The carriage rolled smoothly down the wide road, pulled by a pair of well-groomed horses, their chestnut-brown fur almost gleaming in the sunlight. Unlike the hard-packed dirt and rough cobblestones we’d ridden across for the last two hours, the road here was one solid sheet of granite polished to a near mirror shine.

On either side of us were massive mansions surrounded by expansive grounds, each one more elaborate than the last. The amount of money needed to build and maintain such lavish structures must have been mind-bogglingly huge. Statues, fountains, vast stretches of elaborately-arranged flowerbeds and artfully pruned bushes, and other wasteful displays of wealth and opulence surrounded buildings large enough to house my entire village with room to spare.

I could only sigh internally at the waste of it all. Thousands of pieces worth of labor, materials, and expertise used for little more than bragging rights. It would be at least slightly more understandable if each manor was also surrounded by impressive wards and other, more subtle, defenses. Then you were not just splurging on opulence but also on safety, and that was something I could get behind.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the manors we passed were defended by shockingly basic wards and barriers. They weren’t bad per se, but with some rare exceptions I was pretty sure a motivated fourth- or fifth-year could punch through them with a few days of preparation. It was still better than most of what I saw in the city where the Avalon portal was situated, but only just.

In theory, I was probably wealthy enough now to afford something like this, I realized suddenly. The money I’d gotten from Elpha probably made me relatively wealthy by the standards of a middle-of-nowhere island nation like my homeland. Not as wealthy as a Great-Name noble like the Warbringers, Earthshadows, and Crownguards, but wealthier than any peasant or merchant would ever be.

I paused mid-thought. That wasn’t really true, was it? I didn’t just have my own resources to fall back on now, but also those of my oath-bound servants. In a few years, once I was sufficiently established and could ensure that Daphne, Cayla, Briella, and potentially others were able to inherit their parents’ positions and wealth…

The slight smile on my face did not fade for the rest of the fifteen-minute journey down the wide boulevard, particularly when the ridiculous seat of the Warbringer family’s power came into view. I was pleased to see that Daphne’s family was one of the ones that had invested in proper wards. The sort that could hold off groups of trained mages and make even an archmage pause. I doubted they were as good as the wards around Lightcastle, but they were certainly just as good or better than what the Earthshadows had.

We stopped just outside the tall, wrought iron gates, the elaborate patterns decorating them hiding runes of protection and reinforcement. I quickly climbed down and helped first Daphne and then Cayla out of the carriage. Knowing this was the last time she’d be near me for many months or possibly years, Daphne clutched onto my hand for slightly longer than was absolutely necessary, but eventually let go and signaled the two guards standing by the gate to summon servants to help deal with her luggage.

From there, it took only a few minutes to get everything unloaded and taken care of and I climbed back onto the raised seat at the front of the carriage while Daphne and Cayla acted out a tearful goodbye. I only half-listened to them as they talked, hugged, talked some more, promised to write to each other, hugged again, and so on and so forth.

Eventually, they finally finished the whole song and dance and I climbed back down to help Cayla up into the carriage. It felt utterly pointless, but apparently it was what coach drivers were supposed to do and it was a small enough inconvenience to help sell the entire act. Daphne gave me one last, longing look, then turned back to speak with the guards.

Apparently her father was out of the city on some kind of business and he’d left orders for Daphne to head back to the smaller manor she was living in while she was studying at Lightcastle. I had to suppress a tired sigh when I heard that. It would have been so much faster to just drop her off there! Instead here I was, more than an hour by carriage away from the portal. What a waste of time. At least the ride wasn’t too uncomfortable, the enchantments on the carriage and horse tack meant there was no jostling and bouncing and I barely had to do anything at all to direct the horses.

Well, no matter. I flicked the reins lightly and we were off. Leaning back slightly, I decided that it was a real shame that the portal was going to be moving tomorrow. There were still so many things I wanted to do in Xethis but that I’d never really had the time for. Now that the month-long winter break had begun, I finally did have time to pursue personal projects, but several of them would suddenly be far out of reach.

Well, it wasn’t like I wasn’t going to come back. Dealing with Seatamer and now the Earthshadows were both long-term goals that I simply wasn’t ready for yet. Seatamer was a nearly thousand-year-old elf with magics and resources that I simply couldn’t match. Similarly, while Adonia was no match for me already, I did not like my chances against her father and their numerous enforcers and servants. Working with her family’s cadre of security mages, investigators, and interrogators had given me a healthy respect for their competence. If not for the anti-scrying pendant the Myrddin had given me near the start of the semester and the many layers of privacy and disguise spells I had layered over myself I would not have dared to step outside Avalon until after the portal moved.

Outside of those two, I still wanted to deal with the group of nobles that had attacked my precious Lea. I knew now that none of them had been behind the second attack on my friend, but that did nothing to lessen my conviction to take care of them. Permanently.

Unfortunately, it seemed as though my preparations in that direction were going to be wasted. I doubted the information I’d collected on the wards around there homes and where they could be found was still going to be very useful in a few years when I finally made it back to Xethis. Still, by the time I was ready to deal with Seatamer and Adonia’s family I was confident I’d be able to handle a few arrogant noble children as well.

“...driver? Mister driver? Sir!”

I shook myself and looked back towards where Cayla was sticking her head out of the carriage window and calling up to me.

“Sorry, sorry,” I apologize quickly, trying my best to stay in character, “My apologies ma’am, I didn’t quite hear you the first time. Can I help you?”

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“It’s alright. Um, where exactly are we going?”

That made me pause. I looked around and suddenly realized that I was not on the road I should have been on. Instead of turning away from the boulevard where the majority of the noble mansions were situated, I had continued down it away from our destination and towards where some of the lesser noble names had their homes.

Huh. I hadn’t been that lost in thought, had I? “My… apologies, ma’am. I seem to have missed a turn, I’ll get it all sorted out, nothing to worry about.”

Continuing down the road, we came to another turn that would take us back to Avalon, but something stopped me before I could command the horses to move onto the narrower street. I was instantly on guard, the mana trapped just beneath the surface of my skin roiling as I rapidly checked my body and mind for outside influences… and found… nothing?

There was no foreign mana within me, nothing unusual at all. I closed my eyes and focused, but there was nothing to see. A concentrated pulse from my core rolled through my body and bounced back without any interference. The circulations in my mind felt crisp and neat, with no signs of tampering or damage.

I opened my eyes and found that I had moved past the turn and was continuing down the road, away from both the Capitol and the portal.

I went from confused and worried to terrified in a fraction of a second. What. The. Fuck. Was. Going. On.

My defensive spells were still up, untouched and undamaged. My body, mind, and soul were my own, untampered with to the best of my knowledge. And yet, here I was.

“Cayla,” I called down as calmly as I could manage.

Her head popped out of the carriage window. “Yes?”

“My bag please.”

She passed me the small satchel I’d left with her in the carriage and I scrambled to dig out a pair of small potion vials and the token that identified me as a third-year Avalon student for anyone that knew how to look.

I threw back the first potion, cringing at the acrid taste of the potent general antidote, then washed it down with one of my emergency shots of elven milk, the most magically powerful substance I had easy access to. If this was a sufficiently subtle attack that I simply couldn’t detect, then it was possible that a sudden spike of foreign mana inside my body could potentially destabilize it.

I hid the token in an inside pocket, then turned to pass the bag back down to Cayla. After a moment’s thought, I turned away and set it down on the seat beside me. If something was happening, it was better to have it nearby, and the token in my pocket was more of a giveaway of my identity than anything else I had brought with me.

We continued down the road for another five minutes. The mansions around us were still clearly expensive and elaborate, but visibly less so than the ones closer to where Daphne’s family lived. They were smaller, shabbier, and less well-cared for. Some had minimalistic gardens or inactive fountains, chipped paint on out-of-the-way corners or slightly dirty windows.

I could feel it now, a silent voice ringing almost imperceptibly through the air. Someone, no, something, was calling out, calling to me. The pendant around my neck felt hot, almost burning my skin. I reached up and wrapped my hand around it, the heat suffusing my body and sending waves of clarity through my mind.

Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. Up ahead I could see a manner that almost shone to my eyes. It looked very much like the rest of the buildings around it, but I could feel the power of its wards from down the road and the air behind them was suffused with grasping tendrils of off-yellow not-mana.

“Cayla,” I asked slowly, “Can you feel that?”

“Feel what?”

“The… yellow… the clouds? The…”

“What? Sir? Is everything…”

I clutched the raven pendant, its feathers and claws digging painfully into my hand. The jewel in its eyes felt like a tiny knife stabbing into my palm, but I welcomed the pain and the sense of stability it brought me.

“Cayla,” I asked again, “Do you know whose manor that is? That one, over there. With the red tiles and the big statue out front.”

Cayla looked around, then ducked back inside and looked out the window on the other side of the carriage. “Um, I think it might be Archmage Blightcleanser’s home? He’s the current Royal Mage, one of the king’s personal advisors. I recognize the statue, he commissioned it from a sculptor that used to work with one of my uncles. The boat carrying it from our island to the capital sank and he made a really big deal of personally fishing it out of the ocean and bringing it back here.”

I tried to remember what I knew about the man. I remembered the name from Professor Shatterglass’s lecture about the important people we might encounter on Xethis, but little else of value. He was the royal mage, she wasn’t sure if he really was an archmage or just claimed to be one, he was considered young for his position, and he was a new Noble Name with no established family behind him. None of that did anything to explain what I was seeing.

I took a slow, deep breath, my eyes glued to the distant building. With a great effort of will, I flicked the reins and commanded the horses to stop moving.

There was something achingly familiar about what I was looking at. It reminded me of… the Outsider. The one whose magic I had absorbed only a few short weeks ago. The magic that now filled my body in an impossibly complex web of circulations that I had only barely begun to unravel the purpose of. Suddenly, incorporating something I barely understood so deeply into my body and soul seemed like it might not have been a great idea.

“Cayla,” I began, not really sure what exactly I was trying to ask of her. “I…”

I trailed off, my mouth open but no words on my tongue.

“Yes, sir?” she asked after a long moment of silence, but I had no response for her.

The tendrils were moving. Yellow, oily smears of something drifted invisibly through the air like the many tentacles of a massive kraken. There was no way I should have been able to see anything like that through the powerful wards around the building. The amount of mana flowing through them should have blocked out any mana moving behind them. Indeed, I couldn’t sense anything from the building itself, but somehow those streaks and tendrils were as clear as day both to my eyes and mana sense.

Someone called out to me, another carriage driver annoyed that I was blocking the road, but I could barely hear his voice, much less make out what he was saying. All my focus was on the sky and the runes I could almost make out written in the air above Archmage Blightcleanser’s home. The man scoffed and maneuvered his carriage around me, snow-white horses pulling a similarly white carriage embossed with the symbol of a shining shield.

I found myself struggling not to climb down from my high seat, to rush towards the light before me. It felt so warm, so welcoming, so loving, so hot and cold, the gentle touch of a warm home and a loving family welcoming me in and… and…

Cayla was calling out to me. My nails dug painfully into my palms and I tried to focus on her words, on what my servant was telling me. I had no home left, no family left, only the home and family I made for myself, and this was not it. I took a deep breath and squeezed my eyes shut.

Cayla was climbing up onto the high seat beside me. “Orion, are you––” and then a wave of mana and something else crashed against us like a tidal wave and my world became nothing but light and fire.