by Eric Vall
The sound of the explosion was deafening as it tore through Sleet’s office and shattered the glass on the windows. Sleet’s mahogany desk splintered and sent shards flying in all directions. It was only due to Arwyn’s quick thinking that we weren’t pummeled and speared by wooden shards. She leapt in front of the group of us and used her barrier magic to turn the shards to sawdust before us, but it wasn’t enough to prevent the shock from the explosion from throwing us back.
I barely refrained from hitting the wall behind me, or rather, from smashing between Nia and Gawain, who both hit the wall with a loud smack before they crumbled to the floor.
Electricity sparked as the lifts malfunctioned, and the chains that turned the mechanism snapped. There was a loud crash as the lift plummeted to the bottom floor. Smoke billowed and filtered from the windows that were no longer there as fire crackled and the aftershock settled.
Through it all, however, I heard Antoine’s scream of pain as fire scorched his hand and arm, and wood splinters drove through his side. I could barely make out his form through the smoke as he stumbled off Sleet’s still unmoving body. I saw him stagger toward the window, but my vision was quickly blurred by Nia’s water magic. A swirl of rain gushed from her palms and formed a cloud that put out the fires in the room.
Once the rain and smoke cleared, all that remained of Antoine was his bloodied coat puddled on the floor by the window.
“Oh, no you fucking don’t,” I seethed.
I raced toward the window with my hand already reaching for my pyrewyrm crystal. Then I crushed it into my palm, and the monster materialized just outside of the window. My own footfalls, as well as Gawain’s behind me, echoed in my ears. The both of us jumped from the window and landed a few stories down on the back of the pyrewyrm.
“Hope you don’t mind,” Gawain said as he situated the gun in his hand.
“If I did, I would have dropped your ass already,” I told him with a smirk.
“Just focus on keeping our mode of transportation from taking us to the other side of the world,” Gawain scoffed.
“On second thought, maybe I will dump you off my ride.” I rolled my eyes. “Just don’t miss.”
I maneuvered the pyrewyrm lower so we could scan the streets of Varle with more ease. Of course, there were onlookers, even in the middle of the night, who were terrified of the faceless beast we rode upon, and they screamed and ran inside of their houses or other establishments.
I couldn’t blame them. Pyrewyrms were particularly nasty in the sense an untamed one had the ability to suck out souls. In fact, I would have gone as far as to say they were the monster form of an animandu, but that was something left to explore for a later time. Right now, I had a bounty hunter to catch. He couldn’t have gotten far.
Wind rushed through my hair and whipped my cheeks as we glided through the night sky. Despite having rode on the pyrewyrm’s back in the Narufey, there was something to be said about the adrenaline of feeling the air on my bare skin.
I steered the monster around the two main towers, and I was so close to them that I could have run my fingers across the stonework. We flew over the school grounds, and my stomach flipped as we swooped down. The general Academy staff was policing the other students and cleaning up the mess we left behind in the courtyard on our way to see Sleet. The soldiers who were supposed to be keeping an eye on us were nowhere to be found, as if once the real trouble started, they just cleared out.
Some watch dogs they were.
From there, I pulled on the fleshy back of the pyrewyrm and maneuvered it beyond the gates of the Academy. We soared over the business district, and though it was late, there were people still mulling about in the streets. Drunks and lonely shopkeepers alike pointed and covered their mouths in what I could only assume was a mix of fright and fascination. None of them were Antoine, though, and I was starting to wonder if he had simply vanished into thin air.
When I saw someone pointing upward past us, I yanked back on the pyrewyrm, and I rocked harshly with the sudden stop in momentum. I shook my head to stop my world from spinning, then shifted my view to the sky above us and gasped.
I should have known from my previous run-ins with Antoine that he would have some kind of floating or flying magic he would have used to escape.
Some thirty feet above us, atop a spinning ball of black and purple darkness, stood Antoine, though he didn’t look right from down here. In fact, he looked disfigured, mangled even. He had sustained injuries from the explosion in Sleet’s office. There was no question in my mind about that. If Arwyn hadn’t put up that shield in front of us, then we would have been in pretty rough shape ourselves. As it was, Antoine had taken the brunt of the force of Sleet’s desk splintering to pieces, not to mention the burn marks he’d probably suffered from Gawain’s attack.
I yanked hard on my ride’s flesh, and I felt my stomach drop when the pyrewyrm banked up toward my target.
Antoine was ready for us, though. Dark tendrils surged forth from his shadowy ball and arched down to meet us. I wasn’t worried, though, not when I had a giant wyrm that practically ate essence and darkness for breakfast.
I stopped my monster short and commanded it to spread its flesh toned wings. Its span was so large that, within mere seconds, it encompassed all of the tendrils the shadowy ball had thrown at us.
An idea hit me then, and I turned to Gawain.
“Give me your gun and cover your ears as tightly as you can,” I yelled over the wind.
“Why?” he asked and made a face like I was crazy.
“Just do it if you don’t want to die, okay?” I grabbed his gun from him so he could properly prepare himself for what I was about to do.
“Fine!” he scoffed as he covered his ears.
Then I commanded the pyrewyrm to unleash what was most likely its most devastating attack. I just hoped the people below us were far enough away that it wouldn’t affect them.
The pyrewyrm reared its head back, and as Antoine unleashed another wave of darkness, it screeched. A pyrewyrm’s screech was deadly. It was so high pitched anyone who could hear it ran the risk of having their brains literally explode. That was the worst case scenario, but the screech could, at the very least, cause severe bleeding from the ear canal and trigger headaches that hurt so badly it could render someone blind.
We had specialized earmuffs made for instances we came across them, but we hadn’t met any since the Magicae Nito. Because I had turned this one into a crystal, however, it was technically mine, and thus I was somehow immune to its screech.
Beside me, Gawain gritted his teeth and yelled. There was nothing I could do for him, though. This was just something he was going to have to tough out for now.
As for Antoine, I heard his agonizing scream, and he gripped his head as the sound pounded in his ears. A wave of dark energy shot from the pyrewyrm’s wings, and my opponent was knocked from atop his little ball of black energy as it was engulfed. He fell as the pyrewyrm’s screech came to an end, and for half a moment I thought the asshole was going to splatter all over the ground below us, but then a second little shadowy ball materialized under him, and he rode it back up slowly.
This black ball of magic was much smaller though, so I guessed between the explosion in Sleet’s office and whatever injuries he had sustained, Antoine was losing stamina fast.
As he ascended once again, a spell that looked identical to the one he had been about to use on Sleet crackled in his palm.
Fine. If that was how he wanted to play, I would play the game with him.
With one hand firmly on my pyrewyrm to keep control of it, and the other on Gawain’s gun, I charged after him. Through the night sky we flew as he sent strikes of purple lightning hurdling at us. I felt the lightning crackle over my head as I jerked the pyrewyrm down. The static from the blast left goosebumps along my skin, and I felt my stomach lurch as we straightened back out as quickly as we dodged.
I had half a second to examine Gawain’s gun a
s I steadied it in my hands. I briefly remembered the crash course Gawain gave me during the Magicae Nito, but I found myself still unsure of which toggles and switches did which thing. I knew it had the ability to change elemental attacks based on the weakness of whatever enemy it was up against, though.
I shrugged and aimed the gun at Antoine, hoping to the Maker whatever came out the other end of the barrel wasn’t going to somehow backfire and kill both Gawain and me. An ice spell like the one Gawain shot into Antoine’s henchmen blasted out the other end, and I exhaled a sharp sigh of relief that I would live to see another day. The ice shard missed him by just a small fraction, but I managed to graze his face enough to leave a jagged wound on his cheek.
If Antoine felt anything from the blast, I wouldn’t have been able to tell. He made no such indication that the brush of an ice shard on his cheek affected him in the slightest, and it left me to wonder if I really had hit him. It certainly looked like I had.
No matter. I just had to try again.
As I readied another shot, Antoine kept himself calm and collected. He stood perfectly still on his shadow ball and tutted his fingers in a quick, precise fashion.
He probably figured I couldn’t hit him. He may have been correct, since I was untrained with the gun.
“I thought the gun was supposed to be able to scan an enemy and tell you what the best elemental approach was?” I shouted over my shoulder.
“We haven’t gotten close enough to scan him!” Gawain yelled back.
“Fair enough,” I snorted. “Let’s see if I can fix that.”
I tossed Gawain’s gun back to him. He was a better shot anyway, though it was fun to play around with it while I had the chance. Besides, I needed to keep my concentration on steering the pyrewyrm so we didn’t end up on the other side of Mistral. I heard him tinker with a couple of mechanisms on the gun, immediately followed by the sound of an ice bullet soaring through the air. The blast, however, was totally shattered as the disks spun by.
Like Antoine’s other attacks in this battle, I thought the disks would be easily avoidable. He was getting sloppy in his execution, but I was wrong. When I dropped altitude, the disks followed and homed in on our location.
“Damn it,” I grumbled, and I steered the pyrewyrm away from the disks as they gave chase. We soared through the sky, and I was careful to avoid going too low. I didn’t want to cause any collateral damage to the city on top of everything else that had transpired tonight.
“I don’t suppose you have a plan?” Gawain asked over his shoulder.
“Sure,” I lied, and then I made a sharp drop with the pyrewyrm that left my stomach a few dozen yards above us.
Gawain scoffed. “You don’t have a plan.”
“ … Okay, I don’t have a plan,” I admitted and grinned cheekily.
We swerved again, and I nearly clipped the tip of the pyrewyrm’s wing with one of the disks as I made such a short turn. That move, however, did give me an idea. I looped back around and aimed my wyrm straight for Antoine, who looked too occupied with his wounds to pay us any real mind.
“Get your gun ready to scan him,” I ordered Gawain.
With the disks hot on our tail, Gawain climbed along my monster’s spine. He crawled past me and positioned himself around the pyrewyrm’s long neck to get a clear shot at a scan. By the time Antoine realized we were closing in on him, it was too late.
Gawain held out his gun and aimed it at Antoine dead on. I heard the whir as the holographic glyphs that gave the weapon its power spun wildly around the barrel, which meant the scan was in progress. As soon as the mechanical sounds stopped, Gawain slid back down the pyrewyrm’s neck and awaited the results of the scan.
In the meantime, however, I had pulled my monster up hard with a mere second to spare before we collided with Antoine. As I thought, the disks didn’t have the same quick reaction, and they sliced into the bounty hunter like a hot knife through butter. I could hear the blood squelch as the darkness scored his flesh and sank into him.
With a silent command, I instructed my pyrewyrm to do an about face. Once we were about fifteen yards away, far enough that we could make an escape if we needed to, but close enough that we could advance, we stopped and hovered in place.
My throat tightened, and I choked out some obscenity when I finally saw how gruesome Antoine looked.
Large chunks of Sleet’s desk were lodged into his left side. Scrapes and gashes littered his neck and chest, but what stood out most was what looked to be part of one of the desk legs sticking out from Antoine’s eye. Blood streamed down his face and dripped down his body so fast I wasn’t sure how he hadn’t passed out yet, especially when I took in the massive raw burns on his other side. His arm hardly looked like it belonged on a human body from how mangled it was. Flesh hung loose in places where the muscle had all but been charred and chipped away, and his clothes, or what was left of them, exposed even more cuts and wounds from enduring the brunt of the explosion.
“Give it up, Antoine!” I yelled high above the city. “It’s over!”
A slow, strained cackle filled the air as Antoine’s body started to become consumed with the very same darkness he rode upon, the same darkness that had destroyed Penny on that fateful morning in the plains outside the city.
“Indeed, it is!” he agreed, and he tossed his arms out to the side as though he were putting himself on display for all of Varle to see. “What a thrilling conclusion to our story!”
“What do I do, Gryff?” Gawain whispered with a finger on the trigger of his gun and ready to shoot at my command. His scan must have come back, and he now had the perfect elemental advantage over Antoine.
“Just wait a second,” I told him. I wanted to hear out whatever Antoine had to say. I needed to know who hired him and why.
“Who hired you, Antoine?” I asked. “Why did they send you after the ciphers?”
Antoine’s charade dropped, and his face fell as his eyes glowed an eerie shade of purple and black tears streamed over his wounds. It looked almost like essence, but that couldn’t be right, could it? Only banishers could hold a substantial amount of essence. That was what made them so rare and unique. It was only a fluke I had been able to hold as much myself.
“She promised me if I brought them to her, she could bring Penny back,” he revealed. “She told me all I had to do was bring them all to her and that I could do whatever I wanted to you after I did.”
“What did they want with the ciphers?” I pressed.
“What they wanted was none of my business!” Antoine yelled frantically as his body became more and more unstable. “What mattered to me was that wretched scab of a woman told me she would bring back my love if I disposed of you and your little friends!”
“But who?” I screamed back desperately. “Who made you those promises, Antoine?”
A strangled noise escaped Antoine’s throat, and he fell to his knees as his body shook violently. His chest heaved as his dark magic took hold of him, and he vomited something black that fell from the sky like sludge.
Gawain and I shared a shocked glance as I silently urged my pyrewyrm closer still. We’d seen this before with Penny. We’d watched her become completely consumed with her own power and grow mad until nothing remained of her but a dark puddle. It wasn’t something I ever thought I’d see again, but here I was, watching as yet another human with a fondness for dark magic was devoured by their own insanity.
We stopped when I was close enough to Antoine that I could have grasped his chin. There was nearly nothing left of him as he wept, and his body melted into the dark sphere he had perched himself on.
“Tell me who she is,” I urged carefully. “Tell me, and I promise I’ll kill her for lying to you.” I made that promise, and I heard Gawain’s sharp intake of breath as I did, but it wasn’t a promise I was sure I could keep.
“The councilwoman,” Antoine rasped. “Miriam Sharpay.”
Of course it was. That much was blatantly obvious,
but I had to hear it from his mouth. I needed it to be solidified.
“That’s how you knew how to get inside the Academy,” I said as I started putting the pieces of the puzzle together. “She gave you the enchantments to break the wards.”
“The soldiers were decoys so we could put our plan into motion right under your noses,” Antoine tried to laugh ironically through his tears, but all that came up was more of the black, tar-like substance. He finally looked me in the eye as inch by inch of him melted into the shadow ball.
It all made sense. The sudden need to keep an eye on us, the soldiers disappearing at the first sign of danger … everything was connected.
“Penny is waiting for me,” he told Gawain and I. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve done my part.”
And then he was nothing. His face had melted to the point that he couldn’t speak anymore, and his eyes drooped to where his nose should have been. Within moments, he completely disintegrated.
I had to look away so I didn’t throw up and rain vomit all over the city.
“Let’s go,” Gawain suggested slowly, and I nodded. I didn’t want to waste any more time than I already had.
We hopped back into Sleet’s office the same way we leapt out, and I recalled my pyrewyrm into its crystal with a quiet ‘thanks.’ Then I turned to find everyone was still there, save for Almasy and Orenn, who I assumed had taken Sleet to the infirmary since he was also absent. There was a curtain laid over Petyr’s body in the corner, and I was afraid to know how much more mangled his body had become after the explosion.
“Did you find him?” Layla asked as she hopped up from the floor and ran over to us.
“Yes,” Gawain answered curtly.
I didn’t think he meant to be so short, though, because he immediately shot Layla an apologetic look that made her frown.
“And?” Varleth asked. He stood against the back wall by Petyr as though he were protecting and preserving what integrity and honor the little messenger man had left in death.
“Dead,” Gawain and I answered simultaneously.
