Chapter Nineteen Pt2: The Battle of St. Circe’s
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-Ovid

There were at least three dozen Gangling Men facing off against the St. Circe's witches, and more kept on coming. As I watched on, a group of three of them wrapped Michelle in their bindings and started to drag her away… for each of us that they took away, they could make another Gangling Man, further skewing their numerical advantage. I sprinted through the mud and leapt, drawing energy from the flashing ley above me to boost my air time, and then brought the energy down with an audible crack that sent the bastards reeling. Simone dashed in to help, unspooling the bindings from around Michelle while I dealt with the stunned Gangling Men.

Further out, another group of them absconded into the woods with somebody. And there went another group a few seconds later, and then more streamed forward from the rift. We might hold out for an hour, but then what? Every witch who could defend for shit would be taken, and then they'd get everybody else in one fell swoop. My knees went weak, and I almost did resort to prayer… how could we possibly win?

"I was going to ask what we missed, but it would appear that the answer's 'quite a bit'," Lily said.

"Oh, thank the stars!" I wrapped her in a hug. "I think we're losing."

"Indeed… how far would you say the conservatory is from here? Thirty yards?"

I blasted a Gangling Man to shreds and then gauged the distance. "Sure, around thirty."

"Good." She knelt, drew a circle in the ground, and reached into her pocket to cast a few small bones into it.

"Remembrance of things past is hard,
but recall now these stalwart wards,
my mistress bind both time and space
to bring these symbols into place."

With a pulse of power and a generous bit of assist from the ley storm, all of our wards sprang back into place - sometimes, I forget that Lily's been doing witchcraft for almost a century, but it's kind of hard to forget when she pulls random crazy stuff out of nowhere. In this case, she'd gotten the earth to remember the wards that had been on it recently. That gave us some breathing room, as all of the nearby Gangling Men were pretty much instakilled, some of them shredded completely beyond recovery. But more were still coming, mostly hurling spells at us from across the barrier of wards, though some of them were hard at work carefully undoing those wards.

I put my defensive magic to good use, protecting Simon and Cassie as they hurled out magical attacks across the ward line. They'd run forward, right past my defensive bubble, cast out wards or fire (harder than lightning zaps, but much more effective against these bastards), and then retreat back behind me. Curses and other magical attacks pinged off my defensive shield and, honestly, I could have kept it up all day. With as many of the Gangling Men as we were dispelling and/or blasting to shreds, they'd have to stop before we did - however quickly they could make new men, it was a lot slower than we were offing them with our St. Circe's hospitality. Maybe we were going to win this one…

The ley storm flickered over toward the edge of school… a lot of magic was going on over there, and it wasn't ours. The Gangling Men had been throwing themselves at our defenses, but it was partly a distraction to keep us away from the portal, for they'd clearly been busy over there. Busy preparing summoning rituals. We heard them growl and roar and croak, lumbering out of the woods. While the Gangling Men, technically speaking, weren't of our world, for as long as they had a witch as an anchor, they could summon beings using that witch's power. And they were clearly pretty good at it - I counted at least twenty of the lumbering monstrosities, each of them the size of a rhino or larger, ungainly but dangerous-looking aggregations of real and fantastic animal parts. They'd just summoned a horde of chimeras.

"Our wards will hold," Lily said, though she didn't sound certain.

The wards did hold… for the first few of them, anyway. They burst around the beasts as they lumbered across, piercing their scaly and leathery hides, sputtering forth bubbling, ichorous blood that smoked upon the ground. As the first great beast died, its eye wheeled around to face me, black and full of malice. Toad-friend or not, I wouldn't be turning these creatures against the Gangling Men.

Another one leapt at us, triggering three of our wards and eviscerating itself mid-air. Not only did it dispel the wards, its forward momentum carried it right over, forcing Cassie and a handful of other girls to scatter. The chimera's blood sprayed out, some of it splashing on the nearby girls. Cecilia got an especially large amount on her arm, shrieking as the stuff bubbled and burned at her skin. Nurse Argent rushed over to provide assistance, but I could tell she was going to lose most of that arm… Cecilia and I weren't exactly friends, but I hoped it could be regrown with witchcraft.

"We have to retreat back to the conservatory!" Dr. Clay shouted, and some of the nearby girls started to flee in earnest while she provided cover.

A third beast charged through the breach in the wards, snarling and rushing at the nearest clustering of witches. They ran and dove for cover, some of them managing spells as they did… the chimera barely slowed, though. It shrieked in angry rage, stomped the ground, and prepared to charge again, right toward Dr. Clay. She cast some sort of spear out from her hand, and it skewered the front of the beast but barely slowed it. I wished in that moment that I'd studied more offensive magic, but most of it was on our list of forbidden topics, and most of the battle magic I knew was more attuned to incapacitating an opponent. Though I did know how to un-summon a creature. Supposedly, it could only work toward your own summons, but I wondered…

Temerus-carvay-sigmus-serapho-quartopus. I added the last signal on, because it would trace the energy back to the summoner and sever the bond. Sure enough, a huge blob of light shot down from the ley storm above us and consumed the chimera inches before it trampled over Dr. Clay. Three beasts down, many to go - we weren't going to make it. Even Lily was directing students to retreat toward the conservatory, deep within which the remaining students were hiding. But they wouldn't be safe for long if we couldn't stop the current charge…

Another chimera lumbered through another part of the ward wall, breaching it in its death throes… now there were two gaping holes. Maybe more, though I didn't see them racing to the other end of our perimeter. They only needed to get enough in once to send us fleeing and unable to defend and reinforce the wards. If that wasn't bad enough, I could see a group of Gangling Men in the distance, busily assembling some sort of artifact… whatever it was, I could guarantee that we wouldn't like its effects. I slowly realized that this was going to be our last stand. I started to retreat…

"Wait!" Simone grasped my arm. "Help me…"

She'd set up some kind of ritual right there behind a little many-tiered pedestal dedicated to Penelope Hughes-Nicht, who'd apparently cultivated many of the plants in the school garden. It was a fiendishly complex summoning ritual, and not one that I'd seen before. Where had she learned it?

My eyes went wide when I realized what she’d done – use the tiered structure of the pedestal to turn a ritual circle into a little magical radar dish to boost her summoning. In fact, I suspected the pedestal had been designed for that. "Where did you learn…"

"I found another book," She said quickly. "I was going to give it to you for your birthday, but things got sort of side-tracked, okay? I'll give it to you later… but for now, support my circle and make sure none of these… things get to me."

I put my hand upon her shoulder and gestured toward her ritual setup. "Do what you have to. I gotchu, girl."

It was a good thing I did, too. Another beast breached our perimeter, bowled Ms. Azucar over (fortunately, she got mostly out of the way), and it took the combined efforts of Lily and myself to burn the thing to a crisp when my un-summoning sputtered out (I guess the ley was still recharging after last time). Simone made a face and handed me a smallish velvet sack… a smallish, moving velvet sack.

"Please throw that into the circle when it energizes," she said.

What was that? A caterpillar. A huge, green, spiny caterpillar the length of my whole hand, and thick. Even I was a bit grossed out by it, so I can only imagine how Simone managed to capture the thing. Presumably with somebody else's help. I held the wriggling thing for three or four seconds as Simone did her chant, at which point the summoning circle pulsed to life and I dropped the poor thing in. For an instant, it disappeared, transformed into a ghostly, phosphorescent butterfly the size of a dinner plate. Then the earth all around us started to tremble.

"What the fuck did we just summon?" I asked.

"Gigan," Simone said. I'd never heard of the thing before, but it didn't take a brilliant witch to figure out that the thing was going to be big.

Big was a massive (ha!) understatement. A huge arm erupted from the ground and wrested one of the chimeras into the earth, crunching its rhino-sized bones and sending spurts of black, acidic blood arcing through the air. I almost vomited and poor Simone did vomit. Then Gigan erupted the rest of the way through the earth, fifty feet tall, many-armed, and covered in chitinous scales and quivering spines. It said a lot about Simone's resolve that she'd managed to summon a huge, humanoid bug-thing (well… bugs only have six limbs, and Gigan had at least ten) when she normally couldn't even stand unusually large ants.

"Subdue the beasts," Simone said, and then pulled me toward the conservatory. "We'd better get the hell away…"

I looked to Gigan, lofting two of the chimeras in its mighty arms and crushing them into one another. With each massive footfall, the earth shook, and its vocalizations could best be described as 'unusually loud chittering', so I was in no mood to stick around. But neither could I retreat with the rest of the witches…

"Send Gigan toward the Gangling Men." I pointed to the guys assembling the artifact. "I'm going to the tree…"

"What? That's crazy?"

"Crazier than holing up underground and hoping the Gangling Men and whatever weird-ass thing they're assembling out there can't deal with the eldritch horror you've just summoned? They're going to keep coming, and then they'll take us all away." I kissed her on the cheek. "You bought us time, now let me take care of business. I beat the thing once, and I think I can do it again."

Lily brought me into a hug. "I hate to say it, but you're right… as a wise witch once said: if the prophecy is true, then we're living it now. But nothing says you have to do it alone. Come on, girl, we've got a tree to un-summon."

+++++

We waited a minute for Lily and Dr. Sauvage to shore up the wards while the chimeras were distracted and/or getting crushed, and then Simone had Gigan stomp toward the Gangling Men, the whole earth trembling, clods of dirt the size of my whole body flinging up in its wake. Lily and I made our break for it then, taking her car and screeching out from the front of the administration building. We took the road out toward the lake, past Gangling Men and a chimera or two, and then went off-road once we got near the pier. We rumbled along the snowy slope for a good thirty or forty yards.

Lily glanced to me. "You know, for a luxury car, this old girl does pretty well in the…"

Just then, we crunched into a snow bank - fortunately not all at once, but the front end of the car went up and the back wheels spun uselessly in the ice and mud.

"Comment redacted," Lily said. "I hope you know what you're doing."

"Me, too."

The lake's waters churned in the storm but, miraculously, our little styrofoam boat with its ritual circle had remained intact and in place. I hopped into the boat and rowed us out… I rowed us out slowly. Cassie sure made it look easy, but I guess she had a lot more back and shoulder strength than I did, and longer limbs to stroke through the water with. I poured the collected water out of the styrofoam container, made a new circle inside for a portal ritual, and dropped a Gangling Man's symbol cloth inside. The portal shimmered back to life.

"Let's do this, I guess," I said. Just then, the entire southern sky alit with a great violet pulse that dwarfed the flashing of the ley storm, followed by a hum that I felt in my bones. "I hope that summoning was one of ours."

"It wasn't," Lily said. "Let's do this."

I was about to hop through the portal, but instead our whole boat got sucked right in.

Point of note: opening aquatic ley lines is actually a decent battle tactic. Our canoe sluiced into the Gangling Men's sanctum along with quite a bit of lake. It poured freely through the portal, flooding everything around us and pushing any Gangling Men who might want to stop us right out of the way. It took ten or twelve seconds for the flow to stop, at which point we'd got our bearings. The flow of water had taken us from a ley portal, banging us along against the chamber walls, and washed us right into the main chamber, with its eerie glow, its huge creepy tree, and its dozens of Gangling Men…

"Get the witches!"

Lily and I were ready, blasting at the Gangling Men as we drifted past, our canoe eventually grinding to the bottom of the chamber as the water spread out and became too shallow to float us. I got at least three or four, and Lily did even better… but there were a lot of them in there. I guess they'd put out a four-alarm APB since shit had started going down and now they were ready to go, bringing captured witches in from far and wide to rebuild their tree and making new Gangling Men as quickly as they could - a number that was soon to include Lily and myself.

"What's our plan?" Lily asked, turning to me. "We can't hold them off forever."

"We go up in the tree," I said, recalling the instant of connection I’d felt with all of the witches and warlocks of the tree the first time I’d been hoisted up into the tree’s creepy-as-fuck boughs.

"What?"

"Do you trust me?"

Her steely eyes took me in and she put her forehead to mine. "Yes. I am the Herald of the Stars and you are the Storm… if you say we go in the tree, then we go in the tree. Simone gave me my daughter back, and I expect you to make our reunion a happier one."

Already, the Gangling Men were rallying, wrapping us in bindings faster than we could undo them, charging into the breach faster than we could blast at them, and soon my hands were bound, the threads running through my fingers. And then and there, the Gangling Men could have and should have killed us - they had another tree now, one in Lily's sanctum, and they didn't need my power to get them through the witch's ward. But they were greedy and short-sighted and weren't about to pass up two sublimely powerful witches in their clutches.

"Put them in the…" one of the Gangling Men started.

"Wait!" Another said. "The One Voice has spake… they aren't to go in…"

Well, shit, I thought.

"…They aren't to go in until Rowan Bryce commits all his progeny to the tree… for the son is still within her, and his corruption will unmake our plans again, should it be allowed unchecked."

They brought Rowan in, and he stormed right over and slapped me full across the face. And, bound as I was, I couldn't defend myself whatsoever. I cried out and tumbled to the waterlogged floor. He spat on me and then pulled me back upright, fury wild in his ice-blue eyes.

"Do you see what you force me to do, you bitch? Now I must renounce my own son to this damnable tree… but no matter. I can always have more children. But I will slake my fill of revenge. Give me the paper, gangler, and I'll blot it. Then hoist this bitch in the tree and make her suffer. You make her suffer the nightmare of living death."

"Gladly," the nearest Gangling Man hissed. "Here is the contract, Bryce."

He glanced it over and blotted it with blood, signing Lucian over to the tree and nullifying my trup card. Oh well - I wasn't getting out that way again, but I hadn’t planned on it. They carried Lily and me over beneath a bough - the bough we'd teleported to Lily's sanctuary had already regrown, though it was still more spindly than the other branches. I wondered whether the addition of the two of us would thicken it up. Then the fibers wrapped around us, my sight growing dim and then black, and I once again felt the movement of being hoisted far above the chamber. We were well and truly captured.

Almost immediately, the tree started tapping into me, going quickly and without much subtlety - it didn't want to give me a chance to escape its clutches again. Ironically, this is exactly what it did wrong, for it gave me an opportunity to move my essence around, to push the little rump-essence of Lucian Bryce to the fore, providing me a momentary shield from the tree's assault.

I recalled the sensation of leaving my body, of traveling along the little essential pathways of the tree, as I had done before. I couldn't leave my body… I pushed at my essence, pushed as hard as I could, but it stayed put. The tree probed its way through Lucian's little spark and my own essence stayed put. And I realized I wasn't going to be able to pull this off, that I was going to be captured forever. That everybody I knew was going to be enslaved to the tree, that my plan had failed and the Gangling Men had truly won this time - no way out. I despaired, and I shed a tear. And, though I was still 'trapped' within my body, I suddenly felt every little node and pathway of the Tree of the One Voice, and I felt every witch and warlock within it, and I called to them:

"Sisters and brothers, we have been wronged and we have been defeated. Though you do not know me, I am your sister, and you are my siblings in magic. If your time in here has left you weak, has left you hopeless, I understand. But believe me when I say: hope is not lost, even if we cannot see it.
Let your tears clear rheumy eyes
and look past bindings long secured
toward welcome hearths and starry skies,
to friends and families inured
from this corruption, we withstand
'til our bright Mistress scours the land."

A chorus of voices, the essence of despair, and a clear voice of hope: these were the elements of the Starlight Summoning. Far too complex, far too interpretive for a single witch or warlock to cast. But what about a whole goddamn tree of them? Yes, that might just manage. The power and structure of the tree would be its own undoing because the Gangling Men had accidentally built themselves a massive radar dish for witch summoning magic and I’d just flipped on the power switch.

I felt the other denizens of the tree, felt their essences harmonizing along the pathways of the tree, resonating and singing out as I repeated my plea, growing in power until I felt something within me burst, felt something pulled right out of my being. Suddenly, the stygian black of my vision was replaced with a dazzling panoply of stars. In an instant, my bindings within the pod, every fiber binding me into the tree, were gone. And, with nothing but luminous light to support me, I found myself floating. Something squeezed my hand and, glancing to my right, I saw Lily bathed in light, saw her looking at me with tears streaming down her face. There were hundreds of us floating, and at our center was Mistress Starlight, the patron goddess of the Sisterhood of the Starry Night.

I felt my mouth move, heard my voice speak, even though my brain wasn't giving it any commands. All of us spoke at once:

"Long have We waited for our children to call us to this world, and long have We awaited our vengeance. O Tree of the One Voice*, you have wronged a goddess, and she will have her fury slaked. We banish you and your children back to the wretched pit from whence you came, and may the corruption you have stoked here blight you, branch and root."
*She said the tree's True Name, a name so utterly unpronounceable by the human tongue that I won't even attempt to capture it here.

And with that pronouncement, Mistress Starlight unleashed holy hell upon the Gangling Men.

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