A sudden and powerful light catches me off guard. I stumble to a halt amid the rush of people flooding into the tower. Someone crashes hard into my back, sending me stumbling sideways. I move away from the press as we all begin to spill out into a massive open chamber. The room is circular, more than a hundred feet across, the roof overhead fifty feet high, and the floor made of an odd pure-white substance that illuminates everything. Lines run through the floor, fourteen in total, aiming toward the center where they intersect and continue to the other side. A slight hum pushes an ache into my head. Galea appears at my side, tsking as she stares at me, and with a wave of her claw banishes the hum.
“What was that?” I ask, looking around the room. Confusion runs through the people gathering near the door, those already inside being pushed aside by the tide that continues to storm in.
“An obtrusive probe,” Galea says. “I am not the kind of spirit to look down upon another for conducting a scan, but to blatantly attempt to delve through so many layers of providence is rather uncouth. Not to mention the waste of resources. Pardon me saying so Mistress Charlene, but I doubt that this group of youngsters have more than a smidge of providence to their names.”
I squint at the fey spirit as she stares indignantly up at the ceiling. “Find her!” I command, rather than pointlessly asking Galea to explain herself. One of these days I will need to take a trip to Faeth and see if the enchanters there cannot pull more information out of this spirit than I can.
Galea turns, scanning the crowd, pointing a claw across the room. “There they are,” she says. I turn, seeing Kendon and Coriander standing amid a group of people, their group gradually swelling in number.
Jor’Mari pushes his way out of the crowd a moment later, looking at me. “Where?” he says. I point across the room to where our enemies stand amid three others, more people slowly filling across the room to reach their gathering. A scowl takes over the man’s face, and I see his body subtly shift. Jor’Mari takes on the form of his speed specialization, the claws extending from his fingers lengthening, his canine teeth almost becoming fangs. When he takes off, I feel the wind buffet me at his leaving.
Jor’Mari is already halfway across the room by the time that I work my way into a sprint. A casual brush of his shoulder knocks a woman from her feet as he flies past her like an arrow of death. To my surprise, Jor’Mari releases an ability I have never seen him use before. As he sprints toward the group of five, those standing there turning to notice him, his body begins to swell. It is a fairly slight thing, he grows a foot and a half in height, the muscles already coiling around his shoulders, chest, and arms bulging as they double in size. The horns I have sometimes seen grow from the man’s head sprout anew, two spikes of red-tinted black that curve toward the back of his head. By the time that he reaches the scrambling group, Jor’Mari tops out at just over eight feet tall.
Kendon steps out of the group, raising the strange shield of green steel I saw him use earlier. Jor’Mari, his huge form barreling forward faster than any natural creature, does not turn aside. He collides with Kendon’s shield, pitting his lengthening horns against the steel of the rank two magician. An awful clap cracks through the room as the two forces meet, and I am brought back to that first day when I fought the Desert Spearman–a hollow pit forming in my gut. Like his brother on that day, Kendon’s decision to take the blow head on proves disastrous for him. The man is lifted from his feet like a rag doll, his body hurled ten feet back to crash into the glowing white wall with a horrendous wrenching of steel.
There is shouting all around me. Faintly, I hear someone call my name, but all of my attention is on the woman standing behind three other men, trying to back away from the monstrous fiend in front of her. I can see her better now that I am closer. The left side of Coriander’s face is a smear of blistered skin, the hair on that side of her head burned away. A ball of fire explodes out of my hand toward her as Jor’Mari moves like lightning, weaving between the panicked swing of a man to seize his arm.
Coriander notices my bolt of dragonfire and pushes one of her unsuspecting allies in front of the ball of fire. The explosion blows both her and the unfortunate man off their feet, the leathers of Coriander’s sacrifice not catching flame. With so many people standing around in here, I am afraid to add the growth affix to my attacks.
“Stop that crazy bitch!” Coriander shrieks as she pushes herself to her knees. Another bolt of fire is already sailing across the distance between her and me, and this time she has no one to protect her from me. The lob of fire collides with her side, the orange flames burrowing into her expensive clothes, making her erupt in fire. She screams, falling to her back and trying to pat out the flames. I am almost there.
“Behind,” Galea warns.
Without thinking, I throw myself to the side, narrowly avoiding a spear of earth. My balance destroyed, I roll over backward before sliding to my feet, hurling two bolts of fire at a man who seems to be conjuring another spear of earth. Surprise registers on the man’s face for an instant before a red barrier of force appears in the air in front of him. Two twin bolts explode against the barrier, leaving it cracked like a pane of glass, but the man behind it otherwise unharmed.
I see five others in the mix of people still staggering into the room join hands. In a flash they disappear.
“Behind again!” Galea screams in my ear.
I turn in time to feel a lance of pure radiant light tear through my body. I gasp, my hands falling to the wound in my chest, feeling air and blood sucking into a hole torn straight through a lung. Coriander stands amid a larger group now, a savage grin on her face even as her clothes continue to smoke and smolder, the five I saw before having appeared around Jor’Mari.
A group of six stab at Jor’Mari as he weaves through them like a snake, each swipe of his claws cutting deep lines through the arms and chests of his attackers. An aura of brown energy erupts amid the group, one of the combatants a rank two magician. Chains begin to shoot up from the ground, spiraling and trying to catch Jor’Mari’s arms and legs, but the man is just too fast for them. His wild attacks turn to a harried defense as he tries to dodge between a myriad of magic and weapon work aimed in his direction.
Then, like the descent of an evil god, Kendon falls from the air with his hammer held in both hands. Jor’Mari tries to dodge, but the bloom of soul presence around Kendon and the scalding of Jor’Mari’s skin makes him just a step too slow. Kendon’s terrible hammer lands on the side of Jor’Mari’s head, his rightmost horn shattering beneath the weight of the blow. A spear stabs through Jor’Mari’s back as he stumbles back a step, and a chain lashes out, coiling its barbed links around Jor’Mari’s leg, pulling him off balance.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“Something his happening,” Galea tells me as I pour all of my magical might into a Dragonfire Bolt.
I can feel it too, growing in the room around us, another magical aura thrown off by the strange whiteness of the floor and walls. The aura is almost impossible to see due to it being everywhere, but Galea picks it out as easily as I do. Magic pours through the entire chamber, the thrum I felt in the back of my head before returning as the swell continues to build.
A man in the group circling Jor’Mari hacks at his arm with a hatchet while Kendon stands from his landing, swinging a backhanded strike of his hammer up at Jor’Mari’s jaw. The blow collides, crushing Jor’Mari’s chin up into his pallet, Kendon’s hammer erupting in a show of dark lightning.
They will kill him if I do not do something drastic. Adding the growth affix to the ball of fire building between my fingers causes my channeling to accelerate immensely, a benefit of the affix I didn’t notice the first time I used it. The Bane Crystal falls to the floor in front of me, its green light drawing me in as I press the fire in my hands to the crystal. I am vaguely aware that behind me some kind of magic detonates against something solid. The eruption earns as much of my attention as the hole through my chest. Despite the incredible pain and the feeling that I am drowning, I know that the wound will heal. Somehow, that is enough to let me ignore it for these precious few seconds.
I hold the ball of churning green fire above my head as the affixes fuse inside the dragonfire. The whine cutting through the room continues to squeeze my head like a vice; I have no time to waste. Pulling a small bit of rock from my inventory, I hold it out in front of me with my free hand, pointing it toward Jor’Mari.
“I summon thee, Jor’Mari,” I yell into the cacophony of the room. The man only gave me this trinket this morning, and despite doing exactly as he had instructed, a speck of fear blooms in my already crowded mind. The odd marking of blood on the palm-sized slab of rock lights crimson for a bare moment, and the man disappears from his spot of torment, reappearing at my side. The moment that I sense the man collapsing to the ground next to me, I release the dragonfire in my hand. The bolt of green fire roars across the space, the air itself rippling as it races toward its target.
Kendon is the first to react, stepping out from amid the confused press of magicians, summoning his shield of green steel in his hand. He braces himself, putting his shield in the line of the bolt of dragonfire. I doubt that he expects what comes next.
The emerald dragonfire splashes over Kendon’s shield like a ball of water, the fire spraying over Kendon and the rest of his compatriots. As the fire crashes down onto them, they cry out, the dragonfire eating their clothes, their weapons, their hair, and their skin. The brown aura from one of the men condenses, magical sand spraying from his hands all over his body, snuffing out the fire as it continues to try and dig into him. He manages to douse the flames after a moment, continuing a stream of sand and pebbles over two others that have fallen to the floor, their bodies still alight with eerie flames. I watch Coriander flail amid the group, ripping away her expensive clothing as the dragonfire eats through even her enchanted gear, shoveling sand onto herself to try and put out the flames.
I am so close, just one more good strike and I will have her.
“What an eventful opening,” A voice booms through the room. Just as I am about to release another bolt of fire, the thrumming coursing through the room reaches its crescendo. Walls of translucent light spring up from the ground all around us, cutting the room into twenty-eight sections distinct from one another. My dragonfire splashes impotently against the barrier of force between me and my target, the flames falling limply to the ground and fizzling away to nothing.
With a hate that I didn’t know I could have, I stare up at someone floating in the air above the center of the chamber. A jolt of terror invades me as I notice the woman levitating in the air, four angelic wings sprouting from her back, is staring back at me when I turn her way. A force outside of myself slams me to my knees, and it feels as if my hands have become glued to the floor.
“The time for petty squabbling is over,” the woman commands. “The requisite number of competitors have entered the tower. This test is now to begin.” The woman’s aura floods the room, an oppressive force falling over everyone, drowning out all sound other than her voice.
“We have watched. We have observed, and the Willian Guild has found this generation of so-called elite magicians wanting. Removed from the supervision of your fathers, mothers, and mentors, you so quickly devolve into violence. Is oversight the only thing keeping you youth in line? Do you not possess an ounce of integrity in you, a drive to live by the tenets you would describe as your ideals in polite company?
“You believe that we have not seen your unprovoked assault on one another, your willingness to push past the final bounds of decency for your fellow beings to earn even the slightest advantage. Those of you in the peerage, does this not violate the most basic promises born from your grandiose self-importance, the right to rule not wholly contingent upon your naked exercise of force? Those of you brought here by talent or chance, how easily you debase yourselves, falling to the whims of expediency. You may think that we have not seen, but we have.”
At a gesture, windows appear in the air around the woman. More shocking than the scenes of cruelty, violence, and blatant murder that they depict, is the fact that I am not the only one capable of seeing them. I hear a gasp near me and turn to see Jess kneeling near me inside of the wedge Jor’Mari and I have been trapped inside of. Samielle, his face a mess of burns and lacerations, pulls a splinter of earth out of Jess’ arm, tossing it to the ground. The man ignores the splinters riveting his left wing as it lays limp on the ground.
Through the barriers dividing the room, I can see more eyes fixed upon the scenes playing out overhead. The sight of Samissa collapsing to the ground, an arrow passing through her neck as if it weren’t stealing her life away. Terrible scenes float through the air around the angelic woman, the righteous anger on her face growing more and more earned by the moment.
“We have seen everything!” she proclaims. “Awful.” The woman casts her stare over the whole of the room, forcing men and women to demure beneath her baleful glare. “This contest persists, but it has become clear to the guild that a more childish approach might be necessary for you lot. If you cannot control yourselves, raise yourselves above the most basic proscriptions we give to children, then we shall speak to you like children. Violence against your fellow competitors outside the bounds of direct competition is prohibited. Wanton violators will be ejected and any future intercourse with the guild that they aspire to will be severed. If you cannot abide by even this most self-evident rule, then it will be enforced by your betters. Make no mistakes any of you, we can force this upon you, and we will.”
“Now,” she raises her hands, a thrumming atmosphere running through the room picking up once more, “you have turned your minds against your fellows. It is a magician’s first duty to safeguard the state and the people from forces within and without, to understand what conflicts they face and to find expedient and judicious solutions, to safeguard civilization from the rabid forces of the dark. The guild has found you lacking in this, both in resolve and in character, and we shall test it now. We shall pour monsters down atop you, trapping you in a never-ending progression of the dark beasts that pound at the door. Those of you lacking power, will, or resolve will fall away or perish. To leave this contest, all you need do is infuse some mana into the symbol in the center of your wedge, and the onset of monsters will vanish. You and all others inside your slice of the room will fail the first level of this tower, and not be allowed to progress to the higher floors. The onset of monsters will not cease until half of the competitors have faltered. You have ten seconds to prepare yourselves.”
At her proclamation, a brilliant light enraptured her form, blinding me for a moment. By the time I blinked away the spots in my vision, the woman had vanished. I stared around the triangular slice of the room I found myself trapped inside of. Jor’Mari, Jess, and Samielle were trapped along with me, each bearing wounds. There were two other that I didn’t recognize, an elven woman and an earthspeaker man. The three of us eyed one another for a moment, all of our gazes sinking to the circle of intricate runes inscribed on the ground, roughly in the center of the wedge.
A shaking echoed through the bright room, a square of darkness erupting in the floor of each of the wedges. Then, nightmares began to pour forth from the holes in the ground.