The Coin of Kenvard

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “So what do we do?” Ivy asked.

  “We try to figure out what the missing piece is. Once that piece is brought into proximity, the formula is complete, the spell is complete. These will become physical. We can alter them, separate them from reality. Or simply remove the sword and they recede into abstractness again. Whatever we do, we must do it very carefully.”

  Ayna flitted to Deacon’s side. “You are quite literally playing god, Deacon. This is unacceptable.”

  “Unacceptable? This is why we study magic!” he said. “This is everything.”

  Ivy stepped forward, eyes set upon a curling emblem orbiting the sword. It was crescent-moon shaped, with dozens of filaments stretching from one side to the other. From the right angle, it looked like a harp made entirely of filigree.

  “This one… this one is music, isn’t it?” she said.

  “It is.”

  She shakily held up a hand. Ever so lightly, she brushed it. The filaments trembled, producing a tone that was beauty distilled. Ivy shut her eyes and drank in the sound.

  “Amazing.”

  As joyous as the sound was, a gleam in Deacon’s eye suggested there was something else that Ivy’s action had produced.

  “They can be manipulated…” he said. “They aren’t fully physical, but they can be manipulated. We are closer than I thought.”

  “Steady, Deacon,” Myranda said.

  He turned to the others. “Listen. Do you know why there were five Chosen?”

  “Because that is what was determined necessary to defend this world,” Ether said.

  “Precisely. No more, no less. But we do not have five Chosen here. I’ve cobbled together as many elements of the Chosen as I could, but only four of you have been brought into proximity of the spell in flesh and blood.” He turned to one of the sigils. “We are missing the fifth.”

  Myranda and Ivy both saw what he was planning. They motioned to stop him. Deacon raised a mystic shield. As powerful as Deacon was, his shield was no match for Myranda. But it didn’t have to last more than a few moments. He drove his healthy hand into the space sigil. His chaotic hand thrust into the time sigil. He curled his fingers and focused his mind. The field around him shattered. It would have been enough if the earth had been broken, hurling the others to the ground. What truly happened was far worse. The very fabric of existence around them fragmented like a broken mirror. Shifting, irregular-shaped windows of reality orbited the sword. A glimpse of a green field slipped past Myn. Her claws sank into the soft grass, and when the sliding window continued on, she was nowhere to be seen. She had been left behind in whatever warm glade Deacon had conjured up for her. One by one, he willed them away. Ayna was banished to a sandy slice of desert. Ether was dropped onto a rocky mountainside. Myranda was dropped into the throne room of New Kenvard. A sun-dappled stretch of forest attempted to claim Ivy.

  The nimble malthrope, the last to be targeted, sprang back and away from the roving bit of displaced landscape. Another drifted and sliced toward her. Flares of blue colored her panicked attempts to avoid them. Though none were able to capture her, each pushed her just a bit farther away from Deacon, leaving him to his task.

  He twisted his hand in the time sigil, turning it in sequence with the space one. A new fragment of reality split the increasingly patchwork field. This one revealed a howling, frozen place. Stones seemingly exempt from the forces of gravity danced in an impossibly complex pattern of orbits and clashes. Gradually, one stone in particular came into view. It was small with a flat top. A black silhouette of an inhuman form was burned like a charred shadow into the gray rock. On either side, a footprint looked to have been carved into the stone itself. And driven into the heart of the silhouette was a sword of intricate, unmistakable design.

  A subtle adjustment to the time sigil caused the windswept snow to slow to a stop, then reverse. Faster and faster the time reeled back. Days, months, years. The passage of time was almost imperceptible. Then came a single, dazzling moment. An impossibly intense light flashed, dousing the field in a heat that singed Deacon’s robes and sizzled the snow from the field around him. Deacon squeezed his fingers more tightly in the space sigil. The jagged shape tightened, masking out the worst of the powerful glow. Just before his final manipulations isolated only his intended targets from the roiling power of the white wall, a tendril of energy lanced through and struck him, hurling him away from the sword.

  #

  Ivy took another desperate dive to avoid being swept to what looked to be a small island in a vast sea. She was barely able to keep hold of her senses, on the verge of a fearful transformation. A window burst into view ahead of her, far too close for her to react. She shielded her face with her hands and dug in her heels, sliding to a stop. Though she wasn’t certain what being banished to a distant part of the world would feel like, she was quite certain it wasn’t simply the same icy chill of a frozen field. When she was confident she’d somehow been spared, she lowered her arms and opened her eyes.

  The window was right there ahead of her, and two more had come within inches of boxing her in, but all of them had frozen in place. She crouched and sprang into the air, clearing the smallest of the windows. When she landed, she was presented with a field littered with similar angular shards showing random pieces of the world. They were arranged like the exhibits in some sort of haunting art gallery, stationary and monolithic. She wove between them, approaching where the sword had been driven into the ground.

  When she reached Deacon, he was motionless and barely breathing. The energy that struck him had seared his skin in places. The blighted flesh of the affliction crackled and darkened to a smoky gray.

  “Deacon…” she said, crouching beside him. “Deacon, I don’t know what you did, but we need to fix it. We need to…”

  Her voice trailed off as she looked to the sword. It would have been enough to see what had become of the sigils. Where once they had been stunning designs of pure light etched into the air, now they looked to be sculptures crafted from the very essence of reality. They were real. Solid. Gleaming with metals far brighter than gold and silver. Sparkling with fragments of what Ivy imagined all gems were striving to be. It was a sight no mortal had seen before. And it was meaningless in the face of what waited beyond it.

  Huddled down, frozen in time, was a robed malthrope. His teeth were bared. His eyes wild and unseeing. Like a statue locked in his final moment. It was Lain, driving his sword into the unspeakable form of the thing that had once been called General Bagu. The light was already gone from the black thing’s eyes, but even locked as he was in the space of a single instant, Lain was clearly still very much alive.

  Deacon groaned. His afflicted arm shuddered.

  “Deacon… you did it, Deacon,” Ivy said, wiping tears from her eyes as she tried to fight through the emotions of seeing her dear friend, if only in this momentary echo. “We’ve got to get this fixed now. I don’t think I can just pull the sword out while everything is in bits and pieces.”

  The stricken wizard was too dazed to answer. Ivy turned to the orbiting sigils.

  “Why did I have to be the one here for this part…” she muttered.

  With the sort of respect normally reserved for chained attack dogs, Ivy crept toward the sword and its many shapes.

  “Don’t break the world, Ivy,” she whispered.

  Deacon seemed quite capable of identifying what each of the shapes did. There were dozens of them, slowly orbiting the sword. Ivy decided her first step was to bring the others back. If she could bring Myranda, Ether, or Ayna, they might have the wisdom to solve the rest of the problem. But which was the space sigil?

  The shape she selected first was a perfect circle embedded with concentric rings of colored gems. Even approaching it sent jolts of raw, vibrant power through her. She touched a finger to the sigil. Images and knowledge flooded into her mind. She saw every hue, every shade, every combination of colors the world had ever seen. A
nd more. She saw colors that had never existed. Colors mortal eyes couldn’t hope to process. A slow slide of her finger made white snow and gray earth come alive with bright blues and rich browns. Through the jagged gates to other parts of the world, she saw similar effects intensify the colors there. A glide in the other direction caused the tones to cool and deaden.

  She returned the colors to what they had been. Tempting as it was to leave the world quite literally a little brighter than she’d found it, she wasn’t here to toy with nature.

  Ivy tugged at her fingers and watched the drifting sigils go by. They were things of such beauty, such deceiving complexity. For things like color and music, she could see the symbolism. But what sequence of shapes was meant to imply space? The answer dawned on her not when something of clarity and beauty slipped into view, but when something random and discordant did. There were only two of the sigils that seemed wrong, with elements shifted out of place. They must have been the ones that Deacon had manipulated.

  She held her breath and pressed her hand to one of the two. In a rare stroke of luck, she selected the one she’d been searching for. Images flowed into her mind, layering one atop the other. Every part of the world, all at once, forced its way into her thoughts. It was dizzying, far more than her untrained mind could sift through. Fortunately, she didn’t need to. The merest hint of a notion caused the images to scatter and refocus. She wanted her friends by her side, and instantly she saw each. They were running or flying, desperate to return to the place where Ivy now stood.

  Ivy slipped her fingers across the surface of the sigil. Impossibly intricate elements of the design slid and slipped. The jagged windows around her aligned themselves. The sizzling heat of the window with Lain’s frozen echo of time mercifully vanished. Though the motions necessary to produce the effects she desired were feeding themselves into her mind, it was hardly a simple thing to achieve them. It was like being taught a new language or art form all at once. She had the knowledge in her mind, but accessing it with the subtlety and precision that was called for was at the very limits of her ability. If she’d not had an artist’s hands, she very much suspected the windows into other parts of the world would have plunged down into the ground or off into the sky. As it was, one of them dipped far enough into a warm tropical sea to send a wave of saltwater gushing across the field.

  One by one, she was able to maneuver the windows such that she could see, however distant, each of the Chosen. They hurried toward her. For good measure, Ivy attempted to open windows near a handful of other allies. It never hurt to have a few extra friends.

  “Close enough is close enough,” she said.

  “No,” Deacon said.

  She turned. The wizard was on his feet. His afflicted flesh was near black now, with feathery fractures running across the skin. “I came this far. I did this much. It would be a crime to subject the world to the dangers and risks that I have conjured in error and not complete what I started.”

  “Deacon, it’s over. We just need to—”

  “It isn’t over!” he barked. “Not until we learn all we can from this. Not until we test it and experiment. Not until we’ve made the change we seek to make.”

  The tone wasn’t his anymore. The kindness, the duty that flavored Deacon’s voice even in his darkest moments was gone. He was cold. Hollow. Vicious. He summoned his gem to his afflicted hand. In his grip, the same thin lines of light curled across its surface.

  Ivy could feel him beginning to weave some manner of spell. She looked about. The nearest of the Chosen to the window she’d conjured was Ether, but she wouldn’t arrive before Deacon did whatever he was aiming to do. She narrowed her eyes and hissed a breath.

  “I really hope this isn’t a terrible idea…”

  She turned and grasped the space sigil. Ivy didn’t try to manipulate it. She doubted she could use it with the same finesse Deacon managed, and thus she doubted she could banish him. Instead, she tugged at it. After only a moment of resistance, she hauled the entire sigil free and dashed into the open field. When there wasn’t a world-ending destruction of the fabric of reality, she knew its removal was at least not the worst thing she could have done. With it in hand, he couldn’t keep the others from arriving. All she had to do now was keep it away from him until someone better equipped to deal with magic could set things right.

  She felt power crackle behind her. Instinct and panic served her well enough to dodge the first three lancing bolts of arcane energy.

  “Ivy, you are forcing my hand,” he said. “The longer the facets of existence remain physical, the greater the risk something irreparable occurs. You are my friend, my ally, but my loyalty is to the world, not to you.”

  Ivy didn’t bother turning back or replying to him. He was beyond the point of reason. And from the sound of the wailing wind, Ether would very shortly make any argument a moot point.

  “Very well then. I shall have to improvise,” he called.

  The tingle of magic directed at her dropped away. Rather than relief, realization struck her like a blow to the stomach. She’d taken the sigil that would allow him to keep the others at bay, but he had every other sigil at his disposal.

  She slid to a stop and turned. Ether’s fiery form was screeching toward him like a comet. Deacon placed a hand on one of the sigils. The whole of the field lurched and twitched with his influence. Whatever he was doing, the air above the sword was luminous with power. White light curled and sculpted into an angular, dragon-like form. The light cracked away like a cocoon to reveal a dragoyle in midstrike. He had reeled time back to the moment many years ago when, in this precise place, a dragoyle had clashed with the swordsman named Rasa. On that day, the swordsman had fallen and the Sword of the Chosen was left for Myranda to find. Right now, the thing was simply frozen in the air. Another tweak by Deacon allowed it to roar to life and swoop forward.

  The thing was not under his control, but it was a beast of D’Karon creation and, thus without other instruction or control, would strike at any and all of the Chosen it could detect. Right now, that meant Ether.

  The elemental struck the horrid beast. For a moment, the monster battled her to a standstill. Ether was a force to be reckoned with. After three fiery blows, she’d already ruptured the beast’s hide. Ivy’s gaze shifted to the air above the sword again. A second dragoyle was forming, and when it was released, a third was summoned. Deacon had yet to put his hands to anything but the time sigil, and he’d already worked out a way to conjure an unlimited quantity of dragoyles to occupy the Chosen.

  This battle would be dire.

  #

  Myranda charged toward the window before her. Already she could see that pure chaos had claimed the field ahead. She held her staff tightly and brought a series of spells to mind, then dove through the portal and landed in the field. A dragoyle’s attention turned to her. She raised a shield to deflect the monster’s blow and summoned a lance of fire to sear it.

  “Deacon! Enough!”

  “Not enough!” he called, a demented glee in his voice. “Never enough! Look at it all. Think of the possibilities!”

  She warded off another monster. “You’ve unleashed works of the D’Karon on the world again. It is precisely what you sought to prevent!”

  “It is simply an echo. Again, and again, and again. And they exist or cease to exist at my whim.” He paused. “Echoes…”

  He inspected the sigil he had influenced to summon the dragoyles.

  “Yes… I see… Subtle changes, stretching backward. The source of the time echoes. And so it is solved. So long as the sigil is repaired when I am through, the echoes will cease. Best that I be left to my work, then.”

  Two of the beasts collided in the air above Myranda. They scrabbled against one another, fighting for the chance to be the one to reach her. Neither would get their chance, as a burst of flame and a flash of claws signaled Myn’s arrival to the battlefield. She smashed them from the air and trampled them
into the earth.

  Myranda dashed for Deacon. She made it no more than three strides before it seemed that the ground itself was tipping beneath her. She felt like the level plain was becoming a steep hill. Myranda drove her staff into the earth to steady herself.

  “There,” Deacon said, poking at another sigil. “A force I’ve never conceived of manipulating. The very thing that holds us to the ground, freely manipulable.”

  A third dragoyle struck Myn, knocking her to the ground. Its jaws yawned wide and a plume of caustic black miasma belched forth. Myranda focused her mind into the wind, but found a will already in place. The breeze whipped into a gale, first whisking the black stuff harmlessly away, then ripping the beast itself from Myn’s back. A piercing point of yellow light marked where Ayna had entered the battlefield, hands raised and potent mastery at work.

  Myranda fought the force trying to pull her and the others away from Deacon as he continued to intensify whatever effect he was working at. She heard something touch down beside her and felt something firm and slick form beneath her feet. She looked down to find something akin to an icy staircase was rising out of the field.

  “Steady there,” Calypso said from beside her. “Was it you who brought me into this fracas? I’m more than a bit cross with Ayna for leaving me behind when she heeded the call.”

  “It wasn’t me, but I’m glad you’re here. We’ve lost Deacon, he’s toying with the forces of nature.”

  Ayna darted down beside them. “If those symbols control aspects of reality, he’s too close to them for us to risk attacking him directly.”

  “Mmm… The least we can do is clear the field a bit,” Calypso said. “Leave the Chosen to the greater tasks. Can you get these beasts out of the way, Ayna?”

  “Simplicity,” she said.

  The fairy landed atop Myranda’s staff, borrowing it as a focus. She swirled her wings and raised her arms. The air around them followed her motions like she was conducting an orchestra. Dozens of identical black monstrosities, their great leathery wings caught in the gale, were ripped skyward. The warriors themselves were spared, as was a wide swath around Deacon lest the wind disturb the sigils.