
I took the spiraling stairs back up the manor’s lab two at a time, flitting my wings with each bound. As the distance closed, my mind swung violently between my emotional desire to back up my sister and the logical reality that there might be little I could do.
I slammed a fist against the wall as it trailed next to me in frustration. I was unarmed, debraided, and considering how predictably I fell into the enigmatic Magecutter’s trap already, would going in blasting raw lightning mana turn out any better? It was a long day of fighting already, would I just find myself drained and useless if such an attack was ineffective? If we knew they were prepared already, we could have made camp for a day and recovered before infiltrating.
When I got to the landing at the top, my hand twitched towards the latch of the door that separated me from the lab beyond. I could retrieve my spear inside, but even Ghisé was being led about by the nose by that human woman, and my sister was leagues better with a spear than I. Was rushing in again the right choice here?
I pulled my hand back from the door and brought it to my chest, where my heart fluttered faster than a fledgling’s first flight. I leaned my forehead against the wall, even as the sounds of conflict reverberated from the other side. What would Jiju say to do?
… She would say to flee no doubt. She would say that Ghisé was doing her duty as guardian. That I should squeeze through one of the narrow openings that I passed by on my way up the stairwell. And fuck it all but I know my sister would agree with that assessment.
I started weaving a new Enhancer spellbraid as I considered and quickly dismissed the idea of leaving Ghisé behind.
I hated the idea that all this fighting was over me. That Alex would betray his family and uproot his life for me. That Ayza would bait the mines with the lives of her underlings for me. That Ghisé would throw herself in front of a crossbow bolt or a magecutter’s blade for me. That Cee would lay her dreams of tribe leadership on the line for me.
They all swore up down how I was special, and over the past year in the village I let myself learn to believe that. I learned to feel pride in my nature as Lightblessed. I used that nature to convince both others and myself that I had the power to overcome. “Unreasonable confidence,” I muttered low in a parroting of Cee’s last words.
I batted absently at the freshly bound braid of my rewoven spell as I wondered if it would be enough. Without my complement of braids though, what power did I have really? Jiju said that the braids were just a way for the guardians to mimic the power that the blessed had innately, but my innate power was so much more limited. Breathing a cone of lightning was potent, but inefficient and wild. It was such a narrow application of power. If I had the time, I could’ve sat there and rewoven even the most complex spell through. I had all the structures memorized.
I pressed my forehead to the door and closed my eyes. I went through the motions of weaving the braids in my mind in self soothing fashion. Where my heart thudded in my chest at the idea of facing the humans without the braids I’d come to rely on, my mind wound itself around the spells I was used to having at my disposal.
It was during those mental exercises that something clicked. As I wove my internal mana through a series of complex motions that a fuzzy perception resolved itself in my mind. The electromagnetic fields beyond the doorway I pressed against revealed themselves to me. Objects in the room like the metal cage that once held me prisoner and the fittings on the furniture showed in more distinct fields. Fuzzier and frantic fields swayed and moved about each other off to the sides. Several feet directly ahead of me stood an impassive human shaped one.
With a short gasp I pulled back from the doorway, and the room beyond became muddled by the fields of the reinforced wooden barrier that separated the stairwell landing from the lab beyond. I released my focus with a sigh, and the mana I had coiled into a mental braid unwound itself, bringing my perceptions back to normal. When my hand went to my chin in consideration, I found my cheeks pulled tightly into smile.
My gaze crawled up and down the doorway that measured nearly twice my full height as I coiled my mana tightly into a familiar pattern of weaves, and with the thrum of magic in my chest I began to push. Through the magic of the spell I could feel as invisible lines of force ground against the door’s surface, latching on the hinges and metal reinforcements that bound the solid wood. The portal—weighing multiple times my own weight—pushed back against me as it moved within the slight play of its frame and against the jamb. With a few steps, long and assisted by the force, I found myself backed against the far wall at the other end of the landing.
With increasing force, I felt my back press up against the wall as hard as the door pushed against its frame—greater even with how much smaller than the door my own body was. My chest heaved and struggled to keep the wind in my lungs and the blood to my brain. Enhancer kicked in as I hardened myself, pushing back the blackness that was threatening the edges of my vision. After a moment a cracking sound reverberated off the wall of the chamber as the frame finally gave way, loosing the door and sending it tumbling into the chamber. With a huff, I pushed off the bracing wall and dashed through the opening to spy my handiwork.
Not immediately spotting the magecutter, I stayed wary as I took in the scene. Ghisé had taken the momentary distraction to dispatch one of her two opponents, though her condition was worrisome. She bled from multiple wounds, including a myriad of shallow cuts, not all of them ones I saw the magecutter deliver personally. With the exception of her injured wing from the mine, her injuries all looked superficial, but actively bleeding from so many still made my breath hitch for a moment. She was certainly in danger of falling unconscious from blood loss alone, would need a bevy of stitches besides, and I feared that infection could take root.
Pulling my gaze back to the door as the dust settled, I could see the large wooden construction laid at an angle, a figure buried beneath its bulk. Ayza I presumed, but a furred tip of something hung out from beyond the edge of the frame, forcing me to do a double-take. Ayza hadn’t been wearing pelts.
Ghisé cried out then, pulling my attention back to where the remaining guard had buried the tip of his spear into her thigh, collapsing her to a knee. The human was bringing his spear back for a coup de grace, forcing me to abandon my search for Ayza or my discarded spear and commit to a panicked flight towards my guardian sister’s foe. Before he could finish his attack, I barreled into the guard in a tackle of buffeting feather and raking talons that had both him and myself tumbling into a lab table. It was a solid stone construction, extruded from the floor, that Alex and I spent many hours hunkered over late into the evenings more than a year ago, which sported some new cracks and an equally fresh coat of red ‘paint’ as a result of the violent manner in which the guard was thrown against it.
The room was near silent then. The tackled guard would never make a sound again, and the sounds of the guard Ghisé mortally wounded were dying out. My guardian herself was groaning quietly herself, having collapsed back onto her rear. My own breathing was quite audible in the stillness as the seconds ticked by. The doorway I’d blasted, and by extension the woman under it, still had not moved, so I answered the call of sisterhood and fluttered over to Ghisé. The breadth of injuries made me wince. We knew where Alex was sent, but paid too high a price for too little.
“It’s not that bad, Tali,” said Ghisé.
“It’s worse than you think, Ghisé. I can’t believe I got us into this mess.”
“I can.” Ghisé looked at me flatly, but the corner of her lip watch twitching with the effort.
“Gods, Ghisé, when did you learn sarcasm?”
“Cee has been teaching me.”
“I’ll be sure to sing your praises. Let’s get back.”
“What about Alex and Jiju?”
“Alex isn’t here. If Jiju is… she’ll just have to hold out. Giving the humans more prisoners or corpses to work with wont help our people.”
“I’m still alive,” Ghisé hissed.
“Let’s keep it that way.” I helped her to her feet and lightly pushed her towards the opening in the room that was the maw to this evening’s trap. She wobbled her way to it and leaned heavily into the wall. I could get us to the ground and away from here—fighting through an awakened and alerted manor filled with humans wasn’t an option.
My eyes swept the room again, landing once more on the de-hinged door with the stilled figure below. An explosion of paper lined the floor between the door and the entryway where it was formerly fastened. I flitted my way over to the opening and began gathering the scattered pages of Alex’s memoirs, picking my way towards the reinforced door with the magecutter’s body beneath. Before I could finish gathering them all, the scrape of a boot, brought my eyes back to the lab entrance. There, Count Petras stood once more, holding his rifle.
Though the Count’s legs shook with the effort of maintaining his standing position and his shoulders hunched, his arm was steady, pointing the deadly weapon towards me and grinning wickedly. I swallowed the beginnings of a curse as I stared wide eyed at the man whos eyes I should’ve gouged out when I had him defenseless. I should’ve considered that he didn’t need eyes to tell me what he knew about my misplaced mentors.
“<Just gonna shoot me then?>” I asked. Anything to keep him from pulling the trigger while my mind spooled up a known, but only tested spell. He was well out of reach of spear—even if I was armed—yet there was so way his steady aim would miss from this distance either. Even if I was at my top speed, there’s no dodging a well aimed bullet.
“<I’ll take your feathers from your corpse. Trouble like you is not worth more than that, regardless of what that Syndicate bitch thinks.>” His finger tensed against the trigger.
Magic it is then, I thought.
The mana within me bound into a tight weave. It was a failsafe of a braid I worked hard to develop before giving the railguns to the chief and village warriors, and I focused it on the arcane circuitry of the gun the count now held. If my spell failed… well, hopefully, Vander would keep his promise and Luna wouldn’t be too disappointed in me.
“Tali!” Ghisé called out.
My body tensed.
The crack of a shot split the air.
And… I was fine. I peeked my eyes open from my flinch and breathed out a sigh of relief at the spreading red splotches that dotted the count’s arm and chest.
“<…How?>” The count sputtered at the realization. The gun had misfired spectacularly, sending the bullet in the wrong direction, blowing out the back of the gun and peppering the man with shrapnel. He collapsed to the ground in a heap.
“I’m fine!” I called back towards my sister I spun back to hurriedly gathering the pages. As I did, I noticed the door was now lying flat on the lab floor. The buried magecutter was now missing. I spun a full three sixty but found no one but Ghisé. “Where did the human woman go?”
Ghisé looked to me, then to the door. “I didn’t see!”
I swore and scooped up the remaining pages as the sounds of boots rained from the stairwell. With a swear, I fluttered my way back to my sister. “We’ve gotta go.” My sister winced and nodded, then laid out for me to take her up in my talons. I stuffed the bundle of pages into my mouth and bit down, took up my sister, and carried us from the tower.
After several more seconds passed, I heard shots from the tower behind. We hadn’t gotten terribly far considering the weight of my passenger. My stomach flipped in a panic as I spotted a human knocking an arrow and lining up his shot. I hoped he was a bad shot. An arrow whipped by, causing me to suck in a muffled gasp past my mouthful of paper. Strangely, it went in the opposite direction and plunged into the chest of the guard, causing him to tumble out the window and land storied below with a sickening crunch.
From where the arrow came, I found the shooter hovering with her bow held tightly. I thought Jiju maybe, but no… it was Sen, gesturing us away and towards the tree line.
What's Sen doing here? I thought. And… why are her clothes stained with blood?
Welcome back and thanks for the chapter