Rowan sighed, positive he was to the wire on time. Not that he had a schedule for the festival progression. It was only supposed to be a minute. Devin was really going to lay into him for vanishing on them without warning again.
He’d specifically promised to make an effort to stop ditching after that particularly nasty fight. Her problem wasn’t even that he leaves or what he chose to do with his time. Really, she was terrified. Terrified of not knowing what to do without him.
“Don’t you get it!? We are helpless without you! You’re six years older than us. You got to leave the outpost. We didn’t. Then everyone-. Then you just… keep leaving us to fend for ourselves without a word. We don’t know what we’re doing out here! We’re completely fucking lost without you. Rowan, I-. I know that you care. I know you care about us more than anything, I do… I just… I just want you to act like it sometimes.”
All he had to do was say one word and he had failed. There was no excuse for it. The young man stretched to his feet, ready to meet his fate. At least maybe he’d make it back before the ritual started.
Except.
Something gripped him. A suffocating dread. The same feeling. The one that had accompanied the massacre all those years ago. No. Worse. The air grew thick in his lungs at the disgusting sounds soon echoing in his mind.
In all this time he’d never even caught a glimpse. He’d never thought this idea would pay off more than any other. It’d just been grasping at straws like he always was. His fist clenched.
Rowan twisted, cutting the air and sending a crescent of flames sweeping across the landscape again. His hand whipped back to send a second before the first was an inch beyond his fingertips. He lunged forward with another upward flourish.
The thing shrieked at a migraine-inducing pitch as it was burned in its failure to out weave the string of immediate attacks. His jaw locked. Why did its presence feel so much worse than before? Why did it feel more familiar than it should?
A boisterous battle cry rattled out as it hurled itself at him. A snap of the fingers invoked a barrier with hand aloft to maintain it.
He remembered a half-second too late. The monstrosity’s maw and appendages were filled with razors. Razors made to shred magic. The man ripped his left hand from the space behind the barrier as teeth gouged through it. Pain flooded in. Rowan stumbled back, clutching and healing his wounds without time to assess the damage.
Again jaws snapped at him and he barely skirted around on one heel. It landed hard, tearing grooves into the soil. More was upturned as it quickly contorted itself to face him.
More and more he was convinced that something was catastrophically wrong here. Why was it so small!? Why hadn’t he noticed immediately!? It was less than half of what it was. It was smaller than him!
That sixth sense for mana tipped him off again. Right as claws threatened to dig into his shoulders. More flames erupted at his back. Close enough to scorch his clothes. Another round of shrieking followed.
He dove as the opponent in front of him moved to strike. More flames sparked to life where he’d been standing followed by more screeches. However, this time they were calls of frustration.
The man had sent himself rolling and slid to a stop on hand and knee. He staggered to his feet, already panting, “What…?” He barely breathed the word. Another quick gesture that ended with a nearly closed fist. Vines entangled his foe. It was a brief moment of reprieve, but it was enough to allow him time to stare. He couldn’t process it. He couldn’t accept it. How were there two of them snared in his trap?
No. They weren’t it. They weren’t the original. and he didn’t like the realization sinking into his mind. He flexed his fingers. That anger from mere seconds ago was burning away to something else. Something cold. Beyond the crest of the hill came crawling a third and fourth from the presumably literal woodwork in the distance. These ones were no bigger than dogs. More unwanted confirmation of rising suspicions.
His disgust couldn’t be more apparent as he scoffed, “Right, even that thing is just an animal after all…” This was their hell. His and his mother’s punishment for his birth.
One of his captives bit into the vines despite the unnatural amount of thorns jutting from it. Even when it whittled them to a point it could easily rip itself from the rest, it kept eating them, oozing the viscous substance it called blood everywhere as it did. Rowan sneered at the sight as the others followed suit. They were constructed with magic. He was sating their hunger. Anything with structural integrity would do more harm than good.
“Then how about,” he threw a loose x symbol drawing, “immobilize!” The predators kept crawling toward their prey. “Blackout!” Still no effect. “Muddle?” He sighed when no change was observed, “Can’t blame a guy for trying, can you?” He’d have to step it up.
The man jumped to his aces, “Erupt!” A wave of molten rock burst into existence at their right. The creatures had the sense to scrabble the opposite direction despite how tantalizing more of his mana must have been. He should have guessed they weren’t as mindless as he hoped. “Sink!” The ground once supporting them was enveloped in a sea of sand. More vines shot from the eroded earth at another motion in effort to drag them to their death.
Only the smallest was engulfed with ease. The others were more fortunate, ripping through and managing to escape the threat with mostly negligible damages save the loss of a single limb melted. The scraps of the first spell devoured his other efforts, cooled, then faded to nothingness.
The retaliation was coming.
“Mom doesn’t want you and neither do I! Erupt, damn it!” His brethren didn’t take kindly to that. Another spray of lava separated them. Or so he thought. A mass of flesh barreled through, splashing the super-heated substance at its creator. Rowan threw up his hands with a snap of fingers to create a shell of barrier magic. Clumps of his own attack spattered the shield and solidified to black not long after. He dropped to a knee as something much heavier slammed onto the surface.
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The maimed monster bit into the magic beneath its claws, seemingly aiming for Rowan’s face beyond it. A jerk of the head ripped a hole and then it dispersed. The only solace the mage had was the recoil flung him from the space soon crushed underneath the creature.
It landed heavy enough he could feel the earth shake despite the new distance. Some of its more severe wounds sewed themselves back together. Not all of them, but enough that it could keep going. The others were circling, like he couldn’t see them blatantly flanking him.
Unable to defend, Rowan took a page from Devin’s book, electing to charge himself physically with magic through his own methods. He threw himself from range of their snapping maws like a rag-doll. If their teeth so much as grazed him they’d be claiming whole chunks of his energy.
Again he dodged with a jump back. A swipe of four fingers saw a concentrated burst of wind intense enough to quite literally slice through the air at his would-be assailant now in the space he’d just been occupying. It successfully tore through the shoulder of the small one. Another slice formed in Rowan’s wake. Again and again and again. Left, back, right. Each dodge was paired with a cutting retaliation.
But this wasn’t maintainable. A mere fool dancing with bulls and lions. Outnumbered.
Every time he was a hair slower as his enhancing magics steadily waned. He was more and more narrowly escaping injury. He just needed one extra second. Just one… second!
The male fumbled. His foot slipped out of place atop the smooth grasses. ‘Oh no…’ It almost felt like everything unfolded at a snails pace. But in reality a tail slapped him across the face with such sudden ferocity it could have snapped his neck. The power of it catapulted him yards away.
Rowan pushed to his feet immediately, driven by adrenaline and desperation. A crack formed across his cheek as bits of the clay shell he’d encased himself in crumbled off to the ground. He didn’t have the luxury to wallow in the blunt force of it. He asked for a second and he received one while they regrouped to pounce his new location.
The mage raised dominant arm. If lava was too fluid… he threw it downward. A small bolt of lighting struck the largest at its crown. It didn’t even scream, merely convulsed then crumpled into a heap of sizzling and popping mutated flesh. Its carcass disintegrated of its own accord as ash drifted into air.
Rowan nearly keeled over. His vision doubled briefly. Claws struck for his face. He managed to flounder from range for the time being. He was burning his mana to scraps placing too high of a demand on his body. Stressing his mind to the point of deterioration. But he only needed to get through two more! His right arm went skyward.
It was sharp. Sharp enough his breath caught. Crimson peppered his skin, his clothes, the grass. His expression blanked with shock, watching his arm spiral off, carried by the momentum of the creature sailing past.
‘I… I can’t do this.’
x x x
“Yes, you can!”
His mother had grasped his shoulders. Her blue irises bore into his with unwavered confidence as they stood in the outpost’s infirmary. He had volunteered to help her or his grandfather in some capacity here often. But this was-.
“It’s too much.”
“Rowan… I know that it’s scary, that I’m asking a lot from you, and you haven’t done this by yourself. But I know you can do it and you have me here to guide you.”
He remembered hearing Fenry long before he was in the building. The screams etched into him more than any of the previous. Because he was standing, waiting for him at the table, and knowing it was all on him to fix it.
“You’ve watched me do this time and again, love. This isn’t the first incident with a razortail and it won’t be the last. I’m not going to be around forever. You need to learn to do this. You’re ready.”
Two other men had hoisted the injured half-elf hunter onto the table. Huffs of relief followed that he was no longer being bumped this way or that. He immediately dropped flat, clutching at his thigh above the tourniquet. His wife had followed, paler than the sheets on the infirmary beds, carefully unwrapping a bloodied shirt.
The boy’s horror had grown as the severed limb was bared and settled beside the man, “I’m going to be sick…”
“No, you’re-.”
“Kid,” Fenry had cut her off. He’d been dripping sweat from distress, but given his bravest face, “You got this.” They really believed in him.
Rowan had swallowed with steeled resolve when he met Fenry’s gaze, “Okay.” He took another deep breath just to be sure his nerves would stay settled. The boy had place palm to the man’s shoulder, “Sleep.” The first step was always to knock them out, but the results weren’t nearly so dramatic when someone was in pain. The hunter had to force himself to relax to let the spell take him. He needed to be still and he wouldn’t want to be awake for what Lucille was about to do.
His mother had done the worst of the work for him, dumping alcohol on what was now a bloody mess, instructing as she did so, “You know what a clean, butchered animal looks like. We’re still animals too. Just meat and bone.” She pressed flesh to flesh, “Focus on the image of cleaned bone. A whole, strong, intact bone.” Rowan covered the gap with one hand. From there he chose to close his eyes, letting her voice lead him. “Think about how muscle weaves around that bone. A bundle of filaments. Now about arteries and veins. Hollow tubes. Then the skin to protect it all.”
“Hmph.” The sound from her had been the prompt for him to peek. “See?” She undid the belt that had been strapped to Fenry’s leg. A smug grin awaited, “I barely even helped.”
x x x
Rowan clutched the tattered remnants of his stub, “Fuck!” There wasn’t time to writhe. The smaller was already baring down on him, ready to finish rending him to pieces. He forced himself to loose his injury, flicking up opposite fingers.
A jagged cell of spiked rock jutted from the earth around him. The creature screeched, but it was too late to change trajectory mid-air. It was skewered through by its own action. A weak trembling claw reached for the mage, ever so slightly cutting into his cheek. Then the monstrosity went limp. Its form degraded to be swept along by the wind as the last had.
Jaws crushed through the conjured rock, ravenously chewing it to mere energy. The other wasn’t going to waste the opportunity for a meal. The spell was released before it could have its fill.
Instead Rowan set his muscles aflame again even as his feet went numb. “Obscure!” the word was thrown, consuming the area with a haze of smoke as he lunged for his arm laying what seemed a world away.
He skid into his own flesh. The little smokescreen wasn’t going to buy him much leeway. The mage shoved the severed limb to the raw stump with a wince. He hadn’t really meant to be that rough. But he felt every tick of the clock. His palm slid to span the gap. Just one more second!
His left was finally able to let go and once it did he barely avoided another swipe for his core with a dive. A heartbeat later he found his feet, his right arm shot to the sky, and then lightning blinded him.
Rowan swayed, but managed to otherwise freeze where he stood, panting, waiting for the white and ringing to fade. Surely he’d be dead by now if he’d missed. Eventually he could make out the kneeling half of the last monstrosity misting off into the air a foot in front of him. The young man had won, but…
The mage looked to confirm his legs were still beneath him. They had gone completely numb. “Shit…” Another falter in his stance and he dropped, trembling in effort on hand and knee to keep from crashing face first into the dirt. He couldn’t really feel his hands either. But Rowan smiled at the tears falling to the earth between them as everything slowly grew darker. Until he drained every last speck of his will in the fight to stay conscious.
“She’s… alive.”