Sen had known about the holy site through Tane’s memories, but only distantly. He’d never actually been there, and had no idea what the site was used for. When Tered learned that, his urgent need for a monster hunter had cooled, and he’d decided to lecture Sen on the history of the holy site.

  Murdin just shook his head at the man, then wandered off to continue his work on the wardstones. Sen could hear the tinny cracks of hammer meeting chisel as he added glyphs to stone.

  Tered himself sat on a stone chair from Murdin’s yard. “Not too many years after the Crossing, our people came to settle here in Shiren. As all leaders naturally will, they brought along a group of priests, representatives of the gods, to guide them according to their greater wills.

  “Not long after Shiren’s dedication, the mayor of the time built a number of stone shrines for the gods of those priests who lent their favor to Shiren.”

  “So,” Sen said, “why is this holy site outside of the wardstone net?”

  Tered smiled at that, licking his lips before he spoke. “Interestingly, Shiren has a history of geographic shifts. Did you know, not long after the Crossing, this world was in great upheaval?”

  Sen shook his head, and Tered continued. “It was. Truly, an extraordinary time. I would hate to live in it, but apparently excitement was a core part of life back then.”

  The tone in which he said excitement gave no uncertainty to the kind of excitement he meant: misfortune. Frankly, Sen didn’t understand the purpose of this diatribe, but he didn’t know if it would be appropriate to tell Tered to be done with it.

  He also couldn’t entirely fault the man. It was interesting… to a point.

  “Part of that upheaval involved massive geographic shifts. Flooding, active volcanoes exploding, the world everywhere changing.”

  “And Shiren lived through similar changes?”

  “Precisely! Shiren used to sit a ways away from here, closer to these shrines. That is why this holy site sits outside of Shiren’s wardstone net.”

  “And nobody ever decided to move them to a safer location?”

  Tered chuckled at that. “No, no, that’s not how it works. The gods of those shrines took those areas, specifically, under their domain. They cannot be moved without a great expenditure of power. It’s not worth it, not when, up until recently, there had been so few monsters near Shiren.”

  “And now that there are?” Sen asked.

  “Well, if the monsters continue to roam so close to the town, then their priests may consider it. But for now, we have mages who can ensure nothing prevents each priest from their veneration. Like yourself,” Tered said with a smile.

  By this point, the sun had dropped beyond the horizon, leaving them with only the light of light marbles positioned along the walls of Murdin’s home. Tered jumped as the first of the light marbles jumped to life. While some designs had them work permanently, emitting an endless stream of light, most light marbles functioned on one of several different limitations. The ones embedded in the walls here activated themselves only in the darkness of night.

  It was an interesting problem, from an enchanting perspective. Some glyphs allowed interfacing, in some ways, with reality. The potential for creating new tools seemed immense, but Sen found that the incredible possibilities were limited by his ability to form glyphs. Small objects like the little glass spheres that shed light were nightmares to enchant.

  The work was just as intense when it came to the theoreticals, with any number of small adjustments needed to ensure an enchantment properly interfaced with other enchantments. It was difficult work, but Sen enjoyed the challenge. Mostly. Sometimes, it did drag on.

  Just like Tered. On, and on, and on, and…

  The priest had jumped from topic to topic, leaving Sen with no room to easily extricate himself from the priest of Nielun’s interminable babble. The frustrating part was that some of the topics truly were interesting, but asking any questions led the man down a different rabbit hole, often ending at a conversation so far removed from the original that Sen wondered if it was even possible for the man to keep himself on track.

  Eventually, Murdin found his way outside once more. “You’re still out here? Tered, leave the boy alone. He has work to do.”

  “Oh, my, I’m sorry. The time got away from me,” the priest said as he stood. “Please, do forgive me. I never intended… Well, intention only matters so much. It is the consequence that truly matters, isn’t it? I’ll hold you back no longer. It is late. I should get some sleep, and I hope you will, too, Tane. Please, clear out those monsters as soon as you can.”

  Sen nodded, and Murdin crossed his arms as the priest walked away. When he was out of earshot, Murdin turned to Sen. “Next time, just tell him to shut up and leave.”

  “Is that really necessary?” Sen asked, curious at the clear dislike. “He doesn’t seem so bad.”

  “He’s not so bad, on the surface, at least. The problem is when he wants something. He’ll play the game around you, on you, and over your dead corpse if he has to.”

  “The game?”

  “Politics, boy. Politics. Tered’s whole life is running a political game, ostensibly in order to help prevent disasters in the name of his god. No, Tered is not your friend, no matter how well he plays the kindly old man.”

  Sen never learned to play the political games as well as others he knew, but Murdin’s solution didn’t seem like the best way to deal with it all. For now, there was nothing to be done. Whether Tered showed himself to be a problem or not, Sen had to treat him fairly until shown he wasn’t worth it.

  Maybe Sen would just try to avoid any long conversations with the man.

  Sen wanted to work on his burgeoning workshop a bit more, but Murdin told him to go home and rest. It made sense. Monsters were now his biggest priority, which meant dealing with them first thing in the morning would be for the best.

  Surprisingly, Sen slept through the night. It had been a while since the last time that happened, and the morning came with a beautiful dawn. Instead of following his normal pattern of a run, Sen pulled himself together to go and check on the shrines.

  For once, Sen decided not to use warmth to keep the chill away. Or, rather, not yet. The morning chill felt refreshing, and he let it egg him on as he ran through the village and toward the gates, then exited and into the woods.

  Sen had decided he would go without any scrolls for a while to see if it helped him make any more progress. The strides he’d made with light seemed incomprehensible to him not long ago, and he wanted to see if similar changes could be made with fireball, or shock.

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  Warmth never seemed to prompt any changes, despite the fact that he used it almost every morning as a body-channeled spell. Sen wasn’t sure if that meant anything important - perhaps warmth didn’t need to change?

  It was a new way of thinking about the magic he found so familiar, and it was an exciting change. Before, he considered everything a known quantity, or lost to him. That there was room for him to explore and expand upon his knowledge felt reassuring.

  The forest lay quiet in the dawn. Bird song echoed out into the air, subdued, and only the lightest whisper of winds danced through the trees. Sen struggled to find any paths through the forest that didn’t leave him sounding like a lumbering oaf, with each step he took breaking one branch, or crackling under the fallen leaves.

  It didn’t take him long to approach the location of the shrines, and he immediately noticed the presence of more monsters once he left the wardstone net surrounding Shiren.

  In the span of only a hundred or so steps, the forest went from pristine and natural, to the damaged hunting grounds of multiple monsters. Sen spotted the telltale dirt and stone markings of tanbinos decorating the forest floor. Large claw marks covered the trees, and broken limbs told the story of monsters defending their territory.

  Occasionally, he spied the blacker-than-night of dried monster blood. It was a stark difference to any other part of the forest he’d explored recently. Most of the area had been clear of large monster infestations, but here, they seemed to be thriving. Sen couldn’t guess why, but it was concerning.

  He ran into his first monster, a lone tanbino, only another hundred feet past the edge of the wardstone net. It growled at him and attacked immediately. Sen dispatched it without much issue, baiting the creature to impale itself on his spear. Once dead, it collapsed into a dark pile of dirt and stone.

  According to Tered, the shrines were all embedded into the base of a sheer cliff face not far past the wardstone net. A gentle slope led down into a gulch hidden by the trees. Halfway down the slope, Sen finally caught sight of the exposed rock on the other side of the small valley. That must be his destination.

  Though the journey so far had gone quickly and without complication, the last stretch brought actual trouble. The first was a large stone roc. Like a tanbino, they were inert material made into a monster, but instead of a wolf, in the form of a large bird.

  There was only one, but that didn’t mean Sen could treat it without caution. A stone roc was a literal flying rock that stood up to Sen’s own chest. Even if he evaded its claws, the creatures bulk could badly injure him if it hit him in just the right way.

  The bird dove at him in silence. Sen ducked out of the way, but barely had a chance to dodge before it bounced off the tree behind him and tried to rake across his back.

  Jumping forward into a roll, Sen dodged once more. It was a bad angle for his spear, so he raised a hand, preparing fireball. It would be a bit of a waste of mana, but he only needed to interrupt the mana in the creature enough to prevent it from flowing so the creature would fall apart. That would be easiest to do with the spear, but this stone roc seemed to have more agility than normal.

  He aimed, but realized he didn’t see the bird anywhere. A rustle of leaves gave it away, but only just. Sen dodged forward once again, this time pulling his spear to the side. He felt the weight of the stone roc colliding with his spear, but it didn’t collapse into a pile like the previous tanbino had. Too shallow.

  It did, however, stumble from its flight and fall to the ground. It scrambled back up, but not before Sen managed to rush forward and stab the monster. This time, it did die.

  It felt like he’d taken only a handful of steps before he then ran into a pack of tanbinos. These, he dealt with at a slow tempo, letting them overextend. He didn’t want to tire himself out too much by trying to go too fast, so he decided not to use magic until it was necessary.

  One by one, the tanbinos fell to his spear, most of them jumping toward him and impaling themselves, only to fall to a pile of dirt without Sen even needing to remove the monster.

  Finally, Sen made it to the cliff face, and there, in the distance, he had his first glimpse of the shrines. A glimpse was all he got before a loud screech ripped out from the air above.

  Sen looked up to see a mountain roc. A mountain roc was an actual bird, sized up to, as the name attempted to describe, the size of a mountain. It wasn’t actually as large as a mountain, but at a certain point, it didn’t matter anymore. It still stood taller than most trees. The cliffs above came alive, and what Sen had previously thought was a large cliff face turned out to be part of the giant bird. It measured easily fifty paces wide from wingtip to wingtip. The creature lifted up into the sky, screech intensifying as it began to circle.

  Well, Sen thought to himself. I didn’t expect to run into something like that, today.

  Battle plans ran through his mind, one after another. Sen found all of them wanting. The sheer size of the creature meant that even if he managed to get a few good shots against it, it would be unlikely to do much damage. This would not be a hunt he could take on himself.

  The question was, did he have a choice?

  If he fled back to Shiren, could he gather a force capable of defeating the creature, or would it cause more damage confronting the creature than ignoring it and hoping it stayed away would? Worse, now that he’d disturbed it, would the creature even let him get away?

  Could something like this just fly over the wardstone net, if it wanted?

  Sen didn’t have an answer for most of those questions, and even if he did, he wasn’t sure it would matter. More and more, it looked like he needed to deal with the mountain roc now. Murdin wouldn’t be able to help if he went back, which meant that, at best, a handful of the guards would be pulled to help him. Anyone else would be a liability. Even the guards might be a liability, he realized. They weren’t trained to deal with monsters, much less monsters the size of a mountain roc.

  Fists clenched in determination, Sen broke into a run. The giant creature swooped down toward him like an avalanche, one giant claw scraping at the earth. Sen only just managed to dodge, rolling in the dirt. He managed a small swipe against the large leg, but it barely did anything. At this size, any cuts his spear could make would be more like paper cuts than actual damage.

  Sen would need to settle in for a long fight.

  Sen ran toward the tree line, looking for cover. From there, he could try peppering the overgrown bird with spells. Maybe they’d be more effective than his spear.

  A heavy bass squawk resounded in his chest, one long thrum that he felt all through his body. With a crash and a pile of dust, the mountain roc landed in front of him, between Sen and the treeline. Its head came down, snapping at him with a huge beak.

  He managed to slow in time to prevent running into range of its wings or legs, but not the beak, and momentum meant he couldn’t dodge well. His spear clanged against its beak, but the creature’s sheer size sent him rolling as the force threw him into the air.

  He needed to change something, or this would be a short hunt, and not one in his favor.

  Channeling shock, Sen built a spell in his hand. He climbed to his feet, eyes on the mountain roc. It stared at him, neck twisting its head as if trying to get a better view of something interesting. It squawked, and Sen took his chance.

  Mouth open, he extended a hand, and shock vibrated through the air, overchanneled as much as Sen could bear. A bar of energy extended from his hand in an instant, leaving an afterimage in his eyes. The bird recoiled, then let out a bellow of rage and pain. Smoke rose from its mouth, but it looked down at Sen. Shock had barely done anything at all.

  A wing swiped through the air, aimed at Sen. He tried to dodge, but it was too large, and he found himself clipped, flung through the air like a child throwing a toy. This is going to hurt, he thought to himself. Without thought, he pulled mana into both arms and legs. Right as he neared the ground, he let the mana explode from him, a fireball from each limb. He would be fine - a mage resisted their own spells - and hopefully the explosions would counteract his fall.

  They helped, but they weren’t perfect. Maybe with some practice it would do more, but as it stood, it slowed him enough to prevent himself shattering into pieces as he hit the ground. Unfortunately, it also left him spinning as he landed, an uncontrolled, dizzying roll that left him unsure where he was. It was a terrifying moment, and when he came to a stop, he felt one arm groping at thin air. He looked to the side to see a small crevice leading down, down, into the darkness.

  A rush of wind beat down on him, and he looked up to see the mountain roc. It hovered above, discolored beak showing only the slightest sign of damage. It looked at him with hatred, giant wings moving with unnaturally slow fluidity. Nothing that size stayed in the air through any mundane method of flight.

  In a blink, it dropped, letting its wings fall flat to its body, giant claws extending toward Sen. It was all he could do to roll out of the way, and he hoped it would be enough.

  It was, but only barely. The claws crashed down next to him. He fell, rolling, rocks and dirt following him. The sound of stones cracking came to his ears, but he realized too late what it meant. The ground fell from beneath him.

  The darkness reached up to greet him.