The Spell Realm

by Zales, Dima

  She wasn’t sure how much time passed while she admired these displays. After a while, some of her overwhelmed awe faded, and Gala began trying to figure out where she was. As soon as she focused on that, it became clear to her that the concept of ‘where’—the concept of location—had a different meaning here in the Spell Realm from what she was used to on Koldun.

  She was wherever her attention was. Her thought was what seemed to determine her location in the Spell Realm. How this process worked, Gala didn’t know, but that didn’t seem to matter.

  She knew she wanted to go back to Blaise. She needed to go back. However, focusing on getting back to the Physical Realm didn’t work the same way as simply moving about in the Spell Realm. Gala tried to demand it from her surroundings, but she had no idea how to achieve what she wanted. A disturbing thought crept in, a thought she had been trying to push away this whole time . . . What if she never saw Blaise again?

  No. Gala refused to give in to it, to admit defeat. She would find a way to get back to Blaise.

  Suddenly, her attention shifted. She sensed something out there. There were things here, Gala realized, things that were not spells from the Physical Realm, but something else entirely. Something completely foreign to her mind.

  There was thought here. Some kind of alien reasoning.

  Fascinated, Gala tried to discern what these intelligent entities were. Their thought patterns were constantly moving and shifting, and she could occasionally glimpse something in their minds. These brief glimpses revealed intelligences that were beautiful, yet frightening in their otherness.

  Intelligences . . . Something nibbled at the back of her mind, some memory that had long been suppressed. Gala had a feeling that she was forgetting something important, and then it suddenly came to her.

  The dreams. She’d dreamed of the Spell Realm before—and in her dreams, she’d interacted with an intelligence here.

  An intelligence that she knew as Dranel.

  As soon as Gala recalled Dranel, she sensed a thinking pattern. It was recognizable as the one from her dream, but at the same time, there were differences. It wasn’t just the fact that the Spell Realm of her dreams had been different from the way she was experiencing it now. No, it was a change in the nature of the being she now sought. There was something like a flaw in the otherwise beautiful pattern.

  “Dranel,” she called out in her mind, trying to talk to the pattern as she had done in her dream.

  There was no response coming her way, but Gala was suddenly immersed in a vision.

  * * *

  Dranel became lucid. The being he had found so interesting, Gala, was casting spells again. He had observed her do this many times, and the algorithms she produced evoked serenity in Dranel, the kind of serenity he otherwise only felt when he was not lucid.

  Somehow he knew the effects these spells would have in the Physical Realm. The concepts were distant and foreign: floating, healing, thunder . . . Dranel had only a vague understanding of what those were.

  He observed it all with a faint sense of curiosity, his mind sifting through the different patterns of the spells. It was only when he felt something powerful gathering out there that he realized it was not going to be a pattern that reached into the Spell Realm next—it was going to be the destructive energy of that spell itself.

  He felt the jolt as the energy entered the space surrounding him, and he instantly knew that, if left alone, this force could wreak havoc on his world. Without hesitation, Dranel made a decision, taking the energy into himself.

  His mind exploded in agony, and lucidity faded.

  * * *

  Horrified, Gala emerged from the vision, separating her mind from the shreds of the pattern that had once been Dranel.

  She had done this, she realized in despair. She had sent the energy of the spell the Council directed at her into the Spell Realm, seeking to protect herself from its destructive force. And in the process, she’d managed to hurt this intelligent being.

  Desperate to fix her mistake, Gala closely examined Dranel’s pattern, trying to determine what went wrong with it. She could feel the breaks and misalignments, the damage from the explosive force she’d inadvertently introduced into this entity’s habitat. She found the errors and tried to mend them, letting her mind focus on what the pattern should be. What it used to be in her dream. As she fixed the errors, she could sense Dranel changing, his mind healing in a way that felt almost physical.

  After what seemed like a long time, but could easily have been a moment, Gala knew that Dranel’s pattern was as it had been before. He was not conscious yet, but that would come eventually.

  She was waiting for that moment when she became distracted by something far, far more important.

  She sensed Blaise casting a spell.

  As she focused her thoughts on the pattern he was generating, Gala again ‘traveled’ somewhere. Wherever she now was, she saw a complex shape with sounds and tastes that she found mesmerizing. She soon knew what the spell in front of her was meant to do.

  It was meant to bring Blaise to her, to the Spell Realm.

  Except it was doomed to fail in its goal.

  Blaise had made a number of subtle, but fatal mistakes in his calculations. It was clear to her that the spell would not work as intended. If allowed to run its course, it would end up killing Blaise’s mind, but even if it didn’t, the next part of the spell—the part that was supposed to take Blaise back to the Physical Realm afterwards—was flawed. Still, it did give Gala an idea of what a return spell might look like, and she tucked away the knowledge for later, focusing on the more immediate task in front of her.

  Reaching out toward the spell, Gala tried to change it, to fix the errors that she could see as she had fixed Dranel’s pattern. She had no idea if it would work, but she had to try. Everything inside her trembled at the possibility that Blaise’s spell might go through in its current form, that he would perish in his attempt to reach her. She only had time to implement a few tweaks in his spell. Her priority was to ensure that he survived the trip in.

  She focused on the problems in the fabric of the spell. Fixing the spell came naturally to her. The mistakes dulled the bright colors and the subtle patterns. All Gala had to do was make it beautiful again, like all complete spells were. Following her intuition, she broke the spell structure down into smaller parts. If she succeeded, Blaise would arrive in the Spell Realm, and no other parts of the spell would take effect. Once Blaise arrived, she would work out the other details.

  Having set the fix in motion, Gala anxiously watched the pattern unweave, desperately hoping that she herself had not made any errors.

  Chapter 50: Barson

  As Dara and her colleagues completed the spell to teleport them into the Council Hall, Barson braced himself. He knew enough about sorcery to realize that this was a dangerous maneuver. In a flash, he was standing inside the room. His soldiers were here as well—all except two. He could see a bloody mess on the floor, and a cold shudder ran down his spine as he understood what happened.

  Two of his men had materialized in the same spot, dying gruesomely in the process.

  It was an honorable death, and one Barson couldn’t dwell on now. Seeing the shocked looks on the sorcerers’ faces, he yelled, “Charge!” and started running across the giant hall toward the frightened group of sorcerers. His men followed, letting out a fierce battle cry.

  As they ran, a barrage of powerful spells began assaulting them. Terrible heat, bone-chilling cold . . . Pierre and his comrades were trying every elemental spell in their arsenal. The spells slowed Barson and his men, but the enchanted armor protected them from the worst of it, absorbing the energies of the spells. Barson knew there was a threshold, a limit to this protection, but he also knew that this was one advantage of this battleground. In an enclosed space like this room, the sorcerers’ hands were tied when it came to some of their more powerful spells.

  Then the attacks on the mind began. The Guard ha
d protection for this as well, but Dara had warned Barson that some mild effects would still be felt. The fear that gripped his whole being, however, was anything but mild. Still, Barson didn’t let it stop him; he had been trained to face fear and utilize it to his advantage. Running faster, he yelled, “Now!” and lifted his bow into the air.

  His men joined him, and a moment later, a small cloud of arrows flew toward the sorcerers. Instead of reaching the target, however, the arrows fell harmlessly to the ground, bouncing off the shimmering protective shield that the sorcerers managed to put up. Barson was not deterred, however. “One arrow,” he roared, signaling a different strategy—one that had been developed specifically to deal with this magical defense.

  His men focused all their arrows on one particular spot, magnifying the impact of the strike. It was his sister who had come up with this strategy, and it worked. The combined force of the arrows hitting the same spot caused the sorcerers’ protective shield to weaken, and the next batch of arrows dissipated it completely, leaving Barson’s opponents without their primary defense. Now the soldiers’ arrows pierced flesh, and screams filled the air as sorcerers tried to scatter, running in every direction.

  “Contain the perimeter,” Barson ordered, unsheathing his sword. And as the screaming intensified, he and his men swiftly dispatched the remaining opponents.

  When it was all over, the floor was red with blood and corpses lay in piles at his feet. Surveying the room, Barson saw that all of his men had survived this portion of the fight.

  The takeover of the Tower was complete.

  It was a victory as grand as any Barson could’ve imagined.

  Chapter 51: Blaise

  Blaise slowly became aware of being conscious.

  He could still think—which he reasoned meant he was still alive. However, when he tried to open his eyes, he discovered that he could not. As far as he could tell, he had no eyes . . . and no body that he could feel.

  Panic came at him in waves. The sensory deprivation was so terrifying that his mind retreated into the darkness again, conscious thought fading again.

  Upon the second awakening, Blaise felt a bit calmer. The realization of where he was—in the Spell Realm—was something for his mind to latch on to. And as Blaise slowly processed that fact, he realized that he did feel, though not in the same way as he had experienced things in the Physical Realm. It was as if the structure of his own mind was changing, acclimating to his new surroundings.

  After a while, he became cognizant of shapes with colors, tastes, and smells mixed together into strange mathematical patterns. These patterns were mesmerizing in their complexity. As Blaise studied them with awe, he felt a peculiar sense of belonging, as though he was becoming a part of something bigger than himself. The sensation was soothing and frightening at the same time, because Blaise realized he could easily lose himself in this bigger whole and forget that he ever existed.

  No. Focus, Blaise, Focus.

  That wasn’t why he was here. Gala. He needed to think about Gala. Concentrating on her, Blaise tried to imagine what she would look like here, and to his shock, as soon as the thought came to him, so did an avalanche of sensations.

  He saw, tasted, and smelled something wonderful.

  It looked like an intricate web, only it was three-dimensional, a bit like branches of a tree in the winter, and it was covering all of the nearby space. The web was buzzing with activity, small flashes of lightning traveling up and down the tiny strands within the pattern. At the same time, Blaise smelled the color red and tasted the number seven. He knew these concepts didn’t have scent or taste in his world, but they did here. In a strange twist, red smelled peaceful, like chamomile flowers, and the number seven tasted sweet, like raisins.

  And somehow Blaise knew what was in front of him.

  “Gala,” he thought with joy, addressing the intricate design.

  “Yes, this is me,” her thought came at him in response.

  The feeling of relief was so strong, Blaise would’ve shook with it if he had a body. His mind pulsated with joy. He found her. He had succeeded.

  There were a million things he needed to ask her, but all he could say was, “How could you do this? How could you disappear like that?” The words came across as angry, yet anger was the last emotion he was experiencing right now.

  There was no response for a moment. Instead, Blaise could see the colors in the Gala pattern changing. Lightning flashed, and the chamomile color red became violet—which smelled like rosemary for some reason—and Blaise tasted thirteen, which reminded him of a peach. Overwhelmed, he experienced the wonder that was his creation. “You are beautiful even here,” he thought at her, unable to help himself.

  Instead of a thought, he felt a response of a different sort. Suddenly, he was overcome by a deep sense of belonging, an intense feeling of happiness that somehow was not his own.

  He was feeling Gala’s emotions, Blaise realized, and he tried to project his own feelings at her. All the love and worry had now transformed into an almost incandescent joy, and he let her feel it, opening his mind as he had never done before. She responded with a plethora of her own sensations. It was intense, but he did not want it to stop.

  And then he felt the pattern that was Gala begin to join his. Slowly and methodically, they became a bigger, joint pattern. It was strange and wonderful, reminding him of the night before, when they made love for the first time.

  As the merging was coming to an end, Blaise received visions of Gala. He saw her whole life, as short as it was. He saw himself through her eyes, that first time in his study. Then he became her, reading all those books in his library. He was seeing her time in the village, the trial and the fair, the wonder and horror of the coliseum. He suffered with her in the battle with the Sorcerer Guard, and felt regret at the lives she destroyed. He saw himself teach her magic, felt her battle the storm, and in one violent flash he saw their night together and the battle afterwards. He even saw the Spell Realm through Gala’s eyes and realized that she was experiencing it in a different manner. The spells, the strange being she’d encountered, even himself—Blaise saw it all. The culmination of the vision was an ecstasy unlike any other, an exquisite pleasure that was born of the mind, not the body. It seemed to last forever.

  When it did end, he felt her explore his own mind the way he just did hers, and the ecstasy began again.

  Chapter 52: Barson

  The day after the takeover, after all the corpses had been removed from the Council Hall and the room had been thoroughly scrubbed, Barson gathered his men and the sorcerers who had been spared.

  Looking at the faces in front of him, he felt jubilant. This was the moment he had dreamed of all of his life, ever since he had learned that he was a descendant of the rightful kings.

  Dara and Larn stood to the right of him, holding hands. On his left were his sorcerer allies and his closest lieutenants. All present were dressed in their best clothes, and Barson himself wore decorative armor that had been passed down from times of old.

  The only thing missing was the woman he had planned to have by his side at this ceremony—Augusta. Where was she? Where was the Council? The questions tormented Barson, interfering with his joy at this victory, and he knew his first order of business would be to find answers.

  But first, he had to get through the ceremony.

  Stepping forward, he surveyed his new subjects, watching as a pair of young women walked toward the throne, carrying a golden crown on a velvet-wrapped tray. As they got closer, Dara took the crown from them, raising it high over her head. Then she reverently placed it on Barson’s head.

  “Long live the king!” she shouted, turning toward the crowd.

  “Long live the king!” Their answering cry echoed through the hallways, filling the Tower with the sound of a new beginning.

  Chapter 53: Blaise

  When the merging of their minds was long over, Blaise thought back to what he’d learned through the experience. He w
as particularly fascinated with whatever intelligences seemed to exist in this realm. “What do you think Dranel is?” he asked Gala silently, remembering the brief image he got from her mind.

  “I don’t know,” Gala responded, a bit dreamily. She appeared to be still under the influence of their joining. “He seems to be more like you than me, though his pattern is still quite different.”

  Blaise thought about it, remembering seeing his own pattern through her eyes and comparing them in his mind. He could not see any resemblance, but then he didn’t have Gala’s ability to process complex information quickly. Being in her mind here had been a very different experience. She was less like a human being here; instead, she was something different, something greater.

  Dwelling on it, Blaise slowly felt his thoughts fade as his newfound senses took over. It was so beautiful, so peaceful, that the nothingness lured him in.

  * * *

  “Blaise?” Gala’s thought brought him into consciousness.

  “Yes?” he responded, confused.

  “You have not thought for a while,” she explained, and he could detect a hint of worry in her pattern.

  What had happened? Did he pass out? Was it possible to do that in this place? Mildly disturbed, Blaise tried to refocus on something he almost forgot, though it was on his mind earlier.

  “How do we go back?” he thought, finally remembering his original intent. He had come here to retrieve Gala. To save her. To take her back to his world.

  “Do you want to go back?” she thought back, her pattern seeming to pulsate with a feeling Blaise could only describe as hesitation.

  He was not sure he did. This existence was very direct and pure. Blaise could feel what Gala felt, and she knew his innermost thoughts. But somehow, he still felt like an intruder here, though the feeling lessened with every moment. Yet as the feeling lessened, so did his sense of identity, of knowing what and who he was. It was only Gala’s presence that seemed to ground him somewhat, and Blaise had a bad feeling about the episode he’d just experienced. It was possible that he would have more periods of time without thought, his mind getting absorbed into the serene, mathematical beauty of the patterns around him. Could he slowly lose himself here? The idea was frightening.