BT - Book 1 - Chapter 92

Micah drew temporal energy from the ancient badger, ignoring the way it writhed and shook in the wicker cage Jo had made for it as he focused on the ritual.  The flickering green flames burned as far as the eye could see while he stalked forward, stopping every ten paces to recite another obscure incantation.

Quietly, Sarah opened the cage, letting the now youthful badger scamper away into the forest as Drekt shoved a larger prison, this one holding a boar, bristled and white with age, into the position the badger had formerly held.  Micah shifted his spell to the new creature, trying to ignore the flapping of the Luoca as it flew past their encampment.

It had taken them months to collect the materials needed for the ritual.  Only being able to send out Trevor and Drekt slowed things, but at the same time, it wasn’t like they would have been able to collect several bags of salt and rare minerals quickly, even if the entire team was available.

As for the animals they were using as sacrifices?  The first dozen were easy, but before long overhunting began to trim the numbers of the older animals that Trevor and Drekt tried to gather.  Worse, since Micah couldn’t use them immediately, that meant that they needed to spend even more time on feeding and caring for their growing menagerie of aging woodland creatures.

Sweat beaded Micah’s brow as he dug deeper, pulling the weight of age from the trembling boar and slathering it over the intricate array of runes he’d inscribed in plates of granite and buried all around the encampment.  The green fire of Elsewhere’s energy imprinting itself on Karell burned higher.  He could almost taste the tang of the mists on his tongue as the ritual overwrote the local rules of of magic and physics, creating blurry heat mirages from the interactions of discordant energy.

In the distance, he heard the Luoca chatter incoherently.  Quickly, Micah motioned for Drekt to bring another sacrifice.  Without saying anything, Sarah released the now spry boar, allowing it to tear off away from their camp before she dragged it’s cage out of his sight.

Micah brought his hands together, struggling to maintain the massive ritual while Drekt lugged an evolved chimpanzee in a wooden cage, crafted and reinforced by Micah’s wood magic days ago.  They were getting close to the end of the ritual, and it was a good thing.

Week by week, the Luoca had grown braver.  At first, they hadn’t even seen it, only finding occasional circles of dead grass and prints from its spike-like legs.  Then, Micah began catching occasional glimpses of its shadow at night, flashing overhead or prowling amongst the trees.

He reached out with an arm, casting an invisible tether of energy into the chimpanzee.  It squawked and hooted at him in distress, glaring at Micah through rheumy eyes as he began to funnel energy from it into the ritual.

Once more the flames grew higher, as his voice grew in volume.  Out of the corner of his eye he could see Sarah and Drekt shying away from him while the strange syllables rang hollowly from his lips, arms gesticulating in wild yet precisely controlled movements.  The wind began to pick up, bringing strange smells and the chirps and rustles of invisible creatures.

Unfortunately, Micah slashed his arm sideways, drawing a cyclone of green flame up into the air, they were running out of time.  Whatever residual fear the Luoca had of its former master had faded.  Maybe it had shattered the runic bindings on its core.  Maybe it had begun to suspect that Micah would not be able to bring it to heel even if he could grasp the frayed strings of power trailing from the broken spells commanding it.

He pushed outward with both hands, drawing the flames upward and bending them over him into a giant dome of verdant green that flickered in an invisible wind.

Hells, he snorted to himself.  The Luoca might not even care.  The daemon had never been the most patient of creatures.  Maybe it just wanted to throw itself at him in an orgy of mutual destruction, savaging the being that kept it captive on Karell in route to returning to Elsewhere.

A flick of his wrist cut the energy tether to the chimpanzee, leaving it younger and cowering in fear.  Sarah released it, watching the terrified animal sprint past Trevor, Jo, Telivern and Ravi as the quartet warily watched the skies, guarding against a sneak attack from the daemon.

Micah raised both hands high, his voice raising to a crescendo as he began shouting fell phrases, a discordant and chaotic jumble of syllables that urged the flames above him to spin themselves into chains of power and light.

Drekt pushed the final container in front of Micah, a huge watertight trough filled with lake water.  He almost let himself smile as he took in the centerpiece of the ritual.  An evolved sturgeon, the former king of the lake’s depths.  It was almost twice as long as he was tall, thrashing in the primitive wooden aquarium he’d fashioned for it.

He brought his hands down suddenly, directing six chains of green potence to fall from the sky and attach themselves to the struggling fish.  The water began to boil as Micah threw himself into the air, hovering on the wind summoned by his unnatural magic.

Occult phrases erupted from his throat, burning his vocal cords with the power of their intonation.  Micah swayed wildly, his body part of the runes and seals formed by his hands as he directed the spell toward completion, his actions more dervish than maestro.

He raised his hands in the air, prepared for the climax of the ritual, when something in the back of his mind tingled.  Without even having to look at his status, Micah knew that his arcana skill was reaching out to him, whispering secret and hidden truths to him.

The ritual was well crafted.  It would protect the entire encampment in a golden dome of energy, summoning the spirit of the lake guardian to defend his friends and family against the Luoca if it were to attack them, but was that enough?

Even if he defeated the Luoca, it had taken months from him.  Months where he had been unable to raid the Caverns of Rust and gain the levels he would need to fight back against the Khan.  Worse, if he killed it, their party would still be stuck cleaning up lower level dungeons and only earning a trickle of experience.

Magical items and tactics could help Micah even the gap between himself and the Khan, but it almost certainly wouldn’t be enough.  What he needed was raw power, and here he stood, at the locus of a glimmering emerald maelstrom.

Deep down, he knew that he could harvest a fraction of that power.  He couldn’t invest it directly into his body, divine candidate or no, that would burn his body into cinders from the inside out.

No, his fingers tingled as he reached to his belt.  There was another way.  In the same way that a simple enchantment protecting his home wouldn’t be nearly as powerful as one guided by the spirit of an evolved beast, that magic could be redirected.

He gripped his knife, fingers closing around its leather hilt.  His companions had been right to fear the Luoca.  It was foolish to try and contain an alien being more powerful than himself.  He could see that now.

But that wasn’t the only option.

Micah brought his left arm to his mouth, biting down into the cloth of his shirt and ripping it from the limb.  A second later, he was stabbing the knife in his right hand into the exposed forearm.

Blood dripped, fat crystals of ruby, into the boiling water of the sturgeon’s enclosure, staining it red.  The surface of the water burst into flames, flickering red and green tendrils as the two types of magic began to interact.

Acting on instincts that he didn’t entirely understand, Micah pushed the knife deeper, through skin and into the surface of his muscle, and began to carve.  A grimace of pain blossomed on his face only for him to crush it as he drew.

Drekt took a step toward him, his mouth open as he shouted something that Micah couldn’t hear over the whistling screams of the hurricane force winds from Elsewhere.  Sarah, put a hand on the huge man’s arm, stopping him from sprinting into the circle and disrupting the ritual.

Micah’s hair and clothes whipped around him as he hovered, half his own height off the ground.  Blood was pouring from the gashes in his arm and into the tank, the flames burning higher until they wrapped around him in their scalding embrace.

He barely even noticed his friends’ actions, the words to the ritual changing, the tempo increasing as if some invisible drummer had introduced their own counter rhythm to the mix.

Still, through it all, it felt… right.

Micah stared with feverish eyes, his disheveled, sweaty hair framing his face, at the crude carving of a fish in his forearm.  He threw his knife to the side, and a quick motion of his hand cut the buffeting wind that supported him.

For a brief moment, he fell, landing in a crouch next to the bonfire atop the sturgeon’s water tank.  Without giving himself a moment to think over his actions, the way he’d changed a dangerous ritual mid stream solely based upon a hunch and the whisper of instincts, Micah plunged his arm into the bubbling liquid.

The agony shocked him out of his trance.  Suddenly, Micah realized where he was, his head shoved in a gout of flames, blinded but unburnt, and shoulder deep in a pool of liquid agony.

He screamed as the altered magic of the ritual poured through his flesh, imprinting golden runes on the bone below.

Micah tried to wrench his arm free, only to find himself rooted in place, his body frozen as forbidden magic coursed through him.

Jo and Trevor ran over only to be waved off by Sarah as she glanced worriedly back at him.  Micah wanted to shout at them, to tell them that now of all times was the most important to keep watch, but all he could do was wail and gnash his teeth as wave after wave of agony overtook him.

Then he felt it.  The magic circle he’d inscribed around the encampment, thrumming with power from the centuries of temporal energy that he’d fed into it.  It glowed like a massive golden circlet, warding and protecting everything inside.

His fingers touched the tough hide of the sturgeon through the water, the entire fish illuminated in the same gold as the ritual enchantment.  Snakes of power reached out from it, most connecting it to the magic circle, but a handful wormed their way up through Micah’s hand and into his injured arm.

He could feel each worm of power as it burrowed and singed its way through his flesh, creating channels of agony on their way toward the runes the ritual had just inscribed in his bones.  For a second they hesitated, just outside the runes, as if testing the nature of the seals burned into Micah’s body.

Then they struck, fusing to his arm in a white-hot flash of blinding pain.

Micah collapsed to the ground, left arm no longer bleeding and clutched to his chest by his right hand.  He rolled onto his back, reveling in the feeling of his suddenly unfrozen body.  Around him, the great green flames of the ritual were gone, replaced by the ozone taste of magic and a menacing thrum of barely contained destructive potential.

Distantly, he heard the footsteps of his friends, sprinting to see if he was all right now that the ritual was over.

More pressingly however, he felt the sturgeon in his mind.  He could taste its confusion, its simple desire to return to the lake and live its life as an apex predator, eating, sleeping and growing older and larger.  It didn’t feel any fear, just a desire to protect.  To obey.

“Are you all right Micah?” Jo was on her knees next to him, Trevor right beside her.  “Were you hurt when you lost control of the ritual?”

“Lost control?” Micah grinned madly at the two of them.  “Everything went perfectly!”

He flipped his left arm over, a manic glint in his eyes.  Where there should have been a crudely drawn image of a fish, instead rested a golden sturgeon, a perfect and intricately detailed match to the lake monster they had used as a final sacrifice.  Even as they watched, it began to swim circling around his arm like Micah’s skin was the water of its lake.

“Well,” Trevor rolled his eyes, “at least whatever that was didn’t mess with his personality.  Micah’s still an idiot.”