Magi Legend

by Andrew Dobell

  The temperature didn’t seem too much different than it had been on her heated rooftop. It was a comfortable temperature that felt neither hot nor cold, and yet, Amanda could feel the sweat beading on her temples as she moved away from the building. She knew it came from her growing fear and unease about the Abyss and the things within it, but she couldn’t help it.

  Moving further along the street, passing a couple more buildings, she stopped short when up ahead, something big lumbered out from a side road into the avenue she stood on. The creature was huge, maybe twice the size of a human with massive, powerful arms and shoulders. It stopped in the middle of the street and seemed to be contemplating which way to go, its face hidden from view for the time being.

  Amanda ducked down again and stayed low, watching the creature, when another walked out to stand by the first. The second one looked just as inhuman as the first, but had a more upright stance as opposed to the first one’s more stooped gait.

  Amanda had no idea who or what these were, so she backed up to an entrance into the ruin of a building she stood beside and moved off the street.

  Satisfied she wouldn’t be seen by these two things for the moment, she looked into the building she’d taken refuge in. Although dark and dusky, this one appeared lighter than the first she’d ducked into. Looking up, she could see through five or six floors due to the huge holes in the ceilings above her.

  Glancing back at the creatures in the street, they were now pointing and motioning down the street Amanda stood beside. Looking back the way she’d come, she spotted another colossal creature pulling itself from the building she’d used for cover a short distance back up the street. Feeling exposed, she backed up further into the structure she stood inside and looked around. She wanted to get out of sight but had a moment of brain freeze until she looked up again through the holes in the floors above her. She could just shift back into the Material world, leave this behind, but as scared as she might be, she didn’t want to go yet. She wanted to see what these creatures did, and maybe get a better look at them. She could cross back into the Material world at any moment, after all, and the situation wasn’t desperate yet.

  Working carefully and gently, causing as few ripples to the local Essentia as she could, she worked her Magic and attempted to Port several floors up to the highest level she could see into.

  To her relief, her Magic worked as she had hoped it would. In fact, if she had to comment, she would say it had actually worked better than in the Material world and had been slightly easier to do. She stood on the edge of the topmost hole and looked down, smiling. For some weird reason, she had felt a little scared to use Magic here, thinking that things might work differently somehow, and she would have to learn to use her Magic differently. But that had been an utterly unfounded concern and one she now knew to be false.

  Feeling happier and more confident that she would be able to survive here, she moved away from the hole. She stood in a room without windows, with just a doorway to her right. She moved slowly and quietly into the next room and jumped in surprise, her Aegis flaring from the sudden flush of Essentia she pushed into it.

  Someone else was in here.

  The figure looked human at first glance and was crouched at one of the windows that looked out onto the street. As Amanda jumped, the figure did the same, backing away from the window and pressing itself into the corner in fright.

  Taking a deep breath, Amanda started to calm down. She looked like a young girl. She was mostly human in appearance, with a few odd things about her. Her face seemed longer and her cheekbones more pronounced than a human’s would be, and she had long elfin ears that tapered to long slender points up the side of her head, although one jutted out at an angle like it had been damaged once upon a time.

  She wore little better than dirty rags that hung limply from her very slender body but had nothing on her feet. Also, her left hand and forearm looked blackened, the skin on it flaking in a few places.

  Curious about this nervous creature, Amanda took a step forward with her hands out, her palms facing upwards.

  “Hey, I’m not going to hurt you,” she said and she moved into the room. “I’m Amanda. You’re safe.” Walking around the girl, Amanda realised that she was actually really quite small, maybe three to four feet tall, and not as young as she’d thought with womanly curves beneath the elfin creature’s rags.

  “H… human?” the girl asked in a light, sing-song voice.

  Amanda nodded and smiled. “Magus,” she said tapping her chest to indicate she was referring to herself.

  “Ye… you’re a Magus?” the girl asked.

  “That’s right, my name is Amanda.”

  The girl glanced about the room, moving only her eyes before looking back at Amanda. She put her hand to her own chest then and said, “Bramble. I’m Bramble.”

  Edging around the room as she spoke, Amanda finally got close enough to one of the windows to see out. The creatures were all moving further down the road, away from them. Amanda breathed a sigh of relief; they were safe for the moment.

  Amanda looked back at the girl as she settled against the frame of the window so she could keep an eye on the street. “Nice to meet you, Bramble.”

  “A Magus. You’re a Magus,” the girl repeated.

  “I am.”

  Bramble came away from the wall and stepped out into the room, looking Amanda up and down with a critical eye. “How did you… you know… get here?”

  “With my Magic,” Amanda answered.

  “But you can’t, you’re banned, aren’t you? Banished.”

  “We, the Magi, I mean, are. But I am not anymore. People are saying I’m some kind of Chosen One, and this is one of my abilities now. I don’t know. It’s all a bit strange.”

  “You crossed over to the Abyss. This is… special. This must mean something,” she said as she walked about the room. Amanda noticed for the first time that the girl had a pair of huge, ragged-looking dragonfly wings that sprouted from her back. They drooped down to the floor, hanging limp like they hadn’t been used in a while.

  “Are you a… fairy?” Amanda asked.

  The girl looked up, then down at her wings before returning her gaze to Amanda again. “I prefer the word Fae, but yes, I suppose I am.”

  “You suppose?”

  “There’s not many of us left, most have been… changed, corrupted, like everything else here.”

  “The Archons,” Amanda said flatly. She’d heard the stories of the corrupting influence of the Archons. How their incredible power and hate had changed the fragile balance in the Aetheric Realm that had once been called Arcadia. How their corruption had seeped into everything, twisting and changing the realm. Like anywhere else, the Aetheric Realm had been home to good, bad, and indifferent creatures, but this Magical realm, fuelled by Essentia in a way that the Material realm is not, could not resist the Magical power and the darkness of the Archons. And so, over time, Arcadia became the Abyss. Those creatures who were already closer to the darkness only grew more cruel and powerful. While those who followed the light, found their world and their natures changing. A few resisted, but over time, the darkness wore them down, dragging them into the shadows.

  She knew that the faction of Magi she belonged to took their name from the original name for the Spirit World. The Arcadians fought to destroy the Archons and restore Arcadia. During the dark years of their fight against the Archons, millennia ago before recorded history, Arcadia had served as their hideout, their safe haven, and their staging ground for their assaults on the Archons.

  The Aetheric Realm and its inhabitants had been their allies in the fight against the darkness, and one day they would return the Aetheric Realm back to its former state.

  Bramble looked down at her blackened arm. “The Archons,” she repeated, mirroring Amanda’s tone.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Amanda said.

  “But if you’re here, and you’re a Magus… then maybe things will change?” s
he said with hope brimming in her eyes.

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “I think they will. I think this is a good sign,” Bramble said, her face beaming with a huge smile.

  “I hope it’s a good sign,” Amanda said, mostly to herself as she gazed out over the rooftops of the surrounding buildings, noticing the strange flying demons soaring lazily over the destroyed city. She’d best be getting back, she thought, Gentle Water would be worried.

  - Haiti

  Nymira sat in an ornately decorated seat that was covered in bones, skulls, and other Voodoo paraphernalia and waited as the man in the black suit approached. He wore a large black top hat and carried a black lacquered walking cane with a chrome skull on the top.

  From beneath the brim of his hat, the man’s keen eyes shone from the painted skull on his face that gave him a macabre, yet beguiling, look.

  “Mistress Nymira, I bring you news from the continent. The one known as Amanda, who took Lucian and New York from you, is being called the Chosen One based on the Prophecy of Helene. They say she has been marked and already bears the signs spoken of in the text.”

  Nymira sat forward slowly and rested her forearms on her legs to get a better look at Baron Samedi, her loyal servant from New Orleans. “Is that so?”

  Encounter in the Pit

  Pit Club, New York

  Eudoxia sat with her back to the wall in the soft leather chair behind her large modern desk. The desk sat to one side of the large apartment beneath the Pit Club that she guessed had once been Lucian’s private home. In front of her, beyond the desk, stood several soft modern sofas, each with a metal frame holding the cushions in place. The seating surrounded a glass coffee table while a huge flat-screen TV hung above them on the wall to Eudoxia’s left. To her right, behind a frosted glass patrician, her huge bed lay empty, its sheets made and pulled neatly into place.

  At the far end of the space beyond the sofas, an expansive kitchenette with an island hugged the far wall with the apartment’s main entrance on the left side.

  Eudoxia had decorated the place with a few of her own personal effects, most of which had an Egyptian theme, or failing that, a punk rock theme. She’d been called a tempest of contradictions by some for her eclectic style.

  Unlike many long-lived Magi who struggled to keep up with the changes of the modern world, Eudoxia bucked the trend and loved anything modern, adding the things she loved to her style and day to day life.

  She knew that it had been a trait that her mentor, Nefertiti, loved and found very useful. At over three thousand years old, Nefertiti had barely registered that digital technology had become such a huge and powerful thing, and only Eudoxia’s guiding hand had changed that in any way. Even then, a Magus like Nefertiti usually preferred to do things with Magic anyway.

  Eudoxia sat forward and looked over the open dossier before her. She’d been sent here to watch and find out a little more about Amanda after Nefertiti had encountered her in Los Angeles.

  Eudoxia had come to know Nefertiti’s charge, Shaitan a bit while he stayed with the coven. She’d never really taken to the man and found him to be unpredictable and scary. He’d clearly seen things during his travels in the Abyss, which had served to unhinge his mind to the point that he would and could lash out at any moment. His two apprentices, before they’d met with their sudden death at Nefertiti’s hands, had taken advantage of this and channelled these episodes into attacks on Arcadian covens in Los Angeles.

  Predictably, it hadn’t been too long before they hit a coven that caused the Council to take notice and do something.

  Nefertiti’s coven had no love for the Council, but they were not Nomads, either. They considered themselves to be independent and outside the war between the two factions. They pursued their own path and did their own thing. This didn’t go down terribly well with the establishment, but when you had a Magus as powerful as Nefertiti in the mix—unless you wanted World War III on your hands—you let them get on with it.

  Nefertiti had many interests, both personal and business-related. She loved playing the game of politics and using her influence to guide things to her favour, and she also had an interest in the legends and stories of the Magi. Something had interested Nefertiti about Amanda. Eudoxia didn’t know what it was, but her mentor wanted the redhead watched, and so that’s what they’d done, to the best of their ability. They’d lost track of her a couple of times over the last few weeks, but they could usually catch up with her at her brownstone before too long.

  In the last couple of days, new rumours about Amanda had been spread on the DWeb forums, saying that Amanda had recently been marked as the Chosen One from the Prophecy of Helene.

  There were a few sketchy half-truths about some kind of fight on a desert island, but already the story had started to take on a new life of its own with several fairly wild additions to the narrative.

  Eudoxia preferred to focus on the facts though, sifting through the talk of nuclear war or worse and get to the truth.

  The marking she’d gotten at least seemed to be accurate, Eudoxia thought as she looked at a photo which showed Amanda on her roof terrace with some kind of new tattoo on her back that had not been there before.

  It looked like a reasonably large design as well, covering her whole back from her shoulders down to her hips.

  She would love to get a better look at that tattoo to see what it actually looked like. The zoomed-in photos they’d been able to take of it so far didn’t show the design clearly other than its general shape.

  Beside the photo, Eudoxia had printed off a copy of the Prophecy of Helene, which she read through once more.

  Many years from now, a time will come when the Archons will return.

  Guided by the Red Witch, they will return to Earth.

  You will know these times by the mark of the creator.

  Placed upon the body of one of your own.

  Mark her soul, with colours of life and death.

  See the body marked by the power of the creator.

  Mark her passing into the Abyss

  See the Weavers, whose company she keeps.

  She will be your guide in the dark times ahead.

  Be ready to fight, for the time will soon be upon you.

  All that I have prophesied will come to pass,

  when Ishtar gives birth.

  As usual for these kinds of things, the language had been crafted to be suitably vague, meaning that it could be interpreted in various different ways.

  Did the Red Witch refer to Amanda with her red hair, or someone else? Amanda would be the obvious choice, but it seemed to indicate that the Red Witch would be the one to bring the Archons back to Earth, and if Amanda was actually the one who would fight against them, why would she bring them back?

  She supposed that time would tell.

  In the meantime, she wanted to check on the renovations that were happening upstairs in the club. The grand opening had been scheduled to happen later this month, and there still seemed to be so much that needed to be finished before then.

  They used what Magic they could to speed the process along, but the opening of a club was a public event, meaning that the right wheels in local government needed to be greased, which in turn, delayed things.

  Nevertheless, everything seemed to be progressing well, so she saw no reason why they wouldn’t be able to open very soon.

  Eudoxia stood up from her chair, and after a good stretch of her back and arms, wandered through her living space, pausing to stop at a mirror to check her appearance.

  Eudoxia had a skinny frame with dyed green hair, several piercings, and tattoos all over her body. The main tattoos being two snakes that ran from the backs of her hands, up her arms, over her back, and down the length of her legs. She wore loose ripped jeans with a black fitted top and flat boots. Satisfied with her look, she walked out of her living space and closed the door behind her. She could just Port up there, but she felt like a stroll and having a look aroun
d as she went.

  Lucian’s apartment had been furnished in a bright, stark modern way with clean lines and very little fuss to it. Outside in the corridors, although the minimalist look had been kept, it had a more utilitarian feel to it with bare concrete walls and little in the way of furnishings.

  They had cleaned up the mess that had been left from the fight between Lucian and, from all accounts, Amanda and her friends from the Legacy Coven. When they’d moved in Elba, Ninette, and Tobias each took their pick of the other living spaces within the five secret levels beneath the club.

  They’d left the lowest level alone as it had only really housed what they could only guess had been animal pens. The whole level had reeked, so they’d cleaned it with a sweep of Magic and pretty much closed it off, preferring to live in the upper part. Eudoxia walked through the corridors that now lay quiet, insulated from the work going on in the club above where she guessed most of her coven would be.

  She hadn’t walked far though when she discovered Elba taking a break in a side room. The large man looked to be resting up after having eaten something, his empty plates sitting on the table that he now had his feet on.

  “Working hard, I see,” Eudoxia said, mirth in her voice.

  Elba opened an eye and looked over at her, his eyebrows raising slightly. “Just taking five,” he said.

  Eudoxia raised her hands and smiled. “Just kidding, I’ll see you in a bit.” “You will do,” Elba said, closing his eyes again and sitting back.

  Eudoxia smiled and walked away from the room. She liked and enjoyed the company of her coven mates, and working together on this renovation had been a great bonding experience for them, bringing them closer together.