by Vic Connor
“I should think it’s the other way around,” the figure says with an undertone of sarcasm. He reaches up to his hood and pulls it back in one fluid movement, revealing himself to be a beautiful—unnaturally so—young man, glowing with an internal force all his own. He looks like he has so much energy contained inside him that, at any moment, he might burst in an explosion of light, blinding everyone in the tavern.
Aremos gasps and pulls back a little. This is a Maker, descended from their place of power in the skies above the palace.
The whole tavern falls silent as Aremos jumps to his feet. “W-what is it?” he asks. He remembers to bow, a little late, bobbing his head hastily without taking his eyes from the beautiful face.
“I have something for you,” the Maker informs him. He shifts his gaze to the warband. “There will be gifts to follow for all of you, but for the moment, I’ll need to borrow your friend.”
“Take him,” Sah says as the other two nod, dumbfounded.
“Well, then,” the Maker says. “You have my thanks.”
With that, he raises his arms, and a nimbus of energy flickers around his entire body. He begins to chant a litany of words of power, a spell unknown to and uncastable by anyone else present. The jam-packed tavern begins to murmur and gasp as the crowd looks on. A couple of mages in one corner stand on their table to get a better look, and a warlock on the other side of the room begins to scribble down the Maker’s words, hoping to glean something from the scene. A witch guffaws, and a pair of elven nobles begin to shout.
A ring of people soon forms around Aremos and the Maker, all of them heckling and yelling, cheering and jeering and booing.
The Maker’s fingertips crackle and his eyes glow blue. At the same time, Aremos finds his own body glowing the same shade, surrounded by and filled with the same light, the same power.
Aremos glances to his companions. All three stare at him with disbelieving, fascinated looks on their faces. They grow faint as Aremos grows light, their voices fade as the Maker’s own incantation rises. The light enters Aremos’ own eyes and he blinks, then squints. His companions’ faces become dark shadows. The whole tavern dims into darkness, all blotting into one black mass until the only things Aremos can see are himself and the Maker, who stands before him dripping with power.
The tavern disappears, the darkness falling away as the light of day returns once more, and Aremos finds himself alone with the Maker. They’ve been transported into the wilderness, high atop a lone mountain surrounded by dark woodland. A cold wind blows, ruffling Aremos’ hair and cloak. The Maker’s own cloak remains still, his hair unbothered, completely undisturbed.
“Where are we?” Aremos asks. “I don’t know this place, I don’t think I’ve been here before.”
“Quite so.” The Maker nods, looking around. “Few have. This place doesn’t usually appear on Arkhart’s maps. It’s for our own use when the right time arises. The right time,” he adds, smiling at Aremos, “has now arisen, indeed.”
He holds out his hand, palm forward, and Aremos’ staff begins to shake. The staff is clutched in Aremos’ right hand, as it always is, and he tightens his grip around it in a sudden and desperate bid to control it.
“No,” the Maker advises. “Let it be. You must release your old life if you’re indeed to train at the Academy. Now is a time for renewal, rebirth. It’s a time to reshape your world.”
At these words, the staff lurches from Aremos’ hand and hovers before him. It quivers there for a few seconds, and Aremos can sense its power being dissipated. With a casual gesture, the Maker breaks it, shattering it into a thousand little splinters. Before they can hit the ground, the splinters turn to smoke and the smoke disappears, wafting away on that strong mountain wind.
“My staff!” Aremos croaks, furious and frightened. This staff has been by his side ever since he remembers himself. After hundreds of battles where it channeled Aremos’ magical power and protected him in the direst situations, it has become much more than a weapon—it has long been an extension of his very soul, a part of his identity. Without it, he feels naked and lost. His mind muddles, and his empty hands hang limp.
The Maker smiles and clicks his fingers. At their feet, the mountain begins to tremble, making Aremos’ entire body vibrate. The Maker holds out both arms, relaxed, his hands turned toward the sky. His palms glow blue and his eyes burn, and he seems to be sending some of his power into a spot just above them. A nimbus of light appears in his hands, softly at first but growing brighter. As the light intensifies, a new staff slowly fades into existence, resting on those upturned palms. The Maker smiles and holds it out. The staff lifts in the air, then hovers over to Aremos.
Aremos’ previous staff was slightly twisted ash wood, with elven runes carved into its length and a faint white crystal at its tip. This staff is black and straight, made from an unknown wood carved so perfectly as to look engineered. A light blue stone stands affixed to one end, gripped in wooden claws and pulsing with magical energy. Dwarven and elven runes decorate the claws, tightly packed and etched with a subtlety and skill that Aremos has never seen before.
He reaches out a hand and the staff springs to him, its power joining with his own to flow, free and fluid, throughout his entire being.
“It has been cast with runes of Adamant by the greatest smiths from amongst our own ranks. My fellow Makers involved themselves with its creation to build up its power,” the Maker explains. “The elves of the White Tower have thrice blessed it, and the dwarves of Bloodkeep sacrificed one of their greatest stones for its tip. This staff will never break, and it will make your enchantments stronger than ever: A shield cast with this staff will rarely fail you, and any attacks will come fiercer than you have ever experienced.”
“I don’t know how to—” Aremos begins, but the Maker holds up his hand once more, silencing him.
“This is not the only gift I bring for you,” he says. His raised hand begins to glow white hot with magical power. Once more, his eyes light up: They seem to ignite in their sockets with a strength that frightens Aremos. Whole worlds could burn in that power, he thinks. The Maker’s hair whips around him and the stone at his feet begins to crack and smolder. Then, as the spell reaches its crescendo, the Maker releases it. White Flame lashes out from his outstretched palm, engulfing Aremos, burning him, causing him great pain but no apparent damage. The fire ripples all over his body, scorching and hurting him before it finally dies down, leaving nothing but a blissful sense of peace, of orderliness and amity. A few lingering flames flicker on the ground around them, luminous and beautiful.
“I know…” Aremos begins, struggling to comprehend. “I know that spell… A new power?”
“Sort of,” the Maker says, smiling. “It’s more like a new attribute. The White Flame. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
Aremos nods. He has heard of it on his travels. He has even seen a few advanced casters use it to devastating effect. Anybody who wields the white flame is anathema to Necromancers and Demon kin; it provides a boost to all spells directed against these creatures of darkness, enabling even the humblest of curses to tear the greatest of demons to shreds.
“Take these gifts, Aremos the Wyvern-slayer, as a pact and as a promise,” the Maker tells him.
“A promise of what?”
“We received word from the spirit child Somera in the world beyond worlds,” the Maker says. “And we shall be replying in due course, excited to enroll her in our academy. But she requested that she be kept anonymous. She wants nobody to know that you and she are linked, no doubt to avoid the attention that would follow.
“This,” he continues, gesturing to the staff and the White Fire still flickering around them. “Is a goodwill gesture, to let her know she’s appreciated, whether or not she chooses to remain in the shadows. She’ll always live in the light amongst the Makers, held in our highest esteem. We’ll keep her secret.
“Now,” the Maker adds before Aremos can begin to speak. “We have s
omething else for you. Nobody can hold onto the White Flame for long if they haven’t used it to defeat the blackest of demons. And the Staff of Adamant is tied to this, as well—you need to defeat a greater demon, or these gifts will vanish the next time you manifest.”
As the Maker speaks, a great roaring, snarling sound erupts from the forest below. Looking down, Aremos sees a sickly green light emanating from a distant glade. It pulses and glows in a clearing a few miles off, but the presence of Necromantic magic is unmistakable.
“An evil Demon of the Undead, previously unknown in this world, has awoken. It’s trying to draw its kin into Arkhart, summoning them using the blackest of magics,” the Maker says. “There’s no time to waste: You must stop it before its host grows too large. Such a creature could summon an army of ghouls and evil shades if left unchecked. They’ll march across our world, doing unspeakable damage.
“Aremos, this mission is yours to complete alone,” the Maker concludes. “Though you’ll be aided in kind. For this one battle, we’ll lift all the caps to your power usage. For the duration, you’ll be a demi-god with the Makers’ own strength to wield. Use your new skills, try out your new staff… Save us from the demon’s evils and make your new gifts permanent. And, Aremos,” the Maker adds, smiling. “Do try to have some fun with it.”
As he disappears, the last of the White Fire flickers out, though Aremos knows that the power remains within him.
“Well, then,” Aremos says, looking down into the forest below. “I suppose there is work to be done.” He summons a portal, draws his sword, and steps through. It’ll be a busy evening, indeed.
The demon, Esae’sid_PlagueMod15, stands upon a low hillock in a clearing deep in the woods. As he approaches the creature, Aremos wrinkles his nose at the stink. This should be a vibrant forest filled with animals, birdsong in the air, and deer aplenty stalking the paths through this wild place. But all is silent and still while Aremos walks beneath the trees’ canopy. Black trunks stand warped and blistered along his route, and the smell of decay lingers everywhere.
The smell worsens when he reaches the edge of the clearing. Fetid, pestilent, the miasma chokes him and makes his eyes water. He recognizes the black magic for what it is. All around, it has begun its work, warping the world to better suit its own dark whims. If Aremos breathes this air for too long it will take him, too, mutating him into a plaything of dark spirits. He whispers an incantation and focuses his power on gathering what little white magic permeates the area to him. A faint bubble surrounds him, glowing slightly.
The air grows fresher, cleansed by his spell. He gasps, drinking it in by the lungful, and then he focuses. The Maker was right: The spells come more easily to him than ever, and he can put more into them than before. The power makes him giddy. One day, I too might be a Maker, he thinks. If the child spirit Somera studies well, I could wield these powers eternally…
He can see a halo of dark energy rippling above the clearing. He stands in the shadows at the clearing’s side, hidden for the moment, watching.
The demon is a foul creature indeed. It stands at least five times the height of a tall man. Dead and rancid flesh hangs off its frame, with yellowing bones protruding so that it looks like a corpse. Deep, squinting eyes line either side of its face, row after row, all of them yellow-tinged and glowing with a sickly inner light. Antlers of white, cracked bone stand in three rows across its head, all intertwining as they rise to form a ghastly, ungodly crown. In one hand, it holds a long, black-shafted scythe bearing a blade spotted with rust and dripping with ichor. In its other hand, the demon holds the bloated corpse of a man, just head and torso with the limbs removed. Worms crawl from the body, all over it, maggots and worse dropping down to burrow into the ground.
Aremos employs his Second Sight and watches as the worms drop. Each one burrows deeper, further infecting the ground with black spellwork, calling out to the dead of the land to be less restful, to wake up and take up unnatural arms against the world of the living.
A black cloud roils above their heads, a dark halo gathering power and rending the skin of this world open. Cracks are appearing in the clearing, great doorways between the world of Arkhart and the world of the devilish entities the demon is summoning. All are corpses, the warped frames of long-dead necromancers or worshippers of cults of black magic. Their eyes burn yellow and, though their bodies are decaying, they walk with an unnatural vigor, a strength which Aremos reads as he watches. Their stats are good—freakishly good. Though they are slow-moving, they have twice the strength and damage resistance of a usual man. They’ll take more damage before they fall, and they’ll fight harder and longer than any normal creature.
I need to stop them here, before it’s too late, Aremos thinks.
He lines up a couple of spells, empowering them as he waits, draining his power bar a little down from 755 points. But his power replenishes faster than normal with the Maker’s blessing, and he knows that the effect of his spells will half-cripple these beasts. He gathers each spell around him, channeling them through his new tool—the Staff of Adamant. They whirl effortlessly around him, tethered by his new staff, ready to be unleashed. Before he lets them go, however, he finds and equips his new power, then laces his spells with White Fire. The move costs him quite a bit more power—50 magical points per spell—but it will make each spell ever more deadly.
With his spells lined up and ready, Aremos begins to let them loose. First, he fires a couple of curses into the roiling cloud above. They’d usually be simple spells of unbinding, designed to slow down or diminish the effects of a dark curse. But they burn bright as they shoot from the tip of his staff, carrying his White Fire with them. When they hit the cloud, the dark magic begins to dissipate, just as it should. The cloud would usually be left to float adrift for a minute or so before it was able to return to its previous strength and purpose. This time, however, it bursts apart, crackling as the White Fire flares through every inch of it, burning it and destroying it so thoroughly that within a couple of seconds, the demon’s magic looks more like a lightning storm than anything. The cloud breaks up into smaller puffs, each tumbling about as the fire consumes them, and then white flame begins to fall down from the sky into every doorway the demon’s spell was holding open, setting these alight around the edges and burning each creature to half health as they step through.
As the flaming storm rages, disrupting the demon’s ritual and sending the entire cohort into disarray, Aremos extends his hand and unleashes a few magical projectiles. Six of those menacing demons loom nearby, and he hits them each with a fireball. Rather than their usual orange glow, however, these fireballs also burn a bright, incandescent white. Two miss, briefly setting fire to the ground. However, the others all hit, four projectiles into four monsters. Two slam in their chests and abdomens, and the wounded monsters crumple to their knees, bent over and wailing as they burn. Their health diminishes quickly and every one of their stats drops. They stagger to their feet, almost useless now, still burning and in agony. The third spell catches the third creature in the back and knocks it six feet forward. It falls and rolls, a burning mess, before climbing once more to its feet at just ten percent of its health, stunned and barely able to function.
These are demons who should be able to take four or five fireballs apiece, Aremos thinks. He’d only intended to use them as a distraction—he hadn’t expected them to be so damaging.
The fourth demon is hit in the most dramatic way. Aremos manages to strike it in the face, just as it climbs through one of the burning portals. The fireball knocks its head clean off its shoulders. The head soars backward, burning bright white, and zooms through the doorway and into the demon realm. Therein, it burns ever brighter, feeding on the demonic energies for a few seconds. It grows too strong to contain itself, however, and explodes, gushing white-hot flame through a number of the portals dotted around the clearing, consuming five more demons—nearly killing them outright—before closing the doorways almost immedia
tely.
The whole clearing turns to face Aremos, as he knew they would. They trace the genesis of these burning curses back to where he stands and begin to bellow and screech. The zombie demons stagger toward him, all converging, as Esae’sid_PlagueMod15 itself whirls around to fix Aremos with its awful gaze. It barks a command in its terrible language, guttural and coarse. It then extends a hand and dark, sickly, greenish energy coalesces around its fingers. As it slowly points one finger at Aremos, its spell shoots forward, arcing over half of the clearing before stopping in mid-air as everything freezes.
Aremos smiles. His third spell has them all frozen in a double Time Warp, easily cast now that his power caps have been removed. None of the creatures move. Esae’sid_PlagueMod15 is paused, snarling in painful slow-motion, and the spell blasting toward Aremos now moves across the clearing pixel by pixel, barely making any ground despite the fact that, in real time, it should have engulfed him in seconds.
He opens a portal and steps through, vanishing then reappearing among the densest clump of demons. Their smell, this close, is enough even to penetrate his wards, and it makes him retch as he swings into each one. But he grits his teeth and keeps a level head as he sets to work.
Aremos lights up the tip of his staff with the same White Fire that has caused such chaos all around him. The entire length of the adamantine rod trembles with power and Aremos wields it double-handed, using it like a quarterstaff and smashing it with great, overhead blows into each of the demons he passes. He catches one on the top of its spine, another full in the face, another in the crook between its neck and shoulder. Sweeping upward, he catches another in the belly before reversing his grip and laying a sideswipe against yet another, cracking into its chest. Each strike sings with white magic, burning deep wounds into the flesh it impacts. Aremos catches two of the already hurt demons, destroying them outright. The others, which had been at full health, are down to twenty or thirty percent after suffering his powerful blow.