by Jaxon Reed
Another may have smiled, or offered an embarrassed reply. Magos did neither.
He said, “Royalty may commit atrocities without repercussions. You know this. The king’s line may do whatever they wish. But you should have been wiser, Toni. You should not have committed this act with him. He could have easily taken one from Sōphrosynē. It has happened before. Do you think yours will be first abomination I have destroyed? Far from it.
“But now, because of your choice you are condemned. You should have let him choose another illicit lover, Toni.”
“I would have . . . were it not for the fact I loved him.”
She pulled in even more mana, to the point of bursting. Her eyes sparkled brightly in the night.
He said, “I appear in the name of His Majesty, King Sthenos. By his authority, I pronounce myself judge over your life. And based on your actions, I judge your life to be forfeit.”
Toni flashed her eyes at him, full of magic and malice.
She said, “I will not go easily, Master.”
He stared at her, measuring her, noting the mana she still pulled in, even now.
He said, “We’ll see.”
Megalos Magos did not have to speak a spell, or move his hands. He merely had to think. And he tired of speaking. This discussion with his errant pupil had continued long enough.
It was time to end this.
With a mere thought, he cast a cage of green energy around Toni, its bars constricting and preventing her from moving. Then it quickly shrank, collapsing on itself, growing ever smaller and crushing . . . crushing . . .
He blinked, and she floated outside the energy cage. It continued to shrink without her to the size of a cat, a mouse, then a bug.
His eyes darted to a bracelet on her wrist.
“An artifact. Short range teleportation.”
Toni did not respond, but cast her own spell.
Bolts of lightning zapped into Magos, each one equally spaced in a sphere around his body. The air cracked with energy as the bolts slammed into him, nearly all at once.
He blocked 20, 21, then 22 bolts. But the last two slammed into his chest.
Nothing happened. He did not fall out of the sky, or show pain. The bolts just fizzled out on his clothing.
“You are not the only one with artifacts, child.”
With that, he raised his hands above his head and began to cast.
Now the battle began in earnest.
Large swathes of green energy flew in the air above the village, lighting up the night sky in a display never seen before or since. Huge shapes, cubes and spheres and pyramids, flew in at angles, trying to ensnare a black-clad battlemage who slung back lightning, sunfire, and molten lava at her old master.
They spiraled upward in a fight to the heavens, casting death and destruction, dodging and blocking magical blows.
They struggled for minutes, rising higher and higher into the night air.
But no matter what variety of magical energies or deathblows Megalos Magos threw at his former student, she countered with spells of her own, sending back attacks just as strong, trying to knock him out of the sky.
“Enough.”
It was one word, but Magos stopped and held his palms outward.
They floated high in the air now. An evening breeze unfelt on the surface made their clothes and hair rustle. The temperature this far up felt much cooler, too.
Magos pushed, and the fabric of reality rippled out from one of his hands.
Blackness mixed with the dark evening air, as waves of chaos flowed toward Toni like an ocean wave.
She activated her bracelet and blinked up to escape it.
But Magos expected the move. He whipped his other hand up and shot a second ripple at her new location. This one moved even faster.
A waviness tumbled over Toni as reality altered around her. Everything looked squiggled and distorted for a moment.
Time slipped. Time sped up. Time slowed to a crawl.
Slowly, she floated onto her back, looking up at the stars.
Her vision blurred, and new stars appeared.
Everything blurred again, then the sky appeared blue, filled with the light of two suns.
The sky faded away, and when it returned it looked reddish-orange instead of blue.
Toni fought in her mind to stay sane, and tried to cast a counter spell.
She focused on the memory of a clock, a mechanical masterpiece she had seen during her travels in human lands.
It measured out the day, ringing bells on the hour. At noon a mechanical woodcutter marched out of a door in the clock’s face and chopped at an invisible tree, much to the delight of crowds below who gathered to watch him every day.
She focused on the memory of the clock, a physical representation of time, and devised a spell. A solid spell, one that would recall her place and time back in the present. A spell without a name that she created in her mind on the spot.
The waviness, the distortion of reality passed. With a sigh of relief, her eyes found familiar stars in the night sky once more. She was back where she started.
She flipped over in the air to face down, and made a slicing motion with her hands.
A slit in the air appeared behind Megalos Magos, crimson light streaming out of it. The elf flew backward, sucked into the red sky world.
Toni jerked her arm up and the slit sealed.
For a moment, all grew quiet as darkness returned to the skies.
Then Magos popped back into his former position, porting in time and place back to their world.
They locked eyes across the open air.
He said, “I forgot how quickly you learn and adapt.”
“It’s because I’m young.”
He did not respond, choosing instead to cast another spell.
This one was invisible, but she could feel it. It was pure force from above. It slammed into her and forced her down toward the ground, knocking her out of the sky.
She popped away, teleporting a few feet to the right. But the size of the spell was too great. Its force still pressed upon her, pushing her down, down, down.
She cast Globe of Protection before hitting the ground, a simple but effective counter spell. Dirt geysered up around her as the force slammed her down. She felt the breath squeezed out of her lungs as crushing pressure bore down on her globe.
But the globe held and the pressure passed, the downward force dissipating.
Magos floated down and quickly cast his cage around her again. But this time he made it much more complex. Instead of a simple square box with bars of light, he added multiple walls and barriers, much larger and even stronger than before.
Light shimmered through the night, brightening the field they fought in, as bar after bar of bright green energy surrounded Toni on the ground.
Then he cast a wide area of effect spell, the largest and most powerful one he could muster. He attached a stream of mana from the Abyss so the spell would grow, then tied it off so it would continue.
He said, “Amplify.”
She could not port out of this one with her bracelet.
The giant cage of deadly energy, the complex system of bars and barriers began to move, compressing its inner space where she stood, even as it grew larger on the outside with the amplification spell.
Toni looked up and saw layer after layer of energy beams high above her and around her, now squeezing in while growing stronger.
They rebuilt, new bars growing behind the ones shrinking in, the amplification spell magnifying and multiplying the energy, reproducing new beams of light now that closer ones shrunk down to crush her.
It looked fiendishly clever, looping into itself, making it seemingly impossible to escape. It was truly a spell worthy of the elves’ greatest mage.
She reached into the Abyss for more mana, drawing up the largest amount she had ever mustered.
Desperately she searched for a way to escape as the space around her compressed.
“I can
’t go up, or out. I’ll go down.”
She thrust her palms low.
The ground exploded in concentric circles around her, spreading out quickly.
Magos squeezed his fist, and his complex energy cage shrank even faster, compressing the inner space quickly.
She felt it, felt the pressure intensifying.
She looked at the spell following her, Sight of the Past, the hazy window showing her daughter’s older face . . . and she tugged at the Abyss.
Toni pulled in more mana than she ever thought possible, and pulled the earth down all around her.
And her spell combined with the amplification area of effect.
A house on the edge of the village shook as the ground quaked nearby. Then its foundation dropped, sinking 50 feet, pulling the house far underground.
The rest of the village followed, collapsing under the surface as circles of destruction spread throughout the soil, tugging everything on top down below.
In a moment, the entire village was gone, sucked into the land around it.
The amplification spell doubled, and now the mana drawn from the Abyss massively increased and the downward pull of the ground expanded outward again, this time heading straight for the nearby city of Melody.
Melody, a new city, only three centuries old.
Melody, created to sing the praise of a monarch, with its fountains sounding beautiful notes, its very columns designed to sing with the breezes passing through them.
Melody, pride of the Queen’s Land and a marvel of engineering . . . suddenly began to sink.
Two enormous spells twined together as tightly as threads binding a garment. They twisted and turned and brought magical forces multiplied several times over, pulling in an almost limitless supply of mana, then doubling it, then doubling it again.
And everything sank down into the ground.
The walls to Melody disappeared in an instant. A huge circle around the city collapsed as if the foundations were dust instead of bedrock.
Houses and buildings, streets and city blocks all sank quickly, covered over by sand and dirt churned up from below.
The people sleeping, and those out at night in pubs or on the street were all sucked down with the city, their fate sealed under ten thousands tons of soil.
They struggled to escape, those who were awake. Their hands scrabbled for the surface, bloody and dirty, clawing and crawling up through rock and dirt.
But they went down deep into the ground with all the buildings and the streets and the statues and the fountains.
The spells stopped suddenly.
Up top, the city stood no longer. Dust swirled thick in the air, like a dirty fog. But nothing of Melody remained on the surface.
The spells fizzled, the magic in both dwindling away as a final tall monument in a city park submerged, its granite top succumbing to a loamy tomb.
Magos floated over the submerged city, looking down, and for the first time his expression changed, ever so slightly.
He squinted in the dusk, observing a huge flat, circular field where a city stood not a few moments before.
There, near the center, the ground shifted slightly as he floated near.
He stopped and watched as dirt rolled off an elf, and her black tunic melded with the night once more.
Magos pulled from the Abyss and channeled all his energy in a giant vortex of deadly force, focusing it on the lone figure below.
She flicked away just before the force slammed into her. With nowhere else to go, it burst into the ground and carved a deep trench, slamming into the top of a sunken building.
He looked, but Toni was gone. She teleported down there somewhere, into the sunken city.
Magos conjured a mana gheist and slung it into the hole.
“Follow her. Find her.”
The blue being solidified, its ectoplasm quickly forming into a shape ideal for hunting. A sleek, oblong head and wide dark eyes glanced at its creator once, then at the hole. It streaked down into the city, slipping quickly through the air.
Magos followed, floating down to the ground, then into the new entrance to the underworld.
Beneath the surface, mana from the two spells persisted, sinking into the city’s infrastructure. Streets pressed back on the dirt and space formed above them. Alleys became dark passageways. Houses and buildings pressed up against sand and soil, refusing to be crushed. A gigantic underground bubble formed, the city captured within.
Magos floated above a large street, now far underground. Bodies on the cobblestones stirred, absorbing residual mana. Soon they would walk again as zombies, or worse.
Up ahead he saw the blue glow of his mana gheist turn a corner, chasing its prey. He sailed over the dead and hurried to catch up.
He heard a BOOM! accompanied by a flash of blue light.
As he rounded the corner, Toni floated in the middle of the street, waiting for him.
She had taken out the mana gheist, but flew no further.
They locked eyes, above the subterranean street.
She raised her fists, and made beckoning motions with both hands.
He summoned more mana gheists, creating them for battle this time. Blue spectral warriors with lances and spears appeared from below, drawn from the practically limitless supply in the Abyss.
A dozen, three dozen, a hundred gheists flowed at the mage’s call. Magos jerked his hand toward her, pointing at Toni.
“Kill her.”
The mana gheists rushed to obey. They flew in waves, and crashed against her Globe of Protection.
But such a spell could only hold them off so long, Toni knew.
Desperately, she reached out a hand and cast Mana Core.
A blue ball filled her palm, heavy and dense with magical energy. She threw it outside her protective sphere, and it thunked down to the street below.
The mana gheists near it were drawn in, zipped up as soon as they touched the little globe. And it grew.
Now its pull became stronger, and more gheists were sucked in, struggling, pulling against an invisible current they could not escape.
And as each one absorbed into the core it grew bigger, bigger, until none of the gheists could escape it, even those trying desperately to flee.
Now the mana core stood ten feet in diameter, glowing blue and pulsing in light. The cobblestones in the street cracked under its weight.
Magos shifted his attention from the globe back to Toni. They locked eyes and regarded one another in silence.
Finally, he spoke, his words echoing softly in the large tunnel.
“No spell will work against you, will it, Toni? I have taught you too well. You know the old ways of casting, where you are limited only by your imagination, not a list of memorized spells. You are as powerful as your link to the Abyss, and whatever I bring against you will be countered by something equal in measure. For the Abyss holds the limit of my power as well.”
She said nothing, but she kept her hands up in a fighting stance, ready to cast again.
Magos nodded, as if stating the obvious confirmed it.
Then he said, “Very well. I will defeat you by brute force.”
He spread his arms out wide and . . . changed.
He grew taller, wider, and his arms stretched, then stretched even longer as ectoplasm coalesced around his spirit.
He stared at her once the transformation completed. He stood twice as large, and his arms looked like giant scythes.
His voice changed, becoming stronger, spookier.
“I never taught you this one, Toni. The soul seeker form is my oldest, and deadliest. I have not used it in many centuries, not since the Late Wars against the Ancient Empire.”
He moved forward, a freakish form of death, a white glowing monster with impossibly long arms.
“I am your judge, Toni. And I judge you unworthy of life. I am your judge!”
He reached out with one of his impossibly long arms and swiped through her Globe of Protection, popping it like a
bubble.
She jerked back instinctively, not letting his ghostly hand touch her body.
She unleashed her own blast of force, sending it straight for his face. It barely fazed him. He jumped forward and grabbed for her again.
Toni made a lifting motion with her hands, and a section of street 30 feet long and 20 feet wide ripped out and flew up in the air, slamming into him.
But he passed through it, his body becoming more ephemeral and ghost-like.
“You cannot stop my judgment, Toni. I am invincible in this form. No spell can stop me.”
He advanced again, arms stretched out. His face transformed into a monster’s. Hideous yellow eyes stared at her, and his skin grew pale as lifeblood morphed into ectoplasm.
She said, “Magos! These ancient forms . . . you will become like this forever if you don’t change back!”
“You can’t fool me, Toni. Treachery won’t work. I am your judge . . . and executioner.”
He lunged forward and swiped the air again, ethereal fingers swishing a hair’s breadth from her breasts as she jerked back in alarm.
She turned and flew away.
He roared and raced after her, arms outstretched.
She twisted mid-flight and shot Greater Fireball, Lightning, Major Damage . . . any spell she could think of to stop him.
But nothing worked. The energy sailed right through him in his partially physical state.
He raced after her.
She turned down another street. She looked to her right, and racing along beside her she again spied the hazy window into the future, and her daughter’s face.
“I’ve got to think!”
She turned, and shot down another underground street, then teleported forward as Magos’s giant hand snatched at the air behind her.
“No spell will work. No spell will work. What is there besides spells? What damages the ancient forms?”
She turned again. She saw a faint blue glow ahead and realized she had circled back to the mana core.
That gave her an idea.
She glanced over to the hazy window, at her daughter so much older in the future.
“I love you Tawny. Take care of Toby! Mana is the only thing that can alter our forms!”
She streaked toward the core and called on the Abyss and for the first time in her life, she transformed. Her body shifted from the corporeal into ectoplasm, glowing white.
