Beside him, the Reaper slowly sat up. His sunken, dead-fish eyes stared out toward the river unblinkingly, and the leaf he’d been enjoying fell from his mouth as his jaw slackened.

  “What in the name of the immortal First is that?”

  On one side of the bridge, where the fast, turbulent waters of the Dunnser splashed against rocks and foamed white, a large whirlpool was forming. Only instead of pulling the water deeper, it was surging up. The strong current of the river fed into the whirlpool as it gathered up more and more water, rising up like a giant column emerging from the surface of the river.

  It rose higher and higher, until the mass of water reached the height of the bridge. Alex could see the water swirling violently inside the column, the sound of it like a continuous crash of waves. It reminded him of his own fire and how he rotated it inside itself to keep it contained. Tendrils of water suddenly sprung up from the top of the column. They too curled around each other, forming bulges of water that slowly took the shape of a hand and fingers.

  Around him, everything had ground to a halt. Valerian and Bryon stood in stunned stillness. Cedric’s visage grew haunted as he held his weapon before him. It almost looked like he was trying to hide behind his glaive.

  “No,” he whispered, horrified.

  The young couple and the old woman’s family all stopped too, watching in disbelief as the column of water became a colossal arm beside the burning barricade on the bridge. Alex felt paralyzed, like he was witnessing a natural catastrophe he could do nothing to stop. Smoke curled around the mass of the arm. Steam hissed out into the air where fire was closest to water. The water seemed to bubble and boil there, but the river fueled the giant arm no matter how much of itself was lost to the heat.

  When it happened, it almost didn’t seem real. The hand curled into a fist as massive as a small house. The arm pulled back, hovering above the fire for a moment, then it came down. The impact was thunderous. The whole bridge shook as if it had been hit by an artillery shell. Steam and smoke exploded out, random pieces of half-burnt wood flew like bullets through the air.

  Alex found he’d thrown himself on the grass, hands tight over his head. When he looked up, he had to squint to see the bridge through all the steam. The fire still raged fiercely in most of the barricade, but the leftmost side of it had nearly gone out, the piled up objects there broken and scattered. Hovering near it, the whole upper half of the water arm was gone. But as he watched, the hand started to slowly form again as the whirlpool at its base kept swirling and feeding the giant arm with water.

  The blacksmith was the first to snap out of it. “Go!” Bryon yelled at the villagers. “Go now, quick!” He ran up to one of the donkeys tied to the cart and slapped it in its flank. The animal whinied and took off in a trot.

  “Go with the villagers,” Valerian told them. “I’ll hold them off for as long as I can. You need to make sure they get to Holdenfor safely.”

  “No!” Daven stood, and by some magic of his class, his bow strung itself with a quick swipe of his hand. “You said it before. Even if we run, we won't be able to outrun them. We got to fight them here.”

  “A chaser’s death can be his greatest source of power. Trust me, I will hold them.” The paladin’s voice held no doubts. Alex saw the strength of his conviction on the set of his jaw. He’d accepted his death. Yearned for it, almost. Reaching into his pocket, Valerian took out what looked to be a coin and held it tightly in one hand. Then he strapped on his new shield and started toward the bridge.

  “I’m not going nowhere.” Daven followed him.

  “Crazy fools.” The Reaper was already on his feet, ready to make a run for it. “You can’t fight that, whatever that is.”

  Alex looked to Cedric, waiting to hear their crew leader’s plan. But nothing. The man looked like he’d been petrified where he stood. Alex wanted to scream at him. Screw this.

  “No one’s dying,” he announced. “And no one’s fighting either.” He stepped in front of the Reaper to stop him from leaving and grabbed him by the robes. “You do earth magic, right? Those supports there.” He pointed to the barely visible stone foundations of the bridge. “Can you take one of them down? At least weaken it?”

  A gleam of recognition appeared in the Reaper’s eyes. “You want to take down the bridge?”

  “No.” Alex looked as the water tendrils flowed together to form one finger then another. “I want to make it so the giant arm does it for me.”

  xx

  They just made it to the base of the bridge when the water fist pounded down again over the barricade. This close, the bridge’s groan grinded his ears like the gritty wail of a dying animal. Water sprayed all over them, and the visibility grew worse as the world became enveloped in steam. Alex could see an orange glow through the haze, but he couldn’t tell if they were just embers or if the fire still roared.

  Valerian helped him climb down the steep bank to a narrow bit of rocky land where the foundations of the bridge had been staked, two thick wooden pillars surrounded by large square-cut stones dug deep into the ground. The whole structure looked solid, the kind of thing you could reliably come back to in a hundred years and still find it standing despite time and weather chipping away at it.

  The Reaper followed behind him. Despite the man’s standoffish attitude, Alex didn’t think he wanted to see all these people get slaughtered either. He kept that in mind as he approached the closest support pillar. If his plan didn’t work, he’d be dooming himself, the crew, and the whole of Riverbend.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “So?” he asked the Reaper. “Can you do it?”

  The man knelt on the sodden, rock-strewn ground, his hands splayed out beneath him much like Diana did when she wanted to affect the earth. Alex noticed his hands didn’t touch the ground itself, only the gravel and rocks above it. Did they even need to touch the ground? And if they did, did it have to be the hands? Why not the feet, if they were already walking on the earth?

  The system of arteries that fed him power were coiled all around his body, not particularly congregating on the hands or anywhere else. Yet Alex himself still mostly used his hands to create his spells and traces. He’d never thought much about it before. It was all just very natural and instinctive.

  When he’d looked out to the other side of the riverbank before it all became shrouded in mist, he hadn’t seen anyone dipping their hands into the river. Did it mean that whoever was creating the massive water arm didn’t need to touch the water to affect it? Was there even a difference between controlling the different elements? A headache began to throb its way into his skull. Always too many questions and too few answers.

  The Reaper had his eyes closed for a few seconds.

  “And?”

  “Sturdy old thing.” He grunted and blinked up at Alex. “This is not my specialty, you gather? I deal with soil and mud mostly. Not cut stone. I can break up the ground around it, make it less compact, looser. Nothing I can do about the support itself, but it’ll make it wobble.”

  “It’ll have to be enough,” he said, trying to sound more certain than he felt.

  The Reaper shrugged and quickly got to work. The low rumble he’d come to associate with earth magic started, though he had to focus to hear it above the constant noise of water splashing and churning. The water arm seemed all the larger this close. No, it was getting bigger, he realized. The column of water rose higher, grew thicker. More and more water from the river coalesced into the mass of violently swirling water.

  “This better work, kid,” the Reaper said with a touch of fear.

  Despite being soaked, Alex’s mouth had gone dry as dust. High above, looming over the bridge, water tendrils as thick as tree trunks surged, coiled together like lovers in a dance, and the gigantic arm gained its last finger. Beneath his feet, the ground began to shake, like every particle of sand and soil was vibrating and shifting in place.

  “Done!”

  And not a moment too soon. The water hand closed into a fist. It looked big enough to put out every fire in a two kilometer radius.

  Alex let a wave of power blaze through his arms, filling him with superheated energy that bloomed over his hands. Two familiar explosive fireballs took form, small and compressed and eager to burst. He crammed them with as much power as they’d take, and as the water fist swung down to hammer the barricade, he shoved the fireballs against the stones of the foundation.

  Despite being right next to it, the boom of the explosion was not louder than the thunderlike crunch that followed. It sounded like the biggest egg in the world had just been cracked. Assaulted by all the noise, Alex didn’t open his eyes until after he’d been showered by a substantial spray of water.

  Then he looked out across the river and startled.

  “Huh.”

  The giant arm had crashed down and through the bridge, punching a hole through its middle where the barricade had been. If the span of the bridge was divided into three parts, then its center bit was just gone, floating away down the Dunnser in fractured pieces alongside half the furniture in the village.

  “I’m not sure we needed to be here soaked to the bone if this was the plan,” the Reaper piped up.

  Alex turned to the man standing next to the foundation. What he saw didn’t fill him with confidence. His most powerful trace had only shifted the bridge’s support pillar into a slight angle. The stones were a bit out of place and the wooden column inside looked charred, but the support hadn’t given out. If the water arm hadn’t overshot its power, the bridge would still stand, the Kruwal would have crossed, and Alex and the others would’ve been caught with their pants down because of his stupid idea.

  When Valerian pulled them back up to the green, Daven was standing there grinning like a maniac.

  “Whatever idiot they have doing the whole water thing is not much of a thinker, eh?” He laughed. “Classic mage stuff. Wait till I tell Diana about this.”

  Bryon the blacksmith was up there too. He was holding on to the lead of the same pony the crew had taken on their first trip to the dungeon. Behind them, the caged wagon they’d used to transport the Wild Boars was now used to carry a few of the man’s belongings.

  “We should get going,” he said. “Just because the bridge’s gone doesn’t mean they don’t have another trick up their sleeves.”

  The other side of the river was still mostly covered by the roiling mixture of smoke and steam. “Could this water mage, uh, stop the flow of the river so the Kruwal can cross?” Alex almost said ‘Moses-style’ but had the presence of mind to clamp down on his own tongue.

  The Reaper snorted. “Kid, if a someone like that was on the other side, we might as well just get it over with and slit our own throats. You won’t find many men in the world with that kind of power.”

  “It can’t be a man,” Valerian said. “Male Kruwals can’t wield magic. They must have a Matriarch with them.” The big man’s brow furrowed, then he shook his head. “No, the Matriarchs believe they get their powers from their mountain and sky goddesses. They’ve never been known to leave their valleys.”

  “And you have known those red-skinned bastards to prowl the forests around Riverbend, have you?” the blacksmith asked caustically. Valerian frowned at the question. “The world’s always changing, chaser. That’s the nature of things.” He spat to the ground. “Twenty years I’ve lived in this piss-stained village. Had never even heard of it before I came. Now, I doubt I’ll be coming back.”

  The pony neighed softly, agitated by the tone of his voice. Huffing, Bryon turned to calm the animal, running his hand over its mane. “Climb up already,” he called back. “We can still catch up to the others.”

  Quick as a cat, the Reaper pushed past them and leapt up onto the back of the wagon. Once settled, he looked back at them like him being the first in line was the most natural thing in the world.

  “What?”

  “Prick,” Daven grumbled, but he climbed after him. Alex let the injured Valerian go next before he stepped into the creaky wagon himself. Only the crew leader remained stuck in place, staring out across the river with a harrowed look on his face.

  “Cedric,” the archer called back. “Let’s go.”

  Cedric’s gloom lasted another heartbeat before he made his way up the wagon and they took off. Later, when their wagon had travelled over a long sloping hill and they no longer could see the village, smoke appeared over the canopy behind them. They watched quietly as the black plumes roiled and rose up into the cloudless blue sky.

  In their anger at being denied crossing, the Kruwal had torched the western half of Riverbend.