Retribution, p.14
Retribution, page 14
Regis’s jaws were snapping furiously at the caustic tentacles when I reappeared standing over Valeska. An aetheric blade formed in my hands, pointing down, and I thrust at her core. She let out a piercing cry that cut off suddenly as she was jerked away by the tentacle around her torso. My blade carved a smoking hole in her side and the granite beneath her.
A huge iron spike manifested from my own shadow and thrust upward. Bracing my blade against my forearm, I caught the momentum of the spike and let it propel me up into the air and away from the grasping tentacles. Spinning, I deflected a burst of lightning that had ricocheted off Regis, then landed just in front of him. The aether blade swept through the vines harrying him, and then those chasing me, but more spells were already bearing down on us.
‘Move,’ Regis’s deep, half-mad voice sounded in my head. Destruction was swelling within him, building up like magma within the caldera of a volcano, and he was about to rupture.
Jumping up, I planted one foot against the edge of an expanding spike and Burst Stepped after Valeska, my aether blade searing through the granite tiles of the floor in a straight line toward her and Richmal.
Behind me, a nova of Destruction washed across the room, erasing everything it touched. But my focus was on finding Valeska. She seemed to operate as the group’s Shield, hiding them, protecting them, and even repositioning them when necessary. Without her, the rest would be exposed.
Richmal tried to repeat his trick of catching me mid-Burst Step, but I was ready for it. The aether blade swung up at the same time as the chamber blurred past me to the side, and I sliced through his spell and slammed into him shoulder first.
He was hurled off his feet to crash against the chamber’s outer wall, and all his spells flickered out for just a moment.
Valeska had pushed herself up to one knee after Richmal had saved her. Despite her grievous wounds, she was still casting, surrounding herself with a buffeting force while cutting at me with wicked scythes of condensed air. I pivoted and dodged those I couldn’t block with an aether-wrapped fist, then, when I was nearly on her, invoked God Step.
Jumping, wild arcs of purple lightning ran along my forearm as I punched down at the side of her head from my new position. There was a crunch of bone as my fist connected, and then everything went dark.
Black wings had wrapped around my face, flapping and reeling, jerking me this way and that. With my hand still wrapped with aether, I raked my fingers through the spell, shredding it. But by the time I could see again, Valeska had already been whisked away.
Resummoning my blade, I leapt toward the downed Richmal, swinging at the back of his undefended neck. A blue-black blur flew at me from the side, hammering into me and pushing me off course. My sword cut up and sank through both rune-covered armor and flesh.
“Blaise, send Valeska back,” Richmal’s resonant baritone rumbled as he pulled himself to his feet. His expression was strained, and his tangled hair was matted to his head and stained brownish red.
Ulrike slid to a stop ten feet from me, pinning me between her and Richmal. Blood was gushing from her leg, which appeared to be nearly severed at the knee. She supported herself on her towering shield, which rested between us, and leveled a conjured spear at my face, snarling, her lax self-assuredness gone.
A bestial howl shook the cavern, and Regis leapt in from the side, his massive paws slamming Ulrike to the ground.
Dozens of sickly green darts flew from Richmal’s hands, peppering Regis’s side. Dark green mana seeped into him, circulating through his bloodstream in a matter of seconds.
Liquid fire ran through my channels as I siphoned aether from my core, down my arm, and into the palm of my hand, where it built up until the pressure forced it to explode outward, bathing the cavern in violet light and engulfing Richmal.
There was a flash, and a wedge of blue-black static disrupted the air around Regis. He roared, breathing out a gout of Destruction, but the static buzzed around and away from the flames before coalescing like a guillotine above him. At the same time, Ulrike was jerked out from beneath him by the lightning bolt in her hand.
The static moved through Regis’s body like a saw, cleanly dividing flesh, bone, and even aether. My companion howled as his huge, slope-backed torso came in two, the rear half stumbling on its shorter, thicker legs, the front struggling to balance as he lunged awkwardly after his prey.
Regis’s barely-contained rage and need to unleash Destruction crashed into me through our connection, warring against his survival instinct and a desperate edge of existential uncertainty.
A razor-sharp knife of panic slashed at my guts, and I could only watch the horrifying spectacle as I struggled to process Regis’s inner conflict alongside my own suppressed emotions. I missed the mana coalescing from the shadows above me just before a spear-thin spike thrust out from the nearest column and drove at my face.
I spun at the last moment, taking the blow to the side of my armored head where the horns sprouted out. The spike shattered, and a foot-long shard twisted in the air and drove into my cheek. I felt it scrape bone as it deflected downward to push out the base of my skull.
The force of the impact knocked me back into a supporting column, where I leaned for a moment, dazed, one hand scrabbling against the jagged butt of the spike where it poked out of my face.
The ground shattered beneath my feet, dropping me to one knee in a pool of burning sludge. Dozens of black iron spikes interlocked over the pool to create a sharp-edged dome, pinning me into the poison that I could already feel sapping my strength as it attacked my nervous system. The spikes tightened, forcing me down farther into the ooze. My lungs seized, and I felt my heart stutter.
The iron dome lit up with blue-black light, and hundreds of bolts of electricity began to crash back and forth. My body locked up. My mind went numb from the shock as the ooze continued to eat away at my armor. When I reached for God Step, I couldn’t sense it. I couldn’t feel anything at all past the pain of mana attacking every nerve in my entire body.
“Now, while he’s pinned! Valeska, report to the High Sovereign, inform him—”
My ears popped and stars burst behind my closed eyes, and my muscles began to spasm as I pushed back at the spikes, but to little effect. I lost all sense of Richmal’s words, only knew that the Wraiths were shouting at one another. Although I couldn’t understand what they said, the desperation in their voices was clear.
Blue-black particles of deviant lightning mana flashed and popped as they impacted the amethyst motes that made up my aetheric barrier. Dark green mana sizzled and burrowed into the aether before evaporating. Gray-brown deviant earth mana cracked and broke against the purple barrier.
Through a gap in the spikes, I saw Regis, or what was left of him. My companion had been reduced to little more than a wisp of aether trapped within a cage of Ulrike’s mana. I could feel him, but just barely, burning, his consciousness receding with each passing moment as more and more of his aetheric essence was exhausted just to keep his feeble form.
I reached for him, tried to pull him to me with the force of my will alone, but he wasn’t reacting, couldn’t escape the spell burning him away to nothing.
Time seemed to slow, almost like when I’d been able to use Static Void, before. Suddenly, I could feel the weight of all that mana clashing with my aether, see the way the particles bent and rippled and jumped as one, the shapes of the individual spells, how they were formed, their purpose, the metaphysical stitching that held them together.
The mana wove together in a shape formed by the will of the caster, while the aether both contained the mana and determined its natural behavior, but also moved to accommodate the mana’s passing, the two forces fitting together like light and shadow. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.
My hand quivered as I reached into the turmoil. All along it, the interplay of metaphorical light and darkness—mana and aether—shifted and moved, always together, simultaneously in coordination and opposition. And in between them, a kind of curtain separating light and shadow.
My fingers twitched. The curtain shifted. Aether wrapped around mana and moved it aside.
The interlocking spikes pinning me down released, floating out in the air around me. They trembled, uncertain, Ifiok’s will pushing them to one purpose, but the flow of aether repelling them, redefining what mana was allowed to do.
A web of electricity jumped from spike to spike, crackling threateningly, tendrils reaching out toward me, deflecting, and being reabsorbed into the whole, unable to strike farther than what the aether allowed.
The pool of acid parted, separating, pulling away from me.
As I slowly stood, my legs shook with the effort of enforcing my will on the aether, and through the aether, the mana. My enemies surrounded me, but gone was the physical force of their confidence and their brash expressions.
Instead, I saw wide red eyes amid gray faces turned pale with fear.
390
APATHY AND ECSTASY
The scene around me seemed frozen in time.
Richmal’s face was slack, his focus on the magic coming undone as he watched with awe. At his side, Ulrike blazed with internal light, more and more mana pouring out of her, the web of electricity growing brighter in coordination with her efforts. Her crimson eyes avoided me as she focused on her spell, the muscles of her jaw working as she ground her teeth.
Behind them, Ifiok sagged, sweat pouring down his face, the ruins of his arm hanging limply at his side, his channeled mana trickling away to nothing.
Blaise and Valeska had retreated down the tunnel toward Vildorial, and Blaise was fumbling with a tempus warp. The familiar anvil-shaped device hummed as it collected and condensed mana.
I was still reeling from my discovery of the interplay between aether and mana. Even though I still didn’t fully understand yet what Realmheart was capable of, I had no time to question what I was doing. It took a tremendous effort just to lift one foot and place it in front of the other. There were still five Wraiths to deal with, and I could feel Regis’s life force weaken by the moment.
The orbiting field of spikes and blue-black lightning shifted as I moved, rotating away as I passed, my aether containing and redirecting the mana making up the various spells. The force of my will was matched against that of the three opposing mages. I had to maintain a more forceful hold over the aether than they could enforce on their mana, but there was also something else, some resistance from the aether I didn’t yet understand.
Moving the short distance to Regis sapped even my asuran physique of its inhuman stamina and strength, and by the time I reached the cage of lightning, my legs were trembling. I released the pool of acidic sludge, which splashed back together and then sank between the cracks in the granite tiles and vanished.
Richmal gasped and sucked in a deep, desperate breath, as if he’d been holding it the entire time. “Valeska! Go, now!” he barked, his voice raw.
Releasing aether from my core, I manipulated it around Ulrike’s spell, looking once again for the metaphorical curtain separating the two powers. It was just like in the keystone, when I’d practiced with Ellie. I had to let my mind refocus, shift my perspective. Three Steps had once told me something very similar as well, and even Kordri’s lessons had required that I experience the motion and interplay of our bodies differently.
Perhaps that’s what all knowledge boiled down to: new experiences that shifted one’s perspective slightly, revealing more of a world that was already there but which we couldn’t see.
My breath caught, and my mind stuttered, and I wrenched myself back into the moment. Dozens of poisonous slime darts were hissing through the air at me.
My hand raised, too slowly, my mental fortitude drained and exhausted. The darts parted, their path shifting as they swarmed around me to either side, and I let out a breath simultaneously full of wonder and fatigue. I could feel where each particle of mana and aether interacted, how the aether took hold of the mana and redirected it to create a momentary sympathetic binding of the two forces.
But I was also shouldering the combined force of all that mana, trying to hold each of the individual spells separately in my mind, and as the darts curved to avoid me, I was forced to release my hold over the spikes and lightning web the other Wraiths had used to pin me down.
The field of black spikes fired away wildly, nearly impaling Ifiok and crashing against Ulrike’s shield. The lightning, which she had continued to pour mana into until it burned to look at, condensed into a single bolt and struck the ground, exploding in a blinding flash.
The chamber quaked.
Turning my attention swiftly to the small cage of lightning, I looked for the place where the two forces moved to allow each other’s presence and tugged, peeling control of the small cell away from Ulrike. It snapped and seared the air as I pulled it away from Regis. The wisp bobbed drunkenly as it drifted up around my ankles. Reaching out, I closed my fist around it. It sank into my flesh and drifted toward my core.
Regis offered no response to my sudden presence, but I could sense his consciousness, distant and unaware but alive. I could only hope he would recover if we survived this battle.
Mana flared from the hallway as the tempus warp began to activate.
The bright mana was clear, as was the rim of atmospheric aether that moved to encircle it. Valeska trembled as she leaned toward the mana, her hand stretched out, her fingertips brushing the surface of the portal as it manifested.
I reached out, my gloved hand curling into a claw as I attempted to seize the portal. The aether jumped at my command, contracting around the portal and compressing the mana. The tempus warp’s magic seized, leaving the half-formed portal wavering tenuously in the air.
“I can’t get through,” Valeska screamed as she scratched at the portal’s surface.
“Take him down!” Richmal’s deep voice cracked as he roared, and spells rained down on me from every direction.
Iron and fire broke against my armor and aetheric cladding. Lightning and acid glanced aside, bursting or burning into the ground, shattering the stone with the fury and hellfire of my enemies.
But with most of my focus on forcefully distorting the tempus warp portal, it was all I could do to deflect even half their attacks. Acid and lightning burns scarred my face and metal spikes ripped through both armor and flesh. My face and skull burned where the metal spike had punched through it earlier.
Too much aether was being focused through Realmheart to defend against the Wraiths’ spells and the portal.
But I knew I couldn’t let the Wraiths retreat. Not even one.
In Agrona’s hands, information was a weapon. I couldn’t give him that. I couldn’t let them escape to report on my abilities.
They all had to die.
Ulrike was repositioning to stand between me and the half-formed portal. Her leg, sheathed in a cast of pure mana that sparked and jumped at every subtle movement, dragged limply behind her. Richmal’s arm was pressed down over a huge open wound in his side where armor, flesh, bone, and organs alike had been removed to reveal sharp bits of rib poking through a fleshy red mess, a wound caused by Regis’s last desperate burst of Destruction.
Destruction.
I hesitated even as spell after spell pummeled me, deflecting what I could, absorbing the rest, the pain at once all-encompassing and nothing at all as I focused past it to the thing waiting dormant in Regis’s meager essence.
I hadn’t attempted to use the godrune on my own since the mirror zone, but even then Regis had been conscious, flying to my hand to help me concentrate all of my aether in one specific direction. I knew all too well the risks of using it now without Regis to help me focus and control it. With the abundance of aether in my dual-layer core, I could burn through all of Vildorial.
The spells were becoming more random and madcap, their movements jerky and difficult to follow, and I realized Ulrike was imbuing her lightning-attribute mana into the others’ spells. The resulting fusion of magic was faster, wilder, and much more difficult to counter.
As lightning-infused bolts of burning brine struck me like cannon fire, and my pain-wracked mind fought to maintain concentration, I understood that there was no other choice. I couldn’t defend against the bombardment and keep control over the portal and fight the rest of them.
Eventually my focus would slip, the portal would open, and one or more of the Wraiths would escape.
Even then, I would still have to defeat the others. But what would keep them fighting? If they withdrew to the city, made me fight in the great cavern…
I imagined the power of these Vritra half-bloods unleashed on the defenseless people of Vildorial. If that happened, nothing else would matter.
I clenched my fists. The godrune contained within Regis’s essence came alive with hunger and power, and the violet flames burst to life in my hands, giving off a bright, jagged, deadly aura.
A spasm of pain came from my back where the Realmheart rune burned with golden light, and my vision and sense of mana jolted. I found myself caught off guard by the difficulty of maintaining both godrunes, but I couldn’t release Realmheart. Not yet.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I considered that the hungry, eager power of Destruction was all I needed.
I lifted my hand.
Destruction lurched forward, wild, uncontrolled flames expanding and devouring as they shed their rageful light across the chamber.
Ifiok’s iron spikes thrust forward to meet it. Purple flames raced across black metal, unmaking his magic as it leapt from spike to spike, chasing them back to their source. Unshackled from Regis’s more compatible insight, Destruction rushed wildly, like a stampede of stallions on fire, and Ifiok began to scream. It raced up his arm and across his chest, converting his flesh and blood and mana to purple light and then to nothing at all.
I spun with a poorly suppressed sense of giddiness, spreading the wave of Destruction haphazardly in every direction.
