Cassie
The tornado roared. The Bear roared. My world was chaos.
I tumbled head over heels into the vortex, unable to control up and down—let alone where I flew. I could barely hear over the intense screaming Wind, the sonographic images of my surroundings blurring as details bled into each other.
Yet, I could make out who was who and where they were. Verglas had been thrown from his throne by an up-thrusting stone spire that impaled his beast mount, but this mage proved himself more stubborn than all the others put together. As the Wind threw him against the wall, the wizard froze his lower body to the rock’s surface in a pillar of Ice and gripped his sword and shield with undying tenacity.
Rana hunted him with equal fervor, springing from boulder to boulder with too much force to be snared by the Wind—gluing herself to each surface she touched with sticky slime. She attacked again and again, throwing stones and punches, but Verglas hurled her back bloodier each time. While he showed no sign of tiring despite a lack of oxygen, it was a matter of time before Rana’s injured body failed her boundless resolve.
Familiar faces went by as I spun around the arena. Paul, far below, slid towards the swirling center of the storm. Kleodora lost her composure, screaming in fright. Rasant lost his mount. Vlam never stopped trying to burn her way out of the tornado, her resistance futile. Praxithea clutched at anything that came near. Random mages whose names I’d never bothered to learn floundered by. And then I heard a voice nearing me.
“Not me too, damn mutt! Get them, not me!” Ansbach shouted into the Wind. The viridian mage and I almost collided in the air.
He was a horrible man, and I had no pity for him in my heart. Flapping my wings in girl form to orient myself, I shrieked a Shout of Confusion in his face, and Ansbach lost all semblance of control.
There was a howl, prolonged and piercing that no mortal throat could make. The roar of the vortex whispered by comparison. Its sound cut the sky as the eye of the tornado opened. The Wolf leaped from a nightmare, claws ripping the air as a torn veil, tearing from one side of the arena to the other in a fraction of a second—jaws wide and slavering.
It was over before it began. The Wolf ascended into the boundless sky, trailing an endless echo as Ansbach’s headless body fell to the floor.
The tornado dissipated. People fell, and I regained control of my flight. My hearing snapped into crystalline focus; it was time for us to leave.
I stretched into my great bat form and dipped low, trailing a claw over the Ice to catch Paul’s cold metal frame. Ahead lay Daniel with two figures standing over him. To my surprise and relief, Wendi and Tesem both channeled energy through healing coins held above the bleeding boy.
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As I approached, Wendi scooped up Daniel in one hand—not caring a whit about the incredible pain of touching his blood—and reached high the other to take my claw. Tesem stood by, regret in his eyes as he watched us go. There was no time to consider what could have been.
The Bear reared back and slammed its paws into the ground for the third time. The first broke the Ice. The second caused an upheaval. The third ended the battle.
An explosion of rock and dirt buried the Bear, perhaps exactly as it’d wanted.
Rana had landed from a jump when her rock was launched into the air. She tried using this as a surprise attack against Verglas, but the mage’s poise never faltered.
I pumped my wings as Verglas swung his sword. I raced the blade to Rana as she flung herself at him. Then, before the whistling sword struck, I snatched Rana away midflight—her toad frame’s barrel chest fitting snugly in my mouth, arms and legs dangling out.
I tried being gentle, but Rana fought me in a fit of rage. My teeth kept her from wriggling away for another round with the Ice mage. I flapped and rose while avoiding debris as the wall crumbled.
Atop the failing parapets, four fought the last blows of the battle.
Kenta’s so-called ‘fireproof’ hair blocked Vlam’s gouts of flame admirably. Strands that refused to burn wrapped tight around an arm and a leg. He’d have her restrained in another second.
She laughed. “You thought this’d be easy?” She raised her hand, displaying the barbs in the bracelet pieces of her gauntlets. These spikes sank into her arm and ejected her blood through the points. This confused me for a moment until I realized she bled napalm. With a sadistic grin, Vlam finished, “Welcome to the Second Realm, kid.”
Her grieves and gloves emitted aura like smoke as blood droplets burned in a stream of flame from her hand. The inferno thickened and condensed, growing viscous and hotter, releasing clouds of stench. This dirty liquid Fire cut through swaths of Kenta’s hair, freeing Vlam and consuming strands down to their follicles. The Kaminoke retreated while attempting to smother the embers.
“Yes, yes, burn!”
Rasant climbed all the way up the wall in seconds with his Lightning-fast magic sneakers. The mage twitched and flinched as arcs of electricity leaped across his fingers and through his hair, shocking him involuntarily. Snarling, he glared at Lea, her magnetic personality the lightning rod for his anger.
“The time we wasted, the Mani we lost, all this work for nothing! You’ll pay!”
He extended both hands, palms facing inward, and generated those floating spark balls. Except, this time, he forced them together, and they merged into a more intense, cleaner spark. He fed it power, spinning it into a smooth orb like a potter on the wheel.
For a moment, his aura condensed into a catlike, feral shroud that snarled and hissed.
“Die!” He threw the orb at Lea.
She interposed one of her wrecking ball caramboles… a fatal mistake.
I felt the loss in a half dozen futures and screamed internally as I pumped my wings to the limit. I’d never make it in time!
The Lightning orb burrowed through the center of the carambole like a drill through wood, punching through to impale a terrified Lea—if not for Kenta. The Kaminoke, half his hair smoldering, grabbed her about the waist with a spare braid. His body convulsed as, in his haste, stray hairs brushed the Libra’s skin.
Face contorted somewhere between cataclysmic horror and surprised joy, Kenta yanked Lea away from the path of destruction. The deadly projectile sailed off on an oblivious straight-line course into the distance.
Kenta threw himself and Lea off the ledge of the collapsing wall when he saw me coming. Vlam dove after them, spewing toxic-smelling flames, but I was faster in this form. With several mighty flaps of my thirty-foot wingspan—my apologies to my passengers for the way I jerked them around—I outdistanced the scarlet mage. Kenta lassoed my chest, pulling himself and Lea aboard while trying not to burn me badly as I pulled out of my dive and soared away.