Chapter 22

I’d like to think that I’m the kind of person who’s never really lacked for motivation. What I was missing in passion for my work, I’d always made up for with the kind of self-discipline that everyone imagines themselves having when they’re making their New Years resolutions. Even going to the gym had been something I approached as more of a social obligation than something I actually enjoyed doing. If I had known that, someday, I’d be chased by an enormous snake made of plants and roots, with a mouth full of boulders like some kind of industrial grinder, I’d like to think I might’ve taken it a bit more seriously.

As it stood, I was gasping for breath even with my heightened attributes, and silently resolved to put more points into my fortitude and vitality the next opportunity I got. It didn’t help that the ground seemed to be actively resisting me; it was soft as mud where I expected solidity, and hard as concrete when I’d hoped for a soft landing. Roots tore up from the ground in my path to make me stumble, branches bending down to swipe at me as I ran. Feeding them straight from my own energy, I pushed the flames ahead of me, trying to break down as much of it as I could before bursting through the charred remnants with my arms crossed ahead of me. I rolled over the trunk of a tree that threw itself in my path, taking a moment to glance behind. I wished, abruptly, that I hadn’t; the serpent never seemed to get any closer, it just kept getting bigger , as if distance had hid its’ immensity. It was already an enormous creature, its’ undulating tail reaching back as far as I could see through the devastation of the forest.

I felt my muscles burning, the tiny oxygen furnaces within me working frantically to keep up with the demands of my endless sprint, my lungs heaving like a bellows to try and inject the necessary fuel. A momentary thought distracted me, and I only narrowly avoided another shotgun spray of wood needles. I grabbed onto the sensation of heat, the metaphor of furnaces, tying it back to fire. Running for my life seemed like a terrible time to start contemplating new ways to use my magic, but judging by the quick glance over my shoulder, it was the perfect time to figure something out. I started breathing slower, but more deeply, trying to fill my lungs completely with every breath. I focused on the way the energy moved through my body, cycling into my core and back out, taking power to my muscles and turning it into effort. I reached for that magic, and pushed my thoughts into it, ramming a spear of intention into my core of energy.

A moment later, my limbs seemed to ignite from within, a wildfire of pain spreading through my muscles, the furnaces blazing over with energy too strong to store. I drew in a huge, ragged breath, and leaned into my sprint. Suddenly, I was moving like never before; every step faster than the one prior, my movements quick and sharp as a scalpel, placing every step right where I needed it. When I leapt to vault over a fallen trunk, my leap carried me much farther than normal, and not even my robes touched the tree as I sailed over it. If I’d had the breath to spare, I would’ve been hooting and howling with joy, or laughing until my ribs hurt. As it was, I didn’t have time to celebrate, even though I was finally gaining some distance from the monster behind me.

I wracked my brain to remember which side of the tower the doors had been on, but I’d made too many switches back and forth to judge anything reliable. Instead I glanced up, looking for the protruding balcony, knowing that the front door would be beneath it. It seemed that I wasn’t the only one who had thought to go to the towers for protection; as I looked up toward the balcony, I could see a couple of people pointing and staring from it. One of them, an archer, seemed to deduce that the le-vine-athan was pursuing me specifically, and he began shouting and launching arrows at my feet. “Go somewhere else! Don’t bring that creature here!” His first couple of shots were warning shots, trying to force me to change course away from the tower. Then he was done with warnings.

I felt a burst of bright-hot pain from my left arm as an arrow grazed me despite my attempts to dodge, and narrowly sidestepped another one streaking for my head. “Asshole!” I shouted back, holding my hand out above me to conjure a shield of flame. The next couple of arrows simply ignited when they struck it, burned to ashes before they could strike my skin. I felt some of the ashes spatter down my cheek as he tried to shoot me in the head again. “I’m going to kick your ass when I get up there, you asshole!” I hunched down and raced toward the doors, breaking his line of sight. He began to pepper the immense creature with arrows, their flight finally giving me a sense of distance; the massive serpent had gotten far closer than I was prepared for. It reared up, and I heard the mulching sound of it preparing to spit an attack.

I sprinted into the bottom floor, past a pair of very startled-looking warriors; one of them tried to reach out and block me with his arm, but I ducked underneath it, quick as a flash and kept running. My speed seemed to catch them both off-guard, and they hesitantly began to chase after me, shouting something I couldn’t quite hear over the way my heart hammered in my ears. I took the steps three at a time, blasting through the first few floors effortlessly. By the fourth floor, my lungs ached and my chest burned, my muscles itching as my vitality tried to keep up with the relentless pace I’d set. I hopped up another three steps before suddenly meeting the wall.

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The tower shook, wavering like a punch-drunk boxer as something enormous slammed into the side of it. A handful of steps broke out from in front of me, the wall buckling and bursting inward. I swore fiercely as I jumped up and grabbed onto the hanging edge of the steps, seeing the bramble-covered back of the serpent through the hole it had made from the impact of its’ body. The thorns cut visible chunks out of the stone as it ground past, abrading the tower like a belt sander. I dragged myself up onto the landing and resumed my reckless charge. Nine floors took an eternity to climb, and as I reached the floor with the balcony, I winced to see the pair of bodies pinned to the stone floor by yard-long wooden spikes. Both were utterly dead, pierced through so many times that I was certain even I wouldn’t have been able to survive it. The archer’s bow lay near his outstretched fingers, and the other man – a rogue, I’d guess at a glance – had never even drawn his pair of swords. I finally stopped pumping energy through my muscles, trying to gather myself for a moment, the aches becoming almost overwhelming. I dropped to my knees on the hard stone floor, and pulled the bow closer, reaching for the magic inside of it. I frowned, realizing that it was just a mundane bow, nothing at all magic about it. I grabbed the quiver that peeked out from under his shoulder, and felt a trickle of magic from it. There it is. I pulled from the quiver, and it collapsed into brittle leather in a couple of seconds. The rogue’s swords were next, one of them having some kind of potent ice-based enchantment that took nearly fifteen seconds to drain in its’ entirety. Just in time, too .

I wouldn’t have thought that a plant-snake would have actual eyes, but there it was; a glowing yellow orb wrapped within a nest of branches, flickering to and fro as its head came level with the balcony. It settled on me as I moved, and I felt the tower shudder. I drew on my power, finding the two items I’d consumed had only somewhat replenished the energy I’d spent getting here. The tower swayed drunkenly beneath my feet as I ran toward the very top floor of the tower, holding out hope that there was one more thing that I could drain.

The completed disc sat on the pedestal, as whole and unharmed as if it had never been broken in the first place. I pulled at it for a moment, but it refused to come away, sealed tight to the stone as if it were all one piece. I took a deep breath, and grabbed onto the edges of it instead, closing my eyes as I focused on it. In my inner sight, the disk shone like the sun, so bright that it hurt to touch. I groaned against the pressure of its’ magic as I pulled from it.

For an instant, it resisted, as if it had a will of its’ own. My hands heated up, fires licking at the edges of the disk, battering the enchantment with both will and power, seeking out any weakness in it to exploit. The edges where it had once been broken slowly shivered into sight, the fault lines in the blindingly complex network of runes shivering as they began to separate. I twisted my hands in opposite directions, putting more and more force against the weaknesses in the enchantment, until finally one of them opened just enough.

The power that hit me was like trying to tightrope on a high-power line, and my body buzzed with the huge influx of energy. The tower shivered again, and I felt the slow sensation of falling, the tower beginning to collapse under the relentless crushing assault of the snake. Brimming with power, I wrapped my fist in flame and turned, my punch shattering a section of stone wider around than I was tall. But why stop there?

I stepped to the edge, sucking in the last of the disk’s weakened, fading energies, and wrapped my entire body in flames. I launched myself upward with a powerful jump, swinging off the broken edge of the wall above me to give myself a little extra distance, and dove into the serpent’s enormous body like a cannonball.

I had just enough time, as I neared impact, easily forty feet down, to notice that its’ body seemed to be covered in those long, stone-abrading spikes and thorns. It was too late to change my mind now, so I poured all the power that I could hold into the fires around myself, and screamed at the snake, turning as I fell to go shoulder-first into its’ immense body.

Only at the last moment did I see its’ head emerge around the side of the tower, glowing yellow eyes glaring dully out at me from the brambles of its’ skull.

And then I struck.