We entered Dawn’s residence early that morning. No, I didn’t actually wake up early, I just pulled an all-nighter trying to transmute a bunch of pebbles I grabbed up from a construction site. Aug was totally opposite of my sleep-deprived self, what you would call a proper, functioning adult.

He tried over and over to enchant a regular old knife, his attempts obvious from the slight distortion of space around the blade but every attempt ended in something akin to a poof. A couple hours passed and I was just as unsuccessful as he was, nearing what seemed like my five-hundredth pebble. This is so damn frustrating! There was absolutely no change in the structure of the stone. At least Aug got the blade to do that weird thing with the space around it. I knew, out of the three pillars that transmutation was the most difficult, but I wouldn’t even be able to tell if I was approaching it the right way had the witch not grant me total understanding of it. But even with that understanding, the very power of my mana was not enough. I didn’t even know mana had a power level before I read the first codex, unfortunately, said codex didn’t explain how to increase my mana’s strength.

Spell conditioning doesn’t raise the power level like it does the amount, so what the hell. What raises mana potency? Think, think, think. Mana output, right? If I put more mana into a spell, it becomes stronger…

“But only to a point. Afterwards you get diminishing returns. Spells aren’t that flexible to allow an infinitely powerful spell just because you poured all the mana you could into it.”

What then?

“Heck, I dunno. Ask Emily.”

What makes you think she’s just going to tell me?

“Tell you what?” a voice asked, directly into my ear.

“Hydra’s ass! You tryin’ to give me a damn heart attack, woman?!” I leaned away from the witch. “Good god! No one called for you! How did you know to come, huh? You can read thoughts too?!” My heart was racing because of her. Surprises weren’t my thing.

“Does that bother you?”

“Yes! It’s friggin’ creepy!”

She cackled, walking over to August, “I don’t want to hear that from you Mr Voices-In-My-Head,” strangely looking at him before doing the same to me, then suddenly disappeared.

Utterly incomprehensible.

“Do you get that often?” August looked as confused as I.

“Uh,” I shrugged, “not really, but yes?”

“I’ll take that as a y–” he paused. The glow from enchanting came to an abrupt stop. He looked above me, his limp fingers trying to point but unable to exert the energy needed. A shadow washed over me a second after and behind me was one of Emily’s scaled friends. Thank goodness it was the fairer, much calmer dragon of the duo, Aurora. Her head snaked over to my side, scarily close. I could feel the warmth of her body; no, I could feel the chill. She was the dragon of ice.

“Climb,” she said, very composed and heavily contrasting her audacious fiery counterpart, Audax. He ordered August to jump on. Poor blacksmith.

We took off a few seconds later, not exactly knowing what this was about. Gale was the fastest medium of flight I’d ever experience, until Aurora and Audax carried us across the skies. Mid-flight, we disappeared through teleportation into a huge desert surrounded by mountains. We landed, abruptly so.

The witch stood there, wordless, her golden staff housing her strange amethystine orb with some sort of floating magic. She threw it at Audax and he caught it in his mouth. Next, she used earth magic to create some soil and transmuted it into a simple sword, handing it off to August. She also gave him a red pill and gave me a blue one.

“Donna,” the witch called out, “I advise you get out.”

The queen complied immediately, standing alongside the dragons. It didn’t take much to realise the witch was not to be trifled with at this point. I swallowed, a bead of sweat rolling down my cheek. A glance at August told me he was well aware of the situation, despite our ignorance of the reason behind it. Anything we even thought of saying felt like walking on glass – or rather, a tightrope. We could fall, on her wrong side at any time.

The pill I swallowed boosted my magics. Effectiveness, range, mana cost, regeneration and mana pool. I’m not sure what the red one August took was for, but judging by his near-convulsive muscle movements, an educated guess would say it was body enhancement.

“August, Eric,” she called our names, “fight me.”

W-what… I asked, myself, enchanted by the situation, but petrified as well. I couldn’t move a muscle, which was weird. My very etymology was learning magic at any costs; fear wasn’t a component and hesitation was a useless cog in that machine. But, no matter how much I thought I’d have loved the chance to fight the witch, what I really wanted to do, was scamper. Run away. Hide. It felt like my entire body was shutting down, this was no longer a fight or flight response. By the looks of August to my side, he had the same intentions.

Those serpentine eyes of hers felt like they saw everything, and I mean literally everything. Every twitch my eyes made, every signal my brain sent and received, every cell in my body quivered at her surveillance. I knew that she knew my own moves before I even made them, which backed me into a corner of diminishing stratagems. Every scenario I thought about was plucked out by her sheer power, her unending knowledge, her unscrupulously multitudinous number of spells. All of which I assumed she’d use against anything I might throw at her. Dammit! Was this all I amounted to? I asked myself, my knees buckling and eventually hitting the dirt in a show of weakness. August had long since slumped as well, his hands holding up his torso in a last effort, but then, I heard a strange thud and a growl.

Blood trickled down his forehead as he found his mettle and wobbled to me. Did he… Pain was a good trump to use against fear. The sand and dust mixed together on his forehead and he looked like a total fool, but at least he was a moving fool. His next move surprised me even more, yet it made sense. He buried his blade into my thigh, stabbing straight through. My screams began silent, then stuttered every now and then to mimic my trembling body, but eventually the agony overrode my unsightly fear and I yelped in pain properly.

Renew restored my leg and Aug’s forehead back to normal; we overcame our hurdle. So that wasn’t a spell… I concluded. Dispel should’ve rid me of whatever she casted over us–that’s if she casted at all, which she didn’t. There was no magic involved there, that was just good old human instinct in its most primal, telling me I was about to face off with a creature of unfathomable power.

I casted a fireball at her, which she didn’t even bother dodging. Her usual magic armour protected her with the greatest of ease. With a teleport, she appeared right before me and planted a fist into my stomach. Its blunt force wasn’t anything to bother with, but the penetrating strength made it feel like the punch went through my abdomen and rattled my lower spine. I could feel the pain incoming, so I casted Renew quickly. Aug swung down at her, his quint empowering him to employ a ghastly fast slash.

We were so shocked when the blade passed right through her defences and cut along her cheek that we froze in suspicion of why we were actually successful. But, had we really the leisure to even think so much during a fight with the witch? No, we didn’t, and a beautiful little ball of white light that rolled off the witch’s fingertips and floated toward August told us just that.

I remember being so proud of myself when I went to Inferno Desert and learned Divergence one and two, then learning three afterwards. That pride was shattered today, when the witch’s white orb merely touched August and he pitched so far that I couldn’t even see his body when it hit the mountain. It was damn powerful and made level three Divergence look like a gentle morning breeze.

“Arcane Sphere,” she said to me softly as her cheek healed back without any help from a spell, “and this, is the breath of a fire dragon,” she inhaled deeply and her cheeks blew up.

I put up an Earth Wall between us just before her fire exploded towards me, but that was as useful as stopping a torrential downpour by yelling at the clouds above to stop. The Earth Wall disintegrated in less than a second. If that hits me… An image of my charred cadaver flashed across my mind as Convergence pulled me back for a quick retreat. No, there wouldn’t even be a corpse if that breath of fire hit me, there would only be ashes. Aspect of Fire was my next line of defence, a buff that made any fire magic against me obsolete, yet, the raw strength of that breathe made me actually feel the scorching heat approaching me. One would think the more distance between us, the less intense her fire breath would be, but it didn’t lose its focus or spread out at all. It was like a cone of fire beelining to me. A part of it touched my outstretched arm, quickly burning away a lot of the skin in a split second.

Magnet slipped her dragon fire through the void, only giving me burns along my arm and a little on my torso after it ate through my shirt. I casted Renew yet again, then used Frost Trap, summoned Kor’zha through the ground so he could pull her legs into the ground and used Arctic Rage after drenching her in water. If she couldn’t move because she was frozen, then she might panic just long enough for me to drop the deadly double-helix Wrath of God spell onto her. And I did just that, several times, all confirmed hits, but all she did was curl up and faced her back to the skies. The magic armour she had wasn’t what protected her this time, I wasn’t sure at all what she did, but she was unfettered by my attacks. She released my traps on her and teleported out of the ground.

August was sprinting back. He was mostly fine because of his quint-enhanced body; a force like that would immediately kill any other person. Even with his resilience using quint, I had my doubts about surviving a spell like that Arcane Sphere, even if he mastered his quint usage. I casted a few spells, albeit not weak ones, simply to distract her from blasting him away again. August swung right for her neck this time, going for the jugular quite literally. The witch, with her smorgasbord of spells, with her stupidly strong physical strength and masterful dexterity, chose to negate the incoming blade by biting down on it with her teeth, as if she herself was a dragon. August released it immediately and tackled her to the floor, placing her in a headlock. With the least effort I’d ever seen, she simply tapped his arm with a finger and it completely detached from him. He began bleeding out profusely, not to mention yelling. Pain would be an understatement here.

She stood up and walked towards the blacksmith who’d fallen on his backside in newfound fear. I casted Aspect of Wind and flew between them, pushing her back with Divergence and pulling the detached arm to me with Convergence. Kor’zha softened the earth she landed on to act as quicksand and also placed a dome of stone over her. No matter how many times I casted Renew, it wouldn’t put the arm back together, only stop the bleeding and close the wound. He was panicking, and it was all justified. Telling him everything would be okay when fighting the witch was such a blatant lie that we both knew it would just be an insult to both our inclination to follow rationality.

As I brainstormed the possibilities, a white chain wrapped around my ankle from out the ground, and as it tugged, the rest of the chain rose above ground until there was no longer a belly. “Shi–” it dragged me violently towards where the witch landed. The stone dome disappeared and Kor’zha was trying his utmost best to escape in his full form, but a huge dark violet hand with claws slammed down on him, pulling him back toward the witch. I tried forcing him back to the spirit world, but somehow, our connection to each other was cut, and I don’t think it was the witch’s doing. Kor’zha was so scared that he annulled our contract. Although I didn’t know much about the hand, I did know that it was made entirely of shadow magic–the very magic of death. Was she trying to kill him?

“S-stop! STOP!” I yelled at the brim of my throat. She stopped dragging the two-tailed scorpion, then looked towards me, her dragon-like eyes only to be seen at the side. The shadow hand she controlled suddenly squeezed…

Before I could even process what my eyes fed to me, she teleported over to us, grabbing August by the throat before we could react, summoning a sphere just like the Arcane Sphere, but this one was of shadow magic. If that only touched him, it would be his end. Suddenly, she cancelled the spell, switching it out for a flaming spear, but he batted it away before she could stab him. Chains grabbed me and brought me closer to them. I could barely move a muscle. Her white chains also held August down, and no matter how he fought, how much quint he saturated his body with, it wouldn’t be enough to force himself out of it.

Again, she brought the flaming spear back to life and released the chains on me. I immediately casted Purist and brought Wrath of God down onto her uncountable times. The level three Divergence that happened after each Wrath of God made a crater around them, raising the dust. But when it cleared a little, I could still see her there, standing as if it was just another day. A gust of wind blew by, removing the dust in time for me to witness a fire spear impaling my friend through the chest. First Kor’zha, now August. My mind broke, and a seething uncontrollable rage filled me. “I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU!”

I casted Clone, removed Purist, and used every buff I knew. My mind succumbed to something I never thought it’d need to give in to – being ready to die.

She casted a shadowy spear and threw it, the speed of it unlike anything I’d ever seen, but my blinding rage saw not the danger. The beginnings of Incinerate was cut short when my clone got stabbed by her spear of shadow, his body instantly decaying. After, she transformed into something strange, mystical, repulsive. The very definition of death. Even seeing the towering demon, my body still moved to attack. Her entire body was enshrouded in shadow magic, or more accurately, made of shadow magic, the claws were inches long, the demonic wings spread out and its ghastly eyes a fiery and contrasting white to the near-black purple body.

At that point, my mind wasn’t mine, my body no longer my own, my emotions the monarch of this vessel with no proprietor. The monarch was being ripped apart by internal conflict, and only realised a coup d’état would be the coup de grâce all too late, when the throne was already being usurped. Rage and fear, in a cutthroat battle to decide whether I avenged August’s death or lived. But they were locked in a stalemate. All that confusion amidst the emotions in my mind left it torn and ruptured, unable to withstand the war, it collapsed.

I fainted.