by John Bierce
“Well, that’s actually the good news,” Hugh said. “I see Talia, and she’s not too far off. Heading this way, too.”
“And the bad news?” Godrick asked.
“I don’t see your dad,” Hugh said. “I don’t think he phased with the city.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
No Ground to Stand On
Artur lifted his hammer above him just before the lightning struck. He couldn’t even count how many bolts the storm struck it with at once, but he felt the impacts even tucked away into the depths of his armor.
When it stopped, his hammer had huge molten scars across its surface, forming branching webs that immediately reminded him of Sabae’s scars. Artur imagined it was probably glowing bright enough to light up the lake around him.
Through his dustcloud, Artur could feel what remained of the Havathi fliers darting around as though drunk, blinded by the absurd onslaught of lightning. None of them appeared to have been struck, all the lightning in the area having been attracted to Artur’s hammer.
Artur smiled. He could easily knock a few more out of the sky while they were dazed.
Wait. No. He could knock all of them out of the sky.
Artur assembled a modified blacksmith’s spell in his mind’s eye as he reared back to swing his hammer. The spellform barely fit into his mind’s eye, considering the sheer size and complexity of his linked armor spellforms, along with his hammer spellform and the breathless aura. His armor at its full size was the single largest and most complex active spellform Artur knew of, and neither of the other two spellforms was particularly simple or compact. The blacksmith’s spell, on the other hand, definitely was both simple and compact.
Artur didn’t bother to aim his hammer, he just swung it as hard as he could in a great circle. It actually hit one of the fliers out of the sky, but that was just an unintentional bonus.
Artur pumped iron mana into the spellform. It was originally designed to keep semi-molten iron together as blacksmiths pounded on it, but it was a relatively easy modification to reverse that effect.
His hammer left a trail of immense, red hot iron droplets in the air behind it.
Artur dropped the first spellform and formed another, and the molten iron began to spin in a great circle around him, faster and faster. In seconds, the circle shifted into a cyclone, stretching down to the lake and up into the air.
After a few seconds more, Artur released the second spellform, and the cyclone of molten iron exploded outward.
When he formed a new dust cloud, there wasn’t a flier left in the sky.
Sabae wasn’t exactly sure how she managed to avoid getting hit by any of the lightning. Just like all the rest of her grandmother’s storms they’d passed through this summer, this one had saved up all its lightning to unleash all at once, and the entire lake was lit up by the flash. The only reason she wasn’t blinded was the anti-glare cantrip Hugh had taught them.
It was rapidly becoming her favorite cantrip.
She wasn’t entirely sure how she survived her landing, either. She repeatedly windjumped upwards as she dropped, bringing her speed down to almost nothing, but her wind armor still collapsed entirely when she hit the water.
She also wasn’t sure how her shield stayed stuck to her back, but she didn’t complain.
While she spun up water armor around herself, she took a moment to simply watch the cyclone of what appeared to be molten iron spinning around Artur. It lit up the lake and the storm for hundreds of feet in every direction in a baleful, angry red.
There was no way he couldn’t seize the title of being a great power for himself if he wanted to. It wasn’t quite up to the scale of power she’d seen from Indris or her grandmother, but it more than rivaled some minor liches or dragons that lay claim to the title.
Her musings were interrupted rather abruptly when the iron cyclone detonated, and she found herself having to dodge a rain of molten iron. Some of the droplets were bigger than she was, and hit the water in massive explosions of steam.
The instant the rain of iron had stopped, Sabae blasted forwards, launching herself in and out of the water like a dolphin.
It took her less than a minute to reach Artur’s motionless armor, but she desperately hoped it was in time to warn him of the dragons.
Alustin’s sabre took Forgeheart’s wielder in the chest before anyone else even realized he’d left the confines of the ward.
When you were a paper mage, it was generally a good policy to take out fire mages first.
Alustin activated his sabre’s echo enchantment as he danced through the falling sheets of glyph paper. He might be out of mana, but his sabre’s artificial mana reservoirs were entirely full. Faintly glowing phantasmal copies of his blade lingered in its path, which Alustin was careful not to intersect— they’d cut him just as readily as they would anyone else.
Alustin didn’t need to look to dodge the paper— he was keeping track of each and every one with his paper affinity.
Springcloak’s vines and flowers shot towards him, then collapsed to the ground harmlessly as a gently wafting sheet of paper slid through the warlock’s neck without resistance.
A screaming Marrowstaff swung her staff of bone one-handed at him. Alustin knew better than to block it directly— Marrowstaff could hit hard enough to break him into pieces. Instead, he only swung his sabre halfway towards the staff, then he dropped and rolled across the ground, careful not to pass through the path of his blade echoes or the falling papers.
Marrowstaff’s blow simply bounced of the floating echo, which promptly dissolved, and Alustin’s sabre was already passing through her leg just below the knee. He was sure she was running mana through her bones now, but that wouldn’t be enough to stop a Helicotan saber, at least this early in the fight.
Of course, a missing leg wouldn’t be enough to stop a powerful bone mage, either.
Alustin didn’t even look back at her, he just ran straight for the Hyphal, who was frantically grabbing falling papers out of the air with her mycelial tendrils. So long as the tendrils avoided the edges of the paper, they could stop them easily, but the paper storm was growing thicker and thicker.
Alustin wove through the descending cloud of paper gracefully, leaving a trail of blade echoes behind him.
To this day, no mage other than the Lord of Bells had figured out how to create that enchantment. The Lord of Bells had been absolutely brilliant, though, and had been one of the only multi-affinity liches on the Ithonian continent.
Amberglow cursed as she tried to get past the blade trail while dodging paper, but Alustin would only need a moment.
Hyphal barely even had time to look at him before his sabre cut through her fungal armor and straight into her chest. His sabre left an echo as he pulled it down and out, and Olstes’s Hyphal went limp, prevented from falling for a moment by the echo it was impaled on.
Alustin ducked under his trail of echo blades as falling papers missed him by inches. Amberglow was already lunging at him, but Alustin dodged back, albeit at the price of taking a cut across his cheek from a sheet of paper. It was shallow, though, and wouldn’t even leave much of a scar.
Amberglow was the perfect weapon for fighting other enchanted weapons. It was significantly weaker than a normal sword in terms of material strength, but when Amberglow struck an enchanted item, it would collapse from amber back into tree-sap, engulfing the other enchantment and nullifying its power.
He ignored the illusion of a lunge Amberglow sent forwards— he could feel several sheets of paper passing through that space. He dodged to the side, instead, and swung his sabre at a precise path near a falling sheet of paper, one that caught the page in the wake of the strike.
There were a lot of tricks to spotting illusions, and Alustin knew each and every one of them. He couldn’t see Amberglow, but he could see the shadows the invisible sword was casting off the falling paper and off its wielder.
Alustin almost pulled a muscle stopping his strike m
idswing, drawing it back just far enough to let an echo form. An invisible Amberglow struck the echo, dispersing it.
The sheet of paper that had been caught up in the wind of Alustin’s strike kept flying forwards, though, and Amberglow’s illusions collapsed as the paper flew straight through the mage’s chest.
Alustin dodged past Amberglow’s falling corpse, leapt over part of his blade trail, then danced forwards through the falling paper back towards Marrowstaff.
She’d grown hideous bone appendages in place of her missing fingers and foot already, and screamed as she lunged at him again. Alustin blocked her strike with another echo, and then started dancing around her.
He couldn’t get in close enough to strike her properly without leaving himself vulnerable to her massive new claws. Several sheets of paper struck her, but they only penetrated her flesh, not her bones this time. The longer a battle went on, the stronger and denser a bone mage’s bones would get. Each cut the paper or his sword made rapidly sealed itself with a mass of bone— after a major battle, a bone mage could end up looking like some hideous living pincushion full of strange bone growths. They generally required massive attention from healers to get back to normal afterward. Apart from Artur, bone mages were among the most dangerous close combat mages out there.
Alustin circled her, dodging and lunging through the storm of paper. At this point, most of the light remaining on the battlefield came from their glyphs.
Then, abruptly, he simply stepped back and smiled as a particularly thick flurry of papers descended towards them. He was easily able to dodge through them, but when Marrowstaff threw herself backwards to dodge, she found herself impaled on at least a half dozen blade echoes.
Alustin had completely surrounded her with a cage of echoes as they sparred.
No less than two dozen sheets of paper cut into her, and by the last one, she clearly wasn’t channeling mana through her bones anymore.
Alustin deactivated his blade’s enchantment, and allowed himself a satisfied smile as he danced off through the cloud of descending paper, and out into the darkness.
Hugh and Godrick were halfway to Talia’s position when one of Grovebringer’s arrows slammed into Godrick’s armor.
Hugh didn’t even notice at first— he heard a loud, inexplicable rumbling noise in the distance, then a sharp cracking noise nearby, and then he felt Godrick tackle him off his feet. Something hot passed just feet overhead, and Hugh felt his hair singe from its passage. The instant the two of them rolled to a stop, Hugh crystallized a ward into the cobblestones around them.
When he stood, he could see the chunk of congealed volcanic ash embedded in the nearby cobbles, and a young oak tree was growing out of the ruins of Godrick’s armor. Godrick’s faceplate and Hailstrike both lay on the cobbles outside the ward, but Hugh used his magic to pull both inside just moments before an arrow struck the ward, then bounced off. It promptly began growing into a yew sapling, lying on its side on the ground.
Beside him, Godrick was already rebuilding a new suit of armor, carefully avoiding pulling stone up that might damage the ward.
Hugh had no idea what the loud rumbling noise might have been, just before the attack by Grovebringer.
One of the Sacred Swordsmen strode out of the darkness. Hugh recognized her from Sabae and Talia’s description as the leader of the Hand they’d met in Zophor.
Qirsad Vain, wielder of Ashspine.
Her white uniform was no longer pristine— it was bloodstained and ripped, and half the bronze ornaments were gone. She was carrying a spear of volcanic stone, riddled with deep spellform cracks. A feverish light emitted from the cracks, and Hugh could somehow feel the heat from here. Volcanic ash leaked steadily from inside it, congealing above her head into another ash ball.
Hugh gulped as he remembered a warning from Kanderon about volcanic ash— it was mostly tiny bits of glass. You did not, under any circumstances, want to breathe it.
Godrick and Hugh’s spellbook seemed equally nervous.
Qirsad raised her hand towards the darkness around them.
“Hold fire,” she said.
She stared at them appraisingly before speaking.
“I assume you saw the ash piles and what was in them, yes?”
Hugh frowned, confused by the question, but nodded.
“Your master did that. I won’t deny that the Ithonian Empire had lost its way in its final years, but the countless innocents of this city did not deserve to die slowly and fearfully, in darkness and cold. Kanderon Crux didn’t even have the mercy to grant them a swift death— and I’m sure she could have found some way to destroy the city quickly and mercifully if she had really tried. Have you ever asked her why she did it, Hugh?”
Hugh just stared, trying not to make it obvious he was setting up more wards below them.
“Maybe she told you it was to bring a swift end to the civil war tearing apart the Ithonian Empire? Only, their fall plunged the continent into chaos for most of a century. Perhaps she told you it was to end their horrifying experiments? Those experiments weren’t nearly so horrifying as what she did here. No, would you like to know why Kanderon Crux did this?”
Hugh opened his mouth to defend Kanderon, then forced himself to focus and not get riled up. Beside him, Godrick was most of the way done with his armor.
“The Ithonian Empire threatened her schemes. No more, no less. Kanderon, more than any other being on this continent, is caught up in the constant feuding of the great game of powers. So long as no one nation grows too powerful, none can threaten Kanderon or her territory. Beyond that, she simply doesn’t care. Kanderon has spent centuries sustaining our endless, bloody, useless system, where the residents of a city don’t know who will be ruling over them from one year to the next. To lack magic in our world is to lack any form of self-determination, and Kanderon, more than any other being, keeps it that way. And you, Hugh Stormward, chose to pact with her.”
Hugh almost lost track of his new wards again, wanting to protest at the way Qirsad was talking about the sphinx.
“There’s been so much debate in Havath about what to do with you. Quite a few of us, including the duarchs, would like to try and turn your friends, especially that little barbarian girl. But you, Stormward… you’re pacted to the biggest monster on the Ithonian continent. For peace’s sake, she literally eats people that displease her! There are dozens of confirmed incidents of her doing so in the past century alone, and we’re sure there are many more. For you, there are only three options. Use you as a hostage against Kanderon, try to find a way to turn you into an involuntary weapon against her through your pact, or kill you.”
The ash ball floating above her head continued to grow. It was already far larger than the one that had missed them.
Hugh started rapidly making adjustments to his wards.
“You might as well quit crafting those wards below the ground,” the Swordsman said. “I can feel them just fine, and they’re not going to cause me much of a problem. Here’s the thing about wards— no matter how clever they are, no matter how well constructed they are, your enemies don’t have to be clever to defeat them. They just need enough power to break through. And funny thing, that. I not only have enough power, but after how many of my comrades-in-arms your wards killed, Stormward, I think I’ve joined ranks with the faction that wants you dead.”
Around them, Hugh could see the stones of the city start to phase again. It shouldn’t interfere with the function of his wards, but now was a really, really bad time for him to be wrong about that.
Qirsad twitched the Ashspine, and the ash ball shot straight towards them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The Right Moment to Strike
Roots started sprouting out of Grovebringer’s arrow the second it struck her left shoulder. Rather than try to yank it out of her wound, Talia purged it with dreamfire as she dodged into a relatively undamaged palace.
The pain from purging the arrow was indescribable, but not i
ndescribable in the sense that it was just too much to handle. No, it was indescribable in the sense that she literally didn’t know how she would be able to describe it to someone else. It was as if childhood memories were boiling inside the wound while feathers took bites out of her flesh, and she could vividly taste the color green.
The arrow poured out of her wound in the shape of what appeared to be dolphins made of olive oil, which splashed apart against the floor. Talia waited until they were done, then pressed her burning dagger against the open wound, hissing against the entirely describable pain.
One nice thing about her tattoos, at least— they might have distorted her magic, but many of their functions still worked as intended. Burns, notably, would eventually heal without even scarring, even without magical healing. All in all, a pretty useful magical tattoo design for a clan of fire mages.
Talia hadn’t even caught her breath when the palace began to shudder. Tree roots began sprouting from the ceiling and walls, ripping through the masonry.
Running back out into the open wasn’t an option, and staying in the palace was an idiotic idea. And she sure wasn’t feeling like running away out of the back.
Talia chose a spot where the ceiling still looked stable enough, and manifested a dreamwasp swarm. Then she began spinning them down in a spiral, cutting a circle as wide as her extended arms into the stone floor.
It took less than a minute before the section of the floor collapsed downward, but rocks were already falling from the ceiling. Talia kept her kinetic anchor dagger suspended in the air above her head just in case, and it proved wise when a block of stone half the size of her torso bounced off it. It drained a huge portion of her bone mana reservoir, but Talia wasn’t complaining.
Once the floor had fallen through, Talia dropped down through the hole, using the kinetic anchor a couple times to slow her fall. She was glad she remembered to hold it in her right hand, but even her uninjured shoulder ached from the jarring stops when she landed on the fallen section of the floor.
