[Cerius]

[ooc - Permission given by Ragman to join this thread]

The events of the brightening had flown by for Cerius. Finding his way to Secyclion in his attempt to isolate himself from the Church fo the Faith, the elf had found himself lost in a city with not quite enough gold to purchase a house and no real direction. He was where his past would not catch up to him, but he needed something to occupy himself. The hermit would not survive in the wilds of Eunesia, as close to a foreign environment as he could ever find himself. Hearing the call for warriors to find some missing students, the elf's ears had perked up. On the addition of a five hundred crown reward, the decision had been made.

Now, he found himself sitting far enough from the general chatter to be able to hear the sound of his own thoughts. He did not know much about the request, but any children that required a minimum of eight experienced warriors to shepherd themselves home would have done more than to get themselves lost in a wood. At five hundred crowns each, the fellow Angelo was looking at a minimum of four thousand crowns whether the children were recovered or not - a princely sum, by almost anyone's measure. The fact that they were sailing to a place named Crypt Island was enough to place even the normally overconfident elf on his guard, and the whispering of spirits abroad all across the Empire was already a worry.

The elf closed his eyes.

The last time he had tried to cast Sanctuary in a location filled with undead, his mind had almost split with the tide of hatred that had washed over him. Gathering the essence of Life within himself, Cerius prepared the all-too familiar weave. He had always likened casting Sanctuary to the casting of a net. The more experienced the caster, the wider the net could be cast without sacrificing precision and technique. However, should the net be cast too wide, the caster always ran the risk of being overloaded - either with a plethora of information in an environment rich with unexpected living beings, or pain if his environment were filled with the weaves of Death required to animate the living dead.

With this in mind, Cerius cast his net slowly and deliberately, starting with his immediate visible surrounds and then widening his net out in roughly ten or fifteen metre increments. His aim was simple - to make sure there was nothing sentient within a radius of a few miles that he did not know about.