NaNoWriMo : Part 26
Hidden Purpose - Chapter 26 (And a few words)
Oof. What an interesting couple of weeks we’ve had, eh?
I don’t plan on going on a long political tirade, or discussing the insane winter we’re having, I just hope it makes sense why something that I hoped to have done in December is taking so long. Endings are hard, and writing complexity into them is difficult. I want to make sure everything lines up, and there aren’t giant gaping plot holes that make no sense. I think I’m doing a decent job at that, although it is slowing me down quite a bit, and in the process, my characters are suffering.
I’ll fix all of that in the rewrite, but the fact that all of this is part of the process doesn’t make the initial reader experience any better. In the long run though, I’ll have a novel I can be proud of. For now, I’m trying to get focused back on finishing.
I’ve got some big surprises coming up in these last few chapters, so expect a few more forewords that will actually be more like afterwords, where I expound upon things that happened.
Until then, enjoy chapter 26, and know that the end is nigh.
-Rafe
Chapter 26
When magic returns to the area surrounding the enclave, important things start happening.
Goddid and Sheliya come out from underneath the tables. They cautiously head towards the stairs and begin creeping up them, worrying the worst has happened to Irgimar to drop the nullity sphere.
Tycho is taking to those same stairs, only heading down. He’s moving much quicker than they are, more concerned about Rixton’s appropriate paranoia than any dangers he might run into on the stairs. It won’t take him long to nullify himself free, that is, once he figures out that Tycho is keeping them in a perpetual time loop. He’d rather have a good head start before that happens.
The hundred or so students who have been watching Senji’s bladed dance of death continue doing so from the doors and windows of the enclave towers. They still seem enraptured by the success of a lone man fighting against a force with such an overwhelmingly large advantage in numbers, despite his recent change in fighting styles. As much as he loved standing tall and trading blows with an entire army, it was a rather inconducive method for attaining victory, one that he felt was starting to impede the rather important task of not dying. So, he changed tactics. Run, and occasionally turn around and stab someone chasing him in the throat. It’s working out well for him.
He’s killed twenty-one people now.
The students watching him, along with the professors and all the rest but those who’ve been studying or sleeping through the entire ordeal, also feel a lot better now that their magic is back. They feel like they can do something now, protect themselves if the violence somehow spreads in their direction, and that’s a good feeling to have.
That feeling? It lasts until Demberlin grows tired of watching soldiers die pathetically attempting to fight, or whatever they want to call the screaming foot race they’re a part of, against a clan assassin. About forty seconds.
The world around the enclave begins to quake, again, but it’s not the gentle rumble caused by an elder mage demonstrating his superiority to one of his lessers. It is orders of magnitude more intense than before, the devastating power of a master earthwalker, unleashed. This is the Landsplitter, proving his namesake.
Screams erupt from within the towers. Buildings supposedly made of stone sway like long noodles in the hands of a baby waving its arms in the air, incredibly happy with its slurpable supper. It’s a good thing the enclave was built by mages. Powerfully designed bindings allow the buildings to transition from rigid to flexible and back, exactly for occasions like this. They are the only things keeping the wavering towers intact, and preventing their pieces from raining to the ground as if part of a drive-by assault carried out by a roaming pack of wild trebuchets. The people inside those towers however, are less protected.
Students and teachers alike are thrown about like gambling dice shaken in a cup before an important roll. Some of the more unfortunately positioned ones even stumble their suddenly unbalanced way out of the windows they had been using to watch Senji’s fight. Those not fortunate enough to be born a windrider or nullifier are still lucky enough to be saved by the quick thinking of their fellow students and professors.
None of our stairwell dwelling trio ends up out a window, but Tycho isn’t sure he prefers being thrown back and forth between the walls until he hits his head, loses his footing, and slams down on his coccyx. He manages to slow time enough on his way down that the bone doesn’t snap and shatter completely, but there’s no such thing as a gentle fall for a man in his third century of life.
Sheliya’s able to nullify the effects of the shake on their balance, causing them to fare much better than the eldest member of team save the world. That is, until the royal guard transforms from limp body to armored boulder heckbent on murdering anything standing down staircase from where it had been previously slumped. It’s just another loud noise until it comes into view around the wrap of the winding staircase, far too late for Sheliya to come up with an appropriate magical reaction.
Goddid’s reflexes take over before he has any time to think about the possible consequences of his actions. He reaches out and grabs Sheliya’s arm and yanks her into him as he turns, as if spontaneously entangling her in some kind of intimately risque dance. Without stable footing, the pull sends her off-balance. She doesn’t step towards him as much as fall, the entirety of her weight slamming into his chest and sending them both to ground. He has enough wherewithal to tuck his chin to his chest on the way down and let his back take the brunt of the impact, but he feels, almost hears something snap, even over all the noise.
He gasps, but nothing comes in or goes out. It’s a strange and automated reaction, as if he were trying to breathe in both directions at the same time, but a little blinding pain doesn’t stop him from finishing what his reflexes had started. He rolls Sheliya over, away from the tumbling ball of death and down a single step, this time dropping her back to the floor. He can feel her try to turn to her side as she has a similar reaction to the sudden strike of pain, but he won’t let her. He wraps her up as tightly as he can and presses them both into the stair, then closes his eyes and prays for a little luck.
The armor hits the stair above them and banks to one side, bouncing past his legs. He cries out as something sharp digs into his calf, but once the unexpected projectile has passed by and he sees the force with which each bounce slams into the stairs, he knows he’ll be lucky if he gets away without any broken bones.
Meanwhile, outside the walls of the enclave, the world is beginning to change. The ground is cracking, giant sections of it separating from one another, moving in various directions, fracturing the battlefield beneath everyone’s feet. Some, like the one that holds Demberlin, shoot up into the sky to stand tall like prized stalagmites, each grown locally in this open air environment by the Landsplitter himself. Others, like the ones holding the army, shake, rattle, and split apart or move closer together, but stay mostly intact, right where they are. One however, the one that Senji just-so-happens to be standing on, crumbles away, collapsing underneath his feet and disappearing into the void as if suddenly called to return home, back to the center of Terron where it was likely first formed.
Demberlin watches the destruction take place with silent but scrutinizing eyes, refusing to take any satisfaction from his work until the dust clears and he confirms his success, but it doesn’t take that long for him to receive an answer. He doesn’t see much, just a small flash of light at the center of a cloud of debris, but it's enough.
He clenches the fingers of both hands at the knuckles and hundreds of small stones respond by flying in his direction. They find their place in a floating circle when they arrive, each little piece of the newly formed creation turning in a counterclockwise circle behind Demberlin’s back as a unit until one by one, they shoot forward into the dust at blinding speed. They rip away from him in rapid succession, each one firing towards their target almost immediately after the one before.
Tiny flashes of light appear the instant before the sound of metal can be heard clanking against stone, flashing here and there as they move in a serpentine pattern towards one edge of the cloud, and finally out of it.
“Hide your eyes!” Demberlin shouts, his own face already in the process of turning away as he swipes a hand towards the ground. It only takes him a second to send ten sheets large enough to hide ships behind into the air towards the army, but they're still too slow.
Senji, blazing in brilliant white light, bangs his knives together before the giant walls of rock can obstruct the army’s view. The spark it makes is bright and blinding, like sending individual bolts of lightning to strike with each and every eye unfortunate enough to still be cast in his direction. Their hands reach up to shelter their precious gift of vision, but it's a reflex after the fact, rather than preemptive attempts at protection. The movement is a cause of the effect. The damage is already done.
Men cry out in horror and announce that they can’t see their colleagues, uselessly pawing the air in front of them or calling for help from any who retained their sight, but no help will come from them. The still sighted captain calls a retreat, and those few of his soldiers quick enough to respond to Demberlin’s warning and spare their vision, book.
Many of the blinded try to flee as well, but they all wind up at various degrees of unsuccessful after a couple of steps. Some are lucky enough to simply lose their footing, tripping in one of the many cracks formed by Demberlin’s recent assault on the land. Others end up running in completely the wrong direction and disappear into the cloud of dust floating above the giant hole in the ground, never to be seen or heard from again . . . at least . . . once their screaming stops.
Senji watches them take their last swan dives into the dark, shaking his head at each of the useless deaths created by their unnecessary panic.
He sighs, unhappy he had to rely on his light magic in battle, and knowing there’s no way his brothers are going to consider any of those deaths, kills. An ear-splitting crack reminds him that now is not the time to worry about that, and that he should remain focused on the master earthwalker in the sky, sending what appears to be a small mountain’s worth of rock in his direction.
Senji stands firm and at the ready, watching Demberlin as the small discs of earth upon which he stands shoot from one pillar to another, displacing him over and over again. It’s a strong tactic, one that Senji understands and appreciates. Staying on the move makes him difficult to track and attack, hampering the gifted melee fighter’s strongest abilities. It forces Senji to rely on ranged attacks and magic to fight, both of which Demberlin must assume to have the advantage in.
He might be right, too, if he had just a tiny bit more experience fighting against a talented lightbringer. He hasn’t dueled a lightbringer in over sixty years, and that guy was an untrained chump who barely had a grasp of spark flashing. Senji, on the other hand, is well versed in arc jumping, light binding, and prismatic trapping, among other things.
The massive landslide appears to make direct contact with the clan assassin, giant rumbling rocks tumbling over him and into the pit, removing him from Demberlin’s view.
“Yeha! Direct hit!” Demberlin shouts, throwing a fist in the air to celebrate his success. He steps off of the flying disc at its next stop and remains standing tall and proud on that pillar. He cups his hands around his mouth, then yells out in victory.
“Take that, clanner.”
“Ooohh, what clan is the one from which you hit?”
“Impossible,” Demberlin whispers, as he slowly turns his head around towards the voice behind him, only to find Senji standing there, his light extinguished, half of a smile curled up on the lips peeking out from behind his ripped mask.
“I hope it was someone from the clan of the howling wolf. They are very annoying, always traveling in packs and so often howling at the moon.” He shakes his head and proffers a hand towards the mage, as if in disbelief at some people's stupidity. “It is only full once a month. You would think a clan that worships the moon would understand the lunar calendar! Make it make sense for me Demberlin, please.”
“Uhmm. Maybe uh . . .” Demberlin starts nervously, pausing to swallow and clear his throat. “Maybe they, uhm . . . just uh . . . like to howl?”
“Hmm,” Senji says, looking as if he honestly had never thought of this as a possibility. “I think perhaps you are right. An incredible insight from an incredible mage.”
“H-How. How did you do it. I saw you. I saw you get crushed.”
Senji begins spinning the smaller of his knives around with a thoughtful look on his face. He stops it, holding it so the blade runs back along his forearm, and lifts the hand to scratch at his cheek. He then looks up at the sky, where the sun might be if the winter clouds weren’t blocking it from view, and shrugs.
“It must have been a trick played by the light. I hear that shadows often give false impressions.”
“Are you all lightbringers? Your clan?”
“What a silly thing to ask. Of course not. We have magic of all kinds.”
“I’ve never heard of a single clan using magic.”
Senji laughs. “It feels like cheating. I am certain my brother will make fun of me when I return, but, considering the circumstances . . .” He wobbles his head back and forth then mutters an, “Ehh.”
“We never stood a chance in this fight.”
The softness in Senji’s face vanishes, clearing the way for a more serious response. “No. You did not. Nor do you realize the most important truth of this comment, Demberlin, The Landsplitter.”
Demberlin raises an eyebrow, intrigued. “Is that so? And what is that?”
Senji lifts the arm with the backwards blade to wag a finger before Demberlin. “This . . . was not the fight.”
Demberlin’s eyes narrow, confused and searching Senji’s face for meaning, finding none.
“Think on this during your slumber.”
Demberlin cocks his head. “During my slumb-”
Without any warning, the bottom of Senji’s knife swings up, connecting with the space between Demberlin’s ear and his jaw. It happens so quickly that the mage will only ever understand how he came to pass out after waking up with a dull, aching pain in his face, and a suspiciously shaped bruise accompanying it.
“Sleep well, Demberlin,” Senji says, kneeling to lift the man’s hood to cover his head. “We will need you for the real fight.”
The sighted army below has stopped running, and when Senji stands back up on the stone pedestal raised fifty feet into the air, they look up to him like the victor he is. The captain throws down his sword.
“We surrender,” he says, raising his hands and then looking around at those left in his squad, signaling them to follow suit. “Please. Spare us.”
Senji sighs, then tries to do some quick math, giving up a second later when he realizes no matter what his count was, it was not thirty-two.
“Okay,” he shouts. “You are spared. Now, do you see my knife?” He lifts the large blade in his right hand. “It looks like this. One of your men has stolen it from me and is keeping it in his chest.”
“A chest?” He shouts back, confused. “We brought no . . . Ah. Yes. Chest. Well it would be right over . . . there . . .” he continues, turning to point back towards the gate, only for his view to be blocked by the newly terraformed battlefield. What was an open field is now a heavily disrupted area of crags, pillars, pits, and boulders, with a newly formed mountain several miles in the distance. “It was by the front gate,” he says, starting to work his way in that direction.
Senji nods, though it's unlikely the man below notices the movement, then steps off the side of the pillar and runs down the side of it and across the battlefield, where the bodies of soldiers lie in various positions, shifted by the newly disjointed land. When he finds the corpse holding onto his knife, he steps on its shoulder and yanks the knife free, just as the leader arrives. He cringes at the sight.
“My knife is important to me. He is dead. I do not think he will mind,” Senji says. “Gather those still living, leader. Worry about what you can do for them, instead.”
“What can I do for them? What is there to be done about blindness?”
“Did you know that a single darkener resides at this school?” The leader shakes his helmeted head. “When this is over, perhaps you should start there.”
The man seems confused by the words, ‘when this is over.’ The battlefield is as broken as his army. He turns away from Senji to scan the corpses scattered about. Men he had known his whole adult life, laying dead at his feet or at the bottom of the pit nearby. They were good men, skilled warriors who fought with honor and stuck to the formation, but were beaten by an infinitely superior foe. No amount of preparation could have saved them.
Others were new to the company, inexperienced and poorly trained, and far too eager to prove themselves as superior men in all facets of life. They were too quick to forget about the negative opinions of others, of their punishments, of their failures. They did not yet understand the permanence of battle, or how much weight a failed advance carried. A woman’s tongue can lash painful blows and leave lasting scars on the fragile ego of an aggressive man in a tavern, but he will still live to see the next morning, and with time, his wounds will heal. The sharpened sword of a skilled enemy however, does not leave a man with scars. It leaves them with nothing.
Today, it left Callum with nothing. It left Brith and Miscon and Malchuse with nothing. Good men whose names deserve to be known, especially by the man who slayed them. ‘Certainly,’ he thinks, as he raises his head to share their names with Senji, ‘A warrior such as he, with such incredible discipline and talent, will appreciate them.
He’s wrong, as you may have figured out. What does Senji care about the dead for? They’re dead. And that’s exactly why the leader ends up turning in circles confused, scratching his head and wondering where in the eight hecks he went off too. Because Senji has no time to spend on the dead, when the living are counting on him.
🥘 🥘 🥘 🥘
How much time can two people spend in the same awkward position before it gets too awkward? For Sheliya, the answer is . . . however long Goddid has been lying on top of her in the stairwell. He’s been fairly inactive since the ball of armored death rolled past them, but his eyes are open, his head is moving, and she can hear him breathing, so she knows he’s not dead.
“I can’t get up with you lying on me,” she says, trying to be nice before she resorts to calling him a pervert and forcefully pushing him off of her. She figures he earned that. He did probably save her life after all.
For Goddid however, the answer to the awkward question is very different. Not because he actually is a pervert, but because he’s been trying to get off of her for quite some time now. He would probably register how she’s been uncomfortably glancing away whenever he tries to make eye contact, if he wasn’t so focused on how badly it hurts to breathe.
He wants to explain the situation to her. If he were healthy and tableside, in an environment he thrived, he would spin it in a casually sexy way. Something like, ‘It appears my body is unwilling to leave you unguarded, because no matter what my mind wishes to do, it refuses to move.”
Instead, words float around his head in a painfully fuzzy, barely coherent, disjointed jumble. The word ‘ouch’ is the most heavily represented, followed closely by bones, broken, body, everything, and pain.
He knows he has to try and at least say something, anything really, just so long as it gets the point across. He decides two simple words should do the trick. I can’t.
“Auhhghh-” is what comes out, as a ragged, breathy groan.
“Ew. Ew. Ew. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.”
“Auhhghh-” he repeats.
“Get off me!”
“Auhhghh-” he says again, with just the right amount of added umph to motivate Sheliya to action.
She plants her arms into his chest and begins to push, fully intending to roll him off and then immediately kick him down the stairs, but the pain-filled scream he releases puts a halt to it. The scream isn’t very loud, or very long, his difficulties intaking air leaving him with only the tiniest amount of fuel to feed its fire of sound. It leaves him deflated and empty, struggling to breathe and regain what he lost.
Any room left for misinterpretation has flown out the window, leaving Sheliya’s eyes bulging with worry. “Goddid? Goddid? What did I do?” she says, cautiously bringing her arms back to her chest and lowering him back down onto her in the process. “Are you okay?”
He winces when his chest meets hers.
“Did that hurt? Are you in pain?”
He wheezes, laboring to get air and unable to offer a verbal answer, but he manages to raise his head enough to nod.
“It’s that bad? Where? Your chest? Your back?”
He nods again, adding what he feels is enough emphasis to suggest, ‘both, and everywhere else.’
“Okay, okay,” she says, taking a breath and focusing. “Just hold on. I can help with that.” She closes her eyes and zeroes in on his torso, leaving the area wide enough to be sure it works. “Your body is going to feel a little weird, like when your mouth is numbed at the dentist, but it should help with the pain.”
Nullifying pain is really just removing someone’s ability to feel it. The goal is normally to target the smallest area possible. In a perfect world, that’s the injury itself and a tiny bit surrounding it, but since Goddid can’t even talk, and she has no idea what’s actually wrong, she decides a more general approach will have to do.
She sends a rush of magic through him. He squeezes his eyes shut and winces, pulling in a sharp breath as it surges through his skin. “It’s- cold,” he says, then opens his eyes in surprise. “It’s- It’s cold,” he says again. “I- I can talk.”
Sheliya gently shushes him without opening her eyes. “Stop, I need to focus. This is more dangerous than it looks. Students aren’t supposed to do it.”
He decides to wait until she’s finished to ask his follow up questions, then pays quiet attention to the initial feeling as it fades from something cold to something near nothing at all.
“How’s that?” she asks, opening her eyes from under him.
“Great,” he replies, but the words send a shockwave of dull pain radiating up from his abdomen, exiting his body in the form of a pained grimace. “Better,” he amends, then slowly twists, lifting his right arm just enough to place his hand down on the stair above them. He has to pause to take a couple breaths.
“Still kind of hard to breathe or speak,” he says, struggling with the longer sentence, “but it's manageable. Way better than before.” He braces himself for the pain, then grunts as he fights to push himself up. “Help, help me up.”
With Sheliya pushing from underneath, he’s able to get himself up to a seated position on the next step. He lifts his legs so that Sheliya can slide her way out from under them and then sit next to him. She watches him, paying close attention to the way he is holding his arm wrapped around his ribs.
“I’m sorry, I know this isn’t what you want to hear,” she starts, looking and sounding so legitimately apologetic for what she’s about to say that Goddid knows exactly what that is. “But we –”
“Have to get up,” he finishes, nodding. “I know.”
She lifts his arm to wrap it around her shoulders, asks him if he’s ready, and when he nods again, they slowly and awkwardly start to stand up together. It seems to be going well, until just before he reaches a fully straight backed position, when something grinds, then pops in Goddid’s side. He yelps, then teeters to one side, nearly losing his balance and tumbling down the steps as an unarmored copycat of the royal guard minutes earlier, but Sheliya tightens her grip and pulls him in, just managing to keep him upright.
He latches on to her when he arrives, very aware of how close he had come to dying a death too embarrassing for a tombstone. ‘Here lies Goddid,’ it would read, ‘who despite being a young and relatively healthy man, died by falling down some steps. He is mourned by no one. May the source have pity on his soul.’
“Thanks,” he says, nodding to her once he finds his footing.
“We can just call it even,” she replies, as they get back to moving up the stairs, one grueling step at a time.
“Ehh,” he says, turning to look at Sheliya, smiling in spite of the pain. “Is it though? I wouldn’t have been hurt if I hadn’t saved you.”
She doesn’t turn to look back, just keeps moving them up the steps. “Did you forget I dragged your blind, salted body, all the way across the courtyard?”
“No, but that was only after I woke you up.”
“Yeah, but you were the reason I passed out in the first place.”
“Well yeah, but that was obviously that advisor’s fault. Let’s blame him . . . once we find him,” Goddid says, just as Sheliya gasps, and brings them to a sudden stop. He grips his side and is about to ask why the jerky stop, before she points, directing him where to look, and the question becomes unnecessary.
A blood-stained hand sits on a step above, barely poking out from around the bend. Above it, red streaks and splotches cover the gray pale stones as if they had recently been turned into a canvas by some risque abstract expressionist.
They get back to climbing the stairs, slowly creeping up each step as the gruesome scene before them reveals itself as more and more gruesome. The mages who had been accompanying the ambassador are both dead. The hand they saw belongs to the first, a forcer who is slumped against the wall, limp and covered with blood that it appears he tried valiantly to keep from spilling out of his slit throat. The other is much worse off, torn uncleanly in two as if by an unthinkably powerful man with a dull blade, or by two horses pulling in opposite directions. But it is neither of these things that bring the duo to stop and stand in slack-jawed horror.
A few stairs further, the gray of the wall all but disappears, hidden behind patches of skin, clumps of hair, and a wash of blood; a largely intact piece of a black mustachioed face seems to suggest that the mess belongs to what was once the ambassador’s advisor. And leaning just beyond it, is a headless body, draped in the expensive Otherian formalwear only ever worn by the most important members of the Hiddeland government.
“So, where is Irgimar?” Senji whispers from behind them, startling them both to turn around in jumpy shrieks, and leaving Goddid reaching for the wall to stabilize himself from the accompanying pain. Without hesitation, Sheliya rushes to his side, reestablishing herself as his support.
“Crack it all Senji,” Sheliya snaps in hushed tones. “You almost gave us a heart attack.”
Senji smiles, then bows. “I am honored to hear that. Fear teaches the most powerful lessons, and you both desperately need to develop a better awareness for your immediate surroundings.” When he straightened, his eyes quickly scan Goddid. “You are hurt. How badly?”
He shakes his head uneasily. “I’m not sure,” he says. “It’s n- not so bad. As it looks. I don’t think. But it’s a little hard to breathe.”
Senji appraises his condition, then glances at the worried look on Sheliya’s face. Her lips tense and eyebrows raise, a silent message he receives and understands. It is much worse than it looks. She must be nullifying his pain. If his adrenaline wears off, he likely won’t be able to move at all.
“Leave him,” Senji says.
Without a second thought, Sheliya says, “No.”
“We must find Tycho, and Irgimar, and he will only slow us down.”
“Then we go slow, or you can go ahead alone. I’m not leaving him.”
A smile starts to creep its way onto Goddid’s face, despite how hard he tries to hide it. He tries to think of a good response, to decide what kind of hero he wants to be in this situation. Is he the funny, charming kind? Who pokes fun at her for falling in love with him during a mission to save the world? Or is he the brave, debonair type, who tells her to go on ahead and leave him, because the hero must always put the mission before himself.
Turns out, he’s the slow thinking and quiet kind, because Senji shushes them and points a finger up before he ever decides on a single word to say.
“Listen,” Senji whispers, and they do.
The three of them wait, quietly listening to the nothing that has settled above them, until finally, a distant voice breaks through a bubble of silence. The words are barely audible, but the condescending tone they hold rings as true as church bells. There’s a tension present in them as well, as if they were being held back by another person. As if they were being obscured.
“It’s Tycho,” Goddid whispers, oblivious to Sheliya curling her body into him and pressing his face against the wall, away from the friend who came to the spoken revelation far earlier, sheltering his sight from the light of the two artificial suns suddenly standing next to them in the stairwell.
A pair of flaming coronas around the edges of Senji’s eyes blaze in blinding bright light like golden fire. Tendrils flicker back and forth around their perimeters, licking at his eyebrows and the slice of blood on his cheek. Senji will never know the looks of stunned awe that his friends wear at the recognition, because he is already gone, his movement taking place over the course of a single instant at the unmatched speed of light.
“What the heck just happened?” Goddid asks, looking back and forth around the stairs for Senji, who seems to have blinked himself out of existence.
“He’s a lightbringer? Did you know he was a lightbringer?” Sheliya asks.
Goddid gestures to his own face. “Do I look like I knew?”
Sheliya shakes off the surprise, then starts to pull on Goddid once again. “Come on. We have no idea how far up he just went. We need to go.”
Goddid agrees, so they start climbing. One slow step turns into two, which turns into four, but it isn’t much longer before they stop to stare at a blurry version of their recently departed friend.
“Senji?” Sheliya asks, confused to have found him so quickly. He is standing facing around the bend, just up ahead. He raises a hand back, then signals them forward, but doesn’t otherwise answer. They climb one more stair before the blur surrounding Senji vanishes, sound fills their ears, and a world of pain rushes back to Goddid.
“Shhiiiaa-” he groans loudly, as Sheliya’s magical relief wears off in an instant. He collapses to lean against the wall, free arm gripping his ribs to support his attempts to breathe under the weight of the returned pain.
“This sphere is blended and too small to be Irgimar’s,” says Senji hurriedly, the words rushing out of him as he draws one of the knives from his forearm and sprints forward around the bend towards the sound of chaos. “Stop this, nullifier. You do not understand the danger here.”
Goddid is trying to keep himself upright so that Sheliya can help drag him around the bend, so that they can see the conversation continuing up ahead, but the pain is darkening his vision at the corners of his eyes. Each step feels like a sledgehammer to the ribs. Breathing is just as difficult, like trying to inflate a skin that was poked full of holes. But he continues to breathe, and continues to struggle forward, one side supported by Sheliya, the other crushed against the wall to keep him from falling, and continues to listen.
“Back up,” another voice says. “Take one more step and I will gut him.”
“You’re going to kill me with a knife? You really are an idiot, Irgimar.”
“Give me a reason, Tychorah. Give me any reason.”
“Rixalin, take down this sphere before Senji gets angry. You won’t like him when he’s angry. He blacks out when he’s mad and goes on color focused killing sprees.”
“His name is Rixton you buffoon. Stepherlis, shut him up.”
“Anything in green, Rixton. Murdered dead. I’ve seen him do it. Only I can stop him, so, let me have my magic back, and I’ll mfmfm–”
Tycho’s voice suddenly grows inaudible, the words muffling as though something had covered his mouth.
“Pull his head back, Stepherlis. His insanity is far too powerful a contagion to risk spreading amongst our community. He has to die.”
“NNOHHDNND!”
“Sir? But he-”
“I am your key mage! I give the orders, you listen and obey. Now, obey.”
“Do not force me to do a thing I cannot undo, Irgimar. I do not wish to kill you, but if you move to injure Tychorah, you will be leaving me with no choice.”
A near total silence follows Senji’s words. One only combat by the pained whimpers of broken Goddid as he and Sheliya limp into view. Everyone freezes at their entrance, eyes moving back and forth between each other as the scene devolves into a six part stalemate. She lets go of Goddid and lets him crumple to a heap on the steps, freeing herself to move up closer to Senji and take stock of the situation.
Tycho is held firm within Professor Stepherlis’s grip. One hand is pressed tightly over his mouth while the other is wrapped around his arms, trying to ensure he’s held steady. Stepherlis’s eyes are glancing around confused, but Tycho’s are going wild, flicking here and there, from her to the side, blinking crazily, as if he were trying to pass her a message with them. Did he think she knew morse code? Was that a thing the enclave taught when he was young?
A few steps above them leaning back against the wall is Rixton, sweating and shaking, clearly uncomfortable. She knows it’s partly because this sphere belongs to him. Because maintaining a decently sized nullity sphere that holds obscuration properties isn’t easy for a good mage, and though Rixton was blessed with height, looks, and strength, magic was never his strong suit. But she also knows his real problem. Rixton may talk a big game, may carry himself with bravado, but this isn’t a simple case of fisticuffs. People are dying, and he isn’t at all ready to see an old man bled out in front of him.
Senji and Irgimar are both staring at each other, knives drawn. Irgimar’s face is unsettlingly emotionless. The stone cold look he’s wearing strikes her as incredibly odd, completely alien for the usually expressive master she’s known for the last ten years. He seems unshaken by the situation and entirely unphased by any of the gruesome murders that just took place. By the murders that only he could have committed.
So when his head turns away from Senji and towards her, she doesn’t bother trying to plead for him to stop with her eyes. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking past her, head cocked, examining the man on the ground.
“Wait, Sheliya? Sheliya, is that you,” Rixton asks, breaking the silence once his brain caught up with his eyes enough to recognize that the person who joined the fray was not a stranger, but his friend.
“Hello Rixton. I don’t suppose you would drop that sphere, would you?”
“No way. You were right, you know. Back at Drolly’s. We should have listened to you. Tycho is nuts. He trapped us in a time loop!”
“Trrpp? RRrww? Trpp? Thnpln hwst rt?” Tycho mumbles from behind Stepherlis’s hand, his eyes rolling around his head as he speaks. “Mmmggrsscch. Iddit.”
“It’s youuuu,” Irgimar says, turning the point of his knife towards Goddid, a wide smile crossing his face. “Goddid. I didn’t understand before, but now. Now that I’m here . . . I understand it all. You’re the mental mage. Perhaps the very last of your kind. Our king will shower me with gifts when I bring you to him.”
Irgimar closes his eyes and takes a breath. It only lasts a moment, but Senji takes the opportunity to lunge forward with a piercing stab aimed for Irgimar’s heart. Irgimar’s eyes fly open and his knife draws back, deflecting Senji’s initial attack with unexpected speed and countering with a slashing strike to Senji’s arm. Senji parries and bats Irgimar’s arm away, then throws a counter of his own, showing no interest in letting the fight end there. Both men launch attacks at each other one after another, free arms punching and blocking, hands grabbing for any advantage that might be hiding in the other’s loose bits of clothing as the knives loudly clank and scrape against each other.
“We have to go. We have to go, now!” Sheliya says forcefully, stepping back away from the fight to try and gather Goddid.
In his own attempt to back away from the duel, Stepherlis is forced to let go of Tycho’s mouth in favor of his underarm to pull him up the steps.
“Great idea!” Tycho spits without a hint of sarcasm. “Once you get this gorilla to let me go, we’ll just walk out the front door. Get Rixxon to drop the crackin’ sphere!”
“What? Sheliya? You’re with them?” asks Rixton.
“He- ,” Sheliya starts, as she tries and fails to pick Goddid up from the ground before she realizes he isn’t helping at all. She leans in closer, worried, and hears him quietly wheezing. He pads her arm as if he were pushing it away, turning his head away from her and back to the wall. “Goddid can barely move and Irgimar just called every single mage in the enclave to our location. What do we do!?”
“Get. Him. To. Drpddafffrrr!” Tycho manages, before Stepherlis gets his hand back over his mouth. “DRPDDAFFFRRR!”
“Do not drop that sphere, Rixton,” Stepherlis says, turning back to look at the student. “You know what happened last time.”
“Rixton, please. You do not understand how important this is. You have to drop the sphere.”
“Do not drop that sphere!”
“Rixton,” Sheliya says, looking up at him from below, beyond the two men wholly focused on their life and death duel. He is backing himself up even further into the wall, as if hoping to pass through it via osmosis and arrive somewhere else, anywhere else, so long as it isn’t here.
“I don’t know what to do,” he says, his voice quavering with uncertainty. “Why Sheliya? Why do you want me to drop it?”
“Why does that even matter?” Stepherlis says, cutting in before she can respond. cuts in. “Do not listen to her. You have orders from the key mage to hold that sphere.”
“But I suck at spheres and everyone knows it. He can make a better one himself! Why didn’t he just make it himself!”
“Rixton,” Sheliya says, drawing his eyes back to her. “Have I ever lied to you? Please. Trust me. Let it go.”
“Do. Not. Let this sphere drop Rixton.
Rixton brings both hands to his head and starts to laugh. It isn’t the outward bellow caused by humor, but the uncomfortable chuckle of a cracked man standing at the edge of his decision-making capabilities.
He shakes his head, draws in a deep breath, then stops chuckling on his exhale, shrugs, and smiles. “I’m exhausted anyway.”
Stepherlis turns to face Rixton, mouth open and ready to shout again, this time more directly at him. The entirety of those words will reach the air in less than a couple of seconds, but that’s all the time that Tycho needs . . . since Rixton’s nullity sphere has just come down.