The Restored: Chapter Forty-Two

Hadiya backed up, stepping out into the hallway, grabbing Rhys by the arm. 

“What are you doing?” he hissed. 

“Helping,” she snapped back. “We can’t exactly set up a ritual circle in there, not with her blinking around so fast I can’t even see her movements, despite all the punishment she’s taken.”

Rhys licked his lips uncertainly, then nodded. They paced back, shutting and locking the door, and Hadiya closed her eyes, thinking.

She needed to compose a city-wide banishment ritual while also creating a highly specific ritual that would target the soulstuff composing the current Throne of the Throne of Sacrifice and killing her, without actually damaging the Throne itself.

No problem. 

Not at all. 

It wasn’t like this three-layered city was one of the most densely populated and warded areas on the planet, with a power grid that had been hijacked by someone far more powerful than any one person could be. Or like targeting a specific person without a link with enough precision to kill them without destroying an artifact that they were bound to on a soul-deep level was hard. It would be fine! 

Panic wasn’t going to help, so she cut her emotions off with a mental knife. It wasn’t a magical technique, merely psychological. Her tattoo didn’t allow her to form arch-stars that would be so kind as to compartmentalize panic. But still, by mentally cutting those emotions off and setting them to the side, she was able to focus better. 

She opened her eyes and found Rhys drafting out a spell on paper. She wasn’t sure where he’d gotten paper and a pen, and given the piles of corpses in the entry hall, wasn’t sure she wanted to know where they’d been. She could just be grateful he had them. 

“We need to set this up as two separate, but linked, ritual spells,” Rhys said. “If we can kill Alyphize, or at least injure her again enough for the Contractor to kill her, then we can piggyback his order of returning to the Fallen Void as an extra power source for the city-wide banishment ritual.” 

Haidya glanced over his designs. He’d mocked up the skeleton of his proposition, which wasn’t actually much spellwork, more the theory he’d explained. Interlocking multiple spells together into nested effects wasn’t her area of expertise, and it wasn’t Rhys’ either, but she’d needed to do it a few times when creating her tattoos, so she was familiar with the theory. She took the pen and crossed out a few lines, then re-drew them in a pattern she thought would be more efficient for interfacing with demonic magic, but then tapped the pen against the paper. 

“Alright. So how do we actually do either one of them?” Rhys asked. “You’ve mentioned a banishment ritual, but planar magic isn’t my area of expertise. The only ones I know are meant to disrupt a familiar vessel, not send fully active demons back into the Fallen Void.” 

“Ah, I guess you wouldn’t have read about that,” she responded. “Basically, we’re ripping microportals for the individual to pressure them back into their world. It wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to think of it as the opposite of a familiar summoning, or similar to the second half, where the body gets shunted back to their world. Just on a much bigger scale.”

She gestured to the bag of things she’d taken from Elucidate Labs, which included the Miracle Drop in it, as well as the trash bag full of spell anchors that helped exclude the Fallen Void’s magic.

“We’ll use these.” 

“And how are we going to kill Alyphize?” Rhys asked. 

“Force blast?” Hadiya suggested. 

“She took a shot from the most powerful airship spell spike I’ve ever seen,” Rhys said doubtfully. “We’re not matching that level of blast on short notice. Nor do we have the components for it.” 

“They probably just re-wired the spell so it used all its components in a single blast and burnt everything out, rather than sustain–” Hadiya started to say, before being cut off by Rhys. 

“It frankly doesn’t matter how they did it. What matters is that we can’t do the same. So what are we going to do?” 

Hadiya shot him an annoyed glare, but he had a point. They hadn’t expected to need a weapon capable of damaging someone of Alyphize’s caliber, and couldn’t construct one on short notice. She glanced at the papers that Rhys had and held her hand out. He passed them and the pen over worldlessly, and she started drawing. 

“We already have a set of spell anchors that can set up areas that exclude the Fallen Void’s magic,” she said. “Why don’t we use those twice?” 

“How do you mean?” 

“The only reason that Alyphize is still standing is because she’s able to draw power from a Throne of such high power,” Hadiya said. “If we can cut her access to the Throne off, she’d die within… Well, maybe not instantly, but I can’t imagine her lasting longer than two minutes. She’s strong, but her magic isn’t specialized in healing, and she’ll lack the raw strength to pull soulstuff together raw.” 

“I don’t understand demons,” Rhys sighed. “But I think I get what you’re saying. We can cut her connection to the Throne. That’s fine in theory, but what about the banishment ritual? Those were going to play a key component.” 

“They were,” Hadiya agreed, chewing on her lip and staring at the design she’d sketched out. “I don’t suppose you could form an Auric Copy arch-star?” 

“No,” Rhys said, shaking his head. “I’ve only got two arch-stars. Besides, even if I could try for the Auric Copy arch-star, I’m not Axel. I’m not going to just be able to slap arch-stars together like it’s nothing. And even if I did make it, we’d need to let the anchors re-gather power after.” 

“I know, I know, it was a hypothetical,” Hadiya said crossly. She wasn’t annoyed at Rhys, not really, just at the whole situation. They stared for a few seconds, and Hadiya’s eyes drifted back to Rhys’ original plan of combining two spells into one.

One…

“What if we make it one spell?” Hadiya asked. “We just build it in two parts, and add a delay in the second half activating? The strength of the component will degrade a bit in the minutes of delay, but that’s far preferable to them just vanishing.” 

“Power,” Rhys said grimly. “You said that the Miracle Drop puts off about as much strength as a ley line, right? The dropoff of a component that strong will be extreme – I don’t think we can power a city-wide banishment if the drop is losing power as a component for hours. We’re stretching it to pull off a city-wide banishment ritual that’s interfacing with multiple ley lines with a single ley line in a bottle already.” 

Hadiya spat out something that sounded rather unflattering, and then took a breath. 

“And it’s worse than that. There are going to be side effects to using the Miracle Drop.” 

She’d been holding back on talking about this, since if she had to turn herself, Rhys, and the Central Aura Depository into a giant tumor of flesh, crystal, and metal in order to save millions of lives, she would have been willing to make that sacrifice. But if they did go through with her plan to make one spell with delayed activation of half of it, then this could interfere. Rhys frowned, and before he could chastise her, Hadiya started to speak. 

“I’ve only run a single experiment with it, but it started to warp reality around it. It caused four of my assistants to grow massive tumorous blobs, like the effects of a century of radiation compressed into a single second, all the while not killing them. It seemed to have a comparable effect on non-organic materials as well. I don’t know why or how, but it’s something you should know.” 

Rhys spat out a curse in a language that Hadiya didn’t even recognize, and she wondered if it was one of his ancient spell languages. He started pacing up and down the hall, and as he spoke, his voice rose with the panic. 

“So this whole thing is pointless, then? We need a single spell that goes off all at once, fixes all our problems, and kills us both? I mean, at that point, let’s just lean into it! I have a natural aura! I can form an aura spark! Maybe you can too! That might provide a bit of power.” 

“Sorry,” Hadiya said. “I’m willing to die if it’s what’s needed.” 

“Me too, but I’m not convinced it is!” Rhys snapped. He closed his eyes and took several long, slow, deep breaths to calm himself down before opening his eyes again. “I’m… Well, I can’t say I’m sorry. We will need to talk about you not mentioning this another time. But for right now, let’s move on. Can you direct the growth?” 

“Maybe,” Hadiya said. “I was working on using the growth aspect of the miracle drop with some of the spells we’ve stolen from other countries as a way to get the ambient aura to grow. I did manage to spike the ambient aura, so I can clearly control it to some degree. I just couldn’t direct the side effects – my spell exploded.” 

“Alright. Have you considered intentionally directing it into physical matter?” 

Rhys started sketching out another spell form on paper. This one was a classic force spell, so he was clearly using it as a general analogy, rather than a direct comparison. What he sketched was a method to direct the force of an explosion directly upwards, rather than pushing out in all directions. Hadiya frowned and looked over it, thinking. 

“Maybe? I’ve never tried, but it’s… Well, it might be worth a shot. If I could get the building to grow up, and not have it warp our bodies, that would be fine. But it doesn’t solve our power problem.” 

“Yes it does,” Rhys said. “Actually, it’s already solved. Alyphize solved it for us. We can use it as both a power source and as a method to direct the growth.” 

“What do you mean?” Hadiya asked, crinkling her eyes as she looked at him. “Are you suggesting we target the Demonic Throne? I’m not even sure what that would do – there’s no planar reference for the Miracle Drop, its properties aren’t well understood.” 

“No, we don’t target the Throne,” Rhys said, raising his arm and pointing into the Central Aura Depository’s central chamber, where the sounds of the clash between the most ancient demon Hadiya had ever met and one of the the most powerful demons in all of existence still rang out. She traced the line of his finger through the glass in the door and to the aura crystal that had been ‘donated’ to Elderglass as thanks for their assistance in the One Day War of Paerús. 

A massive aura crystal, grown in baths of crysalltine solutions and an ambient aura rich environment that the barbaric northern country had only been able to produce through their prodigious use of aura sparks. 

A massive aura crystal that served as the heart of the city’s entire power grid.

A crystal that was directing a massive stream of power, including the power of multiple ley lines, into a Demonic Throne. 

If they could get to that crystal, then, well, it had already cracked into the grid to draw as much power as they needed. 

Once something was cracked open, it was far easier to get into, and it seemed implausible that a near-invincible being like Alyphize would have put archmage-class protections on something she only planned to use once, to drain as much power as she could before fading into the Fallen Void to take her place with the other Eleven Thrones. 

And if they could direct that crystal’s growth upwards, it might even be able to help the city as a whole.

Hadiya started to laugh.