> Of all careers and professions, none have so varied a reputation as the Adventurer. To some, they are heroes, righteously defending the innocent; to others, bandits who target monsters more than people.
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> The truth, of course, lies between these lines. Most of them are outcasts; the detritus of society, alike each other only in that they have no better options than to spend their lives fighting.
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> - A History of Adventurers
Ronan was many things. A warrior who had fought blind in the arenas of El'mar and lived long enough to back out before becoming a champion. A mage who had delved deep into the secrets of the arcane without ever attending an Academy. A thief who had cleaned out the vaults of corrupt aristocrats and left their secrets plastered across the walls of their cities. A craftsman who created marvels that would change the course of history.
A slave, who left the city of Kharban smoldering and soaked with the blood of those who had once ruled it. A rebel who had overthrown no less than three kingdoms within as many months. A terrorist who executed every adult member of the royal family of Darsk after finding their 'consorts', naked, chained, half dead beneath the earth.
He had saved countless lives and ended countless more, defending against Monster Surges, teaching people to fend for themselves, finding Dungeons before they broke and letting the local people take them over before a higher authority could find and farm them. He had walked through battlefields, delivering salvation and death in equal measure, and in only a few years, he had become a figure of legend.
And for a decade, there was a cost for his help. An archway in every city, large enough to fit a pair of carriages through it side by side. Each of them were identical in design, local stone covered in runes, the structure extending far into the earth to collect the ambient mana that rose from the depths. And for a decade, they had remained dormant.
They had only been activated for a few months, now, and dozens of merchant conglomerates had collapsed or gotten filthy rich off of it.
Ronan had connected the entire continent with the Gateways; they all connected to a pocket dimension in the Astral plane, insulated from the harmful energy and made to be expanded by future generations, a grand hallway with countless doors at the sides, each leading to one of the Gateways.
They would change the world more than sword or spellcraft could, and would continue to do so long after he was gone.
But while they were the culmination of his work, they were not the only thing that he had done. Over the years, Ronan had ruthlessly sought out knowledge of many kinds in order to spread it, and two schools of magic lent themselves to that search; space and divination. The former was primarily for storage and transportation; books were heavy and bulky, old ones were fragile, and scrolls were painful to move anywhere. That was saying nothing of how often he used a portal or teleportation spell to sneak places that had restricted knowledge. The number of private libraries he’d robbed was higher than the number of regular libraries that most scholars ended up being able to enter.
Divination was more direct in its use to the pursuit of knowledge–it could be used to observe, to measure in ways that would usually require expensive tools. It could be used to find specific words within a book, or even among several–it was vital to the running of every major library. It even allowed for the communication of ideas, of intent, without words–one of many forms of telepathy, but, importantly, one that facilitated communication with beings whose minds were usually harmful to contact. Ronan had done more than brush against the minds of beings who dwarfed him.
The peak of divination, to most who studied it, was the ability to peer into the currents of fate–even more than most magic, it was more of an art than a science, something that, according to conventional wisdom, could not be taught–something that was given by the Gods. Ronan had had his first vision at eleven, and it wasn’t until he was a grown man that he’d learned how to actually harness that talent.
The details of everyone cursed with prophecy were different, but Ronan found that he couldn’t see his own future–his own thread of fate faded and tried to escape him, if he ever looked for it. But when he looked outward, when he tried to view the course of fate at a larger scale, Ronan quickly found out why prophecy was a curse.
He called them Convergences, in the few writings he’d made on the subject. Points where fate convened, events that were the inevitable culmination of countless factors. Monster Surges, tsunamis, Dungeon Breaks, earthquakes, the summoning of creatures that were never meant to take a physical shape…
He had already been an adventurer, by most standards, albeit by accident. Seeing the path that fate would take, though, Ronan fought. He got into the thick of things, constantly–trying to avert the disasters he could, and mitigating the damage of those that he couldn’t.
Fame was an unfortunate byproduct–he had never wanted to be recognized, only to work against fate itself, to save lives and spite a force that was above the Gods themselves.
And he was only 26. Young, by any reasonable standard, though he’d started earlier than any adventurer should have.
Now, he was checking the Gateways–it wasn’t a necessity by any measure, they hardly required maintenance, but he did it anyway, just in case. It wasn’t like it took long, either, since all of them functioned as easy teleportation anchors for him; he didn’t even need to enter the pocket space to go between them.
The last one he got to was at an elvish village, between what they called the Great Plains and the Grey Rock–they were not creative with names–he got a vision, unprompted.
That was never a good sign, but at least he had gotten used to the sensation–enough to keep aware of his surroundings, at least. Not that there was much going on, but he’d always worried about the prospect of getting a vision of something happening with such short notice that he hadn’t recovered by the time it actually happened.
Destruction. Overwhelming and overpowering, without cause and without source, a void that sought to remove everything it found. He could feel its hunger, an endless desire to consume, a silence that wished to bring quiet to all things, something compelling and sickly sweet.
By the time it faded, his heart was racing, and his breathing had gotten heavier. That was deeply worrying. He’d only ever read about that kind of magic before, never seeing so much as a hint of it in all his travels.
Destruction. Hunger, in Elvish, which was a more accurate term. A combination of Void and Infernal mana, which was difficult for half a dozen different reasons. First among them was that they were practically antithetical to each other. The Void was emptiness, an absence so potent that it became a presence all of its own. Infernal magic was chaos and change, aggression and desire, a twisted form of life that refused to give in.
They were both forms of magic that permeated an entire plane, Hell and the Void, respectively, but that was about all that they had in common, both in nature and in the way that they had to be handled. If someone did manage to combine the two, however, the result was a form of magic that would spread and eat away at everything it touched, neutralizing itself in the process. It was one of the relatively few forms of magic that had practically no utility beyond causing harm.
The smart thing might have been to contact some kind of institution–to find the capital of whatever nation currently claimed this area, let them know what was happening, and let the weight of all those resources crush the problem. It was his solution when he found a Dungeon relatively near a populated area.
Ronan dismissed the option immediately. He didn’t know how long he had before whatever his vision entailed would actually happen, and he honestly doubted a backwater like this would have any magical specialists better able to stop this than him. Looking at fate in more detail wasn’t an option either–looking back was always far more time consuming than looking forward.
Ronan sighed, taking in the ambient mana. Anything of that scale would require a monumental amount of energy. If he tried to spot where it was flowing…
Nothing. Rather, no movement, but it was more dense towards the mountain than the plains, like the mana was radiating outward from it.
He ran, of course. It would have been a terrifying sight if the locals had been awake, but even moving at speed, the silencing enchantments on his clothing muffled his footsteps. Wind streamed through his hair, and his ears wound up pinned against his head in a similar way to how they looked when he was angry, his tail visibly puffing up while he moved, his longcoat hanging down more steadily than it seemed fabric should have, betraying the metal plating it was lined with.
He teleported too, of course, but he had to be careful–Ronan had only come to put an anchor here as a favor to a friend, and he’d come in through the plains. The terrain was unfamiliar, then, and he couldn’t safely teleport beyond line of sight without performing divinations that would take slightly longer than just blinking forward.
Of course, divinations were constantly pulsing around him, an intricate three-dimensional map of the area forming in his mind, though he’d probably never end up coming there again. His breath came steadily and easily, though it wasn’t strictly needed. One of the marks of an archmage was becoming a creature that was as much or more magical than biological, and he’d long since passed that point. Still, it was better to breathe than waste his mana on keeping himself alive.
It wasn’t long before he could practically taste the corruption in the air, tiny little wisps of that destructive mana, practically invisible to anyone not looking specifically for it. He easily navigated the terrain, despite the rocks and roots in the way, moving mostly without even thinking.
Ronan assumed this was a Dungeon on the verge of Breaking. That would be easy enough to prevent, if he got there in time–a mana gathering array and clearing it a few dozen times was all it would take to keep it stable for a while. After that, he’d have time to alert people to it, and probably have a good enough idea of what was inside to prevent people from getting killed in there. That was the main reason he saw this as being so urgent, not to mention the fact that a Dungeon with this kind of Aspect was definitely an anomaly, the kind that a scholar could base their career on.
He came to a halt without using a proper spell, directly enforcing his will upon reality, momentum fading away instantly, the excess energy converting itself into mana that mostly paid back what the working had taken to begin with.
Ronan had found a clearing, perfectly circular. More importantly, there was nothing in it. No insects, no small mammals, nothing burrowed under the earth, shallow as his perception usually extended in that direction. No grass.
Bare, loose soil, in a perfect circle. Branches from nearby trees simply cut off at that point, sap leaking from sickly branches. A frown made its way onto Ronan’s face. Subterranean, maybe? Dungeons tended to come into being in more accessible locations, but they were known to generally have some kind of intelligence operating them, and that could be affected by the mana typing it had…
Didn’t matter. Definitely wasn’t a fae circle; Ronan had gone into the Wilds before, he knew what that magic felt like. That was saying nothing of the fact that he was pretty sure that anyone, even without magical senses, would be able to feel what was radiating from somewhere below the earth there.
… And would probably die before long, now that he thought of it. He had the metaphysical weight to be safe from this level of exposure–probably, at least, though he should definitely make a thorough examination when this was over–but the locals… Well, he’d already figured out that they were probably going to die.
Ronan stepped into the clearing, staying near the edges on general principle, letting shielding charms come into being around him, summoned from the pocket dimensions that were tied to him. He had no proper defenses against this, and no time to make them, so he would just use brute force. Destruction reacted with both matter and mana, neutralizing itself and removing whatever it came into contact with.
Within the clearing itself, the usual, gentle probes he kept at all times dissolved within a few feet of his body–Ronan made an effort to stop them, which felt similar to stopping his leg from bouncing once it had started.
Brute force was his solution again, overcharging the spellform in his mind until it was practically vibrating, then releasing it, directed towards the ground below him. He didn’t bother with anything complicated, just something that would locate the most magically potent thing (or person) in his surroundings. The mana was visible when it came from him, a faint dark pulse racing into the earth.
As soon as the results of the spell entered his mind, Ronan realized that he had made a horrible decision. A ward snapped into place when he attempted to spring away, not trusting the stability of any spatial warping that involved his body with the instability in the air.
It wasn’t the entrance to a Dungeon–rather, it was a lumpy crystal that he knew would have been black if it ever saw the light, orange and purple shimmering across the surface like an oil stain. He knew that there had been runes carved into it, stabilizing the volatile mana crystal until just the right kind of mana came into contact with it.
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His mana. He recognized the runework, he’d created similar traps himself, using the exact same principles, though usually he triggered it while he was outside of the area of effect. He cast several spells simultaneously, all divination, information streaming into his mind as he tried to make a plan to survive this.
He wasn’t going to get out. The mana was too unstable to warp space around himself; teleporting wasn’t going to work. Physical movement wasn’t going to work, either, because he could figure out every part of the network of wards he’d stepped into at a glance, from inside of it. He couldn’t actually see any of it directly–it seemed to be entirely made from something that held the same mana that formed the crystal, forming a sort of negative space where he knew what was there specifically because he couldn’t see it. The outer ring was its structure and basic functionality; it allowed for one-way entry; anything could come in, nothing could come out, an arrangement which was pretty much solely used for traps. No potential holes to get through, not in the time he had at least; nobody was keyed into it, and it didn’t seem to allow that functionality at all. Oddly enough, the shape wasn’t a standard sphere, but a cylinder, stretching directly up and down, deep beneath the earth and… beyond the sky itself. No escape.
Force wasn’t an option, either–it was too deep to get to in time to physically tamper with the structure, and the bulk of the structure, forming its power supply, was a ward that he was deeply familiar with.
He’d designed it, after all. There was something entertaining about that, about the fact that the mechanisms that were about to kill him were mostly of his own design.
The details weren’t relevant; the end result of the warding scheme was something that would use the mana of any spell cast against it to strengthen the ward. He’d mostly planned on using it for trapping monsters, rather than people, but he’d known what it would be used for when he decided that its potential for reducing collateral damage was worth however many lives would be lost before a countermeasure was devised for it. The ward wasn’t going to be fading away.
Ronan closed his eyes, given that they were still more vulnerable than the rest of his flesh, sat with his back against the ward, and tried to get ready to face the music.
Not that he had needed to wait long, of course. His analysis of the ward had only taken a quarter of a second, sitting took less than that, and in total, only a second passed between the stability enchantment’s dissolution and the shattering of the mana crystal.
Calling it an explosion would be disingenuous. It did not push anything outward, and in fact had no kinetic impact at all. It was a torrent of pure energy, pressing tight against the confines of the ward, filling all the available space within it and eating everything it touched.
His first layer of defense was the shielding charms he had already summoned; all of them were heavy duty, able to absorb artillery strikes. Combined, their power supplies were shared, and it would be all the harder to overwhelm it and disable them. They bought him what he hadn’t had when it first went off–time.
Ronan didn’t bother to wonder who could have done this. He’d made plenty of enemies over the years, and he should have thought someone would manage this sort of thing eventually, taking advantage of a Seer’s inability to find their own fate and trick him into thinking there was a catastrophe so that he’d panic and try to stop it, just to lead him into a trap. Who it was didn’t matter.
He just had to survive.
Ronan pushed his mana out, not to keep up the shields, but to push away the lingering traces of Destruction that had already been there. After that, he started summoning.
The limited space, of course, didn’t really constrain him much–he just had to expand the space where the pocket dimension connected to the world.
That just made the process take a little longer, and he had time now. Ronan felt the energy turn from a torrent to a tidal wave, a sea of mana that ate away at his shields, drawing deep from the mana that kept them together.
Ronan’s habit of keeping random things in his pocket dimensions was finally paying off, though he had to admit this wasn’t what he thought their purpose would be.
Trash went first. Shattered stone and glass from dozens of rescues were pushed into the void ahead of him, disintegrating as they went–then a pool full of defective potions, which had been hanging in stasis. Then a literal mountain of slag–it was a lot easier to dispose of toxic or otherwise inconvenient materials by storing them in a pocket dimension than it was to actually find a safe place to put them. Part of him had to appreciate the convenience, but that quickly turned into vague annoyance as he ran out of waste. He had to actually decide what he was most willing to get rid of.
The only silver lining was that it felt like the pressure had lessened, significantly but nowhere near entirely. It was like trying to drain the ocean.
First went the raw materials he had–wood from mundane trees, stone that had been properly quarried, scrap metal, starting with the cheapest and most easily obtained. The mana cost was negligible; after he made the initial aperture that condensed the space and shoved material out, he was able to just connect it to the pocket spaces that held everything and let gravity do the work.
Those materials had been to help rebuild homes, and here he was, using them to save his own skin. Even though he knew that they wouldn’t be used if he died, it still brought up a vague sense of guilt. Now was not the time for his conscience to kick in…
Feeding his own mana to the shielding charms wasn’t an effective strategy. Oh, they were good charms, and his actual shields weren’t all that much better, but the only purpose he had for them was to keep the chaos at bay, and that was just a matter of raw mana. He’d replace them as time went on–Ronan had plenty of them–but… when they were gone, he’d have to do it himself. That was going to be a much less pleasant experience.
They did more than the raw materials, but not by much. With a wince, he sped up the process, opening two more apertures, all facing in different directions–none of them towards where the ward had been. The ward had to be actively absorbing the mana, and he didn’t want to push himself away from it if he could manage it. Not that he was entirely sure if he was still close to it… Outside of his bubble, there was just a pure, endless darkness. He hadn’t felt himself move, but he had anchored the apertures in relation to his own body and was too focused on not dying to track his position.
He started pumping out more matter, more mass, now in the form of loot. Some from dungeons, some from people, a sizable portion of it still blood-stained. Weapons and armor that he hadn’t gotten around to melting or giving away, massive bolts of cloth, pots and pans, a river of cutlery, hay bales, a frankly astonishing amount of meat… the fruits of around a decade of taking pretty much everything he could from bandits, Dungeons, nobility, and the wilderness, everything that wasn’t magically potent.
He probably should have been terrified, but Ronan found that he was mostly just irritated. This was all so… wasteful. With the amount of mana that was in this trap, he could have been instantly disintegrated if it were formed into anything that resembled an actual trap. But no, it was just… burning power for little to no purpose besides forcing him to fork over all of his stuff first. What was the point? Whoever did this had to have known a lot about him, had to have been powerful enough to actually scry after him and subtle enough for him to not even notice it. Then there was that vision…
Whatever. Ronan would have sighed if there had actually been any air within the bubble, but… there wasn’t, and it felt weird to do that without any atmosphere. He kept throwing things out. At least he could tell that the pressure was lessening–the shield charms were holding up for a little longer, now. Maybe a quarter of it had been neutralized, probably less.
Less fortunately, he was out of things that weren’t particularly valuable.
It was a bit more painful to start throwing out materials that were actually valuable, but he did it anyway. Magically infused materials–wood, stone, metal, all going straight through. Again, he found himself almost thankful for the convenience–it wasn’t easy for him to cleanse infernal corruption, given his… less than stellar relationship with most gods, and he had a lot of it lying around in there. He probably should have included it with the trash, but it turned out not to matter–even when all of the dangerously corrupted things were gone, the pressure hadn’t changed all that much.
By then, he was running low on shielding charms–he’d already had to start using his older, worse ones, which would get progressively less effective, especially once he ran out of the ones which could link together.
And in the end, nearly everything went. Before long, Ronan was down to the bare essentials–his personal equipment, and maybe a dozen mana potions that he’d designed to absorb directly into his aura when exposed to the air near him. They were for emergencies, but this had gone well past the point of qualifying as one. The last shield flickered out as he summoned his armor onto himself. An active shield still wasn’t perfectly efficient, no matter how well it was cast, and the shield spells he knew best were meant to deflect, not to absorb.
The sea of darkness was only a fraction of what it had been before, but it seized him quickly, swift and hungry as he closed his eyes. His ears always felt cramped when he put on a helmet, but he’d take every bit of protection he could get.
The pain was delayed. The metal he clad himself in fit around his body tightly, enough so that air couldn’t actually get in. It was a precaution for fighting other mages; many forms of mana would make a place unlivable in large enough quantities. A fire mage didn’t need to hit someone directly to sear their lungs.
It started at the hands, which brought back bad memories that were swiftly replaced by the same happening at the feet, then the back of the knee–the joints went first, being the parts that had to move.
Destruction felt hungry as it seeped in; something cold and slick and sweet, clinging tightly to him as it started slowly getting into his body. It felt the same as acid, physically, but Ronan was more magical than biological by now; the feel of the mana made it a different experience. One that he would have to deal with in his dreams if he managed to survive this, a prospect that he hadn’t really fully considered.
More of his armor broke, mana and substance siphoned away as one. It was almost serene, that complete silence, the only feeling he could process being pain. It ate away at his body more quickly than it did at his mana stores; he had to start healing himself.
It was almost peaceful. Oh, it was agony, but Ronan had been tortured before. Hell, he’d put himself through worse, with all the experiments he’d done on himself over the years… But it was a simple loop, something that kept his focus in a familiar way that made time lose all meaning.
Assess, heal, repeat. The process became practically automatic, and even with the acidic mana seeping into his body, he had a good idea of his internal state. If he’d had more organs, he’d have been dead. That sort of tissue was delicate, existing in a fragile balance–but there were perks to becoming an Archmage. He was barely alive in a biological sense, which made him a hell of a lot harder to kill.
He just focused on staying alive. As long as he lived, he would generate more mana to push back the tide, but he could tell that it was a losing battle as he was slowly but steadily drained of energy. One after another, he had to summon one of his mana potions into his mouth, but that required concentrating his mana around it so that he wouldn’t end up opening a spatial rift in his head–and that allowed the sea to consume him just a little bit faster. The healing got sloppier, but it continued.
Until, finally, he realized that there was no more damage to heal. Ronan felt smooth stone against his back, which he realized was bare. As was the rest of his body, including his head and tail. He didn’t have any hair growth serum left, either… that was annoying. Normally, he’d have broken before his armor, but… well, there wasn’t really anything normal about this, was there?
He opened his eyes, blinking rapidly as he made sense of what was ahead of him.
Or, above him, rather. The silvery light of the moon. It had already passed overhead when he had started–he had to have been in there for at least a day. He blinked, recognizing what else was wrong with it.
The stars had shifted. It hadn’t been days, it had been weeks, maybe months.
Fuck, his head was pounding.
He staggered up, looking at his surroundings. Bare stone, with the slight shimmer of the ward, and now only a hazy fog of corrosion. He couldn’t feel it… had he developed a resistance? Ronan hadn’t known that was possible.
He was interrupted by a low whistle, and he whirled around, the air uncomfortable against his ears and tail, but far from actually being harmful. He almost stumbled with the sudden, jerky motion, his body not quite moving the way it should have. Was his coordination that frayed?
Stood in front of him was a figure maybe five and a half feet tall, relatively broad at the shoulder and hip. Only maybe ten feet away–more than close enough for him to tell their gender from a glance at the aura, even with the wispy presence of the corrosive mana cutting away at his perception. A woman.
“Y’know, I wasn’t expecting you to actually survive that,” She’d mutter, seemingly to herself, voice a raspy alto that reminded him of the various smokers he’d come across over the years. Though, given that she seemed just as unbothered as him, it wasn’t hard to figure out that she had done this. “I mean, they’d said this was the only way, but it just felt so… excessive.” She’d blink, though he couldn’t tell much more of her expression beyond that, through a cloth that covered the lower half of her face. Her clothing seemed mostly designed to conceal whatever was underneath–probably weapons. Tattered, but not fraying... “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re alive. Wouldn’t get paid if I just killed you, the bastards…” The same tone, but she was apparently addressing him. He couldn’t tell if this was deliberate showmanship or if she was just… like this.
She reached into the rags, and he immediately backed up, almost tripping over a slight rise in the rock. “Oh, calm your tits, fox boy. I already said I’m not gonna kill you.” He tried to reach into his pocket dimensions, but even looking sent another wave of pain through his skull, a trickle of blood trailing down his nose, with nothing to show for it.
It was a piece of paper, oddly pristine, which she scanned briefly. “Let’s see, uh… Yeah, I don’t give a shit. You kept making things go ways they shouldn’t, on purpose, and they don’t like that, but they also think that you’ll just get out of it if you die, so…” That was a deeply unfortunate moment to have several theories behind the underlying structure of reality either confirmed or rejected, respectively. Who was this? He didn’t recognize the voice, and he was fairly sure there wasn’t a charm to disguise it on her… The figure wasn’t really enough to go off of. She probably wasn’t an elf, or at least any variety that he had seen–the features weren’t quite narrow enough, and the eyes… He hadn’t seen anything quite like them on a person. A dark brown that almost blended in with the pupils, but the irises… they almost looked like tightly wound fabric, stretched out between the edge of the iris and the pupil.
Another wave of pain, every nerve in his body begging him to stop, to curl up and just let himself die. He’d normally be able to function through it, but after another step, his leg failed to support even his own weight.
Nothing broke. That would have been more humiliating than the rest of this was. He took a deep breath, ignoring the fact that that brought more of the Destruction into his body, ignoring the smell of stone and the taste of ash in his mouth.
Where did that even come from?
He glared out at the figure as she started to walk forward. She reached into the rags again, tossing something onto the ground a few feet away from them both. He was facing it, actually–it was a cylinder, small enough to be held in the palm of her hand, maybe a quarter of an inch thick. It was glossy, reflecting the moonlight as it arced through the air, breaking on impact and leaving a perfect oval hanging in the air.
Perfect, stygian darkness, contrasted by pin-points of blinding light. It didn’t quite look like the night sky–the lights weren’t positioned right.
But… it didn’t seem to be the Abyss, either. It would have noticed him–he had contacted the Abyss more successfully than anyone who cared to talk about it, and the things that dwelled within it would immediately notice an aperture like that.
“Go on. Get in. C’mon, I know you can do it. I believe in ya.” He glared back at the stranger, not quite managing a snarl.
There was nothing he could do. Not really. His resources were entirely gone, and while he could feel some trace mana in himself–mostly converted from the smaller amount of Destruction that was still seeping into him, his actual mana generation felt like it was shot to hell.
He crawled. Not to the portal, of course, but towards the woman, who immediately kicked him in the head. It was… shockingly light. Oh, there was enough force behind it to shatter any regular bone, but… even after all the damage, his body still held at least some of its enhancements. “Go on. Get. What are you even trying to do, here?”
He grabbed her leg, and he could tell that there was a look of anger under the mask. “Watch it, you’ve got fuckin’ talons there…” They sunk into the flesh easily, through the fabric. What was going on here? How did someone so… weak manage this? Did she just neglect her body when gaining her power?
Or was she not immune to the effects of that magic?
He didn’t have long to think on it, though. She grabbed him by the neck with both hands–there weren’t any clothes to get a grip on, and his hair had gone as well. “Fine.” She spat, voice full of venom–more of it than he’d expect as a response to something as petty as this, but he supposed that was for the better.
She pulled her arms back, weight shifting, and he felt his feet dragging against the stone. She was facing the portal, now.
He triggered the spell that he’d been holding in his mind, and a blast of raw force hit her, but it wasn’t enough to make her topple, only making her stumble, grip staying tight on his throat. The blood trailing down his nose was met with some of it coming from his eyes, and he could feel the distinctly unpleasant sensation of his ears filling with more blood.
It hadn’t been enough. She didn’t bother trying to throw him, though–they were close to it, now.
It was cold.
The figure met his gaze, warm brown eyes glaring into his, unflinching. She didn’t say anything.
Another step. The cold got worse, exponentially, the closer he got to it. Ronan cast one last spell. He wasn’t going to get out of this. Not in this state, not with the Destruction still around, not in this deep of a pit… But he could get revenge. Maybe not on Fate, but at least on its messenger.
Another wave of force blasted them both forward, into the portal, far stronger than the first, and she hadn’t been prepared for it. He saw fear in her eyes as they both began to tumble.
And then he saw nothing at all.