Alex shook his head uncertainly.
“They hate your kind. Mages—they hate you. If they knew… Perhaps you should be a little less trusting with whom you share your information,” growled Elias. “You think you are safe so long as your secret is unspoken, but you will never be safe, Spellbreaker. You will spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder,” he warned, a tense trace of pity in his words.
“Is that the great evil?” asked Alex, remembering the line from the essay Ellabell had spoken of. “Their hatred of my kind? Is that it?” he added, thinking he had hit upon something.
Elias released a low, bitter laugh that chilled Alex’s blood. “A great evil was indeed set free that day, but it is nothing as insignificant as their hatred of your kind. It is far worse.” His starry eyes took on a distant look that unnerved Alex. “Their hatred was the cause, but not the result. They left a void behind that day, and voids must be filled,” he said vaguely, a sudden sadness appearing in the black, glittering depths of his piercing eyes. “Just remember, Spellbreaker: a desperate Mage will do anything to win a battle.”
“What do you mean?” asked Alex.
“The specifics do not matter, Spellbreaker. They are all the same. Desperate wizards do desperate things. Just look at what desperation made your friend Aamir do, pummeling the face of poor Professor Derhin.” Elias lowered his voice, a strangely joyful note to his words. “Some will even resort to life magic. You saw for yourself.” The cheerful glint continued, Elias’s words reminding Alex of Derhin’s panicked, last-ditch attempt to survive by using life magic.
“So, what is this ‘great evil,’ then, if it is not the hatred between Mages and Spellbreakers?” pressed Alex, returning to his previous train of thought.
“There you go again, always wanting things on a silver platter! Such a shame… I thought we’d made progress,” snapped Elias suddenly, his mood shifting in an instant. “I have spoiled you with my gifts. Well, no more. I have already done and said more than I should have, to help you. How can you learn if I lay it all out for you so easily? If you are so desperate, perhaps you should seek out the Head—he has plenty of the answers you seek.”
Elias’s figure twisted in the air, shifting smoothly into the form of a cat. Alex only caught the glint of sorrow for the briefest moment, but it was long enough for it to trouble him.
“What happened to you?” Alex called, but the shadow-cat was already gone, lost once more to the depths of the manor, leaving Alex with the worrying feeling that his secret guide was never coming back.
Chapter 18
Elias’s words stuck with Alex as the day wore on, leaving him distracted and unfocused in classes and snappy during breaks. The shadow-man had made him feel inferior, and Alex didn’t like it. Also, despite the questions he had been able to ask, Alex had come away from the encounter feeling as if he had even more that needed answering.
In the evening hours, Jari and Natalie were once more absent from his company. Natalie had brushed him off, saying she had an extra session to get to, and Jari had made an excuse about wanting to look over some ideas he’d had. Alex hated to admit it, but he was feeling a little put out by their continued absence. Besides, there were things he wanted to ask them, in the wake of Elias’s revelations. He was worried, and he couldn’t even tell them. Natalie concerned him the most, as he wondered what dark and dangerous arts she was getting into, exactly. He hoped she had been telling him the truth when she’d said she wouldn’t be stupid enough to dabble with life magic, but there was a gnawing doubt in his stomach.
Jari, too, so fixated on his scheme that he seemed not to notice anything else going on around him—not seeing that Alex also needed his help. Even if it was just the willingness to spare an hour to listen to the insanity of what had been going on lately in the ever-developing strangeness of Alex’s world.
He wasn’t ashamed to admit he missed them. The manor could be a lonely place.
Equally pressing was the idea that he was falling behind in some intangible way. With an hour on his hands and Jari absent from the dorm, Alex pulled the notebook back out from its hiding place and scanned the pages. It was a code—he knew that. He just had to figure it out. Surely, that would be easy?
Alex looked across the sketched symbols, seeing no continuity or repetition in any of them. Had he expected the answer to jump out from the page, just because he was a Spellbreaker? No matter which way he turned the book or looked at the inked markings, no epiphany came.
He lay his hand over one of the pages and brought the tendrils of his anti-magic creeping out onto the yellowing paper. It did nothing but dampen the fragile page ever so slightly. Perplexed, he tried uttering random words like “Spellbreaker,” “Leander,” and even “open sesame,” in case a password unlocked the code. The symbols remained exactly as they were.
Frustrated, Alex lay back on his bed with the notebook open on his chest and stared up at the sky, just visible through the curtains, as he tried to come up with something useful. It reminded him of rainy days when he was a kid, the heavy droplets pattering softly against the window as he would pull a box full of jigsaws and puzzle books from beneath his bed. His grandmother had taught him how to do the ones where you had to unfocus your eyes to see a shape beneath a pattern.
He tried it with the notebook, crossing his eyes slightly. It just made him feel stupid, squinting cross-eyed at the pages.
He racked his brain, trying to think of other solutions to puzzles from his childhood. Jigsaws were easy; they just required the missing pieces. But as far as Alex could tell, there were no pieces to be found here. There had been crosswords and code words, but he had tried those already with the book. The symbols didn’t seem to represent letters or characters of any sort. They were just randomly spaced on the paper, each one different.
What else? What am I missing? Alex thought, frustrated by the shapes on the page.
An image of Christmas Day flickered into his memory. He couldn’t have been older than seven or eight, wearing a bright orange paper hat as he sat at the dinner table with his mother and his grandparents, from her side of the family. They had never had any of his father’s side around the dinner table, from what he could remember. His grandparents were dead now, but he could picture them vividly, laughing and smiling as his grandmother served the Christmas meal that sat in the center of the table, a Santa hat on her head. He watched the scene as if it were playing on an old reel. His grandfather reaching over with a dark green package, spotted with golden snowflakes, wiggling it in front of the younger Alex for him to open. Little Alex grasped the wrapped parcel eagerly and began to tear into the wrapping paper, opening the present quickly to see what was inside. A small booklet fell from within the package, followed swiftly by a small magnifying glass made of red plastic. The younger Alex snatched up the magnifying glass and unfolded the booklet onto the first page to reveal a blue, red, and white pattern dotted across the sheet. As the smaller version of himself held the magnifying glass up to his curious eye, the pattern shifted, revealing the words Merry Christmas. The Alex in his memory whooped in delight at the neat trick.
It seemed like a random, useless memory, until it gave the present Alex an idea.
Scanning the room, he made sure he was alone as he pressed the notebook flat on the covers of the bed. Certain that he was, he allowed his anti-magic to flow slowly into the palms of his hands before stretching it into a thin square of glittering black-and-silver energy, much like the shielding spell he had tried the other day but far smaller, held in the space between his palms. A thrill of excitement coursed through him as he lowered the screen of anti-magic over the top of the notebook, like his younger self had done with the red magnifying glass.
Beneath the glittering square, the symbols sprang to life, each sketch spreading across the page in a series of sentences and diagrams and bullet points. There was no real structure to the writing itself, but the screen permitted him to see it as it had been intended. It was a scrap
py sort of journal, really, with thoughts jotted down as they had come to the writer. Sometimes, the work was dated. Other times, it was not.
Alex had to re-conjure the screen every time he wanted to turn the page, but what he saw made his eyes go wide in fascination. The work was written by an actual Spellbreaker. It was a fact Alex already knew, but the information within was designed specifically for Spellbreakers. A true first for Alex. It was like a well-fitting shoe after years of wearing a too-small boot.
On some pages, there were lists of spells and what they were used for. Others told of control techniques, to make the best out of anti-magic abilities—actual, specific instructions on attack and defense methods and how to forge anti-magical weaponry that could be thrown or maintained in a duel. It was all aimed at his kind. There was no figuring out necessary; the words were right there, in bluish-green, on the page, spelling it out.
Though Alex had discovered how to form certain types of weaponry, the notebook described kinds he had never seen before, some of them positively medieval. There was a delicate sketch showing an anti-magical longbow and arrows, with a side note that it was often far more effort than it was worth. Another showed a spiked mace and a double-edged axe, though Alex thought those looked a bit too vicious for his liking.
Just having the notebook in his hands, with the humorous side notes and inner monologue of the writer, Alex felt slightly less alone. It was the most tangible relic of Spellbreaker heritage he had come in contact with, and it soothed a dull ache within the caverns of his heart.
He devoured the book quicker than he had the Battles tome. Every page was filled with something new and exciting that thrilled Alex, making him antsy to try out some of the spells and techniques described within.
However, as he flicked further through the fragile pages, coming to the last section, the writing began to change. No longer formally informative, it took on a more thoughtful, less practical tone. The sentences were scattered more haphazardly, penned wherever the writer could find space. Alex was surprised to find bullet points that noted previous wars and battles between the Spellbreakers and the Mages, repeating the ones mentioned in the other book Elias had given him. At the bottom of the page, beneath the long list of battles, there was a hastily written note within a sketched square:
My father has fallen in battle. My brother has fallen with him. I feel it will soon be my turn. There are not many of us left now. I look to my brothers and sisters in arms and we are growing few. We still hold our defense, but we cannot last much longer. Most of the Houses are already gone, wiped from the face of the earth. I do not simply mean we soldiers. I mean all of them—all of them, gone. Men, women, children, elderly, all. Of the Six Great Houses, three hold fast. I am the last of House Wyvern. On the field, the two remaining daughters of House Volstag fight with the savage fury of the Banshee. Beside us, the head of House Copperfield and his three sons. Never have I seen braver or bolder men and women than these few, who fight as one with me.
I wonder what will happen when we are gone? We are the last.
The pages only grew scrappier as the notebook came to its sorrowful conclusion. The writing was rushed and spiky, Alex having to squint to make out some of the words as he read them. There was something macabre about reading words written by a dead man, but Alex could not tear his eyes away.
I do not know what it will mean for the world, when the last of us falls. The world demands balance. There has to be light with dark, dark with light. Without one half, what will be left instead? It will create a void.
Alex heard Elias’s words echoing in his head, poignantly recalled. “They left a void behind that day, and voids must be filled.”
A void has to be filled.
The notebook parroted Elias. Or had Elias somehow gained those words from these very pages?
A world cannot exist in which there is only magic. It cannot simply be the Mages without the Spellbreakers. If you take one away, you leave a void; something has to replace it. It is like digging a hole in the sand—water will fill it, no matter how far from the sea you are. When a void is created, something has to fill it. Something has to restore the balance.
When the last of us falls, I wonder what will come to balance the scale?
Alex flipped the page over, finding it to be the very last one. He had never thought of it like that before, in terms of a balance that needed to be kept even. Nor could he imagine the terror of knowing his time was running out. And yet it seemed he and Leander had something in common. The tragic title of Last they shared.
We are desperate.
The daughters of House Volstag have sacrificed themselves in the hopes that we may hold out a while longer. I begged them not to, but they used the last resort of their death magic. They could not be stopped, and though it broke my heart to watch them, their last moments proved a fantastical sight. To see their bodies shimmering with bright, blinding silver light as they stormed across the field, channeling their souls into a single pulse of raw destruction, was something I shall never forget. Still, we miss their presence more keenly for their loss. I wish they had not done so, but they were as desperate as I am now, as I write this. It is no easy task, to use one’s death magic, and I wish there had been another way. But those ferocious Howling Valkyries would not be swayed. They did not wish to end their days cowering behind rocks, as we do.
I envy their courage. We all do.
I heard the others talking of performing a similar ritual, but I know they will not.
The aura of the Volstag sacrifice still ripples across the field like ice on a river, almost liquid to the touch, evaporating any Mage who sets foot on it. But they will wait us out. The aura will not remain forever, and they will come for us before long.
I do not wish to use the essence of myself in battle, yet I know I will, should they push me to it. I will take down as many as I can before the end, though I do not imagine the end is far off. We are so very few now. Dillane of House Copperfield fell yesterday, and his sons are bereft.
All hope is lost.
We are the final players in the game of life and death. We are the final weights holding everything steady, before the scale tips. We are all that stands between balance and the void.
I hope they are ready to pay the price for what they have done. May their wrongdoing haunt them to the ends of the earth.
There were only four more words on the page, with the date written rapidly at the very bottom right corner. 1908. Alex’s heart was in his mouth as he let the words sink in. He knew the outcome of the story, and yet Leander had still been alive when he had written those sentences. Leander could not have known what would happen to him. The ambush, the scaffold, the death by magical firing squad. He pictured Ellabell’s description of a burning silver light in the eyes of Leander Wyvern and wondered if it was the same silver light the daughters of House Volstag had radiated as they had walked to their deaths. A flicker of a Spellbreaker’s essence.
It was the first Alex had heard of this mysterious death magic, though he guessed it to be similar to the life magic of the Mages. Everything in balance. Every magic having an anti-magic counterpart. A kind of dark magic that took something from your soul in order to use it—a high-stakes, high-cost power. One to be used only in desperation.
Elias’s words came creeping back—“a desperate Mage will do anything to win a battle”—though relevant, it seemed, for Mage and Spellbreaker alike. It had certainly sounded like desperation in Wyvern’s description of the Volstag women. A last-ditch effort to buy time for the others by using their essence. By bartering their souls as payment. Alex shuddered.
His eyes prickled as he read Leander Wyvern’s final words, feeling them resonate powerfully within the depths of his own heart.
I am the last.
Chapter 19
“Are you ready to go?” asked Alex as he sat down opposite Jari and Natalie in the mess hall, taking a small bite out of a rosy apple.
“What?” Natalie replied
sleepily, looking up from her plate of congealed lunch. Her eyes, so dark brown in color they were almost black, were bloodshot, and the bruised-looking bags had reappeared beneath them.
“Are you ready to go to the cellar? We’ve only got about forty-five minutes,” clarified Alex, checking the clock on the wall.
Natalie shook her head. “I am sorry, Alex, but I cannot go today. I have a session arranged at half past with Professor Renmark.” She stifled a yawn as she pushed the remains of a mushroom through the gelatinous mass of cream sauce with the prongs of her fork.
“But we said we’d meet today,” said Alex, crestfallen.
“I’m sorry, Alex,” repeated Natalie, her brow furrowed in apology.
“Can’t you just brush Renmark off for once?” Alex tried a different tactic, trying to keep the annoyance from creeping into his voice. “You’ve been spending too much time on these extracurricular things, Natalie. You’re exhausted. Come on, just take some time off and come with us to the cellar. You don’t have to spar or anything, just sit with us for a while.” His gaze fixed on Natalie’s so she might see the concern that lay there.
“I’m sorry, but I cannot go today. I really cannot.” She sighed wearily. Alex knew she had seen the look of worry in his eyes and heard the troubled note in his words, because she would not look him directly in the eye. Her shifty gaze only added to his concern. It was as if another curse had settled over her, except Alex could not feel the physical presence of a coiled snake gripping her insides as he had the last time; it was a far subtler affliction than that. It was hunger. Not the gnawing hunger of an empty stomach, but something far more sinister—he could see it in her vacant stare and agitated manner.
“Yeah, I can’t either. Sorry, man,” added Jari guiltily.
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