Ever since the Floating City crashed in Halruaa, the route to the outside world that the archmages had dreamed of had become completely secure thanks to the Undead.
They had not merely marked out an extraordinarily broad, straight public corridor. They had also built an incredibly sturdy road suffused with the aura of the Magic Weave.
Perhaps it could not keep out undead or destructive forces like the Faerûnian Road, or even make mindless undead and evil creatures instinctively detour around it, but at least this road could withstand windblown sand and keep undead creatures at bay.
More importantly, no method could sever this road's connection to the Magic Weave.
Everyone understood just how important that was to Halruaa's mages.
Hadn't those two kingdoms of thieves trapped them into traveling only by airship precisely because, with covert support from certain powers, they could force the mages into situations where physical combat was their only option?
Yet after betraying the current Goddess of Magic for all those assorted, muddled reasons, they now had a road that could adequately guarantee their safety.
By rights, the people of Halruaa should have been happy.
But they could not feel happy at all.
After all, this road had only appeared because the current Goddess of Magic had come to set things right.
And most of Halruaa's mages were precisely the ones she would have to "get rid of."
The ridiculous part was that the only people in Halruaa to suffer no losses whatsoever were those evil mages who had betrayed the Goddess of Magic from the very beginning and embraced Shar!
Those people had seized plenty of benefits during Halruaa's upheaval, then brazenly moved to Chult as though it were the most natural thing in the world!
They had not even lost a pet cat.