Derek woke to find himself in a high mountain glade. He looked around in confusion but felt no fear or concern as a warmth and feeling of reminiscence settled upon him. As he turned in the familiar direction he saw a man at a campfire looking down the mountain at the town of Redwyrm.

As Derek walked towards the campfire the man turned to him, “It has been a while boy, you have gotten bigger. Come, let me look at you, see what kind of man you have become.”

Derek smiled at the wiry old man as he sat across the fire from him, “Old timer, I haven’t seen you in a few years. I’ve missed you.”

The old man cackled, “Ehehe, I had thought you youngins would have forgotten about me by now. Now let me look at you… ahh, I see your father in you, but luckily you have gained some of your mother’s charm. Your old man looked like a block of granite, he did. Hehehe.”

Derek felt the cold of winter encroaching on them, so he got up to tend the fire. He didn’t mind the man’s words as he had always been an odd fellow. The man had brought food to his family when they were hungry and wood and animal skins when they were cold. He never went down into the town but kept to himself living in the forest. Derek’s family had not seen him in a few years and had assumed he had met his end in the mountains. Derek was pleased to see him now, but as he reached to add more wood to the fire the old man waved and the fire was extinguished. Now the forest was lit only in the light of the moon and its reflection on the snow.

Derek looked questioningly at the old man, who gestured at him as he got up, “Come boy, we have things to do.”

The old man set a rapid pace into the forest. As they walked, it seemed as if the distance shrank around them and they proceeded deep into the mountains in little time. Derek quickly lost his bearings due to the strange method of travel. But when they came to a stop he found that they were in another clearing with standing stones around them. The old man spoke to him, “Boy, do you know what these stones are?”

“They seem to be arranged in some form of sealing formation.” Derek responded quietly as he tried to understand the archaic formula he was sensing from the stones.

“Indeed, boy, this is one part of a greater formation that runs the length of these mountains. When powered it strengthens the veil between this world and the world of Demons, making it harder for them to enter this world. It also serves to greatly weaken any Demons in this region by flooding this region with ambient holy energy.

“The formation has weakened recently. Something powerful has gotten in, we must strengthen the seal. Give me your hand, boy.”

Derek listened intently, so sure was the command that he didn’t even think before reaching towards the old man, who sliced his palm open and caught the blood in a wooden bowl. Startled by the pain, Derek went to jerk his hand back, but the man’s grip was too powerful, “Don’t struggle, boy. This is necessary for the seal. Be brave.”

After the bowl had filled sufficiently, white light flashed from the old man’s hand as a holy spell sealed the injury. The man let go and Derek clasped his hand to his chest while he watched the man warily. The man hardly paid attention as he dabbed a brush into the blood and painted it in runes onto the stones. As he did so, he chanted and weaved holy energy into the formation. Minutes passed before it was done and the stones shown a bright white for a moment before returning to their previous apparent dormancy.

Derek focused on the spell, it was complicated, pulling mana from the caster and the blood to form the initial pull of power, then connecting with the mana of the world around it to amplify into a greater effect around the formation. The old man turned to him, “Come boy, no time to gawk. We have five more of these to complete tonight.”

Derek held his hand to his chest and looked at him petulantly, “Will you cut me again when we get to the next one?”

“Yes, but only because I need your blood. Mine is too polluted to serve as sacrifice. You understand the importance of what we are doing right?”

Uncertainty struggled on Derek’s face before he nodded, “Yes, I do. But when we get to the next place, let me perform the cut.”

“Good kid. Now come with me boy, we need to hurry.”

Panklethu felt stifled. Things had gone well at first. He had been building his forces in these mountains since the first snows had marked the end of the autumn hunts, but he must have been careless, because the rapid growth of his force had awakened some ancient monster he had not known of in these mountains. He had been forced to disperse his forces throughout the forest, instructing them to hide in the various cave systems in the high valleys.

Hopefully this would draw that thing away from him long enough for him to prepare, but now his own movements were restricted. He couldn’t leave the cave with his portal for fear of discovery, only daring to send his weakest minions to hunt food for him and deliver messages to the others of their kind throughout the mountains. So he gathered strength in this place, but every few days he received more bad news, the minions were returning with reports that the various enclaves of his forces were being exterminated.

Something was hunting them and he didn’t know what. It was maddening, when he had slipped through this world he had expected to be able to establish his own domain rapidly and with ease. Instead he had found roving bands of mortals actively hunting his minions through the mountains and worse, he had been able to sense their experts overwatching the whole operation as if ready to strike him down the moment he stepped out to engage them.

He had been forced to cower all summer and autumn in this cave, waiting for the moment they relaxed their vigilance to seize an opportunity and in winter that opportunity seemed to arrive, as if to provide him his chance at last, but now, they were hunted and all he could do was cower in his cave. The indignity was stifling, enraging him in his impotence, but now things seemed to be getting worse.

He felt the walls of this realm hardening, making it harder for him to reach out to his source of power. He was lucky that the portal he had created was already finished or it would have been likely that he wouldn’t have been capable of completing it with this injunctive force working against his unholy energies. As the night progressed all the Demon could do was roar out his impotence from the dark hole he had hidden within.

Derek was slightly light headed as they completed the last one. He didn’t know how much blood he had lost, but he was sure it was probably too much. Maybe. He trusted the old man who clearly was more than just a hermit from the mountains. The man’s control over holy magic had been near absolute, and his knowledge of these sealing stones was something that even younger members of the clan wouldn’t know.

Derek knew that many powerful clans had ancient experts hidden away from the public eye. The nature of schema and essence made life spans more malleable. The truly powerful could live hundreds or thousands of years. Eventually the oldest would seclude themselves from the world. Perhaps this man was one such ancestor from his clan.

Returning to the mountain glade once more the old man once again pensively watched the town below them for a moment, before casting a more comprehensive healing spell on Derek. Derek felt the mana settling about him and that sensation of lightheadedness seemed to wash away.

Derek looked up at the man, “Thank you, Ancestor. I feel much better already.”

“Good, now since we still have time, I will teach you a technique to blend fire into holy magic to create what I call holy fury. Now sense the mana as I manipulate it.

“As you know, holy magic is formed by blending order and light magic in such a way that the order mana forms a lattice that the light magic binds to. Similarly, wrath magic is formed by blending order and fire magic in such a way that the order mana forms a cage that contains the fire until it bursts out. In both cases, order, similar to its purpose in nature, provides structure for the other element, allowing that element to become enhanced.”

As he described this he used his mastery over magic to demonstrate the creation of the constructs of the magic spells he described, slowing the process by which holy and wrath spells were cast. Derek watched intently as both fire and light mana were contained within a construct of order.

The old man continued, “This is the nature of order, to give shape to the myriad things. So if that is the case then blending any magic with order should work in this way and that is true in all cases but with chaos magic which is it’s opposite. That takes much more delicacy and control and is outside the scope of this lesson.

"But the important point is to watch the way in which the other mana interacts with the order mana. The light mana binds to the order mana while the fire mana is contained within it. So if the construct of order mana is produced first then the light and fire mana is input in a controlled amount, going to where they are needed, then the three types of mana can be used simultaneously, like so.”

He finished his explanation while demonstrating the exact method of applying the fire and light mana to the order construct, and when he was finished he had completed a combination of the holybolt and wrathbolt spells. Contained within the framework of the order mana was light and fire. Derek got the impression of a greater damage capacity at a much greater mana cost.

He looked at it for a moment, before slowly building his own construct and filling it with the fire and light mana in the same way. It formed and he sensed it before releasing it, it did have more potency than the other two spells, but it consumed far more mana than them. Confused, he looked at the older man, “I can see that this spell would be much harder to counter than the wrathbolt, and the damage would be greater, but is that worth the trade off in mana usage? I have a hard time seeing the value in the use of this except in emergencies where I need to concern myself with outputting more damage in a moment than over time.”

The old man smiled, “You have made good points but I want you to think about what this means for enhancements and malluses.”

As understanding appeared in Derek’s mind, the old man laughed, before casting a spell to put the boy back to sleep, “That’s enough for now, sleep and dream. Remember this meeting when the time is right.”