The Mage's Burden

Greg could feel the heat in his feet through the leather boots he had on. The shifting sands of the desert didn't make for the easiest surface to march on. Many of the guards around him were already seasoned veterans of the desert. They were already used to the heat, the hard march, and all the other challenges this hostile environment had to offer. Mixed in with them, however, were a decent number of recruits who seemed to be having a hell of a time even as they moved through the burning sands.

Greg could easily pick out which of the guards around them were still green simply by how deep in the sand their feet sank when they moved. With the veterans, their steps only left shallow indentations in the ground as they moved. The greenhorns, however, sunk to their ankles, sometimes even deeper, with every step that they took. Greg could only wince at the thought of how much sand some of them had probably gotten into their footwear. With the constant march of the caravan they were guarding, there was no time to stop and clear it out. Worse yet, it was only around midday currently and they would only stop at sunset.

On his part, Greg couldn't help but thank his lucky stars that he was an earth-element mage. Using earth-step, Greg had zero problems moving on the sand without having to fight it with every step. Greg, however, was careful to keep from being too obvious about the fact that he was a mage. It wasn't that there weren't other mages in this caravan, there were. They were positioned strategically all along the caravan. Both earth and air mages. They were hired just in case they encountered the most dangerous phenomenon in this desert. Sandstorms.

Greg had yet to encounter one, but he'd heard say that the sandstorms in this desert could be particularly brutal. The winds themselves were strong enough that one had to walk leaning forward at an almost forty-five-degree angle to keep from being knocked over. However, even worse than the powerful wind, was the coarse sand of the desert. With their texture and the speeds at which the particles move, it's basically like being caught in a large sandblaster. Five minutes in and any skin exposed to the sand will be red and raw. Half an hour in and you will lose a layer of any exposed skin. And given that the shortest sand storms in this desert usually last around half a day, you seriously didn't want to be caught up in one.

If they encountered a sandstorm, the air mages would create a spinning bubble around the caravan to direct the winds around it. It sounded easy in principle, but in practice, it was a monumental undertaking that required powerful mages. Not only were you fighting super-strong winds, but tons of sand were being flung at you every passing second. To maintain a bubble in the face of that would have been impossible if it was only the air mages. Even if they could hold out against the onslaught, the amount of sand that would gather around the dome would be enough to bury the whole caravan the moment the dome was dispelled. This, however, was where the earth mages came into play.

Like an endless river, the role of earth mages was to keep the sand flowing around the bubbles instead of heaping up around it. That way, the powerful winds would carry it onwards and away from the caravan. In so doing, they'd eliminate any risk of a flash burial after the air bubbles were taken down. Again, same as with the air mages, the earth mages had to be formidable enough to handle the tons of sand that the raging winds carried with them. And when one considered that this could last a day if you were lucky and up to a week if you were particularly unlucky, it was easy to understand why they commanded such respect from everyone in the caravan.

Greg suspected that both groups of mages were peak second-tier if not third-tier mages. Greg's training sessions with his teacher were interrupted by the fact that they had to run away from his teacher's former alliance. Otherwise, Greg would have had the same amount of mana as them. As things currently stood, however, he only had enough mana to match a mage in the middle of the second tier. More than someone who'd just ascended into the second tier but less than those at the peak of this tier. Given that he was still very much a first-tier mage, with less than a year having elapsed since he ascended, this amount of mana was more than probably any first-tier mage in the realm could lay claim to.

Still, it was far less than what they had been hoping for. Their target had been to get him to the equivalent of a third-tier mage in terms of the amount of mana he could store. Having been a highly-ranked member of her former mage alliance, his teacher was familiar with their protocols for recruitment. Whoever it was that was sent after them, they would keep chasing for a whole cycle. That's why, even now, six months after they escaped from his hometown, they were still on the run. In all this time, they had remained on the move, making it impossible to continue with his mana infusions under the healer. A fact that had his teacher worried that Greg would lose his ability to increase his mana capacity the longer the infusions were stopped.

The fact that he wasn't as powerful as the other mages in this caravan, however, wasn't the reason for Greg keeping his more arcane abilities hidden. Instead, it was a mix of two reasons. The first and more trivial reason was because of his lack of training in the earth element. Greg didn't have any formal spells in the earth element. He could no more do the kind of formal casting that the other mages did than he could replicate his own teacher's healing spells. If he were to attempt to replicate what they were doing, especially during a sandstorm, more than likely it would end in disaster. That's why he...

Jump!

Greg's body was already moving before his mind could fully process what his earth connection was trying to communicate. In truth, the message hadn't been that as simple as being asked to jump. From his connection to the sands under him, he had gotten the feeling of something lurking within it poised to strike. But in the same way the body reduces the complex phenomenon of a viper into 'jump away', Greg's mind had gotten the complex message from the earth under him and given it the best simple response, jump away.

Barely a second after his feet had left the ground as he jumped backward, the thing his earth connection had been warning him against appeared. A hand shot out of the sand, blade tightly gripped and swiping through where Greg's Achilles tendon would have been if he hadn't jumped at the last second. "Ambush!" Greg immediately shouted out to warn the other guards around him. His warning, however, was drowned out in a deluge of pained screams. All around him, guards that hadn't been as quick to react as he'd been were felled. The few veterans that had been unlucky enough to be caught by the ambush didn't allow themselves to fall to the ground as they took a knee, one hand reaching for their weapons while the other reached for a healing potion, both attached to their belts. Most of the still green recruits, however, either fell forward or onto their backs their hands reflexively reaching for their injured legs. In both cases, the same daggers that had cut their tendons quickly found their way to their throats, staining the sand red in a sharp spray of their lifeblood.