The Restored: Chapter Thirty

I whirled and whipped my blades up around me, prepared to try and have to work on both combat and on powering this vast drain on my aura. It would be tough, but–

An old woman, wearing ragged old clothing, and clutching a faintly glowing wooden pipe, stepped into view.  Her skin was dark, darker even than Hadiya’s, and her face was covered in weathered, worn lines that betrayed her age. The woman had to be at least eighty, maybe even older, but she was surprisingly spry as she stepped away from my raised blades. 

I lowered my blades and gave a tight smile. 

“Sorry. I heard footsteps and fighting, and smelled smoke. Thought you might be a demon.” 

The woman took a long puff of her pipe, and the smoke swirled around her strangely, in shifting tendrils that rushed around dexterously. A smoke sorcerer, maybe? A bit of an unusual rune bond to pick, but there were some people who saw the use for it. 

The memory of Cipher Nightclub lanced through me, the smoke in the air, burning of bodies, and the callous moves of the Arenamaster. We could have used a smoke sorcerer then. While several people had burned to death, the smoke had killed far more…

I shunted those thoughts aside. I would need to spend time unpacking some of the things I had seen, and come to terms with the fact that even though I had done the best I could, I had still let people die. 

I would need to. 

But not now. 

My aura surged again as with the other half of my mind I poured power into the ritual. I nearly fell to my feet, channeling so much power, and felt the old woman’s hand on my shoulder. 

“Do you need a place to stay?” she asked. “You’re clearly doing something important.” 

“Just… Like… Ten mibnits. Mibnets. Minutes,” I said, pulling myself back to my feet and refocusing through my other half of my mind. The woman nodded and pointed, shifting the smoke around her to form directions. 

“I was at the top of the building a bit ago, and I spotted someone with some sort of protective shielding that a bunch of civilians were hiding under. He could probably protect you for a while. It’s about a minute’s flight north from here, then to the west, and up one block.” 

“Do you need me to carry you?” I asked, looking her over. I didn’t want to be rude, but smoke sorcerer or not, a warzone like this was no place for an eighty year old woman. Not to mention, not every demon breathed, and her magic wouldn’t protect her from those. 

“I’ll be fine,” she said, waving her head. “I’ve choked out most of the demons in the building, and I’m going to head to my closet. It’s well warded, with air refreshing spells and everything. I just saw you fly in and thought I’d offer you some help.” 

There was something about her tone I couldn’t place. I didn’t want to call it a lie, and she spoke with a smooth confidence that didn’t leave room for questioning or accusations, but it still just… didn’t sit right with me. I squinted at her, wondering if she might be more than she appeared to be, then nodded. 

“Thank you. Be safe.” 

With that, I started constructing spells, and splitting the funneling of aura along the equally split paths of my mind. While half of me was burning through my decade of storage at a prodigious rate, the other half was using a much leaner amount of power to leap into the sky, holding the swords around me. I blazed north, then west, then took a block up, then I spotted it. 

Though it didn’t occur to me at the time, with everything going on, the old woman shouldn’t have been able to see him from the top of the building. I’d flown higher than the building in my fight with the demon, and hadn’t spotted anything. There were too many other skyscrapers, even if they were half collapsed, in the way, for her to have seen this from the top of the building.

Despite the seeming impossibility, just like the old woman had suggested, there was a cluster of civilians – mostly children and elderly, those unable to really fight against the demons – thronged around a young looking man. His skin was the unnaturally, almost sickly pale shade that only northerners seemed able to manage, with blonde hair and brown eyes. He wore a thick black coat, with black gloves on either hand. His blue aura raced around him, crackling through specific spots on the enchanted clothing to activate them, and magic practically exploded off of him. 

With each sweep of his right glove, waves of stormlike power combining wind, water, and lightning struck down demons that grew nearer. Strange abjuration magic reached out from the other glove to shatter the demonic spells. The coat pulsed with defensive spells as well, wrapping and layering him in a dozen different magical defenses that created a strange sort of dome around him and the children. 

It wasn’t a literal dome, like a ward or a force orb – though he did summon up a hexagonal ward for a half a second to block a spear of crackling hellfire that he hadn’t been able to tear apart in time. No, the dome around him seemed to be made from the combination of multiple other, stranger, more esoteric magic. I even felt the metal in my coat, and the spell I was using to move the metal, both being repulsed for a moment before he shot a tendril of blue aura through one of the hidden runes in the black-on-black stitching, and the effect suddenly no longer included me. 

I landed within the dome, in a small open spot between the children, and immediately felt the difference. 

The world around him felt… locked. It completely lacked the drain of Alyphize’s spell, and it lacked the strange, prickling sensation on the back of my neck that I associated with the ley lines of the fallen void.

“I just need ten minutes to focus,” I said. 

“Okay. Rest. Will be safe with me,” the man said, his accent thick with a northern accent.

I collapsed into a mediation position and fell into myself then, reaching for my aura, and collapsing my mind back into a single strand. Everything I had focused on feeding aura into the spell that was begging for power. 

Seconds stretched, then turned into minutes, the combination of my infused third arch-star and me pulling aura from my vault continually sending power into the magic. First I felt the magic of the person who I thought might be Kelly falling away, too drained to add anything else. Then I felt the power that I associated with Jin pull away. She wasn’t totally spent, not like Kelly was, but she’d still put a lot of power in. 

I approved. It was a good idea to keep some power in reserve.

The next to pull away was the druid, leaving just me, and the strange amalgam of power that was pouring both in and out from the hole that had been punched into my aura. I continued to pour magic in, and I didn’t even know how much I was throwing into the magic.

I hadn’t emptied out my aura storage arch-star in years, so there wasn’t a great way for me to be able to measure how much power was stored within. But it had to be over ten thousand auric units, all dumping into the spell for whatever great purpose it served.

Then, all at once, it was over. The hole in my aura suddenly stopped adding power into me, feeling… burnt out. Like I’d had a familiar that had died a true death, and it had taken a portion of my aura with it. My aura was fully in my own body again, and I snapped my eyes open. 

I wished I hadn’t. 

The air above us exploded, as a small ship, one of the few with enough shielding to continue floating near the center of the city, unleashed its spell right onto Alyphize. 

A siege level spell, one more than strong enough to have ripped right through multiple buildings, despite the wards, fired off. 

But I’d seen a handful of siege level spells fired before, in airship combat. Many airships had thick, powerful plating that required spells of that caliber to punch through. 

Airships spellspikes were designed meticulously to allow them to fire off dozens, maybe even a hundred siege level spells in their lifespan. Some were different, focusing on getting even more power out of them in exchange for specialized requirements, like the highly complex one that I’d seen on the Dancer, which required the auric replication arch-star in order to not burn a fortune all at once. Even those, though, were meant to be able to last several shots through the use of said arch-star.

This was more. It was like every spell that the spike was supposed to fire across its entire lifespan had been compressed and fired into a single shot. 

When it comes to the mightiest powers in all the planes, there is something strange about each and every one of them. I was no master of planar magic, but even I knew that. The archangels had to be meticulously careful to avoid burning out forever. Medb and Titania, the ultimate Queens of Winter and Summer, had three forms with differing faces and personalities altering how they acted. The Dreamscape Judges were severely limited with an endless list of contradictory laws and emotions that were impossible for any one mortal to parse.

And Demonic Thrones were chairs. 

Sure, the title might also extend to those who were currently sitting on the Throne, but the power laid inside of the chair itself, not in the person. The chair lent some unusual powers to the demon, magic that I didn’t fully understand, but that power was limited. 

That was why Demonic Thrones, even the eleven – well, now the twelve – changed more than any other member of the ultra-powerful. Medb might shuffle between forms, but she was still the same essence. The Judges might be changing their minds constantly, but they were still nigh-immortal individuals that changed. Archangels burnt out on occasion, but it was a rarity. 

All it took for a Throne to change hands was for someone to defeat the person sitting atop the chair. A difficult proposition, but far from impossible. 

Which was why, as the torrent of magic exploded from the airship’s spellspike, the Throne of Sacrifice barely suffered a scratch. The chair took the beating of the single strongest bit of magic that I had ever seen, save for perhaps the restoration of the chair itself, as if it were nothing more than a stiff breeze. It made me wonder just how it had ever been sundered in the first place, if it was able to shake off attacks of such power. 

But while the chair was untouched, Alyphize was torn to shreds. 

The Throne of Sacrifice continued to float in the air, absolutely thrumming with unearthly, incredible power. 

Power that nobody was wielding. 

There was a moment of silence that seemed to stretch across the entire city as the Throne hung there. There was no roar of gunshots, no bellowing of a demonic warrior, no crackling of spellfire. 

The silence was broken by the crash of the airship that had fired the absurd magic into one of the buildings. All at once, things exploded into motion again. 

Demons who thought they had enough skill and power to connect to the Throne and take command of it rushed for the center, while those who knew they couldn’t turned their efforts back to feasting on the populace of Elderglass. 

And worst of all, the demons who had once been seated atop the three other Thrones, those of Deepwater, Firefright, and the Soulwitch, exploded into motion. They raced towards the center of the city.

And with where I was, all three of the Demonic Thrones were racing right toward me.