Knowing only that his friends would have been waiting for him on South Street and that something bad had obviously taken place within the city, Alistar poured swordsman’s aura into his legs and increased his pace by a significant margin. As he ran, he noticed that a large host of people were idling about half a league to the west of the road, the colours of their clothes, banners and wagon tarps all appearing familiar. He soon came upon a long line of matted mud that showed where the delegation had branched off from the road in order to set up positions around a distant hill that neighboured one of the many small hamlets that dotted the countryside.
Why weren’t they moving, he wondered? Something was clearly wrong and yet they were simply standing back and watching Mayhaven burn.
Glancing back and forth between the city and the host, a mixture of fear and anger filled Alistar’s chest as he hurried on as fast as he could manage. After what he’d been subjected to before losing consciousness, he knew in his heart that the delegates had something to do with whatever darkness had descended upon Distan.
The closer he drew to Mayhaven, the more prominent the sounds of terrified screams became in his ears. In addition to this, large pillars of flame continued to flare up throughout the city, along with countless sounds of crushed stone and collapsing buildings. Nobody within the county should have been capable of casting spells of such magnitude.
Alistar arrived at South Street to find a scene of utter devastation. The buildings on both sides of the street had been toppled to the ground and were now fueling a roaring fire that was quickly spreading to all areas of the city. Some plots of land were completely empty, as if the buildings and the materials that made them had simply been erased from existence. Dust and debris covered the cobbled stones, which were hot beneath his bare feet as he hurried northward.
Not a minute into his anxious sprinting, Alistar couldn’t help but slow to a stop in momentary confusion. Hundreds of lingering auras were prevalent in his perceptions, but there were no people in sight. Stumbling forward as if in a trance, he stopped in place a moment later as he stared down at an empty section of the road where he could sense a very familiar aura. Falling to his knees, he extended his shaking hands toward the pavement as the recognizable life signal continued to fade at a rapid rate.
“M—Mr. Herst…” he said in a quiet, broken voice, the air heavy and suffocating as he looked around for any signs of the caring old man. “No,” he whispered, recalling the pain of losing his parents, the torment of leaving Kaila behind in Crystellum, the guilt that poisoned his gut when he’d stared down at Janine’s anguished expression in the moments after she’d died within the confines of his old bedroom.
It wasn’t just Mr. Herst.
Lessa’s sister, Priscilla, should have been standing nearby, but her life signal hovered around an empty patch of pavement. The triplets’ parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lawson, and farther ahead, Alder. Mixed in with the hundreds of dwindling auras, Alistar recognized many people that he interacted with on a daily basis.
What on earth had happened here?
While the ground wasn’t hot enough to burn his feet, it felt as if he were walking atop a large stretch of sand that had been baking beneath the hot sun for many hours on end. He ignored the pain, barefoot as he was, and continued onward with slow, hesitant steps.
Anice and Lessa’s faces passed through his mind, giving him the strength to clear his thoughts after a momentary cycle of meditation. Thinking that his main priority was to find his friends and family, he resumed running in the direction of the battle that was evidently taking place in the plaza up ahead. The farther he ran, the more the gravity of the situation bore down upon him.
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There were nearly a thousand diminishing life signals on North Street, which was equally as devastated as its southern counterpart. More familiar auras became prominent in his perceptions; the old lady that sold sugar sticks in the marketplace, Lessa’s parents, Woods… Farther west were thousands more, not a single person in sight when he arrived at the public square.
Fire was spreading in all directions, the buildings on all sides of the plaza shrouded in flames, collapsed into rubble, or simply missing from where they once stood. Debris was strewn about the pavement all around, with screams becoming less prominent in a backdrop punctuated by constant bell tolls. Glancing nearby at a building that was now supported by only two walls beneath a flaming roof, Alistar hurried inside and grabbed one of the few pairs of trousers that were still unmarred and then hurried away from the clothing shop with anxious strides.
What could have caused this?
Examining the widespread destruction as he hurried towards the sounds of battle, he found small amounts of comfort in the fact that he had yet to detect any signs that pointed toward the deaths of any more of his loved ones. Still, with his pervasive magical awareness, it was already clear to him that several thousand people had been killed by whatever it was that was constantly shooting flames this way and that.
That’s…
Sensing his master’s aura nearby, he immediately knew that Tramon was battling whoever it was that had laid waste to the city. His first instinct was to continue rushing in that direction in order to help his master, but after attempting to cast another spell and seeing that he was only able to gather a small amount of water at his fingertips, Alistar knew that he would only be a burden unarmed and magicless as he was.
His next thought was to rush home, but he didn’t get far when something smashed through several flaming buildings directly at his back before it came crashing down onto the pavement about two dozen paces ahead of him.
It was Tramon, though his grizzled beard had been burned away along with what remained of his wispy hair, and his left arm had been severed at the elbow. His entire body was covered in swordsman’s aura which, thankfully, stemmed the bleeding of his various injuries, but it was clear that his condition was very poor.
“Master!” he couldn’t help but yell, which drew the man’s attention toward him.
Before Tramon could say anything, however, an air-shaking roar preceded a scarlet silhouette that abruptly crashed down onto the spot where the sword master had landed as if with the intent to crush him into paste. Alistar fell to the ground in shock as an Inverted man’s violent punch sailed through empty air before smashing into the ground and fracturing the cobblestones beneath him within a radius of at least ten paces.
After dodging the strike, Tramon acted decisively and adopted a posture that Alistar had never seen before. Leaning forward as if bowing low, he positioned his legs for a straightforward lunge. Narrowing his eyes, the old warrior kicked off of the ground with enough strength to leave a fractured web of pavement similar in size to that left behind by the Inverted man’s most recent attack. Shooting towards his target at a low-riding dash, Tramon prepped his gleaming, bloodstained longsword so that the handle hovered just above his left shoulder, with the blade extending behind his back as if he were using it to point at something behind him.
The moment Tramon appeared in front of his opponent, he lashed out with a horizontal strike that contained an incredible amount of force. His blade smashed into the Inverted man’s naked, scaly stomach, sending him flying into a nearby building at the helm of a large energy projection of crescent-shaped swordsman’s aura. Several successive sounds of impact preceded the collapse of at least four residential constructs, signifying that the man’s body had punctured through more than just one pair of walls.
Just when it registered in Alistar’s mind that the muddled man had been present in the clearing earlier in the afternoon, Tramon followed up with a dozen slashes of his sword in a matter of two or three seconds. Just as many energy projections followed after the Inverted man with an explosion of dust and debris that flung much of the flaming rubble skywards, giving rise to yet another cloud of billowing smoke.