by HDA Roberts
Anyway, on with the show.
"Again, a problem for another day,” I said. “We were discussing why I came, even knowing what I did, weren't we?"
"Yes," he replied, his lips twisting into a scowl.
"Well, you're a Magician, too, what makes you think I'm really here?"
His eyes narrowed. I smiled.
He lashed out with a blast of kinetic energy.
The chair I was sitting on exploded into fragments, leaving my Illusion quite intact. It was a brand new sort, called a Six-Fold Glamour. Very complicated, very hard to cast, very power intensive. The damned thing had taken me weeks to master and a solid half-hour to cast, but it was capable of fooling all five senses and any esoteric detections short of a Mage Sight Spell (hence Six-Fold). You could even touch it, which was something no other Illusion could withstand.
I figured that nothing less would be able to get past Myrddin.
He darted to his feet, his eyes going wide.
"Gotcha," my Glamour said, the smile getting wider
You know, I think that the main reason I learned Illusion Magic in the first place was so that I could see the look on people's faces when they figured out that I'd played them like a one-stringed violin. It started off surprised, moved swiftly through enraged, all the way to embarrassed before trying to go back to enraged and sort of getting stuck half way there.
I loved that look.
Sure, it cost me when I put it on Cassandra, but it was usually worth it.
I was to discover, however, that it wasn't quite as worth it when dealing with the most powerful Magician on the face of the Earth.
Because he didn't like being fooled.
He didn’t like being fooled at all.
This next part was my fault. You see, I was safely in the Shadow Realm. I could have left at any time, safe and sound. I should have left, but did I?
No, I had to stay and, well... gloat.
To this day, I still cringe at the thought of having such a big taste of my own medicine.
"Oh, and that looked expensive," I said with a snigger in my voice, having my Glamour stand.
"You little bastard! Give me my knife!"
"You don't really think that I was stupid enough to bring that with me, do you?"
I was, though. It was in my satchel. I’d been desperate enough to hope that he really did have a way into Unseelie, and that had made me somewhat reckless.
"Yes, as a matter of fact, I do," he said, a predatory smile appearing on his face.
He pulled something out of his robe, a shiny, white orb, only a few centimetres across. He squeezed it hard. There was a great flash of white light and the world felt like it had been torn inside-out.
I should have remembered that he'd had a very long time to plan how he’d take my powers. I should have known he’d have a way to neutralise the First Shadow’s greatest weapon.
I went flying out of the Shadow Realm, right through the tiny Gate I was peering through, suddenly made huge before vanishing altogether. I hit his desk and caused it to capsize, sending papers and books everywhere, along with inkwells, quills, a vintage writing mat and rolls of what looked like vellum.
I rolled to my feet, scared out of my mind, because I was now trapped in a snow-globe with the most dangerous human being who ever lived.
"What was it you said earlier?” Myrddin said, sneering evilly. “Oh yes... gotcha."
Chapter 30
Bugger.
As someone who spent so much time arranging karmic irony for people, you can imagine how much I hated it when it happened to me.
Thankfully, Myrddin clearly hadn't had a chance to see any movies yet because, rather than calling on his Magic to wipe me from the face of the Earth, he opened his mouth to talk about it first.
I couldn’t blame him for that, he thought he had me. My Shadows were just gone, walled up behind whatever effect had cut off the Shadow Realm. That meant I was facing off against the most powerful Magician who’d ever lived with only Low Magic at my disposal.
You know, the stuff that coursed through my enemy like a second bloodstream?
Oh, and all of this in his Place of Power.
It would be like a Shadowborn Wizard turning up at Blackhold and challenging me to a duel; there weren't words to adequately describe how screwed I was.
But that didn't mean I was quite dead yet. Realistically, all I had to do was buy time. I hadn’t gone into this blind, nor had I been unprepared. Plus, I’d kept my phone on and a line open to Tethys; she’d have sent help the second the signal cut off.
So, I just needed to stay alive long enough for Kron to crack the shield open. Say... thirty minutes? Conservatively, that is.
But if I was going to live that long, I was going to have to play dirty. Very dirty. And I dared not let him get off the first shot.
So I cut off his head.
I used pure Will Magic, quick and crude, intersecting planes that cleaved through his neck even as he was preparing to talk at me. The head went shooting up, and I was out through his magnificent window before it could hit the ground, blasting the beautiful stained-glass into shards on my way into the open air.
Alas, there was no way even that could put Myrddin down. The best I could do in that moment was to distract him just enough to get out of the tower alive. It was ludicrously hard to learn (I’d looked into it), but a powerful (and skilful) enough Flesh Magician wasn't really that discomfited by the lack of a head. They could rearrange their bodies and spread their neural tissue around, turning themselves into one big, redundant brain.
A Fleshcrafter like Myrddin, with Archon-level control over his very matter and centuries of spare time to practice, would have to be burned down to almost the last cell to destroy him. There was no way I could summon that sort of fire on the fly, especially not when, you guessed it, Myrddin had that Affinity too.
Having an Affinity for an Element, or a type of energy, didn’t just make it easier to use, it also gave you a resistance to it. I, for example, was essentially immune to any Shadow-based attack, they just stopped working when they got close enough to my Aura. There was a limit, of course, but bearing in mind Myrddin’s Affinity for all Low Magic, he would be very difficult to even attack, much less injure, not with the resources I had available.
Suffice to say, not good.
Using a little Will, I pulled myself through the air until I could drop onto the roof of a turret. I looked around for additional threats, like Wardens with guns, but found the castle completely empty. I didn’t know if Myrddin wanted to keep his people safe or of he just wanted to murder me without potential witnesses, but it didn’t really matter. Either way, I wouldn’t have to pull my punches for fear of injuring bystanders (notice I didn’t say innocent bystanders...).
Before I could think of a next step, Myrddin exploded out of the citadel, far quicker than I’d hoped. His form was wreathed in fire, and lightning was coiled around his limbs. His head was already back where it had started, without so much as a trace of injury. He looked at me and smiled.
"Give me the Blade," he boomed, his voice seemingly coming from everywhere. It would have shattered my eardrums if I hadn't had a shield up (another lesson learned; thank you, Squidling).
"I told you I don't have it!"
"You think that I could spend fifteen hundred years with an artefact like that and not know when it's near? Give it to me!"
"Um... no?"
I'd say he threw fire, but that was a bad way to describe it. It was more like the air around me changed into fire and rushed at me, followed up by an absolute torrent of lightning that smashed into my shields and surrounded me with hostile energy.
I threw up hastily made Energy Sinks, and they took the strain off, but there was just so much heat! The tower around me even started to glow with it, to the point that the grounded lightning blasted shards of molten stone at my defences.
All that training with Cassandra made the difference in those awful moments. If it w
asn't for the fact that I'd started thinking through my duelling more carefully, I'd have run out of Magic pretty quickly.
Even so, I was in a losing battle. Even my best defence wasn’t impenetrable, and even if it was, I would still run out of power long before help could arrive.
Myrddin underlined that point by adding kinetic energy to the mix. Thankfully, that was just as I managed to cast my new and improved Dispel Cannon.
The original version had been a simple spherical construct that hovered above my head. It spat out little bullets of Force wrapped in Dispel, designed to tear apart an attacker's Spells and disperse the released energy. The new version was a pair of smaller generators; one of them threw out even smaller Dispels to deal with energy attack, and the other threw out tiny balls of exploding kinetic energy to deal with incoming matter. Far more efficient than what I'd been using, if somewhat more fiddly to cast.
The air between us filled with explosions as my Dispels met his attacks. I used the breathing room to reinforce my shields with additional layers and start gathering up all the waste energy that was floating around the place. Orbs of light, fire, electricity and kinetic energy started forming around me. The turret roof even stopped glowing as I leeched the heat from it.
I gathered all that power together into a single pin-sized Chaos Ball and launched it at Myrddin. Chaos Spells were those with multiple, disparate energy types crammed into them. They weren’t easy to cast or handle, but they could be very effective. A true Chaos Spell, with every sort of energy in it, was dangerous against just about anything.
Myrddin just laughed, and waved his hand. My attack was suddenly heading for a Will barrier of startling strength. It was a half dome, like a cup with the open end facing me. I knew that if my attack went in there, it would be wasted.
I wasn't having that, so I released my framework just before the Spell would have entered the Will-cup. The explosion was... big, to say the least. It wrecked the inner bailey wall below Myrddin and blasted more than a dozen priceless windows open, setting fire to everything on the other side of them. Myrddin even went flying back, his Will Shield flickering at the sudden pressure from an unexpected direction.
Myrddin... didn't like that very much.
In fact, I'd made him hopping mad. Not because I’d hurt him, though. My attack hadn't so much as singed his robes. No, he was mad because of all the collateral damage; all those fires that were spreading even as we fought, obliterating artefacts and historical treasures. If my life wasn’t on the line, I’d probably have been doing my best to stop that. There was no cheap crap in Camelot; everything had significance, and I’d set it on fire...
He roared with fury and pointed an accusing finger at me. In less than the blink of an eye, a Chaos Lance was searing its way towards my face. That thing wasn’t like mine. It was a true Chaos Lance, packed with every form of Newtonian energy; thermal, kinetic, gravitational, sonic, chemical, photonic, electrical... atomic. It emerged as a stream of white light and smashed through every shield layer I had.
Only a hasty Will shield prevented me from being cut in two, and even then I got an ugly set of burns across my legs and thighs, as well as what was likely a pretty nasty dose of radiation to the one area someone who wants a family shouldn't get one.
The deflected beam went into the turret underneath me and gutted the interior before blasting out the other side, taking a solid chunk of the supporting structure with it. I bellowed in pain, which quickly turned to a shout of surprise, as I found myself sliding down the roof of a suddenly collapsing tower.
Thinking quickly, I caught myself with Will and hid behind an Illusion, lowering myself to the ground behind a sturdy-looking building as the tower smashed into the courtyard. The impact spread flaming wood and molten stone everywhere, setting yet more things on fire. The dust cloud was immense, more than enough to hide me. I sent a Mirror-me running off to buy a little time and hopefully distract Myrddin while I came up with a better plan.
I was just thankful the bastard was still underestimating me. He hadn't even cast Mage Sight yet. Mind you, he may not even have known how; it was a relatively modern invention, only three hundred years old.
"Do you really think that trick's going to work on me twice?" that awful voice boomed through the air.
Then again, if you're the combined Primal, fully linked with your Affinities, you might be able to track a man by the heat he generated, the chemical energy in his cells, the electrical potential in his nerves... you get the idea.
I put up an even stronger Will shield and ran as I hastily rebuilt my defences. The Dispel cannons were still working, but I was running down the gaps between buildings, and there wasn't enough space for them to draw a bead on incoming attacks.
I heard laughter and felt rocks start to fall, great sections of fallen tower coming at me like meteors.
Literally like meteors, they'd been Magically accelerated and were on fire. They were moving so quickly that a tiny shard of rock was powerful enough to ricochet off a wall, smash through my slowly rebuilding shields and sink all the way into the meat of my thigh.
All that, and the thing couldn’t have weighed more than a pebble!
I screamed in pain and barely avoided falling to the ground, which would have presented a larger target for the falling debris. I cast a quick Triage Spell to keep the bleeding from doing too much damage, but this was a losing proposition now (as if it wasn’t before!). I had some more tricks up my sleeve, but this was beyond me.
I was losing.
Badly.
I'd never felt out-classed before. No matter what I'd gone up against, I knew that I had a chance at winning. I’d always been able to out-think, out-fight or simply overpower them, but I couldn't do that here. Myrddin was stronger, faster, older and vastly more experienced.
I was out of options, even the Blade couldn't help, I had no way of getting close enough to use it!
I was desperate; I want that on the record.
Still, what I decided to try was really stupid.
But, it was that or death.
I started pulling water from the air.
"Come out, little rabbit, I have your soup pot all ready for you," Myrddin said, taunting me. He'd likely come to the same conclusion about my chances that I had, the bastard.
I spotted a door and smashed it from its hinges with a plane of Will before sprinting into a wide barracks room that I hoped would give me a bit of cover. It was full of bunk beds and arming stands, many with the armour still there in pieces, half maintained or polished. I kept running.
I had a ball of water in my hand now, about nine inches across. I started stripping away the oxygen. That was simple enough, just run an electrical current through it and set up a Spell to collect one type of gas. As I emerged into a training chamber full of mannequins, I had a ball of hydrogen about three inches across spinning above my palm.
That was the easy part. Now I started manipulating gravity and heat, drawing both into the ball of gas by the barrel. The air froze around me, the walls and furniture seemed to sprout ice, the stone in the walls cracked, and everything suddenly weighed a fraction of what it had before.
I spotted a door that led away from Myrddin’s energy signature, but he smashed through a window before I could get to it, sending shards of hardened stone my way with enough energy to tear my shields down again. I released a massive burst of light and sound in his direction that left him reeling, swearing in some ancient Celtic dialect. I hadn't expected Sensory Overload to do too much to him, but it distracted him enough to get me out the door and back into the courtyard in front of the citadel, where the dust could help conceal me a very little.
Myrddin wasn’t distracted long, and came at me again, smiling now that I was back in the open. He may have wanted me dead, but this was still his home, and he didn't want to have to destroy it to kill me.
Me, well I had no such compunctions, not anymore.
The ball in my hand was glowing white hot, and the
hydrogen had been so horrifically compressed that it was now a superheated liquid.
Nearly ready.
Myrddin brought another Chaos Beam down on me, but my Dispel Cannons were ready this time, and they discharged their entire store of Force and Dispel to disrupt that beam enough to be stopped by my shields.
Through Mage Sight, I’d noticed that the Citadel's defences were the most powerful in the entire fortress; far more powerful than the Wards and Enchantments that had been on the bailey wall. As good a place as any to hide. I ducked behind the front door while Myrddin was preparing an even bigger Chaos Lance. I pulled all my shields in tight, as tight as I could get them, layered Will under them, shut down my Dispel Cannons... and threw my little ball of superheated, hyper-compressed hydrogen. When it was right in front of Myrddin, I removed all the atomic energy holding those little hydrogen nuclei together.
It wasn't quite a nuclear explosion... more like the abominable love child of a fusion reaction gone wrong and a fuel-air burst. On a nuclear scale, it wasn't even a particularly big bang, but it was enough to blow apart the inner bailey, destroy almost every building in it and overwhelm the defences on the front of the citadel enough to shatter the front walls, set fire to everything inside it and cause the floor above me to fall on my shielded head.
There was no fissile material or anything, I'd had to stimulate the nuclear bonds to break myself, but the resultant release of energy, heat and kinetic energy was quite spectacular. You might say that it blew Myrddin away...
Alas, only figuratively.
It actually burned him though; blasted his bones, soaked him in radiation, threw him across the courtyard and into the ruin of the buildings beyond, but he was still back on his feet in seconds. He practically threw himself out the rubble, naked as the day he was born, the last shreds of burned clothing falling from his body. That gave me a lovely view as all the wounds I'd spent so much energy inflicting regenerated. It didn’t even take a minute. It was as if nothing had happened at all.
Well, except for the horrific destruction of a vast number of irreplaceable artefacts and the fact that Myrddin was now very, very annoyed with me. That was different.