“Anyone wanna catch me up, real quick?” I asked nervously, half because the three wizards had moved substantially closer to me in the last few moments and half because Glory was sizing me up with an interest I hadn’t seen her exhibit in the short time I’d known her.
William and Liara exchanged glances.
“You’ve got a lot to teach her,” William said, a grin on his face. “You may as well start now.”
Liara scowled, letting out an exasperated sigh.
“I don’t have time for this,” she grumbled. “I have twice the amount of work on my plate as you two…”
All the same, Liara took another step forward, stopping squarely in front of me with her arms crossed. Uncertain as to what to do, I straightened my back, standing tall as I could. Odd as it was, it made me feel less like an adult, that I had to force myself to mimic their confident postures. Like they’d see through me in an instant, and any scrutiny I was currently under would resolve with my being inadequate or unworthy.
“Three thousand or so years ago,” Liara began, sounding like she was reciting something from memory, “the mixed-magic kingdom of Jerusalem was ruled by a wizard named Solomon. He had a reputation for being even-handed, wise, and just in all of his rulings, and as with most worthy wizards, he passed into Mundane mythology.”
I’d heard of him. He was a regularly mentioned religious figure, Solomon the Wise. It still shook me a little, knowing how much of our mythologies had roots in actual, living people.
“Records are a little muddled from back then, but we believe he had some sort of Knowledge magic, something that aided in his judgement, or perhaps something that would catalogue and compare outcomes. It’s believed he was one of the most popular wizard monarchs to rule over a population that was mostly Mundane.”
Glory had ceased her unsettling study of me, and had taken a seat on the ground with her legs crossed. Her hands were held in the air in front of her, in a position that vaguely reminded me of the hokey meditation I’d seen in old martial arts movies, and they flickered with that odd crimson light. and though it seemed like the air was still drawing it away, her quiet focus was letting her amass more than slipped away into the night.
Liara snapped her fingers and I jumped, guiltily returning my gaze to her. From his position standing near Glory, William gave Liara a double thumbs-up. She shot him a glare, but when she turned back to me, it looked like she was trying not to smile.
“The first time the White City attacked Jerusalem, they were rebuffed before they made it over the city’s walls. So they tried a different tactic. They sent infiltrators, who made it to key points within the city before opening portals using some unknown magic or technology. The attack that followed was on a scale that no one had seen before, though we became quite familiar with the tactic over the next few millennia. Jerusalem was razed nearly to the ground, and King Solomon was cornered in his personal quarters in the palace, along with his Mundane servants.”
On hearing that last part, it clicked for me. Our predicament, with no visible way out, the three wizards’ sudden interest in the only person among them who didn’t have some sort of reality-defying magic. The odd phrase that William and Glory had repeated to each other.
Solomon’s Gamble.
“He pacted them, didn’t he?” I asked, anxiety creeping up in the back of my mind. “He gave them all magic until one of them happened to awaken something that would help.”
Liara nodded. “And the last did. Solomon and all of his staff teleported to safety moments before the door to his quarters caved in. It was a desperate act, placing his life in the hands of the chaos that is unformed magic. But as they say, desperate times…”
“Desperate measures,” I agreed. “So you want to pact me, to see if I could manifest magic that might get us out of this?”
“I’m not sure what other choices we have,” Liara said sadly. “Understand that this isn’t something I would ever ask of you lightly.”
I was scared. This was a colossal decision, one that would warrant days or weeks of deliberation. I didn’t even have minutes. Without exception, every single person I cared about was outside this dome, in a city that was rapidly becoming a warzone. There were greater things than my own humanity that I would sacrifice for the sake of keeping them safe.
I inhaled slowly, then released all the stress and fear with the breath.
“We’re wasting time, then,” I said, looking Liara in the eye. “How does this work?”
“More simply than you imagine,” Liara answered, reaching up to tap me on the forehead with one finger.
I could feel the change begin from the moment she made contact. It was like I was expanding, swelling and unfolding in a metaphysical sense. There was a rush of vertigo as my mind struggled to keep up with the sensations it was experiencing, and I staggered away from Liara, barely holding my balance. My hands went to my head, half automatically and half to verify that my head wasn’t actually blowing up like a balloon.
The vertigo subsided but a different sort of feeling had been building in its shadow. I felt energized. There was an odd rushing in my ears, and my vision swam, then brightened. The darkness inside the dome fell away, like someone had lit a spotlight in the cramped space, and it got brighter with each passing second. I squeezed my eyes shut against the brilliance.
“You’re doing fine,” Liara said, and her voice sounded distant despite how close she was to me. “Magic is the energy of life. Your body is being introduced to a quantity of life energy that it isn’t used to handling, but the energized period doesn’t last. If you use too much of it while it’s in this fluctuating state, you’ll crash. Relax. Breathe.”
I inhaled shakily, only then realizing that I hadn’t really taken a breath since the process started. I went through my breathing exercises, forcing myself to calm down even as my mind went in a million directions at once.
Did it work?
What can I do now?
What will the others think?
The riot of unusual sensation in my body began to dissipate. I cracked one eye open, then immediately shut it again. The intense light hadn’t died down in the slightest. I rubbed my eyelids with the heels of my palms, like I would if I’d woken up and then immediately looked out a window into bright sunlight.
“Is something wrong with your eyes?” Liara asked. I heard her kneel down next to me, felt her draw my hands away from my face. Tentatively, I let my eyes open, though I did
my best to keep them narrowed.
“It’s too bright,” I mumbled, holding up one hand to shield my eyes from the radiance. “Is that...Glory? Why is she glowing like that?”
Blocking the woman’s illuminated form helped my vision considerably, though as I looked around the dome I could tell that it wasn’t just her. William was covered in an odd red miasma, more like a thick fog than a light. Liara was glowing too, just not nearly as much as Glory. Like a dim bulb compared to the noonday sun.
Liara and William exchanged glances.
The more I tried to focus, the sharper the glare became. It was almost as if-
Ah.
I closed my eyes again, doing my best to let them relax. They still stung a bit from the overstimulation, blotches of color still dancing against the back of my eyelids, but even with my eyes closed I could tell that the brightness was dimming. My eyes felt strained, like I’d been reading for long hours in near darkness, but as I took a deep breath, the fatigue and ache in them slowly disappeared.
When I opened my eyes, the change that had been startling and overpowering had receded to being simply wondrous. The glow was still there, but it was more ethereal, less painful to look at. It pulsed in all three of them, though it focused on certain areas, in ways that I could understand but couldn’t quite put into words, at least not the way I was used to.
The glow focused in William’s hand was by far the dimmest, but it was also the strangest. When I looked at them, I could see- well, not quite see, more like receive the impression of- a massive room. I got fleeting glimpses of a myriad of things: weapons, tools, bandaging, food, devices...It would normally have been a lot to take in, though not only did it not really feel like it was costing me much processing power, but I gathered the entirety of that impression in a single glance, like that much was written at the surface, plain to see.
Liara’s light was brighter, but it was all focused on the end of her wand. I could see the way it connected to her, a trail of light whose source and destination was obvious, as long as I didn’t have to explain how. I could follow the path with my eyes, but I couldn’t have traced the journey with my finger, because it...wasn’t. There wasn’t a physical path, like I could draw with a marker on a whiteboard, or mark in the air with string. But I could still see it. That left me with little doubt as to the gift I’d received.
I could see magic.
And as useful as that seemed, there was more. Even from a distance of nearly fifteen feet, I could pick out detail at an impossible level. Each individual hair on William’s head, the places on his skin where sweat was catching what little light there was beneath the dome. I could see the tiny muscles beneath the skin clench and relax, the tension they betrayed beneath a face that was normally such a calm mask. I saw the way his eyes kept darting to where Glory was still drawing magical energy from the air. Impatient. Worried.
I turned slowly, panning my vision in a full circle.
The dome around us was magic, obviously, though it was clearly some different kind. Compared to the pale blue light that I could see in Liara and the thick red fog that hung around William’s mantle, the dome that surrounded us was...evil. It was an oddly sophomoric term, but I had a hard time coming up with a better description. The magic that inhabited the dome was black on black, but I could still see it. It was different from the darkness of the color behind it, a darker black born of revulsion and blasphemy. I could feel my skin crawl just looking at it.
And beyond it, I could see where all of the blackness was gathering. Just behind where I’d been trying to get my bearings, there was a source, pulsing out the magic then drawing it back in, along with a steady flow of our own, lighter energy.
“It’s here,” I murmured. I turned back to my companions and found them all staring at me.
“...What?” I asked, shifting nervously.
“You can see the blood mage maintaining the dome?” William asked, his tone half incredulous, like he couldn’t restrain his doubt.
“Um, no,” I said. “I can see the way the magic is flowing, and where it’s coming from. The same point for both. Here.” I pointed to the source, not even a foot away from my finger, on the other side of the dome.
“You can see...the magic?” Glory asked, stirring from her meditation for the first time since she’d begun. She rose slowly to her feet, though I could see the care with which she was moving. Every step she took, every swing of her arms saw the energy inside her body flickering and struggling, like it was trying to escape her body’s containment. It looked chaotic, almost painful, when compared to the ease that William and Liara seemed to cohabitate with theirs.
I nodded. “I’m certain. If it’s not a person, it’s some sort of object that the magic is flowing into and out of.”
Glory chuckled, rolling her right shoulder as she walked past me. “Not bad, kid. Lemme see what we’ve got.”
I stepped back as Glory squared off with the blank, black wall of the dome. Liara appeared at my right, William at my left. My new teacher tapped the inside of her right wrist, and a long, crimson sword appeared in her hand. She gave me a significant look, and I mimicked her, though I barely managed to catch the blade as it materialized.
Jay and Marika had taught the club the basics of kendo, during one of the periods where we’d voted for a self-defence group activity. The sword was designed for a one-handed grip, which wasn’t quite what I was used to, but I’d have to adapt on the fly. The handle wasn’t long enough for me to hold it like Jay had taught me, but I figured the basics of swordsmanship should stay more or less the same. I hefted it in my hand, moving it slightly back and forth, then up and down to get used to holding it. If I needed to move it, I didn’t want to be surprised by the weight of the thing.
A flash of light drew me from my inspection of the weapon. I now saw the difference between the glow of magic my new eyes revealed and the brilliance of actual, visible light, largely due to the fact that Glory was putting out a shit-ton of both. The power that Glory was focusing at the end of her right fist, a truly staggering amount by my vision, was actually bending the space around it.
As the light around her gauntlet reached a truly blinding point, she took a strong step forward and drove her fist into the wall of the dome. The result was so captivatingly dramatic that my newly expanded vision was briefly entranced by the details of the scene.
Glory’s light banished the darkness, just as it had earlier when she’d attempted to break free from the dome. The difference this time was magnitude. Her first attempt, which had blasted a hole three feet across in the black magic, looked like an idle swing compared to the force she now put out with her strike. The dome shattered, almost a full half of it disappearing the moment her fist made contact.
The following shockwave rushed out to meet the black-robed man revealed by the destruction of the dome. My new eyes immediately picked out his form as it appeared, despite the colour of his clothing against the background of the midnight street. In fact, if I hadn’t had my newly enhanced vision, I wasn’t sure I would have had enough time to see him.
Watching the energy of Glory’s blow ripple outward from the point of contact had me thinking that the man responsible for the dome would be hurled off his feet, sent flying down the road like a piece of garbage. The pushback from six feet behind her nearly had me sliding away on the asphalt.
But no, the impact from Glory’s strike vaporized the hapless man. I picked it up in an amount of detail I wish I could have missed. The shock in the man’s face as the energy reached him, the way his expression just barely had enough time to turn horrified as he vanished into the air. A transformation that took barely half a second, from enemy wizard to bloody mist, rendered in high definition with a level of detail retention that had seemed like a blessing before.
So there were definitely downsides to my new magic.
I had a hard time feeling any remorse for the enemy soldier, but there was still something unsettling about the effortless killing. I guess there was more to going from a teenager to a heart-hardened soldier than just getting a magic power.
“Emily!” Liara shouted. I snapped around to look at her, but she was gone, already sprinting ahead with Will at her side. “We need you on point! Get us to your house!”
I stood frozen for a moment as I remembered the cascade of things that we needed to do, everything that could go wrong on our way to even having a say in Tyler and Cheri’s safety. I tightened my grip on the handle of my sword, then took off after the trio of wizards.
Once I’d taken the lead in the group, movement near the row of houses to our left caught my eye. Black-robed shapes leapt from rooftop to rooftop, keeping up with us as we hurtled down the street. The civilian presence had dissipated since the obvious magical attack on us back when we landed, so the battlefield we had to work with was at least free from potential collateral victims.
One of the enemy soldiers stopped as he reached the rooftop at the end of the street where we’d be taking a left to head towards my house. His hand flashed out, a back-hand motion.
The metal was black, not a hint of color to the knife anywhere in its length. Despite that, not only could I pick the small knife out against the backdrop of night sky, I could easily track its path, an imaginary line tracking the projectile’s arc from starting point to where it would strike Liara in the side of the neck. I was about to call out a warning, but reconsidered. After all, wasn’t this what I was for, now? Liara assessed situations, and it seemed like she had a more flexible ability when it came to interacting with magic, so she had a sort of utility role in the group. Glory hit hard, so that’s what she focused on. William was obviously the leader, so that meant, as the member of the group that was able to detect threats and keep an eye on the surroundings…
I planted my lead foot, turning on my heel as I skidded to a stop. Hand-eye coordination had always been a strength of mine, but the act of intercepting the knife was almost eerily simple. I struck the weapon out of the air with a lazy swipe of my sword, a smile coming unbidden to my face as it rebounded back into the air away from us.
Two more knives came flying as the rest of my group reacted to the sound of steel on steel. The first was going wide, a miss by nearly three full feet. The second was on track to hit Liara high on the leg.
“Incoming,” I said as Liara approached me. She didn’t seem able to pick the assailants out in the darkness, much less the camouflaged weapons they were throwing. It honestly might have been an effective ambush, if I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t been so freshly equipped. As it was, they may as well have been throwing tennis balls.
I shuffled a half step to the left before deflecting the on-target knife with the flat of my blade. A tap to the inside of my wrist dismissed the sword back to wherever it waited between my calling on it, and I spun back into the path of the other knife. Everything about the path of the knife was bare for me to see. The spin, the gentle arc of its flight, the hook at the tip of the blade...It was like I had minutes instead of moments to study it in detail. Though I knew it was simply the magic gathering the data faster than a normal human could do it, then presenting it to my brain in a sort of magical comprehension, it felt almost like cheating. All I had to do was reach out into the empty air and watch the knife’s handle smack securely into my palm.
I grinned at Liara, who shot me an appraising look as her wand appeared in her left hand. It was a battlefield, and I knew that, but it was still difficult to push down the giddy rush of victory. My mind was going in a hundred different directions, imagining the possible applications of this magic I’d been handed.
On the roof, the enemy soldier raised an arm, though I could see his hand was empty. Black energy coalesced around the elevated hand, the same roiling obsidian light that had pulsed through the other wizard’s draining dome. I saw it shoot out through the air, but the path it followed wasn’t anywhere near the four of us. It quested out like a reaching hand, until it reached the knife I’d originally deflected, still spinning high in the air. The magic poured into the weapon, and I realized what was going to happen a moment before the knife came flying at Liara’s back like it had been shot from a cannon.
“Impressive results,” Liara was saying, “but don’t get-”
Liara cut off with a cry of surprise as I took a step back and hurled the knife in my hand past her. There was a chance that if I’d tried to move past her, she might have stopped me or tripped me up to the point where I couldn’t position in time to deflect the incoming attack with the knife in my hand.
There was an odd connection between my dexterity and my new eyesight. It was the new spatial understanding, the way my eyes could almost predictively judge the flight of an object based on the way it was moving. Just by feeling the weight of the black metal knife in my hand, I honestly felt like I could have landed it in a bullseye, ten times out of ten. As it was, my throw was dead-on, flying perfectly into the path of the magically-charged knife.
Then it shattered.
It would be an understatement to say I hadn’t expected that. Everything had proceeded so smoothly up to that point, it was hard to say whether or not it was me riding high off of this new magic, arrogance, or just run-of-the-mill complacency, but the parts of my brain that always worried about the worst-case scenario had apparently decided it was a good time for a break.
Whatever the cause, the result was a knife hurtling at deadly speed toward Liara’s unprotected back. I reached forward, but it was far too late. I didn’t need the predictive vision that highlighted the path of the incoming blade, showing exactly where it would pierce her body and where my uselessly reaching arm would be when it did. It was plain to see.
With a stir of the wind and a flash of deep blue light, Glory was there.
Her eyes flared green, and the spinning black knife stopped in the air like it was frozen. She made a shooing motion with the back of her hand, sending the knife flying back along the length of the magic that was controlling it. It struck the black-robed man, who slumped lifeless to the rooftop without even a groan to mark his passing.
The green in her eyes shifted to orange, a color I hadn’t ever seen Cheri use before. They glowed like the light from a furnace, and she turned to look at me as she raised a hand into the air. Her gaze captivated me, holding me motionless as magic poured into the open air from her palm. The darkness around me deepened for a moment, and I revisited that familiar sensation, from back when Cheri had attacked me in front of Heinrich.
I saw amusement flicker across Glory’s face, that sort of haughty disdain you felt when watching monkeys doing circus tricks. It rankled me, to so clearly see the difference between mother and daughter. Cheri was unnerved by her power, and I felt like it led her to being more compassionate, to hanging onto the moments that made her feel more human. Glory, on the other hand, looked like she reveled in that same power. She was more forceful a person than I’d ever met in my life, and even now that I’d gained the same power they all held claim to, she still looked down on me.
Not that she didn’t have reason to. Without her intervention, Liara would have died, and it would have been indisputably my fault.
With a blinding flash, Glory shot a globe of light into the air over our heads. Once the spots had disappeared from my vision, my mouth fell open in disbelief.
The ball of light illuminated the city for miles. It looked like the middle of the day, except where the shadows were elongated by the unnaturally close light source. It had been hard to make sense of it in the dark, but my eyesight was long now. I could pick out details in the interiors of the high-rises still several miles north of us. If I had the time to sit and concentrate, I bet I could have read the calendar in one third-floor office.
“Magic is the great equalizer,” Glory said, snapping my vision back to our surroundings. “But that doesn’t mean that you’re somehow more than the others. You’re all the same. You have the same potential for strength, in your element.”
She stepped close to me as Liara and William joined each other in hushed conversation.
“I’ve seen hundreds of wizards commit mistakes they couldn’t live with, each in the throes of the same madness that dances in your fancy new eyes. And I’m gonna be honest, kid. Many of them were a lot stabler than you. So do me a favor? Don’t act like you’re the only one here with magic.”
She leaned in, gripping me by the shoulder to pull me forward. Her lips were right next to my ear as she whispered. “And let me make this perfectly clear. If anything, anything, were to happen to one of my dear friends, or my daughter, because of your arrogance, your sad little savior complex? I would find a way to make you pay for it. Do we have an understanding?”
I nodded mutely. There were things I wanted to say, but they all rang hollow and childish in the face of what I’d nearly cost us.
“Glad we could clear that up!” Glory said, cheerfully returning to a normal distance and volume. “You did good getting us out of that dome, let’s keep it up, huh? Keep your eyes peeled, call out any enemies you see, and let’s go find your dad!”
She gestured past herself, down the street.
I looked to where Liara and William still watched the pair of us, and saw no sign of pity or understanding there. For the first time since I’d been kidnapped, I felt the sting of separation. My chest ached as I fought back tears. My friends were out there, and the sooner I got a move on, the sooner I could make sure they were safe.
Not trusting myself to speak with a steady voice, I nodded silently once more, and took off at a jog.
