Fight or Flight

Chapter 31

Enola

I sat on the hill over my den – my former den – and stared out in the direction of the lake. I could feel something...

The rider bond told me Simon was still in the small chamber he had used as his room. I had already finished clearing out my rooms – I had already moved most of my possessions into the healer's saddle back when Cess had first brought it to me, so I had only needed a few minutes to scoop up the few remaining coins and the silly cup that pompous herald had tried to bribe me with. It was a strange feeling, but... there was nothing left in my lair. My home of thirty years was now empty.

Once Simon finished up, we would be all done. There wouldn't be anything left for us here. I could charge the 'web' spell with enough magic to keep it going for a few years, and then forget all about this place. The Sea Guard would assign somebody else here to keep the spell going and to watch for any further naga attacks, and... that would be that.

I would go back home, with all the magic and skills I needed to be a healer. I would build out a proper aerie on a cliff or mountain somewhere, instead of buried underneath the ground. I would start a family. I would be with Cess. I would... I would have my whole future ahead of me. The way I should have had it thirty years ago. Finally, after all the years of hiding.

But my reawakened mage senses were telling me there was something more left to do. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the spell I had cast all those years ago, tracing down every strand...

The spell had grown since I had first cast it. That had been part of my intention with the spell – I had no way of knowing where the naga sorceress had placed her spell, so I had no way of being sure mine would cover it. I had been panicking with my magic draining away, and I knew I would not have a chance to cast a second counterspell if I messed up. So I had sculpted the spell to adapt, and adapt it had. But with my mage senses dulled from the lack of magic, I had failed to realize just how far the web of the spell had spread.

But now I could clearly sense every piece of the spell. It covered the entirety of the human town and extended a good distance past it. The lake was completely covered as well, along with a stretch of the distant river that fed into the lake, though the spell seemed to taper off past the far side of the lake. It covered the crystal mine and stretched out toward the forest – the spell had probably sensed flickers of my magic before the magedebt had devoured it, and had grown in the directions I had slept and hunted in response – but for the most part the spell seemed concentrated in the areas the humans went. Strands meandered between the buildings to follow the paths humans had taken as they walked through their town, or split off into the fields to track down a farmer, or curved out into the forest to follow children as they ran out to play games in the areas their parents forbid them from going.

Everywhere that the naga's spell had tried to attack the humans, my counterspell had followed after it. It had hunted down the traces of my own magic and smothered them, healing the twisted illness as it tried to take root. There had been points where my counterspell had been low on magic, and hadn't done as good a job at protecting the humans... but it had always followed after the naga's spell, tracing doggedly after any hint of it.

And it had clumped around one portion of the lake in particular. While most of the spell was a web of feelers spread out in search of my magic, my working mage senses could feel where the spell had returned to one spot again, and again, and again. It had formed layers of knots in the spell. A cocoon, where the spell had wrapped its strands around something again and again and again. A heavy concentration of my own magic.

The anchor point of the naga's foul spell.

I felt a faint flicker of another magic against my senses as I followed my spell to that spot. A hidden sensation that I had not felt in over thirty years, and that none of the other dragons had been able to hunt down in all that time. The strange feeling that had caught my attention back then, and that had lured me into the naga's trap. The naga spell.