The Restored: Chapter Twenty-Two

Jessica sat in a chair, stewing in her anger and watching the demons who had captured her. On top of the sheer vitriol that she felt about the demons who had broken into her apartment and captured her, she had an absolutely pounding headache left from the poisoned air that they had used to subdue her for transport. 

The poisonous gas wouldn’t have been enough on its own to manage it. Her home was webbed in more wards than webs had webs. 

Hm. That analogy didn’t work. She blamed the throbbing of her skull, she was normally much quicker on the uptake. 

Keliathri, her demonic bond, spoke. Their strange, deeper-than-average bond allowed him to borrow her vocal cords in a slipshod imitation of the archmage’s arch-star that fused them with their familiar, and that was normally how he liked to be heard. 

Considering the current circumstances, however, he kept his voice entirely within her mind.

“If I take on the pain, can you save your husband and escape?”

“Yes,” she responded, keeping her mental voice… mental. 

Wow, she was really messed up right now. Pounding headache or not, she should have been more lucid than she was now. The gas must have done something serious to her system. 

Keliathri’s mental presence rose up within her, and she felt the modifications that her body and soul had undergone begin to spin and tweak. Her brother, Axel, had received the best combat modifications that he could physically integrate, but her own were focused on a different purpose: empowering and repairing her mind. 

As her demon’s magic wove into her, she seemed to separate from her body entirely. There was no pain, no pounding headache, and no deleterious effects left over of the gas. The aspects of her that existed within the dreamscape were not shackled by such paltry things as a body, and they allowed her to move and think freely.

This was a dangerous state to stay in for long, and if it weren’t for her perfect memory arch-star, it would have been even worse. She immersed herself in her memories, giving them a roughly tenth of a second delay. That would let her know if her body started registering pain, or if she pulled a muscle, or if the strain this state put on her mind started damaging her optic nerves, or any of a thousand other little things that she might never have known if she’d entirely been immersed within this state. 

Critically, it was viewed through memory, and thus, she didn’t actually feel the pain, only the memory of all the biological attributes, slightly out of sync. 

If she’d just immersed herself back into her body after separating her mind, she’d have accomplished nothing at all. If she’d just immersed herself in memories with a slight delay, her mind would have still been at the mercy of her biological failures, on top of memories. It was only together that she was able to command her body like a puppet, with only minimal risk to herself. 

Her brother’s tricks might be flashier and made him more famous in the arena, but hers weren’t anything to shake a stick at. 

Since she was finally able to think, she ran through the events that had transpired. The Arenamaster had used a demon disguised to look like one of their neighbors, or maybe had used some sort of command spell, to get her to lower the wards and allow them entry. The person had entered, and then somehow tore a portal open to the Fallen Void and let demons stream in. 

Her wards to suppress portals were tuned to protect from the odd creature slipping in through the local ley-lines, and to prevent anyone from opening a portal right into the local space of her home. 

So, the spell their neighbor had been provided had been able to get through them, which should have been the next best thing to impossible. Her best guess was that they hadn’t done it via skill, but through raw power.

That was always the sticking point of a defensive style. No matter how good you were at building walls, a large enough battering ram could break through them.

Her wards were top of the line, but they were limited in power to whatever she could draw from the aura generator in her lab, and had tucked away in temporary storage. 

Of course, the moment demons started flooding the apartment, she’d activated a dozen different wards, and the fight had begun in earnest. She’d killed seven of them before they could even start, and had created protections over herself and her husband, who had started retreating to the lab. 

She had won. Even in her detached state, that was the fact that got to her.

She’d managed to activate contingencies to slow, stop, and freeze the demons in place, trapping several of them within their own minds. She’d used her enchanted items to mop them up, her wands firing pencil-thin beams of destruction capable of punching through their chitin and right into the heart of her demonic foes.

She’d been in the middle of rerouting power to other wards and shutting down the portal that had been opened when Alyphize had stepped through. The demonic heir had always been too powerful for her position, and as she unleashed waves of curse magic, it had swiftly become clear that she had enough personal power to rival smaller Thrones or Faerie Queens.

Even that hadn’t enough to stop Jessica, who had protections against such things. But it had been enough for Alyphize to press an athame to her husband’s throat, and release the gas. 

After that, things got hazy. Perfect memory burned bits of aura to record memories, and it also used the mind’s own focus to improve general recall, which meant that the gas – which, now that she could think clearly, she assumed had been enhanced with curse magic – had stopped her from getting exactly where she and her husband had been taken. 

But there were flashes. She had been dragged to a car, and driven by a shady underpass beneath a massive bridge. She’d been taken down a ladder. She had been in the dark. 

Somewhere in the undercity, then. The undercity was huge, but that at least eliminated roughly sixty-five percent of possible locations. 

She opened her eyes and began accessing the memories of what they could see, as well as what her body could feel. She had been tied to a chair, and had been blindfolded. 

That was less than ideal, but from what she could see, she was in a cheap metal folding chair, atop even cheaper tiles, of the sort that was mass produced for the floors of low-income housing, storage facilities, schools, and prisons. A school or prison was unlikely due to logistical issues, but an abandoned condominium or storage facility was distinctly possible. 

She could faintly see lines of metal on the ground around her, copper or brass most likely, as well as runes in the spiny language favored by demons and an ancient language once spoken in Saxum. 

A ritual site, then. She was going to bet on being in a storage facility.

She focused on her auditory memories, and heard the sound of heavy chitin clicking against the tiles. That was most likely one of the crablike demons being sent to watch over her, then, and do… whatever it was that she’d been brought here for.

Her mind started to spiral out into various theoretical possibilities, but she cut that off. Knowing why would be valuable, but it would come later. Right now, she needed to focus on escaping. 

She could attempt to dislocate her limbs and escape, but while she might not feel the pain in her current state, she was able to be hurt. On top of that, it would be inordinately obvious to any observer what she was doing, and with highly limited access to her enchantments and wards, she wouldn’t bet on her ability to kill the demon. 

What could she do instead…

She manifested a simple force glyph spell in the air next to her head, hidden from visible sight, and folded her familiar ability into it. She wasn’t sure they would have had a detection spell for such a common glyph, but it was better to be safe than sorry, and if they did, her familiar power would make it seem completely inert. 

But it wasn’t. 

The glyph activated, and the force struck her face at an upward angle, directed right at her blindfold. There was almost no power in the spell, it was little more than a slightly aggressive gust of wind, but it gave her a slightly better view of the situation.

Most importantly, she saw the thick legs of who she was guessing was her husband, outside of the circle. He was tied to a chair as well, which was a good sign. There was no reason to tie up a corpse.

Relief singing through her mental state, she turned to the rest of what she could see. 

With her shifted blindfold she could now make out roughly a third of the spell array on the floor, and if she had been still within her biology, she would have blinked in confusion. She had expected some sort of human sacrifice array, or at least some sort of mass power-gathering spell. 

There was a good bit of power gathering spellwork on the outside of the circle, which she guessed was within a second, much larger circle, but the one she was in was almost exactly the opposite. It would direct power into her, and into Keliathri, to do… something. 

She wasn’t sure. She could only see chunks of the spell, and it was a complex one. She’d have needed a few minutes to study it to begin with, a strapped to the chair analysis with only a portion of it was less than ideal. 

Once again, she reminded herself that the why and what were important for later. That was helped, thankfully, by the shifting of crablike feet into her field of view. Large, slightly humanoid, but also oddly horse shaped in their structure, the demon was circling her. 

With her mind disjointed, she was able to easily command her body to remain placid, as if she were still under the effects of the cursed gas, but nerves were running through her mind. 

The demon shifted again, continuing his loop, and she got to work. 

She was a ritualist, and this entire room was covered in ritual work related to demons. Composing a spell to kill any demon other than Keliathri in the area would be hard, but it wouldn’t be impossible, not if she could create it in three dimensional space. 

She sent a thread of her aura into the ground beneath her, hiding it from sight and obscuring it with her familiar gift. 

She was no sorcerer, able to spin up circles with half a thought, and fill out dozens of runes in her mind, but she was able to access literally thousands of spell designs and diagrams within her brain. She rifled through them at rapid speed, looking for spells that were the closest match to what runes she had available.

Once she selected one, she began to modify. The runes weren’t in the right layout, given that she was making do with an existing circle, so she used threads of aura to connect them together. She created her entire circle of invisible aura perpendicular to the floor, and began to draw things there. She created a handful of runes, the ones she needed for her spell, but that weren’t present on the magic she could see on the ground. She needed the spell to move quickly, so she tapped into the existing infrastructure that the ritual had to draw power in. 

It took her quite a while. Jessica wasn’t as skilled with aura shaping as even a neophyte sorcerer, and if she’d had to create all of it out of aura like they did, she would have failed. But since she only needed to create the connections and a handful of runes, it was possible. 

She didn’t have any components on hand, so she used the few that were scattered around the room. Those were imperfect matches, so she ignored them when she felt they might mess with her spell. 

After roughly fifteen minutes of work, it was completed. 

It was a basic spell, the kind of thing that a sorcerer would have been expected to cast within their first semester at Bronzelight, but for a witch, it was quite impressive. She allowed herself to feel an iota of pride, then began activating the runes and charging them. With the massive charging array she was tapping into, the spell was complete almost immediately.

A divination spell to locate corporeal demons snapped into place, and a beam of force, powered by the full weight of a massive draining array, infused with runes that evoked the idea of silver – a real shame she didn’t have any physical silver with her – released in midair. It tore through the demon holding her captive, locking onto his heart. 

If he had been expecting it, he likely could have dodged or created shielding against it. If he’d been aligned with the Thrones that had access to some of the more healing-adjacent powers, he might have healed it. 

But Greed had few of those, let alone Gambling. 

The spell killed him in an instant, and she heard a thump as his body hit the floor. She fired the spell again, just in case, but it had nothing to lock onto. He really was dead. 

She let that go and created glyphs around her hands that shot force through the ropes binding her in place. Her mind calmly remembered that she had registered pain, and was going to be bruised, but nothing was broken. That was fine. 

With her hands free, she tore off the blindfold and leaned down to untie her feet, then rushed to her husband’s side, untying him as well. 

She needed to get one solid look at the room, preserving it in her memories, and then they needed to escape.