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Chapter 45: Fire
🕑 Added 2024-01-13 06:00:02 +0000 UTCWizards have been eager to devise spells for these new Fonts, seeing the potential to simplify the high-tiered multi-Font spells. Progress has been slowed by the difficulty in finding gates to the Arcane Realm in proximity to the new Fonts.
-Tallen Elmheart, Secondary Fonts
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Kole scrambled to his feet and dove behind a counter just as a tongue of fire flew past him.
"Rakin! It’s me! Kole! Stop!" He pleaded.
No response came save for hissing as Rakin walked slowly through the wet floor, turning the water to steam with each step
Kole crawled around the counter, and once he thought he had a chance, broke for the dormitory. He leapt over the serving counter and fell beyond it as flames flew overhead once more.
I'm dead! I'm dead! I'm dead! What in the realms!?
Kole had been scared and a little nervous in the fight before, but now he was terrified. In the dungeon, he knew he was safe, which limited how much terror he could experience, and besides that the goblins were not very imposing. But this was not some man or monster he could potentially defeat. This was a force of nature. He felt the malice of Faust radiating out from the flames, calling to the sorcerous blood within him and promising power.
He’d read about the evil god’s call, from before the last Dragon War when its power had finally been sealed away, but he never thought he’d experience it.
Kole ran for the hall, not turning back to see if he was followed.
"Amara run!" He shouted ahead, hoping she had fled.
He ran down the hall and heard Rakin following. Doorways passed and the hallway seemed to go on forever as Rakin’s footsteps grew louder. Then, Kole began to feel the heat of Rakin’s flames.
With no hope of outrunning the inferno behind him, Kole dove into the next open door and slammed it shut behind him. Taking his dagger off his belt, he wedged it under the door the instant before Rakin crashed into it. There was only a single bang, and then silence.
Kole threw everything in the room in front of the door, first tipping a bookshelf and then pushing both beds. While he worked, the orange of Rakin’s flames glowed through the cracks around the edges of the door. Eventually, the doorknob and his dagger took on a red glow and the room began to smell of burning wood and hear the lapping of flickering flames.
Then, the banging returned, and the latch broke on the first attempt, weakened by the heat. The door opened two inches before being stopped by the barrier. Flames licked around the door, and smoke quickly filled the room. Before a second bang came, there was a loud crack from beyond, and the fire dimmed rapidly before dying down to glowing embers that in turn winked out.
“Rakin?” Kole called tentatively from where he hid behind a nightstand.
“No—“ Amara called back before breaking out into a coughing fit from the smoke. “It’s me.”
Kole quickly deconstructed the barrier, and the door fell open to the floor as soon as he removed the bookshelf that had been holding it up. The outside of the door had been completely blackened by the flames and the hinges had fallen loose at Rakin’s resumed assault.
Rakin lay unconscious—and naked—on the floor before the door. He was covered in bruises and cuts, all still leaking blood on the floor where it landed and sizzled. The knuckles on his hands were completely torn up as if he’d been punching gravel.
“How did you do that?” Kole asked.
Amara looked proud for a moment before suddenly growing stricken.
“Oh no! I’m going to be in trouble…”
“Why?”
“I took something from the lab to study, a runed device meant to contain lab explosions. It creates a barrier against air in a region allowing—“
“Why are you going to be in trouble?” Rakin asked, interrupting what would likely be a long explanation of the merits of such a devise and the secrets she’d intended to glean from it.
“They are very expensive. As a safety device, they use very high-quality gems to ensure reliability. I was going to give it back after I studied the runes, but now…”
Amara slumped against a wall and slid down it to sit on the floor.
“Am I going to be expelled?” she asked Kole.
Kole gingerly touched the ground outside the door with his toe and found it bearable before leaping out of the room. He didn’t dare get close to Rakin, but he watched him closely to confirm he was still breathing.
“I think you’ll be fine,” Kole reassured her. “I don’t know who—or what—those ice people were, but the school is going to want to know about it, and they may forgive a little accidental theft.”
I hope. Kole thought, and reflected that they were about to find out if there was any truth to Professor Shalia’s claims about permission.
The two sat for a while, wondering what had happened to Rakin as they waited for the floor around him to cool off enough for them to move him.
“It felt… evil. Like…” Kole thought, trying to place what he had experienced. “It felt like there was a voice in my head, calling me to destroy. It was easy to block out, but a part of me wanted to listen.”
“That sounds like Faust’s influence presence,” Amara said, “But they sealed that away during the war. Levar himself did it! How could you feel that now?”
“I don’t know.”
***
When they’d rested, and the ground had cooled, they tried to lift Rakin but found the short dwarf to be incredibly dense. He was too heavy to drag and too short for them to drape across their shoulders without lifting him up off the ground. They dragged him a few feet before giving up entirely.
“The door’s too far,” Kole complained. “We need to find Professor Shalia.”
As if summoned by magic—because, well, it was—the room through the doorway beside Kole vanished, and was replaced with a large and well-appointed sitting room. The walls were the white stone of the Dahn, but they were covered with paintings of people and natural vistas. In the center of the room, Professor Shalia stood in front of an easel, and Zale stood before of her, wearing a very expensive gown, covered in lace and gold fit for a noblewoman, not a student or adventurer.
Kole collapsed next to Rakin on the ground in surprise and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
From his vantage point, Kole saw the painting Shalia was working on, and it depicted some unknown human woman instead of Zale. Zale was facing the door and her eyes grew wide at their sudden appearance. Without, turning around, Shalia acted on her daughter’s expression, and the silver paintbrush she held grew into a long knife as mist formed around her coalescing into plates of icy armor. By the time Professor Shalia had turned around to face the group—done in the span of a blink—she was holding an icy white rapier in one hand and a long knife in the other.
When the professor recognized the student, her posture lost some of its lethal menace, but she remained alert.
“What’s happened?” she demanded, the playful mischief typical to her now gone.
Behind her, Zale fought to get out of the ridiculous gown and resorted to cutting it down the side.
“We fought some ice men in an abandoned dining hall,” Kole explained, once he registered what had happened. ”Rakin got trapped and burst into flames then went mad and tried to kill us!”
“Zale, alert Tigereye and go get a healer!” Shalia commanded her daughter as she ran at the doorway.
Zale took off, running out the door without hesitation, looking back at her friends as she did.
Kole thought Shalia was going to attack him as she ran toward him, and he flinched back. But, each of her steps landed on air, slightly higher than the one before, and she ran over his head in a banking turn down the hall. She picked up speed and a gale began to blow down the hall towards the site of their battle, propelling her on.
Amara and Kole watched after her in awe. They’d known their friend’s mother had been an adventurer, but knowing and being the target of her murderous ire were two very different things.
Once she was out of sight, they dragged the unconscious dwarf out of the hallway, marveling at the appearance of the door, and then the opulence of the room. Rich carpets covered the floor, and once he was inside he saw that life-size marble statues of naked men and women lined the wall the doorway had appeared before.
Once they were inside, Kole collapsed in exhaustion, laying on his back with his eyes closed.
“Ow,” he moaned, aware of the pain now that the adrenaline was fading. “I think I broke my face.”
"At least you got ice on it right away," Amara said from where she stood, marveling at the craftsmanship of the sculptures.
Kole broke out into laughter despite the pain.
Amara looked at him confused.
"What did I say?"
Zale returned before Kole could explain, with the hulking form of Tigereye behind her. He disappeared into the doorway without giving the other students a second glance. She knelt down by Rakin, placed a yellow berry the size of a thumb in his mouth, and moved his jaw to force him to chew it.
“Eat this,” she said, almost pleading.
The wounds on Rakin’s body slowly closed as Kole watched.
“Here,” Zale said to Kole, handing him a berry of his own.
Kole looked at it closely before eating it. Up close the berry had a spiral pattern all along it in alternated shades of yellow, unlike any fruit he’d ever seen. He threw it into his mouth and nearly choked it up, so bad was the taste.
“Ugh,” he said through a gag. “It tastes like moldy feet.”
“Sorry!,” Zale apologized. “They don’t always taste good but they will make you feel better. I promise.”
Zale walked over to a cart nearby filled with glass bottles filled with liquids of varying hues of amber and red, and then grabbed an ice bucket and scooped up a glass of melted ice out of it.
“Here you go,” she said as she gave it to him. “Tell me what happened. Are you okay?”
Kole explained how they’d found the secret door and the fight inside, describing the ice men in as much detail as he could, trying to not forget a thing.
Professor Shalia and Tigereye returned shortly after Kole finished. Zale’s mother nodded in approval when she saw that Rakin had been seen to and then turned back to the open door. She placed her hand on the frame and closed her eyes. A moment later, the hallway outside began to drift away, as if the Dahn was splitting in two. As it drifted down and away, Kole briefly glimpsed the black void of nothingness the extra-dimensional sections of the Dahn resided in. Then, the doorway vanished, and Professor Shalia slid something into her artist’s smock.
Her eyes then fixed on Kole and she said, “Tell me everything.”
The two faculty members stood listening as Kole told the story again. When he got to the part where Rakin turned into an insane fire monster, he paused, looking to Zale for permission to reveal that secret. He’d sensed the Rakin had been hiding something from him, but he’d never suspected it was that he was a Fire primal.
A Fire primal and an Earth primal? He realized. Is that even possible? Well, I supposed a primal sorcerer wizard isn’t supposed to be possible either.
Zale nodded, and so Kole continued, leaving nothing out. When he explained how Amara had stopped Rakin with the extinguisher rune, the skinny quarter-elf shrunk in on herself as if he’d just explained how they’d burned down a house.
“You kids did good,” Professor Shalia said when Kole was done, and Tigereye nodded in agreement.
“We aren’t in trouble?” Kole asked.
“No, but you really should have run instead of investigating.”
She kicked Rakin’s sleeping form gently and added, “But I’ll talk to Rakin about that when he wakes up.”
“Are you sure we aren’t in trouble?” Amara asked. “For anything?”
Professor Shalia sighed, “Yes. The Dahn must have led you to that hallway for this purpose.”
Looking up at the ceiling and in a louder, irritated voice she added, “But there were better ways it could have gone about alerting the faculty to the presence of interlopers.”
“They Dahn is self-aware?” Amara asked in amazement, following Professor Shalia’s eyes up to the ceiling.
“As much as any ensouled artifact can be. Which is to say, selectively.”
Kole was trying to reconcile the fact that the Dahn was self-aware when Professor Shalia walked over to the dress her daughter had destroyed.
Tigereye lifted Rakin as a parent would lift their toddler, and carried him out of the room, stopping briefly to talk to Zale on the way. The professors left together, moving quickly to inform others of what had just occurred.
Kole noticed then that Zale was only wearing a shift. His face grew red and he decided that it was his turn to inspect the ceiling. When Zale turned, she noticed his expression and then noticed her own immodest dress and suddenly she vanished, leaving a cloud of black particles behind that drifted up into the air briefly before disappearing themselves.
“Zale!” Kole shouted, looking around the room frantically for his friend, alerting Amara to her disappearance.
The runesmith in training had been inspecting the now seemingly mundane doorframe they’d entered, looking through a very small circle of glass banded by metal and mounted to a handle.
Before either could descend into further panic, black motes manifested as if flowing from a hole in reality and grew into Zale in an instant. Zale reappeared behind the easel, and picked up the painting, clutching it protectively against herself.
“Get out!”
Comments
Benjamin Meyers
“Why are you going to be in trouble?” ̶R̶a̶k̶i̶n̶Kole asked,
Beeees!
Oopsie
