cause after a while with the way he was constantly launching them away the instant they entered his range, but it started to feel like their arrivals were less frequent. At first, there’d barely been peace for a handful of seconds. Eventually, a full minute could pass before a beast returned.

And the gap had only increased. Eventually, so much time was passing between another beast showing up that the sheep had stopped spreading their fire so much, only returning to action when a monstrous scream could be heard in the distance.

Then, after what felt like an eternity, a solid, consistent warmth spread over the land, pouring into the farm in a flood. The sun had risen. They’d survived.

Only in retrospect did he realise that the beasts were failing to come back whenever he launched them in a certain direction; vaguely south. He was too relieved to wonder why.

It had been an exhausted, harrowed group that emerged from the central room of the farmhouse to find pretty much the entire surroundings burned and blackened. There had been a remarkable lack of smoke, but after a moment Lucas had realised that any natural fuel for the fires would have burned out hours and hours ago, and all that had remained was mana-induced fire, which didn’t produce fumes.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Even after safety had been tentatively confirmed, conversation had been sparse. Almost an hour had passed, and not more than a few words had been exchanged. Oddly enough, Lucas felt like he was probably the most awake out of anyone. It was hard to feel tired when his mana pathways had been rubbed raw by a night of almost non-stop activity. It felt like he had a headache all over his body.

With more awareness of himself after spending half the night in a quasi-trance with Jamie, he could feel the stiffness in his joints and soreness of his muscles. His skin was clammy with sweat, his dank hair plastered to the top of his head. Yet he somehow still felt dried out, his mouth arid and his eyes like cotton.

Triumph drowned it all out. Not a single soul had been lost to the beasts last night. Not even a sheep. Even if he’d only driven them away, he’d take it as a victory, and he was going to ride that high for as long as he could.

The feeling wavered when he looked back over at the dejected farmer and his shellshocked children. He told himself that he’d saved them, that if he and his comrades hadn’t been there, they’d be dead; it wasn’t Lucas or his party’s fault that the beasts had been there. The problem was, it wasn’t guilt he was feeling here, just simple empathy.

A kind, good man had lost his home, his livelihood. It felt wrong to sit here feeling all triumphant in the face of that, so he had to remind himself that it could’ve been much worse.

“Do you think they can rebuild?” Lucas asked.

Wick looked up from his staring match with a firesheep and glanced over at the farmer’s family. “It doesn’t seem likely. I know little about farm work, but this doesn’t strike me as a salvageable situation.”

“Yeah, me neither.” Lucas sighed. “But what can they do? Go and set up a farm somewhere else?”

“I suppose so,” Wick said. “It was foolhardy of them to keep living so remotely; I don’t know how they’ve survived this long, with the signs of beast activity we’ve been seeing.”

“The Bowmaiden,” Valerie said. Her voice was muffled beneath her cloak, and her eyes were still closed, but she sounded a bit more alive than she had before she’d settled down to rest. “I don’t know how, but I suspect she’s been keeping the beasts away in some fashion. It makes the most sense, and it would explain why she wasn’t overly concerned about payment. I don’t for a second believe two silvers is less than her commission.”

“Baiting the beasts away, maybe?” Lucas asked, frowning. “But she was pretty far from the farm. Her camp where we met her is miles away.”

“Perhaps the farmer simply got lucky,” Wick said. “Beasts are chaotic monsters, after all; one can never predict their actions. Why they sometimes attack and sometimes don’t. Why one will spot and pursue you from miles away and another won’t react unless you strike it first.”

“There’s only so much luck one can have,” Valerie said. “But you’re not wrong. It is technically possible that fortune smiled on them and no beasts happened across them until last night. The number of beasts making it this far south wasn’t so high in the past, after all.”

“But you don’t believe that?” Lucas asked.

“I’m sceptical. I don’t think there’s anything sinister afoot here, for what it’s worth.” She paused, her eyes cracking open to observe the scene ahead of them. Aly had approached the farmer, her head bowed, and he was ruffling her hair with a sad smile on his face. “Just a girl going to a lot of effort for someone she cares for.”

The three of them observed for a moment, before a firesheep’s crackling bleat drew their attention.

“Another topic we should discuss, since we didn’t have time before,” Valerie said, her eyes scrunching up in distaste. “Do try not to create any more dangerous magical creatures without consulting me, Lucas.”

“They saved us last night,” Lucas said stubbornly. The evidence of the danger they posed was all around them, but better that than everyone getting mauled by beasts. “And they would’ve been either beast food or corrupted monsters otherwise. I like this outcome better.”

“It didn’t go too terribly this time,” Valerie said. “But empowering mindless animals with magic rarely ends happily.”

One of the firesheep lowered its head in her direction and stomped a foot, snorting sharply.

Valerie stared it down. “Animals are creatures of instinct. Many can be trained to a degree, but for the most part they lack the intelligence to make sound decisions or understand the power they wield. This, as you can imagine, leads to them using their new magical abilities in detrimental ways a creature capable of logic or born with magic would know to steer clear of.”

“I’ve seen plenty of humans do dangerous things with their magic, and they do it deliberately,” Wick said, watching the firesheep as it stomped its foot once more.

“It is quite illegal to empower mundane animals with mana, and for good reason,” Valerie said to Lucas. “There are many species with magic of their own, and the vast majority of them can trace their abilities back to an ancestor which was granted mana by a human. Some are harmless; moonflies, for example, are merely flying insects that hatch at night and try their hardest to fly towards the moon. Others are as devastating to the population as beasts; a few-hundred years ago a hemomancer wondered what would happen if he gave his pet rat a taste of blood mana, and it led to the deadliest plague in Aerth’s history. Records say the Red Death killed almost half the population of Aureon.” She gave Lucas a look, then pointed at the sheep that was still hopelessly trying to intimidate her. “The point is, one cannot know what effect mana will have on an animal. These firesheep of yours have already shown their capacity to cause serious damage and the ability to transfer their magic to other sheep. Who’s to say they won’t burn the countryside from here to Dawnguard?”

“I get it. I do,” Lucas said, holding up his hands. “I just… It didn’t feel fair to kill them, you know? They were just innocent animals, and they were terrified.”

“Protecting lives is always the best option,” Wick said firmly. “Don’t let this one guilt you for that.”

“I’m not trying to guilt you,” Valerie said. “I’m warning you of the potential consequences of reckless use of magic.”

“I won’t do it again,” Lucas said, feeling like a scolded child.

Valerie waved him off with a sigh, her eyes turning heavenward beseechingly. “You probably will. I’ve gotten enough of a read on your character by now to know that you’re going to do it again now that it’s worked once.”

Lucas could only smile at that.