Ozahr was facing the wall when he heard Nile return. His footsteps were incredibly light, but he let out a small groan as he sat down. Ozahr could smell the incense smoke again.

He rolled around at once, not entirely happy to see Nile. To Ozahr's surprise, he had new bandages around his arms.

"You're injured," Ozahr noted flatly.

"And you're not asleep," said Nile and extinguished the incense with just his fingers. "Don't worry about me. I'll live."

Ozahr scoffed. "A shame."

For once, Nile lightly laughed. Or Ozahr thought he laughed based on the huff of air that escaped his nose.

"Save your pity laughter," Ozahr told him.

"Pity? No, I'm genuinely amused that a Spell Knight still hasn't figured out a way out of here."

Ouch. That was personal. "Oh, my apologies," said Ozahr, "they didn't teach the lock picking skill at Spell Knight school.” Not that that was a real school.

“I see they didn’t have gym class either,” Nile kept teasing him. “I figured the lightest stone shackles would do, but I didn’t expect them to be this effective.”

“I can sit here all day and hurl insults at you,” said Ozahr with his nose turned upwards. “But I’m better than that. So I’m just going to sit here and relax in silence. I will not be entertaining you any longer.” Ozahr crossed his arms as best he could and closed his eyes.

“Better?” Nile hummed. “I admit you showed promise in the beginning, but I’m starting to think you’re not worth my time. I truly hoped for better.”

Ozahr opened one eye to see Nile leave the room after daring to say he wasn’t worth his time. Now he had to break out just to spite him. And when he admits Ozahr is, in fact, much better than he would have ever imagined, Ozahr will spit on the ground and say he doesn’t have time for compliments from peasants.

“I’ll show him,” he muttered under his breath and quickly scrambled across the floor to his cell door.

There was a simple lock on it holding the door to the stationary bars. There were no magical mechanisms or traps, at least not ones Ozahr could spot. If Nile really thought he could hold a sorcerer down with nothing but stone and metal, he’ll soon have a sorcerer running loose. And Ozahr wasn’t planning on getting captured again.

He heaved his arm up to the lock, just barely reaching it with his hand outside the bars. Shaking it and banging his shackles against the metal was making far too much noise, but whoever was standing guard in the hallway didn’t seem to mind. Ozahr wasn’t even sure they were still there, but he preferred not to take the chance.

He’s only ever tried to lock pick once using magic. It didn’t go down very well when Elidyr caught him trying to sneak into his room full of mysterious secrets and he never had another opportunity to practice. No better time to learn than on the job, Ozahr figured.

He turned with his back to the cell door. Carefully, Ozahr lifted his hand and rested it over the shoulder so that it would bear the weight of the shackle. His fingers were nice and loose—he could already feel the flow of magic much better.

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Pressing the tips of his fingers against the cold metal of the lock, Ozahr began to concentrate. Manipulating magical energy on a small scale was difficult for him, but when he focused on the flow and resistance of his energy inside the lock, he could almost “see” how it was shaped. He counted the pins as the magic wrapped around them.

His magic jumped with too much excitement at first—blindly rattling the pins did little to keep them where they were supposed to be. Ozahr took one more breath and closed his eyes, relying on nothing but the feeling at his fingertips. He kept a steady flow of his magic pushing against the lock. One pin clicked into place. The next two clicked in at the same time. The last four took a bit of wiggling, but one by one they ticked in the silence of the dark room and the spring on the lock finally pushed it open.

“Ha!” Ozahr celebrated and immediately covered his mouth. He had to be careful even in the world’s worst guarded prison, just in case.

Standing up without groaning or sweating proved to be more difficult than picking his cell lock open. Ozahr slowly opened the door and slipped out. The black marble was covered in fine sand that insisted on sticking to his bare feet, and the white cloth they wrapped around him was starting to come undone.

How dare they defile me like that. Ozahr tightened the knots in the robe and kicked aside the hallucinogenic incense that was used on him. He peeked into the dark hallway to make sure no one was alerting by all the commotion, but the hall was empty.

So that's how much he's underestimating me? Didn't even bother stationing guards here? Ozahr scoffed. The nerve.

"I'm worth a whole fortress of guards!" He shouted into the darkness. "Do you know who I am?!"

Something rumbled around the corner in response to Ozahr’s echoing voice.

“Come and get me!” Ozahr stuck his arms out in a fighting position. Even if magical attacks weren’t completely available to him at the moment, hitting someone over the head with a rock seemed like a good enough strategy.

Ozahr was immediately punished for taking one step too far forward.

Something lept from the darkness, something much bigger than himself, and bit down on his extended arm. Ozahr winced and stopped the oversized mouth from going any further with his other arm. He could barely tell what he was pressing into. The creature was largely round and unpleasantly squishy, but Ozahr’s arm felt like it was being cooked alive the longer it stayed in its mouth.

“Let me go!” Trying to push against the gelatinous flesh of the monster proved useless. Ozahr dropped his free hand and gathered as much magical energy as he could in it, allowing his own body to become the fluid channel it had to pass through before letting it all explode from his devoured hand.

The monster flew off his arm and splattered against the nearest wall. Ozahr made out the vague shape of a semi-transparent frog made of swirling, muddy colors, and it was definitely still twitching its leg.

“What the fuck—” Ozahr gasped under his breath as he ran past the monster. His freed arm was still steaming, but his stone shackle was gone.

A sudden change in magical energy behind him caught Ozahr’s attention. He ducked at the last second, but then tripped over the shackles on his ankles. Ozahr watched as a fleshy purple tongue flew above his head and made a dent in the stone wall ahead.

The monster rumbled. It was a near indescribable sound—the strange magic it was made of expanded and shook the very air, reverberating through Ozahr’s chest. The frog was preparing to leap.

Ozahr quickly jumped up to his knees, steadied one foot on the ground, and snapped his free arm forward like a whip. A shockwave tore through the hallway, taking the frog monster with it into the far darkness. Ozahr didn’t stay to find out if his attack was enough.

“Where the hell am I, since when are magical monsters a thing! First a dragon, then a phoenix, now this!” He kept clumsily running with his shackles until a ledge stopped him from going further. Sand spilled over the edge and landed on some stairs below.

Ozahr glanced up and the stairs continued all the way up and down the square room, but the ones connecting to the ledge have been destroyed. Before he could recklessly try and jump the gap, another monster flashed past him. It was flying up between all the stairs, leaving behind its long trailing tail and clouds of dust filling up the narrow tower. Ozahr's reckless idea has just been replaced by another one.

“You better know where you’re going,” he said as he lept after the monster’s tail.

Its rubbery flesh was slippery, and Ozahr had to dig his fingers into the gelatinous mass to hold on. It was cold to the touch, almost slimy, but the longer Ozahr held on, the more his palms began to burn. He put up with it. The alternative would’ve been to plunge into the abyss below.

The air blowing down on Ozahr’s hair suddenly changed as they whipped in another direction. He just barely opened his eyes to see they were charging down a hallway with faint, golden light at the end of it. That feeling and color of magic was unmistakable.

“Nile, you bastard!” Oz shouted as he came closer to the light. The tight corridor opened up to a massive room half flooded with sand and pools of swirling, muddy colors, as if one of the monsters melted into the ground. A creature the size of a house occupied the space and all seven or twelve of its eyes were zeroed in on Nile in the middle.

The monster Ozahr rode gave him an excellent aerial view, and an even better attack angle. With a shout befitting a knight charging into battle, Ozahr jumped off the monster’s tail and twirled through the air. The magic that coiled around him followed his arm and sliced down into a sharp shockwave, splitting the overgrown monster in half.

He landed right before Nile, who looked to be taking a nap on the floor, probably overwhelmed by a single opponent.

Ozahr cocked his chin at him. “No need to thank me.”

Nile wiped some of the sand off the scratches on his face. His arms had visible steaming red marks, just like Ozahr. He didn’t look too happy to see his savior, based on his sunken brows.

He propped himself up on his arm and said to Ozahr, “You do know these creatures feed off magic, right?”

The creature Ozahr has neatly cut in half now twitched up from the floor and grew back its missing limbs, along with his now twin brother in the other corner.

Ozahr dropped his heroic pose.

“Fuck.”