Mages of Avios 2. Battlemage

by Adam Sea Klein

Kanos said, “Just do your best please.”

  The barkeep smiled and sifted through a handful of coins, “Let me see... I have seven traips, four sahms, and you can have as much stew and bread as you can eat and carry.”

  Kanos bowed his head with a single nod and took the 11 small coins from the barkeep, and when the plate was served, he began to eat and did not stop until three large plates were quickly devoured.

  As Kanos sopped up the gravy with his last piece of bread, the barkeep left his other conversation down the bar and took up Kanos in small talk.

  Kanos revealed the town he came from, with hope the barkeep might have some information. The barkeep said flatly, “I’ve heard about Saaverin and what unfolded. A drastic misery. I believe some of those magi sat here at this very bar as they passed through to your village.”

  Kanos thought of the presence of those beastly people at the very bar he sat in front of, and he began to clamp his jaw.

  The barkeep saw the reaction within Kanos and felt much sympathy. He said to Kanos, “My name is Reave of Balchak, and among the people here, three are good people who travel through this ridge every month. But… those two there, I believe have ill intent. They began to pass through this way only after your town was taken. I can smell the magic on them, and it’s not so good.”

  Kanos did not turn to look. He nodded and fiddled with his plate and fork. His mind let loose, and he felt his way around — the energy around him began to expand.

  Reave was intrigued as he saw Kanos take on a deferred state of mind.

  Kanos looked up and then stared eye to eye. He said to Reave, “You have a great sense, I could not feel their presence until now.”

  Reave nodded and said, “I am a traveler at heart, that’s how I got here and why I stay. I enjoy the nuance of different energies. I help people make passage because…”

  Kanos interrupted, “You sense the energy.”

  Reave just bowed his head.

  Kanos said, “There’s more for us, as I’ve learned. Sensing people’s energy is just a start.”

  Kanos stood up and for a second paused, and he swiveled himself around in a single move, took two steps to the table of the strange men.

  The men held an air of cocky assurance, and they balked as Kanos said, “Are you aware of the sorcerers who took Saaverin?”

  The men cocked their heads, and the beardless man raised his right hand, which began to glow with a rapidly growing mass of yellow energy. A sphere grew outward quickly, and the energy looked quite intense.

  Kanos swung the blade of Anoak with a single wheel-house stroke. He severed the man’s forearm with a single hit — the glowing hand lopped down and the yellow light disappeared. The man began to howl with horror.

  The other man stood up and faded backwards immediately. His right arm drew a blade so curved it was nearly round; he pulled the blade back sideways and let it fly. The blade spun and sailed towards Kanos’ throat.

  Kanos struck down the blade and began to walk after the man, who was already charging out the door.

  Kanos broke out into the evening air and saw the sorcerer running down the ridge, already 100 yards away or more.

  Reave followed out the door and saw Kanos staring down the long rock corridor. Reave said, “It’s not too late. He could be tracked in a single day, even without a horse. I know these passages well.”

  Kanos looked back to Reave and said, “Watch this, tracker.”

  Kanos reeled back the blade of Anoak and took a three-step charge. He let the blade fly as the energy around him raptured.

  Reave saw the dagger fly in an impossible line. The blade seemed to pick up speed as it traveled. The sorcerer’s aid still ran as fast as possible, but the blade seemed to have no end of flight. The path of the flying blade extended upward and finally slapped straight into the man’s skull.

  Reave felt reverence and said, “I’ve never seen a blade travel like that… not ever, with all the magic I’ve seen.”

  Kanos said, “The fields of magic are growing stronger. Somehow, I’ve found a way to manipulate objects with the field.”

  Reave said, “The energy has been very weak in our lifetimes, but it grows.”

  Kanos said, “I don’t think this magic is well known in our age. It’s some concept of battle and trekking. I think you have some of this magic, Reave.”

  Reave said, “So, our field grows, as with the mages and sorcerers.”

  “I was called a battlemage by someone who seemed to know.”

  Reave nodded, and said, “Well then, the traveler’s magic may be more than just a compass after all.”

  Kanos replie, “Not long ago, I was a farmer, but now I quest for vengeance. Every last one of them will die before I’m finished.”

  “As it should be —” said Reave, “the story of Saaverin is gut-wrenching. How can I help?”

  9.

  Kanos went back to the bar with Reave. Not surprisingly, the other guests swiftly planned to leave when they saw the skirmish was over. Kanos hollered to the men, “Please do not hold this bartender accountable — those men had a part in the death of my family.”

  Kanos insisted to buy the three men a traveling pack of bread and wine. Reave gave the men the goods. The men contended they were too adrenalized to sleep after seeing battle in such tight quarters, so they would move on in the night. They were reserved but seemed to have some understanding.

  Reave closed the bar doors and set the lock. He came back to the bar to speak with Kanos. Kanos sat and found it hard to loosen up.

  Reave went to the back room and came back with a bundle of cloth and told Kanos, “I get many strange things in trade. Here are some of those things. Have a look.”

  Reave held a golden disk and said, “This is enchanted and can hold a dying man together for an extended phase of time. I saw one stop the blood from a man’s lung that was impaled by a dagger. He lived for 2 days before he died.”

  Then Reave said, “This enchantment can help you raise your power, but it will cost you later — it leaves a deep drain on a person, like too much wine.” Kanos held the tiny rounded blue-purple cube up to the light.

  Reave then clutched a tiny vile of reddish orange fluid. It seemed subtly lighted as he turned it in his hand. “This stuff is dangerous. It will give a man the aggression of an animal, a pure shot of adrenaline times five. I tasted a dab of it once and nearly lost my life running up and down the mountain ridge — no expense of energy could slow me down.”

  Kanos saw these enchanted items and wondered why Reave showed them all. Reave sensed this and said, “I am somewhat of a merchant of such small peculiar things.”

  Kanos said, “Do you use them to protect yourself?”

  Reave said, “I’ve been fortunate and have some personal keeps as well. These are warrior’s spells, and you seem to fit the bill.”

  Kanos pulled out a gold coin called a valon. Reave’s eyes grew large. He staggered for words, “Avi! I have not seen a coin like that in ages. It will take a lot of silver to make change.”

  Kanos took all three enchanted items and went to the long bench to lie down and close his eyes. Reave said, “Wait, my friend, one last thing…”

  Kanos sat up and opened his hand. A small trinket with pearly white light was set into his palm. Reave was nearly ecstatic when he said, “This helps our kind of magic, it is an aid with the field of sight — the reason I felt those men were of ill will.”

  Kanos was intrigued and grateful. “I cannot take your power from you though.”

  Reave said, “All my life, I felt one was not enough. I worked hard to have a backup of anything so worthwhile. If you can lay waste to villains of that sort so easily, then your path is mine as well. I left my hometown three years ago, because the magi in my homeland made it a painful place to live. I saw the hold they had on men and women, and I could not watch them take it all. But, I am not a fighter like you.”

  Kanos said, “Not a fighter yet.” He handed Reave the dagger
of Anoak. Reave clutched the blade in his hand. Kanos set the small white trinket back into Reave’s hand.

  Reave’s eyes grew vivid and wide.

  Kanos asked, “Do you feel the ancient sound within that blade?”

  Reave gasped when he said, “It’s extraordinary... yes I do.” Reave pulled back the blade and let it sail towards the wooden doors. It impaled the door precisely with great ease.

  Kanos said, “I suppose the battlemages are just beginning to arise. Swordsman will begin to be of little use against the energy — maybe we are the solution to that shift. The magi will have to contend with this magic of might.”

  10.

  As Kanos walked into the cool mountain air, he felt quite well. His meeting with a kindred spirit helped sooth the dying light within him. As he walked, he held each enchanted item one by one.

  He pondered his life as a farmer turned into a warrior of revenge and now a holder of many types of magic. He held the white trinket and felt his magic sensation slowly expand. It gave him a huge broad sense of the network of energy around him. It was so enhancing that it was harder to focus on the world around him.

  “It’s like a lens that sees far,” Kanos said to himself, “you can’t see close with it.”

  He experimented with the white object, holding it for long periods of time or shielding it in his small leather pouch.

  He finally stowed it away, so he could travel with worldly awareness. For many days, he hiked as he took a final bend into a downhill slope of a misty forest.

  Kanos clutched the white trinket and felt the subtle tendrils of energy bend out from himself. They returned a sense of chaos, which plucked on Kanos’ heart.

  “These woods are home to something that I seek,” he said to himself.

  He walked for half a day, grew thirsty, and followed the first sound of moving water that he heard.

  The brush and boughs bent underhand as Kanos walked over the thick leaf padding of the forest floor. He saw lighted ways that seemed to fade back to dimness as soon as he approached.

  For another half day, he walked and grew well aware of the trouble of his situation, wandering aimlessly in such a forest. He tried to track a path but found it hard to navigate at all. He chased the spotted light and the sound of water to the brink of great irritation many times. He was confounded and nearing the irritated edge of madness.

  Kanos began to wonder if he was delusional. It took another few hours of enduring a racing mind to wonder if there was sorcery behind the maze-like forest. The confusion was wrapped fully around his senses.

  Kanos clutched the energy lens trinket again and again, and his awareness reached out but hit odd walls and returned vague sensations.

  His water pouch was nearly empty, and his bag of food was nearly gone. “How did I eat all that meat so fast?”

  Kanos thought that being lost and wandering seemed a crazy way to die. So he reluctantly sat and conserved his energy. He began to look inward.

  11.

  “Why didn’t Reave tell me of this forest?” Kanos asked himself. “Is the forest real at all?”

  He felt the world around him and the reduced arcs of sensation in his energy field. “The energy reaches out, but bends back too fast,” Kanos thought to himself. “There is an… enchantment on the world’s energy. How can this be?”

  Kanos knew he could not break such a spell, having no grasp of magic as the magi possessed.

  Kanos decided to have hope. “A battlemage… is a mage though. Not a magus of energy but still of magic.” A full day passed, and his conceptualization was tested. He reached with all sensation but could not manifest a break to the limiter of energy around him.

  He decided not to reach at all, but to pull inward. He began to collapse the field around him into a denser center. It was an odd sensation that slightly grew if he nurtured it.

  He experimented as the day passed on, and only in the late dim hours he found if he pulled just so… there was an auditory sound of sucking air, and then a faint pop.

  The image of the forest around him was abridged; he could see the bright sunlight. The bag beside him was not empty of food but quite full.

  “I’m lost in my mind,” thought Kanos. “I see beyond, but how do I snap into the real world again?”

  Kanos buried the white trinket in his palm and the blue trinket into his other palm. The internal vacuum began to pull again, and the beams of energy rode inward with increased vigor.

  The false image of the forest began to glitch and fade. Kanos found himself sitting on a single boulder with great alarm as a horrible being with a vague dark face loomed 15 feet away from him.

  The creature was manifesting a terrible array of magic around Kanos, and that being did not seem aware yet that Kanos could see it.

  There were continuing arcs of dark energy spreading around Kanos still, and it seemed they were pulling energy from Kanos’ heart. The creature was feeding on his energy.

  Kanos rose, and the being flew up three feet and let out a horrible shriek. The landscape was no more than a vacant gravelly valley among a few plain rock walls. There was no forest.

  Kanos realized he walked into an illusion cast from a being he never heard of before. The face was dim, and the beady yellow eyes seemed to have no orbit.

  The creature scoured the air and began to send torrents of dark energy all around Kanos, and that energy seemed to sap his own reserve.

  Kanos caught a glimpse of light on a faraway cliff top. There was a woman there. She gazed as though quite interested in what occurred.

  The woman walked and leaned and turned and paced. She seemed to have a stake in the affair.

  Kanos looked at the beast and prepared to fight for his life.

  The monster raised its shrouded body into the air and began to send down a great pressure of energy.

  Kanos struggled to move his chest to breath. He struggled to move forward. It did not seem the right choice for him to throw his dagger high. Instead, he reached for the golden disc that Reave gave him.

  The effect of the dark magic seemed to lift. Kanos began to charge toward the woman on the cliff. The dark being scurried behind him, but its grip appeared to fade. The woman turned and ran.

  Kanos tracked the woman for half a day. He found a break in the cliff and made his way through a narrow passage.

  As he turned a corner, he was faced by wicked being, a leering red-eyed rat-like human. Its limbs were long and its face disturbing. Its eyes seemed to weep a red energy that enhanced its movements.

  Kanos took no pause, and he peeled back the blade of Anoak and sent it loose. The creature took it to the chest and was impaled, but that did not cure the situation. The monster seemed not life-like, but enchanted.

  “There is some kind of conjurer and a master of illusions?” Kanos thought, “I’m facing two at once.”

  Kanos charged the rat directly. The massive jaws tried to take a huge bite from Kanos’ shoulder but missed. Kanos pulled out the dagger from the rat’s chest and looped his arm around, sending the blade deep into the creature’s skull top.

  The creature was unable to process the next action — it stood and torqued its head, collapsed, and its body began to decompose into a vile black substance and then transform into wisps of black energy.

  Kanos wasted no time and pursued the path ahead. He found himself in an open zone between the meeting of mountains; around him wrapped a rather foreboding boundary and a 90-foot ring of flat land.

  He walked to the center of the ring, knowing well it was a trap.

  Kanos eyed the terrain high above, as the woman put herself in view. Her brown cape flowed, and her shoulder armor clung tight, and the light plate armor around her torso seemed of fine build. She looked nimble, smart, but her face showed her unnatural derangement.

  Kanos figured the woman as the summoner, since she seemed to puppet the first dark beast. She raised her hands slowly, while her fingers shook.

  A very odd series of three masse
s formed in the ground around Kanos — the masses transformed into strange angled beings with massive jaws and angled heads. They opened their mouths, which spanned three feet wide when open. Their small, stout bodies seemed like sturdy mounts.

  Kanos walked straight to battle, and those gapping mouths snapped like viscous machines. He swung his blade precisely while dodging every strike that came. With each hit of his blade, a grotesque lump of flesh was severed from the beasts and fell to the ground.

  Kanos worked vigorously to chunk off mounds of flesh, taking care not to bury the blade and lose hold.

  The creatures were missing so many body parts, they hobbled around awkwardly, and as Kanos drew them to the sheer rock wall, he ran up the wall broadside and dragged the sacred dagger along the abdomens of all three beasts at once. The beings lopped over and jittered on the ground.

  The summoner above was depleted of energy and staggered when she moved.

  Kanos began to scale the wall with great precision. His energy was enraged and allowed him such swift movements. The woman clearly was unprepared to be pursued up a cliffside. She tried to run, but as Kanos surfaced the plateau, he landed within throwing distance of the depleted sorceress. As he cocked back the blade, his mind was taken far away to the side. He felt his vision fade and pull.

  What Kanos saw was a narrowing tunnel of sight and a huge black rim that seemed to push and pull. His vision was in error.

  Kanos grew dizzy and deflated and couldn’t feel his hand.

  He saw the young man to the left in the bushes, the illusionist, pulling strings of energy around him.

  Kanos reached to his side and pulled the small orange vial to his mouth. Just barely, he managed to sip half of the sticky juice. The illusionist’s look of concern grew wide open and terrified as Kanos seemed to defy all logic and pull towards the man as swiftly as Rauak did long before. Kanos was on the young man so swiftly, the next thing he saw was the mouthfuls of thick red blood gurgling from the man’s mouth just a foot away from his own face. Kanos held the dagger straight up below the man’s ribcage. A twist and release sent the man to the ground, quite dead.