If I was any slower, the swing of the ax would take my head off. I step away, the gray metal singing through the air just in front of my neck. The edge is brown with rust and dull, but I have no doubt the horrendous strength behind the monster’s attack would be enough to easily cut me in two. There is no time to think; the monster’s other ax descends towards me.
Suddenly, it is as if I am back in the training yard with Kithkik, attempting to dodge her sticks. The difference is that if I let a single blow to land now, I will lose my life instead of suffering a bruise. I spin to the side out of the path of the second ax, moving closer, putting a Dragonfire Bolt into the monster’s chest. Without the explosion to obscure it, this time I see my own attack connect. The burst of orange flames splash over the white plates of the monster’s skin, as effective as water, only slightly singeing the growth that peeks through the spaces between the plates.
The monster follows me as I circle behind it, hateful glowing eyes attempting to track my every movement. I am faster than this creature but not by much. It swings again, the huge head of its ax crashing into the moss at our feet, quaking the ground. A gout of flame springs forth from my hand, burning over the monster’s face for the barest of moments before I need to duck its other ax. The continuous flame seems less effective than the unchanneled bolt somehow, the fungi peeking through the cracks not even darkening at my assault.
Embers rain off of the monster as it presses forward, falling to the moss on the ground, setting small fires here and there. I put my effort into channeling a bolt in my right hand, keeping my left free to pepper it with quick shots whenever I have the opportunity. My first attack did manage a bit of damage; I see now. In the center of the monster’s chest a black stain lingers on the white plates, a crack running through a single plate, the growth around the impact scorched.
Its assault is an endless onslaught. I dance with it, the pace of the monster’s swinging axes pushing me into riskier and riskier dodges. The air keens as its weapons kick up violent winds. The barest corner of its weapon knicks my side, the slight collision enough to throw me sideways. I land on my shoulder, a bare moment left to me to see a trail of my own blood falling through the air as the monster charges at me.
My body reacts better than it ever has before, my hands catching me as I roll and turning me back to my feet in the air. Instead of jumping away, I push forwards, shoving an unchanneled Dragonfire Bolt into its face while I step inside its reach. The head of the ax falls past me as the fire blooms across its face, the haft of its weapon colliding with my left shoulder. The snap of bone pulls a shriek from between my gritted teeth, but the monster staggers away, leaving its left weapon behind. We stumble away from each other, the monster falling to a knee, swiping its ax in front of it to ward me off while it pats out the flames on its face.
I manage to keep my feet, barely. My hand curls around the ax buried in the ground beside me, my eyes never leaving the monster in front of me. Its empty hand pats at the flames lingering on the plate of its face, my fire proving effective for the first time. As my hand curls around the haft of the rusted ax, I feel no magical resistance inside of the object. The weapon disappears into my inventory, a smile spreading on my face.
“That’s one,” I tell the monster, doubting that it can understand me. I miss my magical staff more than anything in this moment, the lack burning my hate for Coriander and Kendon all the hotter.
The monster stands, the fire on its face patted out, and turns to face me. Its left eye no longer glows with magical amber, leaving one hateful orb to gaze in my direction. I give it no time to freely recover, tossing three consecutive bolts of fire in its direction. The monster answers my assault with precise swings of its weapon, almost lazy, each arc of its ax cutting the bolts in half midair.
My attention flows to my right hand and the bolt I am still channeling there, not even halfway charged. Less than ten seconds have passed in this fight.
The monster rockets forward, burning moss spraying into the air in its wake. With both hands on the haft of its weapon, it swings at my hip, attempting to split me in half with an incredible swing. I jump, my feet clearing the arc of its weapon, a Dragonfire Bolt coming to light in my hand ready to be tossed down into its face again. Fear rips through me as I see the monster continue its swing in a full circle, never intending to slow for a follow through. The monster’s back hand falls away from the weapon, clamping down on my ankle before I can pull my foot back. Midair, I have no way to change my direction. As the monster turns, it drags me through the air along with it.
My vision blurs and a second later my back bounces against the floor with a crack that almost drives me into unconsciousness. All of the air and strength in my body vanishes, and I lose control of my eyes for a moment. I am vaguely aware that the moss on the ground bounces up into the air along with my body, the monster’s slam enough to clear the earth of anything beneath me. My eyes focus again as gravity starts to take over, the head of a dull ax coming down at my face. I hit the earth again, my hands jutting upwards, cool metal appearing in my grasp an instant before the monster’s weapon comes down.
The titanic force of the monster’s weapon colliding with the Jailor’s Ax in my hands sends shivers all through my arms. I choke down the agony of the strike shaking through whatever bone is broken in my shoulder as I hold off the monster’s attack while on my back. The magical ax I hold onto offers no give, its head only being slightly buried into the bare ground from the horrific power of the monster’s attack. The monster is tossed back a few steps, struggling to keep ahold of its own weapon.
I didn’t ever think that I would need to use this weapon. The Jailor’s Ax is something far too heavy for me to manage, even with my magic running through the weapon to lighten the load somewhat–a unique feature of the massive weapon. The sleek metal has proved impossible to scratch, and given the shaking of the monster as it stumbles away, I doubt it can break it either.
The temporary reprieve turns sour as I see the monster in front of me give up on its weapon, letting the ax sail away from it. The rusted ax sails off into the darkness, disappearing over the lip of a ledge, the sound of its fall disappearing. Before I can move, the monster turns, dropping low as it swings a kick at my side. Even as I try to move the Jailor’s Ax again to block the kick, it slips beneath the guard of the pommel, connecting with my hip.
The world turns into a mess of color once more as I spin away, the sputtering flames I try to throw in return from my left hand marking a trail of fire through the moss. I end my roll on my knees, my stomach lurching. I push down the bile rising in my throat, spitting a mess of phlegm into the burning moss as I stare up at the monster. It stands, the Jailor’s Ax gripped between its fingers.
The monster doesn’t bother with me for a moment, tracing its new weapon through the air in graceful arcs. A snapping shakes through my body, the bone in my shoulder reknitting and pushing back into place. I stagger to my feet, breath ragged as I stare across the space at the monster. When it looks at me, I read emotion in its one remaining eye. The bastard is smug.
The monster flourishes the Jailor’s Ax, ending with the weapon resting on its shoulder.
“That’s mine,” I tell it.
For a third time, the monster lunges at me in a blur of speed. A whistle like the screams of the damned cries through the chamber as it chops down at me, but I am moving as well. The feigned weakness in my legs vanishes as I lunge into the strike, my left hand shooting upwards. My fingers slide over the cool metal of the ax pommel, the strength in the blow enough to snap the ligaments in my hand even from the barest contact. The Jailor’s Ax disappears into my inventory, my own magic that was inside the weapon still marking it as belonging to me. The monster stumbles in its swing, its balance completely wrecked by the disappearance of its weapon.
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“I told you,” I sneer with glee.
My right hand comes up to meet the monster’s face before it can recover, a fully channeled Dragonfire Bolt wrapped tightly around my hand. I put everything I have into my palm as I push it into the monster’s face. My magic explodes against the white plate of the monster’s face. The body of the monster leaves the ground, sailing up twenty feet and crashing into the side of the chamber before falling to the floor.
I slowly relax my hand, the expected backlash of exploding a fully channeled bolt in my hand completely absent. The monster doesn’t stay down, slowly picking itself up off the floor as I get a grip. It turns its face towards me, the white mask a crumpled ruin. I see a terrible mass of blackened matter between what remains of its once flawless face-plate, bunches of fungi playing a mockery of life beneath the protection of its hardened skin. I waste no time in pouring more mana into my right hand, ready to channel another Dragonfire Bolt to its utmost. Another attack like that might actually kill this thing.
Pain stops me cold. It is too sudden for fear to even come over me. I look down. There is the head of a spear jutting from my stomach, a rusted blade covered in my blood. Confusion; I try to wonder about it, how did this happen. The blade retreating, cutting up my insides in a smooth, cold motion rips my words away from me. I stagger forward a step, turning, seeing something unthinkable. Two more of the monsters stand behind me, one holding a bloody spear in its white hands, the second holding a rusted sword.
Before I can move, the spear-wielding monster lashes out with its foot, planting its heel right in my solar plexus. My feet leave the ground, my own blood pushes out of me as forcefully as all my air. My side scrapes against the ground, a single bounce, only the one. My mind is on fire trying to understand what is happening, my hands scramble, looking for purchase on anything, but there is nothing to grab. The ground slips away from me before I can crash down onto it again, the cavern and the light inside sailing away from me as I only feel the open air. My vision of the cavern distorts as I sail over the lip at the edge of the room, leading into the pitch black.
Flashes of Kendon tossing me off that cliff burn in my head, and I can see him there in the retreating light of the cavern, looking down at me as I sail away. The madness and pity in his eyes burns up my soul. I scream, impotence and hate chewing at me as my hands scratch, trying to catch the air itself, trying to claw back towards that bastard. I need to get back there. I need to put this pain and hate into him. How can I hold onto it and not go insane?
My hand grasps something solid, the world fading away.
----------------------------------------
I stand in a void, the pain of my body having vanished. In the starscape that surrounds me, my emotions are brought to the fore, the anger and shame at being so easily discarded bringing burning tears to my eyes. My Affix Index floats in front of me, the twelve-sided object spinning, giving depth to the field of stars around me. Time is a forgotten thing here, a slow crawl that is meaningless in the outside world. Unlike the last time that I studied this Index, symbols now stand out on its surface, runes that mark the magic I have been pouring into it. Seven of the spaces stand occupied, the only one with any real light to it the rune for Growth.
“Why?” I question, my voice cracking. Tears slip from my eyes, rolling like boiling water down my face. “Galea?”
She doesn’t come. I stand alone in the emptiness, no one to see me cry or scream, no one to comfort me and tell me that it will be okay. Is this my final moment? Will I die here, unable to do anything, unable to show that I can become something? The fear is so much worse this time. Finding a goal makes its tearing away all the worse. I scream into my hands, my frustration pouring out.
No. The sound is like a whisper, a hot wind from a nightmare that breaks my self-pity. I turn in the void, seeing a huge complex of shapes moving in front of me, the constant and shifting complexity of my soul. It is beautiful, a set of white-transparent shapes, each smaller than the last, all spinning inside one another in a dance that shrinks away into nothingness. Tears still hot on my face, I become lost in the dance, and see for the first time that there are eight of the shapes in total.
I don’t know how long I stand there, staring at the dance of my own soul. At first, I had thought that the largest of them to be a ball, but I can see now that I was wrong. I have no name for it, but the largest of the shapes, the one that creates the surface of my soul, is a geometric object with a thousand faces. A level beneath that is an object bearing two-hundred and ninety-nine faces. They continue in a series: one-hundred, fifty, twenty, twelve, four, and finally a perfect sphere that pulses different colors. Having studied the Glossary for so long now, I finally know the symbol pressed into one of the face of the twenty-sided object. The rune is for Fire.
Something in the dance of my soul possesses me; it offers me a hint. I turn, looking back at the Enchanter’s Affix Index that floats in the air on my other side. This is also a piece of my soul, having been split apart by Galea, but still a part of me. I reach towards the Index, and it turns in the air without me needing to command it, pushing the face with the rune for Growth out towards me. My fingers brush the face of the rune, feeling the magic stored inside. Growth wants to run free, to be let out into the world, to expand and conquer. My nails dig into the rune, grabbing ahold of the power inside. The magic flinches away from me, trying to retreat away from my grasp, but in this space my power is total, my will the makeup of everything, and I come alive in the feeling of binding the struggling magic in my hand. I am the Empress of this domain.
My other hand moves, the geometry of my soul pressing easily against my palm. A voice from a half-forgotten nightmare whispers to me what to do, but I feel as if the coaching is unneeded. I know what to do. How could I not?
I pull at the magic locked inside of the Index with all of my strength, but I may as well be trying to pull a stubborn mule by the tail. More pain streaks through me in flashes of lightning, the tears still staining my face changing to magma on my skin. I scream, dragging against the stubborn magic with all of my power, the very stars in the sky around me darkening to a dangerous crimson to echo my pain. Then, as if the magic finally loses its grasp on the inner walls of the Index, I wrench it free.
A golden-green light burns in my hand as I plunge it straight into the outer walls of my soul. The world turns white, everything in my conscious mind driven away by the ecstasy of the magic flowing into my soul. I feel power wash over me as the universe around me slowly returns to normal, the distant stars fading back to their natural luminance. I don’t need to breathe in this place, but my body yearns to pant at my exertion.
Looking down, I can see blood standing out on my bare stomach, the pain of the wound returning. I can’t keep the mad grin off my face as the starscape begins to fade. In the final vision of my soul, the intricate dance of shapes, I see a new symbol having appeared on one of the larger ones. I know the meaning of the symbol without needing to read it. Growth has been imprinted on my very soul, and now it spins along, two spaces taken up on the intricate canvas.
I cough, the world a void around me, the only thing letting me know that I still live the pain in my chest and the scraping of stone against my hand. My left arm holds all my weight as I dangle in the dark. With a grunt, my right hand lurches forward, scraping at the stones around me, trying to find purchase. My eyes focus on the speck of light above me, a flickering orange that continues to burn.
Sharp rocks scrape against my skin, prodding me with each movement as I work my way forwards in the dark. My muscles scream, but my new body does not grow tired from the climb. I curse every name I can think of, trying to fuel my climb with anger, each needling of a jagged rock into my flesh another incentive to keep going. For ten minutes I climb, my skin bloody and torn by the time I pull myself up onto the lip of the cavern. The light in the cavern is barely enough to see by now, the fires in the moss having burned down.
Three monsters stand in the cavern, each having turned their hideous amber eyes in my direction as I groan to my feet. Fire burns in my hands, a raging flame that wants only to destroy and consume.
“Let’s go again.”
Magic Essentia: Dragonfire Bolt(Rank 1):
Conjure flames of consumption, a fire that seeks to grow and consume all that it can reach. Dragonfire is a native ability of all dragons, and its aspects take on the properties of the user’s native mana affixes.