The Restored: Chapter Thirty-Two

With shaking hands, I began to build magic. It swirled and glowed around me, which was a testament to just how nervous I was. Hiding your aura from an outside observer while shaping a spell was one of the first things that a sorcerer was taught to do, and I couldn’t even manage it right now. 

I tried to take a deep breath, and was prepared to use my split mind arch-star in order to let me focus on my spells with one portion of my mind while the other section panicked, when a hand clapped me on the shoulder. I turned and saw the dirty blonde haired man in the black naval coat.

“Clam,” he said. I blinked at him. 

“Clams?” I asked. “What?” 

He muttered something in a guttural sounding language that was frequently used in Paerús and Zheren. I’d taken two semesters of the language while I’d been getting my degree at Bronzelight, but he spoke so rapidly that I wasn’t able to make out what he said. 

“Not clam. But clam, yes. Word sound similar. Take breath. Slow. Breath in. Breath out.” 

His grammar was atrocious, and his accent was thick, and being told to calm down didn’t really help me calm down at all. 

“Do you know who is coming towards us?!” I demanded. “That’s the Arenamaster! She’s…” 

I almost said she was invincible, but let myself trail off instead. I knew that she wasn’t invincible, but some patterns of thought were hard to break free of. Besides, despite all of our interruption, she’d still managed to pull off her plan with Alyphize, so she certainly seemed invincible to me right then and there. 

“Bah,” the man said. “She no is Medb. Demon chairs strong, but sit on chair? Not so strong. Even group of demons no is so bad. Enchantments keep them off civilians. Bird almost done building protection.” 

He gave me a savage looking grin, and I noticed his teeth were slightly too sharp then, almost as if he had a touch of aster blood in him. Except that Aster weren’t able to interbreed with humans. Strange. 

“Then? We fight. You defend home. I need home to husband. Thing to fight for. We fight. We win. I present tattoo, go home.” 

“Tattoo. Wait. You’re Hadiya’s friend? The foreign enchanter?” 

“Oh, know Hadiya? Yes. Is clever woman. Interested to see what she do next.” 

Strangely, the inane conversation was starting to calm me down, but before I could respond, wind began to pick up across the city. All across Elderglass, winds strong enough to nearly knock me off my feet began to rush through the city, and in the direction of Deepwater, I saw a figure take into the sky. An instant later, a voice that I’d only ever heard on my radio at home crackled out, amplified through the use of wind and sound magic. Archmage Davalier’s voice echoed as she floated up from the manor house she kept in the city. 

“This is Archmage Davalier, utilizing emergency alert magic. To all those who are out there, still alive, still fighting, hear me. I have struck down this new Throne of Sacrifice personally, and will do it again to any new demon who thinks they can take our city. I know that this is terrifying, but you should know that each and every one of you is under my protection. Keep fighting, all of you, and know that I too will fight to defend our home against this threat!” 

Before she could continue her speech, Deepwater’s power rushed out, and a crushing wave of pressure exploded across that area of the city. The building she was hovering over, its building enchantments already drained of aura, collapsed, but she floated upwards, using her wind and sonic sorcery to strike back at the Throne that Deepwater sat on. 

My eyes started to drift to the Arenamaster, and I felt panic start to rise up again, but Hadiya’s enchanter friend seemed to perk up, getting even more of a smile on his face. 

“Is good! I fight one. Davalier take one. You fight good, did what lair said she did. You take other.” 

“I’m not an archmage,” I said. “Even if I was able to develop aura sight in this instant, it couldn’t let me match her, not in a fight like this.” 

“Mmm, yes. Need break barrier, no? Let demon free?” 

“How did you kno–” 

“Hadiya. How many arch-star have?” 

“Four.”

“Make fifth,” the man said. “Familiar oneness.”

As if it were that simple. As if I hadn’t been stuck at four arch-stars for twenty years. I’d looked into the Familiar Fusion arch-star before, of course. Less popular than Mage Sight, but still popular, especially among those who had multiple familiars to fuse with. But I wasn’t an archmage, and I couldn’t do that. 

“I can’t d–”

“Bird done. Good! Go!” 

As he said it, a silver owl swooped down from seemingly nowhere, and a wave of magic rose up around the group of civilians behind us, some sort of mix of crackling silver, tracking waves of lightning, whipping winds, and swirling bullets of water. It was clearly a complex and powerful bit of magic, and I wondered at where and how he’d managed to pull it off. How was he powering it? Had he somehow stolen and insulated a bunch of aura generators against Alyphize’s magic? 

Before I could finish registering either his words or the magic that his bird had – apparently – managed to do, he shoved me down the street towards the Arenamaster. It was then that I realized something critical, which I should have realized much sooner: I wasn’t within the protective magic.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see the man’s coat and gloves blazing with power as he launched into the fight against Firefright’s advance forces, which were being led by an animated orb of demonic flame. My brother’s hellfire rushed out for him, only for the strange northerner to bat it aside like a child’s toy and unleash a dark wave of magic filled with lightning and death. Wherever it touched, the demons that were accompanying Firefright were torn to shreds, and from the back where Firefright was, I saw the demon’s eyes widen in fear. He began to spawn more demons from his Throne, and raised hellfire in both his hands. 

That was the last thing I was able to catch from the fight, as I was dragged into the battle against the Arenamastersand her forces. 

A demon lunged at me, and I brought down a sword made of copper from a nearby collapsed building on top of its head. I launched myself sideways as a dark bolt of crimson light fired at my head, ripped more copper blades from the industrial beams, and lifted a nearby automobile to serve as a shield against the fist of a particularly massive, lumbering, ogre-like demon. I launched myself at the Arenamaster, who was laughing loud enough for me to hear her, even all the way down on the other side of the street. 

I blitzed forward, whipping attacks out at demons as they ran around me, raising my revolver and starting to layer magic into it as I did. The Arenamaster had trained me to be a killer? Fine. I’d give her what she wanted, and kill every last demon on the street. 

I spun to dodge a burst of hellfire, shot a demon that was glowing and building up some sort of massive attack through the air, and dropped a chunk of warped metal that weighed at least a quarter ton atop another demon, leaping into the air and spinning the blades around me like a blender that shredded any demon that grew closer. 

Behind me. 

I turned and dodged out of the way as a long, thin claw skewered through the space I’d been a second previously. 

To my right. 

I rolled left, raising a mesh of blade to the left, and a birdlike wing struck against the net. 

Up up up! 

I shot into the sky as a demon ripped out of the earth from where I had been an instant before. 

I continued to dodge and roll, following instincts and patterns honed into me by the Arenamaster, then the military, then the special forces, and as I did, I started to fall into an almost meditative state. 

That was when the Arenamaster acted, showing why she had earned the name Soulwitch among the army of the Throne of Sacrifice. 

Soulstuff from each and every one of the demons that I’d killed began to glow a sharp blue color, the color of the Arenamaster’s aura, and red light ran along them. They rushed back to her hand, where they began to reform. 

Except, reform wasn’t the right word. They weren’t re-forming into the same shape that they’d had before. Instead, they were forming into new demons, ones that had been modified to resist the very methods which I’d used to dispatch the originals. The ones that I’d carved into bits with the copper swords were covered in thick, chitinous plating. The one I’d shot in the eye now had three heads and two hearts that had been exposed to open air. The one I’d crushed developed a squat form with thick, bulging muscles.

They rushed into battle against me, and I shifted onto the backfoot, trying to shift my strategies to deal with the oncoming horde, to attack each of them in a method different to how they’d originally been dispatched. I turned my swords into clubs of metal, shaping a handful of them into picks of the sort an ore miner might use. 

“Come now, Mist,” the Arenamaster called out. “You could have been a powerful Demonic Throne. Even if you don’t want that, you could have stepped down and become an Impartiate. Immortal. More powerful than any human could ever be. Why do you turn us down?” 

Her voice was as languid and calm as it always was, even as I whipped spikes through demon’s heads. She reformed them an instant later, forcing me to change my strategy again. I ignored her, hoping that if I didn’t give her the satisfaction of a response that she’d stop talking, and let me get close enough to kill her. 

“We aren’t going to kill you, you know. Nor have we killed Zone. It will be harder to turn the both of you into Thrones now, but it will be done. Alyphize needs her five stable enforcers.” 

“You’re lying! Alyphize is dead and Jessica is free!”

I leapt into the air, following an instinct whispered into my ear at just the right moment, and fired off a shot that should have killed the Arenamaster there and then. Before I’d even pulled the trigger, though, I felt my mass rune bond shift, as if it had been suppressed, and the bullet clinked against a force ward. 

“Do you really think that Alyphize is dead? That the one who un-sundered one of the Sundered Thrones can die so easily? Zone will join us, all in due time.” 

Then she shifted into action. Her Throne exploded forward, and she was in front of me an instant later, her long, slender hands grabbing me by the throat. She lifted me off the feet, squeezing just hard enough as to make it difficult to breathe, but not impossible. 

I felt demonic magic start to soak into me, just like it had when the ritual had started. Thinking quickly, I used a spell to lift a copper spike – not to throw at the Arenamaster, whose body was glittering with protective magic left over from when she had been human.

I aimed the spike for my neck. I wouldn’t allow yet another Demonic Throne to rise in the city and kill more people. 

The second the spike started to draw blood, though, a great weight rushed over me, crushing down on my rune bonds, almost like the massive shaping disruption magic that the constables used in their headquarters. 

“You might be an adult in every sense of the word, but you are still a disobedient, meddlesome child!” the Arenamaster hissed. “You would be nothing without me. You are nothing without me. Everything that I gave to you I can take away in an instant. You will join me! And. You. Will. Like. It.”