Mark had no way of seeing what Angela did to initiate the ritual—assuming she even did something visible to the naked eye. What he did see, which nobody with eyeballs could miss, was the staggering impact of the runes coming to life. One moment the room was filled with the soft glow of the rune etchings, then Naomi’s rune circle burst into a blinding flare of light that lanced into Angela’s Anord rune before flooding into the rest of the lattice, the interior of the runes bursting into a kaleidoscope of hues so comprehensive that it completed the spectrum and left the room feeling as though it was bathed in a perfect white light.

Wow.

That was all Mark could think.

Just…wow.

Mark glanced at his sister to check for signs of strain, but there were none. Her eyes were open and she appeared calm, her cross-legged position and relaxed face looking more like someone in a state of peaceful meditation than someone acting as a bulwark against a fundamental force of creation.

On the other hand, Naomi looked like she was doing differential calculus while balanced on the mast of a galleon in the middle of a hurricane. Her eyes were intense, and her hands moved in a complicated weaving as she manipulated her unseen magic, yet her movements also had a balletic feel to them, as though the artistry of her lattice’s construction was just as important as the final product.

Mark had just started wondering when the ritual’s effects would kick in when Naomi abruptly brought her hands together and thrust them toward his dad like she was pushing some unseen mass in his direction. There was a slight flare in the runes surrounding his father’s Tome, accompanied by a loud grunt from the man himself, like he’d gotten the wind knocked out of him. None of that seemed to concern Naomi, who didn’t break stride, simply shifting position slightly as she moved on to the next person in line.

That process repeated itself for probably half an hour. Naomi would work, then push something at one of the family members, followed by a grunt or exclamation from the recipient. For Mark, it felt like a punch in the kidneys that somehow left his ears ringing, followed by a complete lack of feeling across his body for half a second before it morphed into a sense of connection to his fellow family members. It was weird.

When all four family members had been included in the ritual, Naomi’s movements slowed, and she took the opportunity to address the family.

“You are part of the ritual now,” she said, her eyes still scouring her invisible lattice for imperfections. “I am about to move on to the final steps; soon, we will know if our efforts have been successful. Please begin recalling your memories now.”

Then something seemed to occur to her. “Oh, and one more thing: Disregard any changes to my appearance while I cast the spell.”

Wait, what? Mark thought. He was just about to ask for clarification when his focus was yanked in a different direction.

A buzz had filled the air.

It wasn’t a sound. It was a feeling. One that made the hair on Mark’s arms stand on end. And it was coming from Naomi.

Until that point, the woman’s movements had been measured and precise. Now, her hands were almost manic. A push here. A pull there. Her eyes darting around in intense focus with her hands only a step behind, as though she were in the middle of some unseen 3-dimensional object that rotated around her, forcing her to the extreme edges of human concentration and beyond, until finally, with a crescendo of raised arms, she seemed to grab onto something and slam it downwards into the runic circle at her feet.

Everyone except for Mark lurched as the runes blasted out a whirlwind of undulating rainbow light that seemed to bend the world for the barest instant before the Chaos Rune that held Angela’s entire focus brought the ritual back under control.

Then Power descended.

Whenever Mark had read fiction or watched movies, they always portrayed “magic in the air” as a tingle, like standing near high voltage lines, or perhaps as a wave that washed over the room. This was something else. This was pure, unadulterated terror.

It was rounding a corner on a remote trail and coming face-to-face with a mountain lion.

It was snorkelling over dark water and seeing a tiger shark swim up from the depths.

It was leaning on a balcony railing and feeling it collapse beneath your arms.

It was a terror that grabbed your very core, and if Mark had never set foot in the Kaos Dimma, it would have been the most terrifying thing he had ever experienced. This was what it felt like to behold the true power of a mage, channelled in the most concentrated way, at the most powerful spot on the planet. Mark couldn’t imagine what it took to corral that kind of power, but from the expression of intense concentration on Naomi’s face, it wasn’t an easy task. Her hands contorted and twisted as she manipulated her soul lattice on the fly, displaying what had to be a staggering level of precision to keep the forces from spiralling out of her control.

As the spell advanced, everyone’s Tomes took on an otherworldly appearance that made them look more like stained glass than the physical objects they represented. But the Tomes weren’t the only thing in the room that took on an otherworldly appearance. Except in Naomi’s case, it was something else entirely.

When Mark first noticed a spectral form begin to precede Naomi’s movements, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. It started as a flicker of ghostly fingers or the occasional sense of double-vision as the mage turned her head, but then the separation of that spectral form grew more pronounced, until it began to look less like the figure was preceding Naomi’s movements and more like her physical body was simply an echo of that intangible form’s actions. Sometimes the physical body couldn’t even keep up with the spectral one, racing from position to position, but limited in a way that the premonitory body was not. It was enthralling to behold, but when Mark looked at his family members to gauge their reactions, he was reminded that he wasn’t there to stare at Naomi. He was supposed to be recalling a memory of his great-grandfather, one that had special meaning for him alone.

Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—his choice wasn’t difficult.

Mark focused on his Tome as he cast his mind back to that day. He was thirteen at the time. For several months he’d been having what he called “episodes,” though he’d downplayed their frequency whenever his family asked about them.

Back then, nobody suspected seizures. Why would you? Most people thought seizures meant you either zoned out or shook uncontrollably, and he was no different. Instead, he got his hearing checked. It made sense at the time, given that he couldn’t understand a thing anybody said when the episodes happened. Then there was an MRI, an EEG, bloodwork…all of which came up negative. Through it all, Grandpa Jack didn’t say much, other than to be supportive. Mark did catch the occasional pensive look cast his way, though.

One day, everything came to a head when they were out in the field during harvest. Grandpa Jack had decided it was time for Mark to learn how to drive—it was a farm, after all, and in Grandpa Jack’s mind, you learned how to drive once you could reach the pedals—and the two of them had gone to the far end of the orchard where his mom couldn’t see them. They were out there in the ancient pickup, and Mark had just mastered the clutch enough to shift into second gear maybe half the time.

Next thing he knew, he was in the back of an ambulance with a paramedic leaning over him. Mark would never forget the guy’s words. “Can you hear me, Mark? You’ve had a seizure.” He just kept repeating it over and over. Mark remembered looking around in confusion until he spotted Grandpa Jack sitting next to his mom. She was nodding to him, confirming the truth of the paramedic’s mantra. Mark later found out that the guy had been repeating those words for over five minutes.

Post-ictal confusion was a bitch.

It was, without question, the worst day of Mark’s life. But in his mind, that “worst day” started with waking up in the ambulance. The part before that—being out in the fields, in the driver’s seat of a truck for the first and only time of his life, sharing a secret with his great-grandpa—that was his favourite memory of the old man. It was the last time he’d ever felt normal, and he had his Grandpa Jack right there alongside him.

“I see something,” Naomi said, jerking Mark out of his reverie, but there was confusion in her voice. Her eyes were distant as she looked around, as though her gaze was directed someplace far away. “There are two presences tied to your Tomes. One strong, the other weak and…odd. They’re near each other.”

“Two?” Mark’s mom asked. “The strong one must be my grandpa, but who would the other one be?”

“I have no idea; they are both family in the eyes of your Tomes,” Naomi said. “I will focus on the strong one first.”

Then her forehead crinkled. “Odd? I don’t see any people. All I see is—”

Turkaletta sprinted through the trees, meaty legs pumping for all they were worth as the 200-kilogram beast on her tail shook the ground with every step. Turkaletta had grown significantly in her time on Arenia, but she was no match for this monster. Even flight was out of the question. Her pursuer would leap and grab her before she got halfway to the canopy.

“CHIRUCK CHIRUCK CHIRUCK CHIRUCK!” she shrieked as she dodged rocks, stumps, and tree limbs in her mad flight. Eventually her luck gave out and she tripped while trying to leap over a log she usually would have flown over.

Turkaletta rolled for a half-dozen yards before flailing her way back to her feet, only to discover that she was boxed in by a pair of boulders. She spun to face the hulking animal behind her as it prowled around the log, her heart pounding. She hadn’t gotten a good look before, but now she could see that the creature looked like a cross between a fox and a black bear, a combination that caused a host of predator-fear instincts to come welling up from deep within her being.

It was too much. Wrapped in an overwhelming terror, Turkaletta felt an immense pressure building in her stomach. It grew progressively worse and worse until finally, with a gigantic, wrenching spasm, she vomited out a blast of purple lightning that struck the creature between the eyes and caused its head to explode, painting Turkaletta in a shower of gore.

Turkaletta stared at the corpse as it thudded to the ground. It was hard to say who was more surprised, her or the creature. Probably the creature. Turkaletta was definitely the more confused of the two. That lightning had looked a lot like the lightning those little lizards tried to hit her with before she ate them, but so far as she could remember, she herself had never vomited purple lightning before. Although it was fair to say that her memory wasn’t the best, so who knew?

Turkaletta waddled up to the corpse and poked it with her foot. Yep, still dead. Nudging it with her beak, she looked up, then around her, as though someone would walk out of the forest and explain what had just happened.

“Chiruck?”

“What is this thing!” Naomi said, her eyes widening as she stared at something only she could see. “It…it isn’t human.”

“What is it?” Mark asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s birdlike, with feathers and a beak, but there’s an odd—”

“Oh Christ, it’s the turkey, isn’t it?” his dad said in an exasperated tone.

“This is a turkey?” Naomi said, naked shock in her voice. “Are there many of these where you come from?”

“So many,” Angela said. “Americans eat something like 45 million turkeys every Thanksgiving. Between all the holidays it’s closer to 85 million turkeys a year. It’s horrible.”

“It would be 85 million and one-quarter turkeys, but Angela won’t eat any, so…tragedy averted,” Mark added.

“85 million?” Naomi’s jaw dropped. “How are your cities not overrun in weeks?”

“By turkeys?” Mark asked, looking at his family in confusion. “Uh, I guess the eating really reduces the number?”

Naomi appeared visibly shaken—maybe she had a bird phobia—but she plowed forward regardless.

“I…let us put the turkey out of mind. The other person I sense must be your patriarch.”

“Didn’t you say the signal was weak?” his mom asked, concern in her voice. “Does that mean something bad?”

“Not bad, just…odd. As though his presence is masked.”

“Please, we have to try,” Mark’s mom said, pleading. “We’ve come too far to give up now!”

Naomi nodded. “Everyone, please fix him in your mind again. Though his imprint is weak, I will do my best.”

Jack hid behind a tree at the edge of the camp, waiting for Eliza to get into position. Once she was settled, this thing would get started, but she was out of range of their fancy Silent Communicator Trait by now. He had no way of knowing when she would begin their assault, but it wasn’t the first time he’d waited on a hair trigger before a battle, and he knew he didn’t have long to wait.

Sweat flowed off Naomi’s face, her hands a blur as she wove her way through the spell. Even though Mark couldn’t see her lattice, things clearly weren’t going well.

“I can’t get a hold of him,” she said, her voice laden with frustration. “Every time I try to grasp his impression, it slips away. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Can you get any sort of an idea? A rough area he’s in?” Mark’s mom asked.

Naomi shook her head. “I can’t get anything. I’ve seen all sorts of anti-tracking spells, Traits, Abilities, Skills…everything under the sun. This is so far beyond those that it beggars belief.

“Unless something changes soon, I won’t be able to find your grandfather.”

Nochd wandered through the camp, surveying the mixed group of fighters and casters as they went about their tasks, oblivious to the fact that Death was so near. Which was almost always the case, really. It was the rare individual who was both aware of their own mortality and at peace with it enough that they could cope with Nochd’s presence. That was part of what made Jack so utterly interesting.

The god’s gaze swung over to the copse behind which the man was hiding. Not that the god needed to turn his head. Simply wanting to see anything, anywhere, was sufficient for him to view it, but he enjoyed the physicality of a mortal form from time to time. Besides, even when playing with the movements of a mortal, he was still looking with the eyes of a god. That’s why he was able to see the winding tendril of magic that was even now searching for the man, thwarted repeatedly by the blessing Nochd had used to keep Jack hidden ever since he’d come to the god’s attention.

Curious, the god traced that magic back to its source to see who might be looking for his prospective cleric.

“Oh, now this is interesting,” he said to himself when he reached the source. So many possibilities. Did he grant access, even if it was just for a little while? It would have significant repercussions down the road, and as much as Nochd was omniscient, he couldn’t see the future.

Ultimately, it came down to a matter of trust. Could he trust this unproven family of Legends? Especially when the stakes were so high?

Decisions, decisions.

One of the mercenaries walked over to the cookfire, carrying a large pot he’d filled at a nearby stream. The arrow was through his throat before he even realized he was dead, the pot falling into the fire in a flash of steam.

Guess that’s the signal, Jack thought. Then he was up and running into the brewing mayhem of the enemy camp.

Naomi’s cry cut through the room as she dropped to one knee. Mark instinctively started to rise, but she held out a hand to ward him off.

“No!” she shouted. “You have to stay in the circles.”

“What’s going on?” his mom asked.

“Someone is fighting back against the spell.”

“Is it Grandpa Jack?” she asked, anxiety flooding her tone.

“No,” Naomi said, her voice straining. “I don’t know who this is. What this is. It’s so powerful!”

Mark glanced at his sister. Sweat ran down her forehead from the strain of maintaining the rune lattice, but her focus didn’t bend.

“Maybe we should stop?” he asked, looking back and forth between his sister and Naomi.

“No!” the mage said emphatically. “If something is resisting, it means there is something we need to know. I will do my best to push through.”

Jack sprinted through the campsite, ignoring the hodgepodge of fighters who stared in shock at their fallen comrade, oblivious to his entry from the other side of their camp.

They weren’t his target.

Over the course of the previous day, Eliza had confirmed that there were only two magic users in the camp. He’d thought it was pretty obvious, but apparently there were a bunch of spellcasting types that didn’t shy away from armour and weapons—a lesson he was happy to learn second-hand. One of those magic users was the guy who’d been casting the tracking spells. Eliza called him a “mage,” which seemed like a fancy way of saying “wizard.” Jack had voiced his concern about fighting a wizard—he had a fair estimation of his own abilities and knew he was no balrog—but she assured him that since the guy had such powerful non-combat spells, it probably meant his battle magic was weak.

No, Eliza was certain that their real problem was the woman.

Based on the group’s dynamic, Eliza suspected the woman was something called a “Crusading Devotee.” A fanatic with uncertain powers, but not a paladin or a cleric, or a half-dozen other classes that meant nothing to him. As far as Jack was concerned, all that mattered was that the woman was dangerous and needed to be neutralized ASAP. Shooting her first seemed the obvious solution, but Eliza was confident that both magic users would have defences to stop that kind of thing, so they’d planned accordingly. And so far, that plan had held up perfectly.

There was no way it would last.

Nochd frowned. The tendrils of tracking magic were growing quite persistent, and he had not yet decided what to do about them. Still, they were a distraction, so he brushed the tendrils aside to focus on the events in the campsite.

Naomi dropped to her knees and screamed. A shudder of light swept through the room as the backwash of mana caused her lattice to momentarily become visible in a tapestry of mind-bending complexity that shifted and moved at Naomi’s commands—commands she continued to issue despite being pressed nearly prone by the force acting against the ritual.

This time it was Mark’s mom who started to get to her feet, only to be brought to a jerking halt when Angela shouted a whip-cracking, “STOP!”

Everyone looked at his sister, who was now visibly struggling. “Mom, this room is so filled with power that I have no idea what would happen if the spell fails.” She tried to hide a spasm of pain behind her sleeve as she wiped sweat from her drenched forehead, but the effort failed miserably. “I can’t be sure, but I think the only thing saving us from being obliterated is Naomi keeping the ritual going. Christ, I’ve gained four Willpower points since the ritual started, and I don’t know how much longer I can hold on. Something is going seriously wrong.”

Mark’s eyes swung to Naomi, whose face was a rictus of pain. He wanted to ask if there was anything he could do…then stopped himself.

His eyes swung down to his staff.

Come on, Mark. That would be insane.

He looked back at Naomi, then at his sister…only to see her staring straight back at him. Her eyes, too, flicked down to his staff.

Mark frowned. If that length of mysterious wood was any farther away he wouldn’t have considered it. But it wasn’t farther away. Angela had very deliberately placed it just outside his runic circle. Why she’d made that decision, he couldn’t say, but that was the way with his sister. She looked and acted like an idiot most of the time, then you turned around and discovered she was two steps ahead of you. In this case, that meant Mark could place his hand against the inside edge of his circle and be mere centimetres from the resonance stored within. Two days ago, that distance might as well have been an ocean. But his discovery yesterday morning, followed by hours of practice today, had taught him something vital: The distance from which he could access his staff could be increased through practice.

It changed everything. Even though his copious practice throughout the day had only extended his limits a tiny amount, he now had proof that it could be done. He even had a Skill for it.

Staff Control – Skill Level 6 (Tier-0)

We don’t typically give out bonuses for Tier-0 levels. Nothing about this is typical.

Tier-0 Bonus: You can access the powers of your staff from a distance of 1 additional centimetre per Skill Level.

Mark’s immediate problem was that he had only ever tried pushing resonance into the staff from a distance, not pulling it out. The idea that he would now be able to reach outside the rune circle, access all of his stored resonance, and use it in a way that wouldn’t make their current situation even worse seemed to border on the impossible. But there was a difference between impossible and improbable. And if he hadn’t misconstrued his conversation with Cara, messing with probability might be his thing.

Once again, Mark’s eyes turned to Angela. She gave him a small nod. He nodded back.

She’d known. Somehow, she’d known.

All he needed to do was embrace the Chaos inside of him.

And if it fails, we’ll all be vaporized. No biggie.