by John Bierce
Perhaps she wasn’t as clever as he’d imagined.
The sheet of paper sliced through the Marrowstaff’s fingers as though they weren’t even there.
Everyone but Alustin stared in shock. A bone mage’s reinforced bones should be more than enough to block a sword strike, but they hadn’t even slowed the sheet of paper down.
The Hyphal threw herself to the side to avoid another sheet of falling paper, tearing loose from her mycelial web before it could puncture the last of Hugh’s wards around the Exile Splinter. The other Swordsmen began dodging the slowly falling paper sheets as well.
Alustin lunged out of the ward before the Swordsmen could even react.
Artur was getting thoroughly sick of Grovebringer.
None of the other Swordsmen posed a significant threat to him, if he were going to be honest. The average Havathi Sacred Swordsman was powerful, yes, but they also tended to lack versatility. Ashspine was nearly as powerful as Grovebringer, but it was poorly suited in combat against him.
Grovebringer, however, was another story. By the time he could yank out an arrow, it was almost always sprouted into a sapling, if not even larger. Some of the trees reached ten or twenty feet in height before he could tear them out of his armor, and ripping out those root systems tended to do a massive amount of damage.
Worse, Grovebringer’s wielder never seemed to run out of arrows, and their range was ridiculous. Well outside of the cloud of rock dust that always hung lightly in the air around Artur’s armor.
Artur stomped down hard on the ruins of the living siege tower, taking out a lightning mage and what appeared to be a… hair mage? It was hard to tell through his dust cloud.
Artur couldn’t help but be amused at how many wind mages were flying around the battlefield, largely just carrying other Havathi mages. If they had cooperated, they could have easily blown away his dust, leaving Artur effectively blind, sealed away inside his armor.
But then, no-one ever thought twice about the dust cloud, and nobody at all had known about the enchantments on his stone ring.
It was, above anything else, his most prized possession, even over his hammer. It enhanced his affinity senses to an absurd degree, letting him do things like use clouds of stone dust to perceive the world around him while sealed away in his armor. It helped him control prodigious amounts of stone— though that wouldn’t be possible without his massive mana reservoirs as well. It was what had finally let him escape the Hydra’s Kiss all those years ago.
It also was what let him utilize his breathless aura.
Artur tore a tree out of his leg, then tore a balcony from a nearby palace to repair the hole. As he did so, he finally activated his breathless aura.
There were lots of stories about Artur. He’d heard most of them, but in none of them did anyone speculate that the fear that came over mages forced to fight him was anything but natural.
Some of the fear was certainly natural. Most of it, though, was a spell.
Artur reached out with his iron affinity sense, feeling the iron in the blood of all the mages around him. It would take fine control even beyond his own to tear it from their bodies— even iron liches and blood mages seldom had that ability.
It was not, however, beyond his ability to interfere with it a little.
It wouldn’t take long for his foes to start feeling a little short of breath, as their blood found it harder and harder to carry air. It wouldn’t kill them, or even knock them unconscious, but it would make them fatigue faster.
And, Artur had found, it made people panic. Something about not being able to get a proper breath in triggered fear at a deep level in people. No one fighting him ever made the connection, though— they always seemed to interpret the breathlessness as a product of the fear, not the other way around.
At least, no one who had survived battle against him had made the connection. Perhaps some of his fallen foes had, but it hadn’t helped them.
Artur supposed people didn’t like being reminded how at the mercy of their own bodies they were, and preferred to think their minds controlled their bodies, not the other way around.
Artur swung his twenty-foot long hammer at a slow-moving gravity mage flying near him. The gravity mage attempted to force the hammer down with a gravity spell, but Artur just willed some of the hammer’s insides into its own pocket dimension to counteract the spell.
What remained of the gravity mage went flying over the city.
Artur’s hammer wasn’t really a hammer anymore than it was a ring. If he had to guess, it had been the storage spell for some absurdly huge iron foundry on whatever world it came from. Artur really wasn’t sure how much iron was stored within it, nor did he really understand how its magic worked, but he could manifest iron from within it in whatever shape he needed. It had no spellforms on it, and as he’d found it deep in Skyhold’s labyrinth, he had no real clues where it came from. It still used mana, but it was otherwise utterly foreign in construction from Anastan spellform enchantments.
Using it wasn’t too complicated, however. He just needed to picture the size and shape of the iron construct he wanted to manifest. The more iron he manifested at once, or the more complex the shape of the iron construct, the more mana it used. Because of that, he couldn’t use his hammer and his breathless aura simultaneously for very long.
Artur seldom needed to use both for very long, though. He tended to end battles quickly.
Artur tore a cedar tree from his helmet. He honestly didn’t even need a helmet— his cavity was deep within his armor’s belly— but for some reason, enemies often targeted his armor’s head first, so it made a convenient decoy.
Three of the annoying mages flying around him broke away, heading towards the center of the city and the Exile Splinter.
“No yeh don’t,” Artur growled.
As he strode down the wide canal he stood in, he didn’t bother stepping over the bridges in his path. He just walked straight through them. His affinity senses could feel how much mud he was stirring up from the lakebed with each step.
His armor’s steps might look ponderous, but after no more than six steps, he’d caught up with the fliers. None of them even saw the hammer coming before it swatted them out of the air.
The rain and wind picked up even more as the full force of the storm arrived, and Artur scowled as he lost track of half the fliers chasing him. Storms wreaked havoc on his dust clouds.
He gripped his hammer with both hands, then slammed it with all his armor’s strength through the side of a nearby Ithonian palace. He used his magic to stir up the dust even more, and sighed in relief as his dust cloud expanded again.
Artur swatted at a particularly daring flier who was blasting his armor with ball lightning, but they easily dodged his massive fist. He didn’t mind, though, since he could feel the city begin phasing back into the pocket dimension with his stone affinity sense, and he smiled. There’d be no storm there to mess with his dust cloud.
When the city did phase, however, Artur realized he had a little bit of a problem.
He hadn’t phased with it.
Lightning began to crackle in the clouds above him.
Sabae cautiously stepped back out onto the balcony, her wind armor spinning, and began pulling at the rain around her.
The first two times she tried, her wind armor exploded off her. The third time, her water armor exploded off her.
The fourth time, finally, it worked.
For a moment, at least, then both armors exploded off her.
Sabae paused to think. This could still potentially work with just the water armor, but it would limit the amount of time she could stay below. Even if she preserved a small amount of air inside it, she’d still have to surface within a few minutes.
The problem was, ultimately, that there was no way to keep both armors thin enough to stay within her limited magic range. Trying to stack them inevitably resulted in one of them protruding out, and leaving the whole thing to collapse.
If only there were a way to weave them together, as if…
Sabae wanted to smack herself. Of course that was what she was supposed to be doing as the next step in combining her armor. Weave them together, not layer them.
That didn’t do her any more good than a rowboat at low tide, though. She’d need likely weeks to master something like that. If there was one thing Alustin had taught her well, it was to not try and master a new spell or skill in an emergency. You needed to rely on the tools you did have, and come up with creative new uses for them.
It looked like she was going to have to take the risk of surfacing every now and then.
A thought floated back up to the top of her mind. She immediately shoved it back down as mad, but it drifted straight back up again.
Creative new uses for old tools, huh?
Maybe she was thinking in the entirely wrong direction.
Sabae smiled, feeling a bit like Talia, and crafted the windlode spellform in her mind’s eye. She spun up her wind armor again, took a deep breath, then activated the windlode and began channeling its mana into her wind armor.
The wind armor promptly began growing and deforming as more and more air was sucked into it, but Sabae growled and forced her will against it, slowly compressing it back down again. She hadn’t tried repeating this trick since Theras Tel, but she was far more capable with her magic now.
Again and again her armor tried to struggle free of her grip, but Sabae desperately held onto it. Finally, when she was sure she could pull no more wind into it, she made sure her shield was strapped to her back, bent her knees, and windjumped.
She felt the balcony beneath her crumple and collapse under the force of her takeoff, but she couldn’t see it— she couldn’t see anything. The acceleration pressed against her so hard that her eyes went blind with spots.
For a long, drawn out moment, it was just her, alone and blind in what remained of her armor, shooting up and up and up. For a long, drawn out moment, she could pretend she was a true storm mage, worthy of her family’s name.
When her eyes cleared, she was high enough that she felt like she could reach up and touch the stormclouds, if she wanted to. She was even higher up than she’d jumped with the aid of Hugh’s momentum magnifier ward. Far below her through the rain, she could see the swarm of Havathi fliers still darting around Artur’s massive suit of armor.
What she couldn’t see, however, were the ruins of Imperial Ithos.
It had phased back into the pocket dimension.
“Alright, now today can’t get any worse,” Sabae said.
Sabae reached the top of her arc and started to fall. As she did so, she caught a glimpse of something in the distance. Something huge in the sky she couldn’t quite make out through the blur of her wind armor.
Hope rose up in her. If that was Kanderon, then…
She dropped her wind armor at the same time she came to a realization.
She was looking to the east, not the west.
Without the haze of the wind armor, Sabae could see no less than five dragons winging their way towards Lake Nelu under cover of the storm.
As she plummeted back down towards the lake, Sabae frantically spun up her wind armor again.
She really, really wasn’t going to make fun of Talia’s weird obsession with how things worked in her novels anymore. And she wasn’t going to say that cursed phrase again. Wasn’t even going to think it. Though, really, even if she did, she wasn’t sure how today was supposed to get any…
Above her, lightning began to crackle in the clouds.
Longren toyed with his lodestone amulet as he moved charge between two of his iron plates. He made sure to keep them far apart, for as the spell grew more powerful, their attraction to one another grew accordingly. He had to be careful not to let the moving charge express itself as lightning, not in rain like this. And he definitely didn’t want to risk his iron plates attracting lightning, so he needed to finish before this unnatural storm built up its charge again. He could use his magic easily enough to keep Kai’s wire structures from attracting the lightning, but not while he was preparing an attack like this.
Once it was high enough, they’d tear through the stone of the palace below to get to one another. And, if Longren positioned them right, those terrifying living weapons as well.
His amulet sent a feeling of excitement through his mind at that thought. Longren was its second pacted wielder, and in the last year or two it had begun growing more and more aware of itself and its surroundings. He didn’t let his amulet’s excitement make him hasty, however— as long as the two below him were still alive, he and Kai were still in danger.
No one that young should be as dangerous as Alustin’s apprentices were.
Longren was just glad that he and Kai hadn’t run into the barbarian girl. Her threat assessment rivaled some archmages, and she probably wasn’t even at her full potential.
Beside him, Kai snorted as several more stalagmites stabbed up from the roof, but the two of them were a solid fifteen feet above the roof, atop a wire platform Kai had built, suspended on dozens of twisting wire struts.
“How much longer?” Kai asked.
“No more than a minute,” Longren replied.
He could still feel Artur’s son and Kanderon’s warlock moving around down below— they each had more than enough bits of metal on their clothes for his senses to react to, though he didn’t want to try and wrestle with Wallbreaker’s son for control of them. The two apprentices were sticking incredibly close together, which was foolish of them, to say the least. Longren’s spell would be able to easily take out both of them at once.
“Do you smell something?” Kai asked.
Longren gave him a curious look, and then the full force of the stench struck both of them. Both immediately vomited. Longren lost control of his spell almost immediately, and the two iron plates slammed together with a clang.
The last thing Longren saw was a hammer of ice hurtling towards him.
If he’d lived a little longer, he might have seen a starbolt hurtling towards Kai.
Hugh couldn’t help vomiting again after hitting the wire mage with a starbolt. Given that he was hanging off the side of the building’s roof, it was rather more challenging than it would normally be not to get it on himself.
Given how hard the rain was coming down, though, it probably would have been washed right off his clothes. Hugh was about as wet as he could get without falling in the lake entirely.
Around the building, the floating wire ward sparked and then fell apart entirely.
Hugh called his spellbook through their link.
“Did yeh get some a’ the stink spell?” Godrick asked as he climbed onto the roof.
Hugh shook his head, then followed Godrick up. He automatically began crafting a defensive ward around them in the stone of the roof.
When his spellbook arrived, carrying all the metal they’d had on them, Hugh took back his waterskin— which had a steel cap— and rinsed his mouth out.
“I think me puking in battle when I kill someone is just going to be a thing now,” Hugh said. “I’m still not really entirely alright with the whole killing thing.”
“Ah think ah’d be a little worried if yeh were,” Godrick said. “We only need one battle-crazed maniac in our group.”
“I feel like I should be offended by that, since she’s my girlfriend now?” Hugh said.
“Are yeh offended?” Godrick asked.
Hugh shook his head. “No, because it’s completely true.”
Godrick chuckled at that, and the two of them took a moment to rest and look over Imperial Ithos.
Before, Ithos had been shockingly intact. It had been sealed away from the world and anything that might weather it to true ruins for centuries.
In just a few
short minutes of battle, that had changed.
The living siege tower had torn up great chunks of the city when it had fallen. Artur had torn up even more of the city in his battle against the bulk of the Havathi forces. Hugh could see the immense shadowy silhouette of Artur’s armor crashing around in the distance, as unseen aerial mages bombarded him with lightning bolts, fire, and other spells.
Off in another direction, Hugh spotted a bonefire explosion, and couldn’t help but smile.
“Did you say something?” Hugh asked. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
Godrick shook his head. “Ah’ve just been watchin’ the city.”
Hugh’s spellbook gave them both a weird look.
“Though, now that yeh mention it, ah don’t think ah’ve seen yeh use that crystal floatin’ over yer shoulder in combat at all.”
“I haven’t really needed to. Starbolts are just so much more effective. I’m holding this and my sling back for when I run out of stellar mana.”
“So why are yeh still keepin’ it hoverin’ over yer shoulder most of the time?” Godrick asked.
Hugh grinned. “Alustin’s modular paper wards gave me an idea for a new project. I’m pretty excited for it.”
“Can ah get a hint?”
Hugh just shook his head, and the two of them watched the city for a moment longer.
“City’s phasin’ again,” Godrick commented.
“At least it’ll get us out of the rain,” Hugh muttered.
The phasing event went far more quickly this time. There were quite a few lights this time— he could see Havathi mages scattered across the ruined city, lighting up glow crystals and light cantrips one by one. He could see the lake water splashed across the ruins begin to light up in the darkness. He could see something going on over by the Exile Splinter, but he couldn’t tell what it was. Fairly close by, he could see a familiar burning dagger.
“So I have good news and bad news,” Hugh said.
“Ah feel like ah should ask about the bad news first, since Talia’s not here ta’ do it,” Godrick said.
