by John Bierce
Their branch gave way completely, and Godrick felt his stomach try to crawl up his throat. He turned and lunged for Hugh desperately, reaching as hard as he could, but his armored fingers closed just inches away from Hugh’s leg.
Then a piece of falling debris struck his armor, and when he stopped spinning, Hugh was gone.
CHAPTER FORTY
From the Clouds
Being woken by lightning striking close by was not Talia’s favorite way to get roused to consciousness.
Dozens of lightning bolts slammed into the tree right above her, so close that Talia could actually feel her short hair stand up straight. The afterimages of the lightning burnt themselves into her eyes even while closed, and they were still there as she opened them, and saw the falling, flaming branches in between the cage the afterimages cast across her vision.
Thankfully, she was well out on a branch that wasn’t struck by lightning or falling branches, but she could see the long burnt channels trailing down the trunk, tracing out the paths the lightning had followed down the sides of the tree.
Talia tried to sit up, but her head started pounding. She promptly rolled over on her side and vomited.
She realized she had another concussion, though thankfully not as bad as the one when her hair exploded. Inanely, some part of her mind wished that she wouldn’t have to get her hair cut off this time too— it was still far too short to need to brush, but it was just now getting long enough that it didn’t just feel like fuzz on her head when she ran her fingers through it.
She knew logically that she wouldn’t need to cut her hair again, but she was having trouble focusing.
She managed to shut down that idiot part of her mind before it could start imagining Hugh running his fingers through her hair. Now was not the time.
The back of her head was especially painful, and she gingerly reached back and felt it with her fingers. They came away sticky with blood.
The last thing she remembered clearly was Grovebringer erupting into a massive tree trunk after she’d damaged it, its arrows being eaten and absorbed and sprouting into trees out of what had been Grovebringer’s trunk.
Then there were a few flashes of her running across the roof as the freakishly growing tree tore it apart behind her, a flash of pain, and a flash of her legs dangling as she clung to a rising branch, and that was it.
Her stomach lurched, and she tried to vomit again, but nothing came out this time. Then it lurched again, and she realized it wasn’t her stomach, but the branch itself.
Then Talia was tumbling through the air. Somehow, she forced mana into her kinetic anchor dagger. Her belt dug hard into her side as it stopped her fall, and the catch holding the dagger in her belt didn’t break.
For a long while, she just hung in midair in the rain, dry heaving and watching the tree collapse in on itself, as though it had never truly been bound together. It just… crumbled into a vast, broken pile, as though the tree had been more dry rot inside than actual wood.
She wasn’t sure how long she hung there, just looking.
She couldn’t see where Hugh and Godrick had been. That whole section of the city was just gone, vanished beneath the great pile of sawdust and splinters.
She kept looking, kept searching for them. Trying to spot Godrick’s armor, or Hugh’s annoying green spellbook. But the city below her seemed to be flickering in and out of reality at random, and she turned her eyes away from it, nauseated.
When her stomach was settled a bit, Talia clenched her legs, took a deep breath, and stopped channeling mana into her dagger. Just for a moment, but it was enough time for her to spin about to face the center of the city. She didn’t fall nearly so far this time, and her belt didn’t dig in nearly as hard.
It still took her a while to regain control of her stomach, and for her vision to stop swimming.
When she finally forced her eyes open again, she wished she hadn’t.
Artur’s armor was burning rubble in one of the larger canals, two of the remaining dragons and countless Havathi mages were moving in on the Exile Splinter, and another of the dragons was doing a sweeping patrol of the outskirts of the city.
The fourth dragon was flying straight in her direction, accompanied by dozens of mages. More likely, they were coming to examine the collapsed tree, but it seemed almost certain they’d spot her hanging in midair.
Talia choked back a sob. She doubted Artur could have survived the destruction of his armor. If she had to guess, Alustin had probably gone down fighting to protect the Exile Splinter. And Hugh and Godrick…
They had almost certainly been crushed by the aftermath of Grovebringer’s destruction, and it was all her fault.
Sabae, at least, might still be alive. Talia hadn’t seen or heard anything of her the whole battle, but she was by far the fastest of them, and the best equipped to escape.
She briefly considered trying to fight, or maybe trying to lower herself down in jerks and stops to the ground, but she knew she wasn’t up to either. If she tried to lower herself with a levitation cantrip, she’d just set herself on fire.
She briefly considered just letting herself drop entirely, but couldn’t make herself do it.
Talia resigned herself to just hanging there.
When the clouds above her started glowing again, she started to laugh.
Maybe she should make a bet on whether the lightning or the Havathi would get her first.
Sabae hauled herself out of the canal and collapsed onto an Ithonian boat dock. Artur followed after, looking even more bedraggled than she did.
Even though Artur had collapsed his armor deliberately to help their escape, they’d nearly been crushed by the collapsing stone. Sabae was pretty sure she was going to have nightmares about dodging burning boulders falling through the water.
On top of that, navigating the canals and foundations of Ithos underwater with Artur stuck to her back with her shield had been absolutely exhausting.
The two of them had spent a couple minutes just catching their breath and staring up at the sky when a familiar face poked its way into Sabae’s field of view.
Normally, Alustin would be cracking a joke about them laying down on the job, or something else only funny to himself, but his expression now was grim.
“The Havathi have seized the center of the city, and several of their patrols are heading this way. We need to find the others and get out of here.”
“Where are the others?” Sabae demanded.
Alustin just pointed towards where the mysterious tree had been.
“Are they alright?” Artur asked.
Alustin hesitated, and something inside Sabae seized up.
“Alustin, are they alright? Is mah boy safe?” Artur demanded, climbing to his feet.
“Godrick’s fine,” Alustin said.
The only reason Sabae didn’t grab Alustin and shake him was that Artur did it first.
“What about Hugh and Talia?” Artur demanded.
Alustin shook his head. “Talia’s hurt, I’m not sure how bad. She’s in a relatively safe, albeit extremely precarious, situation. I still can’t track down Hugh. His spellbook must be blocking scrying near him still. He and Godrick got split up, somehow.”
“I can go ahead and—” Sabae started, but both Artur and Alustin shook their heads.
“We’re not splittin’ up again,” Artur said.
“And without my help, it’ll take you nearly as much time to find the others as it would for you to just go on foot with us,” Alustin said. “Besides, how much mana do you even have left in your reservoirs?”
Sabae wanted to argue, but she knew they were right. Even if she knew how to find them, she was running perilously low on mana— not to mention the fact that her mana reservoirs felt… sore, somehow, from repeated use of the windlode.
“Ah’ll need days ta’ refill mah mana reservoirs at this aether density,” Artur said. “Are yeh doin’ any better?”
Sabae couldn’t help but be a littl
e shocked by that— her reservoirs would probably refill within an hour or two at most.
Alustin shook his head. “Not by much. Every time I start to get a little mana stored up, I get into another fight. We’re going to have to depend on stealth and speed if we want to pull this off.”
“Lead on, then,” Artur said.
Alustin took off at a run, and they stumbled after him.
As the drake flew, it wasn’t far to the wreckage of the giant tree. As they ran, though, parts of Ithos began flickering in and out of the pocket dimension almost at random. They had to turn and detour to avoid many of those areas, but when they had to enter it, they couldn’t travel at much more than a brisk walk without tripping on shadows or risking getting separated from the city in either the pocket dimension or the lake.
Even before it had been wrecked by the battle, however, Ithos’s layout was hardly designed for traveling in straight lines.
Something clicked for Sabae then. That odd layout the canals had that she’d seen from above…
“Ithos is a spellform!” she gasped out.
Alustin and Artur both glanced back at her as they ran.
“The canals are laid out to form spellforms!” Sabae said.
Alustin just nodded. “That… makes a lot of sense. Mostly defensive spellforms, I’d imagine. I’ve heard of great powers designing cities like that before, but only a couple have ever been built. It’s hardly a city plan that works alongside the actual needs of citizens, so you could only really do it in a city built from the ground up, and liches are usually the only ones who do that. And defensive spellforms on that scale would almost certainly interfere with the functioning of a lich’s demesne.”
“Less talkin’, more runnin’!” Artur barked out.
Godrick couldn’t find Hugh in the rubble.
He’d barely made it down to the ground safely. He’d had to shed his armor and use a levitation spell to land, but his mana reservoirs weren’t as absurdly massive as Hugh’s— getting to the ground safely had just about drained him, and he’d still hit hard. He didn’t know if his ankle was broken or badly strained, but he’d needed to encase it in stone to walk on it. He’d also sprained his wrist, but not badly.
“Hugh!” Godrick yelled.
His voice was almost immediately swallowed up by the storm.
He only stopped searching when he saw the dragon approaching from the city center.
At which point Godrick simply sighed and sat down on a nearby branch, itself the size of a tree trunk, and waited.
He could barely even tell the difference between the rain and his tears.
When the clouds started glowing again, Godrick considered finding someplace to shelter from the lightning, but he couldn’t even muster the energy to care, let alone stand up and get moving.
He just sat there, watching the dragon approach and the light build in the clouds.
Most of all, he watched the rubble of his father’s armor burn in the canals.
Godrick only noticed there was something off about the glow in the clouds a moment before his vision was blinded by a blast of light brighter than any he’d ever seen before in his life. Brighter than the lightning strikes, brighter than Hugh’s starbolts or flare spells.
But that wasn’t what startled him the most.
It was the glow in the clouds just before the flash of light that really caught his attention.
It had been clearly, unmistakably blue.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Scene of the Crime
When Sabae finally cleared the glare from her eyes after the explosion of light, it was just in time to see Kanderon descend from the clouds.
The sphinx’s great crystal wings glowed far brighter than the moon or stars, bright enough to tint the whole city a vivid, electric blue. They didn’t flap at all, simply spread out to either side of the massive sphinx like some vast geometric pattern that held some deeper meaning that Sabae wasn’t meant to understand.
The meaning of the expression on Kanderon’s face, however, she could understand with ease. It wasn’t a complex emotion revealed by it, nor a subtle one.
It was wrath.
Then Sabae realized something else.
She couldn’t see the dragon that had been approaching.
Sabae spun up her wind armor with some of the little mana she had left, and windjumped up onto a nearby roof, against the protests of Artur and Alustin.
It only took her a moment to see what she was looking for.
Or, the remains of what she was looking for.
The remains of the dragon had crashed into the city far short of the collapsed tree. If Sabae hadn’t known what it was already, she never would have identified it as a dragon. It barely even resembled meat. It was, for the most part, just ash and char.
There was absolutely no sign of the Havathi fliers that had been accompanying it.
Kanderon came to a halt, hovering a few hundred feet above the city. Sabae could make out a small number of figures hovering beside her and standing on her back, but she couldn’t make out any details.
The sphinx’s tail twitched back and forth as she surveyed the city, almost like a housecat about to pounce. Coming from Kanderon, however, the gesture was far more ominous.
The three remaining dragons and the Havathi were frantically preparing for battle, but none moved to attack.
Sabae couldn’t help but notice that the city had ceased its flickering into and out of the pocket dimension entirely at this point.
The standoff continued for several minutes, during which time Artur and Alustin made it onto the roof as well.
Finally, three Havathi fliers approached Kanderon, stopping a few hundred feet away. Sabae could almost swear the woman in the center appeared to be leaving ghostly afterimages behind her.
“Valia,” snarled Alustin.
Sabae glanced at the paper mage, and just for an instant, glimpsed an expression of pure rage on his face. It was gone in the blink of an eye, however, and he just stared woodenly up at the fliers.
“You shouldn’t be here, Kanderon,” the woman— Valia, apparently— called out. Her voice was magically amplified, loud enough that Sabae could hear it even over the storm.
“And yet, I am,” Kanderon said.
“This is a violation of the agreement, Kanderon. You were to keep to the west of the Skyreach Range, and our great powers to its east.”
Kanderon said nothing, she simply stared at Valia.
Sabae heard a growl and she turned to see that Alustin’s look of rage had returned. If she didn’t know better, she would swear that this time, however, it was aimed at Kanderon. It vanished again, however, once Valia resumed speaking.
“Do you really think that anyone trusts you enough to let you reclaim the Exile Splinter, Kanderon? Do you think anyone trusts you not to use it again, simply to further your own ends? Would you really have the audacity to do so, right here at the scene of your ancient crime?”
“Yes,” Kanderon said.
There was a long, drawn-out silence at that.
“If you go through with this, Kanderon, this will be the end of our treaty with you. Do you really think the great powers will unite against us if we move against you now?” Valia asked.
Kanderon started to laugh. It was a cruel laugh, one that raised the hairs on the back of Sabae’s neck, but the sphinx seemed genuinely, truly amused.
“Little one, nothing would please me more than if your masters were to end the treaty. It would solve so many problems for me. Moreover, you’ve done me quite the service, and shown me how little your masters trust even their most loyal servants with full knowledge of the treaty’s contents.”
“This will have consequences, Kanderon! You can’t simply…”
Valia trailed off as Kanderon snarled. Then, to Sabae’s shock, Kanderon’s wings began to grow. Dozens of new crystals seemed to simply begin phasing into existence, much like Ithos itself had done earlier. The crystals grew larger and lar
ger as the wings extended farther out, some the size of houses. Many of the crystals left Sabae with the uncomfortable impression that she was only seeing the tip of an iceberg, and that far, far more of the crystal rested just out of sight.
Within moments, Kanderon’s wings had expanded in size until they dwarfed her massive body several times over. They slowly curled in towards the tips, and some of the outermost hovering crystals had the appearance of great spines, filled with a light that was almost painful to look at.
“Leave,” Kanderon said.
She didn’t say it in an angry tone. Kanderon didn’t make any threats, didn’t move at all. Nor did the mages hovering around her. Her facial expression was almost bland, the snarl having vanished off her face.
She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to.
Without saying another word, Valia and her escorts turned and flew back to the Havathi lines.
Sabae thought Godrick was going to crush her with his embrace. Not in the metaphoric sense, but in the sense that her ribs were actually hurting, and she was pretty sure she’d have to use her healing or suffer bruises from it sort of way.
She made a mental note to check with Artur later to see if he needed any healing— Godrick had given him an even larger hug, apparently having been convinced that his father had died when his armor was destroyed.
Not long after that, several of the mages that had arrived with Kanderon landed beside them. Sabae only recognized one of them— Emmenson Drees, Hugh’s terrifying spellform construction teacher.
Another, a little old woman, shorter than Talia, looked vaguely familiar, but Sabae couldn’t place her.
“Meet the Librarians Errant,” Alustin said, waving generally at the arriving mages. “Not all of them, of course, but it is a rather small order.”
Sabae couldn’t care less about that at the moment. One of the Librarians Errant was carrying Talia, who looked shockingly tiny and frail. She had, apparently, been injured and dangling from her dagger in midair for some time.