The Academia Magica, once the finest magic academy in the Latin world.530Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCKUmrNZNJA
The Kingdom of Mercia, Britannia, Former Roman Empire.530Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡC5ePIPeGEN
August 22, 518 AD, The Day of Abandonment
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The sun was turning black and the sky was burning.
The sun turning black was a perfectly natural phenomenon, of course. It was an eclipse, the earth passing through the shadow of the moon cast by the sun, making it appear that it was being slowly devoured by a shapeless black maw. Nothing but superstition, of course. Eclipses like this appear two or three times every year in various locations on the surface of the earth, but over individual locations they could be vanishingly rare. An eclipse could only be something each generation only hears of from their fathers, and from their fathers before them, and each time a new one appeared the current generation would wonder if this would be the time the sun is eaten. It's only with a proper scientific mindset and a broad range of observations taken over a wide range of times and locations that we've been able to dispel such superstitions and enter into a more rational perspective on the world.
Now the sky being on fire, that was magic.
This would be the final battle against the greatest foe the world had yet to see. It had been a shapeless, nameless thing, sealed inside a canopic jar in the depths of the arcane archives. In an accident, a complete and utter unpredictable freak of nature that nobody could ever have seen coming, the jar was broken, and the thing inside it emerged into our world. No one knew precisely what the creature was, for no wizard could get close enough to study it. The creature fed on magic itself, sucking it from the people and creatures around it like drinking from a well.
A single wizard would wither in its gaze like a blade of grass in the desert. Among hundreds of wizard all living together, it could feed from the whole without killing the parts. It hid among them for years, wearing human form, feeding off their energy, gradually twisting minds into its thralls or seducing wizards into joining his inner circle. It promised those who joined it the powers of a god, and it delivered. It knew ancient secrets to unlock the body's restrictions, turn a person into a walking magical engine, all the better for it to feed off of. At this late stage, the line between follower and thrall had been blurred to oblivion. I was one of only five wizards that hadn't fled into seclusion or gone over to the darkness.
There had been others. The strongest of us had fought and died against the creature. Its wizards scoured them from the earth with fire from the heavens. The other survivors and I had traveled all over the world in search of allies, only finding one in the king of some backwards nation of unclad barbarians. But he listened where none else would hear us, and he brought his vassals and underlings of his kingdom together into a mighty armed host, and we had led them against the armies of the thralls. They had rained fire upon us, but it was a trick we had seen before. My fellow wizards and I had created a counter-spell, one that reflected the fire into the sky and rained it down upon our foes. With their magic weakened from the first attack, our army of barbarians and raiders could lay siege to the Academia Magica and slaughter with impunity.
All that remained was the creature itself, and I was climbing the Aspicia Celestia, the highest tower on the campus grounds. The creature was at the very highest point, no doubt prepared to destroy the world or turn us all into slaves or consume every drop of magic on earth in a single bite or something like that. I didn’t know what it was going to do, just that he needed the eclipse to do it. If we stopped it, or even delayed it so that the eclipse ended before the creature could complete it, the rest would be simple, if only by comparison. If not… well, the rest would be simple.
This would be the final battle against the greatest foe the world had yet to see. One way or the other.
I said before that we didn't know exactly what the creature was. But we do have a name for it. The earliest records called it a thaumophage, the eater of miracles. Those who had faced it and survived called it the gaping maw. It called itself Pteratos, the winged death.
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"John?" I turned. Witney was approaching me from behind. Her ice-blonde hair was matted and singed, her pale skin marred with cuts and black bruises, and her white robes were stained in blood and ashes. Every bit the vision as the day I first saw her. I was hardly in better shape, mind. My eye was swollen shut from bruising, I had no feeling in my right arm and I was pretty sure most of my ribs were cracked because every time I breathed I could feel my sternum trying to escape through my neck. I smiled at her and felt every muscle movement like a dagger in the face.
"I couldn't find any xerion, Witney," I said. "Just a few expired health tinctures, some celery and half a tin of mints. How was your luck?"
"Poor," said Witney. "But I found the records office and retroactively gave us first class honors."
"At least something good comes out of all this," I said.
"I also found Archmage Vespa's private stash," Witney said, and produced a small amphora from behind her back. "Look at the seal!"
I took a closer look at the embossed profile of a distinguished, bearded gentleman staring endlessly off in no particular direction. His head was flanked by letters, but I had to sound them out before they made any real sense to me.
"F…L…C…L…IV…LIA…NVS… PP…AVG… Iulianus?" realization hit me like a severely debilitating facial injury. "Holy skyte, this is from the vineyards of Emperor Julian. This must be a hundred and fifty years old. Did you know Vespa was that old?"
"Did you know she was on an Emperor's Christmas list?" Witney said, pulling out the stopper and producing a pair of goblets from behind her back. That's a wizard thing. We produce stuff. "Shame to let it go to waste before the world ends."
"Do we really have time for this?"
"One drink, Johnny," Witney said, pouring me a glass of the dark red wine. "One before we go."
I couldn't resist her when she called me Johnny.
The wine was bitter, and filled my mouth with the taste of acid. I never had a taste for wine, but Witney seemed to enjoy it. We stood there, drinking our late archmage's wine as we stared out at the burning sky.
The flames seemed to stretch out from one horizon to the other, dropping orbs of fire like hailstones. Beneath us the buildings and grounds of the Academia were little more than a child's model spread out on the ground. And then somebody had lit that poor kid's model on fire. Some arsehole. Some arsehole had hired a bunch of ax-wielding barbarians to run wild on what had once been his own home and slaughter people that had once been his friends. Every so often there was a flash of blue or green or purple light from the carnage below as one of the wizards spent out their last few spells in a futile defense against the invades.
I tried to remember that all of this was to save the world.
There were a hundred and eight stories in the Aspicia Celestia, including the rooftop astroscopia, and we were on the one hundred and seventh. Normally we would have just walked up through the hall of ascension but Pteratos's forces had disenchanted the entire room, making it all but impassable. Instead, we had to ascend the long, meandering staircase that spiraled up the length of the tower like the thread on a screw. I don't know how many stairs there were in this tower, I lost count at something like nineteen hundred eighty-swyve.
Pteratos had seen this coming, of course. The stairs were absolutely choked with minions and constructs and dark wizards whose lives meant nothing in the service of their dark master. Witney and I had three other wizards, and King Loth had given us two score of his most skilled warriors, including three of his own sons, and all of them had been left on floors below, exhausted or wounded or simply dead. We two were all that had made it to the final floor.
Witney and I finished our wine, and let the goblets fall from our hands, bouncing and sliding down the smooth black surface of the tower to the inferno below. I watched, resting my hands on the railing. I felt Witney's fingers intertwining with mine. I looked at her, and brought my hand up to her cheek.
"We don't both need to do this," I said, softly.
"We all swore, John," she said. She was drawing closer to me with each passing word. I felt her arms wrap around my waist. "If Michael and the other were here they'd be going right along with us. We need as much power as we can get if we want to make sure it works."
"But how do we even know it's going to work?" I said. Her head rest upon my shoulders and my arms embraced her almost of their own volition. "Just because it worked when Vespa tried it… this damn thing eats magic, we don't know that this isn't going to make it stronger. If both of us go and it doesn't work…"
"If it doesn't work, we'll be dead anyway," said Witney. "If it does work… I want us to be together."
I don't remember how long we were standing there like that. It could have been forever.
"You're warm…" she said.
"So are you," I said.
It was at the very least until the tower started to shake itself apart.
"No, I mean really warm," she said. "Like actually something medically wrong with you warm."
"Actually yeah, so are you," I said. "Something's going on."
We looked up. The polished black walls and ceiling of the tower were glowing from within like a hot ember. The floor beneath our feet was vibrating, a low-frequency rumble that traveled up my body through the bones and did rather interesting things to bowels.
"The magic…" Witney said, pulling away from me. "He's pouring magic directly into the tower!"
"We need to get up there!"
"It was probably a bad idea to have that last drink, huh?" asked Witney, our footsteps thundering up the shaking stairs.
"It was worth it," I said, smiling at her. "Absolutely worth it."
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The tower was designed to take advantage of powerful celestial alignments, and it had been well prepared for such an event. Black candles. Horned skulls. A pentagram carved in runes. A blood-splattered altar carved of ebony. Much of it was functionally useless but it had been part of the procedure for so long that it had acquired a kind of power of its own. And then there was it.
In the very center of this nexus of dark power – indeed, at the center of all the darkness that had engulfed so much for these terrible years – was the man we had come to slay. Was it still a man? He had once been one, surely, and his flesh was still composed of the same material, but it was inhabited by a dark and horrible spirit, and this black, twisted, parody of a soul was perverting his body. There were the features of man, but not the shape. Limbs that were too long, a waist that was too thin. Mouth too small, eyes too large, head too bulbous. If there was man in there, it had been consumed by the creature within him.
Whoever that person had been had once had a name and a life of its own, but all of what he was had long since been lost to history. Now there was only Pteratos.
And we were here to stop him. A pair of untrained, untalented, undergraduate student wizards was the last front of defense against an eldritch horror that fed on magic. Witney had cast so many spells the pages in her spellbook had started to turn black and flake away, and my staff had been pushed so far beyond the red line it was shaking like those novelty training brooms they made for young girls. Worst of all, at some point during the battle the pointy bit of my wizard hat had been shorn clean off. I looked utterly laughable, standing there with a non-pointy hat. I'm surprised Pteratos didn't just eat my soul on principle.
The thing slid an obsidian dagger across its palm and dripped sickly, black blood over the altar, ululating in some unspeakable tongue. He looked up at me with his slit-pupiled eyes and blinked. I'm sure his eyelids didn't work that way before…
"Johnathan Metamorphos. Whitney Quintessa," It had a voice like somebody had attached a set of tin vocal cords to a bagpipes filled with angry wasps. But somehow the meaning of his words was there in all the noise, bypassing the ear and sticking right into my brain like an arrow to the temple. "You are here just as you need to be."
"None of us need to be here," I said, leveling my staff at him. I was hoping he'd think that billowing clouds of acrid black smoke was a prelude to some kind of death spell. "I'd much rather live out the rest of my life without being a slave to darkness, and you…"
I had to stop and think for a minute. Witney took up the slack.
"Well, ruling the world with a squishy, insectile hand is probably a lot of paperwork," she said, holding aloft her ruined spellbook like it had been dictated to her by god. "You've got to deal with the pockets of resistance that are always springing up, make a lot of angry speeches, maybe spawn an heir to murder you in your twilight years and take over the world before your body is even cold… That last one might be a bit harder for you."
"Yeah, it can be to find the right girl if you're not exactly a looker," I said. Witney glared at me. "…force of habit?"
"You know not how little you know," Pteratos said. "All of this has come about according to my machinations. Even you, now, here to end my life, are so only at my bidding."
"Oh come on, really?" I said. "How could you have possibly set this up? And why? And how again?"
"You think you uncovered my plans through guile?" said Pteratos, his lipless mouth peeling back as though his cheeks were attached to catgut wire. "That I would consent to such a thing as a mole within my herd? You were allowed to know of this night. The ritual needs a sacrifice."
"And you expect us to simply lie down and die for you?" Witney said, flecks of ash and ember rising from her mystic tome.
"It is not you who will be sacrificed," said Pteratos. He tossed his dagger through the air, the black blade flashing red in the flaming sky. I threw my hand up in front of my face and the knife stopped in mid-air, the blood-red gem on the handle pointed right between my eyes. I stared at it for a few seconds, my dark, bearded face reflected in the facets of the jewel, before I realized what was happening.
"You can't be serious…" I said, gingerly taking the knife out of the air. "You brought us here so that we could kill you?"
"This is as it must be," said Pteratos, gliding forwards, his oily black robes billowing out behind him. "This is not my time of triumph. There is more yet to do."
"I should feel shocked at being manipulated like this," I said, my staff growing hot in my hands, the protective runes carved down its length flashing bright red. "But… well, if you set this up for us to kill you, you've really brought it down on yourself."
"My death is only the beginning," it said, drawing ever closer, its spindly hand reaching out towards Witney. "With the destruction of this body I shall take your form as a vessel. I shall ride your body into battle as a mighty stallion. Your power shall spill out of me as does light from the sun, and all that it touches shall become fuel to feed my fire of destruction."
"…I'm not comfortable with this," she said, taking half a step back.
"It matters not," he said, leaning in, so very close. He was looking at Witney, but we were so very close together. I could see every stretched pore on his face, count the veins in his bulbous eyes as they swiveled towards her. He smelled like rotting fish and his skin shone like it was soaking wet. My fingers clenched around the handle of the blade. "All shall come to fruition in time. We shall become one, and then we shall rule the world. We shall live in eternity. You should be grateful for the opportunity."
"Maybe," Witney said. "I've never been immortal before. But I am grateful for the verbosity."
"What nonsense do you speak now?" he said, his face contorting as though invisible strings were tugging on his skin. "Your fate has been decided. Why waste time with words?"
"That's a question you should ask yourself," Witney said. "If you had just killed me instead of having this conversation, I'd never be able to get all the pieces into play. NOW, JOHN!"
The dagger plunged down like a black Talon, the blade slicing through the air, glinting in the fires of the sky. It caught Pteratos between the shoulderblades, slicing through his flesh like warm butter. His flesh and bones had rotted away so much that the blade could slice through ribs like gristle. Black blood sprayed like boiling tar. Pteratos turnedin the direction of the noise, shrieking like a thousand angry teakettles, and second caught him right in the eye. It popped like a full wineskin thrown against a wall, and foul humors burst over his distended face. Pteratos cried with noise like a dozen thunderbolts and thrashed about, blindly casting sickening green bolts of dark magic in a vain attempt to hit me.
I struck again and again, my arm rising and falling like a machine, slicing at the creature's arms, it's chest, it's face… Many of the most powerful wizards are simply beyond the effects of any physical attack or at least they like to consider themselves as such. Swords and arrows hold little fear to one who can snap their fingers and turn everything in a fifteen foot radius into a pool of boiling hot acid razors. As a result, most wizards don't think it's worth their time to protect against something as mundane as a dagger in the back. Witney and I had prepared for such a thing. We had brought knives of our own, but Pteratos had been kind enough to provide one for me.
I thought it would be hard to look at Pteratos but as it was, as the body had become, it didn't even feel like stabbing a man to death. It felt like… carving a roast goose. A goose that owned me money and had just hit on my girlfriend.
I couldn't take my eyes off of it.
"John!" Witney grabbed my arm on the upswing and held it there. I blinked twice and looked down at the… the thing lying on the ground, black, oily slime pooling around it. I had a pang of regret, just for a second. Witney grabbed my arm and pulled. "We have to finish this now."
That was my girl. Always keeping my mind on the imminent apocalypse.
Witney still holding my arm we sprinted up to altar, my staff glowing bright red in my hand. I had been building up a charge from the moment I started up the last flight of stairs. Ordinarily it would enough to let me fly faster through the wind or blow a stone fortress into rubble or produce thousands upon thousands of white doves from my sleeves. Or it could backfire and reduce me to a rapidly expanding cloud of ash. I had something else in mind. I ran up to the altar and stuck it right in the middle of the pool of blood. The sun was just a slim crescent now, like the last glimmer of waning moonlight before the new cycle. I had to finish this before the eclipse completed or the energy would be channeled but not controlled. It would be like if you tried to build an aqueduct without connecting it to plumbing system. What you've just done is divert the raw, flowing power of nature directly into the center of a major population center.
I slammed my staff down on the altar hard enough to crack the wood. Still holding it with both hands and bracing my foot on the altar I turned my staff up to full. Opening every valve, disabling every safety, kicking it into top gear and practically ripping off the limiter. It was shaking before, but now it was so violent that tiny bits of stone were dancing around my ankles. I feared for the integrity of my teeth. Witney had her tome of spells out, opened to the final page, the last one that could still be read.
Intenete Purgatorium. The Unconstrained Purge. The mage killer. Every drop of magic squeezed out of a wizard like a fresh gerbil out of a snake. It was made for a time like this, when there wasn't one drop of hope of survival left. This spell allows a wizard to take his full measure of magical potential and summon it all up, at one time, in one place. At the cost of his own life, he could accomplish something glorious. For a truly powerful wizard like Archmage Vespa, this one spell could decimate an entire army.
For us? Well, I was never more than a gamma-minus student, but Witney was at the top of her class. Between us, we could probably destroy one bodiless abomination.
"Witney!" I shouted, taking one hand from my shaking staff and holding it out to her. The moon was almost totally blotting out the sun. A look over my shoulder and I could see Pteratos trying to stagger to its feet. I had just a few seconds and then, one way or another, it would all be over. "…it was a good run, wasn't it?"
She smiled, her blue eyes shining, her long hair whipping in the wind coming from her spellbook. I'm going to miss that smile. Or maybe I'm not.
"We had it pretty good until the world ended," she said."
Pteratos rose off the floor, lilting to one side like a capsized boat. It blinked its remaining eye at me, horrible black ichor dripping from the ravaged socket. Behind it, the stellar halo appeared around the black shadow of the moon, making him look as some twisted angel fallen to earth. The entire tower thrummed beneath my feet, the stones glowing with magical energy. I squeezed my staff hard with one hand and Witney's hand with the other. Together, we brought forth every last bit of our will and focused it into two powerful, final words.
"INTENTE PURGATORIUM!"
The magic ravaged through me, as every last cell of my body surrendered its gift to the spell. Cold fire seared my blood and thunderbolts struck along my spine, but my grip on my staff was locked in as though secured with chains. Witney's hand burned in mine, and I could see her body wracked with fits and spasms, her very bones glowing within her flesh. I could hear the spinning of the atom, the music made by the tiniest, most indivisible fractions of physical being, playing a symphony for my ears alone. Looking at the stars above me I could see the vast stellar forges, the pillars of creation themselves, so immensely vast that no number existed that could measure it. I could smell life. I could touch God. I could taste my own soul.
I was everywhere. I was everything.
I was magic.
And then I was nothing.
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