Dream II - Chapter 38

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Race: Draconian

Bloodline Powers: Improved Strength+, Rending, Firebreath+
Greater Mysteries: Fire (Noble) 5, Wind (Noble) 3, Sound (Advanced) 2
Lesser Mysteries: Heat 4, Oxygen 4, Embers 4, Pressure 4, Current/Flow 4

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A blast of wind caught Percival throwing the young man across the room in the blink of an eye.  If a sphere of water didn’t catch him just before he hit one of the archive’s stone walls, there likely wouldn’t have been anything left of him but strawberry paste.

“Why?” Pothas hissed accusingly, teeth gritted against the pain.

The ball of water disappeared, dropping Percival to the ground.  The damp youth stuttered something incomprehensible, his eyes wide as he stared with wide eyes at the knife still lodged in his mentor’s side.

“A question you have not the time or right to demand an answer for,” the lead attacker replied menacingly.  “You have maybe five minutes wind master.  Ten if you have consumed an elixir and studiously developed a poison resistance.  Come, now that there is some urgency let us finish this game of cat and mouse.”

Pothas turned back, making eye contact with Samazzar before jerking his head toward the sputtering Percival.  Sam nodded, and his master rewarded him with a tight smile before stepping out into the open and facing the remaining raiders.  He was limping, but Pothas managed to keep his back straight as he stared them down.  A second later, Rose stepped out from behind her cover as well, followed a second later by Tazzaera, gingerly cradling her injured arm.

Samazzar turned his attention away from the magi.  Dussok and Takkla would find places to make themselves useful, likely by supporting Crone Tazzaera’s flame and heat from afar, but Takkla’s bow and Dussoka’s spear were more than capable of slaying a distracted or unwary practitioner.

But that wasn’t his fight.  Percival, distracted and sopping wet filled his vision.  The youth barely even paid him any attention, focusing instead on his bruised chest and damp robes.

Gently, Sam exhaled, gathering a ball of flame in the palm of his hand.  That made his fellow apprentice notice him.

He couldn’t be sure, but Samazzar suspected that Percival made the first move.  The air swirled, forming a tiny, self-contained whirlwind in the other man’s hand, and then everything seemed to happen at once.

Wind roared behind Sam as Pothas unleashed the full force of the mystery with enough power behind it to level a brick wall.  At the same time Rose and Tazzaera added their own flare to the attack, hiding blades of air and whisps of flame inside the tempest that the master threw at the doorway to the archive.

It was more power than Samazzar had ever seen his master channel.  Without restraint or apology, wind and fire slammed into a barrier made of water.  As soon as they made contact, they curled around it, probing like fingers as they sought a weak spot in the barrier even as a half dozen plants pushed their way up through the stone floor of the archive, buds opening to reveal reddish purple flowers that almost immediately began to shake and spread sickly yellow pollen.

All of those observations took place in the barest whisker of a second before Percival’s magic arrived.  The wind, condensed into bludgeoning hammer blows and interspersed with sharpened and hardened pressure fronts that served as blades screamed toward him.

Samazzar planted his feet and reached out with his own wind.  Unlike the magi fighting on the other side of the room, he couldn’t form a wall of air to defend himself.  His mastery of the magic was only at the level where he could manipulate an existing instance of the mystery, something that Percival was more than happy to provide him with an ample supply of.

Each attack felt like a tendril of green energy as the human apprentice threw it at Samazzar.  Sam could control the blasts, somewhat, but wresting enough control of the wind long enough to send careening to the side at the last minute was a struggle.  Instead, about half of the jabs and slashes landed, albeit at angles that battered, sending sparks flying off of his tough scales rather than truly harming him.

Percival’s control of the mystery of wind was stronger than Samazzar’s, there was no question about it.  Any time the two of them clashed head to head the boy was able to overpower him, twisting the hardened air from his grasp and slashing Sam’s unprotected body with it.  If it wasn’t for his evolution, Sam was sure that he would have died a half dozen times from sharp thrusts and heavy blows that escaped his control

Blood trickled from a pair of razor thin cuts on Samazzar’s cheek where Percival had tried to blind him as well as a trio of tiny holes in his hip and torso.  More importantly, his left leg was bruised and stiffening up from one of the slower, heavy bursts of wind that he hadn’t been able to deflect in time.

But Sam had the rhythm of attacks now.  Percival was attacking with everything he had, eyes wild as he threw every erg of power he had into the unending torrent of wind streaming toward Samazzar.  Any subtlety that the young man might have had was thrown out the window in favor of brute strength, giving Sam the opening he needed to defend himself.

The attacks were more than the draconian could contend with head on, but after his first couple of failed attempts to redirect the wind blades, Sam began to get a good feel for their speed.  Same with the heavier blunt attacks.  He could only seize control of them by surprise, and Percival would reclaim control of the bursts of wind within a second at most, but now that Samazzar had a feel for their timing, that was all he needed.

Blood continued to flow freely down Samazzar’s face, drying almost instantly in the rushing wind as he grabbed hold of a pressure front that was almost touching him and twisted it, letting it brush past his scales and deflect off into the library.  A heavier clump of air rushed at his chest only for a sidestep and a surgical push of Sam’s will to send it flying free as well.

It was like being at the center of a hurricane.  Samazzar forced a bubble of relative calm in the midst of an uncontrollable storm of destruction, letting the wind rattle and batter him but preventing any serious damage.

A fraction of his will separated, sending a line of fire from the ball in his hand down toward the ground where he sent it zipping along the floor toward Percival.  Another pair of wind blades rushed through the air, one from the left and the other from the right as the increasingly panicked apprentice tried to pincer Sam.

He lost control of the flames for a moment as he shifted both of the attacks, fighting through Percival’s willpower to redirect one the left blade up and the right down.  Both of them scraped against his scales uncomfortably before they hit the ceiling and the floor respectively, leaving divots in the stone.

When Samazzar returned his attention to the line of flames he was directing toward Percival, most of them were out.  A wave of his hand, sent them roaring back to life and rushing across the floor.  At the last second, Percival noticed them, abandoning his own attacks to erect a shell of wind around himself.

Sam’s fire slipped through.  It took most of his focus to keep the defenses from simply snuffing the flames out, but by focusing on the oxygen content in the air that the human was flinging at his magic, Samazzar was able to expand his blaze to meet the gusts that threatened to extinguish it entirely.

Percival’s eyes went wide, a fraction of a moment before the fire leapt from the floor toward his body.  Pressurized air deflected most of the burning gasses under Samazzar’s control, but a pair of embers managed to slip through and touch down on the man’s cloak.

His clothing was sopping wet, and that was likely all that saved the human as Sam’s fire spread across the man’s body in the blink of an eye.  As hot as he made it, the fire needed to evaporate the moisture first before it could ignite the fine linen, and Samazzar didn’t have much time before Percival recovered from his panic and redirected the wind to finally kill his flame.

So he detonated it.  There was maybe a fist sized clump of burning cloth on the human’s chest and thigh, but the explosion as Samazzar twisted its form was enough to char flesh and crack ribs as the fire transformed into gas and expanded suddenly.

Samazzar felt a familiar tingling in the back of his mind as realization began to dawn over him.  It was all just pressure.  Hot air.  Cold air.  It might push and create the wind, but it did so by swirling together and creating pressure fronts.  That was what he was was doing unconsciously every time he tried to manipulate the mystery, creating tiny alterations in the airflow to raise or lower pressure, pushing or pulling the wind along.

His mind clouded, Samazzar unconsciously reached down, grabbing the cliff drake’s flight tendons from his pouch and shoving them into his mouth.  The bits of muscle and gristle tasted awful.  You weren’t supposed to eat them after all.  Theoretically, he should have spent days sourcing other ingredients in order to maximize their efficacy while tempering the untamed magical potency that could hollow out an unprepared practitioner from the inside.

But those concerns weren’t even on Samazzar’s mind.  He chewed mechanically, Percival all but forgotten as he shrieked in rage.  Distantly, Sam wondered if the man’s indignant shout was from the pain he was suffering or the sight of him devouring the ingredients that the human coveted without any preamble or preparation.

Another wave of attacks launched themselves at Sam, but this time they didn’t seem nearly as threatening.  True, the air was as dense or sharp as ever, but for some reason it felt softer, more pliable.

Energy coursed through Samazzar’s body, threatening to overwhelm him as more and more truths about wind revealed themselves to his questing mind.  He turned the attacks aside subconsciously, riding the crest of the surge of magic to easily overpower Percival’s flailing bursts of wind.

Warmth filled his chest, rapidly escalating from a comforting feeling to a burning sensation that he couldn’t detect with the mystery of heat.  Facts and images came to him, faster and faster until it felt like Samazzar’s head was spinning.  Distantly he felt a trickle of blood dribbling out of his nose and down his muzzle where it dried almost instantly under the whirlwind of futile attacks from Percival.

Reality began to filter back to him.

Percival was hyperventilating, eyes wide and with bloody craters in his chest and thigh.  The human was still throwing attacks at Samazzar, but it was clear that he was beyond thought.  It would have been a simple matter to change the speeds of the attacks or to send them through the air on random trajectories, preventing Sam from ever locking onto them to redirect them.

Instead, he was clumsy and wasteful with his power.  Seeking to batter the draconian into submission with sheer force of will without considering that of Sam’s abilities, even with this recent breakthrough, wind was clearly secondary to the power of fire.

Samazzar reached deep inside himself, grasping hold of the energy that was rampaging through his veins.  He could feel the potency from the flight tendons lashing out as it burned and scarred his muscles and organs.  With the gentleness of a mother with a newborn, he wrapped his will around the feral magic, and channeled it upward, breathing a gout of fire.

Wind swirled around the blast of flame, protecting it from outside interference as Sam expanded its scope and heat.  He could still feel the tendons fizzing and burning inside of him, after all, no one but a life practitioner could truly simulate the tempering of an alchemist inside their own body, but he had deprived it of its sharp and cutting edge.

Percival’s will clashed with Sam’s, seeking to use brute force to overpower the cylinder of wind that encased the flames.  To an extent he succeeded, a plane of pressurized air was able to assert itself between the human and the oncoming inferno, but it was degraded and weakened from its clash with Samazzar to the point that it barely slowed the fire.

This time, the young man’s wet cloak wasn’t enough to save him.  The blaze engulfed him, turning the clothing to ash in an eyeblink before it charred the flesh from his bones, leaving little more than a withered and blackened corpse that slumped lifelessly to the archive floor.

Samazzar stumped slightly, the bruises and cuts stinging him but nowhere near as painful as his stomach and chest.  He could tell that his enhanced body had survived the introduction of raw wind magic, but it had been a near thing.  Luckily, Draconians were particularly attuned to the wind and air, otherwise, he likely would have been joining Percival on the archive floor.

He turned to take in the rest of the fight.  Pothas had both arms in the air, his skin pale and clammy as he channeled the full might of the mysteries.  Hot and cold bundles of air clashed together in front of the stairwell, generating a swirling pressure front that put the entirety of the battle between Samazzar and Percival to shame.

Only their leader was still standing.  The cloak had been ripped from his shoulders, revealing a slim but muscular frame.  From the ground vines had grown up around him, shielding and supporting the man as Pothas’ wind magic pummeled him, his attacks easily thwarted by a combination of Tazzaera and Rose.

Then, Samazzar’s breath caught in his throat as the hot and cold air merged.  For the barest fraction of a moment, nothing happened.  Then, a cyclone spun into being, peppering the attacker with detritus for a fraction of a second before it slammed into him, ripping the vines from the floor and sending him slamming into the ceiling hard enough to leave a webwork of cracks in the stone.

A pair of vines grew from the floor with fluid ease, reaching up to grab the man’s ankles and pull him away from the miniature tornado, but before they could drag him to safety, the cyclone followed.  It smashed into him again, ripping both of the ropes of plant matter from the ground with contemptuous strength and sending him flying into the stairwell.

He hit the stairs hard enough to bounce.  Once again, vines grew from the walls, forming a lattice of plants in front of him.  The raider cast one baleful glance over the top of the wall, another set of vines reaching down from the ceiling to grab him and begin dragging him backward and up the stairwell.

Then the windstorm slammed into the barrier.  It held for almost two seconds before the mass of wind magic shredded it, but that was more than enough for the invader to escape.

Pothas wobbled, letting the tornado fade as he struggled to stay upright.  Then, he lost the power to hold himself upright and fell to one knee, a smile on his face.

Samazzar and Rose were by his side in seconds.  On the other side of the room, Takkla and Dussok were tending to Tazzaera.  Evidently, she had taken another would to her left hip to match the missing scales on her arm.

Pothas coughed, his entire body shaking as his apprentices crouched down next to him.  When he looked up, there were stains of blood on his hand, but his face was covered in a massive smile.

“He’s gone,” the wind master rasped exultantly, “but more importantly did you see?  After years of experimentation trying to master the cyclone, I did it.  It turns out the secret ingredient was mortal peril.  If I had known that things were that simple, I’d have almost killed myself long before now.”