Curse of Magic

by Michael Brightburn

  I stumbled backward, but the roots didn’t let go, digging into my flesh and slicing it deeply. Blood poured out and I screamed again, this agony feeling just like that from her fire. Strangely cold.

  It was going to take my hand off.

  I fumbled for the other sword, the one I’d taken from the animated dead blacksmith, drew it swiftly and slashed through the roots, which fell away.

  “You can’t win,” the Breaker said. Her voice was low and husky, unexpected for a high elf. “Give up now and I’ll kill you here instead of turning you in.”

  Vi snarled at the Breaker.

  My hand still had some dead roots clinging to it, and I pulled these away, revealing a shredded mess of flesh beneath.

  “I’m sorry,” Sienna said, seeing the damage. “I was trying to help.”

  “It‘s fine. You did your best.”

  “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  “Yes,” the Breaker said with a sneer, “what are you going to do? You’re running out of time. The dead will soon be here.”

  I looked, and saw that she was right. They had slowed to a crawl, but they hadn’t stopped. They would be here quite soon. It was hard to say exactly how far away there were. Two hundred paces? Three?

  But I knew they would be here soon. I felt it.

  I focused back on the Breaker. “Maybe we’ll just stay here. Let them take you.”

  “Go ahead. You’ll be the ones to pay the price. They’re animated by magic. Which means I can Break them.”

  I gritted my teeth. I knew she wasn’t lying.

  I didn’t have any experience with the dead. We’d learned very little about them in school. Some said it wasn’t magic that animated them, but the gods.

  But what were the gods, if not magic?

  It seemed our only choice was to kill the Breaker, and hope we could deduce where she was going afterward.

  I made sure I wasn’t using any magic at all, then knelt down beside her and felt in her pockets.

  “She had a bag,” Vi said. “It fell off back there.” She gestured with her head back the direction we’d come.

  I looked, but didn’t see it. “Where?”

  Vi looked too, scanning her head, then stopped. “There, on the side of the path.”

  I followed her eyes. It took me a good few moments to locate it. If she hadn’t pointed it out, I wouldn’t have noticed it at all in the dark.

  Yes, her vision was much better than mine.

  I ran for it, the dead nearly having reached us.

  I skidded to a stop and slipped on the soil. I went to the ground, grabbing for the bag, then scrambled to get up again, which for some reason was incredibly difficult, as though the soil was ice.

  A hand fell on my ankle, and I felt my life force seeping away as cold seeped in to take its place.

  It was a dead woman, her body nothing but bones, dressed in a white dress and fine silk gloves, holding on to my ankle.

  Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  No, I’d been surrounded.

  One of them had gotten around behind me.

  But it was only Trin. She was pulling me away.

  I kicked and kicked at the dead woman, and finally her wrist broke and she let go with a banshee wail. “Stay,” she moaned, and seemed to float forward toward us.

  Trin helped me to my feet and we ran back to where Vi had the Breaker pinned.

  We didn’t have long now. I dug through the bag looking for a map or some indication of where she was going.

  Without that, we couldn’t kill her and would have to bring her with us.

  I was wary about activating my magic around the Breaker, but I risked it, quickly activating it to look for the spell.

  I spotted it, and then my vision went white as the Breaker corrupted my magic and used it against me.

  I ceased Pulling, and the whiteness faded to black, but my night vision had been ruined, and I could see little more than vague outlines now.

  The Breaker laughed. “Your lycanthrope grows weak. She’ll bleed out soon. They’re not so tough when they can’t heal.”

  We needed to get her away from the Breaker so she could use her magic and heal.

  “Break this,” I said and kicked her in the head.

  I couldn’t see her eyes, just the outline of her body, but she made a noise, and so I kicked her in the head again, and she fell silent.

  Vi collapsed to the side of her.

  “Here,” I said and held out the bag in the direction of a figure. I thought it was Sienna but couldn’t be sure.

  After she took it I picked up the unconscious Breaker and tossed her over my shoulder like a sack.

  “What are you doing?” Trin asked.

  “We need to get out of here.”

  I couldn’t see the mass of dead coming for us, but I knew they were coming.

  “Someone else lead the way, I can barely see at all. She blinded me with my own magic.”

  I saw the shape of Vi push herself up.

  “You going to be okay?”

  “Yes. Follow me.”

  We did, me carrying the Breaker, Trin carrying Alva, and Sienna holding the Breaker’s bag.

  We moved swiftly, and the dead quickly fell away.

  It seemed the farther away we got from their city, the slower they moved.

  When we broke out of the tree covering, the area was much more brightly lit by the moon, the sky no longer strangely dark.

  When I looked back, I saw that area was cast in darkness, as though some large invisible force cast a shadow on that land.

  I wasn’t out of breath from running, but I was uncomfortably cold.

  Trin was breathing hard.

  Even Vi was tired and not healed fully. She had many cuts and slashes on her body.

  I sat on the ground, setting the Breaker down. “Those cuts. I didn’t see a weapon on her. Did you disarm her?”

  Vi huffed through her nose. “No. I was transformed when I first attacked her, and she twisted it, used it to attack me. I’ve never seen a Breaker so adept at it before. She did it before I could even react.”

  I searched through the Breaker’s clothing, looking for anything that might be useful.

  I found a sack of crowns and pennies, the crowns a mix from different kingdoms.

  I found nothing else on her.

  “She’s going to wake up soon,” Sienna said.

  “You can sense that?” I asked.

  “The earth can. I think using my magic is somehow waking her up even quicker.”

  How did you break a Breaker? We couldn’t just tie her up. That would do nothing to stop her interfering with our magic.

  It seemed our only option was to kill her.

  “Let me eat her,” Vi said, strangely coming to the same realization I had.

  I didn’t immediately reply. It seemed a waste to kill such a strong Breaker.

  But then again she had been defeated by us rather easily.

  Rather too easily. A simple kick to the head?

  How was that even possible? Yes, they were as susceptible to physical damage as was anyone, but that was too simple.

  She led us to the city of the dead, set up the whole trap, and could’ve easily defeated Vi.

  But then let herself be pinned down.

  Wouldn’t she have been able to draw power just from Vi being on top of her? Touching her?

  So why hadn’t she?

  I frowned, noticing again how cold I was, despite our run. I looked around at the surroundings.

  They were there, but indistinct. Like a dream.

  My stomach twisted.

  I looked at my companions, looked then to Trin. “Where were you born?” I asked her.

  “What?” she asked. “Why?”

  “Just tell me where you were born.”

  She pursed her lips. “I was born in Davoasil.”

  “What’s your father’s name?”

  “Why are you asking me these questions?”

&n
bsp; “Answer me.”

  “Xantin.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “Rendra. Why? What’s going on?”

  “What’s your father’s name?”

  “Calisin.”

  The knot in my stomach tightened, grew.

  I stood and looked around the area again, taking in its indistinctness.

  Then I held out my hands to the side and focused.

  I focused on moving, on lifting, and suddenly my body rose from the ground.

  I floated high in the sky above the treetops before I opened my eyes, took in the world around me.

  It was vague and indistinct.

  I was floating in the sky. I was flying.

  But I was no angel. I was no wizard.

  And while a Dark had many abilities, flight wasn’t one of them.

  But here I was.

  Because, this wasn’t where I was.

  This, was a delusion.

  41

  My eyes sprung open and I found myself looking at a black sky, stone all around me.

  I was confused and in a strange kind of pain. It took me a moment to get my bearings.

  I was still in the dead city. I was on my back. I was surrounded by the dead.

  When I looked down over my body, I saw that one of them held my hand, the same one which in my delusion had had the flesh ripped from it.

  The flesh hadn’t ripped from it, but it had gone a ghostly pale, and I could see my bones through the translucent flesh.

  They were draining my life force from me.

  I struggled to break free, but their grips were hard. Cold and unbreakable.

  Without thinking I Pulled from myself and phased, and those hard grips closed on themselves.

  There was no pain, instead the cold stopped seeping into me, and my body began to warm.

  I propelled myself up and forward, out of the crowd of dead.

  “Darthos!” a voice shouted, and I turned to it, saw Vi still on the roof of the building on the street above this one.

  But it wasn’t only my attention she drew.

  The group of dead who had been draining me lost interest now that I was untouchable and flooded between the buildings and up the embankment, toward the building Vi and the others were on.

  “Come on!” I shouted. “We’ve gotta get out of here!”

  I didn’t know precisely what had happened, but I didn’t have time to figure it out right now.

  Whatever it had been, it seemed likely that it was the Breaker who was responsible.

  A Breaker who had gotten away.

  There was still her path though, and so I hadn’t been out long enough for that to dissipate, which meant we still had a chance.

  Trin screamed as the dead swarmed the roof.

  They were quick.

  Nothing at all like in my delusion.

  They had no interest in me now that I was phased, instead focusing all their attention on the girls on the roof.

  “You have to jump,” I called up.

  “Alva and Sienna are still out,” Vi called, then looked over her shoulder and cursed. She dashed away from the edge of the roof and came back a moment later holding Sienna.

  Then she leapt from the roof, leaping over the horde of dead and landing hard on the roof of the apothecary. From there she jumped down beside me to the stone ground.

  “What about the others?”

  She shook her head. “They already got them. I couldn’t save them.”

  “Get Sienna out of here.” I pointed. “That’s the way the Breaker went. Head that way at a slow pace. I’ll catch up with you.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked angrily.

  “Save them.”

  “They’ll kill you.”

  “They had me already and didn’t manage to. Maybe they’ll succeed eventually, but it’ll take a while. Now do as I say. Get out of here.”

  I turned and ran between the buildings and up the embankment toward the building whose roof Alva and Trin were on.

  The dead completely ignored me as I climbed up past them, and it was only as I looked at my own hands in front of me as I climbed that I realized why.

  I was phased still.

  I couldn’t believe I was able to stay in the state for so long.

  Normally it faded quickly.

  Was this how you became a Shade? It seemed like everything was fine, until finally it wasn’t?

  Or was I just getting better at using my own magic?

  The climb was easy in my lightened state, and on the roof I found the dead feeding upon Trin like they had fed upon me.

  Entire parts of her body were pale and dead-looking.

  Alva lay a small distance away from them, her small body having gone unnoticed, and I ran for her.

  When I picked her up my arms and chest had to solidify to hold her, and this was apparently enough to get the attention of the dead as several of them slammed into me before I could react.

  They tore Alva from my arms and pushed me to the roof, immediately beginning to suck my life force from me, replace it with coldness.

  Grunting in frustration I Pulled from myself harder, phasing completely and dumping energy backwards to keep myself from going down through the roof, hoping I wasn’t pushing myself too much, hoping I wasn’t becoming a Shade.

  That’s when Alva screamed, waking up finally.

  The scream wasn’t one of pain. It was one of rage.

  The dead that had been holding her went flying as Alva suddenly grew to two, then four, then ten times her size.

  Now she was almost twice my height.

  She looked down at me, a shocked expression on her face. She opened her mouth to say something and then suddenly shrunk down to even smaller than she was usually.

  The dead didn’t seem to mind or be distracted by this strange occurrence, and went for her now bite-sized form.

  But when one picked her up she grew again, this time to approximately my size and height, and in so doing pegged the thing’s hand to the roof, then grabbed it by the neck and hurled its body away, where it flew over the lower level of buildings and splashed into the water flowing through the town.

  Next she focused her rage on the ones feasting on Trin and methodically pulled them off one by one, tossing them in all directions.

  Then she picked up Trin’s lifeless body—their positions switched for once—and turned to me. “You ready to get out of here?”

  42

  We didn’t have time for her to explain what the hell had just happened. “Let’s go.”

  She ran toward the edge of the roof and jumped, suddenly growing in the air so that instead of falling her legs grew to reach the apothecary’s roof.

  She was now taller than the building I stood on.

  I jumped down after her, still phased and so unaffected by the distance.

  More dead had come onto the roof and now—like in my delusion—floated down after us.

  They were more solid than I was, but apparently could at least float, if not fly.

  Ahead of me Alva stepped down from this second roof and onto the ground, then shrunk back to about my size.

  I leapt down after her. “Go!” I shouted “That way.”

  We ran out of town in the same direction Vi had gone, following the trail of magic residue from the spell the Breaker carried, out of this dead city.

  Five hundred paces or so ahead of us the buildings ended and the road turned to dirt.

  I looked back over my shoulder.

  They were coming after us.

  Well, that much hadn’t changed.

  Unfortunately.

  “Where are the others?” Alva asked as she ran beside me. Her voice wasn’t exactly deeper, but somehow more full, now that her size was larger.

  Her entire body had grown, as well as the clothing she had been wearing.

  She looked different now that she was larger. I could see more details on her face and body. Could see more details in the clothing
the angel had made.

  “Vi has Sienna. She’s going after the Breaker. They went this way. What happened up there? I didn’t know you could shrink and grow.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Well, you woke up just in time.”

  “It was because the dead tried to drain me. Never try to drain a vampire. We’re immune.”

  How nice for her. If the horde of dead not a hundred paces behind us caught up, at least she would survive.

  The same couldn’t be said for the rest of us.

  As I was no longer phased, running was much harder than it had been in my delusion, and my breathing was ragged and labored as we finally made it out of the town.

  But we’d made it.

  I quickly glanced behind us as my feet switched from pounding stone to thumping on soil.

  They were about seventy paces behind, and still gaining.

  This road led perpendicular to the one we had come in to the city on.

  The water that ran through the town split off to the left, while the road we were on curved to the right.

  The sky was normal, with stars and moon, no dark dome here.

  There were a few trees here and there near the road, but otherwise the vegetation was sparse, and nothing like in my delusion.

  Rolling hills stretched out ahead and to our right, while the water to our left grew wider and the terrain around it rockier.

  Because of the hills, I couldn’t see very far ahead on the road as it twisted around or plowed through them to make passage by horse or carriage more pleasant.

  Were the dead chasing us now the ones who’d made this road, who’d leveled those paths for easier travel?

  How long ago had that been?

  How long had this been a dead city for?

  And what had caused it?

  “How’s Trin?” I asked.

  “She’s alive.”

  It was better than nothing.

  Alva glanced behind us, then slowed.

  “Don’t stop now,” I urged.

  But she did. “Look.”

  I halted and turned to see what she was looking at, ready to chastise her for stopping, but the words died in my mouth.

  All the dead who had been chasing us were stopped.

  They watched us, but didn’t pursue.

  They had stopped at the edge of town, at the place where stone became dirt.

  “They can’t leave…” I stared in amazement.