Sigil

  “It is an elementary piece of craftsmanship, really. A single, most basic chronomancy spell possible, going off twice every second. I believe it stops time for everyone including the caster for a moment. If you happen to live through this, dear, half a second is what the Tower considers and ‘instant’. And I so hope you do live through this,” Jea said, drawing more blood from the rangers twitching and groaning body. I saw in her movements and in her speech that she was trying to drag this out, to slow things down. I didn’t know why, but I wasn’t going to bother finding out.

  I broke the spellrod staff against my knee, creating a large diameter of anti-magic. “Get her, now, she’s powerless,” I cried, even as I crouched ready to charge her myself. But I saw that she laughed with joy when I said it. And the blood link between her and the ranger remained unbroken.

  Before the words were out of my mouth she lunged with preternatural speed towards the elk, and leaped on its back, side-saddle once again. Marcus and Zack were fast, but they weren’t there yet and the animal started moving. The junior ranger hit her in the side with an arrow, and in the back with another as she turned and ran, but she didn’t as much as react to the magically enhanced shots. And the elk took off running at speed, it made for this terrain and clearly magically enhanced.

  Zack kept up, he even seemed to be gaining for a second, but as the elk started gaining inertia on its side, it was clear that we wouldn’t catch up. The heavily armed Marcus was several steps behind yet.

  “Fuck!” I said, even though nobody was listening. I could have sworn that with her retreat more blood was being pulled out of the ranger’s body, “Stop! Don’t chase her!” I yelled. Now that it was happening the trap was obvious. It would take me minutes to cast the anti-magic spell, and if she had my chronomancy disabled as well as I had her divination, I wasn’t going to be able to cheat it out. Then, with one of ours dying if we didn’t chase her, we would have to either leave the area or to lose a powerful ally. I considered it anyways. Truth was, I feared facing her without anti-magic, even with Zack and Marcus by my side.

  But as I saw that the head ranger’s head was actually being pulled by the threads of his own blood deeper into the woods I ran over and started pulling at the nails embedding him into the tree with my bare hands. Soon enough our fighters were there to see my futile attempt, and each took one nail and ripped them out as easily as toothpicks out of not particularly firm banana peel. The ranger slumped forward, and was about to fall in the direction that the blood was pulling him, his hands and face clearly being physically pulled in her direction. Zack caught him.

  “Fuck it, carry him. Zack, you’ll be faster,” I said, and Zack picked up the ranger and threw him over his shoulder without any obvious strain. The strands of blood flowed around Zack’s body and clothes, going directly for the witch in the woods.

  “We have to follow her if he’s going to survive,” I said.

  “That’s her plan,” Marcus said.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “We’re still going,” Marcus said.

  “Yeah,” I said, with a sigh, but it was what it was. We had to deal with her anyways, and if she could counter my chronomancy, waiting here until the spell ran out would do little to help. So we started running.

  I did still try to cast the spellrod. The radius of the spell was large enough that there was some hope that she couldn’t do anything to me while we were in the anti-magic area. Her solution to it was, apparently quite simple. As soon as words of spellcraft crossed my lips, I heard screeching and cawing from above and what from a distance looked like ravens dive-bombed towards me. When they came close enough, I saw that these too were conjured beasts with attributes of several different avians and lizards- instead of beaks they had iguana heads with needle-sharp teeth. They dove disrupting my concentration and attacking me with tooth and claw. Any other spell in my repertoire, this wouldn’t have mattered. Zack and Marcus could intercept them within seconds after they hit me, I could almost always spare some focus for dodging, and I could usually cast through pain, but with the 4th rank spellrod all of my focus was required.

  I didn’t bother a second time. Without the ranger on Zack’s back it would have been worth trying it over and over again until I managed the spell, but with him rapidly expiring as the witch retreated further away from the area of anti-magic it was a matter of life and death. Tactically it was still obviously the right thing to do- sacrificing one man to remove her spellcasting ability was a trade that would win us the fight easily, but not one I was ready to make yet. As we approached the edge of the anti-magic field, I held my breath, knowing that something awful was coming.

  We crossed that invisible line. And nothing happened.

  “She’s trying to kill him off first, we’ll have to get in close,” I said, following the floating helix of blood-threads deeper into the woods, and the rest of my party followed.

  “Tactics?” Marcus said, running next to me without a sign of physical strain.

  “She’s a conjuration specialist. Watch for conjured creatures. Elemental spells from any direction. Worst case, portals and teleportation,” I said. The bloodline hadn’t jumped in any strange erratic way so far, and I hoped this meant that she wasn’t teleporting around, because if she was then we would have no way of ever guessing which way an attack would be coming from.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I heard her voice chanting before I saw her. So did my friends, and we sped up to find her in a less densely wooded part of the forest. She stood atop a boulder, arms outstretched, atheme in one hand, chalice in another, a ball of blood magic energy coiled in front of her. As the conscious one of our two rangers let loose a third arrow at her, she concluded her spell. The blood in front of her burned to ash and dust and the link was broken. The ranger on Zack’s back took a gasp, though it was pained and weak, he was no longer mumbling in semi-consciousness, but pushing off from being carried and landed on his feet.

  And then, around us, three golden orange portals appeared, surrounding us. Then, with a sense of foreboding I looked up, and sure enough, a fourth one was there. Monsters spewed forth from each, two at a time and without apparent end. From above more flying monsters like the ravens back before descended. I swung my staff wide, expending the two remaining uses of Invisible Barrier to create a basic invisible labyrinth around us- really just a few invisible walls the monsters would have to circumvent or climb over- which would only slow the monsters down a bit, not stop them.

  They massed around us for a while before they charged. It was the same mixture of beast, man and monster as before, all nightmarish, all stronger than an average Earthling back home, but nothing our fighters couldn’t handle, and so I immediately stopped paying attention to them, looking for Jea instead. And immediately noticed that she was nowhere to be seen.

  So I let the carnage unfold around me, trusting my allies to protect me and cast the Pseudoportal spell, focusing on her as the target. It still took me more time than I ever could have spared fighting alone, screams and roars surrounded me, bits of flesh flew over my head, blood sprayed into my face, but this was a third tier spell- complex but familiar. And so the tear in reality appeared and I saw her through it. She was in the woods, on her knees, working at the roots of the trees with her silver atheme, carving runes into them. I had no idea what she was trying to do, but saw that she was not paying enough attention to her surroundings to notice the pseudoportal appear behind her. Good.

  Step one in my plan was to cause her pain. I cast Greasefire, the single-target variant, first covering her in oil and then lighting it. I saw her first jump with surprise as the cold oil hit her from where she couldn’t see it, and then fall to the ground, desperately trying to put the fire out as it engulfed her. I too folded over in pain, as my organs lurched and burst from my use of blood magic- inevitable with Pseudoportal-, but she was on the ground. I assumed that this counted as her being incapacitated by pain, and so I used my infernal brand to make it worse.

  Brand of Suffering

  You may use suffering to fuel your spells. When a creature in possession of a Journal in your line of sight is incapacitated with pain, you may feed on the suffering of others. You increase the target’s pain. You recover mana in proportion to suffering observed. You increase the damage from your next offensive spell by a degree proportional to suffering observed.

  The mana that I’d just burned by casting a spell through the pseudoportal rushed back into my body, and she coiled over in pain. Then I saw her casting, and I knew that she’d cast the same spell of fire resistance that I had. But I had mana back, and I could keep going. I conjured icicle elementals around her, even with the first tier spell bursting a blood vessel in my nose, eye, ear with each incantation, but she was soon surrounded by my summons. And when they cut her enough that I could see her flinch back in pain, I used my brand once more. She collapsed on the ground.

  But this time she found my portal, reached towards it and cast as spell through it. I saw that it was just about everything she had in her. Even with her obvious mastery of blood magic the spell she sent through the portal back to me clearly was bad enough to make her collapse on her back at the mercy of the ice elementals surrounding me.

  But I couldn’t feel much triumph over her, as a ghostly hand, cold as ice grasped my throat and began squeezing. I lost my breath instantly, and when I went to my neck to rip the attacking spectral hand away, I found that it was incorporeal and I couldn’t touch it. Black spots began swimming in my vision, and I kicked out with my legs as I fell onto the forest floor, seeing monstrous ravens circling above. My health was already low because of my repeated blood magic use, and I could feel the last of it slipping away as I fell towards final oblivion, knowing that if I didn’t do something, no one else would be able to either.

  Then, for the first time in the Tower, I heard the voice of the other me in my head. A single word- ‘amulet’- came through, in my own thoughts and not at once. I understood immediately, and I collapsed the pseudoportal. As soon as it was gone, the amulet kicked in, protecting me from any spell cast by a caster that couldn’t see me. The hand was gone and I gasped for air, as I saw the fighters, having finished off the last of the monsters rushing in through the portals rush towards me.

  “She’s- she’s almost done. No mana, not much hitpoints. Get her, before it’s too late,” I croaked with raw, broken throat.

  The fighters and rangers turned to the woods, and the rangers found the trail in but an instant. But they needn’t have bothered. As they turned to follow her into the woods, there came out a blood-covered, burned and limping Jea-Aviter, who laughed even as her laughter made her cough up blood and burned throat lining. When she spoke, there was not much of the sonorous temptress left.

  “You almost got me right, pet. And you couldn’t have known better. Conjuration is a hobby. Necromancy is the only school worth studying,” she said, and suddenly dropped, painting a nearby root in her own blood, “And you’d given me too much time to finish my preparations.”

  Green light burst behind her. It filled the air all around Checkpoint in an aurora borealis of black magic energy.

  She dropped to her knees and let her atheme and chalice fall to the ground, and put her wrists together in front of her. “You have beaten me. I surrender,” she said, as the woods behind her began groaning with the voices of dead things come back to life.