Sen looked at him blankly. “Wardstones?”

  Murdin nodded back. “Most villages have wardstones scattered around the edges to dissuade monsters from encroaching. That’s why monster attacks are generally uncommon enough that only one or two make it through. Something like this,” he gestured to the piles of stone and dirt, “is almost unheard of. We need to figure out how this happened.”

  Murdin beckoned him to follow, and they set off into the woods. Murdin spoke as they walked, breaking Sen from his thoughts. They were filled with the battle, and with Murdin’s surprising skill in combat. Murdin’s topic surprised Sen.

  “When we begin your normal lessons, we will also begin your training as a warrior.”

  “A warrior?” Sen asked.

  Murdin looked through the forest as they moved. “We are called mages, but it is not entirely accurate. No, mages are just as much warriors as anyone else can be. Moreso, in some respects. The tools we have allow us to do things that nobody else can. And,” he said, “there will always, eventually, come a day when monsters show up, and you are the only one around to deal with them. You will need to be prepared. Does this disagree with you?”

  Sen shook his head, but Murdin wasn’t looking toward him. Unbidden, a creeping darkness rose up from the depths of his mind. “Fine with me,” he said, shutting it out. “Somehow, I suspect I’ll be dealing with my fair share of monsters.”

  “A depressing thought, but a wise one,” Murdin commented. The two of them fell silent, Sen struggling with his own inner thoughts, while Murdin continued searching the forest ahead of them. Sen followed without much attention to their surroundings until Murdin stopped.

  He knelt without speaking, shuffling the dirt and leaves clear with a hand. To Sen’s surprise, Murdin pulled a long cylindrical stone from the ground. He wiped it with a hand, frowning.

  “This is a wardstone?” Sen asked.

  Murdin only nodded, continuing his examination. He grunted a few times as he swept over the object, before finally speaking. “Troublesome,” was all he said.

  Sen raised an eyebrow, but spoke up after a moment. “What does that mean?”

  “This wardstone is far more worn than it should be. These are usually able to last for a couple years, but I built this one only a few months ago. It shouldn’t be this worn. See here,” he pointed, turning a section of the cylinder toward Sen. “Many of the glyphs are already degrading.” He was right, Sen noticed. Most of the lines were still pristine, but a number of them had small pits, hard to notice without specifically looking for them.

  “What does this mean?” Sen asked him. Murdin only shrugged.

  “I can’t say, not for sure. It does explain how a full pack of tanbinos came so close to the city and that farm, though. We’ll need to replace this one, and I need to go around and check all of the other wardstones to see if any of the others are failing early.” Murdin sighed, then, a long and weary breath clawing itself from him like a specter of despair. “The work never ends,” he muttered quietly.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” Sen asked. If this put more work on Murdin, then his lessons might be delayed even longer. He didn’t want to show it, but his patience was wearing thin. He wanted - perhaps even needed - something else to occupy him. He was already struggling to sleep at night - a focus for that extra time would be nice to have.

  Murdin looked thoughtful as he continued looking over the cylinder. Eventually, he replaced it in the ground, then stood. “Yes, actually. Your lessons were always going to be hands-on, rather than purely theoretical. We’ll just start with that part a bit sooner. Your extra help will be much more valuable than delaying any longer.” His face screwed up in distaste. “Although, we’re going to have a couple people around complaining that their deliveries weren’t on time.” He sighed.

  It took them another hour to inspect the next several closest wardstones, and each of these had increased signs of wear as well. They still had a good portion of the afternoon, but Murdin decided to go back to town. He would check all the other wardstones later, he said.

  “What exactly do wardstones do?” Sen asked the mage as they walked back toward town.

  Murdin humphed. “Well, nobody really knows. Whatever they do, monsters don’t like to come near them, and only pass by a wardstone if they’re particularly hungry or if something drives them through it, like a predator.”

  Interesting. For once, Sen realized he might have an edge of knowledge on the mage. Monsters were formed from ambient mana spontaneously creating life within mundane objects or augmenting already existing life. Or something like that. It was complicated. Nonetheless, monsters loved areas of high mana concentration, and tended to avoid areas with low concentration. If wardstones served to suck up the mana, or otherwise disperse it, creating a low-density area, then monsters would naturally prefer to avoid the area around a wardstone.

  That made sense to him, as well as the lack of knowledge surrounding how it worked. While by no means an expert, or even much of a novice, yet, Sen had never heard of any concept that could relate to mana within Fiddian magic. That prompted him to wonder, though: How were wardstones designed, if the fundamental concepts they were based on weren’t common knowledge?

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  “If we don’t know how they work, why do we use them? How were they discovered?”

  Murdin shrugged. “Despite what the churches will tell you about the Crossing, a lot of knowledge was lost. The years preceding the Crossing were a time of war and conflict that led to the death of many master mages, including much of their unshared knowledge. The schematic and use for a wardstone survived, but not the knowledge of how they work.”

  “You were there before the crossing?”

  “Me? No,” Murdin chuckled. “I might be old, but I’m not that old. My parents were in the first generation to cross over. My mother told me stories of all the knowledge that was lost.” His voice turned wistful as he continued. “Flying islands, wagons that moved without horses, power to manipulate the weather… For all that the Crossing saved us all,” Murdin spoke softly, “we feel the consequences of it every day.

  Neither of them spoke much after that. They continued back toward the city, and headed directly to Murdin’s home upon arriving. They stepped into Murdin’s workshop, and the mage moved to one end that held a large box with a number of stones inside. He pulled several out, natural stones with roughly the same width as the wardstones he’d seen. Murdin sat them on the table side to side.

  “You’ll start with the basics. Preparation.” He turned, grabbing a chisel from the table, alongside a small hammer, and presented them to Sen. Taking them, Sen watched as Murdin picked up his own set. Taking one of the stones, he secured it in a vice set into the workbench, then pressed the chisel up against it and lightly tapped.

  Over the course of a minute, Murdin beat the stone down to a smooth face. It wasn’t perfectly smooth, but compared to when Murdin started, the rock was impressively flat. Murdin removed it from the vise and flipped it, continuing to plane the stone on each side until it sat in a rough cubic shape.

  Taking the rock from its fastening, Murdin presented the object to Sen. “This is what you’ll be doing for the next few days. We’re probably going to need to replace all of the wardstones.” Sen nodded. “Not all of the work you’ll do as a mage will be glorious,” Murdin said, looking Sen in the eye. “Some of it, a lot of it, will be boring. But you have to learn how to prepare your tools. Magic is not a tool you can use at the turn of a thought. It is a profession which creates tools to solve problems.”

  “I understand,” Sen said.

  Searching his eyes, Murdin shrugged. “I don’t think you do, not really,” he said. “But you asked for this. If you decide it’s too much, feel free to leave. I won’t let you come back, though.”

  “I have no intention of giving up,” Sen said, voice resolute.

  “Good,” Murdin said. It took him the better part of another hour to show Sen how to properly plane the faces from the stones. After he was satisfied with Sen’s technique, Murdin filled a bag with several warmth stones and a couple other things that he didn’t recognize. He also pulled out a number of glyphs drawn onto a paper, separated down the center with a small gap.

  “Swap between cutting the stones and practicing these glyph patterns on a paper. That should help with the tedium.” So saying, Murdin left to deal with other errands, leaving Sen with the command to make as many as he could. Sen didn’t ask how many he needed to make - it didn’t matter yet, and it seemed obvious, to him at least, that the work was only partially creating wardstone pieces. The other half was meant to sharpen his skills with engraving, and was an important step on his new magical journey.

  Sen fell into the work easily. His focus wrapped around the feel of the hammer and chisel in his hands. He let the sound of each metallic tink wash over him, his eyes glued to every little detail on the rock face. A part of him wished he remembered the earth manipulation spell he had occasionally used in his previous life, but he never used it enough to set aside the time to properly commit it to memory.

  It would have made the work trivial, and take only a small fraction of the time per piece. If he had that spell again, he thought, hands tapping hammer-to-chisel-to-stone, all of this work would be a waste. He’d be able to form the stone easier than clay in his hands, forming a perfectly smooth surface with barely any effort.

  Sen hadn’t asked too many questions about the next steps, assuming they would come with eventually and out of respect for Murdin’s time. The new problems with the wardstones seemed to be wearing on the man already, and he’d already been pressed for time. Sen wondered if he actually had the freedom to accept Sen as an apprentice, or if he was hedging on Sen becoming a big help soon enough that falling behind in other areas would be manageable.

  Sen found himself enjoying the mundane tedium of each and every little hit against the chisel. It allowed his mind to focus on the task at hand, whenever he wanted to distract himself from the shadows that lurked in the depths of his mind, like the calm at the center of a storm.

  Eventually, Sen looked up to realize that night had fallen outside, and yet he could still see, even without lighting any candles. Several small lights sat embedded in the walls, surprisingly bright. Sen looked closely at one, finger covering the center of it to get a look, only to find a small glass marble, with small scratches resembling glyphs along the surface. Impressive, he thought to himself, before realizing he had more work to do.

  Sen had finished only a small basket’s worth of stones when Murdin returned. He seemed surprised to see Sen still working. “I expected you to go home for the day,” he said as he stepped into the workshop and set down his bag.

  “I figured it would be better to get as much done as possible today,” Sen shrugged.

  Murdin looked down at the planed stones sitting in the basket near Sen. He nodded at them, happy with what he saw. “Good work,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to pick it up so quickly. Perhaps tomorrow we’ll move onto the next steps. Show me your glyph work.”

  Sen reached for a stack of papers on the desk. Murdin rifled through them quickly after Sen handed them over, and surprise etched itself onto Murdin’s haggard face. He looked at Sen, face impressed. “You’ve picked this up remarkably fast,” he said.

  Sen had found that adapting his abilities to inscribe scrolls with runes made creating glyphs easy work, trivial in comparison to building the feel for chiseling the stones into somewhat flat pieces. Even his first attempts with the glyphs had been passable, while it took several attempts to approach getting a decent face on any of the stones. Sen shrugged in response to Murdin.

  “This is good, though,” the mage finally said, eyes lingering on Sen for a moment. “Tomorrow, we can begin the next steps. Perhaps replacing all the wardstones won’t be quite as bad as I expected it to be. Anyway, for now, you can go home. Get some rest. Be here tomorrow, bright and early. We will begin your actual training.”