Aisha stretched her senses through the portal. Invisible knotted ropes stretched out of the gaping hole in space, stretching high into the sky. Each knot turned into an eye that swiveled around, feeding her information in real time.

And through those eyes, she could also see the ravaging energies of magic.

One was of their countrywoman, the witch in the Aellian nobility’s employ. The other was one she didn’t recognize, a new player.

She brought her knotted rope of eyes closer, and it swam towards the manor where the battle was occurring like an eel would swim through water, until it came upon the underground scene of a brown-skinned woman and a light-skinned, gem-eyed man locked in combat.

And par for the course, the gem-eyed thing had let the magic quite literally get to his head, maddening him severely.

Aisha rejoiced. She was truly on their side, then, for why else would she be fighting against one of these subhumans?

Her view pulled away from the invisible rope and snapped back to her real body, sitting cross-legged inside her hut, where the commander still was, waiting for her report. “Send in more men,” she said. “For she fights with us against another foe, one that has gone mad at that. We will gain her favor if we help her now.”

The commander merely scoffed. “Far too convenient for her to suddenly come to blows with her allies at the eve of our attack. No. The men we have already sent will be enough to conquer Altaluvia within the hour, and if the unthinkable happens and they all die to some mad working of magic, at least I did not commit more than a fourth of my men.”

Paranoid, but ultimately wise of him. “Understood.”

“And Aisha,” the commander intoned. “What is the fastest that you can shut down the portal?”

“It is turning it back on that takes long, but the moment I activate a ritual to cancel the portal, it should be instant.”

“How long will this ritual take?” The commander asked.

“Forty-five minutes or so,” Aisha said. So, not ‘instant’ per se, but Aisha did enjoy the tension in the commander’s jaw, and his annoyed grunt.

“Begin now,” the commander said. “The moment you detect something that may destroy us, then I want you to cut our connection.”

Aisha summoned a rope from the sand and quickly got to work.

000

Shana

Take the child. Run. That was what the ball had told her, and Shana did not hesitate to follow its orders, for it was undoubtedly the words of mistress Reza herself, spoken with such urgency that she had no choice but to bend to its will. It was not just her respect and fear towards Reza that animated her, but a deep-seated sense of wrongness overtaking her, causing her to run as if she was being chased by predators, and for all she knew, that could likely be the case.

Blocking her path in the hallway was Safina and Moria, the blue and red eyed maids marked as the lady of the house’s favorites. “Where are you going with that child, Shana?”

She bowed her head to them. “Pardon me, but I must leave.”

“You may,” Moria said, taking a step forward. “But not with that child.”

“What?” Shana gasped. “What do you mean? This is lady Reza’s child!”

“Lady Losinda intends on killing her,” Moria sneered. “Likely because she is a spy for the Goldmen. You cannot take that child.”

Safina stepped forward. “You were deceived just like the rest of us,” she said calmly. “But now you must do the right thing and hand over the child. If Reza resists her punishment, then we can still use the child to talk her down.”

Shana didn’t understand, and not just because she was too dim to do so; it just didn’t make sense to her. If Reza was a spy, then why would she bring her own child to enemy territory? Wouldn’t he be far safer at home?

But it wasn’t the dubiousness of the explanation that caused Shana to take Reza’s side, but the trust she placed in a woman that intended to take her away from this life of constant prejudice and struggle.

The diamond ball nestled inside her pocket spoke to her, and Shana reached into her pocket to pull it out.

It pulsed with a green core deep in the middle. ‘Will’, it said, but it whispered so much more. It needed her will.

She pushed it towards the two girls who had contributed to making her life a living hell for as long as she had worked with the Reizenbrahms, and they fell, as though they had only ever been standing upright because strings held them aloft, and now they had suddenly been severed.

They didn’t make a sound as they hit the floor, their eyes still open despite obviously being asleep, because they couldn’t truly, possibly be dead, right?

Right?

Two [Gem-Eyed] Humans slain

Level up!

She wanted to vomit, but the ball beckoned for her once more, and she threw more of her will into the ball, triggering something. Immediately, she was awash in the feeling of comfort, and although she had indeed killed someone, the effect was such that she wouldn’t break down over it. Not yet, at least.

If she ever needed to run before, this crime was more than enough to make her reach deep into some hidden reserves in her body, and run even faster.

She cleared the entrance to the manor, and ran for the forest.

And then the manor exploded.

The shock of the detonation threw her away, and she rolled painfully on the grass.

On top of the baby.

Her already ashen face turned cold as ice as she saw his limbs bend in ways that were utterly wrong, his body bruised, and his wheezing short and interrupted by tiny gasps and cries.

She recoiled from the gruesome sight, her mind awhirl with the weight of her sins, when the ball called to her again.

Yes, the ball. It held all the answers. She found the ball somewhere in the surrounding grass, and used it on Farhaan, hoping it would not kill him. It was his last hope.

His limbs untwisted right before her very eyes, his chest inflating and his bruises disappearing, replaced by healthy olive skin.

Farhaan opened his eyes and began to cry. But he was alive. A great weight lifted off her chest and she fell on her knees, the burning manor in front of her, and sobbed in front of the crying babe.

000

My senses for magic had improved by leaps and bounds over the past few months, after I had delved deeper into the school of metamagic and varnished my mind, immunizing it to the currents and eddies of that wondrous illogic that made up otherness. It afforded me so much more information in this battle against Reizenbrahm.

He, too, was inventing spells on the fly: such was within his capabilities, being a man who had spent his whole life improving his own Wisdom. His immunity towards the maddening effect of otherness was entirely lacking, hence his current… breakdown.

It left him just barely with the mental wherewithal to fight, however, but he was doing it far too well, far too efficiently. The power he conjured was far too intense. That was partially understandable: he was drawing on the glyphs of fire and heat, of an elemental cluster of spells. He must have spent his saved-up Spell Points on them, and learned to make his own from there.

Still, that did not account for his cataclysmic might.

I held myself aloft in the air, above the burning wreckage of the Reizenbrahm manor, through a minor working of gravitational magic, and I used my bone-tipped appendages to stabilize myself in the air. Reizenbrahm, however, grew wings of green fire, flapping them ever so often to keep himself airborne.

Glyphs danced within the weave of his spells, and I had to focus to make them out and read them in their entirety. I was already learning valuable things from this battle, such as the fact that one could see the proverbial blueprints of a spell if one focused hard enough. I would have liked to test this sight on my own spells, but I did not want to waste even a single moment on experimentation when every second could prove the difference between life and death.

In his wings, and the corona of green fire that surrounded him, a fireball that spun around him several times the speed of sound, I read the glyphs of emotions.

And in his mind, I could feel his brain unbalancing before my very eyes, key regions responsible for emotions atrophying and dying. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex, for self-control and inhibition, and his amygdala, all draining in activity in mass by the moment.

He let the fireball off from its orbit, and I blocked the raging ball of death by lurching to the side, dodging in the nick of time not by reacting physically, but by using magic. My mind was far too fast for my own body, and far too frail to deal with the consequences of such a high-speed maneuver. As expected, the whiplash broke my neck.

That was resolved magically a moment before the injury caused me to lose consciousness, and I had to fight to stay awake as I fired a counter-attack, a shard of bone flying out from my body as fast as I could.

I needed more power, though.

I needed a Circle.

And if the jig was up, then I might as well try and see what I was really capable of when not confined to a tiny basement room with limited surface area.

I had to buy time now. “You are losing your humanity,” I said. “The way you’ve constructed your magic, it will strip away everything that ties you to your identity.”

He actually paused to let me finish, and responded in kind. “Yes. This is my ascension into godhood. I will do what you cannot, and bring my family back.”

I allowed myself only a moment to fantasize about how I would rip his spine from his back while he was still alive, and trample on his corpse. There wasn’t one single word that could capture how much I hated him.

It was, in fact, so great in magnitude that I could only really laugh. “Would you believe me if I told you that you need not look for your daughter?”

I was being unaccountably cruel to him, right now, but it was nothing he did not deserve. Reizenbrahm’s expression turned to fury. “You lying bitch!”

“A liar, am I?” This could either kick things up ten notches, or be what it took to talk him down. My son was still in range of his spells, even as Shana did a formidable job of carrying her far, far away from the fighting while Focus filled me in on the details of what had occurred. Shana had already been forced to use the stored Veil twice for two spells: one to kill a couple of insignificant maids who had threatened my son, and another to… to pull him back from the brink of death.

Ice filled my stomach, and I wanted to throw up, but I held on. Now I was certain of it: whether this was cruel or not, it had to be done.

I split off a thread of my own focus and cast a spell: Commune with Demons. Then, I spoke a name.

“Jogmomich.”

She appeared in a flash of light, her white and black stripped clothing playing havoc with my own human perception of space. Somehow, they both stretched outside the outline of her body, around her, and were not stripes at all: merely alternating black and white dots stacked on top of each other. “Greet your father.”

Reizenbrahm’s hands fell as he took in the demonic form of his daughter. “Janina?” He whispered.

Jogmomich turned away from him and glared at me. Or… she looked at me, but I couldn’t quite tell whether she was actually angry or not. Now that I was so attuned to my magical senses, the outward appearance she took on for my own benefit was far less concrete, more like suggestions of humanity than the real thing. I couldn’t quite say if she was even angry at me at all. “You overstep your bounds, child.”

“Can you tell your father that it wasn’t by my own actions that he lost everything he held dear to himself?”

She rolled her eyes—maybe, I was still not quite sure—and turned to her mortal father. “You should give it your all in this fight. From the very beginning, she had schemed to kill us all and use us in her degenerate magical rituals.”

Reizenbrahm let out a wordless roar, exploding once more as more green flames erupted out from him. He was losing his humanity by the second.

Well, it was a long shot. Luckily, I wasn’t only banking on Jogmomich’s presence to calm him down. Causing him mental instability would be just as helpful to me, and that, she most certainly achieved. Though the intensity of his spells had increased, the finesse of it had taken a monumental dive, allowing me to divert his firepower with trivial ease. The deluge of flame parted before me as I created a wedge of pure magic to counter his own magic, and I cast spells to protect the fleeing Shana from this monumental detonation.

Jogmomich was, as they say, a bust. I wracked my brain for another ally, and came up short on all counts. I could sense that an incredible magical ritual had been completed nearby, a rift in space where hordes of Goldmen poured out, gutting Altaluvia from within. Yes, there was that ‘enemy’ witch, wasn’t there?

And speaking of witches and warlocks, was Erlander Black, the Ghost, not one such person? Unfortunately, neither of them had seen fit to provide me with ways to reach them. And since Rezdnaq had a hands-off approach to me, I was entirely on my own.

000

The Department of Inquisitors was in a great upheaval. All around, men and women dressed in black, wearing the religious insignia of the Great Church, ran around like chickens with their heads cut off. A select few men were relatively calm, one of them addressing all the others who were, as calmly as they could manage, listening intently for a solution to the current crisis.

“—it therefore not evident that the pantheon will lend us aid in our greatest time of need?” The main speaker, the oldest Rector of all the inquisitors, said. “The Goldmen are not only traitors to peace and decency, but all of humanity! They are betrayers of the worst kind, and if their god is not evil, then he will strike them down himself! But the answer is simple, gentlemen! We must pray!”

Noise broke out from that. “Prayer?! Have you gone mad?!”

“Complacency of the highest order!”

“You will kill us all!”

One man ran into the room, bowling over servants and clerks. “They’re gone! The anti-magic treasures are all gone!”

All hell broke loose from that announcement, and as the gathered Rectors discussed amongst themselves what to do, an initiate of the Inquisitors approached a quiet corner of the room. “Rector Black,” he said, and Rector Erlander Black stirred awake from his bout of subjective non-existence. It was so easy to lose oneself in the throes of chaos, forgetting that one even existed when one had spent so many years being ignored and trampled over, neglect their only parent.

Rector Black looked up at the young man, his age-mate. He was a handsome lad, with ice blue eyes and a terrified expression. “Rector Black!” He repeated. “What do we do?”

Rector Black tilted his head and hummed. “I… like you, don’t I?” He thought it over, and found it to be true. He was an agreeable lad, kind and gentle, and with a purer heart than most others who felt the calling of the Inquisition.

“Excuse me, sir?” He bowed his head.

“It would be a shame if you were to die,” he said. “Ah, very well: hold still.” He kicked the young man over, and he tripped backwards, into a waiting tear in space. It was an uncontrolled tear, one that was as likely to lead him to even more danger than less, but it was a smidge better than the near certain death that would await him should he stay in Altaluvia. The tear closed up behind itself, but the working of magic did not go unnoticed.

Every Rector had their senses honed towards the realm of magic, and studied it at length without ever having actually casted a spell. As such, they could feel the reverberations of magic, and could hone in on the one responsible.

Erlander Black, no longer a Rector no doubt, stood up and approached the gobsmacked men. Even the lesser members were too shocked to even say anything, just watching and waiting for more. “According to ninety-eight percent of all future sources, Altaluvia has fallen.” He shrugged. “Or rather, will fall.” It was tough keeping up with mortal time when one spent so much of their time embroiled in the ever-shifting past and present. “Aellia shall soon follow, and with it, hundreds of years of its history, until nothing but ashes remains, and the Gem-Eyed race will no longer have a home. We will become immigrants, nomads, wanderers and vagabonds. That is our certain future.”

The oldest Rector finally found his voice. “Traitor! You are a traitor!”

Erlander opened his coat, where over a dozen different royal treasures, bound in various different vessels, hung from strings, and he picked out one that he recognized as the former possession of a particularly dim Faerie. It was a brooch, the kind which a noble would attach to their vestments: a rose attached to a needle, and a cap attached to a chain meant to be fastened to the tip of the needle to prevent pricking. “I believe this is yours, Maaeniewich.” He held the brooch up, and from his hand, a dapper and well-dressed little pixie only a few inches tall grabbed the brooch, ‘unsheathed’ the cap from the needle tip and wielded it like a rapier.

He looked up at the pixie. He had insectile wings, and was dressed like a little lord about to make his debut in society, with a shock of well-groomed silver hair, and eyes like black, bottomless pits. “Hear me,” Black said. “I do not give that freely.”

“Name your price,” he said in a boyish little voice. “Granted it is not beyond the realm of reason, thy will be done.”

“I want you to paralyze everyone in this room.”

Everyone burst into action, to flee or to attack Black.

The pixie was a blur of motion, zig-zagging lines of trailing star-light. It used the brooch like a sword, slicing through spines and necks in the spots that would make sure to paralyze but not kill.

In only a second, and with the star-lit lines still in the air, everyone dropped to the ground as one.

And Maaeniwich disappeared from whence he came.

Black sighed. “I don’t do this to be cruel,” he stretched out his hands, and manipulated the raw energies of magic, preparing a ritual. Someone more skilled in the rawer, more practical aspects of magic could do this very easily, but Erlander had optimized his craft towards more erudite pursuits. Thus, the sacrifices helped greatly. “But I must be there for her when she loses everything, and I cannot do so without adequate protection.”

He whispered mnemonics under his breath, conjuring the right glyphs in his mind’s eye. Slowly, the souls of the men and women on the ground were beginning to peel off from their mortal shells, entering into the spell that Erlander had weaved.

“Oh, how I wish to be there to aid her,” he frowned, recalling the sight of that Archdemoness. She was very stern about letting things play out as they would for just one more day, until the battle of Altaluvia came to an end.

Only then could he approach her.

It was indeed such a travesty, to leave the sweet mother to suffer so, for who else deserved happiness but the genius of all ages, the very mother who would usher in a new era of reliable, good magic?

The spell activated, and Erlander was ensconced inside a cocoon so powerful that it could resist what was to come. Once more, he eased into a state of mind in which he did not exist, and merely waited, as he always did.

000

Rezdnaq Qandzer browsed through the tapestry of the mortal world like one would a television, watching patiently for an outcome in which something interesting occurred. It was, essentially, all the viable iterations of one particular event, that of Altaluvia’s final fate.

It was such a dreadfully boring affair, truth be told. A high stakes battle to decide the fate of one woman’s freedom, the demented ravings of a bereaved man, the pointless loss of life perpetrated by conquering invaders, a medley of other pointless, boring, impermanent things.

But it was something to do, following up on this event. It was, after all, something new, something that did not exist before. As such, it was only prudent that she familiarize herself with this new paradigm where Altaluvia fell and Farhaan died.

Ah, yes. Farhaan’s death. It prickled a part of her soul, which was strange because the boy wasn’t really dead. He was an Archdemon as well, and an unfilial son who had all but cut ties with her. An ungrateful little brat that she should have aborted when she had the chance.

“Rezdnaq Qandzer!” The summoning was burning with emotions, but the force of it was never enough to forcefully tug her towards the direction of the summoner. That had always been her reality. This time, that little thread had turned into a respectable string, not enough to move her, but enough to irritate her, like an itch that she could not scratch unless she followed the thread.

Reza was learning then. She appeared before her.

Altaluvia was lost, as expected. It was a smoking ruin of its former self, hardly a building left standing. Charred corpses everywhere, and death in the air so thick that it caused a storm of souls powerful enough that mages all across the continent could feel it as prickles in their skin.

Next to Reza was her maid, with a hole in her head where that familiar soul she had concocted sat, inside a vessel of diamond. Reza cradled Farhaan in her arms, crying over him. His soul was about to slip out, and it was only Reza’s magic that kept him alive.

“What do I do?” She sobbed. “You must tell me.” She made to grab Rezdnaq’s dress of flowing blood, but her hands came back only wet with it.

“Were it up to me, you would ditch the dead weight, so to speak,” Rezdnaq smiled. “But I suppose I owe you an explanation for all the trouble I’ve caused you, putting you down this path. The answer is simple: become a God, for only then could you permanently affix your boy’s soul to his body.”

With that, Rezdnaq disappeared, going back again to her palace in the Daemonrealm, that incessant tugging sensation finally gone now that she had satisfied the summoner by making an appearance. She returned to her idle musings, continuing to read the threads of fate and all that would occur, waiting for the next installment of something new.

She hungered yet for the boons that Reza's advancements would bring her, for only then could she with confidence call herself unrivaled in all of existence.