They made remarkable progress with the Arcana. Willow hadn’t half believed it would work, but their overwhelming power and obvious fear of the pneumavores combined to ensure the deans fell in line. Some were even helpful enough to give them updated maps.

“How far do these city-states extend past the mountains,” she asked the dean of Nox. He was a plump, nervous man who kept coughing in agitation.

“Not—not much farther, I think. Just these two to the west, and after that we haven’t scouted the area. But I can’t think that there would be many more, can you?”

“I don’t know,” Willow said. In the Watcher’s future she’d seen great dark plains and burnt peaks larger than anything she’d ever imagined. There weren’t mountains like that around here. Those must be further west, but how much further?

Just outside the city Willow and Leopold made camp. The distances involved were now starting to eat into Willow’s essence reserve, and he’d caught a rockhound just before twilight and was roasting it with a careful application of fire-magic. They hoped it would bring her back up to capacity.

“We can’t warn every city to the coast,” Leopold said.

Willow stared at the crackling hound, held aloft with psychokinesis as it cooked.

“I know.”

He tried the meat, prodding it with a finger before shaking out the spell.

“Do you?” he asked as he floated it over to a bed of pine they’d set out for the purpose. “It seems like you’re pushing yourself to get to every one of them. Why even ask about the other cities?”

Willow sighed. “I don’t know. I just thought that if you knew where they were—”

“Me?” Leopold asked, and the rockhound set down softly on the pine needles. Willow tore a strip of muscle off and popped it in her mouth. It was gritty with sand-sized gemstones, but she chewed anyway.

“We. If we knew where they were…”

“You’re planning something,” Leopold said, tearing a strip of meat off and chewing hard. “And you’re not telling me what it is.”

Willow smiled softly at the glowing sphere of magelight. “What if I’m protecting you?”

“Then I’d say I don’t need it,” he said. “I’d say I’m just as strong as you are in some ways. I’d say that I’ve seen just as much as you have now, more. I’d say that you don’t need to coddle me.”

“I don’t know what it is I’m thinking,” Willow lied. “They’re just plans, half-formed, swirling through my head. I don’t know what we’re going to do, what this land is going to do against the pneumavores. Let’s say we empty every village and town between here and the coast into the cities, what then? Overpopulation? Siege from the pneumavores? The cities will starve if they camp outside.”

“They said they’d find a way to protect against them,” Leopold said. “Why can’t you believe they might find a way to fight them as well?”

But that she couldn’t tell. A vision at the end of the world, darkness, and the Watcher stomping toward the last of humanity. There were no cannons to fight it then, just death.

The inevitable future.

🜛

That night was the first time Leopold slept in a week, and from experience Willow knew he would sleep hard. She waited until he was out, then slipped from beneath their bedroll and walked a few paces away from the magelight. There, she began to quest with her portals.

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How easy things were when she knew the direction and relative distance to her target. The dean of Nox had unknowingly given her those as he showed her the map of the western frontier, although that wasn’t where she was looking at the time. She was looking east, toward the mountains.

The full-size elliptical portal opened into the dark and deserted streets of Asche and she stepped through as quietly as she could manage. She looked back for a brief moment at the sleeping form of Leopold before closing the portal.

The city wasn’t empty anymore, not like it had been right after the magical creatures fled. There were animals and minor magical creatures camped out in all of the houses, all of the buildings. She could see their sleeping outlines as she drifted down the street. Asche had gone back to the wild, perhaps as it always should have. It had been half-wild to begin with.

As she neared the city-center she saw human forms as well in those larger buildings. Clustered together in groups of five or ten, it seemed like at least a few of the former inhabitants had doubled back before they reached their destinations. She supposed that was fine. Let the city restart and try to grow. The only problem was that it lacked a city wall, but walls would soon be of no use to anybody. Something stronger would be needed to keep the monstrosities at bay.

The arena blotted out a broad curve of stars ahead. It couldn’t have always been an arena, but she couldn’t think of it as anything else. It was the place where she was forced to do battle against Dean Weatherby. The place where she was transformed against her will. The place where she’d killed Bryan.

It didn’t smell of death when she stepped through the broken double-doors. A contingent of magical beasts and elves had moved the bodies and cleaned the viscera from the floor and columns. Or they’d eaten it. She tried not to judge them if they had. They were, after all, not truly human.

The place was mostly clean again, and dark. The buzzing luminous insects which had hovered around the columns were no longer there, either dead of starvation or escaped into the wild. Willow crossed to the center of the building and closed her eyes.

The space was almost entirely empty, but might be one thing left. One thing which none would dare touch due to the way it made all who approached it feel. Like something vital was being pushed out of their bodies. Was it still here?

It was. On the stage at the far end, lying on the floor. Willow crossed the great room and gently hopped up onto the stage. She cast a weak magelight and saw the dagger again for the first time since that terrible day. Even from a distance of ten feet she felt the effect of it—the same effect of the artifact in the basement of Durum.

The blade was crusted in blood—her blood—but she saw heavy inscriptions along the flat. Nearly microscopic, they were just as packed if not moreso than the artifact in the basement that had allowed her to see god, and she held no doubt that Andrew had based his design off that original artifact. She supposed that as dean he would have had access to that technology—it was just so hard to think of him as a dean and not a mad mage.

Willow looked around, but the sheath which had shielded its power was nowhere to be found. Probably carted away and buried along with Andrew’s body. It wouldn’t have radiated the same effect, although it would have been able to contain it.

She approached and, even a full five feet away, felt her soul begin to separate from her body. It writhed in psychokinetic energy, as it had that terrible day in the arena, and she backtracked. The artifact was too powerful for her to get anywhere near, perhaps because it had already been used on her semi-successfully. She’d always wondered if having this happen to her had made her more… flexible in that regard. Had made it easier for her to leave her body as the wraith, only tied to it by a single thread.

Willow formed her hands and began whispering concepts. Essence flowed between them into a rough conical shape, tightening as she added barrier after barrier. Barriers for essence, barriers for light, barriers for time. She layered on everything she could think of, finally condensing it into the form of a sheath, and slipped it onto the dagger at a distance.

When she approached the dagger sheathed with swirling energy, she couldn’t feel the effect anymore. And what was more, she couldn’t sense the sheath either. It was a perfectly encapsulated barrier.

She retrieved the dagger and slid it into her robe before opening the portal back to the campsite. Just as she’d hoped, Leopold still slept beside the magelight. She stepped through and laid down beside him. He turned over once, then laid still.

But she never went to sleep that night, the dagger nestled hard against her ribs.