The Sage of Evening sighed as he hung up, looking at the phone in his hand. The Synod had been blindsided by the arrival of Lady Fae and her new spells, particularly those of the Light Element. As the most powerful and revered users of Light in the world, they should have been the most informed about such matters, and instead had been caught wholly by surprise at the existence of five additional Novice-class spells.

The fact the discoverer had not come to them first had irked them. That she was selling off the spells and making tremendous amounts of money, none of which the Court or the Association was sharing in, was hurting their pride and making them feel like they were losing their prestige and authority. Their fiat attempts to exert their authority and gain control of those spells had fallen flat or been ignored entirely.

And now this Lady Fae was with that couple...

Martin Vesper had many contacts of his own, of course, and knew the fate of many, many mages who had crossed that pair. Some died in explosive messes, some just vanished, all never to be heard from again. Too many people had underestimated the two for him to make the same mistake, which was why he’d sent Monty Calvin in his stead to deliver the young woman to him. Once she was inside the Association, it didn’t matter what anyone else wanted; they would get what they desired from her, or she would simply not leave until they had it.

They had many ways to deal with those who might resist their authority, after all. The key was getting her here in the first place, and away from those two...

Martin Vesper stiffened. He blinked once, seeing something out of the corner of his eye that had not been there before, and then an iron hand was under his chin, holding him upright, as his world began to go dark.

He still could not believe someone had crept up on him so stealthily, and none of his Awareness had helped him at all...

---

Assassination DC: 10 + half Level + Dex bonus, +Assassination Mastery/5, +Ruby Enchantment on Tremble. 10+8+15+5+11, a polite 49 Fortitude Save. Observe for twenty seconds, launch a successful sneak attack, and done.

Sama took Tremble’s point out of the man’s ear, punched right through his brain and so disrupting any final attempt to use magic completely. It was a shame to have to take out a Sage, one of the great defenders of humanity, but when those Sages turned against the people they were supposed to be protecting, well, someone else would just have to step up.

Happily, Coralost was cultivating a whole lot of people to replace this worm.

She picked up the phone he had been speaking on, flipped it open before it went dark, and as it came back up, she noted ‘His Lordship’, and pressed it once to bring up the contact information and the phone number.

Sariel, was it? She would remember the name and the voice she had heard on the other end. If she encountered it, she would probably off him immediately, certain that if he was going after someone as bright and upstanding as Fae, he had probably massacred many, many others without a second thought.

Such people deserved the same to happen to them. It was a pity there were no Void Brothers on this world, and such things tended to be left to her and Briggs.

As expected of a Sage, Vespers actually had a long-term contact number for the Archangel who was his superior. Sama memorized it before disassembling the phone and taking the SIM chip within it. It might come in useful later.

With her other hand, she effortlessly hauled the corpse of the very surprised Sage towards his bathroom. Tremble shifted to Vivic, and began the process of burning one of the great Casters of Human civilization away to white dust and washing him down the drain. His magical Armor and Shield materialized as she was hauling him along, dropping on the carpet as his soul was rapidly sent on its way, the extremely robust Curse Element he wielded meaning he was vivisizing much faster than a normal Human.

Oh, was that a Dark Contract going up there? Goodbye to this twat’s soul!

She dumped him into his own tub, his head falling off and a shrunken crystalline skull left gleaming behind. Misty white flames rapidly consumed the rest of him as it fed on his Dark Magic, and thence the rest of his other Elements, sending it all down the drain.

No blood to clean up whatsoever, but she’d have to make his clothes and jewelry vanish.

Sama dropped the crystalline skull in her backpack with his attire. She already had a Human Baneskull if needed, as did her Fuzzy, but there were others who might want one. Like, oh, Contracted Beasts. This one was nice, coming from a Sage, as it could potentially be made into a Dreadskull, so she might just have to upgrade.

His Gear would be hauled off to be Burned, regardless of its value, no need to have others identify it. It could be turned into something equally valuable, regardless.

She departed out the balcony window. All Sages had the capability to fly in one form or another, so they always had an outside access. Standing on the air, Sama slid away through the night sky, unsensed by the powerful Wards of the building, unseen by any cameras. She was less than a shadow crossing the night as she slipped through the edge of the building’s defenses and out into open air, only picking up speed as she skated down the air and into the distance.

Martin Vesper’s disappearance was going to cause quite the tizzy, she was sure. Whether Sariel took it for the warning it was she had no doubt she’d find out soon enough. The fact his soul would never reach the Dark Realm was only going to cause more confusion, as didn’t that mean he was still alive, and he had abandoned his post?

Sama smirked at the uncertainty the man’s fate was going to cause, and banked around some buildings, heading for the rented compound where the team members left here overnight and longer were staying. No one was going to see her enter, as no one had seen her leave, so obviously she had always been there, a perfect alibi, and nobody was going to say anything different.

-Ho, Mick.- The KIA team’s leader mentally straightened up when he /heard her voice. -The Synod has decided that applying pressure to the people around Fae is a right and proper tactic. You’ve warned all your friends and family, and got the security from them that Fae instructed you to, right?-

-Yes, ma’am!- he /answered quickly. That move by the Italians in New York had made sure of that, once he learned of it. -Who made the call?-

-Archangel Sariel himself seems to have been Boston Mage Association Councilman Martin Vesper’s superior.-

-An Archangel.- He didn’t want to believe it, and shook his head despite himself. -Now I know why I never went to church.-

Sama grinned despite herself. -Remember we have your back, and in particular, Fae does. You will probably not be surprised by how quickly she can react, but be ready for something, and inform your boys of the same.-

-You’re acting like this has happened before,- he /said, rolling his eyes.

-We usually mailed the remains of the agents back to their controllers in an Igloo, or we mailed the controllers to their agents in an Igloo. The latter usually got a better reaction.-

He laughed into the darkness of his room. -I imagine it would. I’m almost anxious to see what the sorry lot are going to do now...-

------

Time passes...

Back home it was called Yellowstone. Here, it was called the American Firelands.

It and Kamchatka shared the distinction of having the most active volcanoes on a continental mass. Sure, there were some Pacific Islands dominated by their volcanoes, but remarkably few of them actually had powerful Beasts as residents. Smaller volcanoes actually seemed to repel most Beasts from them, and the ones on islands, well, the Fire Beasts had to come from somewhere else, and the Aquatics didn’t want to go near the places. The combination meant that most islands were remarkably light on most Beasts, and not surprisingly, the only common Fire Beasts in such places were the Avians.

Having ‘safe’ zones of their own to breed in actually meant that the Fire Avians had grown quite powerful, and were the most widespread of any breed of Fire creature anywhere. Even all but the most powerful Fire Dragons didn’t bother to contest territory with the powerful Fire Avian Rulers, and especially the Phoenixes, who had Imperial Bloodlines.

A Fire Dragon ruled Kamchatka, and a Fire Phoenix ruled the Firelands of America.

The Fire Mana naturally dominated everything here. The incredible lava pool below the surface had been brought up long ago, and there was an inland great lake of fire here, kept molten year-round, while over a dozen volcanoes constantly overflowed with firefalls. Crimson streams and rivers of lava threaded across the land as water might elsewhere, and fire-resistant vegetation grew thick, lush, and dangerous here, sometimes releasing heat and flames on their own and turning the entire area into a burning landscape of terrible, fiery beauty found nowhere else on Earth.

Only the most daring of Fire Mages would venture here, daring the wrath of the powerful Fire Beasts living here for a veritable cornucopia of resources of the Fire Element. It was a good way for most of them to die, fishing after wealth fiercely protected by the native Beasts.

I wasn’t so concerned about the Fire resources, although things like Fire Seeds were indeed tempting... and they were all over the place here.

The good ones were around the volcanoes, and the volcanoes were the homes of Rulers, every single one, with one of them housing Fire Phoenix Emperor. He might have been less powerful than the Fire Dragon Emperor, but Fire Phoenix Emperor got along marvelously with Thunderbird, while the Dragon Emperor did not get along well with the Winter Wolf of Siberia at all.

Plenty of powerful Human mages poked their fingers in here at one time or another, and a good chunk of them died. The creatures here weren’t expansionistic, but they were incredibly territorial of their little slice of burning heaven.

Happily, they actually didn’t care much about non-Fire resources, and that was really why I was here.

Lavaflows unearthed and sent into motion a lot of minerals, including precious minerals. The nature of Mana tended to congregate precious minerals, often in unique formations and crystalline patterns, or in veins of unusual purity.

Such areas might be fairly intense with the Fire Mana, but unless it was Fire-Energized stuff, it was of no interest to the local Beasts whatsoever.

So, taking it away also didn’t bother them at all, as long as I could do it discreetly.

I was at the edge of the Firelands right now, slowly reaching out with Commune with Nature. The local Spirit of the Land was heavily influenced by its Fire aspect, and naturally the more powerful Beasts were sensitive to the slightest changes in the Mana lines here. The flow of Elemental energies was extremely thick and complex, to nobody’s surprise, and I didn’t want to agitate the Land or those aware of it. I was carefully expanding my Awareness and link with the Land here, remaining neutral and skirting the zones of Awareness of the Creatures here.

I was mostly going down, which was actually pretty safe. Even in a place like this, most of the creatures stayed near the surface, and their Awareness of the ground beneath them wasn’t the same as the power flowing through the air and along the surface.

“Any luck?” the Mick asked for all of the boys.

Driver Sam had driven me in relays from Austin all the way to the Rio Grande Corridor that passed through the Rockies to the West Coast, then up the Coast to Columbia, the furthest connected point in the continental United States. There were settlements and bases in Alaska, but the land between Columbia and Juneau was wild and open, with no connecting roads, everything moving in and out doing so by sea or air, or overland at great risk on game trails.

We were planning to put the Firehouse in Oregon, in the Klamath Falls area there. The landscape had a notable Fire presence bleeding off from Yellowstone, and the whole Klamath basin was basically a buried volcanic node that occasionally erupted with a lava flow here or there, creating occasional Seeds and the like, while also being mostly habitable. The more powerful volcanoes to the north and south were much more active, and not places to build the Firehouse, but this section of the country, as well as Arizona, still generated a lot of Fire mages.

I also didn’t want to build along the coasts, as those areas were subject to occasional massive earthquakes that could cause a lot of damage when the resulting tsunami swamped inlands. We had proceeded overland from Klamath Falls, with the Mick and Hopper leading the way towards the Firelands.

So, here we were, just outside the increasing Fire Manazone that clearly marked the edge of the place, me pushing my Awareness into it, looking for gold and platinum!