Keiran

If anything, the refugees were understating the precariousness of their position. It had taken me a few hours to look everything over, but by my rough count, they had close to five hundred people with them. That number included a hundred or so children who would not be able to contribute meaningfully to the construction of their new home.

Even with the best help magic could offer, they’d need a few months before their first harvest. In the meantime, they were living off what little stores they had left after their months long journey and trying to supplement that with a great deal of fishing using a very small number of boats that I personally would not have trusted out on the open ocean.

That was supplemented by two full ships anchored off the coast and manned day and night, but it was a losing proposition. Of course, they knew that already. That was why they’d sent a single ship up the channel to look for civilization. They’d eventually reached Outlander’s Gateway, where even now that ship was moored. I was only speculating, but I suspected they’d had no less than five or six groups going in different directions on the hunt for food and probably some other resources.

Shelter was another concern for their new village, based on what I’d seen. If I had to guess, I suspected they came from somewhere with plentiful timber. Their new home did not have that natural resource, and as a result, they were struggling to find new ways to build their homes. Since most of them weren’t mages themselves, not even ignited, from what I could tell, they were suffering under the cooler coastal weather.

That certainly explained the refugees’ interest in the town’s buildings. New Alkerist was unique in that everything but the doors had been built with transmutation spells, mostly stone shape and sand to glass. Stone doors had proven too heavy to be popular, especially after the original population of Sanctuary had realized they had a readily available source of wood in the valley. Though their original homes had been abandoned, they’d taken the doors and furnishings with them when they left.

I finished explaining what I’d learned to my family and held back a grimace at the expressions on their faces. Sentimental as they all were, it was no surprise that they’d want to help. I fully expected I’d be out there putting down a teleportation platform to send workers and relief supplies over to this new town tomorrow at minimum.

“What can we do to help?” Mother asked.

“Their first priority is food,” Father said, a frown on his face. “But… five hundred people. That’s a lot. Even if it’s only for a few months, we don’t have that much to spare.”

“We’re not the only place they’re looking for help from,” I pointed out. “We don’t need to supply their entire village with food.”

“Our mana reserves should be more than sufficient to put a few communal houses up for them,” Senica said. “Even at Tetrin’s outrageous pricing markups. That’s something, at least. Maybe if we made some more boats, they could get more fish?”

I held back a laugh at that idea. Nobody in this village knew anything about fishing, least of all how to make boats. Most of them hadn’t even seen a fish. Aquatic monsters were a rarity, but since it was equally rare for a random farmer to be willing to tangle with one, people tended to stay away from streams and rivers. The ocean was on a whole different level, of course.

I suspected it was probably far safer now than it had been in the past, the worst of the sea monsters having starved and died off thousands of years ago, but safer wasn’t the same thing as safe. There was a reason the few ships they had stayed in the shallow waters near the coast, and while more fishing boats probably would help somewhat, I doubted it was the solution they needed here.

“A bigger concern for me is sustainability,” I said after a few more minutes of debate. “These people, their culture, they worship mages who pretended to be divine messengers. The ones I met didn’t believe it was possible to even learn magic. I don’t know how far away from the Sanctum of Light this particular town was, but I haven’t seen anything to make me believe their beliefs differ in any substantial manner. Will they ignite their cores? Will they learn to use their mana? Or will they struggle and rely on others to save them from every single disaster that comes their way?”

“We all survived for centuries with dormant cores,” Father pointed out.

“Alkerist was one bad harvest away from starving,” I said. “All the villages were. You weren’t connected to anything else and had no reserves. It was all you could do just to survive. It wasn’t that many years ago you were spending half your life working the fields and coming home exhausted every night. How many villages do you think ceased to exist when the wrong monster found them or the crops got ruined a single time?”

“They managed to survive an attack from an enemy and flee thousands of miles across the sea,” Mother said. “They must have been prospering before coming here. Who’s to say they can’t do it again?”

I shook my head. “The lands around the Sanctum are different. However faint it might be, there’s still mana in the air. The soil is better. The plants grow healthier. Game animals live in their forests. Yes, they’re all capable warriors who can defeat a monster with coordination and a lot of swords and spears, but they’re not going to have access to the natural resources they’re used to here.”

“There’s some truth to that,” Father ruminated. “Everything grows so much better here after all the work we did to the soil, and we still put loads of mana into the crops. Even just having ignited cores is a huge boost, but a few dozen mages would make it so much easier for them to prosper.”

“You should feel out how open they are to becoming mages,” I said. “Given that an army attacked their home and forced their entire population to cram themselves into a handful of boats to flee, they might be amenable to abandoning some of their old traditions, especially if it means the difference between their families surviving or starving to death.”

The conversation lapsed into silence after that, all of us lost in our own thoughts. I wasn’t personally all that interested in helping the refugees, but I knew my family saw it differently. I’d long ago learned that it simply wasn’t possible to still have my own life if I accepted responsibility for every problem that was within my power to change. Today it was this group of people. Tomorrow it would be something else. And the day after, a new problem would pop up.

In my previous life, I’d tried to strike a balance by only helping in situations that were right in front of me. I’d assumed that as long as I didn’t go looking for problems, it wouldn’t overwhelm all my time. That hadn’t worked out. Instead, word started getting out and before I knew it, I had people hunting me down to beg for help. All a sudden, my reputation was bringing me a flood of petitioners and, as much as I’d determined I would atone for past misdeeds, it became too much.

That was a large part of the reason I’d become so reclusive for the second half of my life. A century of being a bleeding heart for every lost cause that sought me out had left me bitter toward mankind and their petty problems. It was a lesson well learned, and not one I was eager to repeat this time around.

Yes, I could go out there and spend a day or two building them an entire town made of magic-shaped stone. Yes, I could descend into the sea and harvest enough food to see them through the coming weeks. Yes, I could establish schools to train their people in mana control and provide the necessary mana needed to ignite cores. I had in fact done much of that in limited forms for other villages on the island.

But one of the reasons I’d done that was so that I wouldn’t personally have to address problems like this in the future. This was something that was within my father’s power to handle, though I could tell he didn’t think he was up to the task. All he was seeing was the overwhelming immediate need, which he knew couldn’t be answered by New Alkerist alone.

“I should go,” I said abruptly.

“So soon?” Mother asked.

“I’ve been here for hours,” I reminded her.

“It’s alright, I understand.” Father rose with me and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “This isn’t your responsibility. We’ll manage just fine.”

“Thank you,” I said. It was nice to not have to justify my cold-heartedness to my family. They did understand, too. It wasn’t just something Father was saying to make me feel better. More than anybody else, my family knew exactly how strong my magic was, that I could literally make almost anyone’s problems disappear with a wave of my hand, and that nobody had the right to demand that from me.

“Wait!” Senica said. She scrambled to her feet and rushed over to me. “I need some help with an alchemy thing."

Well, almost nobody had a right to make demands. Senica seemed to consider herself immune to that restriction. To be fair, she was my sister.

“You’re supposed to be working on divinations,” I said.

“I can do more than one thing at once! I was going to ask you earlier, but then things started happening and…” she trailed off with a shrug.

“Fine, fine. What is it you’re working on?”

“Here, let me show you,” she said, grabbing my hand and dragging me toward her workshop. We’d modeled it after mine when we’d been building the house, though only in shape. The contents diverged wildly since she was still a beginner in the discipline, and not one given to the amount of patience required to truly excel in it.

“So I’ve been trying to make an elixir of heat resistance,” she started to explain, though I’d already deduced that from the herb drying rack and the ingredients she’d processed and stored. “I thought they might go over well as a trade good for farmers in other towns who haven’t got the time or skill to master the invocation.”

I nodded. That wasn’t a terrible idea. Nobody liked toiling under the hot sun all day, especially when it was at its peak. “But the blue leaf keeps settling out of the mix instead of properly bonding when you add the catalyst,” I finished for her as I eyed up the equipment.

“Exactly! I can’t figure out why. I know I’m following all the steps. I haven’t skipped any. The ingredients are properly prepared. What am I doing wrong here?”

I pointed to a delicate, spiraling piece of glassware, but said nothing. Senica followed my finger with a confused frown, then looked back at me. “What’s wrong with it?”

“You used river water to clean it instead of distilled water.”

Senica’s jaw dropped for a moment before she schooled her expression. “No I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. What have I told you about lying to me?”

“Fine. Yes, once. I was out of distilled and didn’t realize it. I didn’t want the syrup from the extract drying in there, so I had to use what was available. But I recleaned it with distilled water as soon as I had some more!”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “There are contaminants in the coil now. You’ll need to flush the whole thing with a mild acidic solution, then reclean it again with distilled water.”

“Noooo. There has to be another way. Can’t you just make me a new one?”

I chuckled. That coil was a huge pain to clean, and I’d been guilty of throwing them out and making new ones myself more than once. Senica, lacking my transmutation skills, didn’t have that option. “I’m afraid not,” I told her mercilessly.