“He has lived a dark life of doubt and havoc,” Scammander said heavily. “This is going to be your best chance to die. I’m not even sure if I am going to live through this.”
He pulled out the draft of the new spell Johannes had given him back at Hexameter’s.
Scammander stared down at the closed book the same way a suicide stares over the edge of a cliff right before jumping. “I’m not going to fight a madman confined by the limits of reason,” he scowled and then opened the book.
I felt my mind melt, like a beam of hot light had split it in half and left it gaping open.
And then the wicked ramblings of Johannes Dubitandum seized me and nothing made sense anymore.
The doors to the library flung open. Bats and enchanted books raced through the air, swirling through the mansion’s many apartments followed by a macabre masque of mummies and old skeleton’s carrying candelabras. Finally Johannes’s headless wife emerged in a dowdy wedding gown, stiff arms stretched out before her with long fingers dripping with a strange purple poison.
Follow me, the voice said in my head as his wife passed by.
Suprisingly, nothing had tried to kill us yet. I was slightly disappointed.
We followed her down a dark and narrow hall and into a vast room with wood paneling and high ceilings. Johanns Dubitandum, the potentate of this topsy-turvy nether kingdom, was sitting upside down on the ceiling and glowering. Behind the deranged sorcerer was a giant oil painting of himself and two crossed pistols with handles made of cursed obsidian wood.
The skeletons and mummies lined the walls holding candelabras. I could hear the books and bats soaring through the mansion, beating their black wings and brown pages as they soared up cold staircases, whirled around empty rooms, and sped through dark halls, but they were nowhere to be seen.
“Scammander I have always found you puzzling,” he mused from the chair. “You are the only living thing I have never wanted to kill.”
And that proved, without a doubt, that Johannes Dubitandum was insane.
Scammander stood quietly in front of the upturned throne.
“Tell me then, when did you forget your massive learning? And why did you think you could hide it from your oldest teacher?”
I felt more hopeful than ever after hearing that question, for I was almost assured I was going to die. Johannes knew.
“I am here to negotiate for Evander’s life, should I lose the impending duel.”
And that is when things started to deteriorate.
Johannes waved his hand. “Evander will learn magic,” he snickered maniacally.
“Wait, does that mean you’re actually not going to kill me?” I asked, suddenly filled with dread.
Evander, the voice whispered in my head once more. Look.
When I turned my head to the side, suddenly Johannes’s headless bride stuck her long dripping finger into my neck. There was no pain, for I lost all sensation. I could feel nothing at all, and could move no part of my body.
For a moment the two wizards stared at each other in complete silence.
“You murdered Wynthrope!” Johannes screamed. “You murdered Wynthrope!” Johannes screamed again as he pounded his fist on the chair. “You murdered Wynthrope!” he screamed once more as hot tears began to roll down his cheeks. “Wynthrope was mine to kill!” he screamed again, spit flying out of his mouth as he rose up out of his usurped chair.
Scammander scoffed. “My talons have plucked the manes of fiercer lions.”
“There is no wizard more fierce and fearsome than me Scammander. Your death will secure my great oil painting on the wall at Hexameter’s.”
Scammander didn’t flinch. “There is no place in this unlimited firmament that you could ever kill me. There is not even an alternate reality in these manifolded universes that you could ever devastate me with magic. And so Johannes Dubitandum, I hope your wife has a black dress, since she has no brow to wear a tiara of cypress. For I have come to destroy your home, to lay waste to your body and bride. And if you have any secret children, I promise their death too. For my name is Scammander, the greatest wizard of all time. And as the greatest wizard of all time, like Time, ruin and destruction and desolation follow wherever my sandals tread. And they have tread into your home, and will soon tread across your broken brow.”
And with that everything went black.
Immediately horrible whispers trickled down the walls of the upside-down room, and crept slowly down the back of my neck, raising each individual hair with their haunted stalking.
Suddenly Johannes screamed as he was illuminated in pale purple flames. Layers upon layers of arcane whispers draped themselves across the room like a shadowy gauze and wrapped around my boiling mind, causing my eyes to flutter. Words that could not fit in the mouth of a normal creature scudded through the shadows; cryptic syllables beat the air on leathery batwings; Johannes disappeared for a moment, only to emerge from the darkness once more, limned in the stretching purple fire.
Across the room Scammander appeared suddenly, irradiated by a white glow as Ezekiel hovered over him, breathing a strange dust upon the elf. My brother scowled then whipped the shotgun from his robes and began firing at Johannes’ familiar, but the emerald skull was too fast, dodging every blast. Ezekiel’s breath continued to pour out of his skinless nostrils and mouth, bathing Scammander in glowing white dust. Scammander tucked the weapon away, looked across the room to Johannes, then began moving.
The two glowing sorcerers sped around the dark room like riotous comets playing across a starless evening aether.
Johannes shot to the center of the room, seizing the strategic position. The warlock pinched his fingers together on each hand and thrust them forward as he aimed at the running elf. A tiny yellow dot appeared on Scammander’s cheek, then shot up to his temple as he ran along the wall. Johannes began to shake and stumble as thick yellow light coalesced around his left hand. The thin yellow dot on Scammander’s temple trembled and jumped, bouncing off his face onto the wall, leaping around on the wood paneling as Johannes struggled to maintain control of the huge mana.
Scammander stutter-stepped then froze in place as a blinding yellow beam seared through the wall a pace in front of him. As soon as the beam faded away Scammander resumed his running.
Johannes was already casting his next spell.
Dubitandum held his left forearm across his chest, then set the wrist of his right hand across it as he stretched his two right fingers out and began snapping his wrist back and forth. Tiny magic missiles shot out of his fingers as Scammander scrambled across the room. Ezekiel whirled around in front of Scammander and the color of his magical breath suddenly changed to green, enshrouding Scammander in a thick emerald dust. Scammander began to move as though he was mired in a pit of weighty mud and heavy sand.
I braced myself for the death of the greatest wizard of all time.
Johannes’s whole frame shook as hundreds of long-tailed fireballs spewed out of his fingertips, curling around each other and hurtling towards the elf.
Existence screamed and I shuddered as a dark portal to a brilliant tapestry of stars ripped open next to Scammander. He tucked his legs up under him and flipped in slow motion, but every single burning fireball crashed into his thin frame. Rather than incinerating him, they kept passing deeper and deeper into Scammander, who seemed so faint as to be merely a moving outline of the glowing galaxy. When the fireballs had vanished deep into the gleaming galaxy, the elf reappeared vividly. Scammander grabbed a stunned Ezekiel, and hurled the sinister skull into the cosmos as the gate collapsed behind it.
Scammander shot a quick glance at Johannes, then dug into himself and began running even more desperately across the room. As the magical dust drifted off him he began to slowly fade back into the soft shadows.
The warlock cast with renewed fury. Short, slender lines of red light sped after a vanishing Scammander, hissing into the old wooden walls, illuminating his racing ankles until one finally caug
ht him right in the shoulder and lit him up like a blazing winter beacon.
Scammander grimaced as the flare engulfed him, wrapping and thrashing around him in huge ruby flames.
But he kept running.
And Johannes—Johannes kept casting.
Die, the sinister whisper flayed my mind and sounded like skin being slowly peeled off a victim.
Suddenly a second, faint Johannes knelt down while the other hurled wild sorcery at the fleeing Scammander. The diluted Johannes drew a circle around the standing one and began to etch mystical characters across the floor in a pale blue chalk. Scammander looked up as he raced along the wall, making his way toward me.
The crouching mage had completed the first circle as Scammander sprinted along the wall across from me.
Get here, I thought, staring at my fleeing brother. I turned my head back to the center of the dark room and began to focus on the second Johannes, who I prepared to rush once free.
He began working in reverse, writing esoteric symbols backwards as he completed the second inner circle. The standing sorcerer stretched his fingers which shed their skin; a moment later an ebony bladed scimitar hovered in front of Johannes and he grabbed it with both unskinned hands. A swarm of black spiders seeped out of the scimitar’s handle rushing all over the mage’s fingers, eager for flesh, finding none, but biting anyways.
The wizard steadied the blade in front of him and planted his feet. The ebony blade began to sweat with dull green fluid. Johannes brought it in so close that some of the drops fell to his jacket, eating through the black leather. Then he began swinging. Splinters flew out of the wall across from the warlock as the magical blows chopped all around Scammander.
Dubitandum looked down at his fainter doppelganger for a second then held the blade away from himself once more and aimed at Scammander. This time he pumped poisonous globes out of the dark scimitar. The green orbs sailed across the room, dripping jungle toxins along the ceiling which hissed as the balls passed under it. Even though Johannes was leading his shots they were too slow, splashing behind my brother’s illuminated trail and dissolving into the wall.
Then I realized—Scammander wasn’t running for me, he was running after Johannes’s wife, who still had her finger in my neck.
The second warlock vanished right as it completed the third circle of eldritch runes, which was exactly the same time that the engulfed Scammander hurled himself into Johannes’s headless wife.
Johannes screamed.
Scammander screamed.
I screamed as Scammander and two other bodies crashed into me and the magical fire whipped across my body, boiling my flesh, even as the healing spell regenerated fresh hide and new fur. The pain ceased almost as soon as it started, but stinking smoke filled my nostrils.
Peering through the brilliant red halo of the enflamed Scammander, I looked up to see one Johannes returned to the center of the room holding his smoking, headless bride and a second scrubbing the runes off the floor, ruining his spell and saving his wife in the process.
Scammander huffed and darted away, resuming his sprint without even looking over at me.
The second Dubitandum took his wife by the hand and both vanished. Johannes turned towards me, his jacket still smoking slightly and lifted me to my feet.
He’s already tired, I heard followed by a dark snicker. He’s unfit.
The intensity of the warlock’s magical assault increased and he now began to cast with even more fury and aggression. Rumbling storm clouds gathered around his clenched fists, and I could see streaks of silver lightning flashing within. Johannes spat, looked behind his shoulder at me, and then darted out after Scammander, surrendering the safety of the center of the room, giving chase, fighting with full ferocity.
The positioning duel continued once more as the illuminated sorcerers crisscrossed one another like planets, each trapped within the other’s orbit, then teleported across the room to opposite corners in brilliant staccato flashes. They circled and strafed one another as the enchanting light stretched and shrank around their bodies and billowing robes, mixing together when they got too close.
The walls flashed and the air hissed with clashes of wild magic.
Scammander was fighting back.
Suddenly Johannes shot himself far away from Scammander, who immediately took a knee and flung his forearms up like he was in a fist fight. No sooner had raised his arms than he was pummeled with huge, silver meteors of mana. Primordial thunder punctuated each massive magic missile as it careened into the illuminated sorcerer.
Scammander winced and turned his face away from the silver light as his hair blew back in a gleaming, undulating stream. Each blast rocked his arms up and down from the shock of the tremendous magical force, peeling skin off which regenerated. The blasts came faster and faster until one slammed into my brother, throwing his arms open and driving him into the wall. Raw adrenaline forced him up and got his arms in front of him only to be nailed again. When the onslaught halted Scammander jumped up and began running once more, speeding across the room along the walls.
Across the room Johannes trembled and wiped the sweat off his brow. His chest was heaving from the draining exercise of the wizardly contest. He dropped to a knee—and almost to the floor—but thrust his fist into the wood. He took a hard breath then slammed his fist into the floor and popped up.
I looked into the madman’s eyes—
I saw the ferocity of a champion.
I saw the dauntlessness of a man who fights with no limits.
I saw the recklessness of a man who fights because he has nothing left in this world.
I saw the madness of a man who lost the love of his life.
I saw the confidence of a darkly trained wizard who had slaughtered other highly schooled sorcerers in duel after duel after duel.
Yes, came Johannes’s dark whisper, which slithered across the folds of my slick brain, curled and wound its coils along the crevices, and sent my mind reeling.
Again Dubitandum rushed after Scammander with renewed aggression. He seemed to fight with even more vigor, like he was trying to surpass his limits. Once more the great shadowy room was illuminated with flares of vivid light which came faster and faster as spell and counterspell collided.
A bold beam of flame erupted from Johannes’s hand until he lost control of the spell and fell to the ground, the magic blast vanishing immediately. Johannes sat trembling and muttering on the floor, until he curled up and began rocking back and forth in the fetal position.
Scammander came on fast, pulling out the shotgun, blasting away at the fallen wizard, pinning him to the floor. When Scammander closed in on Johannes he bellowed as he fired the killing shot, but the other wizard rose up as the bullets bounced off him. A hidden wand dropped from the deranged warlock’s sleeve as he cackled and lurched forward, sending a rapid volley of shimmering blue lights into Scammander’s chest. Scammander was thrown backwards and screamed as glass pots popped out of his sleeves and enchanted vials tumbled out of his robe, bouncing across the floor.
Johannes charged forward, but stopped suddenly. The dark wand fell from his hand and the sorcerer collapsed on all fours, retching and arching his back with empty burping. But Dubitandum recovered and set about kicking the potions away from Scammander’s clutching fingers, stomping on others, cracking glass and spilling precious elixirs. When he turned to face Scammander, his younger apprentice was holding the wand. Scammander flicked his wrist, but nothing happened. The wand was empty of its magical charges.
An arrow of negative light shot from Johannes’s open palm. The slender comet of shadows hissed as the curse was dissolved by unnatural symbols which flew off Scammander like starry sea-spray. Scammander returned the volley with his own shaft of shade and it too disintegrated around Johannes in gleaming rune-spray, like spilling diamonds in the sunlight.
Again both wizards faded and appeared in two, three, and four places at once, always staring at each other. One Scammander appear
ed on the ceiling, another, slightly fainter, on top of a globe; a third, even fainter, in a far off corner of the room. Six faint Johannes’s scattered all across the room came together instantly next to the Scammander in the corner; Johannes thrust both of his hands in Scammander’s face. The elf vanished as thick beam of ruby light rent a whole in the mansion, revealing the terrible meandering abyss outside. There was a loud ripping noise as another gate opened below Johannes Dubitatum’s feet revealing the stars and an endless night sky of some other universe. Johannes’s long black jacket tossed about his boots as he hovered over the opening, peering around the room while laughing.
Where had Scammander gone?
A flicker of light zipped across my eyes and I noticed that Johannes had ceased laughing and was backing into a corner, eyes nervously darting left and right. He pulled a glass bottle from his jacket pocket, popped the cork and gulped the steaming potion.
Silence.
I thought I saw the speck of light somewhere across the room.
The mad warlock spiked the bottle into the floor and the glass shards fell to the ceiling. Next he spiked an amethyst and emerald into the floor, and as they shattered and began sprinkling to the ceiling he doused his wrists in their dust. Glowing purple and green wobbling ovals trembled and tumbled around his hands and wrists. There was a small buzzing sound and a deep concussion as the entire room exploded, coming apart in long bands and dust and splinters, each separated by the gaping abyss outside. As the bands pulled away from each other and everything was sucked out into the great abyss, I saw Scammander floating under Johannes blasting him in the stomach with the shotgun.
But each loud blast vanished in a flash of purple and green light, and suddenly the room and everything in it was back together, perfectly untouched. Then the ceiling ripped off and a howling wind swept into the room as each sorcerer tried to hurl the other down toward the ceiling.
The mad cackling started again, and again I could hear Dubitandum’s voice inside my head.
Splatterism: The Disquieting Recollections of a Minotaur Assailant: An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse Page 35