by Harry Nix
Alex willed himself to stop healing. He was partially successful—the mana drain slowed but didn’t stop entirely. It was enough though for his pain bar to begin to fill. The moment he judged he had enough for his homebrew healing spell, he cast it. The clawed hand he had inside Stephen was where the healing flame appeared.
The young necromancer let out a cry of pain as Alex carefully withdrew his finger, sealing the wound as he went. Then he removed the others one by one, healing up the holes.
The surface wounds were quickly sealed but Alex kept feeding the dark flame, running it over Stephen’s body. He had no idea if it would provide deep healing, the way Juno’s spell did. He carefully moved to Stephen’s side and used a claw to shred his clothes off him. Instead of robes, Stephen was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. The t-shirt had a laughing earth joyfully spinning around a grinning moon. It made him look painfully young.
Alex forced himself to look over at the other dead bodies. Nine in total, plus Stephen made ten, one for each drone. All disposable foot soldiers.
He shook his head, feeling the fury rising again. Why send six possibly undead soldiers with guns and silver bullets and then back them up with kids barely out of high school? There surely must have been other more powerful necromancers involved to reanimate the dead.
Alex let out a grunt as a wound opened up on his arm. He’d exhausted all his mana and the black flame on his finger stuttered as the pain went dry.
“Are you injured anywhere else?” Alex asked, letting go of the spell. The immediate relief was bliss, and Alex wasn’t sure he’d be able to cast his healing spell again even if he wanted to. He was more injured than he’d first realized.
“Something hurts inside,” Stephen said. He had some color back to his face but he still wasn’t breathing well.
Alex tried willing the healing to slow again so he could help Stephen, but nothing happened. He cast his gaze around, trying desperately to think of a solution. Wherever he was, he was alone and who knew how long before his pack arrived, or even if they would. Trees surrounded him but as he and April had discovered, his ability to draw on nature was restricted to taking her to bed. She could sit in the forest like a wild earth child and pull magic through the nature around her, but Alex thus far had found it impossible.
His gaze came to rest on a headless body, and he felt unease gather in his stomach.
There was plenty of dead around here and he had a mana bar just waiting for it.
Stephen’s eyes rolled back in his head as he coughed, pink foam on his lips. Alex pushed his worries aside and staggered to the nearest dead body. Since he’d pulled death though a recently killed chicken, he hadn’t tried it again. He’d used up the tiny sliver of it casting his ridiculously powerful Know Thyself 100x, which had revealed far more than Alex had intended to find.
Alex put his hand on the body, again forcing himself to look at it. It had been a man, barely a man, slender and Alex couldn’t help but feel an ache in his heart. He’d murdered this boy. If he’d come out of his wild state earlier, he wouldn’t have killed any of them, unless it was necessary.
He pushed all this down, putting it with the fury and began drawing magic through the dead body.
It came easily, like a faucet had been turned on and Alex realized it was because there were so many dead in the same place. They’d punctured holes through to the magic, like a water balloon stabbed with a pin multiple times. He filled three-quarters of his death mana in under ten seconds before the flow slowed and then stopped. He felt there was more there, but it was outside his reach, exceeding his skill to pull on it.
Staggering back to Stephen he saw he was down to quick gasps, surely moments from death.
Hoping his healing spell was more than surface touch, he cast it, drawing on death to fuel it.
The flame that shot out of his fingertip was a good foot long and deep red but focused, like a welding torch. The coldness was deeper than before and painful, but Alex ignored it. He thrust his finger against Stephen’s stomach. The flame flared out for a moment before piercing through his skin, opening a keyhole wound.
It only lasted ten seconds or so, the flame eating up the mana and then extinguishing. As it died and retracted from the wound, it sealed it up, leaving only a scar.
Alex found himself swaying on his knees beside Stephen, his head muzzy. He realized he’d been staring at one of the bodies that was missing a leg. Odd thoughts of pulling more death mana through it had been echoing in his mind.
“Alex!” Nia called out in the distance.
He turned his head, blinking slowly as though waking from a deep sleep. Nia was with some of his pack members. Juno was riding on the back of a werewolf.
Soon they were at his side, Juno pressing her hands against him to cast heal. He mumbled something about casting the spell on Stephen first but then his words stopped working. For a moment he was on the grass beside Stephen. The necromancer was still alive. Then the cool darkness washed over him and Alex happily allowed himself to sink into it.
3
Alex sat in the cold conference room alone, another ring in his hands, staring into the middle distance, ignoring it, the pile of jewelry in front of him and the results of his ruined attempts to enchant experiments to the side. He was in human form, the chill of the room biting into him, but he didn’t shift to hybrid, where he’d be covered in fur and warm. He wasn’t sure if he was punishing himself.
It was the day after the attack and things were, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked.
Utterly, utterly fucked.
It turned out the drones were carrying three forms of silver in their boxes. There were curls of it, scraped off a silver bar. They were a problem but large enough to easily spot and pick up by any werewolf with gloves. There was silver glitter, tiny flecks that thanks to their size had fallen pretty much straight down from the drones exploding. As a result, there were ten six-to-twelve-foot diameter circles of the village that glittered. The only way to remove it was to scrape up any dirt with shovels and bag it for disposal and to wipe down surfaces carefully.
The final form was silver dust. Alex had seen the clouds of it hanging in the air before he’d gone wild and apparently it had taken its time to drift down, spreading out into a diffuse cloud as it went.
It was close to impossible to remove completely.
Alex had awoken on the way back after Juno had cast her healing spell on him. He’d returned to the village to the sight of werewolves in breathing masks and eye protection with bright yellow gloves up to their elbows carefully wiping down buildings and scraping off the top layer of dirt.
April was on hand casting Purify over and over as werewolves encountered silver dust, the fine particles easy to breathe in. Although Alex was still healing, he took over, giving April the chance to return to the worst of the injured.
Alex had made the mistake of stepping on to contaminated soil with his bare feet and had been instantly burned. His leap away had stirred up silver dust, which he’d then breathed in. Purify had pulled the silver from his body but not before a few moments of sheer agony as the tiny particles burned his throat and lungs.
The necromancers had salted, or silvered, the earth.
Although Alex felt like he’d gone past rage into some deep calm on the far side, he involuntarily growled.
His pack were enraged and even here, far away from most of them he could feel the pull of the pack on his blood and body. They wanted bloody vengeance and he couldn’t think of many good reasons they shouldn’t have it.
According to Nia, the worst thing anyone could do was to break the truce of the Call, a sort of werewolf gathering. The punishment for such a break was the death of the entire offending pack, down to the last child, wiped from history.
The second worst thing was to silver the earth.
Apparently, it could take months to remove the silver dust and in some cases, it made land uninhabitable by werewolves entirely. Packs without access to any form of P
urify, either from a ring or friendly witch would simply abandon the polluted area.
That was shortly before they went on a violent rampage against those who attacked them.
One of the werewolves shot in the head had died, despite their best efforts to keep her alive. Her name had been Bish. Alex had learned she was single with no partner or children and some small shameful part had been relieved it had been her and not one of the parents of the six children now in his pack.
The second werewolf shot, Gem, was still alive but unconscious. Despite Juno and April’s best efforts, she hadn’t awoken and apparently healing spells were no use—all wounds that could be found had been healed. Whatever had happened to her brain would require time now to recover.
Despite the death and the likelihood that Gem would never awake, it was almost as if the pack was far more enraged about the silver.
This led to the next aspect of utterly fucked: they now had a prisoner, Stephen.
The young necromancer had survived thanks to Alex’s healing spell and then further treatment by Juno.
It had been lucky Juno had come after Alex because she was the only one who’d stopped the werewolves ripping Stephen to pieces. From what he’d heard, she’d even had to shout Nia down and, in the end, had summoned a fireball in her hand to back the pack down.
Stephen was now mage-cuffed in one of the upper rooms of the main building and currently only Juno and April were allowed to guard him. Nia had confessed it wasn’t safe for her to guard Stephen and it wasn’t likely any other pack member would be either. All she wanted to do was murder him.
Even Esme and Lydia had made some dark comments to Alex about the mage involving the words “flaying”, “maiming” and musings on the most agonizing castration method.
With gentle probing, Alex had learned a lesson many rulers had lost their heads for: the power of a ruler is delegated by the people and continues only with their consent, as quoted by Nia who had thrown what sounded like Latin at him again: Vindiciae contra Tyrannos.
There was a dichotomy there: he was Alpha and although his pack would argue with him and seek to sway his decisions, in the end, his word was law... right up until it wasn’t.
Nia hadn’t gone into it but there were some Alphas who’d woken up to find themselves alone and abandoned, king over nothing.
Alex had taken all this in and despite what his pack wanted (and what a significant part of him wanted), he was keeping Stephen alive for now. Alex was determined to extract every spell the kid had and every bit of knowledge he carried about his enclave, death magic and anything else supernatural.
There was a risk keeping Stephen alive and with the pack, but Alex knew it was the right move because there was the third strand of utterly fucked to deal with: he’d reached the limits of spell-writing he could achieve on his own.
Yes, he’d written a healing spell that, thus far, seemed to work, although long-term effects still remained to be seen. And he’d written a useless flame sword spell that projected not so much a sword but more a stick of fire from his finger.
But he was stuck. Juno and April had allowed him access to their spells, and he’d read over them countless times but there was virtually no point in reading a book written in a foreign language if you didn’t even have the basic syntax down.
Almost all of their spells were too large for him to copy across entirely, which meant he still had limited offensive spells. Flame Shield and hugging mages had worked a few times now, but it required he be up close and personal. He wanted to throw a fireball, grow vines from the dirt, hurl a lightning bolt.
Juno had described how witches learned magic—from their families first and then their coven, which often contained family members. As children they were taught the basic spells Alex had and then were required to practice them for years to improve their skills. Along the way they were taught more complex spells, other witches extracting favors in return for teaching them.
April’s education had been more formal but along the same lines: repeat the basic spells until your skill levels improved and then learn more complex spells suited to your nature.
From what they knew, mages followed the coven model, living in enclaves and often dedicating themselves to one form of magic. Most mages were born into their enclaves, following their parents, although some percentage of them switched and moved around.
Mages and witches had spellbooks, but they were precious things, heavily guarded and often locked in deep vaults, not least of all because spellbooks were inherently unstable. A spell written down passively drew magic and would eventually even melt steel, if it were not properly prepared. Some of the more ancient spellbooks were more like ticking timebombs, too unstable to open lest they detonate and wipe out an enclave.
Although Juno and April were excellent and (somewhat) patient teachers, there was a barrier even they couldn’t get past: time.
Magic users worked their whole lives to expand their skills, the mana cost per spell dropping as they improved so they could eventually hold more complex spells in their minds.
Alex was still so green he had that factory fresh “new car smell” about him. Although the space in his mind to hold spells had expanded a little, there was no way he was going to become a powerful mage without some serious hacking and compressed code writing. He didn’t have decades to work on slowly increasing his abilities.
At the thought of it, Alex brought himself back to the here and now. The pack had gathered every bit of jewelry in the village they could find. He now had a pile of rings, necklaces, bracelets and even two tiaras. They were all unenchanted, decorative only.
It had been on this pile that Alex had spent the day so far attempting to make a shield ring.
The concept was simple enough: first, the ring needed a spell to strengthen it so it could hold an enchantment.
The execution of this... not so much.
Alex put down the ring and picked up the shield ring he’d been studying. It had four spells on it. He wasn’t entirely sure but from his reading of it had a strengthening spell, a draining spell that fed off the wearer to slowly recharge it, a trigger spell that monitored the body for anything hitting it, and finally the shield itself that enveloped the body and once triggered, concentrated power in a specific location in fractions of a second.
Alex dropped that ring on the table and picked up another shield ring. Here was where he hit problems: although most of the rings held four separate spells, some only held three, a few six and in two cases, just one large spell that looked like four spells mashed together.
This ring held two spells and nothing in them was recognizable or similar to other rings. He hadn’t even been able to find a number to change in the code to enhance it, so it only held three charges.
It was, as Juno described, a “trash ring” that was only useful short-term.
It had a scent to it, burned sugar and vinegar, which Alex now knew meant it was made by a sloppy enchanter or by one who deliberately wanted to sign their work.
Alex dropped it on the table with a sigh and picked up the unenchanted ring again. He glanced over to his spell-casting screen and the limited space he’d been writing his homebrew strengthening spell. He decided to delete another line from it and saw the execute button remained lit up. It meant that at the very least the spell was castable, although it said nothing about the results.
Steeling himself and moving his stack of three metal mixing bowls stolen from the kitchen closer, Alex cast Analyze on the ring. It opened up a small window above it. As it was a simple unenchanted ring it only showed basic information: weight, metal type, diameter and so on.
Alex then focused on the small window and cast Analyze again, charging it up with a dose of pain to open another window. This one held only a blinking cursor. Moving quickly, he copied his spell across in pieces. He was improving at this at least—now he could copy across about ten percent each time.
The space on the ring was tiny but he managed to fit his s
pell into it. Although running Analyze like this was draining his mana, he kept the window open, reading over the code again and wondering if there was another way to do this. Each time now had been the same: drop in the code, close it up, feel a jolt as it compiled itself and then toss it under the metal bowls where it would shortly melt, break, or detonate.
It was like the action of strengthening the ring was in fact drawing on it too much and destroying it.
April and Juno couldn’t help him. Although April used rings, she’d never made them herself, their creation feeling antithetical to her natural spirit. Juno was on board with making rings but had never done so either. She was a Chaos Witch and her rising and falling magic level made enchanting impossible.
Alex was staring at the code, wondering if Stephen would have any information for him, when a new button shimmered into existence. It had execute written on it, the same as he saw on his spell screen, but this one was on the ring.
Alex frowned at it but then thought what the hell. He pressed it, tapping a finger on nothing in the air.
This time the code compiled and drew on his mana but the window stayed open. As the code compressed and shrank it became more like a mathematical expression. As usual it blurred through so quickly Alex only got a hint of the final ultra-compressed form before it vanished.
A new panel appeared on the ring.
Active Spells
????
“Strength spell,” Alex said and watched as the question marks changed to reflect his words.
The window where he’d dropped his code was now empty... and much larger, at least four times the size.
“Holy crap it’s not about strengthening the ring, it’s about expanding how much code you can drop on to it!” Alex said.
Then he suddenly remembered what he was doing. Holding a potentially explosive ring near his face was an incredibly stupid thing to do.