NOVEL NEXT Chapter 13: Spellcraft
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Claire: Sorry, all I invested in was fire spells.
Harry: That's okay–it's really all you need. Make a man a fire and he's warm for a night, but set a man on fire…
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Saturday, November 9th, 2091, about 4:10 pm MST, Ghostlands, Kingdoms Server, Mournhollow
The Devs in Ghostlands had gotten really excited when they wrote magic.
Every spell had a power source—a bangle, staff, artifact, even a bound creature—and a structure to channel it, a glowing network of circles and lines. Carve the shapes into stone or etch them into a staff, and you could skip the chant. But if you wanted raw power, you had to feel it course through you—fire that burned your veins, lightning that shocked your bones.
Claire preferred fire. It suited her.
She shook her head sharply.
The twin bangles orbiting her head caught the motion and ignited. A cherry-red blaze snapped into being, flaring like twin suns. Her pale hair whipped back in the heat, her stance hardening as the ground itself seemed to tense in sympathy.
As the assembled crowd watched in the hundreds, Claire—still donkey-faced—turned back to look at them. She was one of the rare wizards fully capable of casting her spells despite being unable to speak, by virtue of her elaborate headdress.
And so she did.
She shook her head sharply, sending both bangles spinning around her head in their abortive arcs. They burst into a cheerful cherry blaze, the scarlet light igniting her platinum blonde hair. The heat from the ornaments sent the rising air whipping through her hair, pulling it back from her face as though caught in a sudden wind.
Would it have been more dramatic if she didn't have a donkey face? Of course. If they could see the glare in her eyes, it would have been magnificent. But her viewers could see it—on the studio camera feed, in her swanky studio berth. The camera captured Claire's eyes narrowing into a vicious glare.
The bronze headdress's horns erupted into scarlet flame, the intricate engravings along the metal glowing with inner fire, burning like the Earth's own core. Every muscle in her body tensed with effort, veins standing out, skin pinking, pupils glowing like lava pools as she channeled that same hellish energy.
It happened all at once.
The first circle wrote itself into the air around her, shedding heat haze and burning with embers and orange light. From that single circle, a line extended, abruptly bifurcating into a triangle, then splitting into two more lines, each ending in a circle. And then it happened again. And again. At each branching point, more formed—two to three, then three to four, then four to five—until the entire field was overwritten with the floating plane of Claire's spell script.
And then, in an instant, each circle flashed.
They weren't mere sigils. They were faucets, each one fed from the depths of hell. The blood of the earth spilled forth, hissing with heat as it poured onto the massed faeries and the pristine snow.
In the studio, Claire's face showed nothing but contempt—like she was stepping on bugs.
"It was coming to blows anyway," she said, watching the carnage unfold.
Team chat was still disabled for her by the faerie curse, but that didn't stop Harry, glancing up from his own stream, from reading her lips. He grinned, cheerful as ever.
"They'd have attacked us soon," he agreed.
A wall of steam erupted from where the lava met the snowbanks, the air twisting and contorting with heat haze, echoing with the shrieks of the burning fae.
The tilted field worked in their favor—the lava poured lengthwise, carving a barrier between the retreating party and the faerie manor.
It was much easier when faeries weren't actively trying to kill you.
"There goes the loot," Gordon commented. "This definitely makes up for the whole donkey-head thing."
Claire just shot him a glare from her fancy studio camera. From the same room, Gordon could hear Karen laughing.
"It's not her fault," Harry said. "She's always so busy. She probably hasn't read any of the lore books—she didn't know."
"Oh, no, I get that," Gordon replied. The funny thing was, he really did understand. It made perfect sense how she'd gone all this time without reading any of his favorite fantasy series, without knowing she should have expected something bad to happen if she drank the faeries' refreshments. She was just too busy.
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She got off work, and she wanted to shut her brain off. Reading was too cerebral.
That was probably why she was so into fashion—Gordon had long suspected as much. She just needed something to turn her brain off at the end of the workday. Or perhaps that was just his own prejudice speaking. Either way, it had only occurred to him after the fact—while watching the chaos unfold in the streaming call—that maybe, maybe, it would have been a really good idea to warn her in advance.
Bam.
"Do you know faeries?" He muttered to himself.
Yeah. It would've been a good idea to tell her beforehand: Don't take anything from faeries.
"You know," Gordon mused, as they approached the end of the paved path, "I didn't see a single sylph or redcap at the dance."
The ambient music cut out.
Harry, trudging through snow up to his knees, looked sideways at his lightly attired friend striding atop the compacted ice and shrugged grumpily. "Now he tells us."
Gordon wore buckskins and moccasins, paired with a crisp shirt, a buckskin vest, and a bolo tie. Unlike Harry, he wasn't weighed down by a ton of armor and found the crusted ice sufficient support—behind him, Karen moved along quietly, doing much the same, but looking much more cheerful about it. His enchanted moccasins kept his footfalls silent—worth the tradeoff, even if they weren't exactly winter gear. He flexed his gloved fingers absently, rolling his shoulders against the cold.
Claire, least attired of the group as always, simply boiled away the snow and ice near her feet with the intensity of the molten mana she was still channeling.
"If it makes you feel better, my toes are completely numb," Gordon muttered.
The cliff face glowed orange with reflected light as they approached it, finding a thick rope moving ponderously in the wind, much where Harry remembered having left it. Harry reached for the rope—only to recoil in disgust. Hidden beneath the fibrous grass, what he had thought was the rope came away in his hands, revealing long strands of hair still attached to a scrap of scalp.
"Her family would be released," he murmured. "She never said she was told she herself would survive."
Gordon looked at the rope for a long moment. "That's too much hair for one scalp. I'll bet we'd find the wording didn't say anything about getting out alive after being released either."
"Redcaps," Karen muttered, disgusted. "Absolutely vile. Wanna bet Claire already got the ones that did that?"
Harry grimaced. "No bet."
As if on cue, the guttural laughter of the homicidal faeries started up again from somewhere out of sight above them, on the cliff.
And then the storm hit.
The plumes of steam and smoke rising from Claire's lava fields, which had been steaming sulferously overhead in roughly their direction, suddenly gusted forwards on a straight horizontal as a sheer gale
forced them out of the sky, driving rain and sharp grains of ice blanketing the landscape and hiding it from view.
"No one disrespects the Lady Shayla," mocked a hollow voice, a sylph, from somewhere nearby. "Now … perish."
Gordon ran up the cliff-face in a wall-run, jumping and quick-drawing his revolvers—not because he saw anything, but for the split second of extra time it would give him to see what was coming. As his feet left the surface and his flip began to reach its apex, his Acrobat trait kicked in, slowing time for him—and allowing him to focus on the mass of pointed icicles, also in midair, hidden by the grey-swept gusts above them.
Of course, after that, chaos ensued.
To Gordon's senses, he had a solid couple of seconds in the air. To everyone else? He sprinted up the cliff, backflipped, and fired—a blur of motion and gunfire.
His steel-jacketed rounds screamed through the air, a shrill, piercing whistle cutting through the storm. Above, the wind carried the agonized cries of the fae—just before they were swallowed by the rush of the gale and the glass-shattering impact of falling icicles.
Frost magic in Ghostlands was one of several schools that reinforced structures rather than simply freezing them. A logical enough design choice—colder ice is harder ice, to a point. But the magically infused, blue-green glowing icicles falling from the storm weren't just harder than steel. They were stronger than steel.
Unfortunately for the fae, strength didn't matter if you didn't have enough force behind it.
Steel moves if you hit it hard enough.
The falling icicles pinged harmlessly against Harry's forged steel shield, leaving behind only tiny wet craters—nothing more than a light battering.
Basically, no matter how supernaturally reinforced the ice was, physics still applied.
Momentum mattered. Force equals mass times acceleration.
Gravity? That's acceleration. And acceleration increases the longer you fall. If these icicles had dropped from a hundred feet higher, maybe they could have done real damage.
But from sixty, maybe eighty feet?
Not nearly enough.
The projectiles were too light to generate the impact needed for their supernatural durability to actually matter. The magic made them tougher, but it didn't make them heavier. And without more mass, they simply weren't falling fast enough.
Physics 1. Faeries 0.
Gordon took all of this in within seconds. His perk made sure of that. Behind him, his friends moved in slow motion—fire blooming between Claire's hands, Karen's swords somehow already out, slicing arrows from the air.
Situational Awareness kicked in whenever he did something crazy and acrobatic. And Quickdraw? That boosted his damage on the first shot. Between the two, this was his element.
The Redcaps had smaller heads than normal fae, making them slightly harder to shoot. But at this range? With buffs?
Fish in a barrel.