Quinn watched in horror as Phenalope drove the ritual dagger into Riordan’s chest. The image stuck in his mind, rapidly replayed in his racing thoughts. The ornamental knife, sharpened and barely used, had fine engravings of dancing skeletons carrying offerings upon its blade. Those engravings slid out of view as dark flesh parted and red blood spilled forth.
The ritual writhed in ecstatic agony. What was secret and concealed, locked away behind Riordan’s soul, was once more in reach and visible in its dark glory. Swirls of sparkling shadow wreathed them, visible even to the normal people in the crowd. Quinn could see their awe reflected darkly in their eyes, those fanatic women who had come to see their prophet become a god. Was this a miracle or a curse? He supposed it was all a matter of perspective.
In that momentary horror and distraction, Gloria spoke three words laden with layered power. Quinn’s attention snapped back to her, cursing under his breath as he recognized the sensation of triggering a pre-prepped spell. Most of his own combat arsenal fell into that category for safety reasons, which made it intimately familiar. He felt along the shape of the triggered spell, trying to understand what she’d done, but the roar of enraged people was a bigger giveaway.
Basically every cultist in the clearing who wasn’t Warrior-buffed or a death mage just went full berserker and charged at basically everyone else. Quinn’s only saving grace was that the area around the altar had been cleared of everyone but that inner circle, leaving nearer targets for the affected than himself. Of course, that meant teams two and four were getting swamped out there with a literal wave of humanity. He had to end this fast or they would need to stop pulling punches. Quinn really didn’t want to win by trodding on the corpses of people he could have saved. He’d already failed enough, as demonstrated by the three shifters lined up as sacrifices. Two of those were bleeding badly and one of those was still being actively stabbed. Quinn needed to get his head back in the fight and end this.
“Zeren, capture!” Quinn ordered, pointing at Gloria. He’d hoped not to have to use Zeren as a full combatant, given that these death mages had access to an unknown amount of information from Zeren’s creator, but he needed to cut his targets down to a more manageable order.
“I obey,” Zeren replied, stepping forward. They did not waste energy on becoming fully visible, merely a blurred human shape to those without the eyes to see ghosts, but their density increased until their touch was physical.
Gloria could see ghosts, being a death mage. The sharp woman, composed even through the pain of losing her hand, widened her eyes at Zeren’s appearance, but managed to bite out a spell for warding off ghosts. It washed over Zeren, slowing them. The composite ghost grinned, their teeth inhumanly sharp and jagged. Hands pressed out against the inside of Zeren’s ghostly skin, shadow misting out along the stitched seams of their body. The warding spell buckled and shattered.
“Boo,” Zeren said flatly, their grin stretching wider and wider, and reached for Gloria.
Quinn trusted their friend to handle that death mage for the moment, turning his attention back to Phenalope and the ritual in progress. And the berserker spell. And the growing number of physical manifestations of the raw magic in front of him. His mind whirled through the priorities, but then Phenalope settled it for him.
The prophetess death mage pulled the ritual knife out of Riordan in a rough yank, spurring a fresh gush of blood. The blood leaked slowly, pulsing out with each of the shifter’s heartbeats. Quinn saw Riordan’s chest rise and fall in slow breaths, but the wet rattle that accompanied each was worrying. If that man wasn’t a shifter, Quinn would consider him mortally wounded. Since he actually was a shifter, Quinn had no idea how bad those physical injuries were to Riordan. Shifters were tough according to everything he knew but he’d rarely worked with them like this.
Either way, the physical damage was about to become a moot point. Phenalope lifted the bloody dagger and started a new chant. Quinn knew more than enough latin to recognize it was a symbolic dedication of Riordan’s death, committing the last of his life and his death into the ritual and declaring Phenalope to be the center and recipient of the killing tree ritual. Mist began to rise from the dry sandy earth beneath the tree.
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Quinn moved, hooking two charms off of his belt and tossing them at her one at a time. The first triggered a wave of dark energy that was rapidly swept up into the funnel of death magic whirling about them, barely ruffling Phenalope’s hair. The second created a shrieking illusion that invoked mortal terror. Her hands shook with that one and her voice quavered, but it too was sucked up into the hungry maw of the ritual.
Fine, Quinn would do this the crude way. He moved forward, grabbing the big metal bowl of black blood off the altar. Splashing tainted blood everywhere, Quinn swung it in a two-handed overhead arc that made a nicely satisfying thunk against Phenalope’s thick skull. The ritual didn’t stop that, though it did seem to drink the black blood into the earth like desert sands. The dagger tumbled from her hands as Phenalope staggered and lost her chant. She didn’t go down though, swinging around to face Quinn.
“Don’t you ever quit?” Phenalope shrieked, barely audible over the rush of the ritual and the roar of the berserking mob around them.
“Nope,” Quinn replied flippantly, taking another swing with his improvised weapon.
Phenalope dodged that one easily enough. Physical combat wasn’t Quinn’s forte, but the ritual was drawing in loose death magic with alarmingly rapid ease. He took his eyes off Phenalope long enough to cast his gaze back at Zeren and Ingrid. Zeren was losing solidity at a rate Quinn could see now that the ritual was off center and disrupted. It took another second to spot Ingrid, the little ghost having already moved far away from the ritual whirlpool to float at the forest’s edge. Worry was clearly written on the girl’s face, even at this distance. She was yelling, but Quinn couldn’t hear her.
“Zeren,” Quinn called, “Retreat! Stick with Ingrid and stay out of the reach of the ritual.”
If Zeren could have hesitated to obey a direct order, Quinn got the feeling they would have. The look they shot at Quinn as they rushed out of the center of the mess to relative safety. If Quinn got through this in one piece, he was in for a talking-to later on the merits and methods of teamwork, he suspected. If Quinn got through this, he’d take his lecture happily.
He breathed a sigh of relief when Zeren got clear of the effect. The ritual wasn’t draining Quinn’s well directly and his charms were resisting the effect for now, but as soon as the magic was loose in the air, the ritual ate it hungrily. He wasn’t sure if it was supposed to do that, having read about what was required for a killing tree and about what one could do with the accumulated power, but not what the effect of being in the middle of one when it finished did to anything or anyone else.
In front of him, Phenalope couldn’t take advantage of his distraction because the ritual demanded everything from her. The bandages on her arms had come loose, showing wounds that were oddly placed for self-inflicted ones. Red also stained the side for Phenalope’s lovely white ceremonial toga and sweat dripped from her face. Rushing forward, she stuck her hands over Riordan’s wound and then lifted her hands covered in fresh blood, calling loudly to the power of the ritual, declaring herself its master.
Before Quinn could disrupt her again, he was tackled from the side. He got his arms up in time to defend against a follow-up punch from one of the Warriors. With all the spells boosting the woman, her punch rattled him anyway, even being blocked. A bear bodychecked the Warrior off of Quinn a second later, leaving him momentarily dazed. He pulled himself together as quickly as he could, but found himself cut off from Phenalope by the tangle of Warrior and bear and by a determined if increasingly pale Gloria.
Her stump had been crudely tourniqueted with string but still dripped blood. Her remaining hand held another ornamental knife. He wasn’t sure she could cast any more successfully than he could in the current environment, creating a false standoff. He didn’t have time for this!
Quinn’s urge was to just tackle Gloria and try shoving a disabling charm down her throat, counting on proximity of effect to let it trigger despite the magic drain currently happening, but he also had a feeling that would get him stabbed. He’d taken basic self defense with the agency and he still sucked at it. He was the party mage, darn it, not their monk.
Which meant he needed to mage. Back to his list of priorities. Phenalope still was at the top, but he needed more resources to get to her with enough breathing room to do something. Dealing with the ritual itself would also require more uninterrupted moments. Therefore, he needed to free up other people to guard him. He couldn’t cast much here, which meant falling back to cast or--
Quinn was moving before he realized he’d made a decision. He ignored Gloria, flinging himself at the match of Warrior and bear shifter. Getting a hand on the Warrior, Quinn hooked his own magic into the strengthening spells on the woman and pulled. He couldn’t pull them off of her without using way too much of his limited well of power, but he didn’t need to. He just needed to fray their edges and then feed a thread of the spells into the ritual and let that do the draining.
As soon as Quinn created a link between the spell and the ritual, the magic was ripped from the Warrior with all the grace of someone ripping off a bandaid and taking off a layer of skin with it. The woman screamed, with good reason, as bits of her mana body got shredded away with the disappearing spells, feeding the ritual. Quinn blanched.
“Hell,” he muttered, backing off. The bear moved away from the unconscious woman, giving him a look of disgust and horror that was surprisingly readable on an animal face. “I didn’t mean for it to do that.”
Whether the bear believed him or not, it didn’t stop to discuss it with him, launching itself towards Gloria as the next nearest threat it could hopefully handle. Quinn was left staring at the ruined spirit of the Warrior, a stark reminder that at the end of the day, Quinn was just another cursed death mage too, his magic meant for suffering and rot.