The Red Knight

Sometimes plans did work out.

His trolls – the magnificent dhags – were cutting the knights to pieces. They were also dying, but he had more. Or he could obtain more. The Wild was fecund beyond human imagining.

He let the king fight on – on and on – until his reckless charge broke through the ring of bone and hide around the mercenaries. Around the dark sun.

The king and the dark sun together.

He took his gathered power, summoning every tendril that he could muster – the might that had been Thurkan, the souls of the fair folk, the convoluted essence of the Sossag shamans-

He savoured it, for a moment.

There was nothing to interrupt him, no distractions as he placed his power almost lovingly on a spot just between his two foes.

The edifice of his memory was no palace but a twisted yarn of ropes and webs, and he braided them in his mind with the mastery of an aeon.

Laid his hand to the completed cord, and cast.

Harmodius felt it, saw it, and cast his counter: a mirror. Even his counter had tails and vestiges – traps within traps. As he had learned.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain felt the moment the great phantasms were loosed as a single instant. It was as if fire or lightning had flashed through every inch of the air between the two casters.

He was Harmodius. As, for a moment, he had been Amicia.

There was no time.

He had so little left – but he gave it, straight into Harmodius’s arms. He reached and took from Amicia, who was herself fighting for her life – from Miram and her choir. And from the very sunlight around him.

And it wasn’t going to be enough.

The captain reached out to the great iron-bound door, and threw it open, and green light flooded into him.

He threw it through Harmodius to strengthen the counter work.

There was a thunderclap – a gout of white-green fire that shot into the heavens. A ripple in the curtain of reality so that, just for a moment, the veil of the world was wrenched aside. The captain saw black night pierced with white stars, and the dawn of chaos, and the rising plume of power that was the coming of the world.

Lissen Carak – Desiderata

Desiderata felt Harmodius’s power rise to meet the emerald giant – and she saw the deep subtlety of his mind in his casting.

But the emerald’s might was twenty times greater than that of the court Magus, and the tide of green rolled over him – dissipated, mirrored, channelled – but overpowering, like a rising river facing a plain full of channels and damns, yet eventually overcoming all of them to spill in one unstoppable flood-

But vast quantities of the emerald power hung in the air, cast aside by Harmodius’s counter spell. Or part of it.

The ripple of power passed the king, who watched, horrified, as Ser Alan was burned at his side, his armour straps charring, his face a livid red as he screamed – and man and horse collapsed. Beyond him, Harmodius frowned – his hand withered and blew away to ash and then, in a few hearttbeats, the Magus was subsumed. He turned to ash, crumpled and was borne away on the wind.

Thorn was struck by the mirror in the very moment of completion of his phantasm, and some of his own carefully hoarded power struck right back down the channel of his casting, burning him.

He screamed. Flinched. But far across the battlefield, Harmodius’s essence flickered and went out.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

The captain struck, the sword descending more from the force of gravity than from any power of his shoulders.

In the Aether he had Harmodius by the hand.

Take me, boy.

In one moment, the captain had to understand, and to act. He opened his way into his palace, seized the spirit of the dead Magus with one Aethereal hand and cast his own phantasm with the other. The air outside was heavy with discarded power, green and ripe for plucking, and he took it, aided by the meticulous ordering of last night’s foe, aided by the thaumaturgical knowledge of his tutor – of Amicia’s Wild casting-