Waves crashed over the shoals far below, the spray of water caught on the air an ever-present distraction. The salty spray of the sea was a constant reminder to Arabella of her tragedy. She tried to focus, to concentrate on the world around her to get herself out of her own head. The moon shone through the shifting clouds; a beam of light cast off to bathe the world in a sea of trickling green. The stars were gone overhead, only a void and the shining body overhead present.
The firelight flickered in front of her, the barren earth the four of them sat upon somehow incongruent with the fire and the salty air. She idled for a time, drawing transcriptions in the earth with a stick as the rest bickered with one another or recounted their supplies. As a group of rank three magicians, food and water were not so much a concern as their dwindling supply of elixirs and alchemical ingredients were. To the South, the land extended, a high cliff overlooking the sea upon which they camped for the moment. To the North, where they had tried and failed to enter on several occasions now, a wild growth of brambles stood out.
She ignored the chill of the gusting wind, the cold never got to her after her rank three ascension. However, the blistering wind had a tendency to put out the fire, no matter how many windbreaks Caleb set up to divert it. The man stared at the fire as it blew across the ground, pushed by the constant gale, his eyes tired and distant. It had been five days since they could last sleep; the beast came when they slept.
No matter how many were posted to watch, no matter what defenses they prepared ahead of time, one person sleeping on this godsforsaken shoreline would summon the creature. Their band had begun with six members, tasked to hunt down some monster the locals thought to be a nightmare of legend, haunting the fishing villages that called this backwater home. Three days of searching had turned up nothing, no hint, no sign of anything that might stalk the night or the day, plucking innocent townspeople from their cozy beds and woolen blankets in the night. Settling in for the night, preparing to make attempts to scry the land the next day, the six had turned in for the night, leaving only Yllissa on watch.
When they awoke some hours later, Yllissa had vanished, along with all of the stars in the sky. Day had never broken again after that night, no matter how many hours passed as they explored the brambles or the shoreline. The wind began to blow then, harder every moment, the constant shear of its cry over the rocks sounding like the screams of the condemned. When next they decided to bed down, to recover themselves, it had been Illigar snatched away into the dark.
Caleb had seen the abduction, had tried to stop what he claimed to be snaking roots reaching up from the ground to drag poor Illigar away. He was unable to do anything to aide his friend, and no power he possessed could wake the sleeping members of the group until hours later. They did not sleep anymore, but even rank three bodies grew tired and needed the rest after so many days.
The figure Arabella cut into the ground with her stick resembled a new scrying schematic. She blinked, immediately finding several faults with the design as she inspected it with her tired eyes. She sighed, wiping away the schematic and beginning again. Near the fire, Ella began to sob to herself, a quiet event that drew little attention.
“Are we going to die?” Ella asked Arabella, not for the first time.
Frustration welled up inside of Arabella as she glanced toward the woman. Why was she asking her? This was only Arabella’s third rank three hunt, why did they all keep looking to her for guidance? Illigar had been the leader of the team, and Caleb had more experience dealing with situations like this than she did. Just because of her family name, they thought that she would have an answer that they didn’t.
“Maybe,” Arabella grumbled, still drawling in the dirt with her stick. She cringed when she heard the way Ella’s breath caught at her word.
None of their storage items functioned, they stopped working the same time that the stars disappeared. They had tried flying away from the shoreline as well, as rank three magicians, they had all mastered the art of flight. Each attempt was met with disaster, the wind becoming an impossible barrier even just a few feet away from the ground. Jaessar still had a nasty wound on his shoulder from a collision he made with a sharp rock. The wound should have long closed and healed, but it continued to trickle blood, even the normal clotting not occurring. Without their healer, even the smallest injury might spell disaster.
“Light,” Caleb called, pulling Arabella’s attention away from her schematic once again.
She found him looking away from his flickering fire, his eyes turned toward the mass of brambles to the north. Arabella did not see what he was speaking about at first, but as the seconds slipped by, as the howling wind continued to blow, she saw the spark of light bleeding out over the top of the mass of thorns. She jumped to her feet, the light peeking over the brambles like the rising of the sun.
“What do we do?” Ella asked, jumping to her feet as well. The woman, an artist with an ax, shook and trembled as she held her weapon close to her chest.
“We go there,” Arabella said, using the command the party seemed hellbent to impart on her. Truthfully, she had no plans, no ideas for how to pull them out of the situation they were trapped in that she had not tried already. If the worst found them and she had her back against the wall, she knew that she would be able to retreat, but she did not want to abandon the members she had been put with. Any change promised something new, perhaps even something that might save them.
The four crawled through the wall of brambles as they headed north, attempting to fly over the thorns was far deadlier than suffering their intermittent sting. The light continued to grow, taking on the true aspect of the sun, the rays of radiance piercing through the constant gloom.
They came upon a clearing in the brambles, eight stones set in a circular perimeter about an altar they had never found before. Chains and the stains of long-dried blood clung to the stones that stood in sentry around the alter, creating a macabre theater for some ancient and terrible being. None needed to imagine what creature might call the clearing home, as it was currently affixed to the alter by chains of burning light.
A monster, a creature made of cracked bark that clung to rotting muscle struggled against the chains affixing it to the stone, its taloned and wooden hands passing through the links of light as if they did not exist, disturbing nothing. The monster looked like someone’s sick joke of making a snowman from plant matter, having a bulbous body with no legs and two spindly arms sticking off either side of it. Its head was a hideous mass of screeching mouths, each differently shaped, all predatory, with a single gray eye in the center that stared heavenward.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
The light that drew their attention did not come from the chains restraining the monster, but from the man hovering over the clearing. He stood on the air, hurricane winds whipping his red robe about like a flag, his wild crimson hair flailing like a fire. His eyes were made of fire, no doubt his regalia, and they blazed with a hate that made Arabella stop as she took her first step into the clearing. The man sneered down at the monster he stood over, rivulets of blood running from several wounds on his body. In his left hand, held in the air over his head, a ball of fire swelled, looking as if the man had summoned the sun down from the sky, already more than twenty feet across.
The fire grew, its roiling making it look almost as if it were made of liquid rather than ephemera. Arabella could feel the heat of the flames from where she stood more than two hundred feet away, a kiss of warmth on her cheek that promised death at the slightest touch. It continued to expand, and Arabella could do nothing but watch as it grew in size, dwarfing the man that held it up in his hand.
Arabella’s mind returned to her by the time that the ball of fire had reached more than fifty feet across. She could not fathom the mana required to create such a thing; it had to be in the tens of thousands, maybe more than a hundred thousand. She had no spell or ability in her arsenal that could even come close to requiring such ludicrous levels of power.
“Move away!” The man yelled, his voice cutting through the wind that continued to tear at him.
She sensed the others around her ducking back into the brambles, ready to be away from the imminent conflagration. Arabella could not bring herself to do the same, jumping into the air, suffering the cutting winds as she watched on. The unknown man glanced her direction for a brief moment, nodding to her in the instant before he cast his hand down.
The monster chained to the altar screamed, its hands digging at the restraints holding it to the stone, but it could not move. Fire, a torching ball of screaming flames engulfed it as it gave out its final cry. As the flames collided with the earth, it exploded upward, becoming a pillar of fire that rose into the clouds far overhead, consuming the entirety of the clearing in a wave of orange radiance that lasted more than a minute; even the stranger disappeared into the pillar of fire.
The wind that constantly tore at her and tried to throw her out of the sky began to die even before the fire ceased, and Arabella watched the flood of light in front of her, feeling the scorching heat roll over her skin, welcoming all of it. The fire died away, revealing the stranger standing in the air over the epicenter of the explosion, staring down at the scorched and barren earth below him. He scowled down at the naked stone beneath him, the body of the monster vaporized by the destruction he wrought.
A trickle of something cold splashed against Arabella’s cheek, making her flinch. She raised a finger to her face, having it come away wet. She thought for a moment that her nightmare vanishing, seeing the stars begin to peek out once more from the void overhead, had set her to tears. More water, as cold as the sea trickled down from the sky overhead, bathing her in a wash of refreshing rain. She could see a hole punched straight through the clouds overhead, the moon and reappearing stars casting light down as the clouds swirled around the epicenter of the pillar of flame. More of the clouds seemed to conjure themselves from nothing, joining the spiraling mass that circled over the clearing, moving westward and becoming a real storm. As the curtain of rain moved over the clearing, steam rose from the stranger, and Arabella found him studying her as they held the sky alone in the rain.
“You made water from fire,” she said, not really understanding where the words came from.
He smiled, but Arabella could see the falsity in the expression as he approached. “My name is Corinth Devardem,” he said, the churning fire in his eyes beginning to die. “The townsfolk said that there was a band of magicians that disappeared into the hills a few days ago. Might that be you?”
“Yes,” Arabella said, captivated by the fiery eyes that bore into her with their intensity.
“Good,” he said, sighing. “I am in desperate need of directions. I am trying to reach a city called Grim.”
She escorted him all the way back to the city after their meeting. The journey was not a short one, taking two weeks even at the groups maximum speed. She learned a lot about the man who called himself the Red Mage of Evengale, though she found the moniker not all that creative. She was shocked to find that he was only of the third rank, the same as her, and that he had come from such humble beginnings. He spoke of his family, especially of his youngest brother, with a nostalgia that told her he had not been home in quite some time.
The man carried along with him a letter of introduction to the Willian Guild, as well as a sealed envelope addressed to the head of the guild himself, her grandfather. Arabella liked to imagine that she made friends with Corinth on their journey to Grim, but the man held her at a polite distance, always keeping his true feelings hidden and buried. Whenever they found monsters, no matter how small or out of the way, Corinth could not pass by without burning them all to cinders. The man was a fiend for destruction, only ever seeming truly alive in the moments after he had burned the terrible creatures away.
He possessed a great affinity for spellcraft as well, something that the two of them shared. Arabella found several holes in his understanding, coming to learn that he was self-taught. Despite his lack in the breadth of his knowledge, the man’s insights into spellcraft were genius. She imagined that if he ever found a real tutor on the subject, he might one day even match her.
Arriving in Grim, Arabella took Corinth to meet with her grandfather immediately. The guild master was disturbed at the loss of magicians in what was thought to be a simple hunt, but he did not dwell on the loss overlong. Hunting monsters was dangerous sport, casualties were expected, and deaths did happen. She was dismissed as soon as she made her report and introduction, her grandfather not wanting her to overhear the conversation he had with Corinth. The last time that she saw the strange man with her own two eyes was as she exited the audience chamber, the fiery gaze of the young magician turned toward one of the most powerful magicians in the world as he sat upon his throne of bleached bone.
Arabella did not heed her grandfather’s wishes however, escaping to her chambers in the mansion at once, establishing a scrying link to the audience chamber. Despite his great power, the head of the Willian guild was not a magician with a depth of knowledge on spellwork, relying on his advisors to handle such security, men and women whom Arabella had long learned to circumvent with her own skill.
The scry did not communicate sound, making the spying almost fruitless as Arabella was also not adept at reading lips. The two men spoke for a time, their words measured and steady. Then, the grandmaster of the Willian guild led the young mage to another chamber in the guild house, a chamber Arabella had never herself been allowed entrance.
A steel door stood in the room, a single seam splitting its center. Arrayed around the top arch of the passageway were ten symbols, each strange and without any meaning to Arabella. The grandmaster approached the door, placing a heavy hand on its surface, motioning to a symbol in the array that lit at his touch, two crossed swords. At his direction, Corinth also stepped forward, touching the surface of the door, jumping back as another symbol began to shed a black light. The symbol was a simple circle, but it shone with a dark light that excited fear in Arabella’s chest. Corinth reacted poorly to seeing the symbol light up, his face contorting in anger as he began to yell at her grandfather.
The young magician’s eyes flicked to the side, staring into Arabella as he cast his hand out. The last sight she ever had of Corinth was of fire rolling off of his hand, pouring over the invisible sensor she had in the room with the two men, destroying it utterly. There was anger on his face, as well as the briefest hint of tears in the corners of his eyes. He disappeared into a blur of orange, the two great doors opening behind him.