Light flashed. There was a sound like a point blank lightning strike, and a spider web of cracks spread through the dome high above. Lucas’ ears rung. The entire building shook. A chunk of marble the size of a bus broke away from the roof and plummeted like a meteor, trailing flames as it spun end over end. It crashed into the foliage nearby with a muffled boom, and the wall of plants rippled like a shockwave. The ground trembled.

Lucas scrambled to his feet, clutching his firehand to his chest, gaze fixed on the ceiling. The cracks spread and widened, and in seconds it felt like the roof was raining rubble. The rocks beat a staccato rhythm against the plant life, a constant cacophony of noise. A piece of marble the size of a medicine ball crashed to the ground mere metres away from him. Lucas flinched away, but didn’t make it a yard before Valerie snatched him by the upper arm and pulled him close. Her strength brooked no resistance as she swept him off his feet and over her shoulder.

Next thing Lucas knew, he was hurtling through the air, the ground rapidly receding before his eyes. His heart stuttered and his stomach flipped through loops. He didn’t even have time to cry out before they were up and out into the abnormally warm night, through a gap in the dome.

Valerie landed on the singed marble as easily as if she’d just stepped up there, rather than making a leap that would have carried her over a ten story building, but her cloak suddenly looked several shades darker. It was only when she set him down on his feet and he got to look out at the city and the lands beyond that he understood the situation. Half of the Summoning Hall’s roof had been charred black. Little pockets of blue flame clung close to the ground like petrol fires, radiating out from a smoking, blackened point at the dome’s edge.

A field of fire raged outside the city walls. The flames seemed to go on forever, circling around half the perimeter of the city and sprawling out for what had to be at least a mile. They burned high as buildings. Jyn had to have been setting this up the entire time. Hours of work. Obscene quantities of mana and masterful control of it. A part of Lucas admired the dedication and wondered how the Wandmaster had even accomplished all this.

Mostly, he dearly wished Valerie’s initial attack had succeeded in slicing the persistent bastard in half. He felt guilty for the thought. Then he felt pathetic for feeling guilty.

If it had just been fire, that would’ve been bad enough. He didn’t think his rudimentary pyromancy could match up to the level of power on display. But with so much fire, the air out here was dry as an arid desert. Wind rolled through, bringing with it only more heat; thick, almost suffocating. The sense granted to him by his heart’s flame showed him the very air itself was a deep red, and it was all venting upwards.

Dark clouds swirled overhead, illuminated by flashes of brilliant blue-white light that danced across the sky like celestial fireworks.

Jyn said his pyromancy let him ape some brontomancy techniques, Lucas thought, a little disbelievingly. With his basic understanding of pyromancy, it was hard to conceive how the art could translate to throwing around lightning. But the reality was before him, punctuated by rolling thunder.

The attack on the dome had just been the opening foray. Forks of lightning lashed out from the heavens every other second, striking the broken buildings and crumbling towers with deadly accuracy and hitting with far more power than a natural phenomenon. Each bolt illuminated the city in stark relief, casting eerie shadows that danced across the moss-covered marble and stone. With each subsequent crack of thunder, another fire sparked to life that the plant network rushed to put out.

The plants were going haywire, the entire mass writhing like a living creature in pain, launching massive quantities of bioluminescent purple fluid high into the sky and excreting a pollen-filled golden-brown gas that hung over Pentaburgh like a low mist. It didn’t seem to be having any effect. The lightning took on a life of its own, twisting and writhing like serpents in the sky. It arced and leaped between the overgrown buildings, tracing intricate patterns of light across the city. The air was filled with the smell of ozone.

As Lucas watched on in awe, a lattice net of lightning flashed over the tower to the south. It collapsed in on itself, the upper levels of the tower descending into the lower ones, billowing up an enormous plume of dust.

Despite the chaos and destruction, there was a strange beauty to the scene, a primal power that resonated deep within the earth itself. It was mesmerising to behold how much a master of magic could wield, and a thrill went through Lucas when he realised that could be him some day.

Lucas wondered how much control Jyn even had of all this. It looked like a wild storm. A natural disaster. How was he even doing it? There were waves of heat flowing around, but Lucas couldn’t make heads or tails of what purpose they were serving, especially not with his meagre range.

And he definitely couldn’t imagine how he’d go about countering this. In future, he was going to make sure not to give any enemy wizards prep time.

“Is this any better than being inside?” Lucas had to shout to be heard over the thunder, crouched on the roof of the Summoning Hall and desperately hoping lightning wouldn’t strike the same place twice. The marble was shaking beneath them; it felt ready to finish collapsing at any moment. There was as much noise inside the domed chamber as without, an endless cascade of masonry raining to the hall’s marble floor.

Looking back through the gap they’d hopped out of, he saw that the ‘safe’ circle was covered in rubble, but the plants in there were overgrowing even wilder than ever before, practically filling the space halfway up the walls.

When no reply came, Lucas turned to look at his companion. He immediately wished he hadn’t.

Her face was twisted in an inhuman rictus of rage. Her cheeks had sunken like her skin had been vacuum sealed to her skull, and black bruises had appeared beneath her eyes, which themselves had turned a ghostly white and shone with malice. She’d gone pale as death, which only served to accentuate the deep, dark wrinkles lining her face. Her jaw was clenched, her teeth bared in a beastly snarl. There was an aura to her, a promise of unimaginable violence to anyone who was unfortunate enough to meet her wrath. The entire world seemed to fall into shadow as he beheld her, like her very presence darkened reality.

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Demontouched, they’d called her. Lucas understood it, now.

“Valerie?” he called, taking an involuntary step back. Her frenzied gaze cut to him, and he froze.

That seemed to snap her out of it. Her eyes screwed shut, and she went still, seeming to hold her breath. Trembling in place, she dipped her hand beneath her coat and pulled out her pendant necklace. She held it up in front of her face for a moment, and the gem shone brighter, bathing her features in moonlight. It started swaying from side to side like a pendulum. Its movement shifted the angle of the light on her face back and forth, and it progressively seemed to wash away the darkness in her expression and return her previous colouring. Her features smoothed out, her hollow cheeks filling in. In moments, she looked like a person again, as if it had all been an illusion.

“I apologise,” she said, her voice uncannily emotionless. “We should get moving.”

So we’re just gonna ignore that for now, huh? Lucas thought, shaken.

“Where to?” he asked. Answers could wait. If he even truly wanted them.

“Away,” Valerie said.

“Where? How?” Lucas asked, looking around. Lightning flashed, burning afterimages into his eyes that he had to blink away. The artificial storm seemed unending. The pollen gas appeared to be keeping the lightning from striking too deep and it put fires out quickly, but he didn’t like the thought of breathing whatever that stuff was, so leaving that way was, tentatively, out.

The dome gave another alarming rumble beneath them, and Lucas’ heart lurched to his throat. They couldn’t stay here, either.

Valerie’s face was utterly blank. “I am compromised,” she said.. “You must lead.”

Lucas blanched. “Me? Lead?”

Valerie just nodded mechanically, staring at him with unnerving intensity in her blue-white eyes.

“Okay,” Lucas murmured to himself, quickly surveying their surroundings.

The dome hadn’t been hit again since the first attack, and they’d been out here for a good minute now. Why? It was clear Jyn had at least some ability to direct the lightning, or he wouldn’t have been able to ensure the first strike hit the Summoning Hall and drove them out. Lucas watched the lightning for a moment, trying to find a pattern in the strikes. They were chaotic, veering wildly into different areas. But they mostly hit the southern side of the city, directly before the flames, though some snaked around to the north.

The fire and lightning to the south made going north almost too inviting, and it was there that Lucas saw Jyn’s plan, or at least the outline of it. Whether it was because he just didn’t want to come in here to retrieve their bodies or some other reason, the Wandmaster wanted to kill them outside the city. He was trying to push them out, baiting them north where the man himself would probably be waiting with something he’d set up.

Even knowing that, Lucas didn’t know how to counter it. Staying on this roof meant potentially falling to their deaths. Fleeing into the foliage risked getting struck by lightning for real, despite Jyn’s plans. Hell, staying here risked that too. It was clear the pyromancer didn’t have total control over the lightning, just enough to keep it generally in one large area; the element was a mere sub-discipline to him.

Lucas decided to be bold. Fortune favours the brave, and all that.

“We need to get out of the city as fast as we can,” he said. “Can you jump that far?”

Either they’d spring the trap and Valerie would defeat him, or he wasn’t actually there after all and they’d escape.

Valerie shook her head, tugging on her sky-blue cloak. It was definitely darker, more sapphire than sky. He waited for her to elaborate, but her lips were pressed thin, her jaw clenched.

The roof rumbled again. Lucas stumbled, but Valerie’s hand snapped out to steady him. Her grip on his arm was painful, so close to his firehand. Another bolt of lightning blasted an overgrown roof within a block of them, spraying rocks and plant detritus into the air.

“Let’s get off the roof!”

Valerie followed as Lucas started running down the dome, heading north. The Summoning Hall was wider than any stadium Lucas had been to, and the dome seemed to stretch on forever. The curved marble roof was pocked with jagged holes. More were popping up by the second as chunks of marble broke off and plummeted. They had to divert around them, prolonging their run even further. Footing got shakier as they ran, the structural integrity of the dome worsening as more marble fell away.

As they neared the edge, Lucas reached out for his mana sense, aiming for nearby plants. An immediate problem arose.

It felt like he’d abruptly had extra air pumped into his lungs. Heat rippled through his soul in a way it wasn’t supposed to, and the plants within his range flickered and fuzzed in his mind’s eye, their mana starting to flow back through the connection into him. It was his heart’s flame, he realised. Even as he changed the ‘frequency’ of his mana to tap into his floramancy, it remained burning, fire-attuned, and that altered the very nature of his technique. Where normally his mana seeped into the plants and melded with them seamlessly, now his heart’s flame sought to consume the new fuel it had been connected to.

From where they were on top of the roof, the only plants in Lucas’ range were below them, inside the Summoning Hall itself. Moss and creeping vines clung to the walls and parts of the roof, and they started wilting at abnormal speed. His mana barely touched the plants for a second before they were dead, their mana gone, devoured by his heart’s flame.

Lucas ground to a halt, stunned. This, he supposed, was the wall that stopped wizards from pursuing multiple disciplines, especially ones that clashed with one another. There had to be overlap, synergy, to wield two arts simultaneously.

Fire mana consumed plant mana. Of course it did. It was so obvious, it infuriated him that he hadn’t predicted it.

He didn’t know what to do. He needed his floramancy here, but the idea of dismissing his pyromancy after the pain he’d gone through to get it filled him with terror. He lifted his firehand and flexed his flaming fingers. What would happen to his hand if he let his heart’s flame go out? Would he be left with a stump? Or would it revert to how it had been before the nexus of his soul had caught alight, burned and deformed?

Hesitantly, feeling sick, Lucas gripped his heart’s flame, seeing if he could… shrink it, at least. Maybe if it was less ravenous for mana, he could work with the plants for long enough to do something.

Jamie the monstercat woke immediately, hissing at his host for daring to mess with the heat source he was curled around. He radiated indignance and seemed to cling tighter to the flame, hissing and spitting.

Lucas had an idea.