I dragged my feet as I returned to the encampment. No, it wasn't my feet that were weighing me down. It was my heart, heavy and cumbersome. Kelser accompanied me, carrying a large hide bag. Breaking bad news is never easy. Breaking terrible news is soul crushing.
I rehearsed what I would say. Went over it over and over in my head. Offer support. Begin with an apology. Keep a stoic face or start bawling my eyes out? Be a shoulder to cry on or grab one for myself? By the time I saw the crowd gathered at the edge of the encampment, their silhouettes highlighted by a large collective fire, my head was blank. I didn't know what to say. The silhouettes moved. Who was who. I could not tell.
Purple hair. Defined features. A face that was usually kept together, focused, reliable. Now vulnerable. Worried. A slightly protruding stomach. Kann Imm. Hunter of the Imm tribe. Wife of Kirs. Soon to be mother. Soon to be announced a widow.
As Kelser and I stepped into view, without any other figures accompanying us, hauling two large bags and with solemn faces, eyes trained to the ground, the crowd broke. I raised my head, saw Kann Imm, followed by Somm Nare—Kirs' mother. A sea of faces, each a variation of sorrow, disbelief, resignation or horror.
The true weight of a tragedy like this isn't just the deaths of individual people. In a close-knit society like this one, each death was a severed relationship. A hole ripped into the tapestry of the family, the tribe. With death, the threads connecting people to each other betray their frailty. They declare, in a deep booming voice, that the people you could touch and feel and be happy with were now intangible, unfeeling, unreal memories, doomed to fade with time.
I stopped. Kelser stopped next to me. I met the eyes of the people in the crowd. These people who had held complex emotions before they saw me. Worry and hope. Sadness and anger. Many, many things that they wanted to tell their loved ones when they returned. To lecture them. To embrace them. All of those feelings, slowly evaporated as they met my gaze and waited for my words. Words that would carry with them a sense of finality. Right now. When they could see that Kelser and I had returned alone, but before I explained why, they could deny the truth. Exist in a limbo. A timeless moment.
But I took a deep breath. Opened my mouth. And confirmed their fears. The hunting party had died fighting against a fearsome, powerful monster. I had retrieved their remains, and the elders from the affected tribes must take the remains and handle the funeral ceremonies.
I could have kept going. The long walk home had given me enough time to think about a few changes. Changes like making sure the hunters ran at the first sign of trouble. Changes like teaching more people my motion detection magic. Changes like scouting more land personally or forbidding the exploration of difficult to navigate and survey locations, like the dense forest we had just been to. But this wasn't the time. It wasn't the place.
This was the time and place for me to comfort those who had fallen to their knees, or into each others' arms, or onto a free shoulder. The time for me to press a hand to Kann Imm's shoulder. To bow my head to elder Somm. And to ignore the heavy feeling in my own heart, to let my figure become a source of strength for those who were, right now, at their weakest.
---
The rest of the winter passed uneventfully. Our food supplies were sufficient. No other hunting parties faced substantial danger. And the medical magic that I had been focusing most of my time on and spreading within the tribe had fast improved the health and lives of the tribesmen.
The map of the surrounding areas had been expanded all the way to Bek Tepe in the South, the sea in the West, and the roof of the world to the East. And as the snow retreated and the rivers and plains became more and more abundant, I was reminded of the only direction that I had not yet sufficiently explored. The North. Perhaps I would head there soon.
For now, I awaited the spring. With food becoming more abundant and days growing longer, my development of magic improved as well. However, I decided to take a slightly different approach this time. Rather than trying to invent a new type of spell, I began focusing on existing spells and on ways I could make them more powerful and versatile.
Fire magic was the first one that came to mind. I had, by this point, accumulated enough wisdom with fire magic that I could take some more liberties with its shape and nature. My spell to create fire from the air, which was different from the elemental system's fire magic spell, was the most promising spell in my arsenal. The elemental system relied on 'mana' which was the elemental essence that any object held. The 'chemical' system's fire relied on combustion, with 'magic' bridging the gap between what is possible and not possible.
Since this spell was 'magic' and not 'science,' it never actually burned anything in the air. The existence of flammable substances like methane in the air was merely a conceptual mechanism, one that made the spell possible by providing 'knowledge' which could be worked on with 'wisdom.' But if the presence of methane could enable a simple fire, what could a little more focus on the details of the fire achieve? For starters, the actual lack of concentrated methane in the air meant that the 'knowledge' behind the fire wasn't as powerful as it could be. And right now, I had no way of isolating the methane to run tests on to 'justify' the spell completely.
This meant I had to improvise. By burning various things with conventional fire, and then using that fire to burn other things, I was able to strengthen my 'knowledge' of fire and heat. Copper was especially useful here, since my fire magic could not melt it on its own. But by preparing some charcoal and pumping in a lot of air, I was able to prepare a much hotter flame and melt the copper a little bit. I still didn't have the exact method down perfectly, but I was making progress.
These experiments not only helped me improve the technology available to the people of the encampment, but it also helped me slowly improve my own 'knowledge' and prepare better spells. By the time spring well and truly began, I had come up with a way to make my fire spell burn hotter by improving my 'knowledge' of fire. Then, I improved my knowledge of air, in particular of oxygen, with a few experiments that show how a covered fire would die out.
Eventually, my fires were burning hotter because of a greater oxygen concentration. In regular air, the nitrogen ends up soaking up a lot of heat, which makes the fire less intense. But now my fire spell was almost uncomfortably intense!
And now that I was running physical experiments on air, I had come up with air and wind magic that did not rely on the old elemental system. A few experiments proving that hot air rises, and I had a decent build up of 'knowledge' regarding wind! When hot air rises and leaves an area of low air pressure behind it, prompting air from a high pressure area to come fill it in, it provides the 'knowledge' I needed for my improved air magic!
Similar experiments around pressure and temperature in water helped me improve my water spells too. I could know summon jets of pressurized water or even scalding hot or freezing cold water that was sure to annoy any monster! In fact, that sort of manipulation of temperature might even be deadly for cold-blooded monsters, which was something I made sure to note in case I ended up fighting a large snake or something.
I also finally got around to teaching the humans some of the spells I had not taught them before. Specifically, my motion detection magic and light reflection magic. By the time the wildflowers were blooming and the pollinating insects were buzzing and flitting about, the best magicians like Kelser knew all the spells I knew, except for the 'still life' motion magic spell, as well as the improvements to the fire, water, and air magic that I mentioned before.
'Still life' was unnecessary, because the motion magic system included a spell to stop an opponent's momentum, and because the 'still life' spell was pretty much impossible to teach. And the new improvements were so new I just hadn't gotten around to teaching them to the humans yet.
I saw Kann Imm in the distance, walking up to the river with a hand full of freshly plucked wildflowers. Her stomach had gotten much bigger over the past few months. I did not approach her as she stood by the river and dropped the flowers from her hands, letting them drift along the water.
I met up with Kelser and began talking to him about magic and spells and really, anything that wasn't the still painful memories of the people I had failed to rescue on that terrible, cold and dark winter night.