At some point, our fight became less about dodging fireballs and biological projectiles, and became far more esoteric in nature. As Reizenbrahm shed more and more of his emotions, he delved deeper into magic, not just for the sake of power, but for understanding, too.

He sent a curse that would, in effect, ignite every cell in my body; an unholy marriage of fire magic and biomancy. In transit, I watched as the weave of the curse flew towards me like a wide net of ideas and vague thoughts. The comparison ran deeper than I would have expected, too. Just like an idea or a vague thought, I only needed to think at it for it to lose cohesion and collapse on itself.

Reizenbrahm learned, and packed his curse tightly in a webbing of permanence. It was a solid, steady mesh of unbreakability, and as it flew towards me, I could not unravel it with my thoughts.

But I could move it, still. I moved it back towards him. It struck Reizenbrahm head-on, but the mesh refused to give. The curse was still nestled within, inert and waiting to affect a living creature.

From Reizenbrahm’s own shock, it seemed that he had no way to unravel the mesh on his own, which was par for the course with a glyphic concept such as ‘permanence’.

He sent me another meshed curse, this time with a key that he could use to open it. I cracked the code far before the spell reached me, and it exploded into a ball of fire far before it struck me. He refined his method, each time making it just a little harder for me to pre-empt or foil him.

Truth be told, I relished in this back-and-forth. The more he learned, the more I had to learn by necessity. He delved into otherness for me, too, by unearthing more glyphs, and I used that to my advantage, correcting his work like a fussy school teacher. My own Chaotic Immersion was limited, while he bore the brunt, becoming stronger and weaker for it. Stronger, in the sophistication and the power of his spells, but weaker in his own inability to cling to the only reality that mattered to mortals; the material world.

Chaotic Immersion, and its consequences, was akin to being accustomed to a world that did not follow our laws. If that acclimatization spread beyond the bounds of only spellcasting, then it would corrupt our instincts and knowledge, causing us to behave and act in ways that couldn’t be reconciled with our ordinary notion of reality.

In the realm of Otherness, up might be an ever-shifting concept with no real permanence, but in the normal world, where one could use their body’s positioning as a reference point, up was always up. To confuse the two could be disastrous. Though it wasn’t as clear cut as that, his mortal instincts were already being eroded in different ways. Soon, nothing reasonable would remain.

“Haven’t you had enough, Reizenbrahm?” I asked him. “While you burn your own humanity for fleeting power, I best you in every aspect, with minimal sacrifice on my part.”

He sent a series of organic life-burning fire towards me, a nominally harmful attack as far as they usually went, and flew out of the way as they headed for the woodlot surrounding his manor. I sensed for Focus, and after ascertaining that my son was far away from the area of effect, I refocused on the battle at hand.

“My ascension is at hand, can’t you see, witch?” Reizenbrahm smiled. Minutes before, he would have cackled as he spoke, but now he did so with temperance and a cool calm. Soon enough, there would be nothing left at all. “There is a thing such that if you continue to believe it over and over again, it becomes the very thing that we, human beings, try to search for, the thing that we continuously jump over fences and climb over roofs. You are far too simple to grasp at such a profound truth, the truth that nothing is what we make of it unless we continue to do all of what is expected of us in the sense that we, as a society, are sure to make good on our promises.”

Nonsense spoken with such authority. Reizenbrahm truly believed that his psychotic breakdown had even a crumb of meaning, which was already frightening as it was.

What was even more frightening was that unless I controlled myself, I could fall into his ramblings and try and find meaning in them as well, force meaning as it were. His speech was a string of words concocted by a cracked mind, and to fall into the trap that it had meaning could push me down a whole pit of Chaotic Immersion as well.

“There is nothing for you, where you are,” I said. “Nothing that matters to the people that live in this world. You’ve been tricked by your own enterprise, made to believe that you are some great adventurer delving into restricted knowledge, when you have merely done the same thing that thousands of misguided witches before you have. It will end the same way, Reizenbrahm. I guarantee you that. In death.”

I checked the progress on my giant ritual circle, a construct of roots and wood stretching hundreds of meters in diameter, etching into the very earth a kind of magic that could annihilate Reizenbrahm in an instant. I only needed a few minutes. If I continued talking, it would slow him down, halt his development. He was still lucid enough to try and argue against me, which only worked against him. At the end of the day, his Intelligence attribute was not enough to match mine. He had to make an effort to multi-task. I didn’t.

Once more, we were playing that game of sjach that we played all those months ago, where he thought himself a great hunter chasing his prey, but was only being toyed with by a far greater, far more horrifying hunter.

This time, however, he didn’t doggedly pursue a victory. He scoffed, furrowing his eyebrows in frustration. “You are too powerful.”

“You understand, then.”

“Yes,” he said. Then, he flew up into the sky, and away.

Towards Farhaan.

I chased after him, cursing my moment of pride. Reizenbrahm hadn’t given up or lost his spirit. He had only chosen to switch to another tack, one of leverage rather than superior power. I poured my everything into my magic, managing to match his speed, but only after he gave himself a considerable headstart.

Time slowed down to nothing at all in my mind’s eye as I conjured and threw as much magic as I could at him, to slow him down. At some point, I didn’t even bother to throw coherent spells with actual effects at him. Just packets of pure magic masquerading as some deleterious effect was enough to make him dodge and change his course. I threw so many of those blanks at him that he eventually gave up his hunt entirely and poured his full attention on me.

“I can teach you,” I told him. “Help you control these powers, understand them.”

His answer came in the form of a green fireball, just like the others. Unlike the others, this one didn’t behave the same when I batted it away with a push of pure magic. Instead, it just stopped being green, and became a true fireball, one made of physical heat, one that required a physical response, and not a flimsy one either. This fireball was hot enough to melt through steel in seconds.

I evoked the spell for Purge Life, a spell that at its core killed living organisms instantly by robbing them of energy, both potential and thermal. I modified the parameters, bending the spell to my purposes before letting it fly.

The fireball unraveled well away from me, turning into an explosion that, while deadly all on its own, was nowhere close to its full potential.

That took far too much effort and an unacceptable amount of chaotic immersion. He was so much weaker than me, a rank novice, and I was still forced to scramble madly just to survive an attack of his.

What else could I expect from someone who so foolishly decided to spend all of their potential on destructive spells of fire and heat? Of course he would be more than my match in a straight fight.

It was just as well that this fight was not going to be anywhere close to straight.

The Circle Magic ritual was finally completed. The roots had stretched all over the Reizenbrahm estate in a pattern that would mimic the invocation of a spell powerful enough to spell the man’s doom.

Foreign magic intruded on the roots, tinted in a fiery orange. “You think I am a fool?” Reizenbrahm boomed. “I read your intentions in the flow of magic, saw it far before you even conceived of the idea! You think you could take me by surprise!”

I repelled his influence with ease, shattering his hold over my magic with an intensity that took him completely by surprise. He might have been more in tune with chaos than I was, but that didn’t make me any less powerful than him. He was like an infant, clumsy and stupid.

“No matter!” He shouted. “I have seen the power that you have gathered,” he laughed. “It is not enough, little girl!” He conjured shields to protect him, spheres of green fire and magic energies that enclosed him from his surroundings from every angle. He was right. This wouldn’t be enough to kill him.

It wasn’t meant to.

The Circle Magic invoked the first attack spell I ever learned, Purge Life, limited in so many ways. Perhaps if I turned the Circle to a spell with a more indirect effect, I could still kill Reizenbrahm well enough, but it wouldn’t be fast enough. If I injected him full of deadly, ravenous parasites, he could still have enough time to heal himself with his newfound grasp of magic. I didn’t want to take any chances, and as such, I had to spend more time to prepare the spell.

But time wasn’t the only resource I had on hand. I had researched this for weeks, now; the soul was a wellspring of untapped power and potential. It was only my inability to manipulate it with any finesse that limited me, but what finesse did a spell to kill require? With such a straightforward application, I could turn the energy of the soul to supercharge my spell and make it powerful enough to shatter through his innate defenses and kill him instantly.

First, the sacrifices.

With a mental effort, I turned the spell’s direction behind the lines of the invading Goldmen. Below me, the earth lit up in forest green and blood red circles that affected the natural flow of magic. To anyone that was attuned to the force, they would feel it gather in an unstoppable hurricane.

I ignored the system messages in favor of concentrating on the magic as it gathered into a potent orb of deathly pale white. It brought to mind the memory of the Bokora slaughter back in the Harrow Woods, when I had let loose an indiscriminate blast of Purge Life. I had been disgusted with myself, horrified of what I had done with the power I seized in order to survive, in order to make sure that Farhaan would survive.

Now, I was only numb. What difference did one, ten, or a thousand lives make when weighed against the future happiness of the only family I cared about?

The Goldmen, at the very least, deserved this. They were conquerors, invaders, slavers. The Aellians had their fair share of sins as well, but I could take pity on their plight at the very least.

I released the orb. It flew at the speed of a bullet, hitting the mass of Goldmen, expanding into a white dome almost a hundred meters wide. The light faded away, and within the dome, not a single living creature remained standing.

The system had a lot to say about that, but none of that mattered to me as of this moment. Attributes increased, levels increased, but this wasn’t a battle where any of that mattered. I already outclassed Reizenbrahm in every metric that mattered. Unfortunately, the system couldn’t give me more mastery. Only I could.

I poured the accrued points into Intelligence and Wisdom, feeling my own mind mend slightly from the Chaotic Immersion, and race much faster than it usually did. It would give me more time, but victory was another matter entirely.

The white orb returned to my side, having seized the souls of the dead. I could, in fact, hear their screams through the magic in the air, their lamentations as my unholy working forced them to continue fighting despite their deaths. It was gruesome, but it was either this or death. I knew what I would rather choose.

The orb flew down to the network of roots that made up the Circle Magic. All the while, I fended off Reizenbrahm’s continued attacks, my mind racing at the prospect that in a few short seconds, this would all be over.

Reizenbrahm’s furious grimace turned into a delighted, almost lecherous grin. “And with that, we shall let the curtains close on my mortal life.”

He overrode the Circle, pouring his influence in ways too sophisticated for me to stamp out immediately. With his newfound influence, he twisted the roots, shifting them about until the spell became something else entirely. How he knew how to do this was likely due to his own attunement with chaos. Unlike my own trial and error method of learning Circle Magic, the answers just came naturally to him.

“Stop it!” I commanded, but my words fell on deaf ears. I wrested away his controls with all my might, pouring every iota of my mind into the task until he finally gave in and lost his foothold.

Not before he set off a cascade reaction that would inevitably lead to activation. An activation of what, exactly? Not the Purge Life that was supposed to strike at him and him alone. No.

This was an indiscriminate attack. City wide range.

“Farhaan—”

My screams were cut off as an explosion of heat and death billowed out from beneath us. I erected defenses to take the brunt of the lethal magic, but it was too strong for any one magic shield. I put them up as they shattered, each time letting the spell’s effect come closer and closer.

Just as it was about to reach me, the effect abated, and the world came into clarity.

Death had come to Altaluvia.

I landed soundlessly, looking around. Fire, annihilation. Reizenbrahm’s flames had combined with her Purge Life spell, creating an effect that destroyed anything in its path. I doubted there were many whole corpses even left for the buzzards to eat, or even any buzzards still alive to do so.

Reizenbrahm was dead, a pile of ashes mixed in with the rest, another death in an ocean of it.

I let out a groan that no one would hear. And then a scream that went equally unheard. I shouted into the void, barely even hearing the noise as I did.

And then I remembered my son.

000

Shana died.

And suddenly, she was alive.

There was a hole in her head where a ball of… glass had been lodged in, judging by the texture. She was alive in spite of that.

Save Farhaan.

The all-encompassing demand caused her to scramble towards the last known location of the young child. There he was, lying in front of an incinerated tree, dead as well.

Save Farhaan. Calculating appropriate spell. Casting.

Her mind forced itself to think along a certain track that she did not understand, and it was an agonizingly slow process until she regained control over her own thinking. Farhaan breathed in slowly.

Healing insufficient. Calculating appropriate spell. Casting.

She picked up the young child and let her mind get taken away, not bothering to resist. Whatever this insanity was, it had saved the mistresses child. If it could continue to do so, then that would only be a benefit.

Healing insufficient. Diagnosing issue.

Suddenly, her mind was struck by the knowledge that little Farhaan was still dying. His soul was about to leave its mortal nest. Wide-eyed, she whispered “Oh no!”

Calculating appropriate spell. Casting.

Once she had regained her mind, Farhaan was no closer to being healed. If she could give more of herself to this otherworldly voice for it to use, she would.

Time and time again, she got no closer to healing the little boy.

And then the mistress arrived on wings of red flesh, looking like a demon from hell. “You’re alive?” She ran towards them, and Shana froze, unsure of whether to surrender the child to what was obviously a monster or not. A deeply buried instinct bade her to trust this lady, however, for it truly was the mistress Reza.

She snatched the child from Shana’s arms. “Oh no,” she said. “Oh no, no, no, no, what is this?”

“I’m sorry!” Shana said. “I did everything I could—”

“No, this,” Reza shook her head as she whirled her fingers over the boy’s head, as though casting a spell on the young boy. “This cannot stand. I need to fix this!” She perked up with a smile. “I know! I’ll ask her!”

She hummed to herself, and as she did, reality became wrong. Wrong in ways that she could not put her finger on, but wrong nonetheless. “Rezdnaq Qandzer!” She roared, and following her proclamation, she doubled over, vomiting blood.

Blood began to rise up from the soil, and from the blood, a woman floated up, dressed in a long dress of blood that continued to flow without end. A stone slab floated over her head, rectangular, but slowly bending to the shape of a semi-circle that slowly enclosed her skull. The stone crown slowly expanded outwards, taking on a more intricate, yet symmetrical shape. Shana looked away from the lady’s face, unwilling to tarnish the otherworldly being by assuming herself worthy to look upon her.

Reza sobbed. “What do I do? You must tell me!” She tried to grab the lady’s flowing dress, but her fingers could find no purchase on the fluid.

“Were it up to me, you would ditch the dead weight, so to speak,” the lady 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.”

When she made to leave, Reza raised her hand and conjured a green… lance or somesuch thing. It was hard for Shana to make out, but it seemed to be able to cut everything. Everything. Even the abstract. Meaning and form seemed to lose its rigidity around the weapon, and in that same vein, the lady stopped. “That was… not supposed to happen.”

“I’m not the puppet that dances to your tune, Rezdnaq,” she said. “But hear me; if I ever become a God, I will stop at nothing to smear you into the finest paste if you let Farhaan die. Forget our accord; I will destroy you.”

The lady groaned. “Fine. Here.” Glyphs of meaning flew into Reza’s head. “I was serious, by the way. Only the divine can save him now. This should be enough to last you for a while, but I wouldn’t count on it as a long-term strategy. I also wish to make one thing clear, little girl. You don’t command me, and I don’t fear you, so try not to make a repeat of this stunt again, and you might live a long and healthy life yet.”

“Th-thank you,” Reza said, gulping. “You may leave, now.”

The lady scoffed, and sunk back into the blood from whence she came. The blood followed, and so did the smell of blood, leaving no earthly trace of her presence behind.

000

Aisha closed the gate mere moments before the spell could be let through, dooming thousands of her own countrymen to die in Altaluvia.

“Explain,” the general said to her from the other side of the table that they had used as a scrying tool to look over the battlefield. “What happened!”

“They’re dead,” Aisha said. “All of them are dead. Both sides.” And thank the Golden Amura that the good general had elected to hold so many of them back from the vanguard, relying instead on the quality of his troops to win the war rather than their quantity. If not, their losses would have been far greater.

“Your pet witch, I take it,” the general said, remarkably calm despite hearing that a fourth of his troops had just been killed.

“The witch she was fighting,” Aisha corrected. “Not her. Or maybe her as well. I don’t know. Battles between witches never benefit anyone.” She had seen it with her own eyes the destruction and carnage that two mad practitioners could wreak, especially when turning their ire towards each other. Such battles were, at best, futile, and at worst, suicidal. If there was a clear victor in this battle, then that would be a surprise all on its own.

When blood was high, one tended not to think clearly or rationally, two of the most important aspects of mental discipline necessary to use magic with any level of success. Direct fighting undermined all of that, to disastrous consequences.

“Hundreds of thousands dead,” the general sighed. “We can’t even claim any of them as slaves. At the very least, their riches should be unguarded, if those haven’t already been destroyed by the magic.” Aisha rolled her eyes at the man’s callousness. Had it been up to her, she never would have assisted in this twisted endeavor, but unfortunately the highest authority of the Golden Cities had fallen to ‘depravity’ as it were, and now witches like her were forced to sate the High Sultan’s endless appetite for wealth and riches beyond mortal imagination, eclipsing even that of his Sky Ministers.

There was, however, no sating an avarice so unbound by reason. Not in this finite world of scarcity.

Aisha made to walk out of the tent. “I will contact our superiors.” She would, in fact, finally make good on that escape she had prepared for so long now. This was the straw that had broken the camel’s back; she could no longer fight in a war that could see the annihilation of hundreds and thousands in an instant. It was just plain unhealthy. Any of those people could easily have been her.

“Re-establish the gate afterwards,” he said. “At the very least, we should take back some treasure to show for this campaign. Make sure the other side is safe to enter, first.”

A figure appeared before her from thin air, blocking her path out of the tent. A familiar figure.

His skin was dark brown, contrasting sharply against his bright, almost glowing, golden eyes. Two golden earrings dangled from his ears, shaped like sabers, their pommels blue sapphires. A golden circlet was fastened along his hairline, reaching only the length of his forehead, and at its center was a golden star with a sapphire embedded into its center. On his right arm, he wore a golden arm bracelet with figures of golden birds and ivory-winged butterflies of solid sapphire. Thin rods stretched out from the bangle on his forearm, converging on a sun-shaped golden emblem resting at the back of his right hand. On his left arm, a golden snake coiled around his arm up to his wrist. His pristine white robes did not cover his chest, and was instead open to reveal his chiseled musculature, looking solid as though it were hewn from sandstone.

None of that compared to the baby sun floating behind his head, casting a dim orange light on the inside of the tent. Or the man’s half-lidded eyes of silent contempt.

The general behind her immediately dropped to his hands and knees, pressing his forehead on the sand, saying nothing, as was customary when in the presence of the High Sultan.

Slowly, unsurely, she moved to do the same, but his powerful hand stopped her. “Stand,” he said, and that singular word sounded like an ineffable truth of reality to her, simply the thing that the universe expected of her. So she stood. He walked past her, and she quickly moved to give way. He sat down on a throne that was not there before, and from him, the world changed to a new vista, of an endless horizon of clouds from which desert peaked out from the gaps. She whirled on her feet, and found that they were all standing on an enormous platform of gold. The tented ceiling was replaced with the endless blue sky, the sun directly above them, bearing down on them like an angry judge. “I detected reverberations of magic in Altaluvia. Powerful magic,” he said. The sun behind his head hurt to look at directly, even though the light it cast was nothing compared to the sun in the sky. “Bring the culprit to me.”

She wanted to ask how, but she couldn’t. It was as if reality itself constantly asserted that she did not have the standing to converse with him, and that doing so anyway would be the same as turning coat and betraying her country and the High Sultan. Faerie magic, no doubt about it. Was the general experiencing something similar? No, it probably never even occurred to him to do anything else but listen.

“The djinn have foretold my victory,” the High Sultan continued. “My world domination, with the Mother of Magic at my side. Reza Talib of no country, whose talents in the arcane will shake the world.”

Relying on the prophecy of demons? Aisha wanted to correct him, explain to him that no future was certain, especially not those foretold by those monsters. That would only earn her a quick execution, even if she could bring herself to open her mouth.

The Sultan reached his hand towards her, and a disc-shaped object appeared there. It flipped open on a hinge to reveal a compass spinning wildly. “Go to Altaluvia, attune this compass to her magic, and it will point towards her. Take it.”

Aisha’s body moved on its own as she obeyed, walking towards his throne and taking the compass and placing it inside her pocket.

“I will deign to hear your name, little soldier.”

Her mouth opened on its own, finally freeing her long-trapped voice. “Aisha, daughter of Djamila.” She did not want to be remembered by her father’s name, so she would use her mother’s if she had to, not that she was that much better. She just wasn’t him.

The man remained inscrutable as he looked at her. “I expect results. You can expect a reward. If you don’t disappoint me. Go now.” The illusion disappeared, and the Sultan was now standing, and they were all in the tent.

She turned tail and fled out of the tent, cursing her horrible fortune. Now the High Sultan was counting on her, giving her no avenue to flee undetected. No matter where she went, his agents would find her. Her only hope was to find and bring in Reza, and ask that her reward be her freedom.

A hopeless dream.

000

The Ghost broke out of his cocoon not by magic, but by merely pushing his hand through the fragile mesh, shattering it like thin ice. It was a wonder that he had survived at all, so much so that it almost felt like his continued living was some sort of magic-induced delusion, and that he was a ghost in truth, doomed to haunt this graveyard of a city once so prosperous, but now reduced to an ashen, smoking wreck.

The inquisition headquarters was merely a square of brick walls, most of it not even reaching the height of his waist. He walked through a gap in the walls that used to be a door, and took in the desolation, the all-encompassing nihility that suffused the air.

He clenched his jaws, anger leaking through at the unfairness of it all. This death was necessary for the grand plan, but the fact that it even was was the true injustice.

His path stretched in his mind’s eye towards his next destination, where he would act out his role. The Red Archdemoness had confirmed that his plans had a chance of success, and Reza herself shared in his dream.

He put one foot in front of the other, each time begging for the strength to endure what would undoubtedly be a long and difficult journey.

End of Book 1