If he's concentrating on it, he can hold onto it about twenty seconds; he can cast it again when he loses it if he remembers to draw the energy back, though.

He expects he'll be practicing both a lot today, then.

Is the horse in a friendly enough mood to let him mount her? Come to think of it, can he find a saddle and tack anywhere? A week of riding bareback is going to get very miserable. 

Is he going to look in the house with the dead bodies?

If the saddle is nowhere to be found in the barn then he will, reluctantly, look there too. He should probably be trying to scrounge for other supplies though; sleeping would have been a lot better with a blanket, he has no food or water-carrying receptacle, he could use a waterproof bag for his book. Also he'll look around for money, since it's not like they're going to be spending it.

The house has a saddle, and blankets, and food in various states of rot, and canteens for water, and a little bit of money in the mattress which is underneath the bodies of three people squashed by the tree and then a toddler who seems to have died of dehydration or exposure while clinging to them.

He has to turn away and blink a lot before he can bring himself to go closer. If he had somehow gotten here sooner - but he couldn't have, he was - dead, or in the process of dying maybe - that's the entire problem here... 

He holds his breath and forces himself to sort of poke the bodies out of the way so he can get at the money hidden in the usual spot people hide their money inside mattresses. 

He takes a blanket, and for the road ties it at the corners to make a sort of bag, which he puts two of the water canteens in, and if he can find any food that's not too questionable to eat then he'll take that, otherwise leave it and go saddle the horse. 

There's a little food that's not too questionable to eat. The horse is tolerant of being saddled.

He ties his food and water and spellbook firmly inside the blanket-sack, and rides out, casting the magic-sensing spell every so often and trying to concentrate enough to reclaim the energy from it. 

There's not a lot of magic to be seen along this road, just a lot of devastation. Some people are wading through their crops to see if anything can be salvaged. By nightfall he reaches another small town; some of its lower-lying buildings are flooded but the temples are intact, and there are a few other buildings standing clear of the high-water mark. People are working on repairs.

He heads in to see if any of the temples have space to host a traveler, or any news. (He wishes he could offer them useful magic in exchange for room and board, that would be very reasonable, but neither of his working spells are that helpful, probably a town this size has someone who can do magic better than he can right now.) 

This town has a cleric of Aroden who now isn't, and she looks like she hasn't been sleeping and hasn't been eating. They haven't heard from Westcrown but, well, it seems like probably something went wrong. (Her affect is almost entirely flat, but at 'something went wrong' she giggles, a little hysterically.) They have space to host a traveller. They don't have food to spare, really. He should maybe consider getting on a ship to Absalom or something once he reaches Ostenso, the storms presumably didn't reach that far. 

That's all right, he'll pick at his slightly-questionable salvaged food. It hadn't occurred to him - or, no, it had, but he hadn't fully gone through the implications - that of course Aroden's clerics would have lost their divine magic. 

He tells her, dully, that he was just starting to dabble in arcane magic before all of this happened, and he's not very good but he can detect magic for her, if that's helpful for some reason, and make things light up, though that would really only be helpful for reading after nightfall or something and she doesn't look to be in the mood for that. 

Is anything magic that wouldn't be expected to be?

He's not sure what's expected to be magic, around here, but he can cast it and then point out everything that's showing up to him? 

Sure.

He does that, though he'll need to cast it again a few times to even cover the full interior of the temple. (Getting lots of practice seems good. He still feels mostly blind even with that, but it's better.) 

The temple is consecrated. There's a scroll in a box in the other room.

He points these facts out to her. :Should I look elsewhere in the village too?: 

"If you'd like," she says dully. "Interesting, I guess, that it's still consecrated."

"Yes." All his memories of how consecration would work are from a god's eye level; he tries to dig at how it would work from the human view. And has a peek around the town with his magic-detecting spell, because why not, he's not exhausted yet and it might be interesting and will let him practice. 

Consecration works by bringing in positive energy; if they made it permanent, then they just made this temple a well in the world for positive energy, for as long as it lasts. In this case it survived the death of the caster's god.

One person in the town has a magic weapon. If he were good with this spell he'd be able to tell what kind of weapon just by looking at the magic but as it is it's just a tangle. The school is transmutation but that's not very informative.

He goes back to the temple and asks the cleric if said magic weapon is one of the expected magical objects. 

"Oh." She frowns, distantly. "I think Sila has claimed he has one he inherited? I've never actually seen it, though."

Shrug. It isn't really his business and he's going to leave tomorrow. 

He unties his bag so he can use it as a blanket, returning the spellbook to under his coat; he feels kind of protective of it. 

He sleeps a lot better that night. 

In the morning there's a traveller passing through town in the other direction who claims he was in Absalom and paid someone to teleport him to Ostenso and is now riding north to try to find his family. He claims there's been three weeks of awful storms in Absalom, too, and all ships that were at sea are presumed lost there.