NOVEL NEXT 42. Deathly Peace
Excerpt from Captain Zilian Yuka’s ‘Handbook for Self-Defense.’
“If you can’t win a fight, there’s no shame in running. If you can’t run from a fight, there’s no shame in cheating. No blow is too low or trick too underhanded if it saves lives. Remember to stay calm, and listen to your instincts.”
The colour of Certainty had worked wonders with Arcane Fetters—it hadn't left a tether to her that could be severed by the beast’s claw, fuelling its own stubbornly self-perpetuating growth with the magic around it. The efficiency was phenomenal, and Yenna was left feeling eager to try other spells infused with the colours she knew.
With a moment to breathe as the beast-man tried to break out of his Certain Fetters, Yenna had space to identify the problem before her. The main issues were the beast’s unnerring claw and constant muttering—if they could be neutralized, Yenna could stop him from casting his counterspell entirely. To that end, she started working on a spell.
Joy felt like the easiest place to start—it was the colour of magic she was most familiar with, and its power flowed freely from her even in tense situations. Concentrating on the whipping winds, Yenna formulated a variant of the Arcane Fetters spell and threw it towards the beast-man’s free hand.
As before, the beast-man attempted to knock it aside with a flame-wreathed strike. To Yenna’s fascination the flames only seemed to stoke the whirling green of the wind as it spread across his hand. Rather than lock his hand in place, the magic shook it around with such violence that it was near impossible to trace the arcane symbols necessary for his counterspell. The beast-man’s eyes narrowed at the Fetters as he glanced between Yenna and the spell with extraordinary disdain.
The small smile that had crept onto Yenna’s face vanished all too soon when her assailant changed tactics. Instead of trying to counter the muddy spell creeping its way up his arm and torso, the beast-man swept a burning leg to break the tethers binding him to the ground before charging towards Yenna. It was a tactic for fighting mages that even Yenna knew about—if the mage's life was snuffed out, their spells would be too.
Yenna's only saving grace was the persistence of her Certain Fetters, and the disruption of the Joyful Fetters. Even with its tethers broken, the earthen wrap prevented the beast-man from bending his arm while the winds weakened and threw off potential claw strikes. It was at best a temporary reprieve—the mass of muscle and death twice her size appeared ready to ram into her with his sheer bulk.
The mage’s next spell was less formal, and more an act of desperation. Yenna recalled the stream back in Sumhrell, and her redirecting of the river to make a bridge—specifically, how the water under her feet had attempted to push her away even as she walked on it. Conjuring water onto the ground as she retreated, Yenna called upon the power of Flow and created a puddle between herself and the beast that flowed like a raging river. The beast-man mindlessly took a step into the puddle, nearly stumbling and falling in, though he narrowly saved himself with a flap of his wings. With almost contemptuous ease, the beast-man flapped his wings once more to jump straight over Yenna’s puddle.
It looked like some ridiculous game, Yenna’s retreat sprinkled with lackluster attempts to stop the beast. He was unstoppable, shrugging off the mage's every attempt to harm him. Fear started to flow freely through her body, and she could feel the crackling of lightning as it threatened to harm everyone involved through her sheer panic—Tirk included. Stop, Yenna! Think! He has to have some weakness, or else why would he bother blocking attacks?
The hovering pane of magical sight over her eye wasn’t much help at first glance—the chaotic flow of magic rendered the display nearly unreadable. One thing stood out, however—in the centre of the beast-man’s chest was a tiny, nearly-unnoticeable chunk of blackness. A perfect void of magic that defied scrutiny, surrounded by a corona of glowing power. That has to be it—the source of his power! If I can somehow hit that…!
Despite the breakthrough, Yenna still didn't like her chances of winning a straight fight. She had been lucky that the Certain Fetters and Joyful Fetters had been so ‘sticky’ that the beast hadn't been able to bat it away, but there would be no point in firing off new attacks at him if he was going to either take them on his arms or deflect them entirely—his ability to regenerate far exceeded Yenna’s ability to damage him.
At the same time, Yenna realised, those attacks could delay the beast-man and force him to remain on guard. With a deep breath, Yenna allowed her fear to culminate in dark lightning. Wary of backlash from the uncontrollable emotion, the mage tamed it with thoughts of the things she was proud of. Her students, past and present, her achievements as a mage, the members of the expedition—the lightning wrapped around her hand stopped trying to strike her, changing to a softer, lighter purple.
This lighter coloured bolt was no less potent than its darker variant, the air between the beast and Yenna’s hand flashing with violent discharges of electricity. The beast turned its body, letting the sparks discharge into the earth clinging to his arm. To Yenna’s rising frustration, her previous spell was shielding him quite handily—in fact, the bolts were cracking the earth, freeing up some of his movement. Shooting out a desperate gout of Wroth-infused flame as the beast came closer, Yenna’s back hoof hit a wall. In her attempts to get away from him she had lost track of where she was going, and now the mage found herself cornered.
The flames had barely done anything, undirected as they were, but the weakness left by her bolts had allowed the beast-man to break free of the Certain Fetters. With a contemptuous swipe of a flaming claw, he destroyed the Joy-infused wrap around his other hand. Yenna could feel her heart beating in her chest as the beast-man loomed over her. He looked down, opened his beak and uttered one word with a voice like gravel.
“Die.”
Yenna watched him raise a hand, claws wrapped in flame, and felt a coldness flood her body. Everything fell into slow motion, though the mage knew it was no trick of her mental acceleration—perhaps some final reserve of adrenaline. Feelings ran through her at breakneck pace. I did everything I could! Why didn’t it work? How was I supposed to win this? What will happen to me? To Tirk, and the others? I’m going to die! I never should have left home! I should have stayed right where I belonged!
She felt a sharp sensation like a dagger run through her heart, icy death ready to drag her to her grave. Even as her body and mind began to accept her death, a final sliver of courage—a voice deep within her soul, spoke. Have you really exhausted every possibility? Will you die as a mage, or live as a witch?
Revelation hit her like an avalanche. Stasis. The light-blue colour of ice, the colour of stillness, whose darkest facet is death—whose shining light is peace!
A pulse of energy erupted from Yenna’s body, knocking the beast-man back a step. The final colour, the colour so thoroughly anathema to her, was also close to what she held dear. Stasis wasn’t something to be feared, not entirely—for stasis could mean peace, and that peace could be defined by what came before. A true, wonderful stasis could only come after a lifetime of action and satisfaction—death was not a desirable peace.
Yenna's senses felt subtly sharper as she achieved her realisation. The colours she could see appeared more vivid, the sounds of the still realm not so muffled—she could feel the blood pumping through her veins, and Tirk’s heartbeat as he shivered on her back. Now the answer felt obvious. To survive this moment, Stasis would be necessary to return everything back to a desired state.
The beast-man blinked at her, readying himself for another strike. Focused on him, Yenna could feel the magic flowing around him—specifically, she could feel the barrier that protected him from the stillness just as she had her own protections. As his claw strike came down, Yenna flicked an arm out—his talons scraped against the bracelet Lumale gave her, the conjured metal helping to deflect a blow that would otherwise have taken her arm off, though the strike made something in her wrist snap audibly.
Despite the damage to her wrist, her movement had the desired effect—the barrier around his claw had failed, trapping the beast’s hand in stillness. He struggled against it fruitlessly, giving Yenna a moment to slip out of her tight spot. Thankful that her body had yet to register the pain of her likely broken wrist, she turned and used her other hand to tag the beast on the back.
A pale blue thread wormed its way around the struggling beast-man’s body, and Yenna had to duck out of the way as he ineffectually clawed behind himself. Wherever the thread roamed, the beast-man’s protective field wore thin and failed. Stillness crashed over him, freezing him into a fearsome statue once more.
Yenna didn’t let herself relax yet. Her heightened magic sense saw one last holdout within the beast-man’s body—around that pitch-black void in his chest. It made sense now, why he had been able to move again in the first place. The corona of energy around that void inside him pulsed like a heart, and slowly, ever so slowly, forced back the stillness. Yenna had merely delayed him, not entirely consigned him to stillness.
Something behind Yenna shifted, and she realised after a moment that Tirk had jumped off her back.
“Tirk, stop, it’s still dangerous!” Yenna reached forward with her good hand to grab him, but Tirk raised a hand and stopped her. His face was uncharacteristically serious, and his horn glowed with a soft white light—Yenna wasn’t sure what to make of it, even with her senses enhanced. What she could tell, however, was that Tirk was about to do something important.
“Moon and stars, hear my plea.” The boy clasped his hands together, speaking with the confidence of a venerable preacher. “Let stillness unwind and reform, to set the good and righteous free under veil of night, to bind in waxingmoon and waninglight the wicked evil.”
Then, a ring of light appeared around Tirk’s clasped hands—Yenna immediately recognised it as the same kind of prayer-spell that the priestess Suee had cast. The pale moonlight illuminating the area suddenly faded to darkness, and Yenna watched in horror as the moon above them waned entirely to obscurity. There was a sudden, thrilling coldness, followed by an overwhelming bloom of motion.
The wind began to flow, carrying strands of magic from the glass-roofed tower to wrap around the frozen beast-man. Light, sound, warmth and motion returned to the world as all the stillness coalesced into the form of the beast-man. Yenna watched in amazement and marvelled at the beauty and simplicity of the spell—all the magic that had flowed endlessly through the astrolabe in the tower now weaved around and through their would-be assailant in a wide strip, folded just so that there was only one side to the shape.
A thud from nearby snapped Yenna’s attention away to Narasanha, who had become unfrozen in midair and once again landed unceremoniously on the floor. Shouts could be heard from within the manor, and a guard’s bell rang. Gasps and shouts went up from bystanders who, from their perspective, had just witnessed the mage Yenna appear with some bound beast.
Now that the tension had faded, fatigue assaulted Yenna’s body and the pain of her broken wrist caught up with her. As the mage shouted in pain, the bodyguard was the first to check on her—Tirk stood in stunned silence, staring at the bound beast.
“There, mage, it’s just a break. You’ll yet live.” Narasanha’s grip on Yenna’s arm was tight, though she was exceedingly gentle with the wrist—using two hands to ensure the mage couldn’t accidentally twist it. She reached up with a free hand and pointed at a surprised crew member nearby. “You! Fetch Mayi, she’s at the stables.”
“W-Wait,” Yenna groaned, “The priest that was with Suee needs her far more. I can be looked after later– argh, it hurts!”
Narasanha made a face, and Yenna suspected the bodyguard had forgotten. Still, she nodded and instructed the bemused yolm expedition hand to go help the other priest, even as she carefully held Yenna’s arm.
“Tirk…?” Yenna looked down at him. The boy was still staring straight at the beast, mouth agape as though in awe. “Tirk– ach! Tirk, what was that? What did you do?”
Tirk turned and looked up at Yenna, his black eyes wide. “I didn’t do anything. It just came out of me, like… like when my horn tells me where to go.”
Then, like a bubble being popped, Tirk’s confident stance collapsed. The boy burst into tears, and Yenna leaned down to wrap an arm around him—awkwardly forcing Narasanha to follow. Holding the boy to her chest, Yenna gently stroked his head—and let out a sob of her own that she hadn’t realised she was holding back.