Elias felt like he was back in his army days—a Novice Mage running from one battlefield to another, taking orders from his superiors. At his age, with his power and title, that was the worst thing anyone could make him feel. But did he have a choice? No. Favors demanded repayment, and what Arzan had done for him—for his kingdom, for the land Elias had once thought beyond saving—was no small thing. If this was the price to ease a fraction of that burden, he would bear it. It was, after all, the least he could do.

Still, every passing hour away from his lands gnawed at him. The plague lands were changing—slowly, but changing—and he wanted to be there to see it through. Each day he lingered away from them felt like stealing from his own people. But duty was duty. The sooner he finished this errand, the sooner he could return to the soil that was learning how to breathe again.

When word first came of the Lancephil civil war, he knew instantly what it meant. Bits and pieces of what Arzan had told him before began to make sense—hints he had ignored. A few days later, runners arrived. They took Amara back to Veralt, much to Elias’s disappointment. He had grown fond of the girl, stubborn as she was, and her sudden departure left him feeling emptier than he expected. The runners simply said she would be safer in Veralt.

Safer. Elias had his doubts, but he didn’t argue. Their lord, they said, wanted him to repay a part of the favor and move as close to Caelond as possible. They gave no explanation, no details. He had pressed for more, but the runners knew little.

He’d wanted Arzan to come himself to tell him what this was all about, to speak plainly instead of sending messengers. But he understood. The boy was running to become a king and Elias understood what that meant. So Elias did as he was asked. The runners handed him a smooth, dull-blue aethum stone before they left, claiming he would receive further instructions through it. He hadn’t the faintest idea what that meant, but he had nodded anyway. Curiosity, he told himself, could wait. Answers had a way of finding him whether he wanted them or not.

The problem was that Caelond wasn’t accessible by land, at least, not without cutting straight through Lancephil. And that was something Elias had no interest in doing. Marching through a civil war was a good way to tangle up in politics he had no interest in. The only other path left was by sea.

He hated the sea.

For an Earth Mage, it was the worst kind of weakness. No soil beneath his feet. No pulse of stone or grain of sand to call on. Just endless water that ignored his commands and mocked his power. But he didn’t have a choice, not if he wanted to reach Caelond.

So he went back to Vanderfall in a single day, burning through more mana than he liked to admit. Once there, he headed straight for the docks, the smell of salt and oil already souring his mood. He found the fastest ship bound in Caelond’s direction, paid double for speed and silence, and climbed aboard. The captain—a grizzled man with a missing tooth—was smart enough not to ask questions once the gold hit his palm. That alone made the journey bearable.

Days passed as the ship rocked and creaked across the waves. Elias stayed below deck most of the time, meditating and practicing what spells he could manage in this sailing prison. Every time the boards shifted under him, he could feel the absence of the earth like a missing limb. The sea was loud, restless, untamable—everything his element wasn’t. But it was okay. He kept telling himself that he needed to endure just a little bit more.

He kept the aethum stone close, half-expecting it to hum or flash with Arzan’s orders. But it stayed cold and dull. His mind also kept thinking of him and what he had become.

He had already heard of Arzan’s victory against Veridia weeks back. The rumors reached him when he and Amara had been trying to purify more land. It was impressive, too impressive, and it unsettled him. It honestly worried him a lot because he himself wasn’t sure that he could stand against that woman, but that kid had. Arzan had. It had made him far more wary even if technically they were on the same side.

He had seen enough kings and heroes rise to know that power rarely stayed gentle. Being on the same side didn’t always mean safety—it just meant that, for now, their goals aligned.

Still, Arzan was his benefactor. He owed him too much to question him openly. Elias would do what was asked, fulfill the favor, and leave before the boy’s war swallowed him too.

Once he returned to the plague lands, he could focus on what truly mattered—healing the soil, restoring the rivers, rebuilding life where there had been only rot. With Amara’s help, the progress had already been remarkable. Her gift was unlike anything he had ever seen, and a part of him couldn’t help but wonder—when all of this was over, perhaps he could convince Arzan to let him take her as a disciple.

Or at least, learn how that mysterious power of hers worked.

Even the girl herself didn’t fully understand her powers yet, but that could wait. For now, his favor came first.

The voyage to Caelond didn’t take long. The kingdom’s borderlands brushed against the sea, with a string of docks that marked the edge of its territory. But landing there would’ve been a death wish. Any foreign ship approaching those docks would have been flagged and questioned before anyone could head in a town. Elias wasn’t about to make his presence known that easily.

Instead, he ordered the ship to head toward the swamps that spread along the southern coastline—thick, dark waters that looked more like veins of rot than land. The captain had protested, of course. Few men were fool enough to sail that close to it with the rumours of swamp beast. But one advantage of being a Magus was that ordinary people didn’t get to tell you “no.” At least not an ordinary ship captain.

So, with muttered curses and shaking hands, the man brought the vessel close to the swamp’s edge. The smell of brine and decay hit Elias like a wall. When he finally stepped off onto the sodden ground, the ship was already turning away, eager to escape whatever else lingered beneath those waters.

The swamps were a nightmare to move through. Mud swallowed each step, and the air buzzed with insects that thrived on the still water. Strange shapes shifted under the surface—scaled backs, glimmering eyes, things that didn’t belong to any simple bestiary. But the ground, however damp, was still ground.

Here, he could fight. Here, he could move.

Elias sank his hand into the earth, feeling its pulse under the layers of muck. The land answered. With a low hum, he bent the terrain to his will—lifting solid steps where there was none, forming bridges of packed soil to cross pools that hid teeth beneath their reflection. A few beasts lunged at him from the dark water, but he struck them down with spikes of hardened mud or simply let the ground swallow them whole.

He didn’t waste the corpses. Any part that might serve Amara—a fang, a gland, a scale rich in condensed mana—he took, aiming to make potions out of them later. The girl’s strength was still too fragile for his liking. If he could help her grow, he would.

It took hours, maybe more, but eventually the land began to rise. The swamp thinned into tangled trees, and in the distance, he caught sight of a single watchtower. Caelond’s token guards. The kingdom clearly didn’t bother defending this place. It was too wild, too treacherous, too useless for trade and only had few guards.

Elias watched the tower for a while, counted the guards’ rotations, then sent a small quake rumbling through the opposite side of the bog. The sound drew shouts and movement as men ran toward the disturbance. By the time they returned, he was gone—nothing left but faint footprints in the mud that the swamp water was already swallowing.

Once past the patrol, Elias climbed higher into the hills until he found what he needed: a hollow in the side of a mountain, just wide enough for him to stand upright. The air inside was cool and dry, and the walls pulsed faintly with mineral veins rich in mana. It would do.

He traced a small array at the entrance, some seals to hide his presence, then sat cross-legged near the back of the cave. The aethum stone sat on his palm, dull and unmoving. He exhaled, steady and slow, and murmured to the empty air.

Days slipped by like sand through his fingers. The cave grew quieter with each passing sunrise, and Elias found himself falling into a rhythm of silence. He cultivated for hours, letting his mana cycle through his heart in slow, disciplined swirls, grounding himself against the hum of the mountains. The aethum stone lay beside him, always within reach, but it remained as lifeless as the day he’d received it.

No glow. No pulse. No message.

At first, he told himself to be patient. Orders came when they came. But after nearly a week, the silence began to gnaw at him. Civil wars weren’t common in this part of the world—but wars were, and he couldn’t help wondering if this one would swallow Arzan whole before any word ever reached him. Perhaps he should have gone to Lancephil himself, lent his strength to the boy’s side directly. The royal family of Vanderfall would have called it betrayal, of course, but he doubted he cared anymore. They had abandoned the plague lands, abandoned him, long before Arzan had ever offered a hand.

The cave gave him peace but no satisfaction. The stillness was thick, unbroken except for the drip of water from the ceiling. Hunting beasts was out of the question—too much risk of being seen. So, he waited, breathing mana, listening to the slow heartbeat of the earth beneath him. Boredom was a curse all Mages shared, and Elias had long learned to live with it.

Until, one evening, the air changed.

He felt it first—a faint thrum, distant but sharp, cutting through the steady rhythm of his cultivation. His eyes opened. He felt something approaching. Not from the ground, but from the sky.

He stepped out of the cave and tilted his head upward. Against the pale wash of clouds, a small dark shape moved—metal glinting under the light. He quickly realised it was a drone.

His chest tightened. He remembered those machines vividly—their thunderous bursts against the treant’s bark. There was no mistaking their design. It was sent by Arzan.

The drone dipped lower, struggling to hold its altitude, then veered sharply before spiraling down. It vanished somewhere near the ridge below the mountain’s curve.

Elias sighed.

He didn’t waste time. With a tap of his boot, the ground trembled and rose beneath him. Solid steps of earth formed in the air, each one blooming from the mountainside as he strode across them with long, confident strides. The wind rushed past his ears as he crossed the ridge in minutes.

It took a bit longer to find the drone itself. The metal gleamed faintly under a tangle of roots and stone, its wings half-buried in mud. Elias crouched beside it and brushed off the dirt. To his surprise, it hadn’t exploded. The structure was mostly intact—its seals still faintly visible, though dim.

He ran his fingers along its frame and frowned. “Out of mana?”

The readings confirmed it. The drone had drained every last drop of energy coming here. He pulled open its core through a latch and saw three small aethum shards, pale and cracked. They were completely spent.

Elias understood almost instantly how the drone had found him. It was keyed to the mana signature within the aethum stone he carried. A clever trick, and one that made him hum with approval. Using a mana beacon as a guide ensured accuracy even across borders. Efficient and discreet. A method only someone like Arzan would think of.

Still, it had limits. The shards were too small for long-range flight, and without a regeneration array or a secondary power link, the drone would always burn itself out before returning. Something to improve. Though that wasn’t Elias’s concern.

He searched the drone thoroughly and found a small compartment tucked beneath the core. Inside was a folded letter, sealed in wax. For a moment, he just stared at it. Somehow, the sight of a handwritten message after seeing the advanced mana drone felt absurdly old-fashioned.

When he broke the seal and read the contents, the lines on his face deepened.

“Bloody hell,” he muttered.

By the time he finished, he was glaring at the letter like it had personally insulted him. Arzan was insane. Only someone half mad or frighteningly confident in his abilities would ask him to do something like this.

Soon, the letter caught fire in his palm due to an enhancement on it. The flame was small but hungry, devouring ink and paper until nothing but a trail of smoke curled away.

“He’s going to get me killed one day,” Elias said to no one, the echo of his voice bouncing softly off the rocks.

But he owed him. And he wasn't the type to not pay his debts.

Back in the cave, he paced for a long while, thoughts circling like restless birds. Every path he considered led to the same dead ends—too risky, too loud, too much attention. Yet the more he mulled over it, the clearer it became. There was only one way to pull off what Arzan had asked of him. Risky, yes, but doable.

He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose, and muttered, “Fine. Let’s see where this madness leads.”

Gathering his gear, Elias stepped out into the cold air once more. The mountain range stretched wide and silent before him, a jagged spine of stone under a dull sky. He sank his hand into the earth, feeling its pulse answer his call, and the ground shifted to carry him forward.

He traveled fast—faster than any horse could run. The land bent beneath his will, propelling him across valleys and ridges. For hours he moved, guided by his knowledge of Caelond. One advantage of age was familiarity; he knew the terrain of every major kingdom around his homeland.

His destination lay ahead: the Xyreth Forest.

Elias had never set foot there, but he knew its reputation. A place with a high mana density due to special trees. Where beasts grew faster, fiercer, and smarter than anywhere else. No common man dared enter; even Caelond’s own Mages only ventured in to hunt rare monsters or to prove their worth to their masters.

But this wasn’t their season of trials. Which meant the forest would be empty—save for the things that ruled it.

The wind shifted as Elias crossed the treeline. The smell of damp moss and beast blood filled his lungs. Beneath his boots, the earth thrummed with power.

From time to time, a beast would stir in the underbrush—drawn by the taste of mana rolling off him like faint heat. Some were small, little more than twisted lizards with too many teeth; others were massive, the kind that could crush a wagon in one strike. All of them thought he was prey.

All of them were wrong.

Elias didn’t even break stride. A flick of his wrist, a twist of mana into the ground beneath them, and stone spikes erupted. Flesh split, bones cracked, and the air smelled briefly of blood and dust before the forest swallowed it again. He didn’t even give a single second glance and kept moving forward. The deeper he went, the thicker the mana became, until even his skin prickled under the pressure of it.

When he finally reached the foot of the mountain, he stopped. The peak above loomed like a dark tooth against the sky, and at its center, halfway up the slope, yawned a cave. The air reeked of sulfur. Even from where he stood, he could see streaks of scorched rock spidering down the cliffside, like old burn scars that had never healed.

He nodded to himself. “This must be it.”

If he wanted to pay back Arzan's favour, this is the place to start his plan. What he was about to do could easily get him killed, but Elias didn't want to second guess it now.

He got to work right away.

Instead of climbing directly to the peak, Elias circled around to the mountain’s far side—the shadowed slope where the rock turned loose and earthy. There, he pressed his palms to the ground. The soil shifted at once, responding to his will, and began to open under his command. Layer by layer, he shaped a hole downward.

He didn’t want to go too deep since that might lead into the territory of the underground beasts. But he needed the hole wide enough for his purposes.

When he was done, the pit was exactly the size he needed.

Now came the harder part.

Elias drew a set of seals along the inner walls, each stroke carved with precision. They were part of an array he had learned decades ago, back when he thought it a useless curiosity. The array was a simple concealment array. But it would do.

He pressed the final seal into the dirt and poured a slow stream of energy into it, just enough to make the markings stay active for a few days. The air rippled faintly, and he could feel the array settle into place.

When everything was in place, Elias exhaled, brushing the grime off his sleeves. He ran a hand through his beard and hair in case they got scorched and made his way towards the peak of the mountain. “Let’s hope that wasn’t my grave I just built.”

The sulfur stung his throat from above. As soon as he reached the peak, he stopped and placed his hand against the ground.

A pulse of mana shot out through the rock.

Instantly, the mountain answered.

In his mind, the pathways unfolded—tunnels, caverns, fault lines, all etched like a living map. He also saw the location where something large and alive stirred faintly in the depths of the mountain.

Elias smiled faintly. People liked to say Shadow Mages made the best assassins, but they had never known the advantage of being an Earth Mage with eyes beneath the ground. In seconds, he could feel the location of every living thing within miles, trace each tunnel, each chamber. Nothing hid from him when he truly wanted to see.

With the location fixed in his mind, he didn’t waste another moment. He slipped into the cave and cast a few spells on himself. A first-circle spell of his own design erased his scent entirely, while a second spell muffled the crunch of his boots to nothing more than a breath.

The tunnels twisted like a beast’s intestines. He advanced slowly, altering his path whenever his senses warned of danger ahead, sometimes carving new passages straight through the rock to bypass beasts. It was slow work—an hour, maybe more—but patience had always been the mark of a living Magus.

Then at last, he reached the chamber.

It was vast and oddly silent, the air thick with the weight of mana. There was nothing in the chamber except for eggs—dozens of them, each as big as a dog. Their shells veined with glowing lines that pulsed like slow, beating hearts. The colors varied—deep crimson, glacial blue, and one, luminous gold-yellow, radiating heat.

“That’s the one,” Elias muttered.

The thought of what he was about to do made him grimace, but orders were orders.

He lifted the egg with effort—it weighed nearly a quarter of his own body—and tucked it under his arm. The surface was warm, faintly vibrating. He didn’t bother hiding anymore; speed was more important than stealth now.

With a burst of mana, Elias forced a straight tunnel through the mountain wall, rock folding away before him as he moved. When daylight finally broke across his face, he didn’t stop to breathe. Earth gathered around his feet, carrying him down the slope in wide strides until he reached the hidden pit he’d dug earlier.

He lowered the egg carefully into the hole, checked once that the array’s seals held firm, then covered it over with hardened soil. It was done.

“Now run,” he whispered to himself.

He turned and sprinted, the ground itself lending him speed, but he had covered only a few miles when a sound ripped through the sky.

A scream—deep, feral, and so loud it made the earth tremble.

Elias stopped, chest heaving, and looked back.

From the peak, a colossal shape uncoiled from the mountain. Scales shimmered in shades of black and red, each one edged with the dull glow of mana. The creature’s head was long and ridged, with horns that swept backward like carved blades, and when it opened its jaws, the light inside was the color of a dying star.

A wyvern.

It beat its wings once, and the shockwave sent dust rolling down the slopes. The sky darkened as more emerged behind it—red-scaled, blue-scaled, their eyes bright with fury. They roared in chorus, a sound that tore through stone, then spat their wrath into the world.

Streams of blue and crimson fire cascaded down the mountainside, igniting forest and rock alike. The air turned molten; the ground shook as trees burst into ash.

Elias stood for a heartbeat, watching the sky blaze with living fire. Then, muttering a curse under his breath, he turned and ran faster than before. He had done exactly what Arzan wanted.

He had woken the wyverns.

They were Grade Six beasts, apex predators of the skies—creatures born from fire, wind, and fury itself. Even among high-ranked monsters, wyverns were feared not only for their strength but for their senses. They could smell, see and sense mana for miles.

That was why the array mattered. The one Elias had built around the buried egg didn’t just conceal mana—it smothered it completely. No scent, no heartbeat, nothing for the wyverns to trace. To them, the stolen egg might as well have vanished into thin air.

And when a wyvern lost an egg—when the smell of one suddenly disappeared—it didn’t search calmly. It raged.

Already, the air shook with their fury. The sky was a storm of wings and fire; blue and red flames poured down like rain, scorching everything they touched. Whole trees ignited in seconds, the forest below turning into a burning sea of smoke and ash.

Elias gave one last look toward the mountain, where the wyverns spiraled in madness, screaming into the clouds. Then he turned away, muttering under his breath, “You really are insane, boy.”

The ground shifted under his boots as he moved, carrying him swiftly downhill. He didn’t stop to rest, didn’t dare look back again. He had done his part. The Caelond skies would burn, their Royal Mages would be too busy fighting wyverns to send aid anywhere else.

And while the beasts tore the kingdom apart in their wrath, Elias slipped through the dying forest, each step taking him closer to the border and away from the chaos he’d unleashed.

***

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