“Hey look, fruit roll-ups. I can’t believe my aunt’s been holding out on us. It’s like my mom’s purse without her keys and water bottle,” muttered Stavius as he stuffed some of the dried fruit in his mouth.
“I don’t use a purse,” complained Claricha.
“He wasn’t talking about you,” snarled Elisa as she pulled a water bottle out of a side pocket.
“Is that my sister’s map? I remember making that with her when we were little girls. It was great for sneaking out of the house, but it won’t help you much here,” laughed Claricha. She had forgotten about her important business and conjured up a comfy chair to watch the kids.
Elisa wasn’t as convinced that the map wouldn’t help, but Stavius motioned her to stop before she unrolled it.
“Elisa, this isn’t going to be useful. It’s just going to make a hole in the floor with nothing below us for a hundred feet,” sighed Stavius.
Claricha was enjoying their struggle and added, “It’s more like a 200-foot drop, but your point is well made. Besides, a primitive creature like you can’t see it, but there is a spherical shield surrounding the altar.”
“Oh, we can see it. It extends about halfway into the gap between your floor and ours. That thing is radiating so much energy that it’s impossible to miss,” grumbled Stavius.
This startled Claricha. Her son was right, of course. The powerful shield radiated swirling red, blue, orange, and black colors, much like a soap bubble in sunlight. She just did not expect him to be able to see it.
Claricha chuckled, “Yes, the talisman’s energy powers my shield. Nothing can penetrate it, not even Tessop’s precious map. Her magical contrivance is strong, but it can’t go through magical shields, and there is no way over, under, or around mine.”
Something happened on the distant battlefield at that moment, and Claricha rose and walked to the far side of her platform for a better look. Elisa started to put the map away. But Stavius touched her arm and silently sent her a thought. “I have a crazy idea which might work, but you’d better tie that rope to something secure in case I’m wrong.”
Elisa quickly tied one end of the rope to a massive, marble statue of some long-dead Aubornis patriarch as Stavius tied the other end around his waist. He turned the map toward the altar and instructed Elisa to keep the tunnel open while he grabbed the talisman and to help pull him back when he had it.
Stavius silently pointed at the parabolic equation Ops had written on her map to create a tunnel under the shield at the slave camp. It curved five feet deep and came out on the other side, thirty-two feet away using the equation: y = 5 * ((x/16) – 1)2 - 5
Elisa looked at her friend as though he had lost his mind and muttered, “But Claricha just explained why Ops’ map is not going to work. It can’t tunnel through a magical shield. And, even if it could, you’d fall through this floor. You’d end up swinging at the end of your rope as soon as you jumped in.”
Stavius grinned and said, “I never thought I would use the stuff we learned in Club S&M. Ms. Datta will be so proud.” Then he rewrote the equation to be: y = (2 * ((x/15) – 1)2 – 2) * i
Elisa was confused. She said, “I get that you just changed some factors and multiplied the equation by an imaginary number, but what good is that?”
Stavius answered, “Well, the entire equation isn’t imaginary. Everything multiplied by zero is zero, which is a real number. Therefore, this equation contains real numbers when x equals zero and thirty.”
Elisa whispered, “So, you think a hole will appear here and another one thirty feet away. And you plan on crawling down a two-foot-deep tunnel through imaginary space to pop out into real space over there by the talisman?”
“Yup. The tunnel won’t need to pass through the shield because it won’t be in the real world until the other end,” answered Stavius.
“You are insane!” hissed Elisa.
“Nah, I’m wearing a rope,” joked Stavius in an attempt to mask his fear. “Power it up, and let’s give it a try. Just be ready to pull me out if anything goes wrong.”
Elisa enchanted the map despite her misgivings. Moments later, a square hole appeared beside them as another appeared near the center of the altar. Claricha failed to notice the holes as she angrily shouted at the battle in the distance. Stavius dove into the hole while his mother was distracted and disappeared.
Elisa saw the rope steadily vanish into the hole behind her friend, but he didn’t appear to be falling. Less than a minute later, he popped out near the talisman altar inside the shield!
The tunnel was not what Stavius expected at all. It was like sliding through a reflective, silver tube. The shaft only sunk a couple of feet, so it was easier to navigate than the deeper passage under the slave camp shield. Moreover, it was incredibly slick, so he slid the entire length of the tube with one firm shove when he entered.
He was as surprised as Elisa that his plan worked and stood dumbfounded by the podium, which held the Crown of Helios for a moment after he climbed out. The sound of his exit caught his mother’s attention, though, and she quickly spun around to confront the intruder.
Stavius saw the stainless-steel spear flying toward his heart just in time to raise a shield. The projectile dissolved into a spray of marble dust, but the force of its impact knocked the young man off his feet.
“Mom!” Stavius yelled before rolling to his left as a massive battle-ax crashed into the floor, mere inches from his head. He scrambled to his feet as Claricha struggled to free her weapon from the cracked tile floor.
“What are you doing!? I’m your son!” Stavius screamed.
“I know exactly who and what you are, you filthy beast!” screamed Claricha as she threw a handful of knives at the boy. She had given up on freeing her ax and decided to transform it into other weaponry.
Stavius easily dodged three of the knives, which went over the edge and exploded upon striking the shield outside. He blocked the other two with small hand shields and stared at this deranged woman.
“Why?” he asked in disbelief.
“Why!?” she screamed. “You try to destroy everything I’ve spent my life attempting to achieve, and you dare to ask why? You are even more stupid than I thought.
“I have been striving to become the most powerful wizard in the most powerful family ever since I was a child. I’ve suffered through working for these lazy fools for years, waiting for my chance. Now, four of our rivals are powerless, I have deposed King and Queen Aubornis, and I will have all three remaining talismans by nightfall. I am attempting to ensconce Familia Claricha as the sole rulers of Septumcolis tonight, and you are trying to ruin it!”
Claricha hadn’t been idly chatting. She had transformed the marble bust of some hapless, ancient member of the Aubornis clan into a gleaming sword during her tirade and was circling Stavius.
Stavius was unarmed since he still had no magical skills, but he hoped his shield abilities would protect him.
“You aren’t going to kill your own flesh and blood,” he said with more hope than conviction.
“Possibly not, but I am certainly going to try!” Claricha shouted as she lunged at her son.
Stavius sidestepped her thrust and countered with a fist glowing with magical power. The sword’s blade snapped off, but the force of her blow twisted his arm. He stumbled back as his shoulder throbbed in pain and realized she had driven him to the edge of the platform.
“Hey, you’re trying to knock me off this thing!” he yelled.
“I am so proud that you managed to figure that out. Perhaps you aren’t as stupid as I thought, but it is time to end this,” Claricha growled as she thrust her arms forward and let loose a lightning bolt of energy.
“No!” screamed Stavius as he rolled to his right and tossed up a quick shield. Claricha’s energy bolt glanced off his shield but began ricocheting off the inside of the energy shield surrounding the altar. It seemed to increase in power with every strike, and Stavius feared it would knock one them over
the edge or hit the talisman itself.
He quickly stood up to absorb the bolt’s energy with his chest. The power was incredible, and Stavius was woozy by the time it had entered his body entirely. His mother stared at her son with disgust.
“Now, Staven, you will die as you should have died so many years ago. I should never have let you live once I learned of your inadequacy, but I was too soft back then. Goodbye and good riddance.”
Claricha raised both arms, arched her back, and thrust her body forward with every erg of energy she could muster. Stavius saw the insane expression on her face as she attacked and witnessed the utter hate inside her soul.
The boy reached out to accept his mother’s blast but did not reflect it this time. Instead, he grabbed it and greedily drew it inside his body. He was prepared and sucked every bit of energy she threw at him. She eventually realized the futility of her attack and tried to stop, but Stavius would not relinquish his hold.
The seventeen-year-old kept pulling the energy from his deranged mother. Her facial expression melted from greed and hate to fear and then to abject terror. This stupid, handicapped child who was more beast than human had depleted her magical energy and was sucking out her life force.
Stavius was almost blind with rage, but he had no desire to kill anyone, especially not his mother. He stopped and stared at the frail woman who had collapsed on the floor in front of him. Her forceful presence had vanished, and all that remained was the fractured shell of the woman he had feared all his life.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry,” muttered Stavius as he struggled to catch his breath.
Claricha’s strength might have ebbed, but her vengeful spirit returned in an instant.
She spat at him and screamed, “You are sorry. You are pathetic! How could something like you have sprung from my body? You were never able to create anything with magic, but now you’ve managed to learn how to control it in its raw form, like the animal you are. You still cannot create anything. All you can do is destroy! You have no purpose, no future, and no reason to exist. You are an embarrassment to me and to everything human.”
Stavius felt as though her cutting remarks had physically slapped him. He yelled, “You are wrong, Mother. I am not that little boy you abandoned. I am Stavius, I am a Prophecy Hero, and one day I will become a god!”
Claricha laughed, “Well, your appearance is indeed less impressive than your statue, Stavius, Hero of Septumcolis. And, might I add that you seemed to have failed with the whole martyr concept as well. You can’t even die properly, can you?
“But it doesn’t matter. You are trapped within this shield without a way to cross the gap to the parapet. You will never get out even if you could manage to remove the Crown without blowing us up. Face it, kid. You’ve lost.”
Stavius glanced at the rope around his waist and realized his mother was correct about one thing. He was not going to get out the same way he came in. Elisa was only able to hold the tunnel spell for a few minutes, and there was no sign of his exit. The tunnel had severed his rope when it collapsed, and only a six-foot length remained dangling from around his waist.
Stavius untied the useless rope and studied his surroundings before replying, “I’m not worried about removing the talisman from the altar’s power stream. I have plenty of experience with that. I’m also not too worried about this shield. Shields like this are built to keep things out rather than to keep them in.”
Claricha scooched herself over to a statue and groaned as she leaned against the sculpted woman’s cool, flowing, marble dress. She smiled as she said, “You might not find that to be true. I designed this shield, and it is a part of the same system protecting this entire city. The talisman directly powers my shield, and I assure you that the spell is well-designed to prevent anything from passing in either direction.”
Stavius tugged a little power from the shield and could tell that Claricha was telling the truth. Claricha’s spell was incredibly strong. It would be impossible to absorb if it was part of the central Septumcolis shield, and Stavius believed that part of her claim as well.
Claricha had, however, neglected to mention that they were on the same side of the shield as its power source. Stavius tentatively extended a thin tendril of magical power to the shield from one hand and a second stream to the talisman with his other. He smiled at his mother and asked, “Have you ever heard of a short circuit?” as the energy arced between the two elements.
Stavius shaped the energy beams so that they met in front of his body instead of coursing through him. He was able to step aside seconds later to watch as the now, self-sustaining energy path grew in size. The shield began to pulse, and colors began to swirl across it like oil shimmering on the surface of a pool of water.
The colors swirled faster and faster until the shield became a milky-white blur. This process continued for over a minute as the sphere surrounding them became more and more opaque until it appeared to be rigid and hard. The shield’s surface lost its glossy sheen and developed an irregular matte finish, much like an egg. Then it exploded.
The explosion was not forceful or loud. The egg-shield simply popped and fragmented into millions of small pieces, which turned to dust as they fell away. Suddenly the two adversaries were exposed under the cloudy sky, which was threatening to rain at any moment.
Stavius turned his attention to the talisman, but he was too late. Claricha had somehow found the energy to stagger over to the altar and had grasped the Crown of Helios in the energy stream.
“No!” screamed Stavius. “The stream will become unstable if you yank out the talisman. Let me do it properly, or you’ll blow us both up.”
Claricha chuckled a wicked laugh and said, “And, why would I want you to have it? You want to steal my crown and use it to fulfill your prophecy. Well, what about my prophecy?”
Stavius was confused but decided the best course of action was to keep her talking as he planned how to keep her from killing them both and destroying the talisman.
He asked, “What is your prophecy, Mother?”
Claricha’s eyes glazed with a dreamy look as she answered. “Why, that one day, all seven families and their talismans would be united into a single, infinitely-powerful family to rule Septumcolis and the world.”
Stavius was afraid that approaching his mother would cause her to pull the Crown out of the power flow, so he elected to keep her talking.
“It seems to me that you’ve been eliminating the other families rather than uniting them,” he observed.
Claricha sighed, “Yes, well, the goal of my prophecy is to have Familia Claricha be the one ruling family, regardless of how I attain it.”
Stavius gulped as he finally comprehended his mother’s ultimate objective, but she ignored him. She was stroking the Crown in an almost loving manner.
“Did you know that I created this crown?” she asked. “I had been fascinated by the talismans as a young girl and studied them endlessly. Then, one of your so-called Prophecy Heroes managed to steal the original Crown of Helios.
“No one knew what to do until a small girl bravely approached the despondent king and proclaimed that she could recreate it. I doubt that anyone in the Aubornis family believed that I could. But I was a magical prodigy, and there were no other alternatives.
“I spent years crafting this crown, harvesting stones from dozens of dragons, and refining my work until it was a perfect recreation. I was given the title Shreeuv Aubornis as a reward and became the most-respected wizard in the city. I built the bridge across the river. I created the city’s protective shield, which you just destroyed. And, I nurtured my talisman as it matured, and as its power grew.”
Claricha was actively caressing the talisman now, and Stavius realized she felt more of a kinship to it than to him. He might be her biological son, but she believed the Crown of Helios was her real child.
Stavius took a step toward his mother, and Claricha quickly spun to face him. Her face was contorted into an insane
and gleeful expression.
Claricha snarled, “You think you have won, but you have won nothing. This crown is mine and mine alone. You want to steal it from me, but I will never let that happen. If I cannot have it, then no one will!”
The thought of losing her precious crown was too much for the old woman, and she suddenly grabbed the talisman and pulled it off the altar.
Stavius knew that the entire tower would explode in minutes. He frantically tried to find a way out, even as he felt like retching after her mention of harvesting dragons. The young man wondered how many creatures had been chained, tortured, and murdered by these families.
Claricha laughed at his desperate search and said, “There is no way either of us can get far enough away from this place to survive. My ultimate satisfaction is knowing that you did not steal my crown and that I have corrected a mistake I made so many years ago. I just killed you, and there is no way you will be able to avoid dying this time.”
Then, Claricha Shreeuv Aubornis did something so unexpected that Stavius collapsed to his knees in disbelief. She slammed the Crown of Helios onto the floor and bent it. It was damaged so much that it would never fit with the other talismans, but Claricha didn’t stop. She smashed the talisman again and again until it twisted to a point where it broke in half. She picked up the pieces and threw one over the precipice into the darkness below. She embraced the other in her arms and began rocking back and forth as if cuddling a baby.
The alter was about to explode, but Stavius didn’t care. All the heroes’ hopes were gone. His dream was not supposed to end this way, but he felt such a crushing sense of defeat that he couldn’t move. Stavius didn’t care whether he lived or died. The Prophecy was over. Civilization on his home world would end. Humanity and all other life on Earth would die. Their team had failed because he had failed. He didn’t deserve to live anymore.
Stavius closed his eyes and dropped his head as he waited for death to claim him. He wasn’t sure what dying would feel like or whether he would have an afterlife after being destroyed by the impending explosion, but he was unprepared for what happened. The boy heard the altar crackle with one final power surge and felt a crushing pain as it exploded, and death lifted him up away from the physical world.
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