by N. P. Martin
"Destroy him."
As the Wild Card Magic burst from me in a blinding blaze of light, it felt like a freight train was passing through my body, forcing my back to arch so much I felt sure my spine would snap. But the pressure only lasted a few seconds, for that’s all it took for the energy in me to escape the bonds of its prison, and when it did, it shot right up to the ceiling before transforming suddenly into the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. Before my eyes, the Wild Card Magic began to form itself into something that I can only describe as an Energy Dragon, complete with wings and a tail, and a horned head with a huge mouth full of jagged teeth. And if that wasn’t enough, the Energy Dragon’s body began to take on a myriad of different colors—cobalt, magenta, violet, viridian, copper and a host of others—all swirling together and glowing with an intensity that simply took the breath away. Even Drakkar, when I glanced at him, was looking up and whispering, "Beautiful…" to himself.
Until, that is, the Energy Dragon screeched and then attacked. It came swooping down and went right through Drakkar’s back before bursting out of his chest, only to turn around quickly and pierce him again with its gorgeous light. Drakkar stood with his arms out wide as if receive the Energy Dragon’s holy light, only there was nothing holy about it, for it was just a force of destruction as it kept swirling around him, continuing to pierce his body with its head and tail, Drakkar sounding like he was experiencing both great pain and great pleasure at the same time, his moans and cries of pain borderline orgasmic.
Soon, the Energy Dragon swooped in for the final time, and when it entered Drakkar’s chest, it disappeared inside of him, all of the beautiful colors and glorious display of light now gone.
When this happened, Drakkar and I stared at each other, as we both waited on what was going to happen next, even though I had no idea if anything was going to happen. I even began to panic that he had somehow managed to defeat the Energy Dragon, swallowing it up inside him and consuming all of its power.
But that’s not what happened. The Energy Dragon’s disappearance was a mere temporary state. Drakkar knew this before I did as something like a peaceful smile spread across his face. Unexpectedly, he lifted his right hand and pointed his palm at me, and a split second later I was hit with a vision of some sort, and I found myself not in the swimming pool anymore, but standing in what appeared to be a large field surrounded by mountains on one side and forest on the other. It was a beautiful sunny day and the lush green field was peppered with color thanks to the abundance of wildflowers growing amongst the grass. Small birds and animals also danced around the field, while deer grazed by the edge of the forest. It was a beautiful scene, until I suddenly got the impression that something was badly wrong. As I looked down, the gloriously green grass began to turn black and the wildflowers withered and died as if they had just been sprayed with extremely fast-acting poison. As I watched on in horror, the birds dropped dead from the ever darkening sky and the deer by the forest fell over and died. With every blink, the scene before me got worse, until every living thing in it was dead, already beginning to rot into the blackened soil. Then, as the sky grew black and thunder began to crash, I became aware of another presence in the now barren field. A dark figure that stood not far away, featureless but for two burning red eyes that glared at me, and I knew right then I was looking at death incarnate, a being whose only purpose was to poison the Earth and bring death and destruction in its wake; a being that was wholly unstoppable…
When the vision ended, my mind snapped back to the swimming pool, and I stood disoriented for a second as I refocused on Drakkar. He went to say something, but never got the chance to, for the Energy Dragon that had disappeared inside of him appeared now to be bursting out of him again. Beams of bright white light suddenly began to burst from all over his body as if someone were shooting holes in him, drawing cries from him that were a strange mixture of agony and ecstasy. Then, with one final sustained scream, Drakkar simply disappeared in an explosion of light that burned brightly for just a few seconds, before that same energy redirected itself toward me, taking me by surprise by once again disappearing inside my body.
Before me, there was no sign of Drakkar at all, and I knew his entire being had just been obliterated and wiped from existence. "I did it," I whispered in near disbelief.
Then I collapsed as the world went dark around me.
Chapter 22
"Corvin? Corvin? Can you hear me? Wake up, Corvin…"
I opened my eyes to see the face of my mother hovering above me, her beatific smile beaming down at me like that of an angel’s. "Ma…" I said, reaching up to touch her face.
"No, Corvin, it’s me, it’s Amelia."
I frowned as my mother’s face seemed to shift until I was looking at Amelia’s face instead, which was just as comforting to me. "Hey beautiful," I whispered as I smiled up at her.
Amelia smiled back as tears welled up in her eyes. Then she leaned down and kissed me softly on the lips, a kiss that seemed to simultaneously go on forever, and yet nowhere near long enough.
"All right you two, Jesus…"
I recognized that voice. It was Dalia. When Amelia stopped kissing me, she helped me sit up, and I saw Dalia and Davey standing looking down at me. Monty also stood next to them, looking like an extra from a slasher movie, his face and body still covered in blood and slash wounds. I also saw we were still inside the swimming pool. "Drakkar…" I said in sudden panic.
"He’s gone," Davey said as he leaned on Dalia for support, his right leg hovering slightly off the ground. "You did it, son. You ended him."
Dalia shook her head at me. "That was some next level shit, by the way."
"You saw?" I asked her.
"We saw enough," Amelia said. "How did you conjure that dragon or whatever it was?"
I shook my head slightly as I thought back to the Energy Dragon that had exploded from me, and its magnificent colors and fierce power. "I don’t know," I said truthfully. "I just seemed to connect with the energy inside of me all of a sudden, and then…I released it. The Energy Dragon did the rest."
"Well, no matter how you did it, your Energy Dragon as you call it saved us all," Davey said.
I looked at him and smiled. "You weren’t lying when you said the results of transmutation were hard to predict. I don’t think any of us could’ve predicted that."
"Is it still in you?" he asked.
I paused for a second as I felt the Energy Dragon deep within me somewhere, but it was no longer raging and hungry, but sated. "It’s in me, but it feels different now, more subdued. Peaceful even."
Davey nodded as if he understood. "It seems like it’s yours to control now."
"We’ll see," I said, still unsure about this new power I seemed to have gained.
Dalia frowned down at me. "I noticed Drakkar extend his arm toward you just before he got vaporized. What was that about?"
I shook my head as I thought of the terrible vision he had given me. "Nothing," I said. "Just the last grasp of a dying man."
Dalia nodded, seeming satisfied with this answer. "Right then," she said. "Let’s get the hell out of this place. I need to sort out this old codger’s leg."
"I’ll sort you out girly if you don’t quit with the old codger business," Davey said as he hobbled on one foot.
As Dalia chuckled to herself, Amelia helped me to my feet and I put my arm around her. "Let’s go home," I said.
Chapter 23
Dalia drove Davey’s Range Rover as Davey obviously couldn’t drive it himself with a broken leg. We dropped Amelia of first at her uncle’s old house, the orcs opening the security gates for us as we drove into the driveway. Before she went into the house, I stood outside with her in the flood-lit driveway for a minute. "Are you sure you don’t want company tonight?" I asked her. "I’m not sure you should be alone after everything that’s happened."
She smiled and shook her head almost sadly. "I need to be alone for a while," she said. "Don’t worry about me, I
’ll be fine."
I stepped up and put my hands on her slim waist. "I can’t help worrying. I love you."
That plaintive smile again just before she kissed me briefly on the lips. "I’ll call you."
I watched her go as she turned and went through the front door, closing it behind her without looking back at me. I continued to stand for a full minute, just staring at the door until Dalia sounded the horn, at which point I turned from the house and got back inside the Range Rover.
We dropped Monty off next, who had been staying uncharacteristically quiet this whole time, as if he was struggling to come to terms with what happened to him. "I’m sorry this happened to you, bro," I said as I helped him out of the Range Rover.
He shook his head and did his best to smile, which was no doubt difficult, not to say painful, because of the myriad of tiny cuts on his face. "I gotta say, it wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences having that mad bastard cut me while talking nonsense the whole time." He looked down at his mutilated torso and sighed. "This will set my sex life back for a while, no doubt."
I laughed slightly. "Even now, you’re thinking with your cock."
"At least he didn’t cut it off, that’s something at least."
"You’ll heal. Juts give it time."
"I know," he said. "And by the way, you owe me a night out for this."
"I think I owe you more than that."
"Just a night out will do."
I nodded. "Wherever it is, I’ll be there."
He raised his eyebrows. "Wherever?"
"I’m going to regret saying that, aren’t I?"
We both laughed as we clasped hands. "I’ll be seeing you, bro," he said before walking away, then added over his shoulder. "Get your glad rags ready."
"I will," I called after him.
Soon after, Dalia pulled up outside the bookshop on the Quay. "Are you going to be all right?" she asked as I opened the front passenger door.
I nodded. "Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. And thank you," I added, looking at both them in turn.
Dalia shook her head. "We didn’t do much. I didn’t anyway."
I put a hand on her leg and squeezed. "Believe me, you did plenty. It was enough you were there."
She smiled. "I’m always here for you, you know that."
I smiled back. "I do."
I watched them drive away for a minute, until the tail lights disappeared around the corner. Then I stood for another moment, taking in deep lungfuls of the crisp night air, my mind inevitably dwelling on the vision Drakkar had given me. Was it real? I wondered. Or was it just Drakkar’s last attempt to fuck with my head?
Whatever the case, I hardly had the mental energy to think about it. All I wanted to do was fall into bed and sleep for longer than a few hours for a change. As I searched my pockets for the keys to the door, I considered calling Benedict to see if he had sorted things with the authorities, but as I didn’t appear to be surrounded by armed police, I took it that he had. I would phone him tomorrow, just to be sure.
When I found my keys, I inserted the front door key into the lock and turned it, but something made me pause before going in. A feeling that someone was standing behind me. I spun around quickly with my hand out, ready to use my magic if need be. Sure enough, there was a man standing there on the cobbles. A tall man dressed in a light gray suit, seeming to be in his sixties or thereabouts. His long white hair was tied back in a ponytail and his lengthy beard was combed into a point of sorts. He looked incongruous in the suit, as if he very rarely wore one.
He also looked familiar, and it took me a moment to realize where I had seen him before. "It’s you," I said. "You were in Wicklow, in the woods that night."
The man stepped forward as he nodded. "My name is Sylven Mirahorn," he said in a thick Irish accent and deep voice, a voice that was full of effortless authority. "I’m from the Order of the Serpent. It’s time we finally talked…Chosen One."
Book 6
Epigraph
"Beneath the broad tide of human history there flow the stealthy undercurrents of the secret societies, which frequently determine in the depths the changes that take place upon the surface."
Arthur Edward Waite, The Real History of the Rosicrucians
"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die…"
H. P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City
"Circus comes to town, you’re playing the lead clown…"
Metallica, Leper Messiah.
Chapter 1
"Welcome to my inner sanctum."
Sylven Mirahorn stood facing me inside a huge circular room that stood at a dizzying height, stretching all the way up to a massive glass dome that was reminiscent of an observatory. To say I was overwhelmed would be an understatement. Not a minute ago, I was standing outside my bookshop, staring in shock at Mirahorn as he explained that we needed to talk apparently. His presence and his words—the phrase "Chosen One" especially—had stunned me into silence. This was the man I had been so desperate to talk to after all; the man who presumably held answers to the many questions I had concerning the Order and my role in it. But before I could even bring myself to speak, Mirahorn came forward and took hold of my arm, teleporting us to the place we were now in. His inner sanctum by all accounts.
The place put my own little bookshop—my own inner sanctum, if you will—to shame. The circular walls were lined with shelves that were stacked with hundreds of thousands of books, row upon row of them, which stretched all the way up to the glass ceiling. As I stared up, I noticed a metal walkway under the glass dome, clearly designed so one could stand and look out through the glass, perhaps at the stars above, or further beyond if one had the gift of sight, which I was sure Mirahorn did. As he stood wordlessly looking at me, I could feel his power radiating off him, could even see it dancing in the air around him. I had never felt such powerful magic, not even on Drakkar.
And speaking of Drakkar, I still hadn’t recovered from my confrontation with him, which only seemed like it happened mere minutes ago due to the fact that my mind and body still hadn’t come down from the adrenaline-fueled rush of the whole thing. My mind was still spinning from having managed to somehow conjure that Energy Dragon from within me. Pain was also beginning to make itself felt in various places, namely my chest where Drakkar had hit me on my already sore and disfigured flesh. My head too was pounding.
"You have any whiskey here?" I asked Mirahorn, not really caring how such a question might make me seem in his eyes. Fuck it. I needed a drink, and he hadn’t yet earned my respect. Powerful he may be, and also intrinsic to my apparent destiny, but the fact is, he and his Order had purposely kept me in the dark for so long now that I was frankly a little pissed that he should show up like fucking Gandalf declaring that we needed to talk, when I’d been looking to do exactly that for fucking ages now! And to throw the whole Chosen One bullshit in my face as well, as if he expected me to just play whatever role he and his cronies had set out for me? It was too much. I had every right to tell him to fuck off and leave me alone. The only thing stopping me from opening a portal and getting the hell out of there was the vivid memory of the vision Drakkar had left me with. The vision of death incarnate. I knew in my bones that the world was going to end, that it had to be prevented from happening, and that Mirahorn would be instrumental in making sure that it was prevented, if such a feat was even possible. Give the terrible power of the dark figure in my vision, I didn’t hold out much hope.
"You’re angry," Mirahorn stated matter of factly.
I snorted slightly as I shook my head, realizing at the same time that my torn clothes were covered in blood. God knows what horrific sight I would see if I looked in the mirror right now. "Amongst other things," I said. "If you knew what I’ve been doing for the last forty-eight hours, you would understand."
Mirahorn stroked his long white beard. "Actually, I do understand, because I know exactly what you’ve been up to your wh
ole life, not just the last forty-eight hours." He turned away then, once again leaving me to stand in stunned silence for a moment as he crossed the polished wood floor, walking up three steps to a large annex, coming to stand in front of a stone fireplace that stood higher than even him. "Come, join me." He waved his hand across the fireplace and flames immediately ignited the pile of logs in the grate. Then he sat down in one of two red velvet armchairs with deer skin throws hanging over the top. There was a round table between the two chairs, and when Mirahorn waved his hand again, a bottle and two glasses materialized out of thin air.
If nothing else, he has skills, I thought as I watched him pour what I assumed was whiskey into the two glasses as the flames grew higher in the fireplace. More to get a drink than anything else, I eventually went and sat opposite him in the other armchair, which as soon as I sat in it, felt blissfully comfortable. That, in combination with the roaring fire, made me want to go to sleep.
"Please," Mirahorn said as he gestured to the whiskey glass on the table, having taken one for himself. "Help yourself."
I reached out and took the half full glass, downing the contents in one before refilling the glass again. The alcohol made me feel even more relaxed as I sunk into the armchair and stared wearily at my host. "You have a lot of explaining to do," I told him as I crossed my legs and rested my glass on the arm of the chair. "Like what exactly do you mean when you say you’ve been watching me my whole life?"
"I didn’t say I was watching you," he said, getting up to retrieve a long pipe from atop the mantel of the fireplace. When he sat back down, the tobacco or whatever it was in the bowl of the pipe seemed to instantly ignite without him having to do anything, immediately filling the air with its pungent aroma. "It’s more that I’ve been keeping tabs on you, to use the modern vernacular."
