The rumble of distant guns told Gaius Nezzar and Ibrahim Kalishah they needed to hurry, though they hadn’t exactly been dawdling before. Soon enough, they could make out the rising dust and the great airships in the sky. Then Mayat Shadr came into view, and then the leyline regulator. Above, the Divir moon was huge in the sky, having already begun its controlled descent two days ago. Near the edges of it, there was the faint glow of decaying magic, visible even in the daylight.
Even with the urgency of the situation apparent, he needed a moment to take it in. The western quadrant of the city had been returned to ruin, but seeing the rest of it rebuilt was a balm on his weary soul. He’d known those ruins since he was young. For hundreds of years, he’d watched them continue to decay.
And the regulator—!
His heart swelled with pride. His daughter had designed that. She’d told him of the scale, but seeing it was a different matter. It was monumental, exquisite, melding form and function. It was unlike anything he’d seen in his long life. For just a moment, he lessened the kinetic force pushing him for extra speed.
Then his aura swirled, and he redoubled the mana driving the spell. Below him, Ibrahim put on another burst of speed.
In the chaos, it was difficult to make out what was going on, but spotting the redeployment of the dreadnoughts was easy enough, and from the echoing roar, it was obvious what they were fighting. An opening, he thought. And they’d best not squander it—Gaius could just make out the battle moving closer to the edge of the outer shields. It too was easy to track, because as that fight moved, the city around it crumbled as high intensity spells blasted apart stone walls. Flashes of fire and lightning cut through the smoke. Zhuan and her guard were being pressed hard, that much was clear.
Gaius remembered his fight with Archmage Solvir. It had pushed him to his limit. That fight would look trivial compared to this one: the entire Archmage Company, backed by Sorcerer Elite, was pushing towards the shield and the regulator behind it. Naluri had warned him they were adorned with adamantium, and that Liuan had no doubt warned them of his favored tricks. Mere mana siphons and curses would be insufficient to tilt things in his favor.
He glanced up. No sign of her yet.
Engaging now. Breaking off communication. Do hurry, Gaius sent, and slowed down to let the cat off his shoulder. It hit the desert sands and scurried off to safety. “We take the center, together,” he sent to the dervish.
Below, Ibrahim raised his sword in acknowledgment.
As they closed in on the north of the city, Gaius conjured his black shield. As they passed by the border of Mayat Shadr, he lifted up a chunk of debris from below and used it to smash an Akanan skiff. There were soldiers battling on the northern flank. Fighting had become hand-to-hand in the trenches, and Gaius had no time to sort out who was who. He let loose his bindings, killing the Akanans who were hanging back first, but he also let his death spells rip through the trenches too. Sparing them would be foolhardy if his mercy cost them here. He needed as much soul energy as he could gather.
The archmages had the discipline of craft, but not of tactics. It was the Sorcerer Elite lookouts who saw them coming, but in the cacophony of the battle, their warning went largely unheeded. Zhuan Li was easy to identify—she too was using a black shield spell, and it was by her that the fighting was the most intense. There was fighting all along the western edge of the regulator and its defensive shield, but it was those elite forces in the center that would decide the battle. As Gaius consolidated his gathered soul energy, he watched as Zhuan desperately lashed out with blinding light beams and chunks of stone, but her allies were occupied with their own fights, and only a few of them were at the archmage level. As he took in the numbers, a grim fatalism fell over him. She was trying to fend off ten archmages at once. Outnumbered as they were, it was a miracle she and the Prophet’s Guard hadn’t fallen.
“For our families,” Gaius sent.
Ibrahim leapt.
The dervish’s soul blazed as it had when they’d dueled in his camp, fractal patterns that were flame-bright to his soul-vision, interlaced and woven in an armor that was nearly impervious to the arcane force. He extended that soul-pattern out to his sword.
Ibrahim descended. The Sorcerer Elite at the fringe of the fight put up layers of shields in front of his target, but they might as well be reeds defending against the scythe. His blade came down with perfect form. It passed through the shields, through the enchanted steel cuirass, through flesh, through bone—the arcanist’s soul was torn apart with such force that Gaius saw it fragment and splash outward.
It was beautiful, but it was also a lot of power. No energy in all the lands or stars was free; Ibrahim was burning his own soul to achieve these effects. Such a bright pyre would burn quickly. If the fight became one of attrition—Gaius’s favored tactic—they would lose. He let loose.
His opening black line spell was infused with soul energy from the soldiers he’d just culled. Where the dead had fallen, it burst apart their slowly fading souls in necrotic shrapnel, and where it struck Akanans, it brought foreign soul energy into direct contact with their attuned adamantium jewelry. Spell resistance softened the blow, but several weaker mages were killed outright. The survivors screamed, but their agony was drowned out by the very air being torn apart by barrages of spells.
Ibrahim had plunged right into the center of the levitating Akanan mages, and so did he. It was a suicidal maneuver, but it used the chaos of battle and the numbers of the Akanans against them. Their most destructive spells would be hard to use in close quarters, and with spells overwhelming the senses, they would be difficult to quickly pick out—especially if they kept moving.
As Ibrahim stepped off the air and cut one of the archmages in half, Gaius pulled debris from below. The archmages, knowing that indirect attacks were most effective at defeating their spell resistance, wrestled for control over the debris, using their own lift object spells to force the chunks of stone back down. That exposed them to a contest that Gaius did excel at.
Archmages tended to fall into a predictable pattern. They were so practiced, so efficient at casting, that they almost always used the most energy-efficient path. Those paths hadn’t changed in centuries, and so even with his divination blocked, Gaius knew where to cast. He attacked their spells at the point of transmutation, right where the arcane force would normally become kinetic energy. Instead, he wrapped as many spells as he could in siphons, then used that stolen arcane energy to fuel more of his spells. It was these cascades he’d used to such great effect against Archmage Solvir.
Spells slammed into his black shield, and Gaius worked to transform that energy too, even as he maneuvered through the chaos so that he wasn’t overwhelmed. The shield darkened to pitch black, but he wasn’t monitoring the battlefield through sight, but through souls. He saw Ibrahim’s soul blazing out like a second sun, leaping through the air as spells detonated around him, powerful slashes cutting through flesh and spell alike. He saw the muted souls of his opponents, the spell-resistant jewelry they wore clearly delineating them from the defenders.
He levitated through the air quickly, trying to keep his movements unpredictable. Despite his siphons, his mana was draining fast from the sheer number of spells he needed to defend against. Lighting and light crackled against his shield. Force and fire smashed into him. The air was incandescent. Gaius cast a second black shield, then a third, displacing them and then having those shields move about. Opaque as they were and with no soul-sight, the attackers had to split their efforts to multiple targets.
But he was being overwhelmed. Ibrahim was too; he was hemorrhaging soul energy far faster than Gaius had even thought humanly possible. His bright slashes were missing more as the archmages spread out to both to avoid him and avoid hitting each other.
Below, the archmages opposing the arch-necromancer had stopped fighting for control of the debris. Instead, they’d realized their spells were being sapped and were pulverizing everything around the battle, knowing if they made the rocks small enough, they’d easily be defeated by force shields. But, if they thought the only winning move wasn’t to play, Gaius had a surprise in store for them.
He’d had plenty of time to discuss tactics with Naluri as he was relegated to useless duties and she was acting as sentinel. Given his role in most timelines as chief runic architect of the device, the other Prophets had become familiar with most of his spells, and most of his tactics. However, she was of the opinion that his paranoid nature meant that he hadn’t demonstrated several of his best spells to the other Prophets in any timeline, and he was inclined to agree.
He had an ostentatious name for this spell, drawn from his favorite of the old Triarchic poetry books, but he thought it was worthy of it: the desert sands sweep away the world. Sure, he could have called it “sandstorm,” but that didn’t quite feel right for something of this magnitude.
This spell used glyphs from the classic manipulate particle spells so widely used by mages. Such spells were useful in cleaning up smoke or preventing hazardous air from choking miners, but few considered their applications in combat. A stream of sand was easier to deflect than a boulder with a force shield.
The battlefield was always the place to be most wary of a necromancer. When the killing started, there were souls in abundance. And unlike the mages he’d fought in the Unification War who had priests who actually knew something about containing or dispersing the souls of the dead during a battle, the Akanans had taken no such precautions here. The dead were scattered about by the thousands, and even as his decoy black shields shattered, he called them to him.
His grand spell mixed that soul energy into the sands. The glyphs and runes did all the work for him, matching each particle with a small bead of splintered soul. Individually, it was harmless.
Combined, it was a whirlwind of death.
“Get to Zhuan,” he tried to send to Ibrahim, and could only hope the dervish heard his remote voice.
Gaius cast, putting himself in the eye of the storm. Great winds whipped up spirals of sand and dust. The city the archmages had pulverized was now his wrath, spinning around him like the tempests of the eastern seas. He floated in the center of the Akanan forces, letting them feel his fury. The soul-infused sands smashed into the layered shields of the enemy mages. Surprised at first, he could sense dozens of them shattering. He saw several souls as they were caught up and scoured away, the adamantium helping them resist the foreign soul energy burrowing into and burning their own, but only for so long. Several fresh corpses dropped out of the air, their tattered souls joining the spiraling sandstorm.
The soul-infused gyre also acted as a second layer of protection, dissipating the arcane energy of any spell passing through it, giving Gaius’s shield much-needed relief. He fed everything into it, mana pouring from his aura. For a brief moment, the Archmage Company was put on the defensive. Dozens of them flew backward, retreating away even as they recast shields or attempted to use their own particle-manipulation spells to push away the sand. Several, though, weren’t fast enough. He pushed streams of sand down the throats of two archmages, and scoured away the flesh of another. Some of the lesser mages, exhausted from their defense, let their levitation spells lapse, some dying in the fall.
Then the archmages regathered their strength and retaliated. Spell after spell pulled away his storm while others redoubled their assault. Lighting crashed down on Gaius while fire pushed his shield to the brink. He cast a second shield layer, tried siphoning their spells, but there were just too many of them.
The sandstorm dissipated. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ibrahim flung back from the battle by a sheet of metal smashing into him. Gaius couldn’t hold. His mana was draining too fast, and no energy transmutation could compensate for the difference in total power.
He flew towards the regulator and the defenders, calling his undead constructs to ignore the Akanan infantry and join him. Several of them had made it to the fringes of the fight where they’d felled some of the weaker arcanists, but the rest had either been delayed or destroyed by the relentless bombardment. A quick glance at the battlefield told him that things were dire. Ominian’s Army forces had been pushed back to the last line of defenses around the shield, and the shield itself was taking heavy artillery fire.
As he flew next to Zhuan, he said, “Almost!”
A haggard Zhuan gave him a grim nod and recast her shield. Gaius sent out flurries of spells in every direction, infusing what soul energy he could into each, breaking down the excess soul energy he gathered into mana. But he could only reincorporate that mana into his own aura so fast, and not only was his aura growing thin, it was destabilizing from the low-grade mana influx. Zhuan’s spells were growing weaker too, even as, together, they held the center.
A battered Ibrahim rose up from a pile of rubble he’d been buried in, but his soul was no longer as bright, and Gaius could sense the currents flickering. Blood ran down his arms. He raised his blade to cut apart a spell aimed at him, but it was clear he was tiring.
Zhuan’s bright disintegration beam pierced an Akanan sorcerer, then sizzled off the shield of an archmage as she swept it around. Gaius let loose with force and fire spells, casting curses where he could against any mage he found without sufficient spell resistance.
Spells continued to rain down on them, endless torrents of fire and lightning, blades of force the size of carriages, and showers of steel fragments as the Akanan army pushed to support their forward mages. Several of the Prophet’s Guard fell. On the flanks, most of the remaining guns and smaller shield engines were pulverized.
Within a minute, his aura was so depleted he had to put all his mana into his shield, switching to a defensive role, landing by the remnants of the Prophet’s Guard. Only Zhuan remained in the air now.
On their flanks, the Ominian’s Army was performing a heroic defense. They’d pushed the Akanans back, even if only for a moment. Soldiers from every corner of Enteria were fighting with everything they had, their small shields and firearms looking paltry compared to the battle of the archmages, but no less important. In the distance, he could also make out the soul of Apophagorga, though the soul of the creature was in tatters, and it was cowering below the earth.
The Akanan archmages then drew back suddenly. A reprieve, he thought gladly.
Then Gaius looked up.
“Shields!” he called out. Zhuan and the remnants of the Prophet’s Guard layered everything they could, as the Akanan dreadnoughts finished moving into a new position.
Artillery came raining down, splashing across everything. Even the Akanan archmages had to raise shields to defend against their own artillery as it saturated the area. Behind Gaius, the leyline regulator’s shield flickered.
The airships hung there, no longer moving. They no longer needed to; there was no artillery to fire back at them.
A woman, surrounded by a group of six mages, was levitating down from the flagship. She wore her own adamantium cuirass, and a mask Gaius immediately recognized as that of the Fifth Prophet. Her group was silhouetted by the setting sun.
Gaius ground his teeth.
“Liuan Var,” Zhuan spat.
“You and your fellow heretics have lost,” boomed out Liuan’s spell-enhanced voice. “Surrender, and I will make this painless.”
The Archmage Company was reassembling, along with what remained of the Sorcerer Elite. Only a few dozen remained, but that last bombardment had sapped Gaius’s mana. He couldn’t remember a time his aura had been so depleted. He looked to Zhuan, but she was exhausted too.
Behind them, the shield was misting, a sure sign it was about to fail. The leyline regulator would be exposed in moments.
“The dreadnoughts must have run out of ammunition. About time. That’s Cearsia and a few more Sorcerer Elite with her,” said Zhuan.
“What’s her myr rating?” Not that it mattered overly much. The five sorcerers could probably overwhelm them, never mind the Akanan archmages who were still standing.
“She’s kept it hidden. Well over archmage, since she was able to overwhelm Jherica, but it’s irrelevant. My aura is gone.”
“And mine, Sacred One,” said one of the Prophet’s Guard nearby.
Gaius threw back his head and let out a deep laugh. “Treacherous tyrant! You failed. You’re too late.”
Liuan Var froze in the air. She looked back and forth, but seeing nothing, continued forward. “Your bluff means nothing. Will you kneel in redemption, or will you die blasphemers?”
“I will stand tall,” he said, giving the Akanans a fearful grin. Above them, the sky flickered with light. Not from the Divir moon, either. It was a far brighter flame, sending pulses of light across the entire sky. “My daughter has returned.”
“Your dau—?” Liuan said, her shocked words coming out before she could stop them.
Next to him, even Zhuan’s eyes went wide.
The light above them grew in intensity, flickering an unearthly orange and purple. Across the battlefield, everyone’s eyes turned skyward.