Willow felt a white-hot pain bloom in her back and she tried to take a gasp of air but she couldn’t breathe. Her heart spasmed in her chest and she knew it was beating against something. Andrew pulled her close to him.

“Carl did a wonderful job keeping you contained, but we don’t need this anymore,” he whispered into her ear, then pulled the silver amulet from her neck. The moment it was gone her world expanded two, three, four times, and the pain of her mortal injury faded.

The flesh body collapsed to the ground, though little blood ran from the injury. It saw that the dagger which had been plunged into its flesh was inscripted and thin, and from the feel of the effect it could tell the device was meant to keep it out of the body.

It was about to turn on its attacker, an old man, but six other bodies in the chamber drew rods of magic which almost hurt to observe. It knew that if those things touched it, they would do grievous injury.

A glowing circular gateway of white light opened in the air above.

A man in the center of the group raised his staff and pulled back like a javelin. The tip unfurled into three spiraled prongs, and he hurled the device. As the staff flew, the single shaft unraveled and the three constituent rods spun in the air as they latched onto it. They sealed themselves to it, they compressed it down to a smaller size, squeezing it into a spherical prison.

It raged at the violation, but the three rods had already bound themselves around the back and were shrinking it to a size akin to the man. It knew itself to be so much more than this, and it hated that man with his staff. It would give anything to destroy him.

There was a younger man with the group but without a rod, manacled, and she watched as he gently touched a small sphere in his robe which seemed vaguely familiar. He made a sign toward her, and the sphere exploded in a blinding shaft of fire.

“No,” roared the man who’d thrown the staff, but the damage was done. It’s stabber hurled himself to the ground and the inferno blasted at the bands which contained its power. The bands melted in an instant, their inscriptions flowing together into a meaningless babble, and breaking the bonds became child’s play.

It expanded again, dwarfing all of the men in the room. Their heads tracked it as it grew to its full size, almost scraping the ceiling of the vast wooden chamber. One of the men drew a sword and hurled forward toward it.

It gripped the man but something under his armor made him slippery. It gripped him harder and the man stumbled. Harder still and he went to one knee, then began scrabbling at the leather armor. Smoke billowed out from under the breastplate, lit from within by a faint red glow. The man screamed and it clamped down a final time.

Whatever had been protecting the man gave way and he pulped like an overripe apple. One of the dangerous rods fell to the ground from his corpse, still sheathed. What a waste.

The six men wielding magic rods ran toward it and the mush that was once the man with the sword. It reached into the floorboards, seeping through the fibers, and jerked. The wood splintered before the oncoming charge.

The manacled man yelled something and threw himself into another man, sending them both to the ground. At some point the young man’s manacles had come undone, perhaps from the sheer density of essence in the air. No matter; if he took up a rod, it would kill him.

With two hundred hands it plucked shards of wood from the shattered floor and hurled them toward the attackers. Its hands might not be able to reach them without undue force, but the wood had an easy enough time peppering their bodies until they sprouted quills from every surface. The men fell on the spot, staining the stage with seeping blood.

The man with the staff chanted, and the twist of his essence formed into the same wounding effect that the rods held. It gathered its full strength to smash down on the mage in mid-cast, when the previously manacled man came from behind and slid the pulped man’s sword through the mage’s chest. The man stuttered mid-cast and the lance of death dispersed on ethereal winds. He fell to his knees.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The last man in scripted armor threw something at it, shining and twirling through the air. It flung a board from the stage toward the man which bisected him easily, but his projectile was coming fast. It reached up to intercept the missile, but too slow. It entered its body and…

It wasn’t a projectile. It was a cane. A metal cane. A cane her father had made her long ago when her body was wasted. A cane she’d used to defeat an impossible enemy. A cane she thought lost forever.

Willow found herself, the cane hovering midair, staring down at Leopold through eyes that were not eyes. She had a thousand, and she had none. Her real eyes were back with her body, which was slowly bleeding out behind her. Andrew was still standing over it, watching the slaughter with glee.

Willow turned, as much as she could. Really she moved her attention, past the numerous twists of essence hiding among the rafters toward the old man and his rictus grin. That grin faltered for the first time.

He looked down at her body and just like that she saw his next move. He dropped to his knees and reached for the inscripted dagger, no doubt to widen the wound and speed her demise, but she caught him with the cane. It passed through him as easily as it had the deathworm and his body slumped to the floor in two pieces.

Then Leopold was there. Leopold! He was alive, miraculously alive, and he was kneeling beside her. He turned her onto her side, exposing the tip of the dagger through her breast.

“Oh gods, I don’t know what to do,” Leopold muttered. He touched the inscripted handle of the dagger, then pulled back. It was clear he was afraid of killing her faster.

“Remove the dagger, Leopold,” Willow said, the air itself her vocal cords. He looked up into the swirling sphere of essence which was her ethereal form. What had Andrew called her? The Wraith?

“You’ll bleed out,” he spoke to the cloud, eyes searching for something to fix on, but there were no eyes as he could see them.

“Annabelle,” she thundered, and Leopold ducked and covered his ears. She’d said it with every board of the theater, every rafter and nail, even the ones surrounding those knots of essence in the rafters. She’d have to deal with them eventually.

They waited, Leopold applying pressure around the twin puncture wounds until Willow sensed a presence approaching the closed doors at the other end of the theater. The locked doors rattled ineffectually. Willow punched a hole in one of them, through which Annabelle slowly emerged.

“Oh,” she gasped, looking around at the carnage. Willow had been reborn in it, the sight no longer disgusted her; but she supposed another would be disgusted. She gripped Annabelle around the waist and hauled her across the room to land on her knees beside Leopold.

“You’ll have to do the healing, I’m afraid,” Willow said from above. Annabelle looked up for the first time, trying to focus on the luminous sphere.

“He did it, then,” Annabelle said. “I don’t know if I—”

“Not yet he hasn’t,” Willow said. “My body isn’t dead. If you are truly contrite, save me now. For him.”

Annabelle glanced at Leopold then bent down and examined the knife. She bit her lip and began weaving her hands in the spiral spell-form.

“Pull the knife on my command,” she said to Leopold. He laid his hand on the handle and nodded. Willow watched with detached amusement. Who would’ve thought her boyfriend back from the dead would be working alongside her traitorous guide.

“Now,” she said, and Leopold pulled the knife. Immediately Willow felt a connection open up that had been pinched by the knife and its inscriptions—the thread which tied her back to her body. Through the thread she could sense she was very close to death. It felt almost familiar, as if from a half-remembered dream.

Healing essence poured from Annabelle’s hands into Willow’s chest, coating the inside of the channel which ran through her heart. It pulsed with the imperative to heal. She felt flesh knitting back together, chambers and vessels sealing and blood conjuring out of nothing. Leopold watched agog as the puncture wound in Willow’s back closed up completely.

Annabelle rolled the body over onto its back and opened an eyelid. She bent down and laid her ear on the chest, then looked back up at the hovering sphere thirty feet wide.

“Your body’s alive. You can return now. I think.”

Willow found that, for a long moment, she didn’t want to. She was afraid. Afraid of seeing what she’d done through human eyes. Afraid of starting life again knowing what she was capable of. Of knowing that this almost limitless power coursed through her veins. Even after everything, she’d barely used a thousand em.

Slowly, Willow sank. The sphere contracted as she followed the thread which led back to her body. With proximity, sensation returned. She felt soreness in her chest, bruises blooming on her knees from where she’d hit the floor after being stabbed. Wetness on her cheeks, she didn’t know what from. Had she been crying?

She followed the thread completely and as she entered her body a bloody bar of metal with a wooden handle fell to the ground beside a corpse a dozen feet away. She opened her eyes.

When had Leopold taken her head in his hands? He was smiling. He was crying. She was crying too, hot tears tracing lines to her ears.

“Hey,” she choked out. He leaned down and kissed her.