The sorcerer hadn’t perished, but it had been a near thing. Any battle involving such powerful acolytes was always watched by the gods involved so the Sorcerer knew his apparent death had to be as realistic as possible.
That meant he really had been succumbing to the attack and faced being annihilated. He’d had to cast his own magic at just the right moment, swapping his body with a recently killed corpse at the precise instance so it would be obliterated immediately.
He arrived, battered and burnt, in a cave forty miles from the battleground. In the days before the battle he’d been secretly filling the cave with enough supplies to last several weeks. Now he laid low, not going close enough to the cave entrance to tell whether it was night or day and not using any of his powers. He
