It only took us a minute or two of walking to reach the Ministry of War after passing through the fort. Inside of the building was a man who was shuffling through a rather intimidating pile of paperwork. He gave us a distinctly bored look as we walked in, before turning back towards his paperwork.

“Refugees?” He asked, not even bothering to look up. I shifted uneasily.

“We’re refugees, yes. We have six spellcasters or shapers in our group,” said Ella, gesturing towards Anise, Felix, Sallia and I. “The kids aren’t done with their training yet.”

I wondered why Ella was so determined to mention that we hadn’t finished our training, before I realized that some of the strongest defenders of the city fleeing probably didn’t look great, even if we had only fled once we were out of essence and the overseer was dead, making the situation basically hopeless. On the other hand, if four of our six magic users were children, from an outside perspective it made much more sense. Children wouldn’t usually be expected to help defend a city, because they were more likely to cause disruptions than actually help.

The clerk gave us another scan, and this time, his eyes grew much warmer when he looked at our group. In particular, his eyes lit up when he saw Felix, Sallia, Anise and I. I wasn’t sure whether he just liked kids or whether he appreciated the fact that we were magic-users. Or perhaps he appreciated both things?

“Four kids and four adults, huh.” he gave the four of us more appraising looks, and then smiled at us. “So two adults are magic users and all four kids are magic users?”

Ella nodded. “Me and her, are the adult magic users,” she said, pointing at herself and Amelia. “I’m a shaper, and she’s a witch. The four kids are all shaper-casters.”

“I don’t mean to doubt your words, but shapers are pretty rare, and shaper casters are incredibly rare.” he turned towards us, and gave us sunny smiles. “Can you kids do some shaping and some spellcasting for me? Just something basic, so that I can verify your magical talents?”

I nodded, and quickly used general shaping to repaint the floor of the room from a chalky gray color to a bright red one, borrowing some of the paint from the building’s exterior walls.

“I’ve been working on my general shaping, but I still have a lot of work to do with my attunement,” I said. Then, I quickly followed up by making a basic tier two spell. A moment later, an empty bottle of ink flew off of his desk and fell into my hand.

He gave me an even warmer grin. “That’s pretty impressive, little lady. How old are you this year?”

“Twenty years old, but I turn twenty one soon,” I said.

“You’re pretty good at magic for only being twenty,” he said. “Was that a second circle spell?” I nodded. “Not bad. Do you know any third circle spells?”

“Just one,” I said. “I can do fireball, but I haven’t learned any others yet. It’s really hard for me to wrap my head around all of the magic symbols I need to put together at once, so I avoid messing with them too much.”

“A third circle spell at only twenty. Pretty decent,” he said, pulling over a new sheet of paper and quickly marking a few things down. “You said you know fireball? What about your attunement? What does it do?”

“I can kill denizens of the underdark really easily as long as they’re below a certain level of strength, and I can also heal,” I said.

“I see. Very interesting. And one third circle spell...” The clerk trailed off as he kept scribbling notes into his form, before finally, he stopped and turned towards Sallia. “What about you, young lady? Can you also demonstrate a spell and some sort of shaping? General or related to your attunement is fine.”

“I specialize in strengthening my body. Would it be fine to display a few feats of physical strength, and then some general shaping?”

“That works for me,” said the clerk with an amiable grin as he got out a fresh form.

After that, Sallia demonstrated her abilities, followed by Felix. Last, Ella and Amelia also demonstrated their own ability to use magic, while the Clerk happily wrote down our information.

“Not bad at all. How did you guys end up here? I imagine most cities would have been happy to hold on to you guys, seeing as you’re talented shaper-casters…”

Ella took this opportunity to start recounting how we had ended up here, starting from the time we had found some extra Orukthyri warriors in the cavern we were getting our first kills in, and then describing the loss of our home city. The clerk seemed surprised at first, but once we mentioned that our city had fallen, his eyes shone with a glimmer of recognition. Then, Ella detailed our journey through the wastes, as well as the encounter that had led to us losing Felix’s father.

“Our news has been a little spotty recently, but I’ve heard some vague rumors of a city about a week or two away falling. I guess the rumors were true. Your reports about the state of the surface are more troubling, though… you say you ran into a strange chasm, and that it managed to kill one of you and wound four more just by looking at you?” Asked the clerk, seeming both curious and unnerved. He glanced at my shins, especially noting the gray coloration between my knee and my boots, and then looked at the strange gray color on Anise’s mouth and nose.

Felix’s mother opted not to answer, while Ella simply nodded.

“I see. The surface truly does seem to be getting more and more dangerous these days…” said the clerk with a sigh. “I don’t remember there being quite so many strange monsters out in the world. Even a decade or two ago, the adventurers that returned to the city usually had stories about a few dangerous encounters, but running into so many dangerous situations in only a week on the surface… that is most disturbing. I wonder if this is a sign of things to come?” he shook his head and sighed.

“Is the surface getting more dangerous as time passes?” I asked, as I also started to feel worried. I was planning to explore the surface more thoroughly in the future. If it was getting more and more dangerous as time passed, that would be bad news for the group, since it would still be a decade or two before we could explore on our own.

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“I don’t know,” said the clerk. “It might be getting more dangerous, or it might just be that you guys were particularly unlucky. But adventuring return less often than they used to these days. Of course, that’s not necessarily an indicator that the surface is getting more dangerous. After all, there are plenty of other reasons adventurers wouldn’t return to the city. Perhaps they want to find a new home because they don’t like the city’s overseer. Perhaps they got lost and ended up returning to another city. Perhaps they found a surface settlement and decided to settle down there…. Well, if there are actually any independent surface settlements. I’ve heard a few stories about from drunk adventurers, but I’m not actually sure if they were telling the truth or just pulling my leg.” Then, the clerk sighed. “Honestly, though, I think times are getting worse. But that’s a problem for someone like the overseer to handle. I’m just a clerk.”

“I see,” I said. I thought back to the fact that many of the weaker members of our party had been infected by the black sun far more quickly than Ella had predicted they would be. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was truly a sign of the deepening influence of the black sun on this world, or something of the sort. Outsiders were much weirder than the monsters native to this world, and that also made them much more dangerous, because it was harder to plan around their abilities.

It seemed that this world’s troubles were getting worse, rather than better. I couldn’t help but think of the black star that hung in the sky like a gaping maw, devouring all hope for the future of this world’s inhabitants, and shivered.

As I sank into my thoughts, ruminating on the possibility of an ever-diminishing future filled with despair and death, Ella and the clerk began talking about our own situation again. After a few minutes of listening to Ella’s story, the clerk nodded.

“Since you said a couple merchants that pass through here regularly could help identify you, we’ll wait for that before we fully integrate you into the city. Don’t want anyone with a shady history joining the city, even if they’re shaper casters. Not that I’m suspecting you, ma’am. It’s just our standard routine. But you can at least sit in one of the buildings near the fort for a few weeks while we wait. I’ll also see if we can get any healers over. Maybe we can get your injuries healed up. I bet your arm really hurts, and these kids are probably in a lot of pain as well. I can’t promise that our city can do anything about it, but I’ll at least arrange a few doctors to take a look and see if they can figure something out.”

Ella nodded. Her eyes held a certain amount of hope and expectation, but I could also tell that she wasn’t actually expecting for this city’s healers to be able to treat our injuries.

The clerk gave us instructions for how to find our new building, and after that, we quickly headed out.

As we walked through the streets, I took a few minutes to look at the city. It looked much like our old city: in fact, now that I was looking more closely at our new home, I realized that there were some common design patterns shared between our old city and our new one. Both had neat, grid-based street patterns, which had been slowly added on over the years after the second Orthan empire fell, and the color culture in this city was close to the color culture of our previous home.

“I don’t know if or when we’ll find either of your parents,” said Ella, breaking me out of my thoughts. “So for now, I’ll take care of the two of you, and I’ll ask my merchant contacts to keep an eye out for both of your families once I get in contact with them again. They only travel to nearby cities, so if your families somehow ended up several cities away we might not get any word about them. But it shouldn’t be too hard to track them down if nothing abnormal happened during their journey,” said Ella, grimacing. For a moment, I saw a flash of worry flicker across Ella’s face, and felt a similar bit of worry in my own heart. My parents were just regular people. I had no idea if they had managed to safely navigate through the tunnels and reach another city. Sallia’s parents faced a similar issue: they weren’t really strong enough to deal with even the weakest creatures of the underdark. Both underground and overland travel were incredibly dangerous if one wasn’t strong enough to defend oneself, and regular orthanoids had no guarantee of arriving at a new city safely. Even if both of our families had left our old city safely, there was a good chance they had been killed and eaten en route to somewhere else.

I shook my head, trying to brush off my negative thoughts. There was nothing I could do for my family right now, but I desperately hoped that they had made it to safety and we could reunite in the future.

I turned towards Sallia, and I saw a similar amount of worry on her own face. I hesitated for a moment, then, ignoring the pain in my legs, I waddled my way over to her and gave her a hug. I wasn’t sure whether it was to comfort her or me.

* * *

The next few days were spent in recovery. Amelia still hadn’t fully recovered from the death of her husband yet, and Felix was also in a pretty bad mood. Most worryingly, our injuries were getting worse over time, not better. As time passed, they were slowly turning darker and darker, and the stabs of icy pain I felt in my legs were getting worse and worse. My healing spells seemed to somewhat stave off the worsening of our injuries, but it did nothing at all to fully heal us. And I only had so much alteration essence per day. I was growing very worried about our injuries, although I didn’t have a good idea for how to treat them yet. Even more odd, some of the muscles around my legs seemed to be… shrinking. It was very subtle, and I wasn’t sure if I was imagining things. However, when I spoke with Sallia about our injuries, she confirmed my observations. With her rune-enhanced eyesight, it was easy for Sallia to see things I might miss, and Sallia claimed that there was definitely a problem with the injuries everyone had sustained.

This made me even more worried.

I spent most of my time trying to figure out what was wrong with our injuries. I couldn’t kill whatever was lurking in our wounds with extinguish, because I couldn’t see a candle of life or a soul to target. I didn’t understand why this was the case, but however the fog creature had evaded my abilities, it had completely shut down my easiest solution to start healing us.

After two days, the doctors and a shaper specialized in healing muscle damage and enhancing muscles showed up at our new place of residence, in order to take a look at us and see what could be done about our injuries.

The doctors were left totally baffled by our injuries. They didn’t seem to have any idea what had even caused our wounds, and had no idea how to deal with whatever was inside of our wounds and causing them to get worse and worse over time.

The muscle expert was even more confused.

“I have no idea what’s going on with your injuries,” he said, frowning as he looked over my legs. “They’re turning more and more gray, and I can tell that something is wrong with them. However, I can’t heal them. It also feels like… I don’t know. It feels like your legs aren't here at all when I try to interact with them using my shaping. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it seems to be what’s happening. And because my attunement can’t lock on to your leg muscles, I can’t do much to help them.”

The man’s words led me to a rather unfortunate realization.

Our wounds were not going to get better on their own.

However, the man’s words, at the very least, sparked a bit of inspiration in me. I wasn’t quite sure what was happening to our injuries, but I at least had one idea for how the fog creature could evade my extinguish ability and make the muscle-attunement man’s magic believe that there was ‘nothing’ where my legs were supposed to be. I was making a bit of a blind guess, but I had no better options if I wanted to save my legs, Felix’s eye, Ella’s arm, and Anise’s mouth and nose. I needed to move fast to fix the problem, and for that, I needed to flesh out my fifth rune and reconstruct the healing component of my attunement.

It was time to finally flesh out my healing abilities. I just hoped I wouldn’t be too late.