NOVEL NEXT 65. Storming Grandeur
Excerpt from Master Mirode’s
‘Elemental Philosophy.’“Have we spoken of the element of surprise? No, it is not classically one of the Elements, not defined as such—but it produces such fantastic results. The world shudders around the power of surprise, distinctly altered by the ingredients that went into its creation. Emotions entering it come out like a sudden change in the weather. Happiness is a cool shower on a warm day, soaking your clothes with unexpected delight. Fear is the crackle of lightning to herald the onset of a coming storm. We all experience surprise differently, and can bring it about in all manner of ways—but there is no denying that even magic is swayed by this powerful element.”
In the moment of revelation, each person in the room revealed something of their true colours. Yenna froze, a flimsy prey animal caught in the gaze of a massive predator. Valkh screamed in fright, tripping backwards as she scrambled to get away from the skull. Demvya stood stock still, the goddess not immune to a moment’s panic—or perhaps caught in the throes of Jiin’s own surprise. Narasanha was the only one who took action, and she immediately regretted it.
The bodyguard charged forward, all four arms spread out wide to grab at the silupker and skull from different angles. She took barely two steps forward before hitting a snare, a faintly-visible line of shimmering magic wrapping around her ankle and tripping her over. Yenna registered with academic detachment that she had also begun to scream, and that her instincts had been hijacked by her training—the world slowed as her mind accelerated, allowing her to fully comprehend what they had walked into.
Barely visible on the tiles of the research chamber floor was a spider’s web of glowing magic. With no limbs to use between the two of them, the sorcerer and silupker had created a massive series of magical circles through force of will and expertise. Even as Narasanha pitched forward, her eyes widening in surprise, more ethereal strands were threading their way across her body. Even with her perspective of time altered, Yenna watched in horror as the spell bound the bodyguard before she could even react.
The silupker stood tall, as tall as its snake-like body could allow it to, the skull perched atop its spade-shaped head like a macabre helmet. It hadn’t moved at all since they entered, the direction of its gaze impossible to discern with the glowing light in its eye-sockets. A gentle humming noise emanated from it, and Yenna realised it wasn’t standing idly—using the silupker’s ability to speak, it was modulating its normal speech to provide the vocal component of its spells. Whatever it was doing, Yenna couldn’t imagine she wanted to let it finish.
The mage mentally sifted through her arsenal of counter-spells, and raised a hand to begin tracing out a spell-circle. Her train of thought was almost lost at the realisation she had instinctively drawn forth her quicksilver dagger, its stiletto tip pointed forward to write like the nib of a pen. It made her opening move that much more efficient, the small flicks of her wrist just slightly faster than the movements of her fingers, the magic flowing without resistance through this extension of her being. Within the span of a heartbeat Yenna finished casting her spell.
A wave of chaotically randomised energy pulsed towards the skull-wearing silupker, reinforced with a layer of Flow, the deep-blue colour of magic associated with passivity and calm. There was an instinctive change of nuance in the colour as Yenna employed it—her mental image of a cascading waterfall followed the rippling magic, washing away careful spellcraft into the rushing white-noise of flowing water.
With extraordinary speed, the skull well-and-truly fixed Yenna in its gaze. Even as Narasanha tumbled in slow motion, the battle between the two spellcasters pitched forward into disturbing rapidity. Yenna’s Flowing wave of magic washed away some of the tethers binding the bodyguard, even as a high-pitched screech emanating from the silupker’s body caused several parts of the spell-circle to flare to life. To Yenna’s distinct horror, she realised the skull was using the chamber’s equipment to empower its spells—co-opting spell circles and drawing from the hidden magical reserves that powered it all. The only flaw Yenna had seen in the entirety of Highshine’s masterwork design—there was no accounting for an enemy being allowed at its heart.
For all Yenna’s training, she didn’t have the breadth or depth of the skeletal sorcerer’s experience and expertise. A dam rose before her wave, the flow of magic crashing back to cut off the source of its own spell. Unknown spells behind the silupker started to resonate, and the very air vibrated with unnatural energy. A throbbing pulse of sound assaulted Yenna, too deep to hear but strong enough to feel within her being. Whether it was the sorcerer’s intention or not, she could feel it eating away at her concentration—the fortress of her mind reduced to a sand-castle before the rising tide. The mage grit her teeth and tried again.
Metaphor empowered the emotional output of witchcraft, a defiance of the shifting mathematics of arcane magecraft, a mere question of ‘what do I wish to happen’ that ignored the how and why. Yenna focused on the metaphor in her mind, sharpening it with the knife in her hand—she was not on the shores, not protected by walls of hand-packed sand, she was the storm itself, assaulting the island the sorcerer had created for itself. The crackle of Pride-filled lightning met with the calm of her Flow, recontextualising itself into a new colour-betwixt-colours—if she was the storm, then her power was in Grandeur,
an overwhelming force of nature that all bowed before.As a moment of clarity, Yenna realised that this was exactly what Lumale had asked her to look for—to break down the colours further into the points in between, to enhance the efficiency and power of spells by diving deep into visualised specifics. She had done it once before already, without even realising it—against the skeletal sorcerer, no less. Then, she had burned with Passion, an orange light between Certainty and Wroth. Now, she donned a storm-filled cloak of deep, regal purple, her Grandeur buffeting her opponent with a squall of overwhelming force.
No finely-drawn spell-circle was necessary this deep into the power of witchcraft—Yenna’s personal presence burst forth as a bolt of lightning, metaphysically striking at the connection between the sorcerer and its spells. The sorcerer responded with its own emphatic rejection—it was no being of flesh, caught unprepared in a storm. In an instant it wove a cage of quasi-real metal, the energy of the storm dispersed harmlessly into the ground. At the least, it forced the sorcerer to release Narasanha.
Narasanha’s form had become tangled in the tendrils of magic, her momentum carrying her strangely forward only to have her path cut off with not-quite-there steel. Yenna felt her mind slowing down, unable to maintain the razor-sharp focus with so much going on. The cage of metal dispersing her bolts, Narasanha’s dangerous tumbling, the scrabbling and shouting of Valkh behind her, all the input Yenna had been unconsciously tuning out to live inside her storming metaphor came crashing back, shattering a fragile trance she had fallen into. Mortal concerns came flooding back, distracting her from a losing battle of wits with an enemy spellcaster.
The bodyguard’s tumbling was going to leave her seriously injured, her body thrown off unpredictably by the speed of magical bindings appearing and disappearing in the very same breath. Her current trajectory had her on a serious collision course with a shelf of dangerous magical reagents, the least of which could poison the flesh, the worst capable of eating through steel. Yenna had no choice but to stop her, and for once her entire mind was in agreement. Even by cold, detached logic, the mage’s survival instincts agreed that a large, powerful beast of her own to hide behind was the route to safety—the rest of her screamed with worry for a friend.
Yenna returned to comfortable spellcraft, not willing to trust in the unpredictable results of witch magic. A spell of telekinetic force wove itself into a crash net, a gravitic field temporarily realigning Narasanha’s direction of ‘down’ to the opposite of her field of travel. It wouldn’t be a comfortable stop, like redirecting her travel into a wall of stone narrowly cushioned with a minimum of padding, but it was a far sight better than the horrors of an alchemical spill. Once, Narasanha had gone out of her way to catch Yenna when she was falling—it felt only just to return the favour, in a manner of speaking.
The world slammed back into motion, events momentarily feeling far too fast for Yenna’s liking. Narasanha juddered to a sudden halt, the wind knocked out of her with a deep oof of pain. Valkh’s screaming had reduced to a muffled whimpering, and with a flick of her head Yenna confirmed that Demvya was cradling the researcher to her chest to keep her safe, flowers sprouting to form a suit of magical armour all around her. The silupker hadn’t stopped its deep thrumming, and Yenna realised belatedly that the sound had been rising in both intensity and pitch as she had scrambled to save Narasanha.
Two glowing circles to either side of the sorcerer flashed with a black un-light, actively leeching the glow of light in the room. Two columns of dark flame erupted from them to form an arch over the silupker’s head, a burning heat suddenly filling the room as though a furnace door had been opened in front of them all. Yenna took a quivering step backwards, covering her face with her hands as the sudden temperature spike washed over her. She tried to cast a spell—something to cut off the sorcerer’s magic, something to protect herself and the others from the pitch-dark flames’ heat, anything at all, but nothing worked. Yenna’s ability to manipulate magic scrabbled at the red-hot metal surface of a far greater spell, unable to find the tiniest bit of purchase as it forced her to the ground.
Barely able to look up, Yenna saw out of the corner of her eye a red blur shoot forward—Narasanha diving in once again, hand outstretched to grab the skull off the top of the silupker’s head. A sickening crunch-thud, barely audible over the sound of the silupker’s spell, heralded the bodyguard slamming back to the ground. A massive dark-blue fist had knocked Narasanha to the ground, followed by the sharp bark of a deep laugh.
“Fancy meeting you here!”
Following that voice made of sharp teeth and violence, Yenna forced herself to look up—like looking into the sun, the mage had to squint against the light, heat and force of what had blossomed into a magical gateway. Emerging from that bridge between spaces was a person not unlike Narasanha herself. Taller, built with the heavy-set musculature of a true warrior, her deep blue skin was a stark opposite of the bodyguard’s red. Like Narasanha, she was possessed of more arms than usual—six powerful hands poised like the punch-drunk double-vision of an opposing boxer, one of those arms retracting from a savage blow to Narasanha’s face.
Her muscles rippled beneath her skin as she pounced on Narasanha, pinning her arms, leaning sharp teeth and vivid green eyes right into the bodyguard’s face. Their bodies pressed together, a stationary battle as Narasanha struggled to break free of the stronger woman’s grasp, her opponent relishing in the closeness as her messy black hair closed around their faces like a curtain.
Yenna, so consumed with concern for Narasanha’s wellbeing, barely noticed the others emerging from the archway portal. A pair of tall, stick-thin ghouls clad in filthy crimson robes, a withered yolm with tiger-like claws protruding from too-long fingers, and a person armoured in a suit of black metal, their joints shining with revealed diamond-white between impenetrable and alien material. The armoured person lifted a hand, and a symbol flashed before Yenna’s eyes.
It was so familiar, her brain scrambling to place where it had seen it before, retina unwilling to lose its image and allowing it to burn into her sight as she scrambled through the shelves and tomes of her own memory to find the corresponding record that would tell her what this symbol meant and why it hurt so badly and who it was for and when it would become totality and–
Yenna’s mind automatically tripped a safety feature, an ill-used breaker switch her salvation against a mental hazard that would have trapped her in a loop. Rather than be consumed, the mage simply passed out.
In one moment, sound, light, motion, concern, pain—in the next, darkness.