There were none of those, I checked, but in the end there may as well have been. I was a block away from the source the first time I felt the pull of magic, and every step I took only helped that sensation grow, and wrap itself around me like a boa constrictor, tightening, squeezing. Even at the Black Fortress, there wasn’t a single moment where I felt as completely overpowered by magic as I did now.
I felt small, infinitely small, like an ant that had just discovered its place in the universe and had to decide whether its own fleeting existence was worth a damn in the grand scheme of things. The sensation took hold of my chest, my stomach, my heart; I almost couldn’t walk, it was so powerful. I wanted to turn around and flee, because whatever was happening here wasn’t going to be good for anyone, but where would I even flee to?
If this thing, if whatever was going to happen turned out badly, there wouldn’t be anywhere to run to. Everything would be gone. Draven had mentioned that the power of the stones was immense and could lead to incredible devastation, but I had never felt that kind of power before. Moving towards it instead of away from it was a huge part of the battle already, but I had to win—I had to push. In that moment, there was no me; there was only an instrument that could prevent a lot of people from getting hurt or killed.
The building at the source of all that magic looked like a shutdown old supermarket. The windows were boarded up and graffitied all over with gang tags and pictures of… really inappropriate stuff. As I stared at it, this battered up, mustard colored building with the word Superkey written across the top in white lettering, I noticed light shimmering through some of the gaps in the boards covering the windows.
I moved quickly toward the front door, but it was locked with a chain from the outside. That meant there had to be another way in—unless someone had locked the door from the outside after Abvat and his people had gone in? I scanned the tiny parking lot, but it was empty. I decided then to move around the building, checking for any possible back doors or other methods of entry.
The Superkey had a service door around the back, next to a large metal warehouse door where trucks could slide in and unload their cargo. The large metal door was shut and padlocked, but the staff door beside it looked warped and bent. I walked up to it, stuck my fingers into the gap between the door and the wall, and pulled. The door opened without a fuss, it wasn’t even locked. Someone had busted the door to get in and hadn’t been able to lock it after.
Fighting the ever-growing sick feeling in my stomach, I opened the door and slowly slid inside, watching for any signs of movement. The room immediately ahead of me was a small store room with empty metal shelves that were now rusting and ruined. At the end of the room there was another door; that one was locked.
Quietly, I pulled a multi-tool from my backpack and started picking the lock, carefully listening for that click that’d tell me the door was unlocked. What I heard from the other side instead were voices. Someone was talking, several people actually; and one of them was Abvat. I could recognize that skeevy little snake’s voice anywhere.
There wasn’t much time now. I hurried with the lock, getting a little clumsy with it and reminding myself not to break it, because then I’d be screwed. A frantic minute passed, sweat popping on my forehead, but the lock gave with a click. I put the multi-tool away, prepared myself for what was on the other side, and stepped through, keeping low to the ground as I went.
The supermarket had been completely transformed into what looked like some kind of refugee center. Instead of aisles and stacks, there were beds on the floor—rows of them—and instead of two or three followers, Abvat had thirty, maybe forty. If that wasn’t enough of a shocker, there were kids here, and women, all watching from the sidelines as Abvat and a small handful of others stood around a stone that was floating between them and surrounded by a halo of bright, golden light.
My mouth fell open, my breathing quickened. These people, these families… they all just wanted to go home, to go back through the rift. But that was… impossible, wasn’t it? All this time people like me had been falling the rifts and winding up here, without memories, without identities, and none of them had ever been able to figure out a way through the rifts from this side.
What made Abvat think he’d found a way?
I spotted Crag, the mountain of a man that he was, laying on the floor off to the side of the room. Lording over him was a man in a leather jacket holding a baseball bat, but beside Crag were two other unconscious bodies that had to be Draven and Aaryn. Careful not to get spotted, I crouched and crept behind what looked like a deli counter, moving closer to the others as events around me unfolded.
Abvat’s voice began to rise, and then the halo surrounding the stone became a beam that shot into the ceiling, creating a misty ring of shifting light that pulsed and throbbed and strobed. My ears popped, my chest tightened, and I keeled over, putting my hands out to stop me from hitting the floor with my face. Something was happening to me. I felt like I was… falling away, one piece at a time; my very essence dripping off me and draining into a giant storm drain.
I needed to get to Draven, and I’d do it on my hands and knees if I had to. Around me I could hear the sounds of children crying and the panicked mutterings of people who didn’t know what was going on. Whatever I was feeling, they were feeling too, and they were reacting. Reaching the end of the counter, I saw I was about a ten-yard dash from the sentry with the baseball bat. He wasn’t Naga, though—his face was too wide, his build too stocky, and his eyebrows too pronounced.
Aaryn was the closest of the three to me. She lay on her side, her eyes were shut, and there was blood on her cheek. Her own blood? I wasn’t sure, but I knew I had to wake them up somehow. I couldn’t do this on my own. Careful not to attract any attention, I shrugged my shoulders out of my backpack and set it down. I then scanned around for anything I could throw, something large enough that’d make at least a little noise.
After a little looking around, I spotted an old door handle and lock. It was small enough to throw, but large enough that it’d cause a thud wherever it landed. I aimed it across the big guy’s feet and tossed it as hard as I could. The handle hit the floor and clattered along, stealing the sentry’s attention. Taking the chance now that he was distracted, I crept out of the darkness, got as close to him as I could, and I wedged my dagger into the back of his knee.
I didn’t know who this guy was, I didn’t hate him or anything, but he looked like if given half a chance, he’d rearrange my teeth with that baseball bat, so I didn’t feel bad crippling his ability to walk. He went down like a sack of bricks; hard and fast, and squealing as he went. But the buzz in the room was so loud, nobody had heard him fall.
By the time he turned his head to look at me, I had picked up his baseball bat and was ready to deliver the clean shot to the head that knocked his lights out. Not wanting to lose it, I pulled my dagger out of the back of his leg, wiped the blood on his shirt, and slid it into its sheath before dropping to my knees next to Draven.
I checked his pulse, and it was still there. I checked his mouth, and he was still breathing. But when I tapped his face, he wouldn’t wake up. His skin was pale, his lips were blue, and while he was clearly unconscious, he seemed to be writhing in pain, shuffling, like a dreamer having a nightmare. Aaryn, I noticed, was doing exactly the same, as was Crag.
They weren’t going to wake up.
I stood, grabbed the baseball bat, and holding it firmly in my hands, I pushed through the group of people assembled around Abvat and the stone. When I reached the front, I called him out.
“Abvat!” I screamed, throwing my voice up and over the rising tide of panic washing through the crowd. These people knew something was wrong, but they hadn’t yet put together what I had. If they had, they’d have started running by now.
Abvat turned his eyes on me, his solemn, reverent expression transforming right before my very eyes like a caricature. “What the fuck are you doing here!” he yelled.
“How did you get—you know what, never mind. Somebody kill this little bitch already before she ruins everything.”
Some of the men assembled around me started to approach. I took a swing with the baseball bat at one of them, the bat cutting through the air just in front of him. That was enough to make him and the rest back off. These people weren’t fighters, they were scared of me—scared of him. “I think before you kill me, you should probably tell these people what you’re doing to them, don’t you?”
“Will somebody please kill her already?” I could tell I was pissing him off, but he wasn’t going to move away from the stone. Maybe he couldn’t.
“You can all feel that, right?” I asked, directing myself at the crowd, “That drain? It’s him. He’s leeching your power so he can make the stone work because his magic isn’t strong enough.”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“I figured it out until I saw these people here. You’re not going to send them home because you can’t—you’re going to use their energy to get yourself home, and if you have to treat these people like living batteries to make that happen then so be it, because that’s the kind of guy you are, Abvat. Aren’t you?”
“You shut up!”
“That’s the best you’ve got? Shut up? You’re gonna have to try harder than that.”
“I’m going to take you all home, I promise!” he yelled. “We’re all going to get to be with our families again, our sons and daughters, that’s all I want. You have to believe me, just hang in there a little longer.”
I walked over to him, first testing the waters to make sure no one would make a move on me, then quickening my pace when the men who’d come forward to attack me stayed still. I could see them now as I moved closer to Abvat, their faces bathed with the light from the stone. They weren’t all Naga, maybe only half of them were. These were all people who had fallen through the rifts, but they were all members of different species that had decided to take refuge together in this place. They were desperate, clinging to Abvat’s promise that he could help them get back home… but he was lying to them.
That realization had hit me as soon as I felt the magic drain on my very soul, a revelation pieced together from things I’d been told. The Naga had stolen their magic from others, which meant theirs wasn’t pure, which also meant Abvat couldn’t directly handle the magic in the stone… unless he was able to steal the energy from others whose magic was pure. Back at the infirmary, he’d been present when I used Bastet’s magic to draw the stone out of Fate’s body, and only then had he been able to touch it. He must’ve leeched some of Bastet’s magic to do that, and I’d been so distracted I hadn’t noticed, not that I even would’ve noticed considering I barely had any magic to call my own.
There was also the thing Draven had told me about the potential devastation that little stone could cause if it was interfered with by a weak sorcerer—which Abvat definitely was, even if he probably thought he was some kind of little serpent God. Maybe there was part of him that thought he really could help all these people, but he was more likely to kill them before that happened, and maybe even kill many, many more if this thing exploded.
“You’ve lied to all these people,” I said, “I thought you maybe cared about them when I saw them all here, but you’ve been collecting them for just this moment, haven’t you?”
“It’s not like that!” he yelled.
“Then what’s it like, Abvat? What are you doing here?”
The stone was starting to rotate now, spinning rapidly on the spot, occasionally jerking to change angles. How long before the magic went off? Minutes, maybe. “I just want to see my family again,” he said, “I just want to go back home like everyone else. Don’t you?”
“I’d like nothing more than to go back home, but instead I’m here, trying to talk you down before you get all these people killed! Just stop what you’re doing, and we can talk about this. We can figure something out! The Order—”
“The Order!” he laughed where he stood. Not once did he drop his hands or make it look like he was going to attack me, though I was close enough to attack him if I really needed to. “The Order doesn’t care about me, or them, or even you and you know it. They only care about their war, their power; power on both sides of the rifts. I would know, I was there too.”
“Abvat, we can help you. We can help everyone. Just stop, Abvat. Now!”
“Look at you saying we can this, we can that. They’ve turned you into one of their little pets, haven’t they?”
“After this is done, I’m getting out of here, Abvat. I’m going home and you’ll never have to see me again. Wouldn’t that be nice for the both of us?”
The stone sent a flash of light up along the beam and shooting into the ceiling. Only the Gods knew what was happening outside, but whatever it was, it probably wasn’t subtle. Abvat didn’t reply. His gaze was fixed on the stone, which was spinning wildly and then jerking uncontrollably, spinning, and shifting position, like it was getting ready for its final act.
The drain on my energy was becoming too much to bear, now. It wasn’t a physical sensation, but a spiritual one. I felt like I was wasting away, like bit by bit everything that was special about me was being sucked into the stone to be used as fuel for whatever was going to happen next. In my periphery I could see the big guy I’d dropped starting to get up again, shaking his head and clutching his leg, but just as he went to stand, Crag, who seemed to have regained consciousness, shot up, wrapped one formidable hand around his head, and bashed him against a wall.
I turned my attention to Abvat again and saw his hands had light up with crackling black and red energy. His eyes were as wide as his smile, and gleaming with the radiance from the stone, but something was wrong. The beam of light was faltering, flickering like a lightbulb about to go out, only the stone wasn’t slowing down—it was moving even faster.
“Abvat, stop!” I yelled.
“No! It’s almost there, almost there!”
Children were crying, people were panicking now, many of them had already dropped to the floor, overcome by the draining sensation that had gripped me, too. I’d given him a chance, I didn’t have another option. I gripped the baseball bat as tightly as I could, aimed, and swung it at the side of Abvat’s head. The baseball bat struck true, and the Naga went flying.
Home—fucking—run, you little snake.
The stone gave off a shockwave that picked me up and sent me sprawling toward a wall. I hit it hard, the baseball bat slipping out of my grip and falling to the floor. Dazed, I tried to get up, but my vision was swimming. I could see the stone in the middle of the room, still hovering above the ground, still spinning and jerking, still glowing, only now the beam of light shooting into the ceiling had puttered out completely.
I shook my head to clear the dizziness, but before I could do that, someone grabbed me by my hair and dragged me across the floor. He kicked me in the gut and I fell onto my side, clutching my abdomen. It was one of the men who had been channeling the stone with Abvat. I didn’t know him, I could barely even see his face for the brightness coming from the stone behind him, but I didn’t need to see it to know he probably wasn’t smiling.
He went for another kick, only this time I managed to grab his foot and twist his ankle, sending him crashing to the floor. I spun around on my back, flipping myself upright and drawing my dagger out of its sheath. The guy on the floor was clutching the back of his head and writhing, but another was coming toward me.
I weaved out of his path, spinning around him and starting on my run toward the stone when the third guy came at me, his face twisted with anger, his eyes wide, his hands glowing with magic. I froze in the face of the coruscating light flowing between his hands, dreading to know what it would feel like if he caught my head between it, but then Crag shoulder-charged him,
changing his direction entirely. He went flying into the wall across from us so hard it cracked, pieces of it falling to the floor on top of him.
I stared at Crag, dumbfounded. “You saved my life,” I said.
“That doesn’t mean we’re friends,” he growled.
“Oh, but I think it does.”
“Crag, get Aaryn and these people out of here.” Hearing Draven’s voice made my heart leap and relief wash through me. He was holding onto the side of his head as he approached, but he was alive, and he looked like he was ready to rip someone in half. “Now!” he yelled, pressing the issue.
Crag, nodding, immediately set to work on his task, rounding the scared refugees up and herding them out of the store like they were sheep, but Abvat’s men weren’t done with us. Two of them were heading toward me. Draven readied his sword, which he must have retrieved from wherever they’d taken it after he was disarmed, and got to work fighting them off. He moved like water, swift and graceful, the shadows clinging to him and making him difficult to see. I didn’t think those guys stood a chance, but I couldn’t ponder this for long.
Abvat had gotten up, and he was screaming. “No, no, no!”
I turned toward him. “It’s over!” I yelled. “Give up, undo whatever you’ve done here before that thing explodes.”
“Don’t you get it?” he snarled, “I can’t undo it. There’s nothing to be undone.”
My entire body went cold. “What?”
“This was always going to end like this, but if you hadn’t interfered, I may have gotten through—I could be with my family right now! You’ve ruined everything!”
His hands came up, both of them pulsing with dark, Naga magic. He threw a ball of energy at me, and I moved aside just in time to stop it from striking me square in the chest. Using the momentum from my twirl, I ran toward Abvat making sure to give the stone a wide berth. He kept throwing balls of magic at me, each of them missing me by barely more than a hair. As I reached him, he drew a dagger from behind his back and he attacked, swinging furiously, his face streaming with tears, his mouth filled with spit and venom, his fangs enlarged and ready to puncture my human flesh.
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