The truth of the matter was that I simply didn’t know and I was starting to believe I would never know. I wasn’t sure anymore that I would even recognise myself without the fear in my eyes. It was the only feature that remained within me that bore any resemblance to who I had been. I didn’t recognise the cracked and scarred face, nor my hardened and bitter eyes. Even my voice had turned into a harsh rasping whisper. I would be all but unrecognisable to those who had known me as a child. But the fear, yes that was mine. In that fear I could finally see myself. I had nothing left of myself but my fear. Where had things gone so wrong?
I closed my eyes and moved away from the mirror. My reflection contained no answers, merely condemnation, and I had had enough of that. I had a whole world for that - a broken, desolate and destroyed world. A small tremor shook through my arms and I gripped my hands around the basin until it passed. They were happening more often now. I wasn’t sure if the tremors were a product of my injuries or something else, but they were becoming more common.
In my last fight with Victor, he had completely destroyed me, including fracturing my skull, caving in my chest, and breaking almost all the bones in my arms and legs. Three scars ran across the left side of my face where my head had been crushed. The doctors had told me I was lucky to be alive, but I didn’t feel lucky. No, I felt that Victor had intentionally left me alive to suffer. He had humbled me intentionally, knowing exactly how far he could hurt me without killing me. There was no other explanation. I don’t believe in luck - If Victor had meant to kill me, I would be dead. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was why he had left me alive. He normally wasn’t one to gloat in the suffering his victims. I didn’t understand Why I was still alive and that scared me. It made no sense. He should have killed me. I knew him enough to trust in that. So why hadn’t he?
Another tremor shook my hand as the fear set in again. I thought I had the tremors under control, but clearly they weren’t. They only came upon me when I relived my battle in Melbourne. My memories of the event were sketchy at best. I mostly just remembered the pain. I had been a fool. I was nothing more than a bug to him then, and he had swatted me with righteous fury. He had shown me just how much more I had to learn. He hadn’t just defeated me - he had destroyed me.
I had thought that defeating Marcus meant that Victor, too, would fall beneath me. I should have known better. After all, even Marcus had determined he would need six of our kind to defeat his former master. What arrogance to think I would be sufficient where six had failed? It took several minutes until the fit passed. I turned away and left my reflection of my fears in the mirror. It would be there waiting for me when I returned. I knew this, it always was.
* * * * * *
“Report,” I ordered crisply as I stormed into the command centre. Soldiers on either side of me stood to attention as I brushed past them. I could see them glance nervously as they saw my feet glide over the floor without seeming to move. I ignored them. My senior officer glanced up at my entrance without drawing to attention or saluting. That was fine. I never expected such displays from my subordinates. I was no soldier and had no need for such ceremony. They did what I asked them, that was enough.
“Scouts report an increase of activity in sector twelve,” he grunted with a wry grin. Marcellus had been my senior officer now for five years. He had served me well and had been promoted when my last senior officer had been killed in action. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but Marcellus had proved competent and loyal. He did the job well.
“I thought we had previously cleared that area,” I rumbled.
“We thought we had,” Marcellus commented. “There must have been bunkers or an underground complex we missed.”
“How many?” I grunted, indicating the insurgents.
“Preliminary reports indicate only a few,” Marcellus responded quickly.
“Any mages?”
“Our scouts returned, didn’t they?” Marcellus grinned in way of answer.
I nodded grimly.
We had been chasing this group for approximately six months now. When the mage wars had broken out, small splinter groups of insurgents had seen their chance to grab power. Most allied or were quickly dominated by mages and turned into local muscle. This particular group was working with Killian Voll. He led the largest contingent of enemy mages and was probably just as responsible as I for this whole war. I had been chasing him for six years, and he had managed to elude me completely. He had been one of the more outspoken mages towards the start of the war, but I hadn’t heard anything from him in years. It was possible he was already dead. He could have easily been dispatched in any number of mage battles in the last few years, but I didn’t think so. Killian was the most probable leader of our enemies, and I doubted that he’d simply disappear into the night. I actually had no idea how many of my kind remained. We didn’t exactly claim credit when we killed one of our own. It was merely something that needed to be done.
Eventually the fighting coalesced into two sides as the fighting intensified. Some, like myself and others that worked for allied forces, did so because we were attempting to bring about peace. I knew such concepts as peace was a lie. That we couldn’t have peace until our kind were swept from the world, but I couldn’t do that alone, at least not yet, so I worked with other mages. Our foes banded together because they had no choice, but there wasn’t any real loyalty among them. They would turn on each other if the opportunity arose. It was as if we as a collective species had gone insane. We no longer considered ourselves human and we had turned on each other and torn each other to pieces. It was sickening. I had seen mages in the midst of savage battles with each other only to gang up and turn on me when I arrived, as I was the more powerful threat. We were truly sick and we no longer deserved our place on the planet. This was a fact and it was a goal I was going to realise.
It wouldn’t be easy. As we had turned on each other, greater and greater feats of Mana were required to overcome our foes. The victors of each fight became more powerful through contests, and the survivors were very powerful indeed. Each battle led to an increase in power, each victory led to a new threshold of control that could then be turned upon the next target. At first the battles had been fairly containable; however, this had quickly spiralled out of control. The last mage I had fought had been able to bring down buildings with a wave of his fist. When we fought now, countless others paid the price. As most of the fighting took place in cities, our battles were claiming many thousands of casualties each time we met, and yet the fighting continued. It would keep going, until there was only one side left and even then, I suspected we would simply turn on each other. I knew I would.
I had heard no word of my former master in this time, but I assumed he was in hiding. His plans had been smashed to pieces by Marcus Devereaux. The mad man who had started all this, although to be fair I don’t think he had envisioned this hell hole of a world as the outcome. He had simply attempted to overthrow the monster that had been Victor and set himself up in his place. He could not have seen that others of our kind would use the conflict as an opportunity for themselves. He had been a fool, and we had all payed the price. Fool though he was, he could have perhaps prevented this; unfortunately I had killed Marcus in the same battle he had attempted to destroy Victor.
With Victor discredited, Marcus and the Primea dead, there was no one able to reign in the more destructive instincts of our kind. I cannot imagine the carnage that had been wrought the first six months of our war. I had been horribly injured in my fight with Victor and had been moved to a safe location. I had been spared the massacre of our kind as the old and weak had been hunted down and destroyed by the strong. I had been protected from the predations of our kind on the world. I had seen video clips of atrocities performed by mages who had lost their humanity. Many claimed to be gods. But when gods fight, it is the common man who suffers.
I was now tearing across what had once been rural United States searching for my kind with
the intention of bringing them to justice. This was a fool’s errand; I no longer sought to capture them. There was no point - anyone capable of being captured wasn’t a problem. The directive of my orders aside, I never captured anything anyway. That wouldn’t serve my purposes.
The fighting here was long over, but the damage was done. The land war that preceded us was the first to be fought on American soil since the Civil War and it had torn the country a new one. I didn’t much care for the land war and at one point I thought it likely we were going to lose. They had swept us out of Europe, across the Atlantic and across the States. Yes, we were losing, but somehow we didn’t. Our enemies must have overstretched their reach because they crumbled about a year ago. We began to push back on all fronts and we reclaimed lost territory. What remained was nothing more than a mop-up job. The enemy soldiers weren’t much of a problem. No, the real problem were the Mages. Although the war was all but over, my kind didn’t exactly follow the rules, and unchecked they could cause chaos. The real problem was finding all of them before they found us.
Marcellus would return with his report once this next den of insurgents was cleaned out. We had perfected this technique through years of practise. The team would go in. I would remain behind. Should a mage be present, I would be brought in to deal with them. Should a mage attempt to flee the site, I would stop them. Marcellus knew his team was nothing more than bait for the wolf, but as bait goes he was very crafty and cunning bait. He wouldn’t be caught easily; he knew the risks and knew when the odds weren’t in his favour. That was why he had survived for so long. All I had to do was wait and see what quarry my bait caught.
* * * * * *
“It was just a small group this time,” Marcellus reported back, “mostly non-combatants.”
This was becoming more common every time the team went out. Large portions of society had been displaced during the invasion. Cities seemed to be the preferred sites for mage battles and this made them horribly unsafe for everyone else. As the population was displaced from the urban centres, they swarmed out into rural areas. Farms and small towns were ill-equipped to deal with the influx of people and had quickly fallen prey to chaos. Small communities turned into armed camps as they fought to keep control of their land and property. Riots and even small mundane battles had been fought over control of resources that up until recently would have been worth little. Those who remained in the cities fared no better. Order collapsed pretty quickly as looting and rioting spread throughout the cities and people were pushed out into the suburbs and outskirts of each city.
Marcellus’s report was unnecessary. I had used my powers to observe the team in their mission. I knew exactly what they had encountered and how they had progressed, but I didn’t want them to know this. They didn’t need to know the extent of my powers. Their mission had gone exactly as planned, but I wasn’t surprised - this wasn’t the first time we had done this. We would send scouts out to stir up any resistance; should we find something, a more prepared team would be sent in to nullify matters. The only people in any serious danger were the scouts; we had about a two to three ratio of fatalities. Unfortunately there was no other way - if I used my powers to search an area there was a very good chance they would be spotted by enemy mages and a direct fight would ensue and people would die anyway.
I trailed my finger along a scar on the left side of my face as I pondered what to do next. I had had high hopes that we would have stirred up mage activity in this mission. We had been following the activities of a mage known as Gregory Tibus, who had been considered a senior compatriot of Voll. I had hoped that finding Tibus would lead us to Voll. But this looked like a another dead end.
Tibus was Greek born. I hadn’t heard much of him from before the uprising. I had heard that he had allied himself with Victor, but that had obviously changed. Most mages seemed to be out for themselves now, trying to carve up the world into little kingdoms of power, especially now that the fighting had died down. In some ways the fighting between our kind was more vicious than it had ever been.
“What’s next?” Marcellus grunted. “This was obviously a waste.”
I inwardly cursed. Marcellus was right. This had been a waste of time. Our scouts had found nothing and I concluded that no mages had been present in the sector. Unfortunately, in this instance I was wrong. I didn’t find out about the mistake until several seconds later, until the distinctive sound of a teleportation brought me spinning around in surprise. I hadn’t sensed a thread large enough to contain a mage anywhere in the vicinity. It was unusually bold of someone to teleport in like this. If I had caught the teleportation thread mid-stream, I could have easily scrambled the incoming mage, scattering them across a wide area. My shield sprang around me as I expected a mage to launch an attack directly at me. But it was only a small box that had been teleported into the room. It didn’t look dangerous, but I knew it for what it was. It was a bomb.
I cursed inwardly. This gave me two options. I could remove the bomb before it detonated, or I could follow the scry thread that had left it here. I only had a few seconds before the thread would dissipate to the point that I could no longer track it.
I chose the second option.
I closed my eyes and sent out my own scry thread. It was indeed a fortunate day for me. I had been quick enough to see the disappearing scry thread as it arched across the horizon. Scry threads are normally difficult to see, but this one had been constructed by a poorly educated mage. This wasn’t to say it wasn’t powerful, it was it just wasn’t built very well. It was sloppy and that made it all the easier to track.
My own thread trailed along after it, following it back to its owner. I had no idea if the other mage knew he was leading me back to his base. It took several more seconds before a loud explosion of sound and pressure hit me. My shield absorbed the impact easily, and I had become disciplined enough not to let something as trivial as an explosion distract me from my arts. The scry thread led me past sector twelve and my heart sank as I realised where the thread was heading.
New Haven.
New Haven was a settlement that had sprung up after the main war had spread further south. It was mostly made up of refugees who had fled from the intense fighting to the east in cities such as Chicago and New York. They had had a hard journey as they crossed the great American wasteland. Untold thousands would have died on the journey, with enemy forces on their tails. They must have thought that once they reached here they would be safe. They had been told that Seattle was still standing and in our control. While this was true, cities just weren’t safe anymore. Dozens of small camps were set up in the national parks on the east coast as people fled the cities.
New Haven had so far managed to elude becoming a target, but it had really only been a matter of time. A lot of people had moved there after their homes and lives had burned down around them. It was usually small groups of insurgents who took control of these camps, trying to scavenge or steal any medical or relief supplies these settlements received. It wasn’t usually our enemies though.
I gritted my teeth as I realised these people would probably go through it all again. We would not be able to displace this mage without massive collateral damage. I didn’t dare go close enough to the settlement to determine which mage had decided it was time for me to die. Knowing where he was would be enough for further action to be taken. Unlike his thread, my scry thread was well formed and would be difficult to track. They would never know I had followed them. I would send a team of soldiers in later and I would be leading them. This of course assumed that anyone had survived the bombing. I blinked as my thread disappeared across the horizon and back to my body.
I immediately coughed as I glanced around my command centre. It had been completely devastated. Marcellus was attempting to free someone from under a chunk of concrete that had fallen from the roof. I quickly counted at least five dead and numerous wounded. Marcellus didn’t seem to be that badly burned, but others hadn’t fared so well. With a flick
of my wrist I raised the slab of concrete to allow Marcellus to free the fallen soldier. Marcellus glanced at me with a strange look of both thanks and anger. He knew I could have prevented this and had chosen not to. Removing the slab had done little; the solder was already dead, probably killed instantly in the blast.
“Did you find him?” Marcellus breathed out as he let the soldier fall to the ground.
I nodded briefly. “Let’s make sure he pays due price for this.”
“Teleporting bombs.” Marcellus sighed. “That’s a new one.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Clean up this mess,” I ordered curtly.
“Yes, sir.”
I didn’t wait around to see if he followed my orders. I didn’t particularly want to be around for the clean-up either. Four men had died because of my decision to pursue the Mana thread, and there were those amongst my men who knew I could have prevented it. There would be bloody payment required for this. I may have been partly culpable in allowing this to happen, but I wasn’t the one responsible.
Marcellus reported that the command centre had been restored several hours later. I ordered him to assemble a team. We would need to move fast if we were to catch this mage before they fled. I hadn’t seen any follow up scry threads, but had they attempted to survey the results of their bombing they would have known it was largely unsuccessful. They would either continue to attack or flee. Either way, we needed to move fast. We were running out of time.
Marcellus assembled the team in record time. I had a feeling there had been many volunteers to make this mage suffer for their actions. I marched out into the clearing where the small number of soldiers had assembled.
“All accounted for,” Marcellus reported crisply. I nodded briefly as I glanced at the soldiers in front of me.
Mage Emergence Page 2
