Guild Mage: Apprentice

Cold mountain wind whistled around Liv's face as she banked and dove through the sky above the pass; the rush of air against her skin was enough that she had to blink tears away from her eyes.

Half a dozen golden spears shot toward her in a wave. Liv tucked her wings of shining blue mana, rolled out of the way of four, and sent blades of adamant ice to knock aside the final two. Fifty yards away, Genevieve Arundell hovered, wrapped in a golden sphere of coherent mana. Liv had a clear advantage in maneuverability, but her wings didn't protect her in the same way that being surrounded on all sides by a barrier of mana shielded the archmage.

And then, there was the cloud of golden weapons that orbited around Arundell in a dizzyingly complex array of ellipticals. It was all Liv could do to control six blades with her Authority, but somehow Arundell managed to not only keep track of dozens, but to position them exactly where they needed to be at any given moment.

Case in point - in response to the wave of deflected spears, Liv sent her remaining four swords whistling toward the golden orb from four different angles: a rising cut each from the left and the right, along with matching descending cuts. Each sword was parried, in turn, by a golden buckler, rapier, dagger, and axe.

If she could just get a strike through, Liv knew that she could begin battering down Genevieve's defenses. She didn't know the precise extent of the other woman's mana capacity, but she could make an educated guess. Guild Mistress Every had admitted that she could hold twenty rings, and that while both Jurian and Caspian could both contain more, even Archmagus Loredan hadn't been able to call upon thirty rings. That meant, Liv figured, that Genevieve would have between twenty-one and twenty-nine rings of mana.

That gave Liv an advantage by somewhere between fourteen and six rings of mana. They'd both have reserves of mana kept in various pieces of mana stone or pearls worn on different parts of their body, of course, and Arundell might make up a bit of ground there. She was certainly more practiced in gathering up wisps of mana while they fought - a fact that was demonstrated as both women swooped low over the wall, Liv chasing the archmagus as they each wove through patches of ambient mana left behind by the spell-exchanges of Elden warriors and the crown barons. Soldiers dove aside to avoid the two women, but at least two were decapitated by Arundell's weapons. Worse yet, Liv figured that for every two wisps of ambient mana she caught with her Authority, Genevieve managed to grab three.

Still, she thought her best chance at actually winning this fight was to force Arundell to exhaust herself of mana, while Liv kept enough set aside to strike a finishing blow - or at least to drive the other woman off. A retreat could get her what she needed just as easily as a victory. What bothered her was how easily Genevieve had destroyed her first set of wings - she'd been forced to recast when Arundell created that golden orb and floated up into the sky. That had to have chipped into her mana advantage.

She chased the archmage back up into the sky as Arundell began to climb again, apparently satisfied by her harvest of ambient mana. Liv had to flit from side to side to dodge swords, spears, and a variety of other weapons sent to slow her down. It was clear that she wouldn't be able to sneak a sword through the cloud of weapons Genevieve was somehow maintaining, so she needed to break that orb directly. If they were closer to the ground, she would have caught it in a grasping hand of ice and squeezed, but since they weren't -

"Aluthet Aiveh Ghesia!" Liv shouted, her words torn away by the wind. She swiped her wand in the direction of Arundell's speeding orb, and an enormous open hand of coherent mana, shining blue, caught the orb in its palm. Liv raised her left hand and squeezed.

Liv could actually feel the resistance in her own fingers, as she beat her wings to bring herself up short before she crossed into the deadly orbit of Genevieve's weapons. The older woman faced her from inside the orb, that rusting leather mask concealing her face and any hint of an expression. Was she grinning? Panicking? Liv couldn't tell.

With a shout of effort, Liv forced her fingers closed into a fist. But instead of breaking the golden orb, her hand of blue mana itself shattered, breaking into pieces against Genevieve's defenses. Wisps of blue mana floated off into the air for just a moment, and were then sucked in by Genevieve Arundell's Authority.

"Oh my," the archmage called, her voice carrying across the winds that whipped down into the pass. "I suppose you weren't expecting that, were you? I thought you were supposed to be a quick student. When I shredded your wings that first time, you should have realized something was off!"

A dozen weapons shot toward Liv, like a volley of crossbow bolts, and for a moment it was all she could do to defend herself. Her six swords parried and blocked, while she tucked her wings and dove to get out of the way. The worst part was that the older woman was right - she had felt something was wrong, had known that her wings shouldn't have been broken that easily. But she didn't have any time to think -

Time. Liv needed more time.

"Dāent Aiveh Nevn Veilem," Liv shouted, pointed her arm behind her, and twisted her wand about with her wrist, allowing the enchantments worked into the bone to focus her mana. Nine of Genevieve's golden weapons visibly slowed, falling behind the rest of the volley, then halted, hanging in the air. Within heartbeats, the two women had left them far behind, and once they'd passed beyond the range the older woman could control or maintain them, they dissolved into golden motes of mana.

Liv grinned. That hadn't quite been half the archmage's arsenal, but it made a beginning. Still, using Dā like that had been exorbitantly expensive - seven rings of mana to dispose of nine weapons. If she had to continue at that rate, it would leave her with hardly any magic left to finish the fight.

And, it gave her space and time to think. With one part of her mind, she rolled and twisted around Genevieve's attacks, using her six blades purely for defense. With the other, Liv reached out with Aluth, like she'd done instinctively when first imprinted with the word. Now, she tried to get a sense for what was different about those golden weapons.

If her father hadn't taught Liv how to make adamant ice, she would never have put it together.

At the tiniest, most minute level, the smallest pieces that made up ice could be arranged in different ways. There was the pattern they fell into most easily, most naturally - and then there was adamant ice, which had to be formed under enough pressure that those infinitesimal pieces would click into a different arrangement. It had nearly driven Liv mad with frustration when she'd been trying to learn it.

Genevieve Arundell had done the same thing with mana.

The very structure, at the most basic level, of the older woman's mana was different. It was more dense, stronger than regular mana manifestations, to at least the degree that Liv's adamant ice was stronger and more durable than natural ice. And it left Liv in the horrible position of trying to fend off weapons of well-forged, sharpened steel with defenses on the order of a rotten tree branch she'd found on the ground.

There was simply no way that anything Liv built from pure mana would be able to break Genevieve's conjured weapons, or her defensive orb. If she'd had months to study, to learn how to replicate the technique herself, to build upon her understanding of Cel - maybe even to ask for her father's help - Liv was confident she could have done it. But racing through the air faster than a runaway stallion, there was simply no possible way of competing equally on that level.

She had to change her strategy. If Liv kept up as she was, Genevieve would simply harry her into the ground with that cloud of weapons, safe behind her unbreakable orb of golden mana. Liv beat upward again, using her six blades to clear herself a path toward the archmage, and trying to position herself at the perfect angle.

"I see you've put it together, now," Arundell called across the sky to her. "Clever girl. I wish I'd gotten to you before Jurian - we might have avoided all this. When they see you fall out of the clouds, your army will break. That will be the end."

"You think the same isn't true of you?" Liv shouted back. She was close enough, now: she spread her wings wide, took a deep breath, and then pushed outward with her Authority. A wave of pressure exploded across the air toward the archmage, carrying with it a sudden flurry of snow flakes.

In return, Genevieve Arundell's own Authority burst forth from her in an explosion of golden light. The two forces met, high above the pass, halfway between the dueling women, like two wrestlers throwing their bodies against each other on market day.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

The force of the impact rippled out through the air in every direction - up to the storm clouds that lingered above, down to the soldiers struggling at the wall below, and out to the rock faces on both sides of the pass itself. But Liv had judged her position well: as her Authority spread out behind her, it was with her back to the crown army.

The dark clouds, gathered by Julianne and the dowager to be used with Luc, now altered under the influence of Cel, which roared like a beast in the back of Liv's mind, awoken after a long sleep. The sky opened up, and the crown forces were immediately lost in a white-out. Snow filled the sky around and behind Liv, driven by cold northern winds, and wrapping the entire pass south of the wall in a blizzard.

Liv was dimly aware of men and women's blades icing over, far below; of how they stopped fighting or marching forward or even working the siege engines, whose ropes snapped from the cold. Puffs of frosted breath rose from every mouth in the crown army, and the blood on corpses began to freeze. And yet, to her, the cold was a familiar comfort: it was the fresh, crisp feeling of rushing out into the Whitehill courtyard, into a world that had been draped in perfect, unbroken white over the night's storm.

She thought, for just a moment, that she could see Genevieve Arundell's eyes widen behind the two holes cut into her leather mask. It might have been the first time the archmage was taken by surprise since she'd come to the top of the wall.

"Or maybe I'll just break your army right now," Liv taunted the other woman.

With a wordless cry, Genevieve pressed her Authority into Liv's, and Liv pressed back.

She hadn't been quite certain what to expect, what it would actually feel like when they measured each other like this. Liv could still recall what it had felt like when she'd first seen Ractia, in that long ago vision: of being unable to breathe, unable to hold herself up. That incredible, irresistible crushing weight. Against her own grandmother, she'd been locked motionless on the training grounds at Al'Fenthia, struggling to move even her own hand. Even when Keri's aunt Väina had opposed her at Mountain Home, Liv had felt outmatched. True, she'd trained since then, with Master Grenfell, Guildmistress Every, and the warriors Kaija had brought from Kelthelis. But she truly hadn't known whether it would be enough.

It was with a sort of grim satisfaction that Liv found, for the first time, that she had the advantage against an archmage. Could she have fended off three professors flinging spells at her at the same time? Liv still wasn't entirely certain.

But she wasn't testing herself against three people at once now - only one.

Liv clenched her fists, the right about the grip of her wand, the left only on itself, and forced Genevieve's Authority back, foot by foot. The blizzard advanced, until Liv doubted whether the older woman would even be able to see through it to find her. As the archmage's Authority condensed, hemmed in, Liv could feel her pulling her weapons back into tighter orbits, as well, so that she didn't lose them within the influence of Liv's Authority.

Now that it was Arundell on the back foot, Liv didn't let up for an instant. Her wings of mana beat against the cold air, keeping her airborne and close to the older woman. Her six swords hovered to either side of her, ready to leap to her defense if needed. If she could batter down the last of Genevieve's Authority, if she could crush the other woman as Ractia had once crushed her, that unbreakable orb of golden mana would wink out of existence, and Genevieve Arundell would plummet down onto the rocks below.

"Authority is only half of what it takes to be an archmage," Genevieve shouted. Liv caught a glimpse of her staff raised, through the driving white snow, but she couldn't catch the incantation itself. Still, she recognized the archmage spell because she had seen it once before - at Coral Bay, when Genevieve had completed the tests to earn her current rank.

Just like that day in the great hall of the vanished Blackstones, before the conclave of mages, a golden cyclone surrounded Genevieve Arundell. Liv knew that there would be an uncounted number of golden mana-shards borne upon that wind, flashing about the archmage's body at such a rapid pace that they weren't even visible to the unaided eye. Anything that touched that whirling column of gold would be ripped to pieces.

Worse yet, the cyclone seemed to somehow shred Liv's Authority just as easily as it might a man's unarmored flesh. Arundell, wrapped in the golden twister, pressed forward into Liv's winter storm, and the storm gave way.

Liv threw two swords at her, more in an experiment than anything else, and the blades of adamant ice were immediately shattered into a thousand pieces. "Blood and shadows," she cursed, tucked her wings, and dove toward the ground.

She had been so close. If it had only been a contest of Authority, Liv was certain that she would have ground Genevieve Arundell down to nothing if she'd had a few more moments. But she'd only twice ever faced an archmage spell before - and one of those, at least, had not come from a living caster. She doubted whether Calevis had counted as an archmage, given that she'd been able to beat his Authority.

But Genevieve Arundell was one, without a doubt, and her magic came at Liv with a level of power that both Calevis and the shade of Celris had lacked. She didn't have the slightest idea of how to counter it. Evidently, Authority alone would be insufficient to stop Genevieve. Again, perhaps if she'd had someone to teach her, or time to practice - but wanting any of those things now was useless.

But if she was going to have to flee, Liv was determined to do as much damage as she could to Benedict's army on her way. She swooped down into the heart of the crown forces, bringing the very heart of the storm with her, and Genevieve Arundell followed.

Liv hit the ground at speed, tucked her shoulder, and rolled across the frozen earth. There must have been six inches of snow already, and it cushioned her impact, though she flung white powder in every direction until she came to a halt. The temperature around her had dropped so low, now, that soldiers were freezing to death even twenty or thirty feet away.

"That's your plan, then?" Genevieve Arundell shouted from inside of her golden whirlwind, as she touched down. "Make me chase you through the entire army, killing as many innocent people as you can on the way?" She must have dismissed her orb, because she actually seemed to be standing with her boots touching the ground.

"Innocent or not, they came here to kill my family," Liv shouted back. "If you want to blame someone for their death, blame Benedict. Blame Milisant. Blame yourself."

The cyclone advanced, and Liv stumbled over a dead body as she retreated, falling to the ground. Her mind flitted between a hundred different plans, a dozen different spells, but she couldn't see how any of them would help her now. She'd never crushed Genevieve Arundell's Authority completely, which meant she couldn't use Dā to simply age the other woman's body until she fell to dust - or Cel to freeze her from the inside out. What she needed, it seemed, was an Archmage spell of her own.

She had two recorded in her notebook, but Liv had been warned time and again not to attempt to cast either one of them yet. Julianne's masterpiece, the product of years of intermittent work, spent scribbling away when she could find the time - and the incantation Liv had been given by her grandmother.

Liv ripped the journal out of its leather straps on her belt, tore it open, and flipped to the pages filled by Eila tär Väinis's elegant hand. As Genevieve Arundell walked toward her, surrounded by her twister, the golden shards of coherent mana within tore up the frozen ground, spraying dirt in every direction.

"There's nothing in that spellbook that will save you now," Archmage Arundell called out. "You have, quite simply, been outmatched since the beginning."

"Æ'Manis," Liv called, allowing the words to vibrate up from her belly, "Cel'Dāet'Arum Ceis."

Cel and Dā woke as one inside her, and surged forth to freeze Genevieve Arundell into a timeless, frozen sleep. Liv managed to get her wand up and pointed at the incoming golden cyclone, and mana surged down her arm as the incantation took hold, but then it all went wrong.

The two words seemed to push against each other, practically fighting, and they twisted out of Liv's control no matter how tightly she tried to hold onto them.

"You stupid girl -" Genevieve Arundell's shout was cut short by an explosion of mana that snapped Liv's wand in half.

Everything went silent, and Liv felt herself tumbling, boneless, through the air. She wrapped her wings about her body and tucked her head into her arms, and then she felt herself hit something. The impact knocked the breath from her lungs. Her back throbbed with pain, and for an eternal, panicked second, Liv thought that the same thing which had happened to Baron Henry all those years ago had happened to her. Her spine was shattered, and she would never walk again.

Finally, she was able to suck in a single wheezing breath, and stumble to her feet. For a moment, she couldn't even tell where she'd ended up, or how far she'd been thrown - and then Liv saw a crater torn into the ground perhaps fifty yards away. She looked behind her, and found she'd fetched up against a trebuchet.

Once, an impact like that would have broken every bone in her body. Even after she'd begun eating the right diet, a normal person could have struck their head wrong and died. But between her mana-infused bones, her armor, and the wings, which seemed to have shattered under the impact - Liv found she could walk.

It was painful, certainly - she felt like a single, solid bruise. But she began circulating mana through her body, slowly starting the process of healing, as she searched for Genevieve Arundell.

Liv tried to ignore the body-shaped lumps under the snow.

The storm had calmed, and now only a few isolated flakes of snow drifted down on gentle winds. It was, for the first time in days, quiet - almost silent.

She found the archmage where the older woman had hit a supply wagon. Genevieve Arundell's mask had been thrown aside by the blast, revealing a face that had been scarred and disfigured by her battle with Jurian. Even the sound of her voice, that hoarse rasp, was clear to Liv now: there was a horrific scar across the older woman's throat.

"Stupid girl," Arundell croaked. A trickle of blood ran down her forehead from an unseen wound, buried somewhere beneath her red, matted hair. She tried to move, but could only groan in pain. After all, the older woman had neither armor, nor mana-strengthened bones. "You can't just attempt an archmage spell on the spur of the moment..."

Liv raised her hand, and a frozen fist erupted up out of the snow. She brought it down on Genevieve Arundell, and there was a sickening crunching sound.