by Mark McCabe
Glancing around the chamber, Golkar quickly confirmed there was no sign of either Kell or the gryphon in the area he had chosen for his arrival. He would have been surprised if there had been. The scan he had performed as he had opened the gate, while verifying Kell’s presence in Ormuz, had indicated that his fellow Guardian was not in the immediate vicinity of his chosen point of arrival.
Golkar slowly ran an appraising eye over his surroundings. Though the ruins looked much as he had expected them to, a strange feeling was tugging ever so gently at the corners of his awareness. There was something . . . something different here. The old city had an odd feel to it. It had been a long time since he had been here; at least a century if not much more. It had been a ruin then, of course, but that was all it had been, ruined, deserted, empty, nothing more. Now it felt, well, almost as if there was something more here than just the ruined buildings.
Golkar dismissed the thought. It must be his new powers. His awareness was heightened to such a state now that his mind was brimming with new sensations and unfamiliar feelings. It would take a bit of getting used to. Or perhaps it was just the presence of his colleague, and the gryphon, if it was still with him. After all, the latter was something he had virtually no experience of.
Golkar knew that he had injured the beast; but how badly remained to be seen. For a moment there, Kell and the beast had given him a run for his money. Though he had ended up sending them both packing with their tails between their legs, he had to admit that his colleague’s use of the beast had been quite a coup in its own way. Not that it had saved him in the end. Still, Golkar didn’t like surprises, least of all ones of that magnitude.
Reaching out with his senses in a broad sweep of the surrounding area, Golkar quickly pinpointed the location of both his opponent and his magical companion. The fact that Kell’s life-sign was weaker than he would have normally expected confirmed that he hadn’t yet recovered from the injuries he had received in their earlier encounter. Though the gryphon was close by, it was harder to read. Golkar had no benchmark against which to read what he sensed from the beast. The fact that they were both together would make things easier for him though. Without any further hesitation, he put his plan of attack into action.
Leaving the building he had arrived in, Golkar strode down a few steps then purposefully across the courtyard beyond, weaving a path through the columns and broken statuary that littered his path. His eyes were fixed on the open doorway of the temple at the top of the stairway that led up of from the broad avenue that ran through the centre of Ormuz. It was an unnecessary and instinctive precaution, for he knew that his opponents were still blissfully unaware of his presence. In a few strides, he was up the broad marble steps that led to the temple.
Golkar halted there for the briefest of moments, readying himself, then strode boldly into the inner sanctum of the temple, lowering his masking spell as he did so in an ostentatious display of his power. Though a tremor of excitement ran through his body, he knew no fear. When his sudden and unannounced arrival drew an immediate reaction from both of his opponents, he was more than ready for them. Raising the wand he held in his right hand, he instantly flung a holding spell in the direction of the crumpled form of his colleague.
The result was both immediate and effective. Kell, who had been in the process of attempting to rise from where he had been resting, sitting with his back against the temple wall, had already raised his own wand and was rapidly hurrying to complete a spell of his own when the holding spell struck him. Golkar smiled to himself at the ease with which it held him. For the moment he was content with a stalemate, neither allowing his foe to complete his own spell or attempting to take any further action against him.
As Kell strained with all of his will to overcome the holding spell and draw his own power forth, Golkar turned to deal with the second of his two protagonists. The first few moments of the battle had confirmed what he had known before it had started, that Kell alone would not have the power to vanquish him. The combination of his recent injuries and Golkar’s own greatly enhanced power made it certain that without some external assistance the wizard was doomed. Golkar, however, hadn’t forgotten that he had more than one score to settle here in Ormuz.
And Thyfur, it seemed, might prove to be a more worthy opponent for him than his colleague had been thus far. Unlike Kell, the beast had responded quickly to his sudden appearance at the door of the temple. The gryphon had risen up to its full length and was towering menacingly over the diminutive form of Golkar when the wizard turned to face him. For a brief moment, Golkar was stunned. Thyfur presented an awesome sight as he slowly drew back, unsheathing his razor sharp claws and preparing to leap at his prey. The sun glinted off of his plumage as his head twisted threateningly towards his foe and his terrifying beak opened to reveal the huge cavity of his mouth. Then, just as he was about to pounce, Golkar raised his left hand.
The air shimmied in front of the beast as a huge net suddenly winked into existence and hung there, as if suspended from some unseen structure way up in the sky above the open roof of the ruined temple. With a flick of his wrist that belied the drain on his power necessary to complete such a maneuver, Golkar flung the magical mesh at the gryphon, instantly covering him from head to toe and effectively binding the beast as surely as if he had been caged. Though Thyfur struggled mightily against the strange bonds, the net stuck to him like a spider’s web. Its gelatinous looking strands glimmered with a pale translucence that belied its actual strength. It was as if Thyfur had been bound within a web of steel cables, sticky and flexible, though stronger than any constraint he had ever encountered.
Feeling that he had the beast’s measure, Golkar turned his attention back to Kell once more. His former colleague hadn’t rested for a moment and was still struggling against the holding spell, unable to complete his own attack despite his best attempts to break free. Though Golkar felt his confidence strengthened, if anything, by the opening salvos in this grim duel, he knew that this would be a fight to the death now. There could be no retreat from this encounter. Each of the combatants would fight till his last breath before he’d surrender to the will of his opponent.
And so Golkar steeled himself to put forth all of his might. He could already feel the awesome drain on his power from the exertion of dealing with both of his opponents at the same time. Despite the apparent ease with which he had contained the gryphon, the spell with which he held the beast had taken some effort to raise. That had been nothing, however, compared to what it was taking to maintain it in the face of the gryphon’s determination to break free of his bonds. To add to that, his duel with Kell was also taking its toll on his resources. He was pushing his new power to its very limits. Yet still he felt supremely confident. He had their measure; he was sure of it.
It was time to up the ante. Ignoring the wrenching pull of the gryphon’s will on his own, he began to apply a crushing force around the upper body of his fellow wizard, slowly but surely constricting his chest, crushing it as if in a vice. He watched detachedly as Kell’s face began to contort with the effort of trying to resist this dual attack from his rival. And as he did so, he wondered at his own power, revelling in the strength that allowed him to deal with multiple opponents and multiple attacks at the same time. They had been fools to even attempt to resist him.
It was then, just when his power seemed to approach its zenith, that the first doubt entered his mind. At that very moment, when he felt that the final victory was within his grasp, that all he had to do was reach out and take it, and crush them both once and for all, Kell first, then the gryphon, began to make a supreme effort, acting as if in concert in a simultaneous effort to throw off the control with which he held them. Incredibly, the intensity of the battle began to rise to an even higher level still.
Somehow, Golkar managed to stay with them, drawing even deeper on his own power in answer to this new challenge. For the first time, however, he began to feel his strength ebbing. He was being pus
hed to a level beyond anything he had ever anticipated he could achieve. His concentration began, for the first time in the whole of this deadly battle, to waver. There were limits after all, he began to realise, to his new power.
Golkar felt his limbs beginning to tremble as the fight approached a critical point. Someone or something would have to give way soon, he could feel it. Both of his opponents were drawing on every resource they could muster, each knowing that they had to exert the maximum effort possible, or end their existence right here in the ruined Temple of Mishra. It was all that Golkar could do to quell their combined resistance. Kell’s he had anticipated, but not the gryphon’s, or at least not to the level it was now clear it was capable of. Perhaps he had miscalculated. The beast seemed so much stronger than he had believed possible.
Desperately, Golkar strove to maintain his three-way focus, the dual attack on Kell and the constraint with which he held the gryphon. As he dug deep into the well of his own power, striving with all of his might to complete his ascendancy over his rivals, he felt himself teetering, as if on the brink of a precipice. How to control so much force? How to sustain multiple attacks in the face of such a call on his will? An abyss seemed suddenly to open beneath him, beckoning and repelling him at the same time with its paradoxically simultaneous promise of peace and utter oblivion.
With a shudder, he remembered that he had seen its like before, when he had opened the portal to Sara’s world. He had nearly succumbed to it then, and that had been without another Guardian and a gryphon throwing all that they could at him in a desperate bid to overthrow him. Though his instinct told him to resist, he felt himself being drawn towards it, against his will, against all of his attempts to defy it. His assessment of it began to change. It began to seem desirable, appealing, something he had to have, even though at the core of his being he knew that he had to deny it. It offered a quick and seemingly logical way out of his current dilemma. He could barely resist its deadly appeal, was no longer sure he even wanted to. As he lifted his feet to take a first step towards it, he felt the floor of the temple shake beneath his feet and a low rumble begin to sound in his ears.
Despair washed over him, threatening to sweep him into the darkness in its wake. Knowing that he was about to lose, he determined to take his colleague with him. With a sudden and final effort, he strengthened the grip he had on Kell’s chest, squeezing with all his remaining strength in one last almighty effort. As he fought to maintain his holding spell and the constraint he had placed on the gryphon at the same time, he felt his own strength slipping away, rapidly now, like a stream racing towards the edge of a waterfall.
Golkar felt a shiver run down the length of his spine, chilling his heart to its very core as a series of tremors rippled throughout his body. Suddenly, a flash of blinding light burnt painfully into his retina and a piercing cry rent the still air of the precinct. He felt a hot wind sear his heart as the soul of a Guardian shot past him into the abyss, thrusting him out of its way in its haste to be gone from this world. Golkar felt a chill race across his soul. For a moment, he stood there, confused, blinking uncontrollably as he struggled to regain his vision. Then he realised what had happened. He had won. He had defeated the last of his colleagues. He was the sole surviving Guardian of Ilythia.
As Golkar began to exult in his victory, he quickly pulled up short. The battle had still not ended. Kell was no longer, and yet the force that opposed him had diminished only a little. Incredibly, though he had just vanquished his fellow Guardian in a head to head duel, victory still eluded him. Something . . . something strong and very ancient still opposed him.
The gryphon, in fact, seemed to be gaining in strength with every passing minute. Golkar could feel his spell of constraint beginning to weaken in the face of the beast’s growing determination, a determination which seemed to have leapt a notch or two with the passing of Kell, as if that great cataclysm had awakened some new source of strength within the beast. If things kept going the way they were, his spell would not only give way, but in the aftermath of its collapse he could be in very great danger of being swept into the same abyss that had taken his colleague. It would be like trying to stand in front of a tidal wave.
Golkar felt the despair rise within him as his energy steadily ebbed from him. Though his destruction of his colleague had been both spectacular and utter, the drain on his own power had also been colossal. He wouldn’t be able to hold out for much longer. Yet the gryphon, if anything, was continuing to grow in strength. It was feeding, he realised with horror, feeding on this place, drawing energy from it in some way that Golkar could not understand. He had miscalculated. He had chosen the wrong place to confront his enemies.
A gleam of light reflecting on the face of a gemstone took his attention as he looked frantically about the shattered room, desperately seeking for a way to avoid his impending doom. A small piece of black crystal stood embedded in the face of one of the walls, above a vacant plinth. Even at this distance, Golkar knew that it was the same as the ones Tanis had given to each of the Guardians. Here in the temple, it had been a symbol of some kind, no doubt, an adornment for a statue that had long ago fallen and shattered on the temple’s floor perhaps. Someone had taken the shard of crystal and set it into the wall of the now ruined and abandoned temple.
The jet black crystal was rare, extremely rare, and precious, priceless even, of the type jealously sought after by all with even the slightest of magical abilities. Once acquired, such items were hoarded and venerated for their unique qualities, for their capacity to augment and store mana.
Golkar had thought only four had ever existed here in Ilythia, shards of a singular larger crystal the Ilaroi had brought with them when they came to Ilythia. There was the one Tanis had owned, and had taken with him when he had left, and there were the three shards he had bestowed upon his pupils, on the three Guardians. At least one of those had been destroyed when Golkar had killed Tarak and, no doubt, another had been removed from this plane of existence with the demise of Kell, only seconds earlier. Golkar still carried his. So that accounted for all four.
And yet, here was a piece, sitting among the ruins of an old building, apparently unnoticed and unwanted. It had probably been there for centuries, if not aeons. Surely fate must have placed it here for him to find it in such a time of need as this.
Golkar had to do something, and fast. In an instant, he took his opportunity. Leaping back out of the doorway through which he had entered and relinquishing the spell of binding that held the gryphon at the same time, he quickly focused all of his remaining power on one single purpose. In the blink of an eye, the crystal turned from rock to liquid and expanded to fill the space that the walls of the room had once bordered. In a fraction of a second, it had gone from a small crystal to a mass the size of a large room. And for a few moments the previously black substance became translucent.
So quick was the transition and so unanticipated that Thyfur could now be seen within, caught in full flight in the now rapidly hardening substance as he reached towards his foe, like a monstrous fly caught in rapidly cooling amber. His mouth was open, his teeth bared. A look of anger, of a beast about to devour its prey, could still be seen, reflected in his wild eyes. The moment was frozen, caught as surely as sculptor catches an instant and renders it in stone for all of posterity to admire.
As the substance snapped back to its crystalline form, though to all appearances immensely larger in volume now than the small and innocuous crystal shard that been it genesis, Golkar knew that its magical properties would prevent any attempt by the gryphon to free itself. It wouldn’t even try to escape. To all intents and purposes, the huge square of crystal now held the beast in stasis. It could no more move or act than it could think or age. It was held, frozen in time, and would remain so for eternity. Nor could the gryphon be seen within now. As the crystal hardened, it assumed its normal colour, completely obscuring its contents. No-one, other than Golkar, would even know of the beast trapped forever
within.
Golkar allowed himself the ignominy of sagging to the floor as his exhaustion washed over him. He had never felt so depleted in all of his life. Nor had he ever been so close to failing. And yet, he had triumphed in the end. Even the powers of the ancients had been insufficient to vanquish him. I have become a god, he thought, as sleep began to take him. Even as the thought took hold, he chose not to acknowledge that he was weak now, weaker than he had ever felt. He had exhausted all of the power he had acquired from Josef, and much of his own to boot. He knew that he needed rest. With rest would come recovery. Once he had recovered, he would return to Tu-atha and complete what he had begun.
Chapter 13
The soft rosy light of the dawn that had barely begun to stain the edges of the eastern sky was a welcome sight for Thom as he opened his eyes and slowly surveyed their surroundings. It was a breathtaking sight, and one that always evoked the happiest of memories. For a while he lay still, peering up at the limitless depths of the cloudless sky above him and setting his mind free to roam back, searching for happier times.
It didn’t work, though. Try though he might, the solace his spirit sought eluded him. Those memories were from another time. Thoughts of the terrible things he had been forced to witness in the past few days could not be that easily banished, he realised, sighing at the despondent thought. For the moment, the life he had led before the sligs had come was little more than a dream, too dear and too cherished to be anything more than a liability in his current situation.
Reluctantly, Thom brought his gaze down from the ever-brightening cloudless sky to examine his more immediate environment. Shrugging off his gloom, just as the new day was now shrugging off the black mantle of night, he strove to focus on what was before them. Better that than looking back at this point. Perhaps today would be a better day he thought without any real conviction as he surveyed their surroundings.