The shout had come from a warlock who had come around the back of the tent. Saul glanced around for thralls, but the man did not seem to have any. He did, however, have a long wooden staff in his hand, and at the end of which glowed red light.

A sigil? Saul thought so for a moment but realized that wasn’t the case. The man’s staff had a yellow crystal inlaid into the end, and the crystal contained the Sigil, rather than the power symbol being pressed directly into the wood. That was new.

Approaching the staff-wielding warlock, Saul conjured a spell he had not used before—Mud Golem. This was not like a summoned troll. A golem was a very different creature.

Trolls were large and stupid but strong and loyal. A golem on the other hand was a creature of animated elemental matter. A golem had the cunning and speed that a Troll lacked, and it made up for what it lacked in strength with an adaptability and crafty courage that was entirely alien to the mind of a troll.

The mud golem rose up out of the ground next to Saul as he cast the spell. It had the shape of a man and was made of black wet earth. Its only facial feature was a suggestion of a depression around where the eyes would be. It moved like a man, though, and it looked around very much like a seeing, hearing creature.

It was unsettling, and Saul found himself very happy it was on his side.

The mud golem seemed to pick up Saul’s intention for it. The monster turned and dashed with a strange, swift, scuttling gait toward the thralls and the warlock guarding the entrance to the tent.

The warlock with the magic staff raised it up above his head and opened his mouth to speak a magic word.

Saul leapt forward slashing at the man’s arm with his blade. The warlock stepped out of his range, tripping over the ropes holding the command tent up. His incantations turned to an incoherent cry of pain as his ankle twisted in the rope and he tumbled onto his back in the snow.

Saul kicked the man’s right wrist, and the magic staff flew into the air. Saul caught the staff in his left hand and plunged the tip of his sword into the warlock’s chest.

His hand tingled and he felt magic flow from the dying warlock, up through the magic staff, and into himself.

“So, that’s one way to transfer a magic item,” he said aloud. He’d heard something like this before. One could not take a sigil from another person, but one could take a Sigilized item from another if the other person died.

It was a dark aspect of the old Sigil magic, and everyone knew stories of even common craftspeople who had ended up murdering each other over the valuable Sigilized sets of tools of their trade.

Well, now Saul had this item at least, though he had no idea what to do with it. He felt his System reaching toward it, exploring it, working out what it was. Of course, that was how it would work. As with every other magical interaction that he did, the System would handle everything between himself and this newly acquired magical item.

Still waiting for the System to work out what the Staff was and what could be done with it, Saul checked in with the progress his mud golem was making with the other two.

Here, he was pleased to find that one of the thralls was down, choking on a mouthful of mud. The golem was dancing a deadly routine with the other thrall. It seemed to have some kind of mud magic of its own, and as the thrall tried to fight the golem, the golem was able to use magic to fight back.

As Saul approached, he saw a tendril of magic reaching out toward the mouth of the thrall. Suddenly, the thrall was staggering forward, dark earth and wet mud erupting from his mouth and nose as if he was drowning. He fell to his knees and then toppled forward.

“No!” the warlock shouted, backing off. “How can it be? The dark magic of the golems has not been seen in the world for… Agh!”

His words were cut off by the golem itself. Surging forward, swift as an assassin, it clenched cold and clammy fingers of earth around the warlock’s neck and tackled him. As he fell backward, the warlock stabbed a knife into the golem’s belly.

A Sigil glowed red. In an instant, the golem petrified. Dark wet mud became crisp, light brown earth. Cracks ran over its mody and it scrambled into a heap of earthen dust.

But it was too late for the warlock. The golem’s strangling fingers came with a magic that choked the life from its victim in a moment. The warlock lay dead in the snow, his eyes staring blankly up into the air.

A highly effective spell, Saul thought.

In much the same way as the fireball had gotten stronger, faster, and more deadly as he’d leveled up, Saul suspected that the golem and his other spells would continue to grow and expand with him. He smiled.

With two swift strokes of his Xornian sword, Saul slashed to the left and right and took off the entrance flap to the tent. It fell with a soft thump into the snow, and Saul saw a vision from a nightmare beyond.

The full force of Grimdir’s magic hit Saul in the face like the heat from an opened oven. Within, the wytchlord himself sat in a raised chair like a throne of bleached bones.

The wytchlord’s knuckles gripped the armrests with such force that they trembled. He was a man of middle size, younger than Saul had expected, but with his head thrown back in a posture that suggested extreme pain. His face was parchment white, and perspiration ran from his brow and cheeks as if his face was freshly raised from a bucket of water.

His mouth was set in a grim line, and from his throat came a low groaning sound.

Around him gathered five warlocks, the silver runes on their robes augmented by other runes, some of gold, some of red, and some of twinkling azure like the depths of a summer sky. They would have been beautiful, if not for the sheer concentrated evil that emanated from them.

Ah he cleared his mind of the confusion that had hit him, Saul realized the true situation. Grimdir the wytchlord was not in charge.

The warlocks around him were.

They stood in a tight half circle around the throne of bone, and they channeled not only magic to him, but also a powerful controlling spell that pushed Grimdir to greater and more strenuous efforts than were good for any man.

Grimdir was not the master of this magic, he was the conduit. He exerted immense effort, but the power coursing through him would kill him before this was over.

He was not Saul’s target. The five mages around him were.

Saul immediately changed tactics. He dove to one side and kicked out at a brazier heaped with smoldering coals. The dry canvas caught fire immediately. Black smoke blossomed in the small space, and the flames spread greedily.

He leaped forward, aware that the warlocks were trying to disengage themselves from their control spell. However, they were too deeply intertwined with the magic to do so quickly.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Saul killed one with a sword thrust, and then was flung backward as a second wrenched himself from the spell and fired a blast of power into Saul’s face. The attack was pure force without form or target beyond the desire to do damage.

Saul flew into the canvas. The fire-weakened tent caved in on one side.

Flames and smoke rushed to engulf the space. As Saul righted himself, gasping to fill his lungs with air after the wind had been knocked out of him from the fall, he saw the four still living warlocks grab Grimdir and haul him off the bone throne. They staggered out of the tent, their powerful magic still thundering out from Grimdir toward the village.

Saul chased after them, but as he did so a blast of fire hit the front of the tent, sending new flames shooting across the canvas. Saul felt his skin burning, and his eyes ran with the dense smoke. He coughed as the fire lapped up the breathable air inside the tent.

He whirled, charging toward the back of the tent, and slashed an opening in the canvas. Diving through, he landed in the snow at the back of the tent. He rolled, looked up, and found that he was blind.

The smoke, he thought through the haze that threatened to cloud his mind beyond recall. It will pass in a moment.

He could still see his System’s spell casting options, and he conjured a rock troll, hearing the satisfying whump of the displacement of air as the powerful creature manifested nearby. The troll would protect him until he regained his faculties.

Pain wracked him. His face and hands stung. He fumbled at his belt and found the rounded glass edge of a Basic Healing Potion bottle.

As he popped the wax stopper from the bottle, he heard the clash of weapons and the shouting of men, and the growling of the rock troll as it tackled new attackers.

Aniseed filled his mouth, and a wash of pleasant feeling and blue energy suffused him as he swallowed the healing potion. He gasped as the healing powers filled him, then blinked as his vision abruptly returned.

He was staring at churned snow. It was red with blood.

How bad had his injuries been? Even with the healing potion, he felt weak.

Without it, he would have surely died.

The thought of his friends back in the village flashed through his mind. They had no healing potions, and they were facing a huge host of enemies.

Time to finish his job.

The magic that had been channeled through Grimdir to control the army had become chaotic and unfocused. Saul could feel it crashing through the forest like the discordant howling of some demented orchestra.

The feeling was disorientation, an assault on the psychic sense of magic which, for a time, Saul had gotten used to not having anymore. But it was definitely still there, he realized now.

In his former life, he had owned the great psychic power of the realm of magic in a direct and immediate way, as a powerful part of his life. He had been able to keep track in the psychic realm of all the mages and sorcerers connected to the great river of power that was continually being channeled from the Prism Academy.

Aside from the odd flickerings of a sixth sense of magic, Saul had gotten used to the absence of this feeling. Now, in the snowy forest glade with the reeking stench of burning canvas and the mashed and bloody snow around him, he felt the psychic sense of magic coming back with full strength.

Perhaps I never really lost it, he reflected. Perhaps there just has not been that much magic to sense until now.

No longer was that the case. The control magic that had directed the invading army was a spell of prodigious power, probably unprecedented in this age of the world.

Who was doing the sending? Whose idea was this in the first place?

Those questions would be answered, but not yet.

Now, it was the time for the warlocks to die.

Saul forged through the snow. His legs felt like jelly and his head was swimming, so he reached to his belt and pulled out another Basic Strength Potion.

These took the shapes of little silver flakes, round-bellied with tall, graceful tops and stoppered with silvery wax. Saul knocked the top off with his thumb and poured the potion into his mouth.

The taste of the strength potion was rich and green, like the smell of rain in summer. It was not unpleasant, which was somewhat surprising since the ingredients were a sickly smelling mushroom and a handful of tree bark. However, the transformation of elements was the power of magic.

Saul smiled as he felt the rush of new energy flowing through him like the first flush of spring after winter.

The feeling of weakness left him, replaced by a crackling, snapping energy. The rock troll that had fought off the last of the guard mages was still active, and Saul had another two castings to use before his cooldown timer kicked in.

Clear tracks led through the snow toward the warlocks who had taken Grimdir, but Saul could have followed them with his eyes closed. The welling surge of chaotic magic that radiated from them was as loud as a chorus of trumpets to his senses, and his awareness of the direction it was coming from was as clear.

He forged into the woods, heading east and slightly north, away from the warlock camp and the village. The lumbering rock troll stomped along at his side.

As he departed from the now-abandoned warlock command post, he heard a sudden deep, rumbling boom like thunder far off. It came from Harkin’s Holdfast. What was happening there?

Saul resisted the temptation to use Eagle Vision to find out what was happening. He needed to keep his focus on destroying Grimdir and the warlocks controlling him.

So long as the control spell remained active, they had no chance of victory.

Saul forged ahead as fast as he could through the packed snow. The warlocks had cut a path through the snow, but it was still hard going.

The rock troll, apparently sensing Saul’s difficulty, took the lead and strode forward with surprising speed for something so large and cumbersome. As it went, it shoved the snow out of the way with its great hands.

Saul and the troll were not the fastest, but the warlocks were carrying Grimdir, and were working their powerful magic at the same time. They could not go at full speed either, and by the lessening amount of snow that had fallen onto their trail, Saul knew he was catching up with them.

He pushed on, on, the sweat dripping from his brow and his breath steaming in the cold air.

After a time, the presence of magic grew so intense that he knew he had to be nearly on top of them. The troll stopped suddenly and let out a low noise somewhere between a dog’s warning growl and two slaps of gritty stone being scraped against each other.

Saul looked at the troll in some surprise. He had not known that the creature could make any noise at all. But then, he thought, perhaps this was another example of his spells evolving and developing as he leveled up.

This troll had lasted much longer than any other he’d cast. It seemed more intelligent and aware of its surroundings, too.

“Good boy,” he said, patting the troll on the arm and speaking to it affectionately as if it had been a pet dog. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

With the troll at his side, he stepped into a round, snowy clearing surrounded by majestic pines. In the center was something that he immediately recognized, but that he had never expected to see in this world.

Twelve feet tall and five across, gracefully arched like a manorial castle doorway, and filled with a swirling red and gold light that filled the clearing with an eerie illumination; there was no doubt in his mind what it was.

A world-bending travel portal, a gateway to the gods only knew where, product of an ancient and powerful magic that Saul had assumed well beyond the capabilities of the warlocks of northern Xorn.

In front of the portal, three figures made a strange tableau, their shapes silhouetted against the otherworldly red and gold. The two warlocks, and between them, limp as a dead man, Grimdir.

As Saul emerged into the clearing, they dropped Grimdir into the snow with no more care than if he’d been a sack of grain. He fell with a wet thud and lay still.

All was deathly silent in the clearing. The portal made no sound, and even Grimdir did not groan or cry out.

The warlock on the left of the portal gazed toward Saul, and then at his companion. The second warlock, taller and more imposing, and with a long salt-and-pepper beard braided with glittering white gemstones, lifted his hands and made two passes with his fingers in the still air.

Blue lines of magic, crisp and bright and gleaming like fresh metallic ink, stretched out after the warlock’s hands. They formed a symbol, not a Sigil this time, but a simple, three-lined rune of a style Saul did not recognize.

The portal’s brightened, and Saul realized the strange blue rune was an unlocking symbol, a key that granted the warlocks access to the portal.

Without another glance at Saul or at Grimdir, they stepped through the portal. The boiling gold and red light swallowed them as if they had dropped like stones into a container of swirling molten metal.

There was a low sound, a deep fizzing noise like water on a hot plate, and the light of the portal vanished. In its place remained two innocuous-looking pillars of stone, leaning slightly toward each other. On one of them, a bloody handprint made a dark smudge on the stone; Grimdir’s blood.

In the same instant as the portal vanished, the overwhelming assault on Saul’s magical senses stopped so abruptly that he stumbled forward a few steps, like a man who has been leaning against a door that has been unexpectedly opened.

He blinked and understood.

The magic that had been channeled from the warlocks through the enslaved form of Grimdir had stopped as the two warlocks had gone through the portal. They had vanished—they had escaped—but the result was the same, for the moment, as if they had died.

The spell was broken.