[Ouroboros' End]
A few days later, Darganth stood in the part of the building they had repurposed as a conference room, his eyes trailing over the property and building plans of the estate. While part of their new base of operations was already restored, only very little of it was in an even remotely good state.
In fact, the conference room had been the second part of the building they worked on, only coming after the renovation of their respective rooms. Or rather, the renovation of their shared room in the case of Darganth and his wives. Having ripped down a section of the wall to connect four adjacent rooms, they had each made various contributions to the final design of the room.
For Darganth, that meant finding a way to display some of the better-looking but less useful artifacts he has amassed since his rebirth, as well as some other trophies. The majority of them were connected to one of the larger events he had been involved in during that time, with one of the more prominent exemplars among the artifacts having once belonged to the mage he had fought in Aleta during his rescue of Melidra.
While he hadn't taken it during the encounter itself, in the years between his coronation and the arrival of the Starweaver, he had recognized the man's personal crest on the object during one of his visits to the region. Though not all were collected after the fact, with an example of the opposite being the scale belonging to the basilisk that had decimated Allaire's tribe all those years ago.
The others had meanwhile contributed their own touch to the aesthetic of the room. On Serania's request, two bookshelves dominated one of the corners that were formed by the half of the old walls that were left standing. Jennia had meanwhile used her input to add a sparring ring to another corner of the room, something that apparently had Allaire's support, considering that the latter was making good use of it too. On that matter, the wolf-like beastwoman had herself introduced a small workshop into the layout of their room, using it to both craft and enchant new arrows, as well as pass time by doing the same with miscellaneous items, following through on any idea for one that she finds amusing or otherwise interesting.
When they arrived shortly after Darganth and those around him finished with this, the rest of their group had done the same with their respective room. With Vorthos and Enilla watching over their Starweaver after having moved it to a smaller but closer port, the vast majority of their companions had thus already moved in. Even with the reserved rooms for Vorthos and Enilla, however, there was still much room to spare on the estate.
As such, the solar dragons around Vagha were free to claim one of the multiple sections that stretched off from the main building, while the other dragons and the draconians spread out over another one of these sections and one of the separate buildings found on the property. And with two of the six of these building wings as well as one of the two standalone buildings visible from the entrance thus at least partially occupied, at least the central part of the estate started to return to a presentable state.
At the same time, Darganth and those close to him had restored the conference room. And with the privacy enchantments and formations in and around its walls having been improved by the combination of his considerable knowledge and the raw power Neandra could supply, nothing short of an elemental god could spy on him.
Looking back and forth between multiple different pieces of paper before him, Darganth compared the defensive positions on the estate with their information on monster locations in the wilderness. Covering the not insignificant width of the gardens that flanked the main building on both sides, the former protected the estate in the direction of the wilderness. Stretching all the way toward the outlying cluster of buildings at the far edges of the property, its mix of towers and magic barriers seamlessly interlinked with the reinforced eastern wall of the main building and formed a continuous wall of defenses.
While monster attacks from the wilderness weren't too common, once they start expanding into it, they might cause a stampede that could necessitate these defenses. Especially so because they weren't simply planning to extract the resources from there. Rather, their main interest was in the mana spring.
As he was planning their expedition toward it and making preparation for the monster stampede this was likely to kick off, Darganth was interrupted when Allaire stepped into the room.
"And, making progress?" She asked as she walked over to him.
"Almost done even." Darganth answered her, lifting his gaze from the documents before him and turning toward her as she sat down at his side.
Allaire was surprised to hear that. Leaning over as he put an arm around her shoulders, she briefly scanned over the papers with interest.
"How far do you think the others can get?" She asked, her gaze wandering down the priority list of what the dragons and draconians that had accompanied them should try to restore while their inner circle will be away.
"It'll depend on how lucky we are with the state of the spell formations. But the spell towers are the most important thing anyway. Especially for a small group such as ours, they'll increase the number of spells we could throw at an attacker by magnitudes. The rest would be nice to have, but it's not essential." Darganth said.
With nothing to add to this assessment, Allaire could only hum in acknowledgment and trust in Darganth's judgment. And instead of focusing further on their defenses, she turned her attention toward the map with monster sightings and known lairs.
On it, two distinct colors split the wilderness into sections where Monstrous species like Orcs and other only as monster classified creatures should be expected, and those where abominations ran rampant. But even when counted together, these two colored sections didn't even amount to a third of the wilderness, with the vast majority being either uncolored terrain that signified minimal presence of either, or with stripes of both colors marked areas that signified contested territory.
A look at the more detailed inscriptions that further separated the wilderness into the different territories also revealed that among the latter, different groups of feral beasts made up the largest portion. While technically an incorrect grouping, as feral beasts don't possess the distorted mana that is the defining characteristic of true abominations, the fact that a majority of both species emerge from failed beast evolutions does make this a common and at least somewhat understandable mistake.
Though no matter how understandable that mistake is, it makes Darganth's work harder. Whereas true abominations are flat out impossible to negotiate with, between his and Yldra's dragon's authority, they can exploit a feral beast's instincts to cower it into submission and avoid a fight.
Similarly, the often missing clarification of which monstrous species inhabits which area also increases the difficulty of finding the easiest path to their destination, not to mention the at times conflicting information that had contributed to the map. While not as bad as the differences between true abominations and feral beasts, it certainly also made a difference whether they had to deal with Goblins or Ogres on a given route.
As such, instead of having drawn one clearly marked path they'd take on the map, Darganth had sketched multiple different options across the wilderness. At various spots, small notes gave more details on a given path, with those notes being concentrated where paths split into multiple possible routes.
"Looking at this, I take it we'll start in a day or two already?" Allaire asked, noticing only a single unfinished route at first glance. And even that route was already close to being finished, with the red line ending at the border of an area marked with 'Minotaurs?' that was separated from their destination by just one more marked-off section.
"Maybe. Though I've been having trouble with that route for half an hour now, even redrew it twice." Darganth said, making Allaire take a second look and notice the faint differences in wear on the paper from liberal usage of time magic, while Darganth explained in more detail.
"At the start we can keep to the Goblin territory that stretches along here." He said, pointing toward one of the largest colored areas, "The problem is that unless we take a major detour, we'll have to go through either the Orc tribe here and the possibly Minotaur controlled area a bit beyond it, or we risk running into whatever monster hunts here." Pointing toward a section marked with multiple danger signs at the last part, he sighs.
Nodding along with his explanation, Allaire offered the only solution she could come up with without studying the maps closer herself, "Then do you really want to have Neandra stay here instead of accompanying us? I know it's more likely that we've made powerful enemies in the city than it is that we're going to encounter something that needs her help in the wilderness, but even at the farthest, she'd be back in half an hour at most. Or we could accept that the restoration will be delayed and have everyone come with us. It will be a month before the Starweaver can dock here at the earliest anyway, so it's not like anything valuable is here yet."
"I've been considering it." Darganth said, falling silent again after those words.
This answer didn't surprise Allaire. Accepting it with a nod, she leaned back and silently watched him work for a few dozen minutes. Slightly perking up when he re-checked and compared two of the strewn around documents, she leaned forward attentively as his pen scraped across the map before
him.
Finishing his action by adding a short note to the point where the previous path split into the three newly drawn lines, he let the pen in his fingers vanish with a quick surge of mana as he leaned back.
"I take it that means good news?" Allaire asked.
"Not for the monsters in the wilderness. I didn't pay much attention to them because most previous expeditions created a few of them, and they're rarely left standing for long once that group leaves, but this outpost here might actually still be usable for us." Darganth said, briefly pointing toward the report from he border wall that stretched along the edges of the wilderness that weren't blocked by the district they were in or other parts of the city.
Apart from their newly acquired property, the gates in these were some of the few paths into the wilderness where one didn't have to cross the hilly or otherwise difficult terrain that acted as a natural border. As such, their records easily accounted for a quarter, if not even a third of the documents on the desk before Darganth.
"Then I'll get the others." Allaire said.
"Thank you. And I'm going to use that time to sort all of this a bit." Darganth said in response, already gathering the papers into stacks when Allaire left to call the rest of their group to prepare them for the expedition they'd start the next day, or at most the day after that.