Incident and Duty (1)
This served as a wake up call for Aldrich. Until now, most of his understanding of Crestmasters has been superficial.
Even when he learned from Krynt's books he mostly dismissed the deaths of Crestmasters as unlucky accidents.
Deep in his mind he had a belief that Crestmasters were somewhat invincible and infallible.
This couldn't be helped as the common sense understanding of Crestmasters was that they were simply out of reach.
However that was far from the truth.
Crestmaster were powerful, frighteningly so, and yet the monsters that inhabit the land were not completely annihilated yet.
In fact there were many areas all throughout the land where monsters regained supreme.
The monsters and other enemies of the empire were not weak at all. In fact, there were times in history when Crestmasters were slaughtered one-sidedly by these monsters.
Another factor was that information about power difference between Crestmasters were very vague.