A woman stands before a large stone basin filled with swirling blue waters lit from within. Her golden hair partially obscures her piercing blue eyes. She gives a frustrated sigh. The sole door in the otherwise unadorned granite walled room opens silently outlining a man as he quickly enters the room shutting the door behind him.

“What was so important we had to meet?” The woman asks.

“We have an interesting development with your daughter. The Vice-Captain of the capital guard placed the following up throughout the city.” The man quietly says, handing her a piece of paper he withdrew from his inventory.

“Where is he and why did he post this without bringing it to our attention first?” She says while staring at a wanted poster of the princess’s kidnapper. A 1000 gold pieces reward for his apprehension alive.

“He had the posters put up right before he left on travel yesterday. My sources show he vanished on the road to the Domain of Light. He is obviously in someone pocket. With his absence they must want your daughter or her companion found in a bad way to reveal their hand so blatantly.”

“The poster has a good likeness, but no name. They must be having the same problem we are with trying to scry them between my daughter’s protective spells and his Veil skill.”

“Yes, but your daughter’s spells will start to fade over the next month.”

“She is aware of that.” She says with a thoughtful look. “We should use this situation. Spread the wanted posters to each of the domains and have imperial squads ready to take custody of them. Make sure to stress there is no reward if he is dead.”

“Is that wise?”

“Yes, I am sure the posters have already made it into the hands of the guilds and they will be searching across the domains anyway. By publicly placing the posters in each domain we give my daughter some warning.”

“Very well my lady. I will take care of it.” The man bows before turning and leaving through the door, closing it behind him.

She turns back to the basin thinking that this is bigger than just her daughter’s sibling rivalry, but is this the work of another group or is one of her daughters working with someone else now? While she pits her daughters against each other to make them strong it looked like at least one of them is taking it to far and will have to be removed assuming she can prove which one it is.

✽✽✽

We both have the last watch this time, so we continue to keep our eye out as the camp begins to wake up. The camp begins to stir when I see several dark shapes moving close to the ground. My high perception and Night Vision are paying off. I sound the alarm and cast a fireball at the closest cluster of shadows revealing them to be several darkly clothed figures. It is amazing that any trade gets done with all these bandits. Several of the figures are patting out flames while they run toward the camp ignoring me on the stone outcrop, which I find odd. I have the best field of view of both the camp and the approaching bandits after all. Voicing my concern to Nora she turns to face my back in case we are attacked. Before starting guard duty I used Stone Shaping to form a ward around us. Then it was empowered enough to absorb 50 hit point damage. That should be enough to stop an initial stealth attack.

Focusing back on the approaching bandits and I cast a maximized double range fire bullet into one of the figures who pitches dead. Immediately I cast another fire bullet at the remaining figures, when they begin to dodge, which doesn’t help the bandit I nail with my next spell. With two dead they are still ignoring me, which is making me more and more nervous.

I get ready to cast another spell when there is a sharp crack behind me, which I know all too well. Something has broken the ward spell. Nora grunts and bounces off my back as I turn and see a huge black clad figure who has locked swords with her. Since I was already casting the spell, I discharge the fire bullets into his face while leaning over her shoulder. This gets me a perfect critical hit directly to the head. He drops to the ground dead revealing a pair of wide eyes on a much smaller black clad figure. I can’t help myself and laugh out loud and turn back to the bandits below feeling Nora push off my shoulder toward the wide-eyed figure with her sword raised high.

There are several spells being cast at the bandits now from the camp and figures are drawing weapons when I cast another fire bullet, bringing down the bandit closest to the camp. While casting I keep an ear on Nora’s fight behind me, which sounds evenly matched. There are still at least two dozen bandits closing on the line of defenders. I notice the bandit’s swords are all glossy with some substance, most likely poison. They are not using any magic, which is odd. I am guessing they want to take the people alive either to get items from their inventory or because they are slavers. I heard the other guards indicate some slavers use a poison to incapacitate their victims.

Rather than try to kill one or two more bandits I try my hand at something more ambitious. I use Air Shaping to form a solid band of air forty feet long at knee height, one foot tall. It would be invisible even in daylight and at night there is no way they will see it. It is a sight to see when they run full tilt into the band of air 10 feet in front of the line of guards. Some of the bandit’s face plant, others somersault into the line of guards. I dismiss the shaping and chug a mana potion while casting fire bullet into the first bandit to rise. The guards manage to take down nearly half the bandits before they recover. Two of the bandits manage to flee the guards after awkwardly feeling for the Air Shaping. I hit and kill both with fire bullet spells before they get away, which almost wipes out my mana pool.

I turn to look behind me to see Nora cleaning her sword on the bandit behind us. Over the next few minutes the guards finish off the bandits and collect all their equipment. None of the bandits are taken alive. The few captured use poison capsules to kill themselves. After we examine the bandits weapons they are found to indeed be covered with a paralytic poison. Nasty. Nora and I get high praise for our guard duty. I think we may be in for another award when we reach the capital.

After everyone’s wounds are tended to we mount up and continue our trip to the Capital. While we ride I think about the bandits and how the battle went. My use of air shaping paid off in a way I did not expect. A wall of fire would have been useful too, but the light would have given it away. I wonder if I can summon fire and change its color. Then maybe take away its color to make the flames black. If I can do that then I can use my fire-based spells at night without giving away my position. I tell Nora I will be experimenting. Then I summon a small flame on my finger and work on changing its color. This proved to be both easy and difficult. I was able to shift the flame between red, yellow, blue and even white, which are colors that I have seen a flame take, but other colors like green and the black I suffered a mental block on. I know I should be able to change the color, since I could do it with the other colors.

I try a different approach by envisioning smoke coming from the flame. Even though these flames don’t seem to be burning anything they are consuming mana, so why shouldn’t there be smoke. After an hour of trying different attempts I got a wisp of smoke. I continued repeating this, until it got thicker until I got a notification.

You have learned the spell Dark Flame, 5 XP awarded. Basic 1.

Looking at the description for Dark Flame I see the following.

Dark Flame, Level 1, Basic Level 1 (0% progress to next level)

This spell creates a small flame of dark fire covering the casters hand, which will ignite any flammable material. Will cause 3 points of base damage plus one point per skill Tier level. This is a spell of the Fire and Darkness Domains.

Range: Self

Cost: 2 mana

Not very useful as a combat spell and not exactly what I was trying for. Instead of the color being black I created a flame composed of both fire and darkness. Hmmm, well I have seen a flame burn black now, let me see if I can still change the color to black, without changing the spell to use the Darkness Domain. I continued to experiment until we stop for lunch. It has gotten easy to change the color of the flame from a deep red through the whole rainbow up to barely visible violet. Also, I can make it white, but still not black without using darkness.

We eat lunch by a modest size pond which has a stream about five feet across feeding into and out of it. Several of the mounts jump in the pond and roll around before getting out of the water. It is getting warm and the road is dusty. I almost wish I could do the same thing. After we finish our lunch sitting in the shade, under the oak trees around the pond, the caravan continues to our evening camp site. I take a break from my spell experimentation to talk to some of the people on the wagons. Most are merchants transporting goods in cheap oversized chest of holding. They are bulky, but can hold a lot more than their inventory. Only the most valuable items are kept in their personal inventory. There are three notable exceptions riding the wagons. One is the bard Tom from the southern city states who has been entertaining us in the evenings. Another is a slim confident young man called Justin also from the southern city states. He has been adventuring in the north with a group that perished with him being the sole survivor. The final person of interest is a tall well build man who is an obvious fighter traveling from the far north named Frank.

During the ambush Tom played a song that boosted everyone’s speed and stamina. Justin used light-based spells to blind several bandits and healed several of the injured. Finally, Frank was deadly with a spear as his preferred weapon. He took out one of the bandits with a spear throw through the head at fifty feet in the dark and then killed three after they hit the air wall and captured another. We have a good group between the guards and the passengers in the wagons. They don’t talk much about themselves, but they do talk about the southern city states and the far north. The far north sounds like lots of tundra broken up by ravines, canyons, and rocky terrain. Just north of the Tassan Empire is a large forest that is divided by a mountain range to the west behind which the elves have a large empire of their own. To the east are just small communities with one small city state on the east coast. There are lots of higher-level monsters in the forest, so it is impressive that Frank has made it so far south.

For the rest of the ride until we camp I try a new approach. I must tell the other guards and wagon drivers what I am trying, so they don’t panic. I start summoning wards into small Stone Shapings I make, but this time I try to infuse fire into the ward. When the ward is damaged I want it to cause fire damage. I try several different formations, but nothing is working. The wards either take damage from the fire I am trying to infuse into them or the collapse. I try a different approach, which finally succeeds. The new ward is thinner than the Raw Mana Wards I have been creating. They are also more efficient, causing a lot of damage versus the amount of damage a Raw Ward can withstand. I am quite happy with the new Ward, which I receive as a new spell.

You have learned the spell Ritual Fire Ward, 100 XP awarded. Basic 1.

We finally pull into the camp site which is on a large flattened hilltop. This offers us a good view in every direction, but we must stop to water all the animals first and then gather water in our inventory for the camp before heading up the hill. Nora and I are not in the watch rotation tonight, so we can get a full night’s sleep. We start the rotation again tomorrow with the first watch. We both sit back and enjoy Tom’s music and stories while we eat before settling in for the evening.