Ch 41: Danger in the Night

Haydn and Baldeur worked together to place several wards of protection around their campsite. She focused on using Mana and he focused on Divinus.

After they were done, they used some Source stones to top off their energy.

Since Piaras didn't need to sleep as much as the others, he planned to take watch the entire night with the others each taking turns.

Baldeur only pretended to sleep while not on watch. He could go a day or two without sleep and still be able to function. He instead had his mind in the Laksulm spying rat and was watching this master of the village.

It was a third of the way through the night when someone came and woke up the master.

"Sir, I apologize for the inconvenience but the entity isn't reacting to Leith. It seems to be rejecting her." The messenger said.

"It wouldn't be the first time. Gather the girls that are of age and see who it wants." The master said.

"Sir, the matriarch thinks it's more than that. It's behaving in the way it does when the Mistress visits." The messenger said.

"Hmm. If she is here, she hasn't presented herself." The master of the village said.

He was over a century old and the Mistress had only been visiting for about 20 years. The high priests of the cult of Sathanas stressed how important she is to their lord and to treat her with the utmost respect.

At first he didn't understand why a child was being placed above everyone else, including the high priests. Then he saw how the entity reacted from the moment she entered their valley.

The matriarch had theorized that she had the same dark foreign energy that both the entity and their Lord had. There had been a few other girls like her, but they had all been given to the entity, not placed in a position of authority.

"There was a group of travelers that arrived just before sundown. Wasn't that when the entity started to act up?" The master asked.

"I believe it was." The messenger replied.

"Find out where those travelers are and gather our people." The master said.

"Yes master." The messenger didn't understand what was going on but absolute obedience to those above you was a basic tenant of their cult.

It wouldn't matter if none of the women with this group were what the entity wanted at the moment. They would just keep the women around and let the entity use them until they died.

The only reason there was months of rest, was so that the sacrifice wasn't killed in a matter of days. They didn't have the population to always allow the entity to have a woman. It was only when it could no longer contain itself that they sent the sacrifice to it.

Now that they had extra women that didn't matter to the village, they could let it have its fill.

After watching the scene, Baldeur sat up from his fake sleep and walked out of his tent.

"Piaras sir, I think we have a problem." Baldeur said.

Piaras and Sigurd were sitting in the dark facing opposite directions.

"What is it?" Piaras asked.

"I'm pretty sure that I just had a Divinius dream of warning. A dark shadow from the east was reaching out for one of the women with us. I'm not really sure which one of them it wanted but I had a great sense of danger." Baldeur was confident that it was Aisling that their entity wanted but his lie about a dream of danger was easier to sell if it was vague.

"Hmm, my own sense of danger has started to pick up as well. Wake everyone up. We'll head towards the exit." Piaras was already starting to lean towards trying to sneak out of the valley.

Within a few minutes everyone was awake and packed up. Piaras cast a few spells to hide them and began to lead them towards the western exit of the valley. Baldeur quietly hummed a few Divinus spells to buff and protect everyone as they moved.

"Try not to make too much of a ruckus but don't hold back if they see us." Piaras said as they came closer to the valley's exit.

"If you all just listened to me in the first palace, we'd already be out of danger." Mathys said.

"Keep your mouth shut unless you don't want to get out of here safely." Sigurd was in bad mood because had caught the man trying to get Derbail to join him for the night in order to help him calm down.

Mathys was about to argue with the other man but his own fear took over, as he realized they might attract attention. He would just hold onto his resentment for now.

As they approached the barricade that they needed to pass inorder to escape, they found that not only was it much larger than the one they passed through to enter the valley, but those manning it were on guard towards the valley.

Standing at the highest point in the middle of the barricade was an older woman. She had a powerful aura of Anodular and seemed to be able to see through the darkness around them.

Baldeur figured this might be the matriarch that was mentioned in the conversation he overheard.

"This is going to be too difficult. We'll need to find another way out of the valley." Piaras could sense that this woman was close to his power level.

They were already higher up in the valley and looking back towards where they had been camping they saw a number of groups moving around by torch light.

The night could end up as a game of cat and mouse. But things didn't go their way.

"Haydn! Cover us!" Piaras yelled.

The mage swung her wand above her head as a transparent dome surrounded them. It was just in time to intercept the lightning bolt that came racing towards them.

Wands, staffs, and other implements helped those with Mana cast their spells quicker. When they reached the third circle, Mana users would have enough energy to infuse spells into implements. They could usually infuse about twice as many spells as they had circles.

It allowed them to bypass the slower process of using chanting, gestures, and mundane items to cast their spells. Users like Sigurd infused parts of their armor and their weapons with spells to boost their melee combat.

Baldeur hasn't created any implements yet because the process takes about a day or two of constantly casting the same spell into the implement. That's why a Mana user needs to be in the third circle to do it, since they wouldn't have enough energy to last that long before that.

He did have a staff that would increase the potency of his spells but it wasn't just for Mana. It also helped with his Anodular and Divinus spells. The problem with him openly using it, was that magic items that worked with more than one Source were both expensive and rare.

He didn't want to answer questions of how it was made since he used his own Laksulm to make it. It may have been better to make only a staff that boosted one Source, but the materials were hard to come by and he decided to make a trump card to be pulled out when he really needed it.

It went well with his other trump card made from Laksulm. A sword that boosted Qi, Psychic, and Infernius energy.

Seeing that her sneak attack didn't have the effect she wanted, the matriarch scowled. It was her job to make sure the entity that their Lord had entrusted to them was kept happy. She had been doing so for over 200 years without incident.

In that time she had seen it react to women with a certain energy about them. They were extremely rare and were only sent to them directly from their Lord.

Each time they were given to the entity, it doubled their results and allowed the entity to grow larger.

It wasn't until word of the City of Gates came to the valley that she learned of other Sources and realized that those women could use a different Source called Infernius.

One of the women in this group must be able to use that Source and she was not about to let an opportunity to please her Lord escape.