Once the words had been uttered in full, then and only then did he lunge off Alex’s support and stumble forward. A brilliant flare of light engulfed him, erupting in a blaze that rivaled the bright light of the sun. Shielding her eyes, Alex tried to focus on the man. Was he okay? Had something gone wrong with his spell?
He looked like he’d combusted into a pillar of white-hot molten…something. Then, Alex saw the bright pillar-blob start moving. A blurry slightly darker triangle began to appear and disappear on the undulating lower half of the pillar, and he realized he was walking. Not fast, but not bent over and vomiting like he had been a few moments before.
“I’m fine.” He gasped out, then bending over, waved her off. “Go help someone else. I’m as good as I’m going to be.” With a shrugging shake of her head, Alex headed off to find someone else who needed help.
A glance around showed her that her earlier hesitation meant that other agents had rescued most of the people who’d been in distress. Those who had recovered quickly, had helped others. It had been fast. Now the last of the group were hobbling towards their vehicles in preparation for evacuation.
Seeing that her charge had already taken off towards the vehicles, Alex looked for Sam. Sam and Frank were escorting a pair of agents, one of whom was too injured to manage on their own. Somewhat jealously, Alex noticed that her fellow magical engineer was able to manipulate her shield so that she didn’t burn the person she was helping.
Behind them the rumbling from the building became a deafening roar. Concrete and metal crumbled and fell. Chunks impacting whatever they landed on with echoes and crunches. Chancing a glance back, Alex saw what resembled an avalanche in reverse. Debris launched itself into the crystal-clear sky. Huge, medium, small as dust? It didn’t matter. It was all going up in what would have been spectacular special effects in a movie.
Yeah! She could admit that. Her mind admitted numbly. Even as a remote and tiny part of her mind was urgently screaming an alarm for her to flee, flee now because her life depended on it. Alex’s legs had slowed in stunned awe. What on Earth could it be?
Was it the unidentified source of arcanes? Was it a monster manifestation? What had transformed? Legs slowing further, the magic technician came nearly to a stop half turned to watch her approaching doom.
Sam, Frank and the others were nearly to the first group of vehicles by the time she realized that Alex wasn’t with her anymore.
“Where’s Alex?” She shouted over the man supported between her and Frank. Her words were eaten by the sound of imminent death coming from behind them.
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“She was right behind us.” Frank shouted back, the lines around his eyes and mouth drawn in a tight grimace. Sam’s forehead furrowed and her head jerked around to look for Alex as Frank yanked open a car door.
“I’m going back for her.” Before he had finished helping the person they were supporting into it, Sam had dashed back into what was now a billowing cloud shooting the occasional sizzling boulder of warehouse into the air.
“Fuck. Sam” Checking to make sure the person they’d rescued was secured, Frank looked back into the cloud that was making its way toward them as it fell toward the ground.
“Don’t wait up.” She screamed back to him as she loped away. Gleipnir was in her hand and she plunged into the dust, her body nothing more than a faint glow in the growing darkness of the cloud.
“Damnit.” Shaking his head, Frank almost tossed his keys to someone else, but changing his mind hurried around to the door. Several vehicles had already evacuated but some had stopped to watch Sam with horror as she ran into a churning maelstrom. “What are the rest of you waiting for. Fall back. Fall back.” He circled one arm in the air for emphasis and pointed out the difficult to navigate terrain before he swung himself into his vehicle and left as quickly as the damaged infrastructure would let him.
Meanwhile, Sam didn’t slow in her sprint back for Alex despite the reduced visibility. Spells rattled off her lips for additional physical shielding, for sight int the dark, for heat vision. She was flipping through spells as fast as she could trying to find where her new junior agent had gone.
Ignoring the blisters forming on her lips from her rapid-fire incantations, the magical engineer faced a living embodiment of destruction in little more than her pants suit. The coppery taste of blood in her mouth mixed with the sweet-savory heaviness of the arcanes she was pulling through her. Was that maybe slightly brighter spot in the cloud Alex. It was impossible to tell under these conditions.
“Oh.” Shaking her head in disgust, Sam yanked the buttons on her wrist open and rolled up her cuffs. “The hell with this.”
As a warlock, Sam wasn’t used to taking in ambient magic. Her power was granted by her patron, the Norse goddess Frigg. Because of this, a large majority of her magic was creation related, weaving in particular. Which was why Gleipnir, a needle and or thread type sentient item, had been her granted pact item.
And while many might think that the creative and fiber arts-oriented obsession of Frigg’s nature might be exceedingly limiting on the magics available to her warlocks, it gave them an advantage that many warlocks lacked. Creativity. And the ability to layer styles of magic and spells to make them more powerful than they would ever be just relying on the magic granted to them by their goddess.
“Vefa ok sauma.” Weave and sew. Sam spoke it quietly, whispering it almost lovingly from her lips as her intention gathered both the power granted by her patron and readied the spell to be fed by the ambient magic. Despite her soft voice, the words of power seemed to dampen the raging noise around her, an all-encompassing command in the vortex of dim yellow light. Raising her hand, the young woman faced the obscured potential doom defiantly and spoke three precise words.
“Bregðandi. Nordr. Kaldr.” For a second, all the world stopped.