Chapter 29: The Archmage

Chapter 29

The Archmage

Whatever was keeping him together just snapped, and across the square, every flame went out.

The lanterns on the corners. The candles in the windows of the Compass. Every flame in Millhaven at the same time, with a sound, the clunk of two heavy stones smashing together.

The air couldn’t hold itself up anymore, folding and shrinking.

Frost crawled across the inn windows, then the whole street, icy crystals blooming in the time it took to suck in a breath. Water in the trough behind the stable snapped with a sharp crack. Somewhere, a kettle screamed once on a cold stove and then went quiet.

Kael’s knees folded beneath him, his hands hitting the ground flat on the freezing stone, shaking and giving out under the pressure. Garren’s cane snapped in two, and he stumbled, hitting the wall with his shoulder. Brenner was just about to shake the impact from the Hollow, but went down, hanging onto a hitching post like it was the only thing keeping him from hitting the ground. Kel was already curled up, hands over ears, like the silence was something heavy, crushing the bronze-rank.

Milo was on one knee, his arms in front of him, instinctively shielding his face. A faint dark red barrier of Aether was radiating around him.

Nyx, the barrier came from Nyx.

Her shape seemed bigger than before, a shadow around her in the doorway, a darker outline hugging her small body, the air thickening as if it were about to sprout wings. But she was struggling; this wasn’t her refusing to take form; she seemed unable to.

Milo stood up, eyes wide open. He started moving toward the Hollow, torwards Sera, out on the cobblestones, and Nyx’s Aether almost yanked him back.

• • •

Roen screamed.

It wasn’t even a word. Just the sound you make when words aren’t enough anymore.

The scream ripped out of him as Aether.

He didn’t control it, he wasn’t trying to control it. It wasn’t as spell he was casting, but him breaking open. Everything he’d been holding back just exploded out of him, a shockwave rolling along the ground, flattening dead grass in every direction. The cobblestones under his feet split in a starburst. The corruption field to the south caved in and burned away in one long second, leaving white earth that was already turning to glass under his boots.

The Hollow was still focused on Milo.

Roen raised one hand.

He didn’t choose the word. The word was already on his tongue, the kind of spell the Tower, he, had outlawed after the closing of the Gate.

“Vol takhen.”

A spear of compressed light left his palm. It went through the Hollow’s centre at a speed the air around it had no time to register. The Hollow did not die. It was not there anymore. One moment it had been a column of cold reaching toward a twelve-year-old boy, the next… the next moment it was nothing. A thin ring of pale ash dissolving before it touched the ground.

Roen let his hand drop, limp and uncontrolled.

He looked at Sera.

She had not moved.

• • •

More Hollows came out of the treeline.

The fourth, the one big one he saw during the scount, as big as Milos farmhouse now, had pulled itself out of the corruption pocket and was already across the dead zone, moving fast, drawn by the discharge. Behind it, four new shapes were closely racing towards Roen. The corruption that had been pooling for months had answered his flare by producing more of itself, and that “more” was coming for him now.

Roen walked south to meet them.

Walked, speed wasn’t a thing he needed anymore. He walked across the cracked cobblestones, past the dying frost, past Kael and Kel and Garren on their knees, past Brenner against the hitching post, into the dead zone that was no longer dead.

The first Hollow reached him at the boundary.

“Erethaal os’venn.”

A pillar of light punched through it from above and fused the ground beneath into a circle of blue glass twelve feet across. The Hollow wasn’t there.

Roen kept walking, one leg in front of the other. His face, cold and empty, devoid of emotion.

The other hollows came at him from the left.

“Drevaan.”

The space around them folded. All of them crushed into the fold. There was a single muted sound that wasn’t exactly a sound, and then there was nothing.

A new shape had formed, still pulling itself out of the earth. Roen raised his hand and spoke a syllable from his first life that he hadn’t let himself say in two hundred years, and the shape stopped pulling itself out. The ground around it, sealed, and it went back to… just ground.

He kept walking south, his breath full of rasp and heaviness.

Every spell was a withdrawal from a well the body couldn’t hold. His vision had narrowed at the edges. His mouth tasted of iron.

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The corruption field went quiet around him as he passed. The dead grass turned to glass under his boots, under each heavy step. The lower note that had been holding under the world for days broke apart and went silent in stages, one strand at a time, until only one strand was left.

And then the ground split.

• • •

A jagged seam opened across the bleached ground, and from it came something Roen knew.

He had felt it once before, in his first life, the year before he died. A pulse from a distant realm that the Tower had detected and couldn’t name.

It rose out of the split now. Not a Hollow. A column of compressed dark, twice the height the inn, with no exact face and no shape except the two horn-like shapes coming from the side of the top part of the darkness and only a vast, empty awareness leaning outward from its centre, looking at him.

It spoke directly into his skull.

— found you —

The voice wasn’t a voice. It was knowledge arriving fully formed. Roen felt it in his teeth as the bone vibrated.

— found you, keeper —

— the return —

— not yet —

He didn’t answer.

He spoke instead. With every remaining drop of Aether he had gathered and shaped and thrown at the column of dark. A spear of light larger than the one that had killed the Hollow. He poured everything he had left into it, and the spear hit the entity and casually slid off.

The void drank it.

The light was gone. The entity was not, it stood there. Motionless, almost… grinning.

Roen fell to one knee.

He was shaking violently and uncontrollably. He couldn’t feel his legs from the thigh down. There was a heat behind his eyes that was not heard per se, but the absence of aether.

This isn’t enough, he thought. Nothing I know is enough.

The entity took one step forward. It didn’t move toward him.

It moved toward Milo.

Roen stood up.

He had no reserves. He had no plan. He had nothing left to shape into a weapon. He stood up anyway, fighting through the pain and pressure. He opened his mouth and the world went white.

• • •

He was in the space between.

He had been here before. Once, at the moment of the regression, the instant between dying at three hundred and forty-two in his chair, and waking in his bed, nineteen years old in a body he hadn’t lived in for over three centuries. He hadn’t remembered being here. The memory had been buried, smoothed over by whatever had returned him.