Brilliant, billowing orange flames poured from his hand in an arc nearly fifteen feet deep. It was all he could muster with his limited strength even though his rough internalization of Kaelob’s flame spell had improved a little. The flames slammed into and washed around the goblin, causing the deadened and crumbling grass to combust impressively. A squealing wail rose from the flames as the goblin was roasted.
Endrance backpedaled as the fires spread back towards him. He stumbled back into the green grass and dropped to his knees as the fires quickly burned themselves out. The flame had burned too hot too quickly to spread to any of the living grass, saving him from suffering the same fate as his enemy. He took stock of his condition as a moment of quiet passed. After a moment of looking himself over he came to the conclusion that he was as close to being dead as a man could be and still be able to stand.
He heard a hacking wheezing cough from in front of him and he looked blearily into the blackened and burned remains of the field of combat. He was just too tired to feel fear as he realized the goblin wasn’t dead, just a numb sensation of irritation. Its body was bent and burned by the flames, charred and smelling of roasted flesh. The thing was trying to crawl away, but its limbs were withered and twisted like spent match sticks.
Endrance gingerly pulled himself to his feet and approached, his feet crunching through ash and cooked plant matter alike. He could feel the heat through the soles of his shoes as he stopped next to the hateful thing.
The goblin wheezed and hacked, its lungs burnt too badly to utter a proper curse. Its movement slowed, and a few wheezes later it was still. Endrance looked down at it with a tired sense of detachment. He was considering checking if it was really dead when the yellow-orange gem set into his silver bracer began glowing. He looked down, lifting his arm to look at it closely. As he did so the first circle of arcane script etched in the silver illuminated in the same amber light.
A faintly visible pale golden wind arose from the slain goblin’s body. It swirled up, trying to disperse, but the light of the gem seemed as a net, funneling the wind into it. It swirled around his arm as the faint light was absorbed by the bracer. As the last of it entered the gem, the second and third circles of script briefly illuminated and then died out.
Endrance stared at the bracer in a dull sense of shock. He flexed his left hand, and feeling had returned to it in that moment. As he watched, the light faded from the gem and in a moment it was normal again. Endrance felt a twinge of apprehension. The bracer had captured the remaining amount of the energy that the goblin mage had been holding in his aura. Any energy remaining disperses soon after a mage’s death, but the bracer had caught the swell in energy and siphoned it into the Crystalphage.
It was a truly amazing artifact. Was his master even aware of what he gave his apprentice? He also did not know if that was all the thing could do. He looked at it again in the spell-light and knew he would have to spend hours studying the thing.
The spell-light grew brighter, and Endrance turned to see Julius trotting up to him. The soldier stopped several paces away and watched him apprehensively. He swallowed, cleared his throat, and finally spoke to the wizard.
“Sir Mage,” he reported “the rest of the goblins are slain, but I only count eleven.”
“The last is beyond our reach.” Endrance replied, surprised to hear the words coming from his lips. “It was already on its way to report to their master when we had arrived.”
Julius’ eyes narrowed. “How do you know that, Sir Mage?” he asked. “Did the mage confess before it died?”
Endrance shook his head. “No, I just… I just know.”
Julius eyed the bracer on the wizard’s wrist and kept as much distance as was respectable. The light over his head illuminated a long groove down the side of the man’s helmet. The remaining men were injured but standing.
“Did you…” Julius began, but couldn’t finish his question. It was obvious that he had seen the bracer’s work in action.
“I don’t know.” Endrance replied. “I’ve never seen that happen before. I am unsure what that was.”
Julius shook his head. “Whatever it was, it was damn creepy, sir. Geralt’s dead. We should cut free the Mathersons and destroy that drum, Sir Mage.”
Endrance nodded numbly, wearily shuffling towards the captives as he spoke. “Yes. We should.”
The last remaining goblin turned from the now far away burning pile that was once his mighty war drum and the bodies of his fellow goblins.
He was at the top of a nearby hill, crouched as the men only a few hundred yards tossed the last goblin corpse on top of the burning drum. He cringed as he watched his comrades burn. No one should go like that, better that they be eaten so they remain with the horde.
The wizard was comforting the last few survivors of their raid the prior day. The other captives had died during the day since their capture. The human woman fiercely held onto the one they had figured was her mate and cried over his body.
When he turned away, he froze stock still as he realized a cloaked figure was standing in front of him, as still as a statue. The creature’s night vision saw through enough of the night’s shadows to reveal the figure before him.
The figure was lean and tall, with slender gloved hands. It reached up and pulled back the hood, revealing beautiful aquiline features and a cascade of silken black hair. Her dark tan skin blended well with the night, and golden feline eyes stared through the goblin before her.
The messenger dropped to its knees, murmuring for her forgiveness. She ignored him a moment, standing next to him as she looked down on the men below.
“Sha’hdi…” The goblin whispered, its grasp of common a miserable mockery of the true language.
“Silence!” the woman hissed, her hair sliding across her shoulder silently as she turned her head, revealing longer pointed ears. Black steel loops and studs pierced both ears, and she had a tightly fitting single loop through her upper lip.
“Sha’hdi,” the goblin tried again. “We did as you ordered. But you didn’t tell us of the caravan.”
“They shouldn’t have gotten involved. She responded curtly. “You should have been able to sack the town with little trouble before that treacherous bastard Kaelob got involved. Somehow the whelp dragged them into it.” Her golden eyes could see the young man struggling to help the four men carry or assist with the injured and dead. They would be busy for a few hours yet.
“But why?” the goblin asked. “I don’t under-“
His voice cut off as the elf’s hand flitted past his throat and a volume of dark blood spurted from the line traced across it. The goblin sputtered and slumped to the dirt, his eyes turning dull and his breathing stopping quickly.
“You wouldn’t.” She said coolly, re-sheathing the finger length narrow blade into her sleeve. She pulled the hood back over her head and vanished into the darkness once again. The night went on, a silent blanket of shadows for the dead that lay under her.
Chapter 09
Endrance woke up to being jostled roughly. He blearily looked around, wary. He realized he was in the back of one of the caravan wagons, stuffed between some sacks of grain and barrels of apples. The wagon was rolling, and he could hear people walking and chatting nearby. Whoever put him in the wagon had the presence of mind to put him on top of his bedding and pile his belongings near his head.
He sat up, and quickly realized he was naked. Someone had stripped him down of everything but the silver bracer on his arm, which had been wrapped in a simple strip of cloth. He didn’t remember wrapping it, so someone must have done so when he was unconscious. He saw across his skin faintly visible lines shiny and off color, like scars that have long healed. They traced his meridian lines everywhere he looked on his body. He had never seen it before, but it was possible it was caused by over reaching his bounds.
He fumbled through his pack and labored to pull on a clean pair of pants. He was lacing them up when a woman pocked her head through th
e flaps on the back of the wagon’s covering.
“Oh good!” she exclaimed, smiling. “You’re awake!”
The woman was Geraldine, wife of one of the tradesmen on the caravan. Her curly gray hair and kind features made her fit the image of a pleasant housewife to a tee. Her clothes were clean and simple browns, the kind that excelled at hiding wrinkles and creases. She clambered over the sacks of grain and placed the back of her hand against his forehead. Her thin hand felt cool and strong, and she smiled warmly when she pulled her hand away.
“Good, good!” she observed. “You seem to be just fine now. We were worried you were going to be ill for longer.”
“Ill?” he asked. “I don’t remember being ill.”
She pulled an apple from a nearby barrel, replacing the lid on the barrel while wiping the dripping water off on her dress with the other. She handed it over to him and shrugged.
“Julius said you fell over halfway back to camp, and they had to drag you back to camp. We got you in the light, and all we could see on you were these little black lines all over your skin like veins. You were sweating and groaning, so Julius had us look after you as he brought back the rest of the injured.”
“If I was ill, why did you put me next to the food?” he asked, taking a bite out of the apple. The taste of food awoke his stomach, and he hungrily ate the apple as swiftly as he could.
“Well, Ethan had seen the marks had been on your fingers when you went to check on him before you left, and Julius said your fight that night was pretty frightening. It looked like the same thing that killed poor Geralt, but you weren’t dead.” She shrugged. “You had no physical injuries, so it must have been a magical illness.”
He held his hands up and flexed it. The fingers had normal feeling again, and were clean. The meridians were just as faintly visible as the rest of him, though they didn’t change in texture from his healthy skin.
He had fully healed from his burn out, but something seemed off. The meridian lines on his right hand seemed uneven. Compared to the mirrored lines on his left, the lines flowing from the central root in his palm through to the fingertips of his fore and middle finger were jagged and forked. He thought of the lightning and how he had kept the spell charged in his hand when he should have released it immediately. Had he somehow done damage to his meridians?
“How long?” he asked. “How many days was I out?”
Geraldine laughed. “Days?” she exclaimed. “You barely had the decency to stay down the whole night!” she pushed on his chest firmly, and he fell back onto his bedding. “Get some more rest. You earned it. I’ll get some food put into you, and you can get back to sleep.”
“But…” Endrance stammered.
“No buts about it!” Geraldine chided. “Julius told us how you saved his men and defeated a goblin shaman.”
“But…” He tried again.
“Shh!” She shushed him again. “I’ll be back in a few with some real food, so you just rest.” And she disappeared out of the wagon, leaving him with his thoughts.
“Just one day?” he asked to no one in particular, baffled.
He remembered how poor he felt before he blacked out, but he had hoped he could have gone farther. It felt like for a moment his power had turned against him. He remember vaguely thinking he was going to die, yet here he was.
He closed his eyes and checked himself over again. He didn’t feel bad anymore; in fact he felt great, all things considered. His muscles and shoulder was sore from the running and tumbling. His chest hurt from his heart pounding in fear pretty much the entire night. His arms and legs had a myriad of little scrapes and scratches that were already healing. There seemed to be no permanent damage caused by whatever magic that mage had used-
He knew. His head suddenly flashed with formula and theory that blinded his eyes in a sudden blossoming pain that erupted within his mind. The principle of the spells used against him burned themselves into his head, and he thrashed quietly in his bed, unable to scream or breathe from the sudden pain. The pain abruptly stopped, and he realized he was half sprawled across a bag of grain.
He quickly dug through his satchel and withdrew the spellbook Kaelob gave him. He yanked a crow quill pen from a small tube on the side and uncorked a bottle of ink. He quickly started penning the formulas that had flashed through his mind before they were gone.
It was spirit magic. He hadn’t seen the effects of the spell because there wasn’t anything visual about it. It had some force, but the most dangerous part was that it ignored anything without a spirit, passing through it unhindered.
He shook his head as he wrote, but the formulas remained. He could probably figure out the long form method to cast the three spells the goblin had used on him. Transcribing them out of memory on the back of a moving cart would be difficult, but he needed to do it. If he recorded them, it would save him countless months of research and hours of practice to have learned such spells the normal way.
Hours later, he looked up from his book, rubbing his eyes. It had gotten too dark to continue any writing, and he looked around. Night had fallen, and the wagons had come to a stop. He saw on the grain sack next to him a small loaf of bread and a wooden bowl of cold stew. His stomach growled at him, and he quickly ate the food and chewed on the now stale bread. He must have completely missed Geraldine’s return, and by the evidence forgot about the food entirely.
His stomach sated for the moment, he took a moment to light a candle and look over his book. The first few pages were covered in arcane script and diagrams, ones he penned from memory. Small footnotes on the margins had been added as he wrote, detailing what came to mind about the spells he struggled to put to page. They would serve their purpose just fine. He was a bit confused as he read through it. It was written in arcane script, true. Most unskilled men wouldn’t be able to read it at all; arcane script tended to crawl before the eyes of those without talent.
The other thing he noticed was that he had written it in cipher. The pages, even if read by a trained wizard would not be able to use the spell as is. They would have to figure out the cipher he used. He frowned, looking down at it. He read it just fine, the cipher translating in his head almost unconsciously.
He had never used a cipher before. He hadn’t even made one up yet.
He sat back, closing the book. The candlelight glinted off of his bracer as he held it to the light. His brow furrowed as he studied the arcane script around the gem. The most he could make out was the innermost circle, which the spellwork was laid down to capture released essences. The second circle had similar phrasing, but used an archaic terminology he didn’t completely understand. As near as he could tell the object captured was wisdom.
What worried him was that ‘wisdom’ in the archaic tongue could also be interpreted as ‘soul’. The archaic tongue used the same word for the two meanings interchangeably in any of the texts that Kaelob had Endrance study as an apprentice.
He shook his head, and put the book away. Whatever happened had happened. He had benefited from it, but he needed to get to a library and research his gift more thoroughly before he did any more with it. The capturing of souls was considered necromancy, a taboo among the magical community. He could not afford to make a target of himself so soon in his career.
He lacked the political savvy to navigate himself through the dangerous climate of the Circle of Magi’s politics. He had barely the status of a newly accredited wizard, and without any accomplishments to his name, he was afraid they would be more than willing to strip it from him. For now, it would be best for him to hide the bracer’s abilities until he had a proper place to study it.
Chapter 10
It took nearly six weeks to get to Ironsoul from Wayrest. There were no further incidents, and Endrance was able to help the Caravaners in little ways during the trip. Their gratitude for saving them from the goblins had carried him far, despite numerous attempts he had made to inform them the caravan was at little risk. Several of them insisted they
could never have known; they may have targeted them next.
Over that time he built a strong rapport with the hired soldiers that safeguarded the caravan. Now a man short, they used his assistance whenever he could offer it. While he had gotten pointers in swordplay or shown new exercises to strengthen his body, he felt the most exercised part of his body were his hands and feet. Every day he walked for hours, and when he was tired he perched on one of the side benches and felt the vibrations of the road through his rear and thighs.
By the time he reached Ironsoul, he was certain of three things. He would be sore for days. He needed new shoes. He needed a damn horse.
The caravan passed through the salt gates into Ironsoul proper after their travel papers were cleared by the guard. He stood just inside the gates and stared out over the city.
Ironsoul was a grand city, the capitol of the satrapies of Ironsoul. Here the high king’s throne sat and here the core of his armies lay. All eight realms under High King Mastadon’s rule brought their tithes and trade to this city.
Ironsoul was roughly circular, with long spoke like roads that ran in the four cardinal directions. At the ends of these roads were sixty yard towers. No guards patrols the walls, instead above each floated an azure crystal as large as a draft horse that was shaped roughly like an acorn. Although he wasn’t close enough to sense their power, he had the feeling they were powerful magic sentries.
The center of the castle was an arching tiered dome over a hundred yards high and three hundred across. Complex statuary and crenellations made up its exterior, though the dome’s size made even large statues seem miniscule. Banners of the kingdom fluttered in the wind from the walls, and its flags were seen flying all over the kingdom.
The second structure was not as grandiose, but at least equally impressive. In the north-east quarter of the city a tower jutted into the sky. From the southern ‘salt gates’ Endrance could see the tower despite the distance, and knew it easily was the tallest structure in the city, much less that he’d ever seen in his life.
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