-Atherinon, Taker of Secrets
The slightest adjustment in the air fires a spike of pain through my entire body. Were it not for the sky affix keeping me aloft, I would plummet as the wings on my back spasm. My hand clenches tight around the tendril stabbing into my stomach, fire pouring out from my fingers.
A shrieking wail cuts through the air from the other side of the wall of black sand hovering in front of me. I command the sand to separate as my fire continues to roil over my hand, but a glimpse at the creature on the other side makes me regret the action.
Manaphage Eye
The tendril stabbing me leads back along a line of twisting and bloated flesh to an eyeball floating in the air fifteen feet away. Four wings, white, like those of a dove, flap in the air behind the monster, not attached to its body but still holding it aloft somehow. Its body is just an eyeball the size of a prize-winning pumpkin, the sclera an ugly yellow color where it isn’t discolored with brown. Its pupil is an open wound, darkness leading into cut-open flesh, from which the stinger protrudes.
The revulsion I feel at seeing the monster pushes me to pour more flames into it. Lacking a mouth, it still manages to screech and thrash in the air, each of its movements jerking the barbed spear in my gut. Despite the evident pain I am causing, my fire seems to make no headway. Desperate, I pour the green power of corrosion into the flames.
Something I haven’t seen happen before starts, the fire affix not leaving my dragonfire even as I add the emerald power, the two mixing and combining. My dragonfire grows darker, the brilliant orange taking on a brownish hue as it eats into the flesh of the monster.
The length of tendril I hold in my hand grows brittle as I close my fingers, eventually snapping like a dried twig beneath my meager strength. The wings hovering behind the manaphage begin to flap wildly as the part of the tendril collapses completely, separating us. I soar back, putting distance between myself and the monster, fascination stirring me as the brown flames continue to chew on the fleshy cord extending from the eyeball’s pupil.
A smell like dry dirt floats on the wind, and looking down at my hand, I find my smeared blood seeping into a handful of ash. The brown fire burning into the monster doesn’t spread like it should, more burrowing into the flesh, bits of ash raining down as it slowly climbs the stalk.
At Galea’s prompting, I move in the air once more, a spear of steel shooting up from the ground below.
Right, I’m still in the middle of a fight. My moonsilver staff drops into my right hand as I bite my lip, using my left to rip the barb out of the wound in my stomach. The pain is incredible, but not nearly as bad as I expected. Mana is already pouring into the head of the staff, an emerald bead of fire manifesting at the end as I turn it to look down on my enemy.
“That wound looks nasty,” Priscilla calls, taking a bare second to pull her attention away from the rune she is manifesting from her grimoire. “If you surrender now, your humiliation will not be too bad.”
She isn’t wrong. The spear of the manaphage had only been in my stomach for a few seconds, but the monster managed to strip nearly two thousand mana from me in those scant few seconds. A lesser mage would be empty on resources.
I flick out the barb in my hand, letting it drop to the ground in front of the demon standing next to Priscilla. The dumb beast tracks it, its head bobbing as the barb bounces on the grass in front of it. It reaches forward with a red hand, picking up the barb in two huge fingers and turning it over in front of its face, mesmerized by the bloody appendage. The demon never sees the flash of green that ends its life.
A shadow is thrown from the erupting plume of emerald conflagration, Priscilla. She rolls through the grass, bouncing a single time as she hugs her grimoire tightly to her chest before she somersaults to her feet once more, the pages of her grimoire spinning rapidly. I am more captured by the sight of the burning demon engulfed in green flame. It looks like a dark skeleton in the flash of the fire, standing for a moment, staring up at the sky before it starts to crumble.
Charging another blast of fire into my staff, I look down, tracking Priscilla as she stops her grimoire on a new page and begins to pull the spellwork from the book. I don’t want to do anything too terrible to her as I level the staff; it isn’t like I am trying to kill this girl. Only now it occurs to me that I don’t exactly understand how to make this woman yield to me without inflicting some horrible kind of pain. Burning someone alive is hardly a way that a duel should end, especially when the duel is just to yield.
Irritation nags at me as I watch her speed through her attempt to summon some new spell from her book. The woman didn’t even do me the courtesy of wearing protective equipment. If she is a duelist as she claimed and has fought in duels before, there is no chance she doesn’t have armor or enchantments to protect from magic somewhere. She must have thought me so below her that she wouldn’t require any, and now it is on me not to kill her with a blast of fire.
While it is true that I mostly changed into my armor so that my dress wouldn’t be ruined, at least I put some protective equipment on. I grind my teeth, trying to think around the obstacle.
Galea, for some reason, fails to warn me at all as the Manaphage Eye swoops at me from the side. With its stinger crumbled to dust, the floating eyeball has no real way of harming me. That is little consolation as its spongy body slaps into my outstretched hand. The slap against my hand mixes with an intense and deep-seated revulsion as the mucus of its diseased eye touches me, and my staff falls from the air as I pull away from it.
The eye spins away through the air as I land a solid kick into it before the head of my moonsilver staff even hits the ground, sinking into the soft dirt and sticking straight up. My irritation turns to real anger, and I zoom after the flailing demon eye. Snagging one of its wings, a gout of blue fire erupts from my mouth, bathing the demon in flames of cold. The diseased creature continues to flap for a moment as the mucus covering its eyeball hardens and begins to crack. After a few seconds of flaming baptism, the monster no longer struggles, what feathers it has left on its wings having grown cold and stiff. With a yell, I spike the monster down into the ground below, where it cracks open on collision, shards of frozen demon sticking to the grass.
Mocking laughter coming from the ground pulls my attention. I turn, finding Priscilla looking smug as a piece of runework floating over her grimoire shines and disappears. A weight settles upon me, the rattling of chains echoing all around me. I drop a few feet from the air as a conjured chain wraps around my wings, binding them together, and rendering them immobile. It only takes me a moment to arrest the fall, compensating for the additional weight, and righting myself in the air.
Priscilla gapes up at me, seeming confused as to why wrapping up the wings didn’t make me plummet from the air. A shadow of a blush comes to her face, and she pulls free the sword, waving it up at me.
“Come down here, coward!” she yells. “Are you going to fight or not?”
I can’t help but scoff. She wants me to come and fight her with what, my hands against her magical sword? We both know that she is stronger and likely faster than me. What an idiotic thing to demand.
“No.”
The woman cries out in exasperation, throwing her sword down to stick in the grass near her foot. She begins flipping through her grimoire again, but I have decided that I don’t like her having that.
Black sand begins to pour from my vault, forming orbs around me that I pour dragonfire into while I start firing unchanneled bolts from my hands at the woman. Bolts of exploding blue fire streak down from the air; I stick to the cold fire as while it isn’t harmless, it is probably less deadly than the alternatives. She probably has the magical defense to take at least one. Priscilla looks up, starting at the sudden onslaught of multiple magical projectiles screaming down from above.
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Priscilla runs, her grimoire slapping closed as she dodges to the side. The woman is fast, though not nearly as fast as I first imagined she might be. More and more projectiles join the fusillade as more globes of black sand are added to my armament one after another. Quickly, the tide of attacks becomes too much for her to dodge completely. The first bolt that connects catches her in the shoulder, spinning her to the side as it explodes. As expected, Priscilla isn’t consumed in blue fire, just a bruise of freezing skin left behind by the momentary contact. If anything, it is Priscilla’s dress that takes the brunt of the blow, freezing and cracking in the spot she is hit. Before she can recover, another hits her in the gut, knocking her over backward in the grass.
I refuse to let up, sending bolt after bolt at her while she is prone. My mana drops at an incredible rate, but I see the chance for victory and jump to take it.
All at once, the bolts of fire begin to detonate prematurely, a wave of blue flames exploding in the air ahead of their target. I cut off the assault. After a moment, the wash of color begins to vanish, revealing a semi-transparent dome hovering above Priscilla, several cracks running through the barrier of magic as she pants beneath its cover. The smugness is gone from her face as she stares up at me, the sheath of white aura surrounding her having grown more subdued. Patches of frozen fabric and skin stand out in at least five places.
“You should surrender,” I call down to her.
She growls something in reply, but I don’t catch a whisper of it. Her eyes turn down to the grimoire in her hand, a manic look coming to her eye as she begins to flip through the pages.
“No, you don’t.”
The assault of dragonfire bolts picks up once again in earnest as I launch attacks down. The light of the fire colliding with the magical barrier is more brilliant than the light of all the stars in the sky put together, bathing the dueling field in their color. I expect the waves of fire to be enough as I drop from the air, but the barrier continues to hold against me. I angle myself toward the shield as the assault continues, pulling free the mageblade I created just a little while ago.
The mageblade fires from my hand, the black sand trapped inside the handle allowing me to fire it forward like an arrow. The blade of the dagger strikes into the shield just a moment ahead of me, the sound of shattering glass quaking the air as the plumes of fire spray in all directions.
Priscilla is revealed, a startled look on her face as the dagger passes by her ear to stick into the grass behind her. The half-formed spell is still lifting from the page when I reach her, my outstretched boot descending with all of my frustration at this woman. To be fair to myself, I am no expert in diving from the air and kicking someone, so when my heel collides with her shoulder, I consider that a success.
The first thing I notice is my heel shattering inside my boot as my foot collides with the woman, the second thing is a snap in my ankle. A feeling of satisfaction mixes with the sharp pain as Priscilla is knocked away from me, rolling backward through the damp grass as she cries out.
Priscilla doesn’t stay down for long, bouncing back to her feet before stumbling a step and grabbing her shoulder. A hand falls to her waist, grasping at the empty air where the hilt of her weapon should be. Her eyes grow big as she sees me standing a dozen or so feet away, holding a leather book in front of me. My triumphant stance is somewhat ruined by the way I have to favor my now incredibly injured leg.
“Yield,” I demand.
The aura surrounding her flickers, now only a few inches from her skin. The woman sneers at me. “I will never lose to a fucking human,” she spits. She actually spits into the dirt, very unladylike.
My willingness to offer grace to this woman is rapidly dwindling. Fire erupts in my palm, the orange spreading up and over the cover. She screams wordlessly as the dragonfire eats into the book, charring it and rendering it to trash in a scant few seconds.
The aura surrounding the woman flares to life again, though still far dimmer than it was before as she lunges forward. A torrent of black sand surrounds her in a swirling hurricane as she charges at me, blocking away any chance she has of noticing me as I drift up a few feet and move out of the way of her charge.
As Priscilla moves through the swirling storm of sand, I feel my connection to parts of it disappear when it collides with her waning aura. As expected, like other soul presences, I cannot control my black sand inside her area of influence. I have gotten around that before by infusing my soul presence with affixes to either match or complicate the innate auras of other opponents, but Priscilla’s soul presence is different. I cannot taste a hint of affixed magic upon it, and it pushes my aura away from it like a magical barrier. Using the same tactic that I have before is impossible but also unnecessary.
The black sand swirling in a vortex around the woman begins to glow with a haunting blue as I pour cold affixed power into the storm. My mana is growing dangerously low, and I can feel a headache coming on from the depletion, but I continue pouring mana into the storm of sand. Parts of the swirling sand continue to disappear from my ability to sense, while other grains reappear under my control as Priscilla continues to stumble forward.
Her movements across the field slow as the storm swirls around her, a tornado of glowing blue sand. She stops, the sand no longer leaving my control. I continue to make the vortex spiral around her for a good half minute before stilling the storm, the glow of the sand evaporating into the air as I pull it back to me in spiraling globes of black.
The retreat of the sand reveals a woman kneeling in the grass, shivering. Her onyx hair sticks to her, frozen to her skin. The dress wrapping her lays in tatters as she hugs herself, shivering uncontrollably, puffs of mist spraying from her lips as she takes quick and shallow breaths. I move around in front of her, noting the chapped and blue lips, the way the cosmetics on her face seem to have frozen and cracked.
Priscilla looks up at me, staring with hatred in her eyes as she shakes.
“Yield,” I say.
The woman tries to spit at me again, a dribble of drool rolling down her chin before freezing on her skin. I take my eyes off the woman, looking to the side where the man Jor’Mari pulled out of bed stands as a judge for this duel. He looks on, hands folded behind his back, not seeming the least bit perturbed at what is happening.
Any anger I might have felt before drifts out of me as I look down at the shivering woman. Well, she won’t surrender. That, in a kind of pitiful way, is a bit admirable.
The full force of my soul presence descends upon the woman. I press the power of my soul against the flickering translucence of her presence. The resistance is there, pushing against me, but this has gone on long enough. The aura surrounding Priscilla begins to shrink back, being pushed by my power back into her skin. I grit my teeth, pouring every ounce of my will into the combat between our two souls, slowly pushing her back despite her struggles.
A sigh escapes my clenched teeth when I feel the power of my soul presence settles upon her. Priscilla falls sideways as an incredible weight presses down upon her, pushing her into the grass, and indenting her in the soft soil. Still, she continues to stare up at me, defiance in her eyes. She won’t yield, and I am not soft-hearted enough to let her off with anything less.
Motes of black dust pull away from globes hovering around me. Priscilla’s eyes snap wide as the black dust pours into her, sinking into her skin and infusing her without any resistance. Even I am surprised at how easily it happens, and the infusion is over in hardly a second.
At a gesture, Priscilla is lifted into the air, the black dust bonded to her body entirely under my control. I feel that control slip for a second as Priscilla rallies her soul presence in a moment of panic, but she can’t fight against me for more than a fraction of a second. She stops drifting up at fifteen feet in the air, floating there like a doll held in the hand of a giant.
The glare and hatred in the woman’s eyes are enough that I don’t even offer her another chance to yield. I don’t care if she would anymore. With another gesture, Priscilla plummets from the air like a meteor, crashing into the ground with a rattling impact.
I lift and slam her into the ground over and over again, less than half a second passing between each impact. A coldness creeps up on me, a morbid feeling of detachment as I watch my opponent crash into the dirt over and over again. It hardly seems like this could be real.
A hand grabs my wrist, stopping me dead in my pummeling of Priscilla. I stop cold, turning my eyes to the side to find Sir Relz standing at my side, his grip on my wrist like a vice. Any more pressure and he would be breaking bones. A shiver runs through me as I look at the man, but that feeling of detachment lingers. I can’t seem to summon emotion.
“The duel is over,” he says. He sounds as if he is barely managing to restrain himself.
I look back to my victim, finding her hovering just a few feet in the air. Priscilla’s right arm is twisted horribly, a piece of bone protruding from the skin. Her other limbs look beaten and broken in places, but the woman still lives, shallow breaths confirming. Her eyes are closed, her face caked in mud and damp grass.
My hand shakes beneath Sir Relz’s grasp, but not from pain. Priscilla slowly descends to the ground, coming to rest on top of an undamaged part of the grass. My black dust retreats from her as Sir Relz releases my arm, pouring back into the globes of sand hovering around me before disappearing once more into the vault.
As soon as I set the woman down, Sir Relz seems to have forgotten all about me, offering a quick recognition that I won the duel before moving over to the broken woman. His hands begin to glow with white light as he bends over Priscilla, hurrying to heal her injuries as quickly as possible.
I stumble back another step, looking on at the scene as I hear more footsteps rushing my way through the grass. Two hands clamp down on my shoulders, gently leading me away from the scene, Jess whispering in my ear that we should go. I let myself be pulled away. The tone in her voice is so soft. She is afraid of what I am feeling, afraid to damage me as she leads me off the field. I am afraid of what I am feeling too, because I don’t feel anything. Nothing at all.
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