The First Mage

Over the next four days we slowly made our way back to Alarna, while staying in the forest as much as possible. Even though the soldiers were presumably turning Cerus upside down right now and we were traveling through the Wildlands unprotected once more, we were in high spirits. Just like last time, we were able to enjoy nature to its fullest, with no beasts disturbing us. I guess it’s even better than last time, since there’s no talking beasts either.

I was still a little uneasy about what had happened with the soldiers, but I guess the good thing about a part of me not caring was that I got past the initial shock relatively easily. Berla seemed very concerned about me at first, but eventually she realized that I was fine as well. What surprised me even more than myself being okay, however, was how quickly Riala had been able to put the incident behind her. I had seen how shaken she was in the moment, but when she got up the next morning, it was almost as if nothing had happened. Maybe her mind had simply buried the memory as deep as possible. We certainly wouldn’t dig it up again if it wasn’t necessary. Instead, we would concentrate on our travels through the woods.

It had been only a couple of days since we had passed through here, but it still felt nostalgic somehow. At times I could swear I even recognized some of the trees, although we tried not to take the exact same paths as on our way to Cerus, to reduce the risk of getting found.

We had to assume that the soldiers would search the entirety of Cerus for us, no matter what. If the mayor stuck to what he had promised us, he would help them. If he didn’t, they would presumably force their way in and search anyway. And if he tried to sell us out, telling them where we were supposed to be hiding, they would not find anything and then search.

Our guards, who we had left in an alleyway, probably wouldn’t be found before they woke up on their own, so they weren’t a concern either. They would report to the mayor eventually, but no matter what he told the soldiers up to that point, they surely wouldn’t just trust him that we were on the run. Not without any evidence.

One concern were the dead soldiers. If someone tried to check in with them, or they were supposed to check in with someone else, they would be found in due time, and the wounds would make it clear who had killed them. At that point, they would cancel their search and potentially try to hunt us down.

Them finishing the search was the best case scenario. We guessed that it would take at least two days to search the whole town, in which case we would arrive in Alarna one day before them, and less Fighters in town would mean less guards that could stand in our way of contacting Gean and other people on the inside.

When we finally arrived at the clearing in the woods south of Alarna, where we had sat up camp back during our first night in the Wildlands, I sat down to write two notes. To be on the safe side, we decided that Reurig would go in alone first, through a tunnel similar to that under Cerus. He knew Alarna and its tunnels well, and even if he was spotted, there was a remote chance that he would be able to explain himself, assuming that nobody knew about what he had done in Cerus yet. He would be able to check out how safe it was to go into town right now and could then report back to us.

While he was there, however, I thought he might as well make first contact with Gean and get us some food, since hunting turned out to be much more difficult than I had anticipated. While Reurig was a good fighter, he wasn’t a trained hunter, and Berla unfortunately couldn’t help much in that department either. They could’ve tried going out into the woods alone, to attract a beast, but since that would be a serious danger to their lives, we decided against it.

Riala and I tried shooting animals from a distance with scripts, but more often than not, that didn't go very well either. The animals apparently had very keen senses, since they often appeared to notice us as soon as we spotted them, and hitting a fleeing rabbit was borderline impossible. At least while keeping the little critter in one piece. As a result, we were a little hungry, having eaten only two rabbits and a few berries in those four days it had taken us to get here.

“Okay, this is the note for Gean, and this one you can put into the drawer with the money. The cabinet is in the kitchen, second drawer from the top, on the right,” I instructed Reurig.

He looked puzzled at the piece of paper with the script on it, that he was supposed to put into the drawer. We had talked about leaving a note for Miles, on the off chance that he might get back to Alarna somehow while we were still out here. The chance for that seemed very low, but it couldn’t hurt to be prepared. However, even though we had discussed using a code, Reurig had apparently not expected me to hand him a script.

“Isn’t this the water source script? How will this tell him where we are?” he asked.

“I modified it a little, to point him in this direction. Don’t worry, he’ll get it.”

Reurig shrugged and then put the notes away.

The message for Gean contained scripture sigils as well, but only the kind that he had shown us while he examined Miles and I, including answers to the formulas he had given us, as a way to prove to him that Reurig had come in my name. Aside from that, I was asking to meet him, because I had something important to talk about in person. If he agreed, and Reurig determined that it was safe to go into town, I would accompany him next time.

“Once you’re on the way, we’ll go south from here and make camp when it gets too dark,” I said. “We’ll meet back up tomorrow at noon, alright?”

“Got it,” he said and prepared to leave.

It was already late in the afternoon, so he would set out right now, to get into town with the last sunlight, before the risk of running into beasts increased. We could’ve waited until tomorrow, but we didn’t know exactly when the soldiers would return and we wanted to use this opportunity.

The entrance to the tunnels was close to the worker camp, about an hour from here. We accompanied Reurig part of the way, but eventually we turned back around and then kept traveling south from the campsite for about half an hour, until we stopped in the middle of the woods, to rest for the night.

Even though we were apparently safe out here, one of us had always stayed up as a lookout, both on our way to Cerus and now on our way back. Since we wanted Riala to be able to sleep properly, this job would fall on Berla and me tonight. It was fine, though it was certainly easier with three people. And even easier yet if you had someone who didn’t need to sleep at all...

I missed Miles. He had kind of invaded my mind, and there had been times where I had hated him, but looking back on it all, I didn’t truly blame him for anything that happened. I could understand why he had done what he had done.

After hearing my story, Reurig once asked me if I was blaming Miles for my mother’s death, but up until that point, this hadn’t even occurred to me. Mother had been the driving force behind our experiments that night, even though Miles had of course been happy about it as well. It’s true that she would probably still be alive if Miles had never gotten here, but that hadn’t been his choice. Neither of us had been truly happy about him being here at the time. The choices he had made after that on the other hand had haunted me for a little while. However, we had gotten through all of that, and we had also seen and experienced wondrous things. Not only that, we would possibly be able to change how this world worked. I was looking at our future with nothing but optimism, and I knew that my mother would be just as excited if she were still with us.

While sitting around a fire, we watched Riala experiment with scripts. She was dead set on getting script activation via snap to work, and she kept trying, even after I had already given up. The script she had copied it from made it look like it should work, even for our scripts, but for some reason it just didn’t.

“Maybe look for something else to experiment with,” I told her, “I don’t think it will work with our normal scripts.”

“I’ll get it working! I’ll surprise Miles and make him jealous when he comes back!” she said with a devious smile.

Riala hadn’t had many opportunities to use scripts while we were in Cerus, and it almost seemed like she was trying to make good on that lost time, now that we were out here again. Additionally, she was fixating on one-upping Miles, after she had managed to do something we failed at once, with producing a sign without a white stone. I didn’t really mind, and her unwavering belief that Miles would come back to us soon had raised our spirits as well. However, I did have to monitor her experiments, since she had also been curious about experimenting with the extraction script the gods had used, and who knows what that might’ve led to.

As I was watching her try and try again, day in and day out, I realized that I was a little different from Riala and Miles. These two were happy to fiddle around with scripts until they figured out how something worked, as if they were trying to break through any hurdles with brute force. Most of the time, I didn’t have the patience for that. The repeated failures were demotivating to me, and instead of always immediately trying the next potential solution, hopeful that that would be the one, I was left frustrated.

My own approach to developing scripts was to brood over problems, think about everything, planning it out, and then try to come up with specific solutions that would, in theory, have a real chance of working. Instead of trying dozens of combinations until you might arrive at the correct one. Though it was good that with Riala and me we still had both approaches, which Miles seemed to combine in himself.

“Grrr! Come on!” Riala said, snapping wildly, but nothing happened. “Okay, how about this...”

With a smile on my face, I kept watching her and made smalltalk with Berla. Depending on how tomorrow went, this might become one of our last relaxing days. But it would hopefully only be a matter of time until other people were able to enjoy the Wildlands the same way.