by Liam Lawson
Abigail’s voice floated through his head, a memory from their very first encounter. She’d been creating a new type of coding enchantment, one that overlaid the magic into the code via a new space for the code and runes to interact. It had been the basis of his new spell template project for class with Nymal and Tibbs.
Could it really be that simple? But with the wards pressing on him he wouldn’t be able to cast in the first place. Or could he? Arlen had not been a smart man, but he’d been cunning. He wouldn’t have come up with something new, he hadn’t been that good of a wizard, but he might just come at things differently. Mindset was important in magic. It required tremendous focus and though seemingly simple, was one of the most challenging aspects of spellcasting.
Trorm began to draw upon his magic to cast. The stadium wards pressed against him. He let them and then accepted them. Let them press into him until they entered into his magic. Power raged through him. Significant power.
Most of which was being used to keep everyone inside the stadium safe from whatever magical assault was occurring outside. If he drew upon too much of it, the attacks might break through. So Trorm only drew upon a little bit…then he applied what he’d been practicing.
He began to cast, and instead of simply pushing the magic straight into his spell like he’d known Arlen had done, he created a layer between the ward’s power and his spell. A new area in which to work and interact that would draw less power and prevent unexpected results. When he lifted his staff up and cast his spell upon the wall, it flowed from him like silken cream, clear and powerful.
Trorm didn’t yet know much in the way of divination magic. He had the basics for a spell that would allow him to see farther and through objects. That was what he cast now. With the stadium’s power, he altered the spell and suddenly had a new equivalent of a far-seeing. He directed it eastward and looked out over the rally.
Behind him, everyone went quiet as they stared.
Whatever Professor Hunt thought he’d seen, he’d been wrong. The living spell was back, fand it was bigger. Enormous. Easily the size of a building and taking on a vaguely humanoid shape. Red light played within it, crackling out from it, saturating the area all around.
Children screamed on the streets and sidewalks. Children that were shrinking, becoming younger and younger. Spells were cast at the living spell from a distance and unraveled before they could reach it, set back in time to before their existence.
Somewhere among those children was Nymal and Abigail. Trorm caught himself trying to search for them, then realized the futility. He wouldn’t even know what they looked like. Something caught his eye.
In the center of a cleared-out parking lot was a circle glowing with runes. The rainbow orchid and serpent symbol of Oana had been painted upon the ground there at first, but someone had taken a can of purple spray paint and laid over it with the all-seeing-star of Xosione.
Lilian and Trisha floated several feet above the ground there, limp and unconscious as the living spell wreaked havoc about them.
Chapter Seventeen
“You can fucking cast fucking spells in the stadium?”
Trorm turned around. Every eye was on him and Coach was glaring at him from across the locker room. His knees turned to jelly and his stomach clenched. An answer was expected. His throat closed up and his tongue turned to lead. His forearms and palms tingled.
“Is that what you just did out there on the field?” Coach demanded. “Because if you fucking did, after every fucking shit thing we’ve been through—”
“I have not!” Rage roared through Trorm so hot and furious that it melted through his fear and he stepped forward, the world falling away except for him and the coach. “I puzzled this out now because I need to know my allies are safe. I would never dishonor my teammates.” He bared his tusks.
The coach looked only mildly mollified and the rest of the locker room came back into focus. With it came the fear. The paralysis.
Abigail, Nymal, Lilian, and even Trisha, they all needed him. They were out there, trapped by that thing. No one had been able to get into the red lit area and all spells cast into it were clearly failing. It was only a matter of time before all those people inside aged backwards into nothing. All of those people were eventually going to regress to a point where they couldn’t sustain themselves and die, and that was just the start of whatever this thing might do.
It needed to be stopped. Lilian had told him that he was just a college student. That she was the paladin and that it was her job to stop things like this. She couldn’t do that now. Apparently, nobody else could either. But Trorm thought he might just have a way to help. Only he couldn’t do it alone and to get the aid he needed, he needed to speak.
So, he forced his mouth open and made himself speak. He went slow, forcing out each word and enunciating it carefully, as if casting a spell for the first time. He couldn’t afford to misspeak now any more than he could under those circumstances.
“I am going out there.” He gestured at the viewing behind him on the wall. “They need help.”
“Those people are turning into kids!” Scott called out.
“Look, Coldstorm,” Coach said. “You’re a clever wizard, but you think you can go out there where emergency responders can’t and not get turned into a bloody fetus on the ground?”
“I do,” Trorm said. “My shield spell protected us before. With a little modification, I can make it into a kind of magical armor that will protect me from the effects of that living spell. With the stadium powering it, it should last indefinitely.” It also shouldn’t hurt the wards keeping everyone safe as long as he didn’t overdraw on them, but he didn’t want to put the idea that the wards might not hold up into anyone’s heads.
He pointed at the people—at the children growing younger—behind him. “I’m going out there. I’m going to pull as many of those people back into the stadium as I can where the wards will protect them. And I’m going to try and stop that thing.”
“Wait,” Scott said. “Wait wait wait—isn’t that the fag rally?”
Trorm didn’t know what that meant. A fag was a type of cigarette, wasn’t it? “I believe it’s the LGBTQ Rally, though I don’t see how that matters. Those are our classmates.”
The silence that followed that was somehow more still. His words had mattered to his teammates. And his words had shamed them. He didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. There were too many faces for his sunglasses to register all of their emotions. He pushed onward.
“I won’t ask anyone to come with me,” Trorm said. “But any who choose to come, I’ll shield you. I cannot save everyone out there and stop that thing alone. That won’t stop me from trying.”
Trorm made his way toward the exit but was blocked by both the security guard and Coach. “Can’t let you go out there,” the guard said. SCARED.
Coach snorted. Trorm had to agree, the idea of this man stopping him was laughable.
“You go out there Coldstorm, you won’t be coming back in here,” Coach said. “You understand me? I’m not letting you go out there to risk your life for a bunch of dykes and fairies. This team fucking needs you!” Coach glared around at all of them. “Same goes for all you dipshits! You go out there, kiss your football careers goodbye. I am not letting you get yourselves killed.”
Trorm glanced back and found that he hadn’t been alone in making his way to the door. The team stood behind him.
“I understand,” Trorm said with a nod to the coach.
“Do you?” Coach snapped. “Do you fucking really? Because if you don’t got fucking football, you don’t have your scholarship, Coldstorm. You think about that?” TERRIFIED.
Trorm clenched then unclenched his fist. It did matter. It just didn’t matter enough to stop him. “I would not be worthy of this school’s education if I were not willing to step up to defend it and its students.”
Coach’s face seemed to collapse in on
itself. A tear leaked out from his eye to trickled down his cheek. “Don’t do this.”
“I’m going,” Trorm said.
“No, you’re not,” the guard replied, stepping more firmly into the middle of his path.
Coach reached out and put a hand on the guard’s shoulder without looking at him. “Son,” he said, taking a shaky breath. “You can’t stop all of us.”
Trorm’s eyebrows rose.
Coach glared at him. “Fuck you, Coldstorm. You think I’m letting you fucking pansies do this by yourselves?”
The security guard’s resolve crumpled. He stepped aside and the entire football team, led by Trorm and the coach, poured out of the locker room and to the stadium exit. It wasn’t hard to modify the shield spell, shaping it to surround the body and tethering it to the target, not with so much power provided freely by the stadium.
In short order, every player emitted a shimmer like a heatwave about their person as Trorm waved his staff over each in turn. “Grab and return,” he instructed. “That’s the play. Pull as many as you safely can out of that spell’s area of effect. Get them into the stadium, then go grab more.” Then, because it seemed appropriate, he called out, “Break!”
The team broke, sprinting down the parking lot like a battle horde ready for war. They tore through the parking lot, across the street, and toward the abandoned signs, flags, and banners. In the distance, officials called for them to stop, but they couldn’t get any closer without risking getting caught in the spell themselves.
Children screamed, cried, sat on the ground or ran wild in clothing far too large for their still shrinking frames. Some were already toddlers, others were preteens trying their best to comfort the panicking babies. The players swooped in, grabbing up children under each arm and hauling them back toward the stadium as fast as they could.
Trorm ran past the children toward the center of the rally where the living spell towered over them all like a misty titan. Below it, Lilian and Trisha hovered unconscious in the air, power crackling about their bodies, leaping back and forth between them and the runes spray painted over Oana’s holy symbol.
That power radiating upward into the living spell’s maw. It sucked down the energy like a leach, growing larger the more it glutted itself. Trorm had only the vaguest idea of how he might hurt that thing. His lightning spell had done some damage earlier. Not nearly so much as Trisha’s divine magic had. Then again, he hadn’t had so much power to draw upon then.
He couldn’t let the living spell keep eating the magic coming from the profaned holy symbol. Nor could he allow it to turn upon his teammates or the victims of whatever mad ritual he was interrupting. That meant he would have to kill it himself or distract it until someone more powerful than him could. The idea did not appeal. Wizards were not front-line fighters. This was going to suck.
Trorm drew upon as much of the stadium’s power as he dared. He’d only have one shot at this before the thing noticed him. His attack needed to be powerful enough to stop it but not so powerful that he eliminated the stadium’s defenses. Even if he somehow got lucky enough to slay the living spell with one blow, that didn’t necessarily mean that this would be over. Who knew what would happen to all that power it was sucking down without the living spell to shore it up.
Trorm bellowed a war cry. Lighting erupted from his staff in bright, crimson with power drawn from the stadium’s wards instead of its usual blue-white, shaking his staff with the sheer force of it. Trorm screamed louder and hurled the crimson bolt of energy into the living spell.
The red lightning bolt struck the misty giant in its distending stomach. The thing staggered back, coughing and spewing up raw magical energy that shot out, blasting craters in the street. Other areas of the street were suddenly repaired, then turned to liquid before vanishing to reveal grassy land beneath. The land before the road was paved.
Worse, with the spell titan no longer there to suck it down, the magical energy roaring up from the profaned holy symbol and floating women became a geyser, spraying magic everywhere in gigantic dollops. One of the dollops fell upon a streetlamp, transforming it into a giraffe which took off at a gallop. Another struck a minivan, transforming it from white to purple. The next car struck exploded. Another massive droplet simply hit the ground and an obelisk of some unknown substance rose upward, gleaming darkly until it was as high as any of the nearby buildings. All around, other effects occurred.
Trorm cursed. Chaos magic. Magical energy not simply drawn up in an absurd quantity, but utterly undirected. There was no telling how it might affect anything it came into contact with. The effects could be harmless. Or catastrophic. At the very least, it didn’t seem to be affecting the air around them, which had been a very real possibility, so there would continue to be a steady supply of oxygen around. That was good.
It was the only bit of good news Trorm could make out. The spell titan staggered upright. Its belly was marked with a twisted series of glowing red cracks that broke the mist in an unnatural pattern where his lightning bolt had struck. The spell titan’s eyes, or the glowing holes that passed for eyes, fixed on Trorm.
“YOU!” it bellowed, taking a single massive, weightless stride toward him, all but eliminating the distance between them. “I KNOW YOU! I HATE YOU! I WILL UNMAKE YOU!”
Trorm stared up at the thing, craning his neck back to meet its hateful gaze. “You’re an articulate one, aren’t you?”
It screamed, clenched a fist the size of a semi, and brought it down upon Trorm. His shield spell flashed at the impact and he was driven down, pavement shattering and then being unmade around him. The force of the blow staggered him, dropping Trorm to his knees. As the spell titan pulled its hand back, he saw that his shield had been driven straight into the ground around him, carving out a perfectly circular furrow about him.
The shield flickered, ready to collapse. Sweat streamed from Trorm’s scalp and down his face and neck. Keeping the spell up took everything he had. That strike hadn’t just been physical, the spell titan had done something. It felt as if Trorm had been holding his shield spell for hours instead of seconds. He blinked sweat out of his eyes, realizing that was exactly what had happened.
The spell titan had aged his shields, pushing them forward instead of back, and the result had drained him almost completely of all the energy he possessed.
Laughter like an oncoming train boomed from overhead. He looked up to find the spell titan’s face manic with glee as it looked down upon him.
“That was significantly less heroic than I had imagined,” Trorm said, almost drunkenly as the thing brought its fist down again. It wasn’t at all how he’d imagined himself going. Here was hoping that his death would mean something.
Chapter Eighteen
A gleaming emerald dome slammed into place over Trorm an instant before the fist slammed into him.
The fist exploded.
Mist and spell energy streamed from the now empty stump of the spell titan’s limb. A scream tore through Trorm, so loud and forceful that for a moment he had trouble distinguishing the sound from his own body. The spell titan staggered backward, gaping at its wound, mouth opening and closing in disbelief.
Trorm stared at it, then at the shield over him. Where had it come from and how had it done that?
“Trorm!” He spun around to find Abigail and Nymal running his way. Nymal had her wand out, the tip glowing with green energy that matched the shield over him while Abigail clutched at her tablet. Neither seemed hurt and both were their appropriate ages. They shimmered with the same spell that protected him from the temporal manipulation of the living spell.
“You’re alive,” Trorm said in stunned disbelief. He hadn’t allowed himself to hope.
“Yup,” Abigail said. “Thanks to your teammates. They got us back to the stadium. The spell de-aging us came undone almost right away.”
“The stadium?” Trorm said stupidly. But he’d only just gotten here and taken the one b
low. Except that now as he looked around, he realized that they were alone. The sky still shone with red energy and there was still evidence of the chaos magic that had spilled out over everything, but there were almost no children left. Even as he spotted one of the few remaining, one of his teammates arrived, scooped the child up, and hauled ass back toward the stadium.
“How long have I been here?” he asked.
“Not sure,” Nymal said. “Best guess, that thing’s been pressing down on you for a good fifteen, twenty minutes.”
Twenty minutes? It had seemed like barely an instant. No wonder he was exhausted. He hadn’t simply deflected a single blow, he’d been battling back the effects of a spell head on for an extended period of time without realizing it. An incredibly powerful spell at that. The feat would have been more impressive if he’d realized he’d been doing it. As it was, he was simply lucky that he hadn’t gotten killed.
“Are you okay?” Abigail said, hurrying to his side. Blue runes and symbols hovered over the screen on her tablet.
“Little tired,” he lied with a grunt. He was exhausted.
The spell titan shrieked and shrieked, all but drowning out their words as it clutched at its wounded limb, dancing about. Its footfalls should have made the ground shake with their size and violence. They didn’t. It wasn’t entirely corporeal, being more energy than matter Trorm realized, which brought him to another realization.
“What was…that’s not really a shield,” he said, glancing up at the emerald dome.
“Nope,” Nymal said. “We figured out what you did to tap into the stadium’s power. I might not be a boom school specialist like you, but I know enough to manifest a shit-ton of energy, if not direct it.”
Panic clawed at Trorm’s stomach. “Is the stadium okay?”
The girls frowned.
“Think so,” Abigail said slowly. “Why?”