“His dark radiance suffused the landscape,

White shadow burned the grass and earth,

Inverted energies take proper shape,

We must foil Death to stop his birth.”

— The Ballad of Sir Joe, by “Golden-Voiced” Garbeaux.

As Jimmy wrought mass murder upon Bagetelle’s defenders, Aimee was preparing, “Dark beyond the Shadow,” she began, holding up her hands, condensing stolen power from the enchanted walls and light poles. She was incanting, a verbal method some spellcasters used to especially powerful spells. Each incantation she spoke now gathered power from a new source, not a little, but all of it. For Incanters, practiced spells were practically a poem, and though she was just a Hedge Wizard, Aimee still pushed on. The ball began to spin, “Crimson beyond the red blood of trees.”

I couldn’t help it, “Red blood of trees?” I muttered, “But sap is–”

“Hush!” hissed McGrue, watching as the orb turned from black to a very dark green, an obvious attempt to duplicate Ignus’ death blasts, but the wrong color. She seemed to be having trouble forming the orb. Meanwhile, light after light was snuffed, the streams of energy from the walls were ending. Arcing out from the orb, a nearby bush immolated.

“Sap into darkness, scarlet before ruby eyes,” continued Aimee, shaking and sweating, pulling the orb back into shape, dulling the green glow, better recreating the death blast, but it jittered as she worked to contain it. Her shoulders slumped, “It’s like baking a cake. I used too much sugar, now I need to balance it out with salt.”

“Because salt cancels out sweetness?” I asked. It looked better, closer to the spell she was trying to copy, “Apparently I don’t know how a cake is made.”

McGrue looked back and forth between me, the still expanding cloud of dead guard, and Aimee, “That orb looks pretty unstable!” he said, worried.

“Mammoth powers in my hands,” she growled, causing the orb’s aura to expand in size, hopefully just in preparation to release.

“That’s big, but not as ethereally dense, as the death blast,” I said. Out of practice though I was, I knew magic terminology. Maybe not as well as some but the difference between the spells was grog to whiskey. Aimee glared at me. She knew I meant the spell would lack power unless she could condense it.

“Strength of inferno, might of sacred oak,” she continued, condensing the orb to the size of an apple; its aura extending beyond its former size.

But that aura was still too green, “Should you be using life mana?” I asked.

“I’m … vested with life mana,” she growled back.

“You’re recreating the death blast! You should use death mana!” said McGrue.

“No! I’d die,” she retorted as she continued fighting the orb, its colors shifting, the orb at its core trying to expand. To explode.

He flinched, “Don’t use death mana!” and another guard exploded into powder.

“Can you even use life to make a death spell?” I asked.

“Death is anti-life, dammit! Life is a frequency of energy! Just … gotta put a ton of magic in … and flip it!” she replied. I was pretty sure that was wrong. In Bard College, instructors spoke of spells cast improperly killing their casters, and a Bard didn’t routinely deal with backlash effects. “It’s called Overcast! A Hedge Wizard’s most powerful tool!”

“The smaller the ball gets the bigger the cloud around it. Is that normal?” asked McGrue.

“Just a little more!” yelled Aimee as she sucked ever more energy, and the aura of the orb was the only source of light left. I looked at McGrue in horror, as he was giving a thumbs up. She began incanting again, “Power … fulness of the earth. Rage of the Sun. Force of the trees. Strength of Fire.” The wobbly, expanding orb finally coalesced into a glowing black pinpoint of power, one she controlled, if only barely.

“Those don’t go together. And powerfulness?” I said as the sphere bulged and jerked.

“Shut up!” shrieked Aimee, struggling. McGrue grabbed me from behind, holding my mouth shut. The orb was uneven, changing constantly, trying to explode, and more brown than Ingus’ jet black orb. Still, it was a spell, which might be enough … if we didn’t die.

Aimee stood strong, hands sculpting the sphere which became a dark, deep, dangerous black color. Like a black hole of annihilation. She squeezed it into a singularity again, and it stopped fighting her. “Aimee, baby? We need to run while we can,” said McGrue.

Beyond Aimee the dust was finally settling, Jimmy’s skeleton flaring to light. The powder that was his friends subsiding, a single guard was exposed, crawling towards us as Jimmy approached. Hearing footsteps, he rolled over, “No! Please! I have a–” and he burst into nothingness.

The final plume of powder blowing away, the grinning skull of Jimmy growing nearer, Aimee shouted, “No! This … this is our only chance! He can run us down, sniff us out. That blast, it’s like the ones I threw using the Fetish, but leveled up by Ignus. Now that I’ve seen it a few times … I think I can … overcast…”

“Yeah, Ignus, I think she did say ‘Overcast’. Like clouds. That is ironic,” said Jimmy, especially cocky. He could see the spell forming, in slow motion, and didn’t take it seriously at all.

We started to step towards her, to snatch her up, but the power she projected obstructed us, like the beating of a massive heart, or a tide pushing us to shore. “Aimee! You can’t. It’s too much!”

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“I don’t think so! My instructor showed me how! Adapt the magic to your nature, project, contain, unleash, Overcast! Let me … focus!”

It hadn’t been even a day since Aimee lost control of a simple spell, sending the corpse of Sir Joe the Bold into a thrashing, dancing spree of nonsense, and that backlash had drained her. We grew terrified as more and more energy escaped, becoming sound and light, byproducts of the forces in play. “No! Don’t!” I called, my words drowned out by pure arcane energy.

Aimee screamed at the gangster, “Hey Jimmy! That spell you’re shooting all over? That’s called ‘Annihilation Ray’! Now let’s see how you like it!”

Cocky, Jimmy ignored her words, “This is amazing! We won’t have to hide underground anymore. We’ll own this town. And it’s all thanks to you, elf lady,” he said, pointing at Aimee before shooting her a wink. She shrieked in pain, and the spell burst, the last beat knocking her back, and all of us to the dirt. No ray had erupted. Rather, the sphere expanded to ensnare its target.

As I raised my eyes Jimmy still stood, enraptured, pointing at us, and the sphere of blackness began to shimmer with all the colors of the rainbow. The moon went black, the stars went black, and the world disappeared. When it all reappeared, even the streetlights, Jimmy was gone.

Aimee coughed weakly, “Did I … did I do it? Did I get him?” Her skin was livid, burned by a backlash, every scrap of cloth, every strand of hair was marked by her efforts. It was a clear backlash, there had been no blast of death magic, but if she had failed, then where was Jimmy?

Everywhere the corpse powder billowed, eddied, slowly rose and fell, stirred up by the spell. “I … I think you did. There’s no Jimmy,” said McGrue, rising and lifting her in his arms.

“Good. Good…” she said, eyes fluttering shut. She was out.

I pushed myself up using a lightpost, “Aimee? Aimee!” screamed McGrue, in a panic, sure that she was dead, but we had no time to check.

“Bukaw?” asked the weird, black chicken that stood where Jimmy had been, its wing pointing in our general direction. From its feathers fell a short, glistening, black wand with a skull at the head, thudding on the stone. The bird then fell over, struggling, seemingly unaware of how to stand up.

Realizing what had happened, I shouted, “Death chicken!” and sprinted, full-speed, punting the demonic rooster as far as I could kick it. Snatching up the fetish, I turned back, running, “Go! Go!”

The muscular McGrue started moving before I got there, but was hobbling, so I took up Aimee. She was much heavier to me than McGrue, but he only had one good wheel, so we kept pace. We could only manage a slow jog, “Grizzly! Grizz! Where are you, you fucking nightmare!”

“I thought we couldn’t call for him!” I huffed, Aimee becoming very heavy on my shoulder.

“That doesn’t matter any more. If he gets the fetish back, Ignus can probably turn him into a monster again! Let’s leave him here as a rooster, and get the fuck out of Grainfest!” He staggered, kicking over a trashcan, nearly falling.

Somewhere, in the distance, a whinnie. “Wait. I heard him! Grizz!?” I heard it again.

McGrue smiled, “I heard him too,” then, a scrape.

From behind us, “Buk-buk?”

“Are you fucking kidding?” asked McGrue as the skeleton of a chicken flared up in the darkness of a nearby alley.

The chicken formerly known as Jimmy Quick stepped out, “Cock-a-doodle–”

McGrue couldn’t help himself, “C’mon! What are you gonna–”

“Dooo!” roared the rotten rooster, vomiting pure death at us. The force knocked us over, and it hurt, but not that much.

“Ow! Run, dammit,” growled McGrue, “He may be less deadly without that wand but he’s still dangerous!”

We fled, still not sure if Aimee was alive or dead, following the sound of our murder horse’s threats (his whinnies never sounded friendly), and fleeing Jimmy as he tried to figure out how to control the body of a barnyard fowl. Left, right, left, Grizzly’s voice grew ever louder.

“Yes! This is it, the alley! Just down … there…” From a cross-street waddled the awkward, fat form of our fowl enemy, squaring up, between us and our salvation.

“Buk-buk,” he said, aggressively, “Bukaw!” he shouted, giving off a small burst of profane energy.

A hint of movement in the distance, I turned, made eye contact with McGrue; he saw it too. We inhaled in unison, shouting at the top of our lungs, “Grizzly!”

“Buk-cluck?” Jimmy Chick (see what I did there?) felt the thunder, but, still not used to his new body, wobbled mightily as he turned to look. Seeing what we saw, in spite of his condition, he still had the confidence of a man possessed by a high-level undead, and began to charge up the dark energies of Ignus the Black.

Then a front hoof came down on the bird, a back hoof, front wheel, back wheel, and Jimmy Quick exploded into the leftover scraps of a greasy, five-piece bucket. The remains smoked as Ignus lost his hold, and the smoke slowly coalesced into the fetish that was in my pocket. McGrue took Aimee from me, pushing her still form into the carriage. “She’s breathing.” he said with a sigh.

I stood over what remained of Jimmy, “My… I really thought people changed back when they died. He’s still a chicken. A thoroughly processed chicken.”

“We don’t have time for that. We have to get out of here.” growled McGrue, getting up into the driver’s seat.

“Wait, wait, I have to do something first,” I objected, curling my lip.

“That’s a mean mug you’re makin’, Gabbo. What’s got into you?” asked McGrue.

I shook my head, “Unfinished business…”

—

Ignus the shopkeep woke with a start. It was grim business, picking his door lock and slipping inside. McGrue had spoken approvingly of my moral decay, but I didn’t care. My hand over the old man’s mouth, I put a finger to my lips indicating he should be quiet, “What is this?” he asked, alarmed.

Sitting up in his bed, he removed his nightcap, wringing it as I looked at his sleeping wife next to him, “You almost got me killed tonight.”

“No. I did no such thing. I just sold you a product. A powerful magic item,” the shopkeep’s eyes grew wide as he realized where I looked.

“I tried to play that ‘Pick of Air Guitar’ and got nothing, shopkeep. You knew my profession. That was a murder attempt,” I growled, poking him in the chest.

“You don’t play it. You cast the included cantrip to summon the Air Guitar. It’s not a musical, magical pick, it’s a magical focus that happens to be a pick!” His wife stirred next to him and his brow furrowed.

“Cantrip? There was no scroll or anything, just the pick!” I pulled it out and it glowed, faintly.

“Where’s the scroll case it came in?” he asked, angrily. “It’s in your pack. Don’t you remember? You were drugged with magic and I used the pick to drain it out of you.”

“I … case?” I untethered my pack.

“The rear pockets, leftmost pouch,” he said, pointing.

Opening the pocket, there it was; about four inches long, with parchment pressed against the inside, “I never saw this.”

“You dare to blame me because your addled brain doesn’t work? Get out of my house,” he growled, putting his nightcap back on.

“You’re sure–”

“Get out or I will prosecute!” he hissed. I left quickly and we departed Bagatelle through a gate left unguarded after the sudden deaths of perhaps three dozen guards. I did not mention my mistake to McGrue. As the sun rose the lands of Lord Veineux, the Grain Monger, were behind us…