King, King, and Queen

There were only three left. King Edobe, King Josofu, and the queen. They were together in one of Edobe’s rooms in Milynine, a room filled with rare animals hung on golden plaques. There were black leather chairs around a black marble table. The animals were mounted on each wall, so no matter where you positioned yourself in the room there was always a pair of eyes watching you.

“We will have to let the mages use our city as a trap.” King Edobe said. “Reports tell me that the witches have used many traps, and yet we have not laid any traps yet. We have thought ourselves strong enough to defeat them the old fashioned way with swords and shields, but soldiers have died because we let them bring swords into battles of magic. And our wizards have been largely useless.”

“Luzan will be different. There is a trap waiting for the witches there as well. I have offered a great deal of gold to any citizen that brings me a witches head.” The queen said. She had not heard the results from Luzan yet.

“Do you intend to make Namelle our last stand?” King Josofu asked. He wore blue silk, a crown of black wicker that had a box of white fabric engraved with gold on top.

“We have to. The witches have worked their way East to us. The trap that we lay here may stop them. If it doesn’t, then there will only be one city left to defend.” King Edobe said.

“And what is the trap that you are going to use in Milynine?” The queen asked.

“We will leave the three high mages here, and they will be as destructive as they need to be. We will have to keep it as simple as that, I’m afraid. There is no time for tea, no time for cakes, it is now we must flee, now we must flake.” King Edobe got up from the table and so did the other two. They exited the room escorted by Milynian guards. The royalty managed to walk fast with their balled fists at their sides, but not so fast that they appeared hurried, not so fast that their clothes crinkled.

Milynine

(The women left Luzan, and marched North to Milynine. It was hard cardio, but the women made it, and now they are setting up their tents)

Lyndross was sewed together properly, and had rested for three days. Although, on the third day she had become anxious and restless. She had been carried on a gurney by Felhur, Edmund Tygrowthe, and two other zombies. It smelled rotten, but she tolerated it. It balanced out because it was nice to have someone to talk to. She liked having someone to look around and describe what they saw. Edmund Tygrowthe had grown up royalty, so he was a socialite and well versed in the arts of conversation. June stopped by for a gentle kiss. She was careful not to put any weight on Lyndross.

The next morning, the two woke up next to each other with Lyndross being the little spoon. They said nothing important with morning breath and smudgy eyes. They left their tent after dressing in different robes. June wore ruby silk. Lyndross wore a purple garb that was long and trailing. Inella and Nehaynosh were at the fire cooking eggs, potatoes, and onions.

“Good morning, lovebirds.” Nehaynosh said cheekily. June blushed. Lyndross dipped her head forward and said, “thank you, good morning to you as well.” Lyndross kept her posture stiff, she could have balanced books on her head while she was walking, and she even kept her back straight when she sat down on a log by the fire. She was mindful of her stitches. The women ate a sturdy breakfast, and gathered the rest. The witches were ready to attack the largest city on the continent, Milynine. The place was empty of soldiers, but the women did not know that. The citizens didn’t know either.

Yoseline showed up through a humming green portal. “Inella, have you seen Addimar?” Yoseline asked .

“I have not. I was ready to chew his ear off, but he disappeared on me.” Inella said.

“Damn. Well, I will continue to search for him by myself then. And there is one more thing, something I forgot to tell you the last time that we met. Addimar has a spell that he uses to edit memory. He calls it “the dream spell.” Don’t let him cast that spell on you under any circumstance. He’s used it countless times to make people do his bidding. It’s not something you’d likE.” Yoseline said. Inella gulped and processed what the spell could entail. Yoseline left just as quickly as she had come. It left the women with nothing to do other than attack Milynine. They were walking cautiously at first. Then, once they were close to the walls of the city, they realized there were no guards posted. There was one child who was climbing around, but that was it, and he couldn’t be a guard. He wasn’t equipped like a guard.

The women marveled as they entered the city. Milynine was breathtaking. High spires of white stone, sculptures of coral, black obelisks of rare minerals. The architecture was completely symmetrical, pyramids crowning much of it. It was all a beautiful sight. The women had let their guards down. They saw people in the streets conducting business as normal. The women talked with each other casually, little side conversations separated from the mission at hand.

That is when the three mages made the streets rise up and wrap around to slam down on the women. The debris from under the ancient road spilled and swirled into clouds of dust and choking agony. Inella and Lyndross simultaneously exclaimed profanity while putting up blue force fields to protect everyone. The blue shields overlapped and combined into a darker blue. All around the women the material of the road warped and shifted. Crumbling into chunks with streams of smaller debris flowing between them, the dust was thick. The debris piled up high; it crushed the buildings on all sides of the street. Nehaynosh made a small hole to get oxygen in. The women could breath, but they were trapped.

“There is no need to panic. I am getting air circulation in here; we will not run out of air to breathe.” Nehaynosh motioned with her hands raised above her head to try and calm everyone down.

“I will try and get some scouting done, I can dig out easily enough.” Dremeira said as she transformed into a mole and dug away. It was several minutes before she returned. “There seem to be three mages. I recognize Dwende from the attack on the caves, but I cannot identify the other two.”

“I’m sure it is the high court wizards of Milynine and Namelle. Those three combined are the only men of this world who can compare to me in the veins of the arcane. Milynine’s Mage is Artur Dragonbreath. He has been studying magic his whole life, and he is in his seventies now. The mage from Namelle, Godoro Iwamisu is in his fifties, and has also been studying his entire life. So with those two alone they have a near 100 year research advantage on me. That doesn’t mean they will be able to stop me.” It had sounded like Inella was griping, but she finished proud.

The glow of the shield brought no fruit off the branch, and the blackness all around them was complete. There was no glimmer from where Dremeira had dug her hole. There was a clear difference between the shifting debris that was on the other side of the barrier and the ground that the women were standing on. That difference was not in color, though. Everywhere that was not touched by the light of the shield was black. The holes that Nehaynosh had made to circulate oxygen let no light in either.

Koa made light in her hand in the form of a yellow, rubber ball. It produced a large enough light that Kotsi, June, and Moira could see each other. They talked about what the odds were that they would live. They all thought they were going to get out fine for the most part. They talked about which animals had been their favorites in the different regions. Koa said that she liked the squirrels in Ko’fell, while Moira liked the lizards in Baz. June said that her favorite animal had been the alligators in Luzan. Moira said that the alligators had genuinely scared her. This group was like many other groups of women who were talking in small knots. Talking was the only thing they could do while trapped under the rubble.

“Lyndross. I am going to go outside to fight. Can I trust you to uphold the shield until I am done fighting?” Inella asked Lyndross.

“Yes, mother.” Lyndross said, and she took the full strain of maintaining the field. She could feel the dirt shifting in ceaseless swirls against all sides. It seemed heaviest at the very top. Inella turned herself into a black mist. An insidious, steady, forward-creeping mist. She was outside in seconds after going through an air hole. She reformed herself and immediately put up a shield. The shield reflected a lightning bolt from Godoro, and a fist shaped stone from Artur. This was the moment that she had worked so hard for. It was time to see if she could really reanimate herself. She knew she could do it to others, but could she do it to herself? Her steely will told her “yes.” She cast the spell on herself and felt an instant sap on her mana reserves. If any of the mages managed to kill her, she would come back to life. To revive herself took significantly more mana than reviving someone else. It made her curious, but she didn’t have time to be curious. Artur and Godoro were shooting more projectiles at her. She cast a speed spell to help her dodge around. She made pads and metal braces to help stabilize her as she jumped, rolled, and ran in unpredictable patterns.

She turned her fingers into a blade of liquid fire and poked a sizzling hole into Artur, but his likeness crumbled into glass fractures that fell like silver dust in the wind. It made Dwende peer from around a corner to say “remember my mirrors? I’m sure you’re frustrated to see me again.” Dwende cackled.

“I’m more than happy to see you. I’m elated, actually, Dwende.” Inella replied. She shot a forked bolt of lightning at Dwende, but it only shattered another mirror. There seemed to be a glassy, tinkling sound and shimmer all over the stones of the city. Where Luzan had been a swamp, Milynine was completely sleek and clean. The tame grasses of the plains couldn’t poke their heads up in the complete masonry of the city. Beautiful spires that stretch hundreds of feet upwards. Inella shot fire balls, lightning bolts, ice blasts, and rock shards, but all her spells hit mirrors. The dusty shards of broken mirrors coalesced and floated in graceful shapes. Inella pinpointed the origin of control and struck at a building. A blade shaped attack of wind over a hundred feet wide sliced a gray stone building into two pieces. The taunting glass cloud ceased as Inella attacked Dwende’s general location.

“You cocky fool, you’re going to get us all killed.” Artur said while swatting Dwende on top of the head. The three strongest wizards in the realm had been hiding together in the same building. Digital projections of them loomed over the city, and the magic of their spells appeared to come from their hands. It had all been a trick.

Meanwhile, back with the trapped witches, Lyndross was running out of mana to maintain the shield that protected every woman from being crushed by tons of loose debris grinding above their heads. Rasha, Kota, and Kotsi came towards Lyndross to assist her. They could see the struggle written upon her sweating brow. With the four women linked together, the shield was not as taxing to maintain.

“What do you suppose is taking Inella so long?” Rasha asked Lyndross.

“I don’t know, but I hope she hurries up with whatever her plan is.” Lyndross replied.

Inella self-immolated. She dragged herself up into the sky with seething rage, foaming mouth. Her body caught on bright orange fire from head to toe. She shot towards the three exposed wizards as if guided by a sling. Her arms were spread out into flaming wings. She crashed anticlimactically into three different barrier shields the wizards had erected. Blue, glimmering energy. The fire went out, and the wizards looked down at the woman pathetically, eyes red with malice and empty of pity.

Lightning

S

H

O

T

Through Inella’s body as she came back from the dead. She woke up, and stood up in her charred, still-smoking robes. She began to laugh hysterically because she knew the spell had worked. All of the mana that she had spent to cast the spell earlier seemed to have replenished somehow. It made Inella think, but she didn’t have time to sidetrack. The wizards were looking at her. They were speechless. Of course, idle hands became impatient, and they started casting spells at Inella, but they were still largely speechless. Artur sent a swarm of clay pigeons that turned into vice grips, into fly-by guillotines. Gripping talons that did not know the morality or boundary of mortal limits. They clenched on Inella, and her limbs were ripped apart. But in a second her limbs were stitched back on her body, as if nothing had happened. She blew a disintegrating wind out of her mouth that turned the pigeons into a brown skyline of dust.

Godoro made a dragon of fire in response to Artur’s failure. The dragon was long, with six legs and four wings. It had red scales, and flickering whiskers of white flame. Inella’s response was to create a dragon of her own. She made her dragon out of stone, and fifteen times as large as any building in the city. A dragon with only two wings, but great density. It had a slouching posture. It was impotent at breathing fire, but it postured like an alpha. Two burly arms bent at its scaly rock hips. A tail with two rows of long spikes. The stone dragon slammed its tail down in anticipation. The fire dragon lunged towards Inella, but the stone dragon slammed down on the fire dragon with its gigantic feet and extinguished it.

You could see Godoro’s eyes burst as the spell he spent his remaining mana on was doused in a single stomp. Godoro crumpled into a pile on the exposed floor of the building they hid in. It was only Dwende, Artur, and Inella standing now. Inella snapped her fingers, and the rock dragon crumbled into separate boulders that rolled furiously towards Dwende and Artur in a rockslide. Inella jumped backwards over the rocks and floated above their chaotic momentum.

Artur produced a quarterstaff from the same limbo realm of the dead that Inella manifests from. He twirled the staff so that both ends rejected the oncoming rocks. It cleared a path for himself. Dwende decided to dig underground and come up to the side of the attack. He readied more mirrors, but Inella split the existing stones up into aerodynamic projectiles that shattered the mirrors as soon as they appeared. Dwende frantically tried to get a ring of mirrors together so that he could trap Inella, but she attacked too fast. Dwende was overwhelmed and died under the tremendous weight of amalgamated stones.

It was just Artur and Inella standing now. Artur batted the last boulder away and pointed one end of the staff at Inella menacingly. Inella gave an ironic curtsy and pulled two curved swords out of the realm of the dead. The metal swords made a ‘shnnnnnng’ sound as they slid against one another. Inella flowed through four simple hand guards before she entered an attack pose.

Artur defended, and sent a snake out of his palm that was preloaded with a venomous bite. Inella puffed fire out of her nose that reimagined the snake as ash, ash that diluted in the wind- scattered and blown. The two battled for a great deal of time. It was such an extended scene of martial arts that June, Moira, and Adda had to add themselves to the link that maintained the shield. During the long choreography of lethal dancing, the two magic users repositioned themselves to see every inch of the city. Every angle. The pregnant stomach of debris the witches were trapped under, a moving bubble, was round and sore on the land. The towers of the city, the destruction of the building where the wizards had hid. The boulders, and all the shattered glass. The city was now draped in a white sand of glass, a messy carpet of shining design.

Inella used her swords to cut into Artur’s sides with parallel strikes that sprayed blood out over the bony arches of his hips. Artur managed to turn his torso into steel (steel that gripped the blades), but he gritted his teeth from the searing pain of the initial cuts. Inella kept her arms outstretched, both blades were still in her tight grip. She feigned a headbutt at Artur, but was clearly out of range.

“Hah, you’re trapped now, aren’t you?” Artur said complacently. With his torso of metal, he felt indestructible.

“Just trying to get you to think with your head is all.” Inella said.

“What do y-” Artur started but did not finish. A clone of Inella appeared with a sword in its hand. The clone stepped onto Inella’s back like a stair and jumped towards Artur, who was equally stuck in place. The clone decapitated Artur with inhuman strength. The clone was gone in a puff of black smoke. The swords were returned to the realm of the dead. Inella turned and evacuated the women from the bubble of debris.

“What took you so long?” Lyndross asked impatiently.

“It was three on one, what are you complaining about?” Inella countered. In the time that Inella was distracted, Godoro regained consciousness in his hiding place. He hastily made a spell to help him generate mana, and then he teleported himself far away.

“That shield was hard to maintain.” Lyndross stuck out her tongue and stormed off angrily. It was probably shortsighted of Lyndross to be ungrateful, but jealousy is not easily collared, and jealousy is one of the many emotions that runs hot in her blood. Jealousy does not squat sitting dog. Nehaynosh approached with a full sheen of sweat on her forehead.

“Thank you.” Nehaynosh said. “And thank you from Lyndross as well, by her posture I’m sure she did not say it.”

“Thank you too, the oxygen was more necessary than what I did. I can see you are tired. Is this an aging tired, or an overworked tired?” Inella replied.

“Both.” Nehaynosh kept it short. The women had a quick laugh and worked together to check in on any one injured in any way. As the collective women looked around at the massively destroyed city they were appalled at how many civilians had been affected. The poorer citizens had been left behind to die. No one had spread any news of Luzan’s fate. Hardly anyone had evacuated. Most had gone into bunkers underground. Those who were not living near a bunker had been caught by rampaging debris. An unknown populace had been swallowed and disappeared. The trembling, hiding citizens had ample time to shake and cry. Inella was not ready to identify the dead yet. She could bring them back, and she would. They had not deserved to die. It seemed so obvious to Inella that they did not deserve to die to benefit their leader, which was ironic given the context of Inella’s personal history. Inella took a moment to question her feelings; she thought of how she had used Blair as a sacrifice when she was still learning the reanimation spell. The very spell that would bring every person dead in Milynine back to life. Where was the balance? At what point did the end stop justifying the means?

Chicken soup in large cauldrons. Communal serving. Various witches worked together to restore the buildings out of the ground up material. Lyndross and June left the city together. The rest of the magically adept women worked to restore the crumbled rubble. Inella and Nehaynosh tag-teamed the duty of bringing people back to life. Nehaynosh went around to all of the buildings and asked for the memories of the people. By collecting the memories, she could isolate each individual, and match those individuals with the individuals from other people’s memories to expand the list. Once Nehaynosh had talked to everyone, she gave the full list to Inella with all the people who were still living subtracted off of the list. The result was an accurate list of visuals on people, with mostly matched names. Every individual was accounted for, but several were only visuals.

Somewhere in Inella’s training, she had learned how to use Addimar’s advice to think critically about the reanimation process. She realized that she did not need a body to restore a person, she just needed to know who the person was, and then she could recreate them. Inella used a spectral fishing pole to fish lingering souls out of the air. Since the people had died so recently, they were swimming together in a spectral fishbowl, and Inella could fish them out in clumps. Once near her, she reshaped identities into their previous individual states. The people who had died and were restored looked around curiously. They were confused at first, but elated right after. They looked at the skin on their hands. They looked at their feet as they walked. Everyone remembered how to walk; they remembered everything. As more and more people came back to life, the citizens who had yet to die gradually came out of their bunkers. There was celebratory cheering in the street. The people who had died were all back. People were dancing barefoot on the stone streets. There was loud singing, cheering, and whooping. Nehaynosh and Inella cooked more food for everyone. Pork shoulder and rice, leafy salads with any dressing you could dream of. People sat on the ground at first, until the witches made chairs and tables. The witches made hospitals with years worth of supplies. They made schools for all of the children with different books on shelves that held their color. The witches rigged machines to make food endlessly, clean, reusable, and completely accessible. The city was totally healed, overstuffed with programs and resources. As the people celebrated, the witches copied the decorations of the festival in Fa’tal. They created lights and colorful decorations. People were crying tears of joy.

Godoro had snuck back to a place where he could observe Milynine. He was fully restored. With magic, he had youth eternally. He witnessed the festival beginning, and all of the celebrating, and he fled to Namelle to report to the kings and queen.

Once everyone had dispersed, Inella took a quiet moment to herself. She was physically exhausted, but she could feel her mana was in a fine state. She decided to enter the world of the dead to visit the artifacts that she could manifest, as well as the people who held them.