Magi Legend

by Andrew Dobell

  “I don’t think so,” Amanda replied adjusting her hold on Olivia, lifting her up by her neck and slamming her against the wall.

  Olivia grunted as the air was briefly knocked from her lungs.

  Marmaduke yelled and threw more daggers of Essentia at her that crunched against her Aegis. But apart from having a couple of her minds refuelling her Aegis, keeping it strong, Amanda ignored him and focused on Olivia. She concentrated her attacks into a powerful, coordinated effort to break down the woman’s Aegis, pressing a spike of wickedly potent energy into the Nomad’s shield.

  Already weakened by Amanda’s previous attack, she saw the Nomad’s Aegis crack under the assault.

  Olivia held Amanda’s forearm in a death grip as she struggled against Amanda’s grasp of her neck, their Aegises sparking with Essentia as they touched. With her teeth gritted and tears filling her eyes, she screamed in defiance.

  “No, you won’t break me,” the Nomad yelled.

  To her left, Amanda’s senses watched as Marmaduke threw more Magic at her, all of it deflected by her comprehensive Aegis. Frustrated, Marmaduke ran at her with a roar.

  Amanda lashed out with her Magic and hit him with a hammer of invisible force that sent him sprawling across the floor with a grunt.

  Pouring her Magic into the crack in Olivia’s shield, Amanda’s powerful Magic tore at it and ripped it wide open. A second later, Olivia’s Aegis collapsed entirely as she screamed. Olivia threw defensive Crux Magic at the Mystical attacks Amanda rushed in with. She was outclassed, though, and Amanda’s more powerful Magic rolled over it and plunged into her mind.

  As she rifled through Olivia’s thoughts and memories, she noticed that the Aegis that Amanda had placed around the three of them was suddenly under attack. She looked up to see Marmaduke attacking it from inside the Aegis, while four more Magi outside were doing the same.

  “You’ll never leave here alive,” Marmaduke said, getting unsteadily to his feet.

  “Watch me,” Amanda stated, not interested in his threats as she suddenly hit upon a piece of information in Olivia’s head that was as good as she could hope for.

  Amanda looked back at Olivia. “There it is,” she said with a smile as she looked into the Nomad’s wide, angry eyes. She ripped the information from Olivia’s mind, and then tore at her actual brain, killing her with a thought.

  “No!” Marmaduke yelled as Amanda cancelled the outer Aegis and released Olivia from her grasp, letting her lifeless corpse drop the floor. “Quick, the keyword, change it,” he yelled.

  But Amanda was already gone.

  She appeared on the Arkady’s quiet main deck.

  Down through the centuries she’d killed many times; these were just two more Nomads to add to the list.

  She didn’t enjoy taking their lives, but had she let Olivia live, she would have known which bit of information Amanda had pulled from her mind.

  The information wasn’t exactly what she wanted, but it was close enough, and would hopefully be the last step before she reached her target. Olivia knew where Kez, Yasmin’s close confidant and aid, lived. Olivia had visited the Nomad’s Sepulchre several times from what Amanda could gather. She knew exactly where it was and how to get in.

  Closing her eyes, Amanda concentrated and focused on sending her senses to Keziah’s home. Her Magic flared, and she was suddenly looking at a derelict house in India. It wasn’t too far from Delhi, and sat out in the countryside, overgrown and in a sorry state of disrepair. But with her Aetheric Sight, Amanda could see the Aegis protecting it, surrounding the building and keeping out anything Magical.

  Amanda also knew the key to get inside, or, at least, she knew the key that Olivia had used last time she’d visited, as it seemed to change from time to time. Pulling on the threads of Essentia, Amanda Ported down from her ship.

  She stood just outside the Aegis in the dark, Indian night.

  Focusing, Amanda brought to mind the keyword that had allowed Olivia inside. She held the word “metamorphosis” in her mind, projecting it out at the Aegis, and stepped towards it.

  Amanda could feel the thrum of energy rippling through her body as she approached, and then passed through it.

  Appearing on the inside, she smiled.

  You should really keep your security up to date, Kez.

  The double front doors to the building stood ajar, so Amanda slipped quietly inside, between the splintered wooden panels into the lobby.

  It was immediately clear that this entire house was just a shell. There were no internal walls left. Only a few load-bearing pillars kept the remains of the outer walls and roof from collapsing entirely. What was left of the floor was covered with the remains of the house’s interior walls and furniture, but Amanda suspected that most of it had actually fallen into the huge hole in the ground in the centre of the house.

  The pit extended from one side of the house to the other, leaving only a meter or two around the edge to walk on. But walking through this space would be tricky, as the whole space, including the inside of the house and down into the chasm, was covered in thick, stringy white webbing that stretched between the walls and pillars, crisscrossing haphazardly like a messy spider’s web.

  Fascinated by the strange, otherworldly environment, Amanda took a moment to take it all in. Looking around, she couldn’t see or sense any Magic, so maybe Kez wasn’t at home.

  Amanda stepped forward, moving slowly to avoid touching the gross-looking webbing, and ducked through a gap. Approaching the edge of the pit, she looked down into the darkness, her enhanced vision piercing the gloom. The sinkhole dropped vertically down into the earth, easily a good few hundred feet to a rocky ground far below.

  The webs appeared to extend all the way down.

  Looking around to confirm there was little else to see up here, she concentrated and Ported down to the bottom of the hole.

  Appearing on the rough stone floor, she realised that the webbing actually stopped maybe twenty feet above her, making escape for an average human a difficult affair.

  Human bones lay here and there, as well as a few fresher corpses, still partially covered in mutilated flesh. The place smelled something awful, making Amanda screw up her nose in disgust. It was a smell she’d encountered many times before, though, such as on the battlefields of centuries past.

  An Aegis snapped into place around Amanda.

  “Impressive,” said a slightly broken voice from nearby. It was feminine, but it sounded somewhat cracked, as if the speaker’s vocal cords were stretched or strained.

  Amanda turned to see a figure wearing a large, layered, ragged-looking hooded cloak step out from the shadows of a side tunnel. She glided over the ground as if she were floating rather than walking, and yet, there was a skittering noise as she moved.

  Reaching up, Kez pulled back her hood, letting the meagre light fall on her features. She had a strange, alien kind of beauty to her, with her slightly elongated face, eyes that were a touch too big, and a pale complexion. Two parallel scars ran down from her high hairline, through where her eyes were, and down to her jawline. She peered at Amanda with the look of an alien studying its prey.

  “I wondered if one day, you might come looking for me. The fact you made it in here without attacking the Aegis tells me I need to update my security. You’re more capable than I gave you credit for. Who talked, by the way?”

  “Where’s Yasmin?” Amanda asked, quietly assessing the Aegis that surrounded her. It wasn’t massively strong, but it would take her long enough that Kez was likely to escape.

  Clever.

  “Oh, really, Amanda? Come now, you disappoint me,” Kez scolded her. “Making demands of me like that, you should know better.”

  “You remind me of her, you know. Yasmin seems to enjoy a little verbal sparring as well.”

  Kez shrugged. “What of it? Was that meant to mean something?”

  “No, just commenting,” Amanda replied. “So, what’s your next move? You know I can break
through this Aegis of yours in a matter of moments.”

  “And I can be long gone before you do. So, no one wins. Why are you here, Amanda?”

  “I told you, I’m looking for Yasmin. You know, that creepy woman you love so much.”

  “Cute,” Kez replied, raising an eyebrow. “I was looking for the why, not the what.”

  “No reason. Can’t a girl just turn up for a chat with an old friend?”

  “You’re not too bad at the verbal sparring yourself, Miss Page.”

  “I learned from the best.”

  “Glad you’re finally admitting it.”

  Amanda did her best to look unimpressed, but this game was holding her up. “Well, this has been fun and all,” Amanda said, “but I can’t stand around here all day talking to you.”

  “And why not? Do you have somewhere better to be?”

  Amanda raised her own eyebrows for a moment before throwing a concentrated blast of Essentia at the Aegis that Kez had encased her in. Outside the bubble of Magic, Kez backed up and threw the cloak over her shoulders, revealing her body beneath, and for a moment Amanda paused in shock, transfixed by the horror of it.

  Below her shoulders, she didn’t look human at all. She looked like some kind of huge black wasp, with another set of ‘arms’ under her human ones that looked more like insect legs with wicked chitin blades instead of hands. She had four similar legs that skittered backwards and held up her glossy black body, complete with a roughly spherical thorax and a bulbous abdomen with a cruel-looking stinger on the end.

  Two pairs of gleaming, shimmering insect-like wings snapped out from behind her. A second later, her head split into three parts along the scar lines that marred her face, revealing black compound eyes beneath. She launched herself into the air.

  Her wings buzzed like a large drone, and she shot out of the hole in a matter of seconds.

  The Aegis around her fell, leaving Amanda stunned. She’d seen Kez countless times, and although she knew she was a strange one, she’d had no idea that she was so inhuman.

  It took her a moment to rationalise what she’d just seen. She wondered how long Kez had been like that. Had she done it to herself, or was that Yasmin’s doing?

  It was one of the freakiest things she’d ever seen, and she’d seen dragons flying in space, for God’s sake.

  Amanda shook her head and pulled herself together, getting her head back in the game. Kez was gone, and would no doubt be heading to find Yasmin right now and tell her the news. It wouldn’t take long before Yasmin knew that things had changed and that the older Amanda was making herself more public.

  Amanda wondered what the infamous Nomad’s first move would be. Looking around her, she could see various tunnels leading off into darkness. She decided to have a quick scout around before she Ported back home, just in case she’d missed something useful or important. With the odd crack of bone snapping underfoot, she stepped into the darkness of the first tunnel, her enhanced vision cutting through the shadows.

  ***

  “Welcome back,” Yasmin said. “We will discuss your findings about the Nexus later.”

  Anastasia nodded, and caught the slightly quizzical look that Yasmin gave the outfit that she was wearing. Perfect, just the reaction she wanted.

  Turning away, Anastasia walked back to where she’d been standing before with Scralex. Nate was there now, and was looking down his nose at her.

  “Nice outfit,” he commented, derisively. “Still fucking your way around the galaxy, are you?”

  Anastasia smiled. “Something like that.”

  Nate’s top lip curled up in disgust. “Yasmin won’t take kindly to you if you’ve squandered the mission she gave you.”

  “No, please, continue. I have no idea how to suck eggs,” Anastasia answered, sarcasm dripping from her every word.

  Hot fury seemed to rise up within Nate, but before he could say anything, the door to the Black Cathedral slammed open and Kez strode in. Anastasia turned. Yasmin had stopped on the steps and looked back at Kez, framed by the light from the blasphemous stained glass window behind her.

  “Kez, my love, what brings you here?”

  “Amanda. She just attacked me in India, and I have it on good authority that she attacked and killed Olivia of the Hellfire Club also. She’s grown in power.”

  “Has she?” Yasmin answered, a grin spreading over her face. “Finally, the time has come.”

  “I’m sorry, I… I don’t understand,” Kez answered. Anastasia silently agreed. She felt a little lost as well.

  Yasmin turned back to Kez. “My love. You are correct. I have kept you all in the dark regarding Amanda and my relationship with her, out of necessity. To put it simply, it seems that Amanda was sent back in time by the Weavers. She was there when I was still an apprentice and stopped a former mentor of mine from killing me. I have been unable to kill her ever since for fear of a Paradox, or attracting the attentions of a Weaver.”

  Anastasia swallowed. Just the mention of the Weavers was enough to turn her stomach. They were nightmare incarnate. But this was an interesting development. Might there be a way she could turn this to her advantage?

  “But if Amanda has attacked you, Kez, then all that has ended, finally,” Yasmin mused to herself with an indulgent smile.

  “So, the gloves are off?” Nate asked.

  Yasmin’s grin widened. “Indeed they are.”

  - Somewhere in the Middle East

  The inside of the temple was veiled in darkness and shadow, concealing many of the details in the architecture. Lillia took slow, cautious steps, her eyes wide as she looked around, peering into the darkness, wondering what horrors they might conceal.

  As she went, she felt sure she could hear something moving, dragging itself across the stone floor, or skittering along on whatever it used for legs.

  Her heart rate rose as her fear grew. Where was the exit? She didn’t want to stay in here any longer than she needed to.

  It moved again. A quick, sudden shifting that made Lillia look around, but she saw nothing, only blackness. The pounding in her chest grew stronger as her breathing sped up.

  “Join me,” something whispered from the shadows.

  “What the hell are you?” Lillia asked, her voice desperate.

  “Lyka…” the voice hissed in reply, followed by another sound of movement in the shadows. Lillia spun around, trying desperately to see what was in here with her. She knew coming down here was a mistake. She knew something horrific would be here.

  A tentacle wrapped around her legs. Several of them shot out of the darkness and pulled her off her feet.

  She slammed into the ground, catching herself with her hands. Rocks dug into her palms, but she ignored them, looking only at the long, mottled-looking tentacles that were wrapped around her legs, stretching off into the darkness nearby. They moved, reaching up and curling around her legs, pulling themselves up over her knees and thighs, leaving sticky mucus behind wherever they touched her.

  Lillia screamed in terror as she tried to kick them off, but they were too strong, too insistent.

  They yanked back and pulled her across the floor, dragging her into the darkness as a huge maw of deadly fangs emerged from the shadows and opened wide.

  SNAP.

  Lillia sat upright in her sleeping bag with a yelp, her skin clammy and slick with sweat. Her heart was beating like a drum in her chest as she realised it was all just a nightmare, a freakishly realistic nightmare.

  “You okay?” Sandy asked through bleary eyes.

  “Yeah, I’m fine, just a bad dream,” she replied, looking up at the looming temple they were camped outside of, feeling sure she could hear the whispered name of “Lyka” drifting on the air around her.

  She had a bad feeling about this.

  The Gloves Are Off

  Manhattan, New York

  Amanda appeared in the hallway of her Brownstone, just inside the front door, and knew immediately that the building’s Aegis was mis
sing.

  Shunting Essentia into her Aegis, the scene before her came into view.

  Chaos.

  Yasmin stood in the middle of her hallway, reading from the Lazarus Scroll. Green mist flowed from the Scroll and gathered at her feet, before reaching out to envelope Yoh, holding him immobile a foot above the floor.

  Nearby, Gentle Water traded Magical strikes with the tattooed blond man, Nate Jones. To her right, Liz dodged a fireball from the Pyromaniac Nomad, Tacita, whose dreadlocked hair spilled over her faded denim. Liz lashed out with Magic of her own, pulling on the fire her opponent had thrown and blasting it back at Tacita.

  Even in a situation like this, Amanda felt proud of her apprentice’s skills.

  On the other side of Yasmin, Amanda spotted Tabitha defending Toni, who nursed a broken arm. She faced off against Anastasia, a cruel blonde Nomad in a short plaid skirt that flared around her hips.

  Movement in the chaos caught Amanda’s eye. She spotted someone who absolutely shouldn’t be there, and did a quick double-take to make sure she wasn’t seeing things.

  Kimi Takahashi, better known as the Black Lotus, stood watching her brother Yoh as the green mist lifted him and pinned him in place.

  Amanda had seen Yoh kill her, though.

  Had Yasmin brought her back from the dead?

  A grunt to her right caught her attention. She turned to see her daughter Maya, also in a fight. Her keen claws ripped at the living shadows that enveloped her opponent like armour, only for those same shadows to whip out as tentacles of darkness, striking Maya in return. The movements of the shadow-girl seemed familiar, and as the girl twisted Amanda suddenly got a look at her face and felt her stomach flip.

  It was Alicia.

  Her childhood friend from the orphanage who’d been possessed by an Abyssal. She was here, and fighting for Yasmin. Attacking her daughter.

  “What the…?” Amanda muttered under her breath as she stared at Alicia.