Even after a few days to reflect on it, Jordan wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. They’d only barely managed to avoid death at the hands of the endless grasping dead, and then while they stood there on the shore, they were attacked by the rotting corpse of a dragon, and somehow Brother Faerbar had struck some vital blow, and it had torn itself to pieces.

It made no sense. None of it did. In fact, it felt more like a fever dream than reality, but no one really talked about any of it except the children, and that only added to the strangeness of the whole ordeal. How did you talk to children about anything? With small words and hopeful euphemisms.

It was Siddrim’s light that smote the dragon. Lunara’s mercy had saved the child. They should all be grateful to the swiftly flowing Oroza for saving them.

All of those things were true, probably, but none of them were answers. They were barely statements of fact, but since that terrible battle, the Templar had been silent and tended only to the child he’d rescued. Physically, he was uninjured, but mentally? To Jordan, his mind seemed shattered. The sailor wasn’t much better. He might swear and curse that something wasn’t being done fast enough or well enough, but other than that, he kept himself to himself, which left no one but children, an upjumped commoner who pretended to be a noble, and a couple of very frightened mothers to talk to.

They were all bad choices, and Jordan did as little of any of that as he could manage. Instead, he tried to study and sort the conflicting recollections of his mind. Often, while he toyed with the manacle, he’d scooped up when he rescued the Templar.

Honestly, if not for the dreadful magics that clung to that gilded hunk of rusted steel, he would have been quite certain that he’d made the whole thing up. There was no way he could make up dread magics like this, though.

He spent most nights sitting alone at the bow, watching the stars drift by on the languid bow wake while he studied the evil auras that wafted off the thing like an evil aura that only he could see. Well - the Templar could see it too. Jordan could tell that much just by the way the man looked at him, but all he’d ever said on the matter was, “If you start to show any signs of corruption, I’ll cut you into pieces and burn the corpse to ashes.”

Jordan believed him. If anything, he had a much harder time believing that the man hadn’t killed him yet. Every day, he told himself that he should throw it overboard at least twice, but every day, he held on to it, certain that if he could just get it to a magus more learned than him, it might reveal some important clue about the enemy that they had to fight if anyone had any hope of putting the world back together.

Winning this terrible war could come later, though. Right now, all that really mattered was that they went away as fast as their fragile little sailboat could manage. Every day, they drifted more and more to the north, with the help of favorable winds and impossible currents, but it changed nothing. Everywhere they went, they found only devastation and empty fields. It seemed impossible that an evil that no one had even whispered about had spread so far in so little time, but if the women were to be believed, it was like this all the way to the sea. In less than a month, at least three counties had been utterly purged of life, and no one could say how much further the damage continued upriver.

It was basically the apocalypse; the world as they’d known it had been abandoned, and in its place, they found only burned-out farmhouses and unburied bodies. They found less boat traffic, too, but that was just as well because the living that they had found had become lean, predatory men.

When they passed from the Oroza to the Tolden river that flowed into it, just before they’d reached the ruins of Siddramar itself, one small skiff with four hungry men actually tried to pull alongside and take what they had by force.

Jordan didn’t even try to warm them, lest he find out the hard way that they have a crossbow bolt. He’d just muttered a few words and watched the lightning bolt arc down from a clear blue sky to hole their vessel and burn their sails.

A couple of them almost certainly died the moment that the lightning struck, but at least one of them might survive long enough to make it to shore, though Jordan very much doubted the man would survive the terrible burns that he’d received in the blast.

The children gawked and squealed at that, but her was subtle enough that none of them seemed to blame him for the magic. The adults knew, of course, but there was as much gratitude as fear in their eyes, and they said nothing at all. Even the suspicious old sailor, who was superstitious enough to make warding gestures at almost anything, didn’t outright chastise the mage for what he’d done because he knew that any other outcome would have been worse.Stolen novel; please report.

Two days later, they finally reached Siddrimar and the great stone bridge that crossed the Tolden, but they didn’t stop like Jordan thought they would. “Bah - keep going,” the Templar called out when he heard they were mooring.

“But if not here, then where?” Markez asked. “I only went this way because I thought your people could protect us, I—”

“Take them to the capital. Let the King protect them. This place is cursed,” Brother Faerbar said, unable or unwilling to take his eyes off the shore for a long moment before he turned around and walked back below decks with the child he called Leo still in his arms.

“Isn’t he supposed to be some bigshot with the temple?” Markez asked, obviously spooked.

“I mean, if you took a whole army off to slay a nightmare, I’m not sure you’d want to go back home and report what happened either,” Jordan responded without meeting the man’s eye.

Being this close to the church was a risk for a mage, and he had no doubt that any of the priests with the sight could have picked him out of the crowd without issue, but today, he wasn’t worried, even though he should have been. Today, he wasn’t too worried. There were bigger forces at play than witch hunts. Instead of worrying about who might try to track him down, he tried to imagine what these pristine walls had looked like before whatever terrible thing had occurred that had brought the high towers down into ragged stacks of rubble and littered the manicured landscape with burn marks and blood spots.

He’d known it was going to be bad, of course, but he was sure the Collegium looked no better than the church’s fortress city. Whether he’d wanted to come here or not, Jordan had assumed that this would be their destination. Despite Brother Faerbar’s lack of communication, he’d assumed that they were trying to warn the elders and high priests of all the terrible things they’d seen, but that didn’t happen, and that created a whole new puzzle.

“Where should we go then?” Markez asked as they drifted slowly toward the shore. “The Capital? I can’t imagine they’re eager for more refugees. We’re liable to find the gates shut in our face, and with so many mouths to feed, I doubt very much that we have the food to get there.”

Jordan nodded. He agreed on all counts. “No. A place like that at a time like this? That’s the last place I’d want to be. We’ll have to go home.”

“Home?” Markez demanded, slamming his hands down on the rail. “Are you mad? We’ve come all this way, and you think we should just turn around and go back to the sea? I… we will never make it through that shadow… if we go back and tempt fate, and mark my words…”

“No,” Jordan interrupted softly before the man could get much more worked up. “Not your home. My home.”

“No offense to you and yours wizard, but I don’t think the ruins of a magic school are a fit place for children and—”

“Not Abenend,” Jordan said louder than he meant to as he slammed his hand down on the railing. “Something you might not know… Something most people don’t know, even though it’s not really a secret, is that most of the students who end up there are the extra sons of wealthy families. I am no different.”

Markez did a double take, “Wait - you mean you and the idiot over there are part of the same club? How’s that work?”

“Well, technically, Dian is the second son of a Baronet. It is a title he wouldn’t inherit even if he was the first son. He’s all posturing and no substance,” Jordan said, flashing a smile. “His father holds the rights to certain… let’s say fishing grounds. Nothing more.”

Jordan had considered holding those details back, but the way it made Markez laugh for the first time on the whole trip made it worthwhile.” So yer sayin’ I can stop taking it easy on him?”

“I don’t think you take it easy on anyone, old man, except for maybe the kids,” Jordan added, getting an approving nod for his trouble.

“Alright then - you tell me where we’re goin’, and I’ll get ya there,” the sailor said, finally listening to the mage for the first time, whether he was blue-blooded or not.

Jordan told him as much as he needed to know. He told him that Sedgim manor was an estate of ample size less than a day from the north fork of the river and that it was less than a week away, just after the Greywood gave way to the hilly pasture lands that his family had owned for generations.

He left out the goblin threats, the sullen older brothers who might not be so happy about his sudden appearance, and the fact that the well-manicured grounds were probably larger than any five little fishing villages like the one that Markez had come from put together. Those were later problems. For now, he just needed the sailor to keep the ship moving, the paladin to produce loaves and potatoes from thin air every now and again, and he would focus on keeping everyone safe.

After all, no matter how far they had to go, as long as they stayed on the water, he didn’t imagine an army of the undead could reach them, and even though he was just an apprentice, he was confident that he could square off against anything short of that.