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Even Ridgemark, which had the great fortune of being built upon a tremendous cliff, had not been completely spared. Many small townships along its outskirts had been flooded. But the city proper was fine, at least, and had become a place of refuge for evacuees from all over the region. The Ridgemark Private Military Police had done their duty well--a fact which had only become clearer as Raul toured the rest of the countryside with his brethren, searching for survivors.

The fighting, of course, had come to a rather abrupt end. It had already been winding down, but when those gargantuan waves started hitting, nothing else seemed to matter, anymore.

And they’d just kept coming, too. It had been unbelievable to witness in real time. Even just one wave had been bad enough, but when the second arrived, and the third, and the fourth, and more--Raul didn’t think he’d ever felt so scared before.

For a while there, it had genuinely seemed like the world might be ending. Drowned in an impossibly huge flood. Something out of a mythic tale.

When the waves finally began to diminish, Raul was left numb. A mindless drone, just doing as he was told by his elders. What else was there to do? Rational thinking couldn’t help him wrap his head around what had happened. It was all too much. If not for Arumoro’s guidance, he might well have just curled up in a ball and been rendered useless to everyone around him.

And he wasn’t the only one, either. He could see it in the non-servants, especially. The muted shock on their faces. The inability to process what had happened.

The news certainly didn’t help, either. The revelation that this wasn’t all just some freak storm, isolated to Vantalay--that instead, it had actually happened across the entirety of the Luthic and shaken the whole world...?

How was a normal person supposed to cope with that?

If anything, that might have been what finally pulled him out of his own stupefaction. The sight of them all, feeling so obviously powerless, doing all they could to not be paralyzed by fear.

He needed to get himself together. There was plenty of work that needed doing, and going through it like some kind of puppet being controlled by Arumoro wasn’t making things easier for anyone--other than himself, maybe.

But that was selfish. When he knew that he could be doing more, that was selfish.