10th Belara, 998 NE
The kids ran down the muddy street and the darkmage followed, a black-garbed figure floating serenely on the air, easily keeping up with them. As though he did it as much for amusement as anything else, the darkmage would nonchalantly raise a hand, gesture at one of the fleeing children; the road would rise up, mud spilling over the chosen target, pulling them down to suffocate in the dirt. He ignored all the other screaming people who turned and sprinted away from the scene, chasing after only the little ones.
Nighteye was swiftly catching up. He was high above his quarry, descending with his wings poised, slicing down through the air. But he could easily pick out the details even from up here – starlight was enough for him to see by, and the wizard wasn’t bothering to direct the mist, hide what he was doing.
He could see the exultant body language of the heretic, soaring upright and aloof, untouchable, as he toyed with the children’s lives. The tiny, desperate hands of his dying victims, trying futilely to claw their way from their muddy graves.
He had no choice. He couldn’t chase the darkmage – he had to save the trapped ones first. Even if it meant falling behind. He couldn’t just leave them to drown in the muck of Lowtown.
He shifted even as he landed – there was no gap between intention and actualisation this time. Changing shape was as simple as changing facial expression now.
With a human arm he reached down into the mire – with a single thrust he went into the road up to the shoulder. He could feel the hair on the little boy’s head – he found the boy’s arm and smoothly pulled.
He could tell at once it was no good – he was going to rip the arm off.
Taking a deep breath, Nighteye plunged his face into the road, then used both arms.
It took another ten seconds to get the boy out, and ten more seconds of gently beating on his back until the champion was sure he was okay.
In the time he had stopped to help, the wizard had continued his horrid task by burying two more children, and was about to turn a corner, chasing the rest of them out of Nighteye’s line of sight.
I know what to do.
The next magic he used was no more difficult to bring into effect than puffing out his chest and standing up straight.
When he reached the next group of buried children he was thirty feet tall, and his arms were long enough, hands big enough, that he could scoop the children out of the ground two by two.
The arch-wizard looked back, once, before turning the corner, in pursuit of the last few.
Celestium, he swore as the killer disappeared from view.
He checked those he saved were breathing and hurried on to the corner, stomping his way through the muck with his new legs the size of trees, splashing the walls of the houses. As he went he set his thoughts on the nearby animals. There were an awful lot of rats and even a few snakes hanging around in the nearest alleys – bats in the roofs – birds hunting spiders and scorpions, flies and wasps… He could imagine them in his mind’s eye all at once, what they were feeling, how they could respond to his will.
He rounded the corner. The heretic was hovering there, waiting.
Random people yelling and running behind him.
No sign of the children, except –
Except Nighteye could sense them, still alive but dying, right beneath the road under the heretic’s floating feet. Six of them. Those who had tried to split away from the pack had been the first to suffer the wizard’s wrath, and their shared terror had kept these six kids together – and now they were going to die together.
He could feel the life down there, worms and weeds and roots and even the lice covering the bodies of the children. He could feel it and he could manipulate it, give it shape with his thoughts. But he wasn’t Leafcloak – there wasn’t anything he could do in such a short time-period to make the roots grow long, make the weeds strong enough to haul the kids out of their disgusting tomb.
The dark wizard floated a little higher, approaching his eye-level.
“Why’re you even saving ‘em?” the man asked in a brusque, local accent, South Lowtown to the core. “You’re a fool, druid. If you knew the freedom that comes o’ letting go –“
Heresy.
The magically-swollen musculature of his wiry body maintained its accustomed agility. He was no fighter, but he could snap out a series of strikes with horrendous power and speed.
None of the blows landed – the wizard swooned and swayed in the air. “They’re usin’ you, you know!” he yelled, laughing derisively now.
Then the black figure retaliated with fire, spraying it in liquid form right into Nighteye’s gigantic face so that it ran down his equally-gigantic mask, melting it.
It hurt. A lot.
He put his massive head down, felt his hood igniting, hair aflame… Still, he didn’t stop swiping with his arms, trying to snatch the heretic out of the air. He could sense the slippery wizard just as easily as he could sense the children. Once he had his hands on the killer it would be over.
Nighteye felt nothing as he pummelled the air, his arms colliding with no obstacles. But that didn’t matter, really. Ending it quickly was secondary right now – with his head down, he assessed the positions of the six kids running out of air down there, trying to pinpoint their exact locations. If he didn’t get them out in the next seconds, the liquid fire would pool above them and they’d be sure to die –
He knew what he had to do.
When he roared in anger the darkmage seemed to think it was a scream of pain, and laughed all the louder.
The moment the wizard backed away a little farther, he acted, throwing everything at his enemy all at once.
Sparrows, gulls, blackbirds, with scorpions and snakes in their talons. Rats leaping off the nearest buildings, the biggest spiders he could find riding their shoulders.
It was a distraction. He could feel the senseless loss of life as the heretic whirled, meeting the new threats with waves of elemental forces that tore them into feathers, gobbets of flesh, twists of dust…
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But it afforded Nighteye time to bend and scoop aside the whole road, upturning its contents as he slid it so that the suffocating children were released, lying now atop a mound of sludge.
He was relieved to see they were panting for air; some of the bravest townspeople who’d stopped to watch the battle were running forwards to help the kids out –
The arch-wizard, noticing that his victims had been freed, loosed a shriek of rage. Ignoring Nighteye, he swirled around the druid, spraying more fire at the children, both his arms extended – the mud swiftly started taking shape around them, humanoid limbs of pure filth reaching out to grasp them, pull them back down into the muck – his liquid flame was about to touch them, incinerate them right there where they were sprawled –
But his anger had cost him dearly.
As the darkmage sped in an arc around him, Nighteye snatched out a hand, but this time he put on another burst of growth even as he stretched.
The ten-foot-long arm the heretic tried to evade was now fifteen feet long, and the champion gripped him by the left leg, pulled him away from his would-be victims.
Got you now, killer.
Before he brought his second hand up to bear on the heretic, Nighteye had already filled the heretic with so many diseases that he actually heard the man’s shuddering gasp, even over the wet roar of the flames still spurting from the black-gloved fingertips.
He’d reached his limit – at almost fifty feet tall, the champion towered over the nearby buildings, giant-like. It was almost difficult not to tear the wizard in two as he gripped the killer in both hands and started to apply pressure.
The wizard shrieked again, but not in anger this time. This was pain, humiliation.
“Turn – off – the – flames!” Nighteye growled. His fifty-foot-tall body produced a far louder, deeper voice than was normal.
The liquid flame appeared to be pouring out of the wizard’s body through the pores in his skin, like a desperate last-ditch attempt to scorch the druid’s hands, secure his release. His black robe was burning away.
But Nighteye’s hands weren’t going anywhere. Scars would heal, as would his face and scalp, even his hair.
Instead he only tightened his grip.
“You – foolish – boy!” the heretic gurgled.
The champion’s eyes narrowed, feeling the surge of hatred. For some reason he was reminded of that hunting trip, three years ago to the day, on his thirteenth birthday – after which he’d given up meat; after which he’d made friends with Avenar, his loyal grouse, and come into his power.
Now he was sure of his power. Now it was no less natural to him than breathing.
“You tried to kill the children!” he cried. “You killed… hundreds… of my friends.” The champion turned his head aside – there were still feathers floating down through the air. “You’re pathetic! You don’t deserve to… breathe.”
The fiery death-throes of the darkmage only intensified as Theor began to shut down the heretic’s lungs with cold precision.
“Don’t deserve… to live…”
He removed the barriers he’d set up in his mind, or they were removed for him – as he squeezed he knew only that they were gone, the instincts that compelled him to preserve life, washed away in a fiery flood, a wave of crying children, falling feathers –
He felt an oh-so-satisfying crunch as the wizard’s ribcage and collarbone popped –
“Nighteye!”
Leafcloak’s shrill cry cut through the fog in the street, the fog in his mind, and he came back to himself.
Even as he let the limp wizard fall from his massive hands, she swooped down, catching the killer in her beak before he hit the ground.
Those people who’d watched the battle between heretic and giant from a distance were now backing away in renewed awe, as the tremendous bird descended into the street.
Theor saw the other two heretics, asleep, clutched in her talons as she settled down on the scooped-out road-surface.
Then she shimmered, becoming herself again, appearing halfway between the sleeping heretics and Theor’s one. He could sense the life still beating inside the broken wizard – and he could sense the life already strengthening, bones and lacerations mending before Leafcloak even reached him.
People were so much easier to break than to put back together again, but she made it look simple.
Within the five seconds it took for her to reach and crouch down at the wizard’s side, he was in perfect health. She put him to sleep and then hoisted him, dragging him across to the other two. This part she made look difficult, but only because there were onlookers.
Then she looked up into Theor’s face.
“Come with me.”
She spoke gently, and the giant boy shuddered.
“Leafcloak, I, hm… the children, I can hardly –”
“I’ve seen to them already, and we can’t do this here.” Within an instant she was a bird once more, swelling in size as she gathered the trio of darkmages together. “It’s over, Nighteye. It’s over. Meet me at Magicrux Peralath.”
She took to the air, the wind of her beating wings making his hair stream where it was regrowing, loose of his hood.
“This is a sorry way to spend my birthday,” he muttered, shaking the feathers through his flesh, bending into position as he became a titanic owl.
Gasps rippled across the small crowd, and a few of the children lifted their arms, waving at him as he soared away.
Magicrux Peralath was located near the southern wall of Mund, in the centre of a rare grassy area. Like many of the bastions of the magisters, it looked like little more than a small fort from the outside. It was round, a squat structure of grey stone with no access from the roof; Leafcloak was forced to set her captives down on the path that led from the street to the gate. It would be far larger under the ground than one would imagine from outside, of course.
The single guard at the door sprang to attention the moment she saw the two birds come plunging out of the smog, and before she’d even retrieved her glyphstone from her belt-pouch the druids were changing back to their human forms.
While the magisters came flooding out and started binding the hands and feet and eyes of the darkmages, the old woman took Theor aside, her grip on his arm firm.
“Leafcloak, I know I went too far, I just, hm, I just –“
“You went too far.” The quietness of her voice was awful.
“I could’ve stopped – I could’ve not killed him, but what was I supposed to do? He just – hm, he insisted on killing them, and I just – I just –” Fool boy. “I…”
She put her arm around his shoulders as he started sobbing:
“I just think it’s stupid, these rules are stupid; why can’t I kill him? My power is power over death as much as it’s power over life – why isn’t it in the rules that I have to kill him? Why does he get to live when everyone, everything he killed is just, just dead?”
“He doesn’t get to live –“
“You know what I mean, Leafcloak!”
The tears flowed down the outside of his melted mask.
She stroked his head and spoke soothingly, keeping her voice low so that she wouldn’t be overheard.
“Do you remember what I said to you, Theor? When we were first introduced?” His eyes were closed but he could tell from her voice she was smiling in sympathy. “I never once met someone like us who gained their magic when they gave in to their urge to kill. No. We gain our magic, our authority, from our stance against death.”
“B-but the d-dark-dr-druids –“
“Do you think I’ve not spoken to them too? They’re like us, Theor, except they give in. They start out like us but they use the words you just spoke, to convince themselves any evil they desire is permissible. Not only permissible, but righteous. The whole meaning of their being chosen for these gifts. But they’re wrong. Power entitles you to nothing. Nothing! You know this. You know this personally, don’t you? You are wealthy.”
He drew back, nodding, breathing deeply and looking up at the sky, doing his best to stop crying.
“You chose to be a champion. Just because you can decide – life, or death – doesn’t give you the right. You have to remember your training, Theor.” She sighed, and the leaves on her face rustled as though stirred by a breeze he could not feel. “Go home – I’ll make sure everything’s sorted here. I’m going to take you off assignments like this for the next six months. We’re going to work on your plant-growth and healing skills next – I see you’ve got the size manipulation under control now…”
She spoke. He listened and nodded. He understood why she was doing this, how it would help him. He understood that he had to go home now, couldn’t wait to watch the three executions the magisters would carry out immediately.
The dark-druids were no different from them, and if he stayed, he could change. Perhaps only a little, but it could happen. The darkness could enter his soul. And maybe next time he would squeeze, squeeze harder than he’d ever squeezed before, turning his enemy into nothing more than a jelly to be cast aside into the gutter, rat-fodder…
So when Leafcloak was done talking he took his leave, travelling north-east to the forest of his home.
* * *