Minutes before the twelfth bell, an invisible phantom that stood atop Vultheras’ clockwork tower. From that brass-shingled roof, rattled by light rain, it watched the surrounding coast and waters; paid close attention to their formation, and most importantly, the arrangement of their large guns.
There are more than I was counting on, Jessica thought. Motes of blue light flickered dimly around her phantom, agitated by her anticipation. I expected they would send the First or the Sixth, the Empress’ honor fleet or the navy’s skullduggers. That they sent the Second with its many capital ships means they’re keen to make a demonstration of us.
“Woe, mighty Bastilhas,” she mimed the tone of an Atilonian crier. “For all its mana, it could not withstand our steel. Two millennia after the Age of Myths, our heroic empress fulfills Achlesial’s promise: That mortal men shall never fear the weird and magical again.”
Assholes.
The first sorceress ‘walked’ through the air, stepped down the roof to its fluted edge. She looked down from the tower to the bronze-painted bricks of the palace below.
Eric has already left the palace, she thought. The generals were stubborn, but they agreed to his plan. They had to, because it was the best choice they had. With the Swordsmaster on the bridge and the rest of our soldiers, our militia, and our proud nobles on the walls, we stand a chance of fighting the Atilonians to a draw.
It’s unfortunate that our best outcome—a draw—depends so heavily on so many things. Our battlements holding, our artillery disabling their long guns, the brave duke surviving, and the defense divisions mounting a successful counterattack. There’s also that wild card with Edwindy, as they ignored our calls for aid before we were encircled. If they arrived, we’d have more than a draw, we would be victorious.
It’s a shame then that I don’t trust Edwindy, who have always been jealous for Mathematzen’s attention. I don’t trust the duke, because he has not fought for many years, and he overestimates his ability. I don’t trust the defense divisions, who could just as easily have fled to Edwindy or disbanded than remained nearby. Our battlements, our guns, our people, are no more skilled—no braver, even—then the numerous Atilonians high on their many victories. I only trust the truth I see with my eyes.
What I see, surrounded by so many guns, is that everyone in Vultheras will die.
King Darigon was prudent to heed my advice. By ensconcing the public with Mathematzen and sealing the lower tunnels, we’ve denied the Atilonians their massacre and bounty; we’ve made victory pointless. My shield bought him that time… I’ve certainly saved many lives. And, yet…. The duke, my ‘father’, Eric and the king, my father, Darigon will, certainly, die.
Did Eric understand my message? Jessica wondered. As for the king, I’m ashamed to admit I lost my nerve. The moment he said Mary, I couldn’t… approach him. Iona was my mother; the creature that those men obsess over is a stranger to me. No, worse, she is a failure. When Eric and Darigon speak of her, it’s easy to believe she was the greatest sorceress that ever lived. But she failed to claim the Eyes for herself. If she was truly so great, would she not be here now? No, I am the greatest. She could never have powered this shield. If I can’t hold it, no one can.
The thought of her still frustrates me.
Jessica turned, walked along the edge of the clock tower roof. She looked out from its corner across the water, to the grand battleships anchored in the sea. Behind them were the navy’s many transports, idling with their turbines primed; each ship packed with one hundred Atilonian marines.
If it were her, Jessica thought, would she have anticipated failure? Would she have bet against herself? Vultheras will fall; my family will die; unless—
I turned this fate on its head.
Plumes of fire erupted from the Atilonian battle line and Jessica’s heart jumped in her throat. She braced her phantom avatar and, in its own primal recognition, her physical body stiffened in the warm fluid of its mana bath.
She had suffered many injuries before, but those events were just stones against her stomach. The daily attacks—the army’s probing shots—merely battered her, made her weary. Those bruises—like painful cuts—couldn’t be compared to that chorus of terror; the ring of fire that laid a crown upon her head. Jessica’s every thought flew from her mind. All she heard were numbers, from one to nine.
Boom! the shells detonated just short of the barrier, slammed Jessica’s shield with a shockwave of heat and pressure. Her astral projection ended immediately and she was cast into the pitch-black darkness of the chrysalis, where she was blinded in the machine. She wanted to scream; she wanted to writhe in a bind of hundred burning chains. They coiled around her arms, seared her stomach, and dug their molten chained through the bone of her skull.
It was feedback, the special dispensation to mana’s harsh law; that a spell could only be cast, or a system supported, so long as the requisite mana existed. Should that mana not exist, the spell could yet be cast—a ritual saved—by the life of the spell caster.
Prodigious though she was, Vultheras’ intricate shield taxed Jessica severely. Only a slim reserve of mana remained in her body. Therefore, when the shield was stressed, a payment was made from her flesh. The chains she felt were the winding coils of the ley lines; the heat its friction, as they rubbed violently and ripped themselves apart.
However, there was a window in the darkness. She could end the spell, disconnect from the machine, and avoid feedback’s terrible price. That was the plan, after all; the shield was only to buy time, those were her words.
If she… could have done it, Jessica thought, bound in chains like hot garrote wires. It’s the only way!
Jessica held on. Her eyes brightened, shined as blue stars. She tapped her unique strength, the ultimate potential only she had: The Eyes of the Sorcerer.
Unbeknownst to Jessica, lab technicians sat at work stations around the chrysalis, illuminated by the light of her eyes. They scribbled down readings from their back-lit glass monitors. Giles, the Selecezi archaeo-technologist, stood behind the lead terminal. He watched her through black, glare-canceling safety goggles; his hands stuffed in his coat pockets, a smile on his face.
“Giles!” a technician turned to shout from his terminal. His eyes were also shielded by goggles.
“What do you see?” he asked calmly.
“She’s not disconnecting!”
“The monitors,” Giles replied. “I want know what the monitors read.”
“Mana throughput is climbing sharply!” a different technician reported, hunched over their screen. “She’s cleared 90%!”
Giles laughed. “Amazing!”
Klaxon alarms blared, cast Giles’ smile in alternating flashes of blue and red.
“Kill those alarms!” he snapped.
“It’s the mana-catalytic rods, sir!” a technician reported. “The mana desaturation system just failed; the sensors aren’t registering a temperature change—they stopped at 1,360 Meltens!”
“They’re… disintegrating.”
Waves of heat radiated from clear chrysalis as Giles watched the mithril rods, placed above and below the first sorceress, come apart in globs. The chrysalis mana fluid boiled and steamed, and sparks popped from its monitor terminals. Their screens turned black and burst from heat.
“Was the shield still active?!” Giles shouted.
“I don’t know!” a technician shouted. “We have to get out of here!”
“It was still powered!” another confirmed.
“She doesn’t even need the machine anymore,” Giles muttered in awe as technicians rushed past him, ran for the door. Sweat dripped from the technologist’s brow, but a smile formed nevertheless.
“We measured her power in absolute throughput,” he thought aloud. “75% of every mana mote was magical energy and 25% was wasted as heat. But this temperature… if she’s exceeded 90% throughput and the heat is still rising, then the mana she’s drawn on—!”
Giles laughed loudly, spread his arms in joy. “Brilliant!” he shouted, alone in the chamber. “This is what I wanted to see! Show me your resolve, sorceress! Show me what shines brighter than the gods!”
The Eyes of the Sorcerer were terribly powerful and awfully mysterious. What experiments king Darigon performed confirmed their principle function: To draw mana from nowhere at all. Jessica could make magic exist without a medium, without a mixture, poultice, or ritual words. The sorceress had to only wish it, and mana was real through her Eyes. It was a power comparable to the gods themselves.
What the king did not confirm, and what made Giles mad with excitement, was the ceiling of that effect. How far could Jessica go? It was an open question, closed only by pain tentatively identified as Positive Feedback. No matter how extraordinary the Eyes were, Jessica was still a mortal of flesh and bone. Exposure to the full power of the Eyes could destroy her body, as a fuse is melted by a surge.
In the darkness, Jessica felt electrified. Her heart raced out of control, her breath slowed to a stop, and her brain threatened to halt entirely. She replaced these functions with magic; balanced the cost of the barrier, the cost of her body, and the thunderous torrent that flooded through her eyes. Without spell words, she willed hers flesh together. When it burned, it healed; when her heart stopped, it started; when her brain was overwhelmed, her thoughts redoubled in their clarity.
I won’t be beat by this! she thought. I won’t surrender to anything!
The Atilonians meanwhile maintained a constant barrage, firing one shell after the other, as fast as their elite crews could load their guns. They pressured Jessica to draw more mana and trapped her in a cycle of ever-increasing values. It couldn’t go on, she had to break; bit by bit, her healing was overwhelmed by the positive feedback, and she began to smoke and char. First, her fingers blackened, and then her hands turned. They withered and burned; black skin split by cracks of blue. There was no flesh beneath her skin, just mana in the purest form.
Jessica felt her consciousness slip as her hold began to fail. Yet, she could not stop. If it was not her pride that held her, then it was the threat of a recoil. Like a taut bowstring, if she were to loose the shield, its ley lines would rebound and unravel into a maelstrom. The city, the sea, and the land itself would then be annihilated in a magical catastrophe not seen since the end of the last age, when Achlesial tore open the Chotokhetzam.
That possibility had crossed her mind before the siege, but she had discounted it out of ignorance. Jessica was surprised by her own power. Were it not for her frailty as a mortal, she felt she could yet go further. The Eyes had no ceiling, no cap; there was no limit to what they could do.
Without recourse, Jessica pressed harder, until she felt nothing at all. The sorceress lost herself to the darkness, adrift in an abyss, and there she would have stayed, were it not for a light. A window long closed, an escape from her own hubris, appeared in the dark. She stretched her disembodied spirit, reached hard as she could, to touch the light.
She began to hear sounds.
