Issue #59 – Return of the Magi
Part 5
Shock didn’t last long in the mercurial mind of Morganna. Where she was agog one moment, a savage grin split her face the next.
“You. I…I’ll be rid of you soon enough.”
Tatiana kept her astral grip firm on the sorceress’s arm and fixed her with a hateful glare. “After what you’ve done to me—to my niece? I’d rather die with you than let you get what you want out of this.”
“But…” Morganna didn’t struggle in the other woman’s grasp, “but you can’t stop me. I… I’ve already started the ritual and you… you… you’re still just a thing in my head.”
Ephemeral brought his spear up into a guarded position. He wasn’t sure what it meant for Tatiana to be expressing as an entirely separate presence on the astral now and was forced to admit that there was still much he didn’t understand about astral mechanics and symbolism. Even then, this was a unique occurrence he couldn’t have been expected to anticipate.
“The problem is you head.” He told Morganna, drawing her attention for the first time since she laid eyes on the woman whose body she’d stolen. “There is something wrong that goes beyond chemical imbalance and physical defect and it drives you to doing terrible things.”
Morganna narrowed her eyes at him. “I am who I am. Morganna who… who turned against the bear-man. Whose… son… was taken from her by the bear-man. Who… who will return the magic to the world.”
None of it appeared to impress Ephemeral. “We shall see.”
He concentrated. Reading and manipulating minds from the astral side was even more difficult than it was from the material. The astral was a literal sea of raw emotional energy and it clouded even the most clear thoughts. But there was no way he was going to get his physical body to the top of the tower, so he made due.
Even if he had been in his real body, he wouldn’t have been prepared for Morganna’s mind.
All minds were chaos, but the controlled chaos of a hurricane; surface thoughts extending outward, tethered to the swirling mass of memory, imagination and delusion that made up the human psyche. And at the center was a core of self awareness; the fundamental truths that declared ‘I Am Me’
Morganna’s mind was only superficially like that. The thoughts at the surface bubbled and writhed, blinking from the surface to the depths rapidly and without pattern. It was no wonder that she talked slowly and repeated herself: the mere act of speaking required her to stalk and pin every stray thought.
And at the center of it all was no self image or deeper need. Instead, there were two ideas at war, yet unrelated, overlapping, yet unconnected. Ephemeral got the sense of a father who never seemed to be pleased to young Elise’s satisfaction and the power she thought could make her perfect.
In a ruin around this was the wreckage of a story that was familiar to him and intimate to her. The memory was of a story told to Elise of Halfren, but it had a broken solidity to it as if it were reality.
“You were mad before you every touched magic.” Ephemeral realized, seeing both the woman before him on the astral and her mind at once. He worked his powers against that tortured jumble; seizing squirming fragments and forcing them into focus.
Morganna sagged under the assault, eye going wide with shock.
“Now do you see?” Ephemeral demanded. “I’ve given you focus so you can see the madness of what you want—the things you’ve done and almost done if not for us preventing it. Pain. Suffering. Death. Across two worlds, and all so you can satisfy yourself?”
Morganna’s head pitched forward and dark hair fell around her face. “I do see.”
“Then you will stop?”
Slowly, she raised her eyes and locked her gaze to his. “Never.”
Ephemeral’s sense detected the action in her mind at the speed of thought, but he couldn’t comprehend what she was doing. The astral plane warped and rolled, causing him to plant the butt of his spear to keep his footing on the plane. A power beyond his own blew past his control of the local astral and tore the astral matter that constituted the air and floor asunder, reassembling it into a circular wall within the tower that ensconced Morganna and Tatiana.
Focus, he realized too late, he had given her focus so that she could see the evil she’d done. But that same focus let her use powers that her scattered thoughts could not have achieved on their own. Knowing that throwing himself against that wall would be pointless, he opted to return to his body and explain to the others.
***
On the other side of the wall, Ephemeral’s alterations started to fade from Morganna’s head like a regenerating wound.
With the last dregs of it, she withdrew fully from the astral, knowing that once she did, Tatiana Farnsworth couldn’t harm her directly.
She taunted her unwilling host as she once more approached the cistern. “I remember now. You’ve been distracting me all this time. Making me…” She paused, her mental tapestry starting to unravel again, “worse than normal. For that, I will kill you once the transference is over. You and… and…” she struggled, trying to reclaim the line of thought. “Yes… and your niece.”
***
Inexorable’s fist slammed into a hastily raised shield, which held long enough for Darkness to fly out of harms way. It exploded into evaporating shards shortly thereafter. Darkness had been trying to hit him from the back, but he turned too quickly.
Codex watched as she tried to get the ADS back into shape for a higher energy attack. Hope was beside her, watching over Kareem when he suddenly came awake.
“K… um… citizen.” Hope exclaimed. She hadn’t been briefed on his false identity for the day. “Are you alright?”
Wincing against the bright light of the sun in his face, Kareem let her help him up into a sitting position. “Keenan.” He whispered to her in the process.
“And I afraid that my own plan for neutralizing Morganna failed. Taking away her insanity only made her a more competent and powerful villain.”
“I did that once.” Hope groaned. “Impact at that renaissance fair. I get where you’re coming from. Learn anything that can help?”
Kareem turned on his comm so the team could hear. “Only that her host is trying her best to help. I have the impression that she delayed her action to let me try mine. Unfortunately, she isn’t trained and has no natural powers over the mind. At best, she might buy us a few minutes.”
“We had best make good use of it then.” said Codex. “Ideas, people. We need to break through that wall. Occult?”
“Working on it.” Occult broke off her part in the attack on Inexorable to see if her latest search in the Books had turned anything up. “All high yield explosive or disintegrating spells require reagents I don’t have and frankly, the tower is meant to stand against magic anyway.”
Darkness looped around overhead to strafe in tandem with Zero. “If we call the general, what are the chances of getting an airstrike called in?”
“On US, soil?” asked Codex? “About as good as you performing blindfolded brain surgery.”
Occult split her unhappy look between the Book and the tower. As it turned out, Manikin’s taunts and the moral dilemma that came with it were pointless in the end. She didn’t have a way to stop the transference anyway.
Inexorable weathered another barrage of black heat and psychokinetic bursts, then smiles broadly at his opponent before going down on one knee.
“This is bad.” Chaos’s voice suddenly reported. “the manikin just teleported away with the knights.”
“Distraction’s done.” Codex translated gravely. Nevertheless, she continued working on the ADS. “And over here, Inexorable just dropped to a knee.”
“Football fan.”
“What?”
Chaos coughed once into the mic. “In football, you take a knee when all you need to do to win is run out the clock.”
Occult heard this and looked to the top of the tower. That’s where Morganna and her aunt would be. Where the transference would be taking place; safe within the walls of the fortress tower. She called up the entry on wizard’s towers again and stared at it, hoping for something to jump out at her.
Only it didn’t. It was just the same descriptions of how impregnable and regenerative the walls were and how they were reinforced against spells meant to counter magic of that sort. Even after the tower was done growing, the outer walls were continually enchanted with a self replenishing spell powered by the leylines. Morganna’s tower wasn’t even the most formidable; most wizards filled the interior with wards and mundane security and reinforcement as well.
Wait…
She stopped and read it again. The outer walls were continually…
Outer walls.
“Chaos.” She said into the comm with all urgency. I need you here now. Darkness, do you remember how you two knocked Inexorable out last time?” She was on the move, running up to where Kareem was still sitting.
“After you knocked out his powers?”
Occult knelt down beside Ephemeral. “Exactly. Only I need you to keep it compressed a little bit longer.” To Kareem, she said. “Can you contact my… Morganna’s host?”
The mentalist shook his head apologetically. “Morganna sealed herself and her mind away after my last attack.”
Tightness clenched in Occult’s chest. She wouldn’t even get to say goodbye.
Maybe she deserved that, considering in the end, it wasn’t about what was right that spurred her decision as much as the realization that even if she got her aunt back in the deal, they would never spend time together again because Lisa would have to be Occult full time, fixing the mess she started by letting Morganna regain her power in the first place.
Someone took her hand. It was Kareem.
“I think you should know,” His face was still changed from the glamor, but that didn’t keep her from seeing the soulful compassion in his eyes, “She told me that she would rather take Morganna down with her than allow her to win.”
She squeezed his hand, then spoke into the comm. “Alright, here’s what we’re going to do.”
***
Alone at last, she slipped under the surface beside herself.
The liquid was neither magic, nor matter but a state on the border between the two where metaphysics and physics collide and come into balance. It had no taste or smell and had no temperature beyond its surroundings. Merely a medium in which the spirit could exist freely for a short while, it was the key element in many rituals including the transference.
Staring up at the ceiling, Morganna reached out a hand and brushed the arm of her old body. Now there was warmth in it, a heartbeat and breath. All it lacked was a mind. Her mind.
Through the medium and the stone of the cistern, she sensed the thrum of the leyline energies as they fed into the tower. The anticipation was a thrill all its own. She had come so close before; becoming great and laying waste to anyone who would try to do the same to her.
It was fuzzy now. She felt like so much had been perpetrated on her. Her spells sealed, the spirit trapped, her brother? Did she have a brother? She must have. He was the bear man and he murdered her son. But why didn’t she remember that son’s birth or childhood?
All these questions were discarded as she homed in on her real desires. Magic was dead in this world. It was up to her and only her, as the greatest sorceress that ever lived to revive it. If that meant that those creatures called ‘psionics’ and lowly common folk with no magic bled for it, it didn’t matter. Magic was everything. Magic was all she was. And as a plant grows toward the sun, so too did she stretch toward the power.
The liquid medium started to ripple and currents formed beneath the surface as the transference spell took shape. Light filled the cistern and in turn, the room with vivid light.
***
Light also spilled from the globe of water in Chaos’s hands as he arrived at the tower. Using water supplied by a fountain on campus walk, he’d created a basketball sized Chaos Nova and was putting every ounce of concentration not keeping him airborne into keeping it stable.
Inexorable noticed and called up to him. “Is that for me? Let’s see what you’ve got; last time you drained my power and it still only put me out for a few minutes. This time, it probably won’t even make me flinch.”
“As much as I wish it was, this isn’t for you.” Chaos shouted back, but his voice was so strained from focusing that it didn’t carry any real menace.
A flash of gold heralded Facsimile as she landed in front of the Knight. “But don’t worry: you’re about to have your hands very full.”lunged, but at the last moment, sidestepped to reveal that the four magi from UMW were behind her, having been shielded from Inexorable’s view by her wings.
Jeremy pushed both hand forward while Jennifer backed him up with a power boosting enhancement to the spell. The Knight Inexorable was catapulted with cannon force backward into the tower wall, where he then came under heavy bombardment by the cement slabs that had recently made up the front steps of the administration building.
Thought the flying chunks of rock and dust bounded Sweet Clyde, his reflexes amped to allow him to dodge nimbly through the fray to deliver his own addition to the mayhem at Elle’s behest.
With her target now off balance and gagging on skunk stench, Facsimile plunged in throwing wild haymakers. The object wasn’t to beat him, but keep him busy.
Occult saw it for what it was instantly.
“There’s our opening.” She said over the comm.
“I hope this works. It might be our last shot.” Darkness called up a massive fog of black heat around herself. It formed a comet tail behind her as she spiraled up the tower.
“It should.” Occult tried to hide her mixed emotions on the subject. “A wizard’s tower by itself is only described as having magically hardened walls. It’s up to the wizard to use spells to strengthen the inside. As far as I can tell, the floors are only built to hold up weight, not repel damage.”
Chaos met Darkness above the tower. “That’s still a lot of magically created rock to punch through.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem.” Darkness brushed hi shoulder as she passed him in air. “If I keep my black heat tightly focused and as hot as possible, a few thin layers of rock won’t matter.”
“Just remember not to let the nova go off until the bottom floor.” Occult reminded.
The Chaos Nova was released into a cloud of black heat, which cocooned it and held it aloft. The light within flickered through the rare gaps in the cover. The pressure and heat the black heat added would multiply the energy released when it went off.
“Ready? Chaos asked.
“Ready.” Darkness confirmed. She separated from him and floated dead center over the tower. A maelstrom of black heat particles surrounded her, coiling around an epicenter formed of the Black Chaos Nova.
“Fax, get ready to pull back. We don’t know what’s going to happen once the seed fails.” Occult warned. Then she reached up and muted her comm. “Goodbye, Aunt Tay. I’m sorry.”
From the eye of the dark hurricane around Darkness, a shaft of ebon power lanced down. At it’s center winked a light that spoke of great destructive energy. The black heat lance hit the tower roof and drilled through it, then it hit the next and the next.
Each successive floor strike within the structure was punctuated by a resounding crash of splintering stone until the tenth, which was instead met with a muffled explosion and a sizzling noise. The sizzling preceded silver-blue arcs of lightning that raced up the sides of the tower.
They grew in number and density, sinking into the stone for less than a minute. Then the tower imploded.
About Vaal
Landon Porter is the author of
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