So, I decided to burn the town down.
Well. As much as it as I could manage. Still, after this time I had gotten good at it, and I could burn down a fair chunk of the town. Maybe with enough practice, I could burn the entire thing, and the surrounding hills as well.
To burn down the town, I had a procedure.
After thirty-five years, I had the town memorized. I knew it as well as I knew myself. At that point, I knew it better than I knew myself since I had more or less gone insane. Anyway, I knew where everything in the town was. I knew the contents of the houses lining the streets. I knew the inventories of the stores. I knew the layout of the tunnels underneath the town.
I had died in every building in the town.
Multiple times.
Humming and sometimes giggling to myself, I walked to the gas station, pulled out the pumps, and tied the levers open, spilling gas across the parking lot. I strolled up to the general store, blasted the door into glass shards with a spell of telekinetic force, and let myself inside. I went to the tools section and helped myself to a hatchet and walked up and down the main street. As I did, I chopped the fuel line of every single car and truck parked along the curb. I had done it so often I could get the entire job done in about ten minutes, and I left about forty cars and trucks leaking gas into the street.
This would come in handy.
Once I had wrecked all the cars, I dropped the hatchet in the middle of the street and started going from shop to shop. I knew where all the gas lines in the buildings were, and I broke them one by one. In the café, I broke the burners and turned the gas on, letting the stink flood the building.
After I had broken the last gas line, I walked to the center of the street and waited a bit, rocking on my heels and humming to myself. I watched the gasoline splash across the parking lot, and I laughed as I remembered burning to death, screaming as my flesh charred and blackened. One time, enough gasoline had spilled that it had gotten into the silo, and when the fire had reached the interior of the silo, that had made an impressive explosion. It had flattened half the town, and I think what had killed me that time had been a shard of molten metal from the silo cutting my head off.
“Goody, goody, goody,” I crooned to myself. I didn’t recognize my voice. It sounded cracked and unsteady. “We’re going to have a barbecue.” That didn’t seem funny, but I laughed to myself anyway.
It was time to begin.
I gathered together magical force, as I had thousands of times before, and starting flinging fireballs.
Not spheres of fire, but fireballs. Countless castings of the spell had improved my skill with it to the point where I could bind a lot more elemental force into a single sphere. Because of that, I could make them explode on impact like little grenades. I started with the land title office across the street from the gas station, hurling fireballs through the window. My magic blasted through the windows, melting the glass in rivulets down the brick front of the building, and started the carpet in the front office on fire. I could have kept throwing fireballs, but I knew the ruptured gas line from the office’s HVAC system would ignite sooner or later.
Laughing at the fire, I moved to the next building, and the next, and the next. I had gotten to the diner by the time the title office exploded. The detonation ripped off most of the roof and blasted out all the windows, and a hot breeze blew past me from the roiling fireball and the plume of smoke rising from the damaged roof.
I grinned, staring at the fire.
“Oh, yeah,” I whispered. “We’re going to burn. We’re all going to burn. Forever.”
It was a pretty fire, but I was just getting warmed up. So to speak.
I went up one side of the street and down the other, throwing blasts of magical fire through the windows. The diner, of course, exploded at once, ripping itself apart in a maelstrom of snarling flames thanks to the gas range. The little grocery store usually burned well, thanks to the gasoline for the emergency generators hooked up to the freezers. Soon curtains of fire lined both sides of the main street, so I cast the spell to resist elemental forces that the Knight of Grayhold had taught me decades ago. With part of my power, I held the spell in place, and with the rest of it, I kept throwing fireballs. Some of the cars went up as well, and soon a huge plume of smoke rose from the burning businesses.
Giggling to myself, I jogged to the end of the main street and waited.
“Hey, guys!” I shouted, bouncing on my heels. “I’m here! Come and get me! Want to have some fun? I’m right here!”
For some reason that seemed hilarious, and I started laughing.
If you want to get attention, a great way to find it is to set half a small town on fire, and soon the creatures responded. Wraithwolves solidified and raced towards me, and anthrophages poured from the houses with access to the tunnel system. Cytospawn flew overhead, tentacles dangling, and I heard the clicking as the beetles reached the street, their legs tapping against the asphalt.
I looked at the charging horde, and my giddiness turned to grief.
I could barely remember the last time I had seen another human. Russell had been dead for decades at this point, and so had everyone I had ever known or cared about. Regret followed grief in a surge. I wished I could have saved Russell. I wished I had slept with Riordan when I had the chance. Had he known that I had loved him?
Then the grief and regret turned to rage hotter than the flames devouring the main street.
I had failed my brother, but he had been taken from me. Arvalaeon had done that by locking me in this hell. Maybe he had forgotten about me entirely. He was going to regret that. His plan for dealing with Castomyr had been to lock me in this place with his pet monsters, and his stupidity had gotten a lot of people killed.
I was going to make him regret that.
For decades, if I could manage it.
I looked at the approaching creatures and started to giggle.
They had ripped me apart so many times, inflicted unimaginable agony on me again and again…but that didn’t mean I couldn’t repay them in kind.
“Hi, guys!” I shouted. “Ready for some games?”
The creatures didn’t say anything. They never did. Anthrophages could talk, but they only communicated with their masters or while disguising themselves as humans. No point in disguising themselves in here, right?
I cast the ice spike spell three times in rapid succession, killing two wraithwolves and an anthrophage. The creatures charged towards me in a mass of claws and fangs and glaring red and yellow eyes, and I grinned at them, waved, and cast the Cloak spell.
It was an effort to cast the Cloak spell, but after dying so many times, the effort seemed…distant, somehow. Remote.
I turned and jogged down the main street towards the gas station, holding the Cloak spell in place around myself. One thing I had realized – I could keep my memory between resets of the town, but the creatures didn’t. They never learned or adapted to my tactics.
Which meant I could use them over and over.
It was time to have some fun.
The creatures poured down the main street, trying to see where I had gone.
I stepped next to a burning car, dropped my Cloak spell, and cast the telekinetic force spell. I could use it to pull or to push, and this time I used it to push, sending a wraithwolf tumbling through a broken window and into the burning post office.
I heard the creature scream as it caught fire, and I laughed. The others turned towards me, and I ran to the left, Cloaking myself again as I did. I hopped onto the curb and walked back, the hot air billowing from the fire making my hair and jacket dance. I waited until I had a good angle, then I dropped the Cloak spell and struck again.
This time I caught an anthrophage and flipped it head over heels into the burning title office. I heard the creature scream in pain, and I cast the telekinesis spell again. I blasted an anthrophage from its feet and threw it into the cab of a burning pickup truck. It thrashed as it tried to escape, the f
ires digging into its flesh, and I grinned and stepped back.
Three anthrophages rushed me, and I cast the fire sphere spell. I had practiced enough with the spell that I could make it explode like a small bomb, but I could do other things once the sphere left my fingers. The spell drilled through the head of the nearest anthrophage, turning its skull to hot coals, and the sphere darted to the left, slamming into another anthrophage, and then killed the third one before the power drained away.
That reminded me of something I had seen long ago, of the time I had gone to Venomhold with Riordan and Robert Ross and Hakon Valborg. Old Hakon had been in the Wizard’s Legion, and he had cast the same spell, though he had been able to kill seven anthrophages with a single casting. I supposed he was dead now, along with his family and his granddaughter Lydia.
That made me think of Russell, and that got me angry.
I Cloaked again, and hunted the anthrophages and the wraithwolves and the beetles and the cytospawn, disappearing and reappearing beneath the Cloak spell and blasting them apart. Magical exhaustion started to seep through me, but I fought on, intending to kill as many of the wretched things as possible. Eventually, a cytospawn hit me with one of its tentacles, paralyzing me, and the surviving anthrophages and wraithwolves tore me apart.
That was what I usually did when I wanted to burn the town down.
Sometimes I started on other buildings and turned the houses into torches one by one. The elementary school made a good firetrap. It had a big HVAC system, which meant it had a lot of natural gas to ignite. Also, the gymnasium tended not to burn, so it made a good place to lure the anthrophages and the wraithwolves to kill them. I could move around while Cloaked in short bursts – thirty or forty seconds at a time, usually – and the gym was big enough that I danced around the creatures and mowed them down one by one until my strength ran out and they killed me.
Some days, I was in the mood for ice.
On those days, I descended into the maze below the town and hunted bloodrats.
The ice wall spell proved useful there. I had gotten better with it over the decades, and now I could conjure a lot of ice. One casting could create a foot-thick barrier of granite-hard ice that sealed off a corridor entirely. I could shape the ice and make more of it, but doing so took a lot of power, so I used the spell sparingly.
As you can imagine, reshaping the battlefield to my liking proved useful.
I split the massive bloodrat pack into smaller groups and killed them one by one, either piercing their skulls with ice spikes or incinerating them with blasts of fire and laughing as they squealed. If I screwed up and they got closer than I liked, I cast the spell for telekinetic gauntlets and smashed them to a bloody pulp.
I also used those tactics on the anthrophages. When I lured them to the tunnels, I could split them off from the others with ice walls and kill them one by one. I could kill lots of anthrophages that way – I think the most I ever did on an ice day was ninety-seven. I even killed the anthrophage elder a few thousand times, and watching the bloated creature shriek and thrash as I burned it to ashes or electrocuted it with lightning globes was immensely satisfying.
Of course, eventually the anthrophages or the bloodrats killed me. But a couple of times I made it all the way to the cathedral, and there I fought and killed anthrophages in the hellish light of the rose window until they took me down, and I woke up at the clock and started the mess all over again.
On other days, I was in the mood for a different kind of mass arson.
I levitated up to a rooftop on the main street. Specifically, the highest rooftop belonged to the grocery store, which had two levels of apartments above the main floor. From the top of the building, I had a good view of the town, the dark mass of the cathedral rising on the other side of the valley.
I threw fireballs at houses I knew contained wraithwolves, and when the creatures finally emerged, I sprinted from the rooftop and jumped.
I wasn’t trying to kill myself this time, though. Instead, I cast the telekinesis spell. I could use it to push things, like anthrophages into burning buildings, but I could also use it to pull things. I got a telekinetic grip on the chimney of a nearby house, and I used that grip to pull myself through the air and land on the rooftop.
From that vantage point, I rained fire and ice and lightning on the wraithwolves and the anthrophages. Of course, the wraithwolves could turn into mist and flow up the walls to get at me, and the anthrophages could just climb up, but when they did, I used the telekinesis spell to jump to another house, and then cast fire spheres at the house I had just left.
I played cat-and-mouse that way for hours. Usually, I got killed when my magical strength failed, and I landed in the street mid-leap, breaking my legs, and the anthrophages swarmed me. If the game went on long enough, eventually I was surrounded by burning houses and had no place left to retreat, and I got overwhelmed. A couple of times I lasted long enough that I drew the attention of the cytospawn atop the cathedral, and they came over and paralyzed me so the anthrophages and the wraithwolves could eat me.
The cytospawn proved challenging. The only way I found to kill one involved hitting it with multiple lightning globes until it was paralyzed and then launching a fire globe at its underside. There was some sort of bladder-like organ at the center of its tentacles that held a flammable gas, and if I hit that with a fire sphere, the whole thing exploded. Of course, the tentacles whipped back and forth to protect the bladder, which was why I had to paralyze it first.
But I knew how to kill the cytospawn.
I knew how to kill every single creature that infested the miserable little town.
I knew how to kill them all because I had killed them all thousands and thousands of times.
But I could never quite escape. I got to the cathedral lots of times. I fought the anthrophages there hundreds of times. But I was always overwhelmed and killed.
Over and over and over again.
Like I said, my sanity didn’t hold up.
I started to think that I had died and gone to hell.
Maybe I had imagined Arvalaeon. Maybe Captain Alan had beaten me to death. I had done a lot of bad things while I was alive, and maybe this was my punishment for them. Perhaps I would be here forever, killing and being killed for eternity.
It made sense, at least to my increasing addled mind. For years at a time, I thought I was in hell, and I fought and killed with ferocious rage. If they were going to hurt me, I was going to hurt them back.
Sometimes I remembered Russell and the Marneys and Riordan, and that threw me into a new kind of fury because I remembered the truth. I wasn’t in hell. I was in the Shadowlands. Arvalaeon had dumped me here as part of his stupid plan to fight Castomyr, and his idiocy had killed everyone I loved.
That kept me going. The hate and the rage kept me going. I could vaguely remember what it was like to feel things other than hate and rage, but it was like trying to recall events from when you were a toddler – it was all foggy and a bit vague.
I was going to find a way back to Earth and Arvalaeon.
And when I did, I would repay the Lord Inquisitor a thousand times over for what he had done.
Chapter 8: Magus
On Day 37,415, something happened.
(That was about one hundred and two years in if you don’t want to do the math.)
Anyway, on Day 37,415, something significant changed. Not in the town, I mean, and not the creatures. They never changed, no matter what I did. No matter how many buildings I blew up or burned down or turned to ice, no matter how many creatures I killed, when I woke up under the bronze clock the town had returned to the way it had been a hundred and two years ago when Arvalaeon had first dumped me here.
For the last decade or so, I had been in a fiery sort of mood, and I had burned down the town thousands of times. The entire town, I should add. My techniques had improved, and if I didn’t make any mistakes, I could burn down the entire town before the anthrophages overwhelmed me. Th
e trick was to make the grain silo blow up first. If I combined that with the gas station, the debris usually ignited a dozen houses and businesses near the county highway, which really helped with mass arson.
Anyway, I had done my usual trick of setting the main street on fire, and I was Cloaking and killing off anthrophages and wraithwolves and beetles that came to kill me. I could Cloak, move to a safe location, then drop the Cloak and attack. I could throw the creatures into the flames, or send a volley of ice spikes to spear their brains, or unleash a fire sphere that either burned through a half-dozen skulls at once or exploded into a howling bloom of flames that consumed a dozen creatures.
I dropped my Cloak and cast a fire sphere, and it zipped from my hand, weaving back and forth as it blasted through the skulls of nine anthrophages. I giggled as they fell smoking and twitching to the ground, and I spun, looking around for something new to kill.
Except…
I blinked in confusion, trying to work out what had just happened.
My fingers flexed, my magic held ready, my will ready to shape the power into killing spells.
“What the hell?” I muttered.
At last, the realization of what had happened sank into my stunned brain.
I couldn’t find anything new to kill because there was nothing left to kill.
Dead anthrophages and wraithwolves and beetles carpeted both the street and the sidewalk. Some of them had been killed by fire, others by ice, and some by lightning, or by getting thrown into the burning buildings.
That didn’t make any sense. How had they all been killed? Surely there were more. I…
Understanding came to me, and the shock was so extreme that it felt as if I had been dunked into ice water.
They were all dead because I had killed them all.
I had killed them with magic, with fire and ice and lightning and telekinetic force. When they had closed around me, I had vanished with a Cloak spell, run to safety, and continued my attacks from a new direction. They hadn’t been able to lay a claw on me, and I had mowed them down without mercy.
Cloak Games: Truth Chain Page 12