by V. St. Clair
“Then it doesn’t really matter that we finally know what has been driving Aleric’s motives all this time,” Master Reede frowned. “Aside from assuaging our personal curiosity, we’re no closer to getting through his barriers than we were before.”
Asher surprised them all by saying, “Hayden’s helped us there as well. He’s identified what the impenetrable wall of magic is made of, which is more than we’ve been able to manage.”
Now the level of interest in the room was palpable, and Zane felt a surge of hope flare up inside him.
Maybe we’ll be able to save him after all…
“Well don’t keep us in suspense,” Kilgore said with his usual gruff tone. “What is the blasted thing made of?”
“It’s a light curtain,” Asher responded, for all the world like it explained everything. Zane waited for the others to say something like, “Of course!” or, “That was my next guess!” but instead the group seemed to share in his confusion.
“A light curtain…” Asher repeated, as though not sure everyone else had heard him properly. “You know…a curtain of light…”
“We’re not all prism-users, Masters,” Reede said flatly. “Most of us don’t deal in light magic.”
“Okay, maybe I should back up a few steps,” the Prism Master tried again. “You all do know that our eyes’ ability to receive and interpret light is what allows us to see…”
“We’re not idiots, Asher,” Willow interrupted, mildly annoyed.
“You told me to dumb it down.”
“Dumb it down less,” the Master of Wands said through clenched teeth.
It was Master Laurren who explained, for some reason.
“Prism-users work their magic exclusively through light, as you all are well aware—translating alignments and arrays is the bread and butter of Prisms. Without the ability to distinguish colors, a Prime Trifecta would look the same as a Broad Triple. The other majors use other conduits to exert magic on the world, but in an indirect way you also rely on light perception for most of it.”
Zane was surprised to find that the Master of Abnormal Magic had a thorough knowledge of prism-based magic, which caused him to wonder about how Laurren came to be the Master of Abnormal Magic, when surely he must have had other skills within the major arcana. For all Zane knew, the man could have also been a prism-user, though that hardly made sense, or else he’d still wear a circlet.
“Hayden says that Aleric has created a barrier of light around the compound,” Asher took it up from there, “using a myriad of variously-distorted prisms to maintain it. It explains why I wasn’t able to tell it was a light curtain of some sort on my own—if he’s using distorted prisms then it wouldn’t look like anything Kiresa and I have ever seen before.”
Zane couldn’t help but note the admiring note in the Prism Master’s voice, like he was giving his old friend points for cleverness.
“If it’s something that only affects prism-users though,” Kilgore asked, “why can’t the rest of us break it down or simply walk through it?”
It wasn’t the first time the others had speculated at what would happen if one of them attempted to simply pass through whatever barrier there was, just to see what would happen. Asher had been able to convince them that while he had no idea what magic was on the place, he was positive that Aleric would ensure it killed whoever tried passing through it.
“Oh you would certainly die,” Asher said easily. “I was right about that much, even not knowing what we were facing until now. It doesn’t matter whether you can use prisms or not,” he paused while Master Laurren walked unobtrusively closer and gestured for him to pass over Hayden’s crumpled letter. Asher hesitated for a fraction of a second before coming to a snap decision and handing it to his colleague, who smoothed it out and began to read it silently.
“The very fact that your brain can interpret light and color properly guarantees that the curtain would work against you,” he finished answering Kilgore’s question. “Hayden says that he saw someone die horribly attempting to pass through it—someone non-magical, which means that his spell can pass through either set of Foci: the magical conduits or the eyes.”
“And what exactly happens to someone who gets hit with this light curtain?” Oliver asked skeptically.
“From the sound of it, it gives you a severe dose of light-sickness. It overwhelms the part of your brain that registers colors and burns you up.”
“So we have to send someone both non-magical and blind if we wanted to pass through that particular barrier,” Willow acknowledged with a frown. “Which would be effectively sending them to their death as soon as they encountered Aleric on the other side, assuming the rest of the defenses didn’t prevent them from crossing through.”
Asher nodded to concede the point.
“I hadn’t worked out how to get past that little wrinkle just yet,” he admitted. “Knowing what it is, Kiresa and I can probably come up with some spells to bring it down in a matter of days, but that still leaves us with a big problem. If the light curtain can only be brought down from both sides at once—and Hayden believes that it will need to be—then we would need someone magical on the inside working the counterspells at the same time as we are, and we have no way to coordinate with Hayden.”
“We don’t even know if he’s free to move about on his own or if Aleric is keeping a close eye on him,” Master Graus put in. “We have to assume that he only has the one prism you sent him, and with Bonk chained, he’s going to need to use it to defend himself, especially at the speed at which he can burn through a mastery-level prism.”
“I know,” Asher nodded. “As I said, even if Kiresa and I can work out some sort of counterspell—which I am cautiously optimistic about now that we know what to look for—there’s still that minor hurdle to overcome.”
“Hardly a minor hurdle,” Kilgore rolled his eyes.
“Well, we either need to find a way to get our people inside to bring down the light curtain, or we need to work on getting Hayden more prisms and instructions on when, where, and how to use them.”
“And we only have a few weeks, at best, to figure it all out before Hayden gets the life ripped out of him,” Tess pointed out softly, staring off into space as she spoke. “Or none of this means anything.”
Master Potts said, “Agreed. If we wait too long, Aleric will be effectively invincible and we’ll never manage to bring him down.”
That isn’t what she meant, Zane thought with a glance at Tess. She meant that Hayden will be dead and nothing else will matter.
“First things first,” Master Willow interjected. “Asher, you need to seek out Kiresa and anyone else who might be able to help you figure out how to breach the light curtain.”
“I’ll do that as soon as we finish here,” Asher nodded.
Master Laurren handed him back the letter from Hayden, which Asher crumpled again and stuffed into his pocket without offering anyone else the chance to read it. Zane noticed how Tess’s eyes followed its trajectory and seemed to stay fixated on the pocket of Asher’s Mastery robes even after it vanished from sight, but she didn’t ask to read its contents.
Asher and Laurren exchanged a look that could have meant anything, and Zane began to wonder if there was something in that letter that the Prism Master was holding back about, but whatever it was, Laurren didn’t call attention to it by asking. Instead, he walked calmly over to the window where Slasher was still perched, standing beside the dragonling and staring out across the grounds as he seemed to process whatever he had just read.
“Still seems like a wasted effort if we can’t get someone from inside the Frost compound to work the spells at the same time as Asher on the outside,” Master Potts observed, and the room fell silent.
For about five minutes they all stood there, not speaking, each absorbed in deep thought about how they might circumvent the insurmountable problem before them. Zane, who knew much less magic than the Masters, felt especially useless as he stood around
watching the others, trying to look pensive but unable to think of anything helpful. He glanced at Tess and saw that she also appeared lost in thought, though he suspected she was dwelling on thoughts of Hayden and of how little time he had left to live if they couldn’t find a way to get to him soon, rather than on ways to solve an unsolvable problem.
Just when Zane’s legs were beginning to get tired of all this standing in place and he was wondering whether it was okay for him to move to a chair, the most exhilarating and terrifying thing imaginable happened.
Asher and Laurren both snapped back into focus and said, “I have an idea!” from opposite ends of the room in perfect unison.
Every other face in the room mirrored the thought that flashed through Zane’s mind.
We’re all going to die…
20
Bending and Breaking
The morning after his strange heart-to-heart talk with his father, Hayden woke up later than usual and spent a long time just lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. He wondered how much of the night before his father remembered by now, or if the moment had ended as soon as he’d left, never to be thought of again by the Dark Prism.
If only I could have said the right thing to reach him, maybe I could have talked my way out of here…
There were moments when he had felt so close to success, so sure that he was finally about to breach the wall of distortion surrounding the man’s brain and actually get through to him that he was on the wrong path and needed to stop.
I wonder how many times Asher felt that way before he finally realized there was nothing to do but kill him.
Hayden frowned thoughtfully, thinking back to his letter and wondering if he had put everything that needed to be said into it. As much time as he had spent drafting it, he still had nightmares that he left out some crucial piece of information—like the existence of the light curtain, or that his father was currently operating without his entire Source available to him.
Not that it mattered, at this point. The letter was gone, and though he had asked Bonk whether it would be possible to call Slasher back in the future to send and receive more messages, his familiar had made it quite clear that that option was not on the table.
His thoughts strayed to Tess. Would she be angry with him because he didn’t write to her when he had the chance? He had considered sending a note to her along with the longer, more informative one to Asher, but hadn’t been able to think of what he would say. A farewell would only make her angry because he would be accepting death, and “See you soon!” seemed way too optimistic, knowing what he knew of the days to come. Since he couldn’t very well lie to her, and the truth was too unpleasant to bear, in the end he had decided that it was best not to say anything at all.
Once they find a way to stop my father, at least she’ll be free. She won’t have to think about anyone with the last name Frost ever again, or the devastation we seem to bring upon her life.
That was a depressing thought—that Tess might be better off without him in her life. He tried to imagine what the future might hold for her. She would probably marry and have children—maybe with Conner, now that Hayden was removed as competition. They’d have a nice house in the country, and Conner would go to work doing something perfectly normal, like making mage-lamps or fixing broken carriage axels with magic, nothing dangerous that was likely to get him killed—like monster-hunting. The thought made Hayden quietly furious and propelled him out of bed.
“I’m not dead yet,” he growled to Bonk, who flapped his wings as though to say, “That’s the spirit!”
Hayden dressed quickly and made his way towards the library to do more research, determined to do his very best to find a way out of here before his time was up. He ignored the growling of his stomach, resigned to the fact that he had missed breakfast.
He strode into the library, half-expecting to find that his father had ripped the pages out of every book in the room and burned them one-by-one the night before. For all he knew, the man had done it on purpose to deprive Hayden of the chance to find the knowledge he needed to escape.
Fortunately his fears were baseless; there were plenty of books left in the library. Strangely, the only thing visibly missing from the workroom was the Dark Prism.
Hayden stopped at the threshold in surprise, trying to recall if he had ever really been in here without his father before. Usually he kept the double doors locked when he wasn’t in here, probably so that Hayden couldn’t wander around and mess with his stuff.
Wondering if it was a trap of some sort, Hayden moved inside and said, “Sir? Are you in here?” looking around the room to make sure he hadn’t missed his father crouching behind a bookshelf or something. Then again, it was hard to imagine the great and fearsome Aleric Frost doing anything as mundane as hiding behind a bookshelf for the soul purpose of testing Hayden. He usually regarded his only son with little more respect than a hat rack.
Convinced that he really was alone in the room, Hayden hurried over to his father’s worktable and began to scan his notes, taking care not to touch any of the pages. His father was perceptive enough to notice if anything was out of place, and the only way to truly make sure that didn’t happen was not to touch anything at all.
A few prisms were arranged neatly on the far end of the table, and Hayden did risk future punishment by handling these. He picked them up one at a time, careful to touch only the edges and holding each up in front of the light from the windows to see if it was useable. Unfortunately his father hadn’t been lying when he said that they all had varying levels of distortion, even the mastery-level orange prism, which was a shame because he had never actually looked through a mastery-level orange prism before until now and would have been interested to see what alignments it had.
He returned the prisms to their places on the table, hoping his father didn’t notice or care that he had handled them. He also realized that there were a lot fewer prisms here than there had been when he first arrived at the Frost house.
He’s probably had to replace a few of the ones that are maintaining the light barrier around this place, especially since Jack activated it and probably consumed a lot of the prisms’ magic. It must take a huge bite out of a prism to force that much light through a person’s mind.
He turned to the notes again, scanning them without really understanding most of it. His father did research in a very different way than Asher, and until recently Hayden hadn’t realized how much personal preferences and style mattered in research. Then there was the fact that his father was working with alignments and colors that were so unnatural Hayden could barely look at the colored pencil sketches without wanting to hurl, let alone understand how they were being used. His written notes were hardly more helpful, as he used a form of shorthand that only he understood clearly, and only wrote one or two words at a time, just enough to prompt his memory if he forgot something. It was like trying to read a book where only one word on each line was visible.
Well, that was a waste.
Hayden moved away from the workstation before his father could come in and catch him spying, because he didn’t feel like getting strangled for no good reason this morning. He contemplated searching the library for a promising-looking title and sitting down to read like he did every other day during his captivity, but then he realized that there was a chance his father had left the property entirely, and that this might be a good time to search the house and the grounds in more detail for ways to escape.
Wishing he hadn’t wasted time in bed feeling sorry for himself, Hayden turned and hurried out of the library, walking briskly down the second floor corridor and slowing only to peek into the various rooms he passed to make sure his father wasn’t in any of them before continuing down the main stairwell to the ground level.
He was considering which end of the main level to search first when he heard an alarming sound from outside—a sort of screeching that seemed vaguely familiar and made his blood run cold.
Hayden won
dered briefly whether it was worth running back upstairs and getting his prism, just in case he needed to fight off anything perilous, but then realized that his father probably wouldn’t go to the effort of keeping Hayden alive if he was going to be careless enough to let him be eaten by something in the yard.
Trying to hold onto that bolstering thought, he proceeded out the front door and into the front yard. It wasn’t immediately apparent where the noise had come from, as everything looked normal and his father was nowhere to be found.
Maybe I just heard a random monster approaching the barriers around the estate and got worked up over nothing.
Before he could convince himself this was the truth of things, he heard the worrisome screeching again, and this time he realized it was coming from around the side of the house, which explained why he didn’t see anything through the library windows when he was upstairs.
Owing to the size of the property, Hayden had to jog to make decent time in rounding the side of the house and turning towards the back yard. He had just turned the corner to the side of the property when he stopped in his tracks.
Three chimaeras had somehow breached the barriers and made it onto the property, which explained the source of the screeching. They were deceptively small and innocent looking, which meant that they were horrendously dangerous, as the smaller chimaeras were the more powerful. Standing calmly in front of them was the Dark Prism.
Hayden reached reflexively for the circlet he wasn’t wearing, itching to draw down his eyepiece and attack the collective group of them. He was momentarily tempted to call out a warning to his father, but then realized that it would make things a lot simpler for him if the man was eaten by chimaeras. Sure, Hayden would have to avoid them until he could go get his prism and fight them one at a time, but it would still be better than having his father to contend with.
