The Spell Realm (25 page)

At Barson’s signal, his men spread out, breaking up into small groups.

The takeover of the Tower had begun.

Chapter 43: Augusta

Augusta hid outside Blaise’s house, listening intently with her spell-improved hearing. Frowning, she tried to make sense of what she’d heard. Jandison had done something with the vote? Blaise knew about it? She couldn’t even begin to wrap her mind around such an incredible story. She would have to get to the bottom of it, but for now, she needed to focus on the task at hand.

Augusta had a couple of reasons for not coming to Jandison’s aid. First and foremost, with him out of the battlefield, she had to focus all of her attention on plan B, the fusion spell. She also needed Blaise weakened, as a contingency if Plan B failed, and a confrontation with Jandison was sure to accomplish that. Besides, if what she just heard was true, Jandison had made fools of her and the rest of the Council, and he deserved whatever Blaise did to him.

Turning her attention to plan B, she focused on the fusion spell. It was dangerous, and Augusta had hoped to avoid using it. Now, however, it seemed inevitable. The creature was too powerful, deflecting all of their usual spells with ease. Even the expression on its face was calm and serene, as though it didn’t care.

No, they had no choice but to use the fusion spell, and to do so now. Implementing it required coordination between most of the Council. With Jandison out of the picture, they couldn’t afford to lose any more Council members. Augusta had been the one to figure out the logistics behind such coordination. It involved Contact spells prepared in advance. Each Councilor had a pair of other members they would Contact—a primary choice and a back-up.

Her heart beating frantically in her chest, Augusta loaded her spell, which was to go to Moriner, her back-up for Jandison. He would Contact his primary choice—Gina—who would Contact Furak, and so on until the cards were loaded with precise timing and order.

Though she knew she’d done the calculations correctly, Augusta still felt uneasy. They were fighting hubris with hubris, and the consequences of any errors could be catastrophic. The fusion spell was a work of terrifying beauty, harnessing the power of the sun and the stars. The energies about to be unleashed were unimaginable. To Augusta’s knowledge, nothing of this magnitude had ever been undertaken in the history of Koldun. But, as terrifying as the spell was, it didn’t frighten Augusta nearly as much as the abomination they were fighting—and she was confident that the powerful barrier they’d built to contain the spell would hold.

Watching the battlefield, Augusta used a simple spell to protect her vision. Though the barrier was supposed to protect them from the harmful effects of the spell, she calculated that some minute percentage of light was going to escape. Given the forces at play, she didn’t want to risk being blinded.

As the spell began to take effect, a shimmering sphere about a hundred feet in diameter formed around Blaise’s creature. This was the barrier. Whatever earth it touched at the bottom section of the sphere was pushed aside, creating a crater underneath the creature’s feet. That didn’t faze Blaise’s monstrosity at all. Instead of standing on the lower layer of the sphere, it was floating in the air, inside the spherical bubble, still looking inhumanly calm.

And just as Augusta noted these details, the fusion spell went into effect, and she saw a dazzling explosion of light.

Chapter 44: Gala

Gala felt torn. She wanted to help Blaise, but if she rushed to the house right now, it would become the focal point of the Council’s attack. The sensation of helplessness, of being unable to protect the one she loved, was unbearable. Gala could feel her calm beginning to slip, her heart starting to beat rapidly in her chest.

And at that moment, she began to feel something strange—some unprecedented spell being cast. She’d noticed she could sense magic before, but she had never felt anything of this caliber. Many people were working together—working on something big.

In the meantime, Blaise continued to fight in the house. Grimly Gala struggled for control, determined to be the master of her sorcery, rather than its puppet, but her fear for Blaise was too strong. Her mind racing, Gala felt the last remnants of her calm disintegrating as her emotions took over.

At first, she again experienced the illusion of her mind leaving her body. Only this time, it was different, more physical. She saw herself from a vantage point high in the sky. It was as if she was seeing the canyon through the eyes of a bird—and that’s exactly what was happening, she realized. Somehow her subconscious mind had connected with that of the birds that attacked her earlier.

It was strange, like she was in two places at once. She could see the faces of her attackers from high up in the air, and at the same time, she saw a shimmering sphere surround her body from both her own and the bird’s viewpoint. And from high up again, she saw herself floating in that glowing bubble. It was something she hadn’t even realized she was doing.

There was something ominous about the bubble that surrounded her—a subtle threat that she couldn’t fully understand yet. She also felt tiny changes in her body, like there was another spell attaching itself to her. She was about to examine it further when she felt the first powerful blast of energy inside the sphere that encased her.

Her reflective spell repelled the blast, pushing it outward, back toward its source, but the bubble prevented it from going beyond its walls. The energy grew, unimaginably powerful and destructive, filling the enclosed space around Gala and weakening her defenses. There was no longer any hope of retaining control, of remaining calm in the face of this maelstrom—all Gala could do was attempt to survive. She was no longer making conscious choices; instead that deep, still-unexplored part of her mind was in control.

Searing, burning pain overloaded her senses as time seemed to slow. She felt her body starting to disintegrate, each cell screaming in agony at its torturous death. The explosive energy was merciless, terrifying, yet Gala’s mind systematically analyzed it, broke it down into its components. And then she knew what it was . . . knew it was the same force that powered the stars above. Hydrogen fusing with itself, forming helium—a terrible reaction that her mind could not find a way to stop.

So instead of stopping it, her mind found a different solution.

It would get rid of the energy by sending it elsewhere—to the Spell Realm itself.

As Gala’s mind ran through the necessary calculations, her agony intensified until she could bear it no longer—until she found herself completely pushed out of her dying body. She was fully inside the bird now, not just seeing but feeling what it felt.

There was a momentary relief from the pain, but then Gala made the mistake of looking down at the shimmering bubble—a bubble that now shone with the brightness of the sun. In an instant, the bird was blinded, and, unable to see, it began falling.

Plummeting to the ground, Gala somehow knew she was about to leave the bird’s body. With all her willpower, she tried to get the bird to fly again, but before she knew if her desperate attempt succeeded, she was brought back into her own body.

The pain was excruciating. Her flesh had disintegrated, ripped apart by the terrible forces of the fusion reaction, yet it was reforming again, somehow being fixed by the directive of her subconscious mind—a mind that seemed to reside elsewhere for now.

Crippled by the stunning agony, Gala lost connection with the mind of the bird completely. The creature was dead. Overwhelmed, she began to lose the remaining portion of her conscious control to one overwhelming emotion—anger.

Then, in a flash, she felt Blaise’s mind go blank, just like the bird’s.

Chapter 45: Augusta

Even with the protective vision spell, Augusta felt a blinding pain in her eyes. The sound of the explosion reverberated through her body, rupturing her eardrums, and the ground under her feet shook with such force that she was thrown to the ground, painfully twisting her ankle on the way. Stunned and gasping for air, she scrambled for a healing spell, her trembling fingers barely managing to load it into her Stone.

When the healing effect began, she could feel the pain in her ankle subside first. She was not sure yet, but her hearing appeared to be returning too, and she could hear some kind of shuffling inside Blaise’s house. Her eyes were healing slowly, however, and she could barely tell light from darkness. She had to hurry, so she used another healing spell to aid the vision repair.

When Augusta could finally see, the first thing she looked at was the other side of the Canyon—and her stomach churned at what she saw.

With a human being, the forces unleashed would have made them disintegrate into ash, leaving the shimmering sphere empty. This creature, however, was still there. Though it was no longer floating serenely, it still existed—and was lying on its side at the bottom of the bubble, curled into a fetal position.

At best, it was maybe injured, Augusta realized with dismay. It was definitely alive, though—she knew that thanks to a hidden locator spell she’d embedded within her fusion spell. She’d hoped she wouldn’t need it, but she took precautions anyway. This locator spell would allow Augusta to know where the creature was at all times, and, more importantly, whether it was alive.

She needed that location spell for her plan C—a plan she’d hoped she wouldn’t need to implement.

Now, however, there was no choice.

Slowly getting up, Augusta forced herself to walk into Blaise’s house.

* * *

Inside, she found Blaise lying on the floor in the hallway. It appeared that the explosion had knocked him off his feet as well. A thin trickle of blood ran down his forehead, and he looked dazed, as if he had just regained consciousness. For a moment, she had a strange impulse to heal him, to take away his pain, but that was absurd, given what she was about to do.

“You,” he whispered, propping himself up on one elbow and glaring at her. “What have you done?”

Augusta could see him reaching for his Interpreter Stone and the cards, and she quickly grabbed her own spell—the one she’d specifically prepared for this occasion.

It was too late, though. Blaise’s spell hit her first. Immediately, Augusta’s thoughts scrambled, her mind turning to mush. A confusion spell, she realized with the small corner of her brain that remained unaffected. A confusion spell that had gotten through her weakened defenses.

Everything felt slow, every thought, every decision, requiring major effort. Why hadn’t he just tried to kill her? she wondered hazily. Her eyes landed on Jandison’s bloody corpse, and her vision swam for a moment. Why hadn’t Blaise used a lethal spell on her as well? Did he still have feelings for her? No, that was stupid, Augusta told herself. He loved his creature now. She couldn’t forget that, couldn’t soften for even a moment—not if she wanted to survive.

Gathering all her strength, Augusta focused on what she needed to accomplish—the simple task of loading the prepared card into her Stone. It seemed to take hours, but finally she managed to slot it in.

Blaise slumped on the floor, his eyes closing as her spell took effect. Paradoxically, Augusta felt relieved that he hadn’t been standing, that he didn’t fall and injure himself further. It was ridiculous to feel that way in light of what she was about to do next.

Nonetheless, he looked still. Too still.

I didn’t kill him
, Augusta reminded herself, shaking off the remnants of her confusion. Like Ganir, Blaise was merely in a coma that she had induced.

Her next set of spells, however, could end up killing him—if the creature didn’t act as Augusta hoped.

Chapter 46: Gala

No longer able to sense her connection with Blaise, Gala felt her anger turning into blinding fury.

Hardly conscious of what she was doing, she sent Blaise’s house back to its usual place in Turingrad. If he was somehow still alive, he would not be safe here, not with what was about to happen.

Once that was done, she closed her eyes and focused on the most powerful force she had known prior to this explosion: the horrifying ocean storms. Mentally reaching out far beyond the mountains, Gala took a precisely measured chunk of space from the air above the ocean and teleported it into the canyon.

The sky exploded with lightning, hail, and tornados. The storm filled every inch of the canyon, with deadly lightning bolts striking every second, turning the rocky ground into glass. The howling roar of the tornados and the pounding hail combined into a deafening cacophony, sheets of rain turning the bottom of the canyon into a lake within seconds.

It was a nightmare—one from which Gala was protected by the very bubble they had used against her.

The storm lasted at peak intensity for only a few minutes and then began to dissipate, no longer sustained by the weather conditions that brought it about in the ocean. As the sky began to clear again, Gala’s own fury slowly faded, replaced by the horrified recognition of what she’d done.

The canyon was all but destroyed. She had lost control again—and in doing so, she might’ve killed people. The Council had intended to hurt her, likely kill her, but she hadn’t wanted them dead. She should’ve found another way.