Soulburned: The School of Souls

Chapter 32: Comets

A shout of surprise turned into a scream of fear as the dark gray stones of the Iris blurred past the plummeting Thale. The rush of howling wind pulled the air from his lungs, stifling that scream and leaving him breathless.

Time seemed to slow and bend strangely as he fell. The extreme shock and vertigo pulled his mind from his body in the most exquisite out-of-body experience he had ever had, smothering his initial fear.

He felt oddly calm.

His first coherent thought, strangely enough, was that Lyra had been possessed, or at the very least, wasn't the person he thought she was. She'd brushed him off the roof of the Iris with a simple gesture! That certainly hadn't been the same girl that he had practiced minor shaping with!

His second coherent thought was that he was about to die. The ground, lit by soul-lanterns and the persistent white glow of the Thymos Barrier, was rapidly growing larger.

Feather Fall.

His descent began to slow and Eros started rapidly depleting from around his lungs.

He swallowed the lump growing in his throat.

This wasn't going to work. He had seconds worth of Eros to fuel this spell, but it would take minutes for him to reach the ground at this speed.

His mind raced for another option.

He'd used Jump to leap from the Walls, but this was much higher, and Jump needed to be cast before one became airborne.

If he'd tried to take a Wizard Mark sooner he have more options! He'd be able to summon some winged creature or cast some sort of dimensional portal! Void, he wouldn't even need Logos if the damn Shrive Blade wasn't sucking him dry of Eros every moment! He'd be able to polymorph into a bird or-

Wait! The Shrive Blade!

The Blade was still clutched in his hand, the instinct to clutch it having been burned into his psyche over the past month. Its vampiric drain on his Eros persisted even now.

His Feather Fall spell failed, and he again began to plummet.

He reached for the power in the sword.

As always, it denied him. It wasn't filled. There was no Eros to spare.

He wasn't enough.

Thale raged, and forced his paltry amount of Logos into the Sword, using it like a mental crowbar in an attempt to dislodge his trapped Eros.

The Shrive Blade, that indestructible piece of the Void honed into an instrument of death, shattered.

Thale erupted into a blazing comet of shriving fire.

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Magnus walked the Third Wall, quietly peering through the humming barrier.

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The main Kovite encampment was only a few hundred yards beyond the dome of light, and even through its milky translucence, Magnus could make out some of the finer details of their fortifications. Buildings that had once been homes and shops only weeks before had since been dismembered. Their materials twisted and perverted into a large palisade that the Kovites had slapped down right in the center of the large main road. A walkway skirted its entire edge, and Magnus could see the tinted silhouettes of patrols.

In the space between the Thymos Barrier and the Kovite palisade, the invading army was constructing a monstrous battering ram. It's main Magnus didn't know where they had found the large stone that they had suspended in its gigantic frame, but he didn't doubt its efficacy. It had been sharppened to a point and painted with blood-runes. The Inner Gates of Sclera were strong and blanketed with their own, less barbaric runes, but he doubted that they would be able to stand more than a few trusts of the massive spike.

How are they even going to swing the damn thing? Magnus thought. It'd take more than a hundred men just to wheel the thing close enough to the gate to make contact, let alone pull arm the blasted thing.

His stomach soured. The Kovites likely weren't constructing it for men, were they?

The smart thing to do would be to sally out and crush them. If it weren't for the Void-blasted Barrier, they would have. Allowing the Kovites to get so close was a mistake. Marelda needed to ramp up her production of those talimans, and fast.

Hundreds of tents had been erected, each would have housed approximately ten soldiers. Thousands of the heathens.

There are fewer now... but still too many.

Yes, surely there were plenty of soldiers in the smaller encampments that sat outside each of the Third Walls wings, but they certainly weren't larger than this one. If they were housing fewer men, it was because they had fewer men.

Magnus grimaced at the implication.

Do they go willingly to be sacrificed?

He shuddered.

For what had to have been the thousandth time, Magnus praised the Void for his and his brother's good fortune. They had been some of the last refugees that had made it to Sclera before the walls were closed, all those years ago.

The Kovites and their 'Accuresed' had swarmed over the Lamerel Isles like angry bees. Entire cities had been wiped from the map in their unholy crusade, but worse had been the Empire's retaliation. The Isles were of no real concern to the Empire, and their blighting had served as a 'tactical sacrifice' to stall the Kovite's spread. Having no choice, the Lamerlians had fled. At least, most of them had.

Some fled to the Main continent, and found safe harbor here, in Sclera and beyond, but some had stayed to fight. They had perished without putting up any sort of real struggle. The survivors had been conscripted, or sacrificed.

The Empire, for all their brutality and schemes, had been right. Without the ability to use Lameral as a launch point, the Kovites were unable to field any meaningful assault on the North. Their only options had been to give up, and return to the ashes of Kov, or march through the Brow.

Magnus and his brother had arrived in a Sclera that had yet to know seige. It was, at the time, a neutral party in the great wars, being only a small city-state. It didn't have the marshall power to muster any significant fighting force. The only true defense it had was its massive walls, which had been centuries in the making, and its Soulmancers.

Magnus had always wondered why a region that had had such a monopoly on one of the most powerful forms of Magic, hadn't long ago absorbed its neighbors and lay claim to the entire continent... but he supposed that question had long ago been made irrelevant

Magnus and his brother had only been in the city for months before the Kovites had arrived at the Scleran Walls, seeking passage into the Northern half of the continent.

The Archmage, the one before Karolus, had denied them passage. He could not condone their war crimes or their summoning of the Accursed.

The Brow was closed. Sclera was sealed. The Seige began.

Already a competent Mage, Magnus had taken one of the improved Eros Marks offered by the Sclerans in exchange for military service. He owed his and his brother's lives to this city. He would not see it fall like Lamaral had.

Magnus turned away from the Kovite encampment to face his found home. It would not fall. Not while Magnus drew breath.

A mote of black fire erupted near the Iris and arced towards the ground. Magnus was instantly on alert. He drew his own sword and began pulling the excess Eros stored in the sword back into this body. He didn't know what was happening, but Shriving Comet was a very costly and dangerous Guardian spell. Its heavy drain on the Blades would put any Guardian into an immediate shortage of Eros, leaving little for fighting... It was how he had managed to lose Herclis, and almost himself in the fight with the Soul-Eater...

With a titanic push, Magnus launched himself into the air, bursting into his own comet of fire, and flew towards the Iris.