-Excerpt from “My Talks with Glis’Merinda, Daughter of Exeter”
Written by Dak of Kell
Air breathes over me in a stream of cold fingers, tickling at the scales that spread out from my wings, buffeting the spans of reptilian skin stretched between the powerful bones. I feel alive with magic. As the power swells and pools into the heads of my twin staffs it vibrates the very air, that churning power flowing from my hands in a rush. I taste it too with my new senses; the lick of the affixes mixing is complex. At the end of my wooden staff, the head of the lamp cage burns a brilliant orange with shocks of white running through it. In my left hand, the moonsilver staff vibrates beneath my fingers, a slight whine on the air as green fire wreathes a halo before its end.
The beast down below, Satrix of the Flaming Sphere, turns its attention my way. Magic blooms off the red-furred wolf, creating a bubble around it as balls of fire spin into existence around it.
“It has a soul presence,” I realize.
The motes of fire orbiting the great beast’s head move, forming a triangular pattern, a spear of fire birthed from the air in the center. Only a few hundred feet separate us now as we stare at each other, our magic building.
Then, Satrix lets fly a brilliant arrow of burning fire. I meet it with my own bolt of consuming dragonfire from my moonsilver staff. The attacks collide, green fire swirling and mixing with the orange. A bloom of heat washes over me as the meeting fires grow together, consuming the very air in their short flash of life. I let go my other blast as the light shows the first hint of dimming, a ball of orange and white screaming down from the sky at the monster.
Satrix lingers on the high stone for a moment, its eyes tracking the descent of my fireball. The fire touches the tip of its soul presence, slowing, but refusing to stop. Before the two can meet, the great wolf vanishes, my ball of dragonfire detonating against the stone with a cough of dirt and fire.
Heat washes over me once more, and I see the world as red. There is the barest instant to bring my weapons up over my head as I track the source of the sudden heat. The tail of Satrix collides against my staves before they can cross one over the other like a falling tree. Its tail slips through my guard, hitting me in the face, and the world momentarily vanishes.
Everything is flashing colors, blue, green, blue, green. The wind whistling past my ears whispers that I am falling. I reach out with my wings, attacking the air, spreading wide the new appendages to catch the heaviest air that I can find. Without the air itself trying to aid me, I would scatter across the ground. Instead, my mind snaps back into order just moments from disaster, my flight in the air righting, and my crash against the ground becoming a merely painful landing.
My feet touch the grassy earth of a small barren circle in the middle of the forest. My legs scream with the effort of catching my fall, failing at the last instant, and driving my right knee into the giving soil with a crack and snap running up my thigh. I bite back the bone-breaking pain, teeth digging into my bottom lip hard enough to draw blood.
Without thought, my soul presence explodes off of me, a wave of red and gold pushing blanketing the entire clearing, overwhelming the great pain with myriad sensations: grass tickling against my skin, the smell of a hare hiding in its burrow, the running smoothness of a python slinking beneath the palm of my hand. The sensations of the forest around me never near a state to render me insensate, my anger is too great, and my attention floats upward toward my enemy.
Satrix stands on the air, the burning fires beneath its paws as steady as stones. My attention warps the air, the cloud of aura around me condensing and gaining direction, reaching up into the sky like an inverted twister. Our auras meet, and I feel the clash as they push against each other. The beast’s tastes like fire, a pure and burning passion pushes at my very soul like a coal. The meeting isn’t one sided, even as I feel him searing me from the inside out, the beast staggers in the middle of the air. It strains, legs wobbling as it tries to stay balanced on the fires beneath its feet, but I pour all my anger and malice into the presence wrapping it. A thought strikes me for the briefest moment, something that I don’t even know is possible or not.
I let slip the fire affix printed on my soul, pouring the manifestation of magic into my soul presence the same way that I might add it to my dragonfire. The heat brushing my soul slackens, falling away to something no more than the slight warmth of the sun on my skin. The red of my soul grows darker, a deep crimson as the gold recedes, squeezing tighter on the lighter red of Satrix’s soul presence like a fist on the neck of a captured animal. The wolf’s legs shake terribly as it fights against me, but it’s no use.
Its front paw slips, sliding off the fire it is perched on and swinging into open air. The beast’s other legs follow in quick order, and it plummets from the sky far faster than is natural. Satrix falls like a meteor, spinning as it howls. A light flashes through its condensed aura, and it vanishes once more, appearing in the air fifty feet away from me.
I give it no time to readjust, ripping it from the air before it can find its paws on floating fires once more. Satrix falls sideways, crashing into the grassland hard enough to shake the earth. A smile touches my lips as I push myself to my feet, feeling tenderness in my leg. I realize now that Lamplighter’s Charge is gone from my hand, lost somewhere in my fall. I can find it later.
Satrix pulls itself to standing again, and I notice for the first time how massive the creature really is. It is well bigger than even the dire bears had been, and fires begin to bloom inside its soul presence once more as it turns its attention my way. I notice that it favors one leg, unable to recover from the fall nearly as quickly as I can.
My moonsilver staff shines brilliantly as I swing it toward the beast, a ball of orange dragonfire spinning away. Satrix has no time to return an attack of its own, the motes of fire gathering in front of its mouth barely able to condense in time. The dragonfire passes through the barrier where our souls brush against one another, and again I see it slow the barest bit. Dragonfire explodes against the head of Satrix, the spinning inferno of fire obscuring it entirely. The grass wilts around the monster, pushed into the dirt charred and ruined.
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Then the light clears, and Satrix stands just where it had been. A patch of fur on the side of its face stands barren, tan skin peeking from between burned fur, but otherwise undamaged. It roars, and I see the arrow of fire explode away from its face, larger now than I have ever seen it.
I fall, turning my own soul presence on myself to slam me into the ground faster than should be possible. The air is driven from my lungs as the arrow of flame sails over me, the kiss of its passing searing the left side of my face and hand. The arrow detonates in the forest behind me, and I hear trees falling.
The wolf appears in the air above me, its paw crashing down, looking to smash my head like a melon. The huge wings on my back vanish into smoke as I roll to the side.
I ignore the pull as some of my hair comes away, pinched between its paw and the earth. I ignore the shaking of the ground as the creature lands with its full weight. I ignore the nightmare that flashes in front of my eyes, my head squashed to bloody pulp on the ground, my team coming to find me after they finish their own fight. I ignore the sensation that comes back to me, what it felt like to have my skull crunched by the Desert Spearman.
Satrix is already snapping forward as I try to roll to my feet, its jaw wide as it lunges to snap me in two. I scream at the creature as it jumps forward, a gout of blue flame belching from my mouth. Satrix chokes, my fire pouring down its throat, and I just manage to turn away from its lunge. It steps past me, stumbling, its back legs catching oddly on the ground and falling sideways to crash into the ground as if falling from a great height. Satrix chokes and sputters as I bear down on it with the weight of my soul presence and the blue fire of cold pouring from my mouth, giving it no time to recover. Its front paws struggle to hold it up, shaking with the effort, blue fire dribbling from its mouth like saliva. The blue burrows into it, burning past just the outermost layer of its fur, charring away the skin to a blackened, frostbitten, ruin that cracks open to reveal the flesh beneath to the freezing touch of the fire.
A howl shakes not just from the throat of Satrix, but out of its very soul presence. A dot of burning orange appears over its head, but I can see such an enormity in the singular spec that my blood runs cold. I breathe in even as the dot shudders, cutting away my own freezing flames. There is no time to call on my wings. I can’t get away from it in time.
Darkness.
The becomes the surface of the sun. A sphere of fire so bright that it strikes creatures blind for miles, heat enough to render even the trees at the edge of the clearing into vaporous dust before a long and sustained howl scatters them. Flaming death becomes the world, but my world is a void of light.
The shaking in the earth ceases, the vibrating stalks of grass growing up around my boots floating back into straightness. Light cracks in through a shell in the pitch dark, and it comes along with a rush of heat. I stand in the center of an eggshell made of black sand, safe form the explosion of fire.
The walls of the barrier around me begin to collapse into spiraling balls of dust collecting around me. With all the focus of my mind mustered, I can control six spheres of the sand at a time, but now I only give myself enough concentration to keep three in the air around me, grains of dark sand sinking into the growing spheres from the air.
Grass withers back from the clean line in the dirt showing the edge of my impromptu shield. Thin, hot air washes all around me, but it is nothing. A ring of fire smolders around me, those trees not utterly destroyed by the eruption of Satrix’s flame now alight and burning brightly. Everything other than the circle of discolored grass around me is burned smooth, only the barest hints at charred remains telling this clearing as ever being anything other than a desert in a forest.
Satrix sneers at me from a dozen paces away, its legs still shaking with the effort of supporting its own body. One of its rear legs has gone lame. The beast dribbles spittle from its mouth that looks almost like molten rock.
“The Flaming Sphere,” I say, noting the burned away clearing around us. My balls of black sand dance around me much like Satrix’s motes of fire did, though these balls of sand are the size of pumpkins, where Satrix’s motes had been much smaller things. I feel a tug on me as the motes pass before my eyes, a tickle of taste at the back of my throat, cinnamon. I pull on that sensation, my eyes widening as grains of sand glowing bright with heat out of the black spheres. The grains collect into a sphere of their own, the size of a chicken egg, but glowing as bright as the midday sun.
The outermost shell of the sand barrier must have absorbed Satrix’s eruption of fire somehow, the mana persists inside it.
Fire springs to light around Satrix’s head once more as it prepares to create another arrow, but it give it no time. A black sphere fires forward like a cannon shot, spinning and changing into an eight-sided geometry, the ends long and sharp like a spear. Satrix just managed to leap to the side, but its legs fail to catch it as its own weight drives it into the ground once more. A second black spear strikes for its face as it struggles on the ground. Hardened mud sprays from the ground as the magical beast vanishes.
Inside my soul presence, I feel it the instant it appears. My final sphere spins into place, becoming a sheet of sand between me and the swiping claw of Satrix. Satrix’s claw lands on the sheet of black sand, scratching a whine that shakes the very air. I totter sideways a step, feeling as if someone punched me directly in the brain, but I keep my feet. A hole is blown through the sheet of sand from where Satrix’s paw landed, and through it I see the beast open its maw wide as an arrow condenses in its mouth.
The final ball of sand, the smallest one already alight with Satrix’s own mana, sail forward, straight into the great wolf’s mouth. I stop the ball just inside its open jaws before it can realize and react. As I fling my fingers wide, the ball becomes an eight-spoked wheel, the points of the spokes stabbing straight through Satrix’s flesh and piercing out the top and bottom of its muzzle.
Satrix cries out in its pain, managing to tug the wheel of sand impaling it from inside its mouth a few inches back, but I hold the sand still with as much effort as I can muster, trapping the creature. The gathering magic inside Satrix’s mouth pours into the already glowing sand, sinking in like water down a drain. The wolf cries out pitifully as it tries to move. Even my anger at the beast begins to wane. I can’t let this go on.
Two spears of black sand stab down from the sky, one sinking through Satrix’s neck before stabbing into the barren earth, the other its chest. Life vanishes from the great beast’s eyes as the spears sink home into the ground. I release my hold on the sand, letting it crumple into piles on the earth that drift toward the sheet of black hovering before me. The body of Satrix collapses to the ground, shaking the earth before coming to lay still.
You have defeated Satrix of the Flaming Sphere
THRESHOLD FOR SOUL REINFORCEMENT REACHED!
THRESHOLD FOR SOUL REINFORCEMENT REACHED!
I can’t help but feel a sense of sadness as I look over the body of the beast. The last red remnants of the monster’s soul presence crumble away inside my overbearing aura, splitting and melting away like the detritus of dead leaves. I feel in that moment, the earth a strange crimson as my soul stretches out to touch the burning clearing, that it would be no a thing to reach out with my power and take Satrix.
More than a dozen feet away, I watch as Satrix’s body begins to dissolve into pink smoke, drifting up into the air and washing over me, vanishing. Three spheres of black sand and one glowing almost white hover in the air around me as I call back my wings.
This was a good first fight at rank two. I take to the air, my thoughts trying to linger on the rush of the conflict, but I don’t allow them. I force myself to look to the copse of colorful trees peeking out above the forest, where my ship and team has vanished to. My soul presence wrings in tight, forming a condensed ball around me not more than an arm's length away. There is still more fighting to be had.
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