I took a few seconds to just breathe. It was over. Ammun was gone. His soul had been released from its phylactery and passed into the reincarnation cycle. Someday, it would return as a new person, one without all its memories from over a thousand years as a lich. That was probably for the best, as that soul had been abused in a way that defied words.

  A few seconds was all I could afford at the moment, unfortunately. My injuries quickly made themselves known to me, intruding on my moment of reflection as darkness encroached on my vision. For all that I would have liked to just collapse on the spot, the battle technically wasn’t over. I needed to patch myself up and go to the aid of my allies.

  Healing was a delicate form of magic, one of the few that demanded my full attention even at the lowest levels. I quickly found a stable patch of ground to land on, pulled a salve out of my phantom space, and smeared a generous portion across both my abdomen and my back where Ammun’s spell had skewered me. Then, using that as a base to draw on, I began the delicate process of transmuting the raw material into a patch on my stomach.

  It wasn’t as simple as just sealing up the holes to stop the blood from leaking out, of course. Ammun had hit my spine, severing some fairly important nerves in addition to rupturing an organ. Right now, the only thing keeping me upright was that I had my back to a tree that had miraculously survived the bombardment we’d put several acres of wilderness through. A big rock I’d hauled over and placed next to the tree gave me something to lean on, since the muscles needed for posture weren’t exactly working right now.

  This wasn’t an injury I’d get fixed up today, but I could spend ten minutes or so to keep it from killing me before I rejoined the fight. My feet were another issue, though that was more about stopping the blood loss than anything else. I’d regrow the missing toes later – once I had a proper environment to do so.

  ‘Keiran,’ the gestalt sent. ‘Grandfather wishes you to know that he would appreciate your presence at Eyrie Peak.’

  Right. Wyverns. Foreign archmages. That was probably a priority to deal with. I also needed to see how Querit was doing and fetch my family at some point. As nice as that island was, they’d want to go home and currently lacked a way to get there. At least they were all safe, thanks to Senica’s efforts to hold the golems back until my shadow could get there.

  I wasn’t sure how Ammun had found them, and I’d probably never know the truth. I’d told literally nobody where that island was, made no permanent portal to it, and put considerable effort toward keeping it hidden. I had to wonder if Ammun hadn’t just been sitting up on Yulitar, staring down at me and watching me work. It was theoretically possible, though it didn’t answer the question of how he’d known where to look.

  More likely, there’d been some spies among the refugees who’d been snooping around and learned of my evacuation plans. How they’d known exactly where I was sending people to… well, other people had gone with my family. I’d be taking a hard look at everyone on the island to see if I could find a source for the information leak.

  ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes,’ I replied.

  I finished repairing my stomach lining and cleaning things out, but there was still a lot of work to do. Ignoring that for the time being, I sealed off the damage to my feet, leaving ugly, scarred nubs there. I’d be flying around for the next day or two; there was no way I could walk on what I had left. An invocation to stimulate blood generation would help keep me from passing out, but that was all the time I could afford to spend on triage.

  At least I couldn’t feel it. I’d definitely want to fix my feet before I finished up with my spine, however uncomfortable it was to leave things as they were right now.

  * * *

  There were four strange mages at Eyrie Peak, all of them coordinating with the brakvaw defenses against what had to be at least a hundred skeletal wyverns. Grandfather projected himself to me the instant I appeared on the teleportation platform, his face twisted into a ferocious scowl. Before he could say so much as a single word, he took in all the blood covering me, most of it still wet, and the massive scars across my stomach. I caught his eyes flickering down to my feet, which hovered a foot off the ground.

  “Ah,” was all he said before he faked a cough and swallowed whatever he’d been about to snap at me. “The gestalt let me know that you’d finished your battle. It was… successful?”

  “It was,” I said. “Ammun himself is gone. All that’s left is to clean up his remnants. You seem to be holding your own against these monsters.”

  “We are, thanks to the reinforcements you sent—”

  “I didn’t send anyone,” I said. “In fact, I specifically warned them never to set foot on this continent again after I caught them trying to make deals with the generals in Ammun’s army.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Grandfather’s brow furrowed and he cast a glance up the slope of the mountain to where two unfamiliar mages were anchoring the defense near the now-dead portal wall. Both mages were fighting with conjurations, one using blades of force to hack at the wyverns and the other controlling streams of water that he whipped about at high speeds to achieve a similar effect.

  “I will take into consideration how helpful they’ve been to you when I speak to them,” I promised.

  “The gestalt has been monitoring them closely. It’s not that I didn’t trust your allies, but with everything going on, it seemed better to be sure. That was apparently the right call, since they lied about actually being your allies.”

  “Not to be rude,” I said, changing the subject, “but this looks like you’ve got things in hand. Do you actually need my help with something? Because if not, I’ve got a few other places to be.”

  “We need you to open some of the portals back up,” Grandfather said shortly. “Not all of them right now, but the ones where we left people behind. If there are any still alive…”

  I doubted it, but I could see why he’d want to know. Grandfather regarded all brakvaw as his family, no matter how they behaved. They’d had a bit of a coup a few years back and he’d been completely torn up about it. Even now, tensions still ran high, and it was rare to see him in a good mood. Usually, he was at least polite, but I supposed I could forgive some terseness in his voice today.

  I got to work and started by scrying out each location. Surprisingly, quite a few of the stranded brakvaw were in fact still breathing, mostly because they’d smartly fled the battlefield as soon as they realized the portals they’d been defending had been shut off. That wasn’t to say there weren’t still a few dozen bodies to be recovered.

  I dutifully opened the portals back up, then assisted with destroying any skeletal wyverns still in the areas so that the brakvaw could collect their dead and fetch back the runners. While I was working on that, I got the gestalt to fill me in on everything else that was happening. It turned out that a few towns had been overrun, victims of Ammun’s random shots in the dark. Querit had saved Hyago’s grove – sort of. It had taken heavy damage and probably set them back a year or more, but no one had died.

  New Alkerist was in one piece, though the wards had suffered greatly and there was basically no mana left in that town. The citizens had rightfully prioritized the security measures for pouring their mana into, otherwise things would have gone much worse for them. Thankfully, my family had evacuated, otherwise Ammun would have thrown a lot more at that location and completely broken through, probably slaughtering the entire town in the process.

  Derro, it turned out, had gotten the worst of it. I wasn’t entirely clear why Ammun had devoted so much effort to assaulting the city, other than perhaps it just being the largest target. It wasn’t really an important location to me personally, so it all seemed rather wasteful. Considering how many of his golems we’d found in that storage facility, I supposed he’d had the numbers to spend.

  It took another four hours of work to finish cleaning up the various hunting grounds Ammun had sent his wyvern colonies to in an effort to siege Eyrie Peak. I didn’t do much of the work, both because the brakvaw didn’t want me handling their dead and because they were eager to avenge their fallen brethren on those wyverns that remained. With the battlefields isolated and the four Order mages helping to hold the defenses back home, they were free to attack the colonies beyond the portals in large numbers.

  For me, personally, that meant a lot of time spent recuperating. There were a few things I’d need to wait until I returned home to complete, specifically the regrowing of the ends of my feet, but I managed to repair a lot of the damage. I also took on the tedious and intricate task of regrowing my spine, with only partial success before I ran out of time.

  It might actually be worth it to extract Querit from whatever he was working on so I could secure his assistance. That would speed up the process considerably, especially since I’d need to repurpose some of that troll’s blood I’d gathered into a limb regeneration potion. I had no compunctions at all about shoving that piece of alchemy off on him while I worked on the more delicate parts of my physical rehabilitation.

  My shadow rejoined me at some point, having finished dismantling Ammun’s underground storage bunker and its many thousands of golems. I decided to keep the golem cores just in case I ever wanted to refurbish them, but that meant a great deal of transmutation to make specially sealed containers if I wanted to safely store them. For the moment, it was easier to leave the inactive ones where we’d found them.

  I did reclaim my modular portal, however. It was damaged in a number of superficial ways – nothing that would stop it from functioning, but its efficiency was significantly degraded. This was why I’d stopped using the thing in the first place. It worked, but it was too expensive to maintain and didn’t have the smooth rune sequences of a permanent portal, making it costly to run.

  Still, as a souvenir and a curiosity, it was impressive. I’d find a use for it eventually. Maybe it could serve as a training aid for Senica when she got to the point that she was ready to start working on master-tier level spells. That was still a long way in the future for her, and even longer for our little brother. I had no doubt he could get there, if he chose to.

  Finally, the brakvaw were done. The wyverns were destroyed, and not just to the point where their animation had failed. I’d turned the skeletons to dust and broken down the lingering necrotic energy everywhere I could find it. That part at least hadn’t been too bad, if only because I’d put the Order mages to work at Eyrie Peak where the majority of the fighting had taken place.

  Once cleanup was done, the four mages assembled before me. Their leader, a woman who looked to be in her fifties, stepped forward and gave me a slight bow. “Master Keiran,” she said, “thank you for taking the time to meet with us.”

  “Yes, well, I had considered just killing the lot of you. I thought I made it clear that I didn’t want you on this continent again. But, since you came to help, let’s start with an explanation and go from there.”