Chapter 7: Ruby Slippers Not Included

The prey was maddeningly close. The packleader could smell the blood of the large prey, could taste it where it had dripped on the stones. Exquisite.

Their arrows had nearly felled the large not-orc prey. He would not be able to defend his heardmates any longer. They would feast on his entrails first. They would make the others watch. The fear and desperation would marinate their flesh before they too were devoured.

Prey always tasted better when they knew what was happening. The sounds and expressions of the prey as they were eaten alive was what was best in life. Normally they would have simply chased off orcs. Orcflesh tastes foul, there is no joy in its consumption. But these were not-orcs. They had caught the scent of these not-orcs when they went looking for their missing packmates. The fragrance was divine, the splashes of blood only confirmed that this would be a feast like none before.

But yet, his pack writhed in denied frenzy. They amassed at the bottom of the rocks, when they tried to come for the prey the dark colored prey took one of the pack from his perch atop the cliff. The pack waited impatiently. The archers had already expended all their arrows trying to score a lucky hit from the base of the cliff, so all that remained was to get to the top.

The pack could smell them, but they could not get to them without losing one of their own. If he, the alpha were to give chase the pack would follow. But that would risk himself being taken. So he waited until the frenzy claimed one of his pack and they risked the open rise to stalk the prey.

The dark one would appear over the edge above and take that over bold hunter. The pack's frenzy would cool, only to boil again and another foolhardy packmate would try.

The dark prey would run out of arrows eventually.

The alpha felt no loss with the taking of these hunters. The pack had grown large and he could stand to lose a few of the bolder of his hunters. Fewer aggressive males in the pack would make it easier to keep his position, and his females.

Yet another of his betas attempted the climb, but this time there was no sharpened spike of death to lance down from the cliff. The alpha moved immediately, pounced on the adventurous beta, growled a warning not to forget his place and threw him back into the amassed pack.

The pack was now climbing over each other in anticipation as the frenzy grew wild, but still they waited for his order. The alpha savored the heady ambrosia of power and delayed gratification. He then bayed the deepest and most satisfying hunting howl of his life as the he lead the pack to their prey.

***

"No more arrows." Brent's matter of fact statement undersold the rising danger.

Charlotte looked around the clifftop again hoping against hope that some new detail that she hadn't noticed before would save them. But alas, there was no such new detail. The clifftop was fairly wide here at the top of the ramp, about twenty-five yards or so. Just a little wider than it was tall. It narrowed to nothing as it lead away from them towards the plateau but it didn't widen much towards the remains of the tower base. Just past the remains of the tower the mostly flat clifftop changed into a rugged jumble of cluttered boulders and sharp drops. Even if they weren't being chased by gnolls going that way would have required mountaineering equipment and training that they just didn't have.

And time that they could not afford.

Binna had come back to sheepishly beg forgiveness for leading them here because the hoped for escape tunnel was nothing more than a dead end.

With Brian out of commission and Michael and Kurt busy trying to save his life, that left Charlotte and Brent to fend off the baying pack at the base of the cliff.

"Alright, nothing more you can do here Brent, get to that basement in the rubble back there. If nothing else we should be able to force them to come at us one at a time inside. Be ready to take cover though, I've got a little bit of juice left and I'mma try something new. If it starts getting crazy up here get your head down, OK?"

Brent nodded wordlessly and ran the fifty yards to the remains of the tower base.

Any minute now the gnolls would figure out that Brent couldn't stop them any more and they would come. And just as that thought occurred to her she heard the deepest and loudest howl that she had yet heard from the gnolls.

Looking over the side of the cliff she saw a new gnoll, at least half again larger than the rest. Muscled and battle scarred. The beast caught sight of her and licked its chops. Without warning it suddenly began running up the ramp with the disturbing long limbed lope of his kind. The rest of the pack literally climbed over themselves to follow.

"Shit!"

She leapt back from the edge of the cliff and ran about halfway to the rubble and turned just as the leader of the pack climbed over the edge with all the grace and menace of a four limbed spider.

***

Brian lay on the floor of the 'escape' tunnel. His breathing rapid and shallow. They had moved him back around the second turn of the tunnel to prevent him from being hit by any arrows that the gnolls might fire down here, but also to give them plenty of room to fall back as they made their stand in the basement.

Binna had already told them that after two more turns the tunnel was blocked. Kurt had gone to see himself to be sure that there wasn't something that he could do to clear a path, but there was just too much stone to shift. He might have been able to move enough to get past the blockage if he had a day or two, assuming that it didn't extend too far. But Brian didn't have a couple of days. Hell, none of them even had a couple hours, minutes was more likely.

Mike was doing his best to stabilize Brian so that he wouldn't bleed out, but from the look on his face he wasn't succeeding. Brian's hastily removed armor was strewn across the tunnel revealing the extent of his wounds.

"Kurt, I've done the best I can to bandage him, but he's going to need a healing ritual and I don't have enough mana to do one this big alone."

Stolen story; please report.

"Alright, just tell me what I need to do." Kurt moved in closer to the fallen giant and got on his knees opposite Michael.

"Just interlock your fingers with mine, yes like that."

Kurt joined hands with the small scholar and together they placed their palms on his sternum and stomach.

"Now, just close your eyes and open yourself emotionally. I'll handle the rest. If it helps, think about how much you want to help Brian."

There were no words to the ritual, or rather there used to be, but years ago they discovered that the words were just a placebo. All it really took was someone with a talent to channel mana and the training to do it properly. Apparently it was quite different from what Charlotte did, but the only humans who ever had that talent were those of 'the taken' who had received it from the celestials before being brought to this world. So, Kurt really had no idea what was really happening when they did it. But he knew that Charlotte performed 'evocations' calling and controlling powers external to herself. Michael performed 'invocations' channeling and amplifying powers internal to himself.

Kurt suspected that the process was basically the same at the root, but he really didn't understand it much at all. What he did know was that all humans seemed to have sizable mana reserves. Reserves much larger than animals or even other sapient creatures in this world. But since they really didn't have much information on other sapient creatures (having only found Trolls and Orcs before meeting Binna) there was no way to know if some of them weren't magic wielding geniuses.

Though he couldn't access this reserve himself he did know that Charlotte's evocations didn't drain her mana nearly as much as Michael's invocations did. An evocation simply opens a path from another plane to this one. A small amount of mana is used to pierce the barrier between them and then a little more to guide the power once it was here. Invocations on the other hand basically did all the heavy lifting with the mana of the invoker themselves. (And any willing assistants.) The main problem was that evocations were mostly just good for brute force, if you wanted to do something delicate like heal someone it had to be an invocation.

As Kurt's thoughts wandered he began to feel a warmth flowing from his palms fed by a tingling sort of chill that began to grow at his toes. He knew invocations could be dangerous. Once you exhausted mana you began drawing on your very life force. It sapped your stamina first, then if you were too reckless, your health. When Kurt was still a child there were many scholars trying to test the limits of invocations that had permanently ruined their health. The reasonable limits of what could and could not be done with invocations and evocations had been set and it was rare for someone to try to push those limits these days.

Nonetheless, it was a dangerous game of chicken to go too far with an invocation. Had the stakes been any less dire he might have hesitated to assist. As it was, Brian's life depended on it and he trusted Michael to know when to stop.

Those with the talent for it said that they could tell when their mana had been expended, Kurt only knew that just as his own muscles began to tremble with fatigue Michael took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and released Kurt's hands.

Brian's breathing was deeper and more regular now. His skin had recovered some of its ruddy complexion and the blood was no longer seeping quite as fast from his bandaged wounds.

Kurt felt exhausted, more than just his own shallow wound and running for their lives from a pack of spider wolves would account for, but after a moment of rest he felt steady enough to stand up.

Kurt spared one last glance at Brian before retrieving his axe and shield. "Will he be OK?"

"Yes, I think so. As much as any of us will be shortly." Michael covered the comatose warrior with a blanket and retrieved his own shield and mace. I suppose we should get back to the top and be ready to fight.

***

Binna wasn't quite sure what she had just witnessed, but what she did know was that ten minutes ago the large human was sure to have died within the hour. Now, he almost appeared to be sleeping comfortably.

She was too stunned to ask any questions as the two smaller human males walked (maybe a bit unsteadily) towards the surface to face off with the long ones. She simply stood watch over the friendly giant and waited for whatever would come.

After finding the tunnel blocked she had been convinced that what would come would be death.

Now she wasn't so sure.

***

The female prey was standing alone between the pack and the old stones where the rest of the prey cowered. The alpha surveyed the top of the cliff. There was nowhere for their prey to go. The prey was trapped here.

The rest of his hunting pack shifted and paced behind him straining with desire to hunt. There was no escape for the prey. The alpha could afford to savor the moment.

***

The large gnoll flexed his muscles and dug his claws into the gravel atop the cliff. His piercing yellow eyes never left Charlotte's own. There were another maybe thirty of them behind the leader, but it was hard to say for sure. The beasts behind him were pacing and nearly leaping over each other jockeying to have a good position for when the leader released them to attack.

A gravelly sort of bubbling sound came from the chest of the lead beast. Was it laughing? Maybe. It was certainly salivating enough. Long ropy globs of spittle dripped from its open fang-studded maw.

It was taunting her.

That was fine by her, the beasts were so focused on intimidating her that they weren't paying attention to the sky above them. Ever since the beasts surmounted the cliff she'd been gathering her mana and weakening the separation between the planes. The clouds above were swirling slowly, but with ever growing speed. A static field grew subtly on the rocks below her feet, the negative charge of the ground slowly preparing to touch the positive of the clouds above.

She was nearly ready. She'd never tried something this big before, but if not now, when else would she do it?

The alpha began advancing on her slowly and she took that as the trigger to complete her evocation. She gripped her staff in both hands and then thrust it with all the strength she could muster into the ground at her feet. It struck the stone and then stood there vibrating like a tuning fork when she removed her hands. The bangles stood out straining against their copper chains as electrical charges pulled them skyward.

The alpha finally realized that something was wrong and began to charge at her, but it was too late.

Her hands free from the staff she began to perform double handed sigils, triangular movements that culminated in a complicated interlacing of her fingers in front of her chest.

She could feel her mana draining fast with the effort to control two gales in an ever tightening helix. The swirling clouds above her coalesced into a massive funnel cloud that dipped its tail out of the sky towards the clifftop. She began to feel a trembling of her knees as her stamina was sapped, but it was enough. The funnel touched the rocks of the clifftop before the alpha had crossed the final ten yards to leap at her throat.

The tornado swirled around her throwing stones and gnolls alike through the air, their limbs flailing akimbo. Brent had already ducked into the basement, Charlotte alone stood untouched by the tearing winds clawing across the clifftop.

Then finally, her strength failed her. Her interlocked fingers released and her arms fell to her sides. As she fell to the ground the terrible tempest dispersed, sending the howling forms of the gnolls sailing off the cliffside in all directions only to fall to their deaths on the rocks below.

***

Once the winds dispersed enough to allow them to leave the substructure Michael and Kurt ran to Charlotte while Brent went to investigate the status of the gnolls.

Charlotte lay on her side next to the still standing staff. The staff spun, bangles flung out to the sides. Before Kurt and Michael were halfway to her it began to wobble and finally fell, clattering to the ground.

Michael quickly turned her over to check her breathing. What he mistook for labored gasps was actually her laughing. Each weak laugh brought a foam of bloody bubbles up from her lungs, but she managed to croak out, "That was bad ass."

"Yeah, but let's not do that again, eh?" Michael responded while checking her pulse.

Her weak croaking laugh continued, "Fuck that. Next time I'mma drop a house on their asses."

(End of Chapter 7)

Written by Charles Caplan, all characters and situations are fiction.