by N. M. Howell
Andie couldn’t even respond. All she could do was stand there and stare at him, her whole life over the past week being unfurled and rewritten. Marvo. Yara. She’d had it all wrong. And poor Marvo had been used as nothing more than a pawn and then disposed of in the most brutal way possible. All to get to her.
“So, you see, the girl is right,” the chancellor said, turning to the crowd. “I am the villain of the story. I did lie and deceive and murder. These ignorant dragonborn may be powerful, but they’re essentially harmless, probably not all that different from yourselves. And I did lure them here with a rather intricate plan in order to have my battalion murder them. And I think I’ll murder you, too. After all, you’re only a few hundred common folk from the city. No one will miss you. You’re going to be slaughtered just like those eight hundred people I killed in the mirror hall.”
The crowd began to panic and turned to escape, but the chancellor’s battalion had slowly been enclosing the entire area while Myamar and Andie had been talking. Now Andie looked around and saw that they were surrounded. She’d expected there to be some kind of opposition waiting, but this was far more than she’d thought possible. The slow-moving, sleek armored men were closing in from all around. The dragonborn warriors tightened their ranks and moved to protect the Queen, but Saeryn waved them away. She wasn’t afraid to fight.
“Whatever happens, do not attack,” she said. “Only defend.”
As if in response to her words, the chancellor clapped his hands and the battalion began their attack. As the first spell hit her defensive shield, Andie could tell that something was wrong. The spell had nearly taken her off of her feet. She knew there was no way a sorcerer’s magic could be so strong, so fierce. She looked around and she could tell by Saeryn’s face that she noticed it, too. All around her the dragonborn were struggling to maintain their defenses. Their shields were giving out faster and their footing was less stable; the closer the men in black came, the tighter the dragonborn had to retreat. Andie and Saeryn were also using some of their power to shield the crowd from any stray spells.
“Something is wrong,” Saeryn said. “They cannot be this strong naturally. It is impossible.”
“It must be the armor,” Andie said, ducking. “Another one of the chancellor’s little ideas. We have to figure out a way to stop them or else defending won’t be enough and this is going to turn into a full-fledged battle. What about the dragons?”
“Perhaps. If it comes down to that. But I want to avoid that as long as possible. Seeing the dragons breathe fire will only frighten the people and the dragon fire is so strong I fear it may injure the innocent.”
Andie began watching their attackers, searching them for weak spots, mistakes, anything that could give them the upper hand. Then she noticed how all the men were facing them directly, their shoulders squared to the dragonborn. They were absolutely refusing to show their sides or backs. Andie curved a spell between two of the attackers and hit one in the side. There was no affect and it only seemed to make the man that much angrier. She aimed another spell and this time purposefully missed by a wide margin, but she caught the spell once it was past the men and brought it down again so that it caught him square in the back. The man lurched forward and collapsed. However, it was only a moment before he regained his feet and resumed the attack. But the secret had been seen.
“That armor is incredibly strong, but it’s vulnerable from the back,” Andie said.
Saeryn nodded and cast a spell that bounced off of the ground and curved, catching a soldier in the back. As he was thrown forward, Saeryn cast again and threw him backwards.
“Curve your spells,” she called out. “But don’t hurt them. Remember who we are.”
Chapter Eighteen
The dragonborn took the Queen’s command and began a fiercer defense. The chancellor didn’t like that. He began to see just how wrong he had been about those people. Still, the dragonborn had their work cut out for them. Saeryn’s command not to hurt the battalion members greatly restricted what the types of spells the dragonborn could do and the battalion was incredibly strong. Andie was struggling to fend the men off, as their attacks just seemed to get harder and harder to defend against. But just when things were beginning to look down and Andie was about to suggest they begin their own attacks, a wonderful thing happened.
The people joined the fight. They began attacking the battalion, fighting alongside the dragonborn. At first, Andie didn’t know what they were doing and she nearly attacked one of the people as they stepped forward, but then she saw how they took up ranks beside the dragonborn and began to defend against the attackers. The battalion was certainly a force to be reckoned with, and the increase in the number of magical attacks against them didn’t seem to daunt them, but it did make a difference. At the very least, it stopped their advance. Not all of the people joined the dragonborn. Some of them remained unconvinced of the lies they had believed their entire lives and took up with the battalion.
Soon, everyone on the mountain was fighting. The air was thick with flying spells that lit the night with their color and energy. Explosions, whistling, and breaks rang through the night as the spells hit home or missed. Only the chancellor remained on the outside of the fight, hiding behind the platform like the coward he would always be.
Andie and Saeryn were fighting back to back and drawing a strength from their proximity to each other. Andie soon realized that they were actually synced and feeding one another through a magical connection that could only be felt between two dragonborn. The fight raged on and on, and some of the civilians from the city proved to be surprisingly powerful casters. But the University’s armor was a formidable thing and the battalion soon figured out what the dragonborn were doing. They closed ranks, tightened, and realigned so that it was nearly impossible to get them in the back. and then they unleashed an attack more vicious and determined than anything Andie had ever encountered. They advanced with a maniacal method, refusing to back down or be swayed by the faces of the people they were attempting to kill.
Andie knew that something needed to be done. The air was growing thick and cloudy with the flying spells, the dust, the stones and earth being blasted high into the air. And the dragons were getting restless. They sensed their riders were in danger and they began to crawl about and circle the confrontation while their mouths began to smoke as the opened their great and terrifying jaws. The situation was quickly spinning into something so dangerous it bound to end in a massive loss of life. Andie began to push herself, to think of something that could stop this before it took a turn for the worst.
“Battalion!” one of the men called. He had a red star on his chest. “Attack formation Delta! Offensive maneuver Zero Hour!”
“What is this?” Saeryn asked.
“I don’t know, but let’s stay close together. I don’t like where this is going.”
The man who had called out the order stepped forward and took off his mask. Andie had been shocked more times than she could count over the last week, but as she saw Tarven’s face for the first time since the night of the battle in the Archives, she couldn’t help but to be shocked again. And, this time, all the way down to her core. From what she could remember, Tarven had been in deep with the University and had failed them one too many times. She always assumed that he was executed shortly after the battle and she never thought she would see him again. She never wanted to. Yet there he was, looking stronger and more menacing than ever. He’d clearly left his plants behind to take up the University’s new armor, as well as the mantle of leader of their battalion. He looked right at Andie.
“It’s been a long time,” he said.
“Not nearly long enough,” Andie replied. “Honestly, I’d kind of hoped you’d died.”
“I almost did, but I’ve been reborn. Remade into something stronger, faster, more powerful. I’m a thousand times better.”
“Well, that’s very cute, Tarven, but I’m in the middle of something right now. I’ll
deal with you later.”
“Tarven is gone. My name is Ashur, taken from the transformation of the flowers that killed a room full of useless diplomats and impotent demagogues. And, as it happens, I think you’ll deal with me now. Form!”
The battalion took its stance in a single, totally uniform movement.
“Mount!”
The battalion interlocked, arms around shoulders to create an unbroken chain. They also grabbed something on each other’s backs and turned. Blue veins began to run through their armor and the temperature within the massive circle of soldiers began to plummet. Simultaneously, black tendrils of smoke stretched forth toward the dragonborn and Andie began to feel herself grow week. It was like she hadn’t seen the sun in days, weeks, months. The tendrils of smoke were leeching the energy of the sun directly from their bodies.
“Begin!” Ashur shouted.
All at once an almost blinding blue light rose up from the battalion as the soldiers began to chant. The cold and the tendrils were still draining the dragonborn and it was a moment before anyone could distance themselves from their own pain to pay attention to what was happening. Saeryn was the first to realize. She spoke in a whisper.
“Eitilt.”
“The time curse,” Andie finished, as they both looked up to the sky.
The wave of blue light from all sides met in the sky above them and merged, creating a dome that covered all of the dragonborn. Terror was quickly passing through the dragonborn and even the fiercest of the warriors looked panicked. Andie was afraid, too, but she was almost too concerned with trying to find a way out to notice her own fear. Almost. Just when she thought the situation couldn’t get any worse, they heard a great rumbling sound. They looked up again and a tear was opening above them. It wasn’t like the portal Andie had saved the dragonborn from. In fact, now that she saw it with her own eyes, she remembered that she’d seen it briefly, for less than a second, when she had been sent to the future. But as she looked up into the tear she could see something. A great, rolling cloud of death coming across the land. It was the same cloud that had almost killed the dragonborn before Andie pulled them out. They weren’t sending them to the future, they were sending them back to the moment before the cloud hit. They would be killed instantly.
And then the panic really began to spread, not merely among the dragonborn who had experienced this before and knew exactly what would happen if they got taken up, but also among the civilians who were trapped in the dome and had no idea whatsoever what was going on. Even Saeryn, who had always been calm and elegant under pressure, was struggling to maintain her peace. Andie wanted so badly to resolve it the way Saeryn wanted, to show the people through sheer force of will that the dragonborn did not pose a threat, but the time for peace was over.
“Saeryn, we can’t do this,” Andie said, on her knees from cold and the smoke. “Your way won’t work. They’re too strong and too ruthless. If we don’t fight back, we’re never going home again.”
Saeryn turned to Andie and looked in her eyes.
“Saeryn, please. You were right. Our duty is to our people and right now that duty is to make it back home to them. We tried to reason with them, but it’s over. At least now the people have seen what the University truly is. Now we don’t need to convince them. We need to save them.”
Saeryn looked around at her warriors, her people. She also gazed around at the civilians who had come over to stand with them. They would all be dead in minutes. She turned back to Andie.
“Then let us do it your way.”
She turned back to face their attackers and took a deep breath. As she exhaled, she pushed a massive blast of hot, magenta magic out. The chain of soldiers stumbled and one of them slipped. The tear above them shrunk a little.
“Attack the battalion!” Saeryn commanded.
With that the dragonborn rose to their feet again and began to mount an attack. The soldiers were strong and they were well trained, but the dragonborn were from a time when everything was decided by battle and blood. As they moved out to cast at closer range the battalion began to retreat, the chain began to break as they were forced to defend themselves.
Andie and her people fought through the cold, the smoke, the pull of the space-time tear in the sky above them. They did not cast at any civilians, but their mercy toward the battalion was at an end. Soon the soldiers had quit Eitilt and were fighting to defend themselves on a personal level. The smoke and the cold also retreated. Yet Saeryn was not satisfied by this. She moved back to stand in the middle of her people and once there she threw her arms up into the air and began to radiate warm and rejuvenating light, as golden as the morning sun. As she did so, Andie and the dragonborn began to fill with energy, power. Saeryn was sacrificing her own power to refuel her people.
“Protect the Queen at all costs!” Andie yelled.
Some of the dragonborn warriors formed a tight circle around Saeryn to shield her from any attack. Before long all the civilians were fighting alongside the dragonborn, finally convinced of their innocence. The front of the University had turned into an all-out warzone—makeshift weapons had appeared and people were fighting in brutal hand-to-hand combat—and more members of the battalion were coming up from the University. Andie knew what to do then.
“Call the dragons!” she cried.
As one the warriors each called their specific call and then they all waited for the dragons to swoop down and bring the terrible fire. But when the dragons didn’t show, they began to get worried. Andie made her way through the pandemonium to the edge of the crowd and looked to the mountainside where they had left the dragons. She couldn’t believe her eyes.
The dragons were under attack. It was the Sentinels. Andie had completely forgotten their existence. The Sentinels were racing back and forth over the terrain, slashing and morphing and pounding almost too quickly to be seen. The dragons spit their fire as ferociously as they could, but the Sentinels moved too well to be hit by such passionate attacks.
The silver beings liquified and launched attacks that couldn’t even be quantified. Andie and the dragonborn had been so preoccupied facing the threat they could see that they hadn’t once looked back to make sure the dragons were okay. They had essentially abandoned them and played into the chancellor’s plans once more. The riders who had been circling in the sky had gone down to help the dragons, but they had come under attack themselves. Andie wanted to go and help them, but there wasn’t much she could do. She remembered what a threat the Sentinels could be, but she also knew that dragons were terrible foes to pick a fight with. They would have to care for themselves for the moment.
“The dragons are facing their own attack,” she called when she got back to the center of the circle. “We’ll have to do this on our own.”
But just as she was about to relaunch the attack, she caught sight of Chancellor Mharú. He was lifting his hands into the air.
“I’ve anticipated every course of events,” he said, grinning maliciously. “And I’ve been practicing this spell for almost forty years. Normally one needs a network of other sorcerers to help power the spell, but in special circumstances, much like this one, sacrifice works just as well.”
The blue light began to emanate from his hands and in a matter of moments the tear had reopened in the sky.
The battalion closed ranks in front of the chancellor to protect him. Almost as soon as he began the spell, civilians began to drop all around. Andie raced to the nearest one and tried to save them, but their veins had already turned a dark blue and their skin was going loose on their body. Dead before they hit the ground. They were dropping in groves.
The dragonborn and the battalion all seemed fine. The spell must have been feeding on the energy of the weakest among them. Andie stood and began casting in the direction of the chancellor, but she couldn’t even get close to him. And his spell was growing rapidly.
“You know the greatest thing about being a coward?” the chancellor called. “You’re afraid of e
verything. And so, you plan and you scheme and you get really good at being clever. Before you know it, you’re a master manipulator who has plans, and backup plans, and backups for the backups, and so on. Would you like to know what I’m talking about?”
“I’d like you to stop talking and come down here to face me,” Andie called, never stopping her attack. “I see you’ve surrounded yourself with super soldiers and innocent people. Anything to avoid the fight.”
“Obviously. I am afraid, after all. Try to keep up. Watch the next phase of my plan. Remember that psychic link I was talking about earlier, with your friend—sorry, dead friend—Marvo? I’ve been practicing on it for months. And once I have one person I can move from conscience to conscience. But why don’t I just show you?”
The doors of the University opened and as more of the battalion began to come out Andie switched sides again and had her hand raised to cast a particularly nasty spell, but she stopped herself. She looked closer. It wasn’t more members of the battalion coming through the doors. It was more civilians. They walked in a brisk, uniform way, not looking at anything in particular, just staring straight ahead. Andie knew instantly what the chancellor was planning. She turned to the dragonborn.
“We have to stop those people,” she shouted. “He’s luring them out here so that he can sacrifice them as fuel for his spell, we have to stop him.”
The dragonborn began to cast on two fronts: one an offensive, fighting back the battalion and their invulnerable armor, the other a defensive, casting sleeping spells at the waves upon waves of people flowing out of the University’s doors. Fortunately, the people were moving slowly enough that the dragonborn had soon stopped the flow and Andie collapsed the doorway so that no more could come out. She looked back at the chancellor, feeling victorious, but was surprised to see he was still smiling. More than that, he was laughing.
