That was simpler than I thought, Florian said to himself as he stood over the unconscious form of George, one of the advanced students. It hadn’t taken much; he left the annex, hid around the corner, and threw a mean uppercut right at the kid as he made to follow him. While the area was well-lit, Florian had noted no guards in the area, and it didn’t take him long to drag him back into the annex and place him back on his bed.
It was late enough at night that everyone was sleeping, and Florian had made sure of that fact using his night vision spell. The finishing touch on his plan was something he hadn’t really attempted much; he began trying to heal the boy he’d just knocked out. A part of him felt bad for injuring the teenager, but the pragmatic part of him knew that the kid would panic if he thought he’d just fallen asleep.
So he breathed in the mana around him, and focused on healing the skin that would soon develop bruising. He imagined it looking as the skin around it did, unblemished and pale. There was no visible effect of his spell, but he hoped that it was working. As for the damage he’d done in knocking George unconscious, he wasn’t particularly sure how to even start healing a brain. It was significantly more difficult conceptually than healing his leg, and he certainly wasn’t ready for that. He just had to hope that he hadn’t caused any lasting harm to the kid.
He shook Wesley awake, covering the other man’s mouth with his hand until Wesley understood that he was in no danger and needed to be quiet. Giving Wesley a couple of moments to gather his things, they slipped out the annex as wraiths. Approaching the garden, Florian noticed a guard trailing them, and with a hasty illusion, he made them vanish. Shaking his head, the slight guard scratched his head and wandered towards them slowly.
They hid behind the large oak tree, holding their breaths. Wesley looked at him with wild eyes, but Florian simply shook his head and indicated that he wait. With no small amount of hesitation, Wesley nodded, willing to wait and see what would happen. Keeping the illusion localized around them, Florian waited for the guard to turn his pursuit in another direction. He hoped it would be sooner rather than later; while he could hold an illusion for hours, Wesley might not be content to wait that long.
Fifteen or so minutes later, the guard left the garden, his eyebrows together quizzically. Florian let go of the breath that he had no idea he was holding. The words tumbled out of Wesley’s mouth like a machine gun.
“What the fuck? Who was that? Why are you being followed? Why am I being followed?” he asked, his hands shaking.
“I don’t think it’ll be safe for us to continue our lessons for much longer, Wesley. It seems that both our master and Lord Jones,“ Florian humored the man, “have sniffed out that something is strange with our behavior.”
“So then we tell them about your discovery!” Wesley pitched. Shaking his head, Florian prayed that his terrified student would see reason.
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“We can’t do that. If we tell Master, you’ll lose the only advantage you have compared to the disciples he’s helping personally,” he began, hurrying when he saw the rebuttal on Wesley’s face. “And we can’t tell Lord Jones either, because then we’ll be causing conflict between the two of them.”
Wesley seemed to calm down and think on that for a moment. “But what if we told both?”
“Then we get in a lot of trouble for not telling them sooner,” Florian looked around them, still too worried about eavesdroppers to release his illusion spell.
“You said that we should stay quiet so we can experiment!” Wesley wagged an accusing finger at him.
Florian shrugged. “I, for one, am not as ready to believe that Master and Lord Jones are as worthy as you think they are.”
Though Wesley tended towards the timid side of things, Florian was hardly surprised when he saw a vein bulge on the shorter man’s forehead. “So you lied, then. They’ve done nothing but help us, and now we’re acting like fucking fugitives, Florian!”
He fought back a grin. Getting Wesley to curse and call him by his first name in the same breath was no small achievement. “I apologize about that, but I’ve learned some hard lessons recently. Among them, perhaps, is that you need to be careful of who you trust.”
Wesley regarded him with a wary look, but he let him continue.
“I once trusted someone like Jones. His name was Commander Ryan Taylor, and he led a fortress just like this one. We trusted him to protect us, but at the first sign of danger, he sent the most vulnerable outside to die. We drained his resources, that was the reason,” Florian paused. “Do you want to be a drain on resources? Just a cog in the machine, ready to be thrown out as soon as you break?”
“But Lord Jones isn’t like that!” Wesley yelled. Florian winced; he hoped that his illusion was good enough to keep that noise contained. “He’s protected us for three years, and he’s made a deal with the wizard to keep protecting us even now!”
“Protect you, or protect himself?” Florian looked up at the sky, where the Moon provided not even a sliver of light. It was as if the darkness had eaten the silver globe. “Think about it, Wesley. The man calls himself a Lord, makes the people around him fight to keep the fortress from falling, and gets Theo to teach magic to a select few individuals who truly believe in him. This garden we’re sitting in is proof enough that the man doesn’t give a flying shit about his people.”
Wesley shook his head violently. “I knew him before Worldbreak, Florian. He managed our store, but he never mistreated anyone. He always made sure that everyone got paid more than market rates, and he was always the first to come in and the last to leave. God knows that without him, there would have been Christmases where my kids went without presents.”
“Where do your kids live, Wesley?”
The change in the line of questioning threw Wesley for a loop. He answered hesitantly, “In Tent 32.”
“Yeah? Your family lives in a tent with who knows how many other families? While that man you believe in lives in a castle, drinking wine and eating as finely as anyone can, refusing to gaze upon the Warriors of Leeds, guarded by a corps of people I only assume you once worked with? People change, Wesley. And I’m not sure Jones changed for the better.”
Florian didn’t give Wesley a chance to say anything more. Instead, he left the other man to stew in his thoughts. If he continued to keep his eyes shut to the new, harsh realities of the world, then there was nothing more Florian could say. But he hoped that Wesley would open his eyes, for both of their sakes.