Page 3466

Yeah. Hector was reasonably confident that it would rear its head up again, eventually.

Which wasn’t... necessarily a terrible thing, either. It was part of him, too. That anxiety. He’d come to understand that much. And on some level, it probably had its uses. Keeping him... alert, at the very least.

Mmhmm. And as nice as this current feeling of contentment or “centeredness” was, he didn’t think that he wanted to feel this way all the time. It seemed wrong, somehow. Unfitting.

And now he was confusing himself. How had he managed to make himself uncomfortable with how comfortable he was? This had to be some kind of new level of stupidity on his part. Maybe that was the real accomplishment of all his meditating. Improving on how much of a dumbass he could be, when he really put it his mind to it.

Well, at least he was starting to feel more like himself again.

The next few days remained rather quiet around Warrenhold. Which was a blessed change of pace.

Everyone was waiting on word from Vantalay--word which arrived via the reapers every morning, afternoon, and night. Apparently, the battle for Ridgemark was going quite well, even if it was taking a while. No new casualties. The city limits had nearly been breached when the Rainlords joined the fight, but now they had been thoroughly secured, and the combined forces of Abolish and the VMP were being continually pushed farther and farther back.

There was even talk of taking the fight beyond Ridgemark and going all the way over to Czacoa in order to try and catch the invading Vantalayan forces over there with their pants down. And maybe bring that entire warfront to a swift conclusion.

Mercifully, though, that was still just talk. After communicating to them about the attack on Warrenhold, the Rainlords seemed equally eager to get back here.

He wondered what would happen when they did. Even just from the reports that the reapers were providing, he could tell that the Rainlords’ overall energy had shifted dramatically.

Which was only natural, of course, now that they’d recovered all their lost kin. They’d scored an incredible victory over there.

A historic one, really. The kind that would probably be spoken of for generations among them. Like the victory at Magarabad, when the Redwater Twins struck down the Sawtooth General, one of the Mohssian Empire’s most reviled and bloodthirsty leaders. Or the victory at Denowa, when one Cassius Merlo, the Water Dragon of his time, led a group of Rainlords in the defense of a small island in the Luthic Ocean that had come under attack for its strategic importance by the forces of a young Dozer and a monster of a man called Suresh.