The Primarch Keeps Breaking Things

>It's pretty empty now. Everyone has run off. Kinda eerie, actually.

The crowd thins out the closer you get, and the air grows from quiet to still. Something's not right. Even for an evacuating town of... what'd she say... a couple thousand bodies, the place shouldn't feel this lifeless. Your skin crawls. Even the skyline seems off.

You're starting to wish you'd just told Elana about the baton.

Ten minutes' jog through vacant streets brings you to town square. Your suspicions are confirmed when you arrive to overgrown grass where paved roads once lay. There's nothing waiting for you here.

Not even town square.

- - - - -

Cut to: Somewhere. Anywhere. Anywhere but Eryl.

You're Lucian again, suffering an impossible headache. The generator, now who-knows-how-far from Eryl's innocents, juts from the ground as a lifeless magitech heap.

If you were feeling sassier and hurting less, you might congratulate Girard on minding his stomach. Very few people survive a mutual displacement spell of this magnitude without vomiting some, and your once-beloved only looks a bit green.

With time passing and Aedan at Maripaz', you couldn't well stand around waiting for the generator to explode. A decade's passed since you last performed a displacement with such a large AOE, but you panicked and poured your all into swapping three hundred feet of cobblestones with a stretch of the Xihuca Plains.

...At least, that's where you hope you are. Years of accompanying Mesdames Primarch and their offspring to this vacation spot should have burnt its coordinates into your mind.

"Lucian," Girard says, leaning against the generator like a discarded toy soldier. You find some satisfaction in his nausea. "Lucian."

You're tempted to ignore him. The side effects of the displacement should've rendered him harmless for now.

>_