Gnarled hands picked up the baby from the wreckage of a house. Last minute shielding had saved the child from the destruction that had ripped through the street. He took a moment to look around.

Other magicians put out fires, sorted wreckage, worked healing magics. The city would recover from the explosive battle. He frowned at the baby, wrapping it in cloth pulled from the ground, and surrounding ash.

He pulled out a ruby shaped like a coffin. He frowned at it. He had to do something with it. He frowned at the baby.

This was the last thing he should do, but the ruby had to be hidden and the baby had to be sent away for his own good.

He worked his spell and placed the ruby inside the baby. Light scarring cut across the young torso. The sealing snapped to life.

Now he had to do something to protect the baby.

He looked around for someone he could trust. He had a few members of his facility on the scene. He sent a pixie spell to call one of his juniors over so he could carry out the rest of his plan.

“Sir?,” said the faculty member. His tunic had a dusting of ash across it. Smudges marked his face.

“Take this baby,” he said. “I want you to hide him and forget where you hid him. Can you do that?”

“Sir?,” said the faculty member.

“I need you to hide this baby and forget where you hid him,” he said. “I will remain here and help put out the fires.”

“I know a place where he can grow up unharmed,” said the other magician. He took the baby from his superior. “He has some talent, but it will be crippled by the seal you have placed on him.”

“There is no help for it,” said the elder magician. “The warlord has been driven off, but he will return whenever he thinks he can locate the boy, and kill him. The price we are going to pay for winning this skirmish is vigilance until we can arrange a more permanent solution.”

“I understand,” said the younger man. “I guess we will see our young friend again.”

“We’ll see,” said the elder magician. He glanced at a fire. Moving dirt snuffed the flames. “I assume that if some talent manifests, he will be sent to the Academy so he will be under our guard again.”

The younger man nodded.

“Go on,” said the elder. “The sun will be coming up, and we want to have a grip on the work that will need to be done.”

“I will return before that happens,” said the younger man. He raised his hand and wind wrapped around him. He flew into the air.

The elder magician walked from the scene, the rubble flattening as he moved. Most of the buildings had been brick and wood. It was child’s play for him to disperse the bricks into earth and push the wood into a pile.

The injured residents were being shepherded to healers by his staff and the city guard. Wreckage moved into piles and more fires went out. Someone had conjured rain. He could feel the water dropping into the city at the edge of the battleground.

At least the boy would have a chance to grow up despite being magically crippled.

He looked toward the center of the scene. His building still stood despite the beating it had taken. There were places where the walls needed to be rebuilt, the bricks needed to be cleaned, the grass regrown.

The stewards would have a field day of complaints while they submitted paperwork for the repairs. He could handle some of that now, before they began their assessment and nagging.

He reached into his sphere of influence and began work by assessing all the damage to the outer wall. He let the magic gleam as it began straightening the bricks, and mortaring them back into place, repairing and joining damaged stone as he walked along the wall. If he made a mistake, the repairmen would report it to him and then try to repair it with their own skills.

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The senior magician entered the grounds, letting his influence reach out. Hundreds of cracks fixed themselves instantly as he walked toward the central tower of the campus. Walls straightened up, foundations shifted back in place. It would take more effort to fix the windows so he left that for the stewards.

He entered the main facility, pausing to fix as much of the damage as he could, and turned to the stairs leading up to his quarters above the keep. He opened the wall, and stepped into another staircase. He closed the wall behind him as he walked upstairs.

He reached his quarters. He took a minute to look out from his balcony. The city was partially destroyed. His faculty was out with the Guard, and the Reserve, doing what they could. He nodded at the flashes of magic he saw on the ground.

He walked from the door to his balcony, closing the opening. He pulled off his dirty and ripped robe. He looked at the wound in his side.

He put his hand on the wound and concentrated. His magic reached out and tried to heal the oozing wound. He shook his head as nothing happened.

He poured some fire into the wound. He clenched his teeth at the pain. He sat down on his bed. He looked at his injury. At least it had stopped bleeding.

He would have to do what he could to help with the repairs in the morning, but at the moment he needed to rest and recover his strength. He would have to nurse himself back to health as well as he could.

No one could know how close he had come to dying. He had to project the image of invincibility at all times. He lay on his bed and closed his eyes. It had been so close. They had won in the end, but the remains of the warlocks and his other minions were still out there and waiting for his return.

There was nothing he could do about that. All he could do was wait too. The wound he had taken had to be dealt with so he could help more. He felt that some of his inner control was not reaching out like it should.

He may never be able to use the full power of his magic again.

He decided that he had to conserve what he had left as much as possible until the warlord returned to try to take his jewel back. It had been a close thing, but now they were safe until some distant point in the future. If they were lucky, the baby would grow up far away from magic and the need to be evaluated.

He should help out with the rest of the damage, but he was tired. He was getting too old for these battles against younger magicians. He closed his eyes.

He let his mind fall into the trance he used to build up his power. It refreshed him as a side effect of what it was supposed to do. He felt around his metaphysical control. His output ceiling had dropped. He winced inside because it had to be because of the wound. He would have to do something about that. What he had left was still good

for most of the minor magics he used, but he wouldn’t last in another big battle.

If he faced the warlord again, he would lose. He couldn’t use his full power with the cap on it from the wound in his side. And feeling the wound now in his trance, he could see that it was poisoning him despite the flame he had dumped on it. He had to do something, or he wouldn’t be able to do anything magical the way he was losing

power.

He snapped out of his trance. He pulled himself off his bed and walked to where he had packets of reagents stored. He summoned water to fall into a beaker. He dug out a few of the packets from his cabinet. He opened them and dumped the powders in the water. He stirred the water with a wave of his hand. He drank the concoction

down.

Pain shot through him. He sat down on the floor and tried to wait for it to end. He put himself into the trance state again to wait.

The pain never went away as he sat in his trance to combat it. His wound shriveled at the edges, but it was still trying to poison him despite the medicine he had taken. He massaged the tissue as well as he could to draw the poison out. He forced it down the wound track scarring he had done with his fire control. The wound oozed as the poison was ejected from his body.

He decided he would live, but he would hurt every day, and wouldn’t be able to use most of his magic in the future. He could still teach, and run the school, but he would never be able to do anything grand like make a city by himself again.

When the warlord returned, he wouldn’t be able to be the bulwark of the defenses like he had this time. He didn’t have enough strength to do that.

His faculty would have to cover for his weakness. He decided that he couldn’t tell them if he wanted to keep their confidence.

And he would have to hire more to replace the members of the faculty they had lost in the night.

He kept his trance together as he planned the future ahead. There were big questions that he couldn’t answer at the moment. He had to do the best he could with what he had.

At least the warlord’s power was also crippled, and he had been humbled. As long as he didn’t find the baby, he couldn’t attack at full strength again.

And maybe that would buy the Academy enough time to create students who would defend the country from his nemesis before he gave up his ghost.

He stayed in the trance until he felt the pain lessening. It would never completely go away, but he had waited until he could manage it.

He pulled himself on his bed and tried to sleep. He would probably have to take sleeping draughts in the future if he couldn’t trance the pain away.

He closed his eyes and hoped for a better tomorrow. The day had been wrecked and he had lost friends in the fighting, almost lost his home, and had inflicted collateral damage on the city from his fight. The sun had to bring something better than all that to his doorstep.

At least the baby would live, despite actually losing his parents and home to be raised far away from the city.

It was the best he could do with what he had.