The Beginning After The End

Chapter 494: An Icy Fist

ALARIC MAER

Our combined footsteps were uncomfortably loud in the confined stairwell. The thud and creak of the wood resounded sharply from the rough stonework of the walls. With only a small amount of mana to support myself, my aged body was already feeling the strain of so much exertion

And all of this without a drop of alcohol to dull the pain. I consoled myself with the fact that, despite being perhaps a quarter my age, Darrin looked a lot worse.

“Quit your huffing and puffing,” I snapped in a staged whisper. “You’re going to bring every loyalist mage for a mile right down on top of us.”

Darrin only huffed and puffed louder. “As if they could hear me over the noise of your creaking knees, old man.”

I scoffed, glad he still had the energy to be a smart ass. It meant his injuries weren’t as bad as they could have been.

Reaching the top of the stairwell, it opened out into a large, empty common room. On the wall, a rickety wooden ladder continued up to a trap door in the ceiling. I ignored the top floor of the student dormitory and ascended the ladder. The trap door was locked, but a single strike against the mechanism twisted the thin metal and allowed the door to swing upwards.

The square of sky I could see was gray-blue. Early morning, not yet full sunrise. Darkness would have been better, but I could work with twilight.

I heaved myself out onto the dormitory roof, then turned and pulled Darrin up behind me. We both ducked down immediately as shouts rang out from below.

After easing the trap door back down into place, we crept to the roof’s edge and looked out at the Central Academy campus. Several loyalist mages were rushing toward the building across the hedged yards. A few more came running out of the castle-like Student Administration Office, and more could be seen in the distance gathering outside of the Chapel, a looming black building that contained the Reliquary.

“If we’re going to make it off this roof, I need out of these cuffs,” Darrin whispered. “How’d you get out of yours, anyway?”

“The old fake tooth,” I said while scanning the nearby rooftops. It wouldn’t take long for them to find us.

Darrin snorted. “Still doing that? I’m telling you, one of these days you’re going to get punched in the mouth, and your last thoughts will be of me while that crap burns out the back of your throat.”

“Took quite a beating this time around, and I’m still here.”

I’d broken the connecting chain on Darrin’s mana suppression cuffs, allowing him freedom of movement and a small amount of circulation through his mana core, but he wouldn’t be able to cast any spells until the cuffs were completely disabled. Considering the distance we would have to jump to get to the next roof, having help from a wind-attribute mage sure would go a long way.

My dimensional storage artifact had been confiscated with all of my tools, and I’d only had the one fake tooth. Considering my current situation, I had a fleeting thought that investing in a second might be worth the trouble, regardless of Darrin’s protests. After all, we’d both still be locked up without the burning powder.

At the moment, though, all I had was the dagger I’d taken from one of the dead guards downstairs.

“Let me see those cuffs, boy,” I grumbled, taking Darrin’s wrist. By imbuing the dagger’s blade with mana, I could harden the steel enough to score the runes. It took longer than it should have with my core in its current state, but after a tense minute accompanied with the sound of the rest of Dragoth’s forces descending on the dormitory, I was able to begin scratching away some of the runes on his cuffs.

It was a delicate process. The dagger was less effective than the burning powder, and the mana suppression cuffs were equally hardened by the same mana they withheld from Darrin. I had to scour away the proper runes without inadvertently altering the spell into something that would harm Darrin, but I had to be careful not to break the point of the dagger or slip off the smooth, curved metal surface of the manacles and slit Darrin’s wrist. The trembling of my hands sure as hells didn’t help either. What I would do for a goddamn bottle of rum, I thought before reminding myself why I’d quit in the first place.

Cynthia bent down beside me, taking my hands in her own. The trembling eased, and I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

It took another minute, perhaps two, to successfully mar the runes. We could hear Dragoth’s soldiers in the building now, shouting commands to each other and the escaping Instillers. I felt the moment that Darrin’s mana came back under his control. His signature reappeared, spiking and diving rapidly as his core attempted to reassert control. After this, it was easy enough to break the manacles off his wrists. They struck the flat roof with a metallic clunk.

At almost the same time, the trap door was thrown open again, only ten feet away.

A woman's head appeared in the opening. From her desperate grimace and look of physical malaise, I knew she was one of the prisoners, not a soldier. She saw us immediately, and her mouth opened to speak. If we had any hope of hunting down Dragoth and the recording artifact, we couldn’t have a trail of his loyalist bloodhounds on our heels…

I hooked the manacles on the end of my boot and kicked out. Whatever she’d been about to say turned into a scream as the manacles struck her across the face, and she plunged back down through the hole. There was a crash and shouting, followed by the sound of fists striking meat.

Darrin gave a quick jerk of his hand, pulling a gust of wind toward him. It caught the trap door and slammed it shut again. Biting back a curse, I bent low and started running while trying to keep my footfalls as light as possible. Anyone with half a brain would see the manacles and know someone else had been up here.

The most likely escape route took us north, across another rooftop and into an adjacent building via a balcony window, but we were standing on the western edge to look out over the campus. It wasn’t far, perhaps fifty feet. I was nearly there when the trap door slammed back open. Myopic Decay flared with power, and a man cried out before ducking back down into the hole and rubbing frantically at his eyes.

Planting my foot firmly on the roof’s lip, I used what mana I could to strengthen my legs and jumped. A gust of wind pushed me from behind, and I heard Darrin let out a grunt of concentration.

I cleared the fifteen foot gap, absorbing the impact of the descent to the other roof by tucking into a forward roll.

My battered and bruised body protested, but I came to my feet already sprinting, no longer concerned about noise. Before we could search for the recording artifact, we had to lose our pursuers.

I heard Darrin come down hard behind me. A quick glance over my shoulder revealed him favoring his left leg slightly, but I didn’t slow down. I’d seen him dismantle a convergence zone guardian with expert efficiency before; I had no doubt he could handle a bit of torture and a twisted ankle, even with his limited pool of mana.

Reaching the far side of the second roof, I leapt across to a balcony, turning my shoulder into the arc and using myself like a battering ram against the glass door. It shattered, and I felt a burning line across my cheek as broken glass cut my skin. My feet slid out from under me, and I collided with a bulky lounge chair, sending both the furniture and myself sprawling with a crash.

Behind me, I heard the crunch of Darrin landing in the broken glass. His shadow loomed over me, and he grabbed me by the front of my shirt and hauled me to my feet. “No time for a lie-down,” he muttered.

A black bullet of force clipped his right shoulder, knocking him into me and sending us both sprawling again, and the apartment’s far wall exploded. A jet of orange fire sprayed over our heads. Flames engulfed the room in an instant.

“Eyes!” I barked, reaching for Sun Flare.

The orange flames catching in the carpet, furniture, and support beams blazed bright, transforming their glow into a blinding glare.

Sending out a sonar-like pulse with Aural Disruption, I grabbed Darrin by the back of his ruined tunic and dragged him along behind me, both our eyes shut tight. The heat of the flames blistered my skin, and several more concussive strikes of force shook the apartment. Somewhere to our left, a roof collapsed.

Only when I sensed our proximity to the door—now hanging off its hinges and smoldering—did I risk releasing Sun Flare. Through my lids, I saw the hot white light dim to a dancing orange and yellow, and I opened my eyes again. Standing and heaving Darrin in a single movement, I thrust him through the door in front of me.

The hallway was choked with thick black smoke, and the collapsed wall and ceiling had sent embers flying. In a minute or two, this entire floor would be in flames.

“At least the bastards can’t follow us in that way,” I mumbled to myself.

Ahead, Cynthia was gesturing me toward the stairwell down. “They’ll come in through the ground floor and try to trap you.”

“No shit,” I grumbled, running past her.

Darrin rubbed at his eyes and stumbled in my wake. A racking cough burst out of him. “What?” he choked out around the coughing fit.

I didn’t have the breath to reply as I led the way into the stairwell. Its stone walls rebuffed the heat, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees in a few steps. The smoke floated up it like a chimney, rising on the hot air, and the floor below was clear—for the moment.

We descended two floors as quickly as we could, then turned into one of the hallways that connected to other rooms, sprinting its length. The window at the end exploded with a casting of Aural Disruption. There was no neighboring building to jump to, but the ground wasn’t yet swarming with Dragoth’s soldiers.

I paused, taking two seconds to breathe and bemoan the loss of all my equipment, which included at least five different artifacts that would have eased our descent.

Darrin went first this time, crawling through the broken window, hanging from its outside, and then dropping down to the next ledge. Gusting wind stabilized his fall.

As he prepared to drop to the one below that, a man in rags ran around the corner, sprinting as if the fire of the abyss chased him. My guts dropped into my shoes.

Two mages came running after him, both in black and crimson. One fired a weak shock spell that struck the escaping prisoner in the back. The man pitched forward, landed on his face, and slid a couple of feet along the cobblestones. Neither seemed to have seen us yet.

Darrin, who was still thirty feet from the ground, pushed off the wall, leaping back in a graceful arc.

The second of the two mages, his eyes drawn to the movement, gave a shout and threw up a quickly manifested shield in the form of gusting, circular wind.

As Darrin descended, he lashed out with a combination of strikes. Wind-attribute mana formed around his limbs and projected the force of the strikes forward and down. The lightning-attribute Caster had half turned toward his shouting companion but was too far forward to be protected by the quickly cast shield. The blows landed like hammer strikes, driving him to the ground.

Darrin used his own wind-strikes to cushion his descent, but he still landed too hard. His injured leg gave out, and he collapsed to the ground with an audible thump.

The Shield shot a furtive look up at the window, and I pulled myself back, hoping he hadn’t seen me. Slowly, I peeked out again. The Shield was creeping toward Darrin, a short blade in his hand, the cyclone of wind-attribute mana still spinning in front of him.

I waited until just the right moment.

Leaping out the window, I aimed myself like a catapult stone at the Shield. As I fell, I bellowed a warcry.

The mage flinched, automatically pulling his shield up above his head. I struck it full on. The swirling wind caught me and redirected my momentum, tossing me to the side. I hit the path in a roll, tumbling across the ground like a tossed die. The fall should have broken every bone in my body, but between the shield absorbing the brunt of the impact and redirecting the force, and my own mana infusing my muscles and bones, I rolled up to my feet with nothing but a cracked rib.

The Aural Disruption rune was already alight on the small of my back, and I channeled the spell into the mage’s ears before he could recover and reposition his shield. He yelped, his face crimping into a tight, pained expression, and the wind-attribute shield flickered. The confiscated dagger flew through the air, spinning end over end toward his ribs.

The wind-shield caught it and flung it aside. The mage’s hands tightened around his blade as he regarded me with a calculating expression.

“Well, shit,” I grumbled, struggling even to stand.

A strong wind slammed into me from the north, making me stumble. The Shield fell backwards, leveled by the force. I lunged forward, dove on the man, and fought him for his sword. The fingers of one hand dug at my face with the other tried desperately to hold onto his weapon. My own fingers clawed at his, trying to pry them away from the hilt. I only needed a little bit of give…

An icy fist reached inside of me and grabbed my core—the very mana that filled it—closing tight, like a wyvern’s claw through flesh. With a horrified gasp, I reeled back from the Shield, clutching at my sternum. I spun around instinctively, looking for the source of this horrible sensation, but no one else was there. Distantly, I saw the same look of terrified confusion on Darrin’s face, the same clutching fingers scrabbling against his flesh in bitter discomfort.

My mana was ripped away. A blood-speckled cough burst out of me, and I collapsed.

Visible in the air, bright streams of mana streaked from every direction, pulled on the wind back northward, toward the mountains.

Through the ringing of my ears, I heard gasping and weeping from nearby. My head lolled toward it.

The Shield was curled in on himself, blood flowing freely from his nose, the sword abandoned beside him. Thinking only of survival, I began crawling toward him. He took no notice, even as I lifted his blade. Finally, in the instant before I drove it down into his chest, he acknowledged me. Tears were streaming down his blood-smeared face. He grimaced, and his gaze turned away, following the glowing lines of disappearing mana. My strike ended his life almost instantly.

Sagging back, I waited for someone else to run around the corner and catch us, but no one came.

It took some time for me to gain the breath to speak. “Darrin? You alive?”

He had to swallow, which he did with some difficulty, before responding. “I think so. What in the Vritra’s horns was that? My core…I’m practically at the edge of backlash.”

I sensed for his mana signature, but it was feeble and inconsistent. My own wasn’t much stronger, but it seemed I had been better able to resist the draw of that…pulse, whatever it was. “It got a good bit of me, too. Nearly drained that Shield dry, I think.”

Coughing and spitting out a mouthful of blood, I struggled to my feet. “Come on, boy. Maybe this will give us the cover we need to get out of here.”

Standing beside the fallen Instiller, Cynthia regarded me skeptically. “Alaric Maer, the optimist.”

I ignored her, watching the Instiller’s body for the rise and fall of breath. There was none. He was still as marble. As still as a corpse, you mean, I said to myself. I was certain it hadn’t been the shock spell that had killed him, though.

“Where are you going?” Darrin asked as I headed north. “The gates are that way.” He pointed toward the tunnel leading beneath the Student Administration Office.

“Can’t leave yet,” I said, the words mumbled, almost incoherent. “Dragoth and the recording first. If we can get that…”

I figured Darrin would protest, but he only grumbled and fell into step as we hurried for the shadows of the neighboring building.

I’d already considered where Dragoth would most likely keep such a thing, if it still existed. When soldiers had been running toward us from other buildings, those in front of the Chapel had stayed in place. That, I was certain, was where the recording artifact would be stored.

The Chapel was relatively easy to reach while staying out of sight. We kept to the twilight shadows, snaking through the alleys between buildings or moving along the hedgerows that bordered Central Academy’s many lawns. We didn’t see anyone else, and the noise of the earlier search seemed to have died away after that pulse. If that didn’t convince us that the same thing had happened to everyone else, what we found at the Chapel did.

“The guards…” Darrin murmured unnecessarily.

Splayed out across the stairs leading up to the large double doors were two full battle groups of Alacryan mages. Most were sitting or lying on their sides, rubbing their heads or stomachs and rolling around like drunkards nursing a hangover. A couple didn’t move at all. None of them looked to be in a position to fight.

The Chapel loomed behind them, more like a small fortress than a school building. Three stories tall and devoid of balconies or windows, only a single set of large double doors allowed entry through the front of the building. Narrow slits looked down over the road and would have been the perfect place for Casters to hurl spells from, but I saw no faces in those windows, and sensed only the vaguest of mana signatures from in or around the building.

Dragoth wasn’t there, at least. That gave us a chance.

“Think we can take them?” I asked, calculating our odds. We weren’t exactly in good shape, but they looked even worse off, and we could hit them by surprise.

“Maybe we won’t need to.” Darrin had bent down to rub his ankle, wincing. “Bluff it?”

I snorted in amusement. “Sure. Let’s bluff it.”

We took a couple of minutes to prepare ourselves and talk through the plan, then circled around behind the Chapel. We caught sight of an escaped Instiller stumbling through an alley a few buildings away, but they didn’t see us. Darrin took the right side of the building, and I came down the left.

We were able to round the corner and maneuver all the way to the top of the stairs before any of the guards saw us.

A Caster in his forties looked up as my shadow spilled over him. His skin was tinged green and he was sitting next to a puddle of his own sick. His pupils were dilated, and he squinted even in the shadow of the Chapel.

Seeing an opportunity, I channeled Myopic Decay into all their eyes, further degrading their vision. “What are you doing sitting on your ass, soldier!”

The man flinched and all his buddies turned in surprise. Darrin grabbed him by the collar of his armored robes and jerked him to his feet.

“Can’t you smell the smoke? Didn’t you feel that blast! The whole damn campus is likely to go up any minute, and you lot are just sitting here.”

He blinked rapidly. “W-what?”

Darrin gave him a little shove but held on so he wouldn’t go spilling down the stairs. “The rest are in bad shape. A few dead. But they’ll be here shortly. They’re relying on you.”

“We’re abandoning the academy,” I said as if it were obvious. “Get the portal active.”

“Go up?” he asked, obviously struggling to keep up with what we were saying.

“Get moving!” I snapped, letting my scowl sweep across all the guards.

In a confused muddle, they began to struggle to their feet. A couple were in such poor condition that they required help just to stand and had to be dragged down the stairs one step at a time. No one bothered to move the corpses, which Darrin and I made a show of inspecting. As I’d hoped, one had a rune-key, which I took.

A few of the guards threw backwards glances at us, but we headed straight for the door, continuing to act as if we were supposed to be there and knew exactly what we were doing. If any of them suspected we weren’t supposed to be there, they kept it to themselves.

The doors opened to the rune-key. The vestibule beyond was empty, and the doors into the Reliquary portion of the building were open. The room beyond was in disarray, the relics of the ancient mages tossed around and their displays overturned. Only a single weak mana signature was present in the building.

“Careful, there must be another guard,” I said, eyeing the open doors across the hall warily.

We closed the exterior doors behind us to give us some warning if the other soldiers returned, then passed through the vestibule and across the hallway that ran all the way around the Reliquary.

I paused again at the doorway, leaning forward to look in.

Dragoth stared back at me.

I froze, my pulse leaping and my guts turning to liquid. Darrin continued forward for half a step before he saw the Scythe, and then he too went rigid. Some insane, exhausted part of my brain hoped that, just maybe, if we stood still enough, Dragoth wouldn’t see us.

But he was staring straight at me. All I could do was stare back. Neither of us moved, not even the rise and fall of our breaths, which we both held.

I let out my own breath in a gust as realization struck me.

Though Dragoth was a huge man, he looked somehow shrunken, sitting in an ornate padded chair that seemed very out of place in this room. His head was listing to one side, pulled by the weight of his single horn. His face was pale and frozen in an expression of fear and confusion.

He had no mana signature, none at all.

I pressed a hand to my chest. “Abyss, that about gave me a heart attack.”

“He’s…dead,” Darrin said, taking a step into the room.

And he was right. Dragoth Vritra, Scythe of Vechor, sat stone dead in his puffy chair. At his feet, a small piece of carved crystal caught the light and refracted it into a splash of rainbow colors across the floor: the storage crystal from a recording artifact.

I was halfway to it before I remembered the other mana signature.

A bolt of soulfire flew out from behind an overturned table. I threw myself to the floor, and it passed just overhead, striking the wall behind me. From this new vantage, I saw the sweaty, pain-wracked face of the Redwater boy. He, too, was lying on the ground, wrapped up in his own black cloak, his mana signature barely a glimmer. Blood fell like tears from his eyes, which were red from sclera to pupil.

“Sure you want to do that, boy?” I grumbled, slowly pushing myself back up. “You don’t look too good. Did that…pulse do that to you?”

He grimaced, and black fire wrapped around his fist. Wind gusted as Darrin moved beside me, covering me until I stood. Wolfrum pushed himself into a sitting position, his back against the wall. He held the flames up protectively, but he didn’t answer me.

Slowly, I shuffled forward until I could reach the crystal.

“No,” he said, his voice scraping out of him like his throat was full of glass. “Try to take it, and I will k-kill you.”

“We could fight, and maybe you could take us,” I said nonchalantly. “Or maybe you couldn’t. Maybe that pulse, whatever it was, hit you a lot harder than it hit us. You willing to risk that, boy?”

He hesitated, and I scooped up the crystal. The flames writhed through his fingers, but he made no move to attack.

I began backing away, and Darrin followed my lead. I wanted to plunge the sword I still carried through the little shit’s core and leave him there to die, but I’d spoken the truth: I couldn’t be certain that we’d win. Even if we did, there was no telling how long it would be before more soldiers started to stumble back here, trying to figure out what was happening.

That pulse, like a wind that ripped mana straight from the core, had given us an opportunity to retrieve the recording and get out of here with our lives. That would have to be enough. Wolfrum bloody Redwater could wait for another day.

Back outside, we found a few stragglers making their way to the portal. We circled around the back of the Chapel before they caught sight of us, made a wide berth around the central lawns and Student Administration Office, and eventually to the gate that opened out to the Ascenders Association Hall. We didn’t run into any more trouble.

We were through the gates and halfway down the street when a woman in fitted leather armor wearing a leather mask that obscured the lower half of her face stepped out of the shadows of a doorway. She looked ill, but lit up with relief beneath her hood and mask. “Alaric, sir! You’re alive. I’ve been keeping a lookout.”

Looking Saelii up and down, I gave a shake of my head. “That pulse, then. It hit you too? The Whole city?”

“Did it ever,” she said, one hand on her hip, the other pressed against her stomach. “Honestly, I was just about to leave. Report back in. Sir…” She hesitated, glancing behind her into the city of Cargidan. “The refugees from Dicathen. They started pouring out of a portal in the big library a few hours ago.”

I cursed. They’d have been hit too, then. Were they the reason for the pulse? Was it an attack of some sort? Agrona’s parting farewell? I tried to remember what it felt like, that cold fist ripping the mana right out of my chest. But it was all speculation at this point. Inside my pocket, my fingers clasped the recording crystal.

“No time to even enjoy your victory,” Cynthia said with a smirk from the shadowed doorway that Saelii had been waiting in.

“Whose in charge of the refugees? What’s the response been?”

“Kaenig’s forces were mobilized to help organize transportation,” she answered promptly, surprising me. Highblood Kaenig hadn’t exactly been charitable over these last couple of weeks. “As for who’s in charge, it’s apparently Lady Caera of Highblood Denoir, though tensions are high between her and Highlord Kaenig—”

I started stumping down the street, each step painful. “Take me to her. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”