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He’d just returned to Warrenhold when news of the storm in the Luthic Ocean first reached him. Hurricane Deva, they’d dubbed it. Nothing terribly abnormal, by all accounts. The Luthic brewed up hurricanes dozens of times every year. Most of them never even made landfall.

But then word started arriving about the tsunamis. Deva was kicking up waves as tall as skyscrapers and sending them all over the world, threatening millions of lives along coastlines everywhere as evacuation orders rang out.

And Hector set out to help, not really understanding the scale of what he was getting himself into until he reached the coastline of Mara, south of Atreya, and began seeing them.

The waves.

They filled the horizon. Gargantuan walls that never seemed to end. And there wasn’t just one set to worry about. Oh no. After the first line, there was a second. And those were just as huge, if not even moreso.

Then a third line. And a fourth. A fifth. Sixth. Seventh.

It was endless. He’d already quit counting. There was no point. He wasn’t going to go home after some set number, anyway. He was going to do all he could.

And he’d been at it for days.

Days of flying across the full breadth of the Gulf of Emerson. Days of materializing the most massive blocks of iron that he could possibly create. Days of witnessing absolute devastation along the southern Eloan coastlines.

Mercifully, Atreya itself was almost entirely spared from the carnage. The geography of the Gulf was such that Atreya sat in one of its most naturally protected corners, about as far from the ocean as a country could get without being landlocked. The ports in Delroy, Cryson, and Jost were affected by some abnormally high and low tides, but that was it.

He was also still worried about an incursion into Callum or Lorent from Bloodeye, but according to the Rainlord scouting team in the region, Bloodeye was making another major push into the Sairi wetlands. Which wasn’t exactly comforting news, either, of course, but it was something. At least he could be marginally more confident that Warrenhold would remain safe while he was away.

He wasn’t sure he would ever be fully confident about that, though. Maybe this was just going to be a perpetual state of being from now on. Always worried about Warrenhold when he wasn’t there, no matter how secure things seemed.