The flames of the small campfire danced through the air while the crackling of the burning wood mixed with the noise of the nest. Gabe continued to look at the statue even as Professor Alrik spoke again.

“Two days ago, in the morning before the wyvern attack, Drevock confided in me that he was beginning to feel a coldness spread through his core. This is always how the sickness begins. I asked him if he wanted to leave, to try and make it back to his tribe before it was too late, but he refused. Instead, he insisted that we push forward. Drevock was many things, but a coward was not one of them. I believe that Drevock saw sacrificing himself as a means to take back control of his fate rather than succumb to it.”

Gabe still didn’t think it was a good enough reason. Even if it took them a while longer, they might have been able to find the repository before Drevock felt the full effects of the soul sickness. Maybe there would have been something there that could have stabilized his soul. Drevock’s parting words to Gabe replayed in his mind.

Sometimes strength comes not from holding an ax, but from dropping it.

“What’s the point of all this? It can’t be a coincidence that you were traveling with someone who wielded mana in a way similar to these Vlatiryx people, a name that we only now know because you had a magical Insight.” Turning back to face the others, he directed his question at Professor Alrik. “What are we really doing here?”

Gabe’s tone was neutral and flat. He’d gone through the emotional wringer as Drevock’s death forced him to face his own fate and he was simply too tired to be angry. A part of him was still angry, furious even at all the lies and deception, but there was nothing to be done about it now. What was he going to do, venture off into the tunnels by himself armed with nothing but a handful of healing spells, three charges on a fireball ring, and a knife? For better or for worse, he was stuck with Simon and Professor Alrik until this was settled one way or another.

“Remember the vision I described to you when we first met, the one of the great battle?”

Gabe nodded his head. “You said that in it each warrior was fighting with enchanted weapons that looked to be made of spellsteel. That’s what got you interested in all of this to begin with.”

“You are correct, but that was not all it showed. This is the complete image.”

Professor Alrik let out an incantation and when he finished light began to form and coalesce in the air in front of them. After a few moments, the image resolved itself. The scene was very much like how Professor Alrik had described it. Two great armies clashed on an open battlefield. There was an indistinctness to each individual, a sort of fuzziness similar to a heat haze that made it hard to make out specific features. This was contrasted by the clarity of the weapons. Swords, spears, axes, and halberds, all in sharp relief and glowing with an inner light that varied across the color spectrum.

However, that was not what Gabe focused on as he looked over the image. Instead, his attention was drawn to what surrounded the warriors. Outnumbering the fighters nearly ten to one were corpses. Piled high with blood, gore, and viscera on open display, the bodies were everywhere. They too had the indistinct haze that masked their features but not to the extent that you couldn’t tell their age or gender.

Men, women, infants, children, and the elderly alike could all be seen among the casualties. And floating above the conflict was a lone figure. Black shadows tinged with red covered them completely, obscuring almost everything about them save for one thing. Whoever this figure wreathed in shadows was, flying high and observing the carnage below them, they were smiling.

Gabe had to look away from the image. He’d seen bloodshed before, but nothing like that. That scene wasn’t just depicting a battle, it showed a slaughter.

“This is why we are here. I spent many decades working on Futureweaver’s Insight. Without knowing the proper mixture for divination mana, I had to go through thousands of different iterations before stumbling across one that worked, and even once I had that, it still took years of testing and fine-tuning the spell so that the results were consistent and reliable. I can still remember the day I felt confident that I had succeeded.”

A far-away look crossed the professor’s face and one corner of his mouth raised slightly in hint of a smile.

“As you saw, the spell is prohibitively mana-intensive and I could only conduct tests every few days to minimize the damage to my soul. For all my tests, I based my questions around short periods, things that could be proven true or false quickly so that I could make the necessary adjustments. After a month of successful results, I was ready to aim for something bigger. No longer was I going to ask about who would be in the room across the hall in an hour, I was going to see the future. I framed the spell around the question ‘Where will I be ten years from now?’”

The expression on his face shifted the hint of a smile now fully a frown.

“At first I thought the spell malfunctioned somehow. There was no image formed, only a deep darkness. I double-checked the spell form and tried again a few days later only to be met with the same result. More weeks were spent conducting tests, only for the spell to work perfectly within periods of a few days. I hypothesized that there was an inherent temporal limit in my spell and I was determined to figure out what it was. I cast the spell using the same question but reduced the number of years by one after each failure. When I got to five years, that was the image that formed. This was three and a half years ago.”

Gabe found himself looking at the floating image once more as he did the math in his head. One and half years until the events in this would come to pass. If Professor Alrik was somewhere in the image, that meant he was either a soldier or one of the casualties. His gaze flicked to the figure wreathed in shadows, but he dismissed the thought before it could fully form. Even as angry as Gabe was at the gnome, no part of him could see him becoming that.

For the first time since Professor Alrik began answering Gabe’s questions, Simon spoke up.

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“Gods I hate that image. It gives me the creeps every time I see it.”

The earth mage shivered slightly to accentuate his point. He locked eyes with Gabe, remorse evident on his face even as he attempted a half-smile.

“I’m really sorry we’ve been lying to you, Gabe. It wasn’t right or fair to you, though you have to admit that this would have been a bit much to lay down right away.”

As much as he hated to admit it, Simon had a point. The way it had been described to him before, the spellsteel weapon had been the primary focus of the vision. People in Aranthia loved to speculate about if and when spellsteel would be used for something more than novel trinkets. Gabe always knew that it would it would be used to make weapons and armor eventually so when the Professor described a coming battle with enchanted weapons, he didn’t give it a second thought.

But this was something entirely different. Yes, the spellsteel weapons were an important aspect of it, but there was so much more going on. Had Gabe been told the full story, there was no way he would have agreed to go along with any of this.

“That still didn’t give you the right to lie to me like this,” he told Simon.

Simon’s expression faltered at the rebuke.

“You’re right. I really am sorry. I wanted to tell you sooner, but we couldn’t risk it.”

“What couldn’t you risk? I still don’t understand why I’m so central to all of this or what even is the point of this expedition. Are we even looking for compound mana node patterns or was that a lie too?”

“Gabriel, I need you to understand,” replied Professor Alrik. “My only goal since conjuring that image has been to prevent it from happening. My experiments with Futurweaver’s Insight showed me that the threads of fate are not as tightly bound as many think. Events in the short term are much less flexible but those in the far future can be changed.”

“If you want to prevent that,” Gabe gestured at the image “from happening, then why didn’t you tell Arch-Magus whoever and have him deal with it?”

“I tried. Once I had performed a few more tests, varied the question a bit, and still received the same result, I went to report it to the leading council of the Pathways of Illumination immediately. They serve directly under Arch-Magus Vernma and handle the day-to-day operations of the organization. They knew about my research but many of them considered it a fool’s errand. Even after I showed them all my notes, walked them through the spellform, and cast it in front of them, they did not believe the image was genuine.”

Frustration and anger tinged Professor Alrik’s words and he got a far-away look in his eyes.

“I argued with them for weeks to try to get them to take me seriously to no result. No matter what line of reasoning I employed or the evidence I showed them, they would not let me speak with Arch-Magus Vernma. Finally fed up, I stormed out of the council chamber and told them if they would not see reason, I would bring it before the nobility of the Kingdom of Dupry, where the Pathways’s main headquarters is. By the time I had arrived in the capital city, someone had sent word ahead that I was a madman and not to be believed. The council denied any involvement, though I am certain at least one of them must have been responsible. Many things changed that day.”

He paused there, a pensive expression on his face. When he spoke again, his voice was thick

with emotion.

“It was the day I lost faith in the organization I had dedicated so much of my life to. People I once considered friends and colleagues began to distance themselves from me. Rumors began to spread that I was conducting research into old, dark magics fueled by blood and sacrifice. I was blocked from accessing my lab and my membership in the organization was revoked. Once I realized I was no longer safe amongst my fellows, I took to the road, determined to find a way to prevent the coming bloodshed on my own. Those were difficult times. I was not sure who I could trust anymore and was constantly looking over my shoulder, certain I was being followed. I traveled from town to town, chasing down leads and reaching out to the few contacts who would still speak with me.

Things became easier after I found Simon and later Drevock, but still the answers I sought eluded me. No matter how many variations of ‘how to prevent this war’ I framed my spell around, nothing worked. All attempts to discern the identity of the figure in black were also unsuccessful. The only thing I could find more information about was the weapons, which is what led me to begin researching spellsteel and the residues of mana contained within them. It was not until I made the connection between Drevock’s Titan mana pattern and the people I knew then as the Dwellers that I was able to begin asking the correct questions.

After conducting a few tests on Drevock, I came to realize that even accounting for the instabilities caused by the flawed pattern, his soul was stronger than it should have been, even stronger than many wizards who had decades more experience attuning their souls. By this time, my own soul was beginning to show signs of damage from overuse of Futurweaver’s Insight. I could no longer cast the spell without suffering the consequences you witnessed yesterday. Frustrated by my own frailty, I believed that if I could rediscover the technique for weaving mana through one’s soul, I could strengthen my soul enough so that I could finally cast an improved version of Futureweaver’s Insight that I have been working on. My experiments showed that my spell could be blocked by powerful dark mana-based spells, particularly those derived from void mana. My hope is that a stronger version of the spell would be able to break through those barriers, but my soul is unable to bear the weight of the spell. And so we began making our way here, where the last traces of the people who created the technique could be found.”

Professor Alrik met Gabe’s eyes.

“I am certain you have realized this by now, but it was a lie when I said that I did not remember what question I framed my spell around when I had the vision concerning you. Do you still wish to know what it was?”

Gabe didn’t hesitate with his response.

“Yes, absolutely. I’m sorry to hear about everything that’s happened to you professor, but that doesn’t excuse the way you manipulated me into coming along. If I really am so important to stopping that vision from coming to pass, I need to know why.”

“I expected as much,” Professor Alrik said as he nodded his head. “You have much to be angry about Gabriel, I only hope that you can see that I did what I had to for the greater good. Before yesterday, the last time I cast Futurerweaver’s Insight was on the journey here, a few days before we arrived in Aranthia. In truth it was a simple question, but one with a terrible cost. ‘What is the key to unlocking the secrets of weaving mana through a soul?’ The image was as I described to you and is what led me to ask for you at the Adventuer’s Hall.”

Ever since Professor Alrik conjured the image of the battlefield scene, a thought had half-formed in Gabe's mind. As he sat there thinking over the professor’s story, the thought grew until it could no longer be ignored. Taking a deep breath, he uttered two words.

“Show me.”

To his credit, Professor Alrik only hesitated for a moment before nodding his head. He swiftly dismissed the ghastly image of war and began a new incantation. Gabe found that his heart began thundering in his chest as the image began to form. A part of him wanted to tell the professor to stop the spell but he remained silent. He needed to see this.

Compared to other visions formed by Futurweaver’s Insight that Gabe had seen, this one was more subdued. He stood alone before a large stone door. The stone around the door was inlaid with the metallic symbols Professor Alrik had mentioned, the ones he assumed were compound mana node patterns. His body was facing the door but he was looking over his shoulder, an unreadable expression on his face. And dead center in his back was a hole large enough that he could see the door through it, red blood dripping down his shirt.