The Aberrant titan shrieked its victory over Talia, its hulking body twitching as it dragged itself toward her, rising to its full height. What remained of the arcanist’s hearing blinked out with a piercing pop.
Despite being too exhausted to move, she feebly flipped over, doing what she could to crawl away. Her death may have been inevitable, but maybe she could keep the beast here for a moment longer. Hopefully, that’d be enough time for the waste incinerator to detonate, because, at this point, she’d lost count of the timer.
She struggled to drag herself away, her arms feeling like the individual muscle fibres were spasming erratically all at once.
Note to self, when using electric enchantments, don’t touch the target.
Not that it would matter.
Though she couldn’t hear it, the tremors under her feet heralded the abomination’s arrival and her subsequent doom. Then, right as she thought she could feel its hot breath on the back of her neck, the stone beneath her gave way, sucking her into its cold embrace.
Talia panicked, suddenly unable to breathe; her lungs heaved against unyielding rock, what felt like a thousand tons pressing against her on all sides; true darkness enveloping her—
She broke through into the open air, gasping and coughing in some vile perversion of birth. Her mind was a haze of pain and confusion and gibbering fear, that primal part of her that still fought for life crowing at her unexpected salvation.
I’m…alive? Holy SHIT I’m ALIVE!
“Whu—how, who?”
Talia’s words were muddled and garbled in her deaf ears, but the screech of rage from the Aberrant rattled her chest with a deep thrum. Feeling around her, the world spinning, she was at least coherent enough to recognize that she was leaned up against the guardrail. Rolling her head to look around, her gaze landed on the last person she’d expected to see.
“Zaric? How are you—”
The collared mage spared her a glance and the flicker of a mischievous smile, his mouth moving with words she couldn’t hear. If she knew him, probably some entirely inappropriate quip. He stood in the middle of the bridge, one arm leaning heavily on a slim, metal cane, dressed in only a pair of black canvas pants. The mage-commandrum’s whole body rested on that cane, putting all of its weight on it, but somehow, when Talia looked at him, she only got a feeling of supreme confidence.
“The bomb,” Talia muttered blearily, “we have to get away from—”
But if he heard her, Zaric gave no indication. Raising a hand, he pulsed out a blast of air so powerful it was visible to the naked eye. The stream of magma flying right at him hardened into a solid block of basalt before turning to sand as he clenched his fist.
Talia flinched, rolling her head around to catch sight of the magmamander as it lumbered toward them.
Zaric stopped it in its tracks without even moving.
Spikes of stone larger than Talia herself punched up from the stone with tremendous force, skewering the monstrosity in over a dozen places. Its mouth ratcheted open in a silent scream, rumbling through Talia’s chest and sparking a high-pitched whine in her brutalized ears.
The mage-commandrum slumped further on his cane, his whole body shaking from effort and certain manaburn, but apparently, he still had enough to finish the job. Raising a trembling arm, Zaric gnashed his teeth and pumped his fist up.
All over the skewered magmamander, stone spikes sprouted hundreds of smaller barbs, expanding and tearing into its body. Oily sludge, more silver than black, bubbled up from its wounds, its already thin skin splitting even more under the assault.
Opening his palm, Zaric let off his coup-de-grace. One final pillar of earth speared up from the ground like the fist of Ishmael herself, come to take back her servant. It ripped through the monstrosity’s bulbous head, splitting its skull into shards of bone that hung from the remnants of its face.
And still, it did not die, squirming and screeching in eerie silence against the bounds of its prison. To no avail. Alive or not, the beast wouldn’t be getting free any time soon. Talia watched in mild revulsion as it tore itself apart on the field of spikes, uncaring of its wellbeing, gouging great gaping gashes through its hulking mass.
Beneath it, the center of the bridge bubbled and glowed with enough heat that Talia thought the granite itself would catch flame.
Shit shit shit, we’re too close!
Screaming loud enough to hurt her throat, just to make sure the man heard her, Talia called out to her saviour.
“ZARIC!”
The mage-commandrum turned to look at her, his brown eyes glassy and his face slipping from a grimace to a pained smirk. The trademark grin slipped from his lips as he saw the expression on Talia’s face, joviality replaced by a light frown.
“BOMB!” Talia screamed, pointing feebly toward the magmamander.
Snapping his head around, the mage’s eyes widened as they landed on the spot just below the Aberrant’s belly where the rune was glowing white hot. Mouth open in a silent roar, he dropped his cane and slammed his hands into the ground, causing visible ripples to form, the rock in front of him liquifying.
In a subconscious mimicry of his apprentice’s prior feat with the gatehouse, the earth shaper sent a series of cracks running through the bridge, breaking the road into chunks. The ground under their feet rocked as the ancient construction made its displeasure known, its integrity compromised for the first time in who knew how many centuries.
Slowly, as if reluctant, a massive section of the arch began to fall, bits and pieces crumbling off and tumbling down into the chasm far below. The largest piece, the one with the explosive and the Aberrant, followed suit, drifting downward agonizingly slowly.
Too slowly.
Dread fingered its way up Talia’s chest, lodging itself in a thick ball at the back of her throat.
The magmamander was the first to succumb. The world bent, a flash of blinding light heralding the warp in space as primal forces that didn’t belong in the lives of mortals were thrust into existence. Flesh and bone and silvery metal disintegrated, inexorably pulled from the beast’s skeleton into a mass of nothingness that hurt Talia’s eyes to look at.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
The moment lasted all of a few seconds when everything seemed to hang in suspended animation. Granite turned to dust that was sucked into that singular point, gigantic blocks of rock ripped into their component particles like they were nothing more than sugar exposed to moisture, breaking apart between questing fingers.
A wave of air buffeted Talia, pulling her toward the implosion and tearing the breath from her lungs.
Then it stopped.
The pull on her eyeballs ceased and the air returned to her lungs, her shaking hands and shallow breathing the only movement in that frozen bubble of time. An instant between instants.
One that didn’t last.
A spot of light burned itself onto Talia’s retinas. The whitest white she’d ever seen.
The weight of another person landed on top of her, shielding her from the oncoming blast.
And then the world shattered and she was airborne.
Her fall back to the earth was brief and meteoric, a burst of pain, a bounce, and then darkness.
----------------------------------------
When Talia came to, she couldn’t breathe.
A blast of adrenalin washed away all of her pain, wiping her mind clean of all thoughts except for one: survive. With the world spinning and her hearing nothing but a shrill whine, Talia’s eyes shot open, and her hands rose up to scratch at the rough palms that were strangling her.
Zaric?
The mage-commandrum was unrecognizable. Blood streamed from his scalp in a vermillion tide. It framed his dark eyes in bloody, bloodshot shades, sliding across the wrinkles and twists of a rictus of rage before dripping onto her face. His lips moved savagely, silently, spittle mixing with the blood on her face.
What the fuck is going on?!
But there was no time for confusion, only for manic fear.
Raising her knee, she slammed her leg into the other mage’s stomach over, and over. But he didn’t budge. So, reaching for the only thing she could think of, Talia let out a burst of telekinetic force—so reminiscent of her awakening—the agony of manaburn paling in comparison to the dark encroaching on her vision.
Zaric went flying off her, only for the stone beneath him to slide up and catch him midflight, setting him back down like a mother might her child.
Talia gasped and coughed, rolling over and spitting out blood and phlegm.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she croaked.
You know what’s wrong with him.
The nagging thought whispered insidiously, but with utter clarity.
He did too much. Drew too deeply. He was already half-gone to begin with. Saving you was the pebble that broke the cart.
Before she could do anything else, the stone around her turned sharp and cutting, and Talia found herself suspended by a cluster of thin spikes, their width belying their unyielding strength. Her arms were spread on either side of her, and a particularly pointed pillar cut into the tender flesh at the bottom of her jaw. The young psion’s saving grace was twofold: the protective plating of her armour and Zaric’s seeming restraint.
The latter more than the former, really. She had no doubt that if he wanted to, he could’ve punctured even silverite with no more effort than it would take to crack an egg.
A rough hand gripped Talia’s jaw, tugging her gaze to her fallen friend’s maddened eyes. Zaric was screaming at her, spittle spattering against her cheeks. The fingers digging into her face loosened, and the silent rant stopped. Befuddled, Talia realized he was waiting for an answer.
She didn’t know whether to sob or laugh.
“I can’t hear you,” she croaked hoarsely, as best she could.
That was the wrong answer, apparently.
The spikes surrounding her tightened threateningly—drawing pearls of blood where they met bare skin—and the muted screaming started anew.
When she didn’t answer, Zaric jerked her head roughly and stalked off, pacing with his mouth moving. Muttering to himself. When he stopped and looked up, his smile was sickeningly sweet. Nothing like the jovial, mocking thing she was used to.
A pit formed in Talia’s stomach as she realized that her friend was well and truly gone.
His chest heaved as he stalked back toward her, and Talia sucked in a breath as she noticed what looked like a black bruise staining his solar plexus. Lines of darkness spread out from the ugly splotch, snaking their way down his arms and into his waistband, creeping along his neck.
Are those—ARRGGH FUCKK
The spikes around her right arm curled into a cage, crushing and bending the limb in directions it wasn’t supposed to go. The sensation of her arm being slowly pulverized joined the host of other aches and pains, amplifying them a hundredfold and threatening to send her unconscious.
Before Zaric could shatter every bone from her shoulder to her fingers, she tugged on her already abused Core, forcing it to draw in more mana to fuel her psionics. With a jolt of muddled consciousness, they both froze.
Zaric’s mindscape was a hostile mess that nearly ejected her almost as soon as she entered it. Broken corridors filled with crude red runescript and the remnants of paintings painted over with blood. Fragments of memory jostled for attention, bending and twisting into delusions right in front of Talia’s eyes.
In Zaric’s mind, Talia was a mage-hunter, one who’d taken his sister from him and was holding her captive so he would turn himself in. The bomb they’d survived had been a warning of what the hunters were capable of if he didn’t comply. The rest was a jumbled mess of justifications and irrational rage mixed with the firm belief that it was he and his sister against the world.
It didn’t make sense, but it didn’t have to. Given that Zaric had never spoken of his sister before, coupled with the fact that when he was sane, he’d firmly believed that he was the last of his line, it was likely that Erada Zaric was dead.
He had just forgotten.
Pulling back, Talia realized that she’d blocked off the mage-commandrum’s motor functions, mostly out of some survival instinct she didn’t quite understand. But that was unimportant. She had a mind to fix. Though she knew it was likely pointless, she felt the urge to try.
She wouldn’t be able to live with herself otherwise. He’d saved her life, but more than that, he was a friend.
Marshalling her Will, Talia forced her way through the scattered puzzle that was her friend’s mind, past the haphazard pieces of memory and into the space where she knew she would find the source of his Gift.
When she arrived, at the entryway to that separate space, she sagged. The small kernel of hope she’d been harbouring in her heart—the one that whispered that this time would be different, that she could save him—died.
The cracked doorway was gone, the whole partition dividing his conscious mind from that other place missing, dissolved into the chaos around her. What remained was a jagged mess of blaring red runes and deep gashes that looked out onto an impenetrable darkness that seemed to seep into the walls of Zaric’s mindscape, corrupting all it touched.
Not only did Talia not know where to begin, but there wasn’t anything left to begin with.
“No…” she whispered, the word echoing hauntingly back at her, as if taunting her.
She sat there for a long time. Long enough that she distantly felt a cluster of minds approaching from down the bridge. Felt the strain on her Core become a palpable pressure against her chest. Like a bundle of knives stabbing at her lungs.
In the end, it was Zaric’s own actions that shook her out of her stupor.
Talia’s control over the man’s mind slipped for a fraction of a second. A fraction of a second was all it took for him to shatter her forearm, gnashing his teeth in victory and howling at her deaf ears before she reasserted control.
The pain was a distant thing compared to the insistent burn of her channels and the tearing behind her ribs.
The delvers drew closer, curiosity and awe turning to concern in their minds as they noticed the standoff. Flicking through those who’d come to check on them, Talia felt despair creep in as she realized that neither Calisto nor Torval were among them. Her vision blurred as tears pooled in her eyes.
No one here had the kill switch, and her hold on his mind was slipping. It wouldn’t be long until her magic refused to heed her and gave out under the strain she was putting on it.
Still, Talia hesitated.
She sensed a few of the defenders stop to look over Osra’s unconscious form. The girl lay curled against the guardrail half-wrapped in a protective cocoon of rock. That, more than anything, was what decided it for her. Zaric had spent the last moments of his life saving both Talia and his apprentice.
Now, given the chance, the monster that had taken his place would undo all of that.
Opening her eyes, Talia gave her friend one last, searching look, knowing that whatever it was she was looking for, she wouldn’t find it.
Ending his life tore mana out of the air, through her blood and into her Core like no working ever had. But the imagery itself was almost stupidly simple. There was no looking for specific areas to control, no searching through thoughts or memories.
It was like a pass of a knife across puppets strings.
And just like that, in all the ways that mattered, Mage-Commandrum Feyan Zaric was dead.
If cries of alarm went up behind her, Talia didn’t hear them. With a flash of agony in her chest and a gasp of relief, the darkness took her.