Millennial Mage

Tala immediately helped to mobilize all units of the caravan guards, regardless of duty rotation. Together with the sergeants, they quickly organized a search-grid, sending the guards out in four groups of five, armed to the hilt. Each group also had flares to bring attention if the children were found or if backup was needed.

Ten more guards stayed back to guard the caravan with Mistress Odera, while all the passengers were made aware that they were to, under no circumstances, leave the space between the two wagons.

Blessedly, no one complained, and many were already huddled around the parents of the two missing boys: Jon and Tam.

The guards would be responsible for sweeping the grove directly around the wagons, and Tala with Terry and Marnin would check the countryside.

Marnin would take the larger swath, focusing east, west, and south, just in case. He was given this section partially because he could move faster in general with his given set of abilities and because with his lower magical weight, he could move faster without creating motive aura resonance.

The other reason he was sent in the more unlikely directions was simply that he was less well equipped for dealing with the creatures that would likely be involved.

Tala would be on Terry, and they were to sweep northward, in the most likely direction the children and bog hag went. Oh, stars provide it’s only one. One should only be able to have a few creatures under its thrall.

Tala looked to her friend, even as she popped two ending-seeds into her mouth. “Let’s go, Terry.”

The terror bird flickered into place under her, growing in size until she was comfortably situated behind his neck. He crouched low and took off at a dead sprint, weaving through the trees.

Tala immediately saw a build up of a motive aura echo. “A bit slower, Terry.” She grimaced in frustration. “Sorry.”

He slowed down, and the resonance faded.

She almost asked him to go on ahead to look for the children on his own, but that would be incredibly dangerous, even for Terry.

The terror bird had no defense against the subtle nudges employed by a bog hag, and the creatures were all known to be able to weaken, or even fully suppress, the magical ability of many arcanous creatures.

That was theorized to be a cornerstone of their ability to enthrall those same beasts.

Terry was monumentally powerful, but they just didn’t know to what extent he would be vulnerable.

It would not be safe for him to get close to them. They might just be able to remove much of his advantage. In the worst case, they might be able to enslave him, somehow. Now that would be a disaster.

Tala tried not to grind her teeth as she kept her focus tuned outward on the surrounding trees. Ending-berries in my mouth. Biting them unwittingly would be bad.

She moved the two bloodstars containing mirrors of perception for Alat around trees to either side to increase their field of view, just in case. The guards should be through here shortly, but she’d feel the fool if she passed the boys by and didn’t notice.

And what a blessing it would be to find the two hiding nearby.

Alat chimed in. -Their gates should be obvious, even through obscurement. But I agree, the wide field of view is still wise.-

They had no luck as they passed quickly through the trees. In fact, they found the first confirmation of the opposite just as they reached the edge of the grove.

A burn wolf howled before bounding up, lunging off of a tree to come at Tala from the side.

It was no bigger than a large dog but was much leaner in appearance. Its eyes glowed an ember red, and the tips of its fur were each a soft, luminescent yellow. Each hair was black despite the tip, and had an almost charcoal quality to their appearance. Even so, they still moved as fur would on a dog. The last thing that jumped out to Tala, upon quick inspection, was the trails of smoke rising from the lolling, fang-filled maw.

Tala drew Flow with her off-hand, holding it in a reverse grip.

She caught the leaping wolf with her right hand, while funneling power into Flow, shaping it into a glaive, which skewered the closest of the wolves closing in on them from the other side.

Large pack.

Her tungsten rod rotated and shot backward, catching another wolf mid-lunge like a bit in a horse’s mouth.

“Terry, quick death.”

Terry became a flickering storm.

Tala dropped to the ground, her mount gone.

She crushed the neck of the wolf that she had caught before tossing it aside, away from the trees.

Burn wolves had the habit of bursting into violent conflagrations, even after death, and she didn’t want the caravan to find itself in the middle of a mini-forest fire.

She had time to twist, transform Flow into a sword, and cut down two more lunging forms before the conflict was over.

The tungsten rod hadn’t slowed in its streaking path backwards, where it slammed the wolf it carried into a tree, then continued. First, unhinging the beast’s jaw, then continued. It crushed flesh and bone, moving in an almost perfectly straight line until it impacted the tree, no part of the wolf remaining in its way.

The rod then jammed downward, embedding into the wolf corpse before flicking it away from the tree line.

With a blurring spin, the metal implement shed the gore it had picked up. Now clean, it stopped just as quickly, rigidly vertical once more. From there, it returned to its resting position at a more leisurely pace, resembling the speed of a thrown rock rather than a crossbow bolt.

In those brief seconds, Terry had slain more than two dozen of the beasts, knocking their bodies away from the tree-line.

“This is too many. Bog hags don’t usually control whole packs.” Tala felt building concern for the boys, and the caravan as a whole.

-A coven? Bog hags have been known to function in family units, on occasion. When they do that, they can control larger groups of other creatures.-

Tala did not like anything that might imply, but it made sense. One bog hag would never venture this far from the northern swamps. A group, though? They just might be bold enough to try it.

Overhead, a circling shape drew her attention, though she didn’t turn her head to look.

What do you think the chances are that that blade-wing falcon is just out for an evening flight?

-Low.-

Another servant of the hags?

-Even if not, it’s worth bringing down.-

Agreed. Tala locked onto the creature, without ever setting her eyes upon it.

As she jumped back onto Terry’s back, and he took off once more, she activated her magics.

Crush.

The falcon overhead shrieked in surprise, already plummeting towards the earth.

Crush.

Even as the bird began flaring its own magic and straining its muscles, the second amplification hit home.

There was no recovering after that.

The large creature hit the ground with a meteoric impact, but Tala didn’t divert her attention as she scanned the land around them, Terry moving northward as fast as he could without creating a resonance with his passenger.

We should look east, closer to the mountains. The thought came subtly, and she almost voiced it to Terry before she noticed that Terry was already moving in that direction.

-Tala.-

Yeah. I noticed. She shook her head. We have to keep going due north, as fast as we can. “Keep northward, Terry.”

Terry trilled and changed his course back.

She considered for a moment, then shook her head. They wouldn’t have gone due north, we should scan to the west.

Again, she opened her mouth to speak, but Terry was already turning towards the west.

“Straight north, Terry. They’re trying to drive us off their trail.”

-There.- Alat brought Tala’s attention to the magic in the air. It was a ridiculously light touch. It couldn’t force anything at this level of power, but it was an effective nudge.

I probably would never have noticed it if Terry hadn’t started reacting, first.

-Yeah, even looking for it, I missed it at first.-

When they crested the next rise to the north, Tala almost screamed in surprise.

A thunderbull surged upward from where it had been waiting just over the top of the hill, crouched low.

Time seemed to slow as Tala’s eyes widened.

Power was already building, nearly to a crescendo around the bull’s body.

“Terry, away!” With her instant of warning, she expanded her aura to extend well beyond her body.

Terry flickered away just as a thigh-thick bar of lightning rammed down from the sky.

Tala was flung towards the ground, but mainly because her mount was gone once again.

Thankfully, this attack was nowhere near as powerful as the griffon’s attack had been, several months back, and she’d learned from that.

As the lightning entered her aura, she threw her magical weight against it. The lightning, itself was being directly manipulated by magic, and that was the only reason she could sway it at all.

Natural lighting of this magnitude would have raked the entire hilltop with a scattershot of power, this was being harnessed and wrangled to hit her alone.

She broke the force which contained the lightning.

The energy shot outwards like the world’s brightest, most luminescent confetti, and Tala was knocked a step backward by the concussion of thunder that followed.

I’m coming to hate lightning.

Several strikes had still jumped to her, traveling down her iron paint, but they hadn’t even burnt away the portion that it had traveled through. Though, the material was hot to the point of burning her flesh beneath. At least, it would have been, if she hadn’t been full of ending-berry power, both from the juice and from her own scripts, which mirrored them so closely.

As it was, the greatest inconvenience was that her eyes were temporarily blinded, and she felt a little dazed from the flash and overpowering thunder that had come through both her mundane senses and those that she’d aspect-mirrored.

Next time drop the aspect mirroring and close your eyes.

-Hey, you did pretty good. Don’t beat yourself up over details.- After a moment’s hesitation, Alat added. -But, yeah. Those would be good things to change.-

Terry slew the bull before Tala recovered, even as quickly as she did, and he was back under her, growing to lift her into riding position before the bull hit the ground.

Its last effect on the world was a thunderous impact.

­-Bad pun, Tala. No.-

My head hurts. Leave me my puns.

Terry was already speeding along the ridge, heading north-east as the most efficient path northward when she regained her faculties.

They had already covered more ground than the children could have hoped to cover in this time, were they on foot. So, they had to be close. Or they were taken by a blade-wing falcon and are already long gone.

Tala shook her head to clear the horrid thought.

No, not happening. She hesitated. Something was wrong.

There had to be something she was missing.

Think Tala, think… Think!

The ridgeline. Why were they going along the ridgeline? She’d asked Terry to go due north.

-There it is.- Alat brought Tala’s focus to another working of magic, and she shouted to Terry.

“Into the valley, now!” She also nudged him to turn left.

But they were greeted with an empty valley, save for some tall bushes.

Do we search all the bushes?

-Tala. The magic is still there. Something is terribly wrong. I think we’re missing something critical.-

Tala stopped, took a deep breath and cleared her mind. They are working magic. Her eyes snapped open, and she swept the surroundings with her duel perspective, instructing Alat to do the same.

They were looking for subtle inconsistencies in the zeme of the world around them. The currents of magic should be uniform and predictable but… THERE!

Back near the grove there was something wrong. It was in a valley just to the east of where she’d come out, as evident by the still smoking bodies of the burnt wolves.

The zeme was too calm, like the eye of a hurricane.

As soon as Tala locked her focus on it, a horrific screech arose from the depths of that valley, and it was as if a sheet was torn away.

“Terry, as fast as you can. Get me over there!"

Terry crouched low and practically rocketed back the way they had come, much, much faster than they’d come this way.

Tala practically blazed with power as her speed instantly created a motive aura resonance, which continued to build, shouting her power to the world.

She didn’t care.

Climbing up the hill towards the grove was a small army of monsters.

Don’t exaggerate, Tala. There’s only about a hundred of the beasts.

What had, a moment before, seemed an empty hillside was now speckled with dozens of burn wolves, terror birds of differing elements, hearth snatchers, rock spiders the size of a horse, and other minor arcanous creatures.

It had been a clever tactic.

Steal children to force a search. That way, the defenders would be spread out. Ideally, the strongest could be nudged to be even further before the true attack came.

They plan on taking everyone.

Then, as Tala and Terry came closer at incredible speed, she saw them. At the base of the hill, still nearly a quarter of a mile away, six stooped figures surrounded a wide flat hillock, on which two bodies were laid out.

"NO!” Tala pulled out a flare, and fired it off, signaling that she’d found the boys and that the danger was to more than herself and them.

She didn’t let herself focus on her goal, instead she focused on that which was in her way. She tried to lock onto the hags, but their features, and locations kept shifting subtly.

-Illusion. Not mental this time.-

So, there might be more, or fewer?

-Exactly, and they might not be exactly where they seem.-

Are we sure they’re down there at all?

-Yes, the source is in the same area as the illusion look there, there, and here.- Alat drew Tala’s focus to various aspects of the illusion and the surrounding magics, along with the general pattern of the zeme of their surroundings as a whole.

All right. It’s a fight, then.

The hags screeched at her, and the sound, even as distant as they were, hit her like a physical blow, the magic around her ears fighting to keep it from getting to her.

Terry flinched, letting out a sound of his own that was disturbingly close to a whimper before he seemed to buckle down and increase his speed all the more.

Tala was a flaming beacon of resonant power as they crossed the last hundred yards.

The creatures that had been advancing on the trees turned at the sound of their masters’ calls, facing the new threat and charging, their own challenges added to the hags’ cries.

Terry leapt high in the last moments, then flickered away, engaging the closest enthralled creatures as Tala dropped on to the nearest hag…only to pass right through the illusion.

Enough! Tala threw her aura wide, filling it with as much of her magical weight as she could.

It felt like her body was slammed by a dozen sledgehammers, but she endured, wrenching control over the zone around her from her enemies.

The illusion shattered, and Tala was left facing ten bog hags, all with their hands raised in her direction.

Power slammed through her eyes, overwhelming the defenses there instantly and driving into her mind.

-I’ve got this.- Alat took the brunt of the attack, which felt like a cold-chisel being driven into Tala’s orbital cavities. The alternate interface let out a pained, whining grunt, but her goal had been accomplished.

Tala’s mind was mostly uninhibited.

With fury in her eyes, Tala instantly saw which of the hags had the most power flowing through them.

Crush.

The central creature dropped to the ground, squealing in surprise. Like a gutted pig.

That lessened the strain on Alat, and together, they quickly targeted more, going for incapacitation on a wide scale before killing them.

Though, as Tala enacted Crush over and over again sweeping through her enemies, she sprinted towards their dropping forms.

Flow will end them before they can recover. In that vein, she threw the knife forward, sending power into it to reshape it into a sword even as it tumbled towards her enemies.

It beheaded the lead hag and was already being pulled back to her hand as the last of the hags collapsed under the influence of Tala’s Crush.

The thralls were going mad, and Tala had to slow her headlong rush to deal with frothing wolves, screeching terror birds, chittering spiders, and other creatures that had gotten around Terry to charge her.

In her other perspective, Tala could see Terry flickering through the mass of gathered foes, eviscerating them even as they sought to overwhelm him with the sheer volume of their power.

Unfortunately, it seemed to be working.

Tala didn’t know if the savage intelligence of the hags was specifically directing the beasts or if they were just well coordinated in some other manner, but the arcanous creatures were filling the valley with hostile power to the point that Terry had very few places that he could go without immediately sustaining injuries.

Still, he wove and slashed, finding holes in the defense and filling the low ground with torrents of blood.

But he wasn’t perfect.

Even at this distance, Tala could see burned feathers and cuts on her friend’s flesh.

He had taken more damage in the last minute than she’d seen him take in total through the entirety of their time together.

She needed to help him, and the best way to do that was to end the threat of the hags. If the beasts were still fighting with their masters gone, Tala and Terry would have a bloody conflict to face together, but she needed the chief devils gone, first.

That in mind, she continued to hurtle Flow at the hags and call it back, killing at least one hag with each toss. As she did that, she had to fight the enthralled with her fists, feet, and bloodstars. She was even able to crack the ending-seeds and exhale dissolution power into two different foes as she fought forward. Maybe a second weapon wouldn’t be a bad idea after all…

Even as her advance was slowed by the tide of lesser creatures, she and Flow reaped a harvest of death among the hags. Those enemies fought futilely to return to their feet and died in the attempt.

Less than two minutes after Terry had flickered away, Tala slew the last hag, and it was as if a wave of something passed through the assembled arcanous creatures.

They froze in place en masse for one horrifying instant, then with shrieks, and chitters, and yowls, and bellows, the animals scattered in every direction, save towards the trees. There were already noises of charging men and women coming from that direction.

Exhausted, Tala turned back towards the rocky rise on which she’d seen the two boys, even as Terry flickered to her shoulder. The terror bird was favoring one leg, smoke rising from still smoldering feathers around several burned patches of flesh.

“We’ll get you seen to as soon as we can.” But her mind was on the low hillock as she raced over.

She already knew what she’d find, but she refused to let it sink in.

As soon as she could clearly see what lay atop the rise, she slowed, color draining from her face, and her chest tightening.

The two boys lay stretched out, their shirts stripped from them, their throats slit.

She’d known as soon as she’d seen them. They’d had no gates.

Now, their bodies lay before her, dead for too short a time to even have cooled off.

Even so, there was no blood around them, indicating they’d been killed elsewhere and brought here.

They were killed as soon as they were taken, weren’t they… It wasn’t a question, but Alat answered anyways.

-So it would seem.-

* * *

She was joined by a host of guards and Marnin shortly thereafter, and she updated them on what had happened.

The boy’s bodies were already in Kit, and the pouch had never felt heavier.

It was a long trek back to the caravan.

The sobs and wails of the boys’ parents, when Tala had presented them with the bodies along with her regrets, would haunt her nightmares for years.

The clearing was somber that night as everyone was faced with the stark reality of the dangers that they were all too aware of, even if just in concept.

Mistress Odera tended to Terry’s injuries, and sat in consoling silence with Tala for the entire time.

Tala was grateful for the woman’s presence, even more so that she didn’t press. Instead of talking, Tala wrote up her reports, and passed them to Mistress Odera before volunteering to take the first shift on watch.

She couldn’t imagine sleeping, with her mind still filled with images of those dead boys.

The older Mage asked if she wanted to talk, but Tala had asked to wait until morning. “I need time to process this.”

The woman had smiled sadly, then nodded, granting the request of first watch.

They discussed the need to move the caravan, due to Tala’s aura resonance, but they both agreed that it was such a short burst that it shouldn’t be an issue, not this close to Arconaven.

That city was less than a dozen miles away, after all.

They’d almost made it…

Tala sat up, late into the night, watching over the caravan.

Just as midnight was approaching, and with it the end of Tala’s shift, a form appeared beside her, seemingly from out of thin air.

Tala had no time to react as Revered power seized her without effort, locking her in place physically and magically. The air was practically drowning in the deep blue of her foe’s aura.

Fear gripped her down to her soul. Alat was gone, frozen just as Tala’s mind and magic were. Her bloodstars couldn’t move, her very soul was under someone else’s power.

A too-white grin spread across the arcane’s face, satisfaction as plain in his features as the blood-red of his eyes.

Within the stillness of both body and mind, Tala heard a horrifyingly familiar voice, the tone somehow bringing to mind images of blood, “Found you.”

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