The first light of dawn crept over Bald Mountain, spilling across the valley in molten gold, gilding the thatched roofs of the newly rebuilt village below. Just seven days ago, this had been little more than a ruin - rotting timbers, collapsed walls, and the lingering stench of abandonment. Now, the air rang with the steady rhythm of hammers striking nails, the rasp of saws biting into fresh-cut timber, and the lively barter of merchants already setting up their stalls in the central square. The scent of baking bread and smoldering hearthfires mingled with the crisp mountain air, carrying the murmurs of a waking settlement.
The villagers had taken to calling it Dragon's Rest - a name born the night Odahviing descended upon a pack of necrophage wolves that had slunk too close to the eastern fields. His fire had turned the beasts to ash in seconds, leaving nothing but scorched earth and the awed silence of those who had witnessed it. Now, where fear had once lingered, something like wary respect had taken root. At the base of Odahviing's favored perch - a flat, sun-warmed boulder at the edge of the village - offerings piled high each morning: smoked venison wrapped in linen, loaves of dark rye bread still warm from the oven, even small carved figures of the dragon himself, rough but earnestly made.
I watched from the high balcony as a group of children, their cheeks still smudged with sleep, crept toward the rock. The eldest, a freckled boy missing a front tooth, placed a freshly whittled dragon statue atop the growing heap of tributes.
"Think he'll notice it?" whispered a smaller girl, clutching her brother's sleeve.
Before the boy could answer, the ground trembled as Odahviing landed with a thunderous impact, his crimson scales gleaming in the dawn light. The children froze as his massive head lowered to inspect their offering.
"Sos-jun-dei (little-mortal-being)," he rumbled in Dovahzul, the ancient dragon tongue rolling like distant thunder. "Your pitiful carving is... amusing." A wisp of smoke curled from his nostrils as he examined the crude figurine. "Though the wings are too small for proper flight."
The children stood paralyzed, caught between terror and fascination. After a long moment, Odahviing snorted, sending the wooden dragon tumbling into the pile of offerings.
"Continue to amuse me, and perhaps I shall not eat your livestock today," he declared before launching back into the sky with a powerful downbeat of his wings that sent dust swirling through the village square.
From the balcony, Serana appeared at my side, watching as the children finally exhaled and broke into nervous laughter. "He's certainly embraced his role as village terror," she remarked dryly.
"Terror would be if he actually burned their crops," I observed. "This is practically benevolence by dragon standards."
Below, the villagers emerged from their hiding places, the blacksmith muttering prayers as he wiped sweat from his brow. The children, now giddy with relief, were already planning their next carving - this time with "proper big wings."
Within the College walls, the initial panic of displacement had settled into a rhythm of renewed purpose. The twelve gleaming greenhouses I'd conjured along the southern slopes pulsed with latent magic, their crystalline walls bending sunlight into shimmering rainbows that danced across the ancient stone. Inside, rows of frost mirriam stood rigid as soldiers, their blue-veined leaves trembling faintly as if breathing, while clusters of dragon's tongue curled like sleeping serpents around their trellises. The air hummed with energy, thick with the scent of damp soil and ozone.
Enchanted golems moved with methodical precision between the plant beds, their stone fingers adjusting glass irrigation tubes or pruning wayward stems. At the far end of Greenhouse Three, Mage-Librarian Urag gro-Shub crouched beside a pulsating nirnroot specimen, his massive orcish hands surprisingly delicate as he turned a page in his weathered journal. "Hmph. Another tonal shift," he muttered to himself, scratching notes with a feathered quill. "High C yesterday, now drifting toward B-flat. Either it's adapting to the mountain's ley lines or we've accidentally created the world's most annoying plant."
A nearby apprentice—a lanky Breton named Erith—paused in her watering duties. "Maybe it's trying to communicate, Master Urag?"
Urag snorted, not looking up. "Aye, and maybe mudcrabs recite poetry when we're not listening. Document the changes, girl. Speculation comes later."
The true agricultural revolution, however, was unfolding in the valley below, where the College's influence had turned barren Crone-land into thriving farmland. Each morning at dawn, teams of apprentices descended the mountain path like a flock of colorful birds in their faction robes—blues and greens and burnt oranges—dispersing to the waiting fields.
Near the western barley plots, Apprentice Rendal adjusted his spectacles as he knelt in the dirt. "Soil cohesion is still unstable past six inches," he called to his partner, a red-haired Nord girl named Hjordis. "Give me another layer of the granular binding spell."
Hjordis rolled her shoulders and thrust her staff into the earth. "Þykktar hold!" she intoned. The soil shimmered momentarily, tiny particles locking together like chainmail. At the adjacent field, another pair worked in tandem—one murmuring pest-warding incantations while the other walked backward, trailing fingers that left glowing green trails of accelerated growth magic in the air.
Farmer Griggs watched it all with arms crossed, his missing ears giving his head an oddly smooth silhouette. When I approached, he merely jerked his chin toward a pumpkin that had swelled to the size of a small cart overnight. Its orange hide gleamed like polished metal in the sunlight.
"Still think it's gonna sprout teeth and bite someone," he grunted, poking it with a calloused finger.
Hjordis grinned as she wiped sweat from her brow. "Not unless you ask nicely, old man."
Griggs spat into the dirt. "Hmph. Magic used to mean getting your crops cursed or your children stolen. Now I've got wheat taller than my barn and tomatoes sweeter than my wife's berry pie." He squinted up at the College towers. "Still don't trust you mages. But I'll take this over the Crones' 'blessings' any day."
Nearby, a trio of children darted between the towering cornstalks, their laughter floating on the breeze as the plants subtly bent away to avoid tripping them—an unintended side effect of the growth magic that the farmers had quietly decided not to report.
The healing ward hummed with quiet efficiency as the morning light filtered through the high windows, casting long shadows across the rows of cots. Farmers from nearby villages formed a shuffling line, their work-worn hands clutching at arthritic joints or pressing cloths to chests wracked by winter coughs. Traveling merchants sat stiffly on the benches, their road-weary bodies bearing the marks of long journeys - blistered feet, sunburned necks, and eyes reddened by dust. The air smelled of crushed herbs and burning purification incense, undercut by the metallic tang of fresh blood from more serious wounds.
Apprentice Healer Tolan moved through the ward with the brisk efficiency of a man who had seen too much suffering to be slowed by it. His calloused hands, better suited to wielding a war axe than performing delicate healing, nonetheless glowed with precise magical energy as he examined each patient. "You there - the miller's boy," he called to a gangly youth clutching a swollen arm. "That break's been set wrong. We'll need to re-break it." Before the boy could protest, Tolan's magic flared and the audible snap of bone realigning echoed through the ward, followed by a quickly muffled cry.
Near the entrance, Mage-Scribe Linwe recorded symptoms in her ledger with quick, precise strokes of her quill. A merchant rubbed his bandaged ankle and leaned closer. "Surely for an extra coin or two, you could provide something to ease the pain of travel?" Linwe didn't look up from her writing. "The pain remedies are available at standard rates in the next chamber. What we cannot sell you is the foolish notion that the roads will become safer simply because you wish it to be so."
In the more secluded treatment area, Senior Healer Maren worked her intricate spells on a farmer whose leg had been crushed by a falling tree. The golden weave of her magic stitched flesh and bone back together with methodical precision, though the man would always walk with a limp. "The muscle remembers the damage," she explained to the watching apprentices, "no matter how well we heal it. Magic can mend, but not erase."
As evening approached, the day's final patients arrived - a group of shepherds attacked by wolves while tending their flocks in the eastern pastures. The most seriously injured, a young woman barely past her majority, bore deep gashes across her face and neck. Tolan examined the wounds with a critical eye. "The beast's teeth left fragments in the flesh," he muttered. "We'll need to purge the wounds before healing or they'll fester." His hands began to glow with a soft blue light as he carefully extracted each tiny shard of tooth and bone from the ragged tears in the girl's skin.
Outside the ward, the first stars appeared in the darkening sky. Inside, the scribes compiled their notes by the light of hovering mage-lanterns, recording not just treatments administered but the fragments of information gleaned from their patients' stories - which pastures the wolves now hunted, which roads had become dangerous after the spring floods, which villages had lost their healers to the southern wars. These details would find their way to Serana's desk before morning, where they would be weighed and measured for their potential value.
The last candle guttered out as the final poultice was applied and the last dose of pain draught administered. Somewhere in the quiet darkness, a patient's soft moans echoed off the stone walls, a reminder that even magical healing had its limits. The night shift healers moved silently between the cots, their vigilance unbroken until dawn's light would bring the next wave of suffering to their doors.
The morning mist clung to my robes as I walked the perimeter at dawn, fingers tracing invisible patterns in the cold air. Each step left a faintly glowing rune that sank into the earth like stones dropped in water. For Bald Mountain's Aegis, I worked with methodical precision - the dragonfire matrix required exact angles and perfect symmetry. Odahviing's scales, embedded at key points along the slope, pulsed with latent heat that made the surrounding rocks warm to the touch. When I tested the ward by tossing a dead branch uphill, it burst into blue-white flames before disintegrating into ash that smelled suspiciously of burnt troll fat.
The swamp resisted purification like a drunk resists sobriety. Each cleansing spell I cast made the black water bubble and hiss, releasing foul-smelling vapors that turned my stomach. By the third day, the water ran clearer, though the fish still watched me with disturbingly intelligent eyes. One particularly large pike surfaced as I worked, its mouth full of what looked suspiciously like human teeth. Our gazes locked for a long moment before it vanished into the depths with a mocking flick of its tail.
Olena's grove proved most temperamental of all. The ancient oaks remembered older magics, and their roots clung stubbornly to the remnants of whatever power had first nourished them. My path-shifting enchantments took hold reluctantly, requiring constant reinforcement. On the fifth evening, I caught sight of a pale figure moving between the trees - whether ghost, memory, or some fey creature, I couldn't say. It vanished when I spoke the binding words, but the hairs on my neck remained raised for hours afterward.
When the final ward snapped into place at midnight, the mountain itself seemed to shudder. A deep, resonant tone vibrated through the stone, setting my teeth on edge and sending every hound in Dragon's Rest into frenzied howls that echoed across the valley. The villagers would likely invent some new superstition about it by morning.
From my vantage at the highest spire, the view stretched endlessly - the orderly lights of the village below, the darker expanse of the warded lands beyond, and further still, the chaotic darkness of the untamed world. The contrast pleased me. Serana's sudden appearance at my elbow, smelling of nightshade and carrying a bottle of what was undoubtedly stolen brandy, didn't surprise me in the least.
"To new beginnings?" she offered, that familiar smirk playing across her pale features. The bottle's wax seal bore the distinctive mark of a noble house from the capital - one I suspected would be missing several casks from their cellar come morning.
I considered the web of order we'd spun across this small corner of chaos - the healed who would spread our influence, the fed who would defend their full bellies, the dragon who had somehow become a symbol of protection rather than destruction. The brandy burned going down, leaving behind the taste of honey and oak and something faintly metallic.
"To controlled variables," I corrected, watching as a lone figure moved along the warded path below, their lantern bobbing like a firefly in the dark. Some farmer returning late from the fields, trusting in our protections to see him safely home. The thought was almost amusing.
Serana's answering laugh was low and rich, the sound of a predator who'd just spotted particularly plump prey. "However you want to name it, my dear Archmage. The results will be the same."
And as the first drops of rain began to fall, pattering against the ancient stones of the College, I couldn't help but agree.
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comment mistakes so i can edit
ill update the other stories first.