The magic engulfed me in an icy sheath, rushing into my mouth and nose like frozen floodwater until I was sure I would suffocate. That might have been a mercy compared to the caustic sensation of it sliding into my flesh, carried as it was by my own sorcery.
I was helpless to stop it and the mace fell forgotten from my hands as scores of confused and terror stricken human psyches exploded inside my mind, howling and screaming in madness as the necromancer’s magic began to dissolve them. Us.
That was the intent. They would take all those lives and make them one, subsuming the will of each and fusing them into a new whole, the component parts of which were entirely indistinguishable. I could feel that purpose radiating from the corrupt magic pulsing through my spirit and flesh, the discordant, squealing note of it acting like a surgeon’s blade to separate my spirit from the flesh it was paired to.
But there was a false note to it. I wasn’t within the necromancer’s carefully calculated circles and geometries, nor had my flesh been prepared with runes to guide and amplify the spell. Tatyana was supposed to be the vessel for the gibbering mass-mind, not me. Like the pebble that starts a landslide, that flaw began to impact on the structure of their spell. Magic, even their tainted version of it, was a continuous flow of energy that spells channelled, and now parts of their spell were having more energy flowing through them than they had ever been intended to handle. The smaller, subsidiary components of the spell failed first, the surge of energy shattering the neat channels the wizards had envisaged and finding the next path of least resistance. It escalated quickly, and once it combined with the spell they’d cast upon me to dampen my sorcery there was no recovering from it.
I felt the flow of it stall and being to vibrate in new and unpleasant ways. The structure of the spell upon me was collapsing as well, but the failure was out of control. I felt my sorcery break through the dregs of the enchantment, but the joy of that reunion was short-lived. It was the final stress on the already volatile mass of energy and with a shriek, the necromancer’s spell exploded, both in me and around me.
Shards of their magic scythed into me cleaner than any blade ever had, discharging their corrupted and incomplete effects into my flesh. I felt myself fly backwards but not the impact of my body against the table. The magic was burning through me, the shattered fragments carrying the intent to separate spirit and flesh into my body in ways it was never intended to.
My body was unlike anything the spell had been intended for though, and I felt the shards bite into the enchantments that bound me to this form, themselves already damaged from the all the years that wizards and priests had been experimenting on me. It felt as if iron nails, each still red from the forge, were being hammered into me, pushing deeper with every breath I took.
I felt the Songlines shuddering around me, flickers of raw energy flashing into being amidst the ice blue flames that already sheathed me from foot to crown, making them burn brighter so that I lost all trace of the world beyond them. And all the while, those red hot nails burrowed deeper, melting into the old and broken magics bound to my very core. I fought it, but it was too little, too late, and fear bloomed within me as I felt the enchantments reacting. Any fluctuation, however small, would affect the flesh they were bound to, and they were being torn and twisted. Fear became pain as the discharging fragments set off a chain of reactions that made my flesh run like water and my bones bend like saplings before a storm.
An unearthly keening noise reached me, and it was only when I had to draw breath that I realised that it came from me. I writhed on the ground as the great muscles of my legs warped and twisted, and my scream finally faded as the flickering magics closed around my throat. I gasped for air that had no longer had a clear path to my lungs, and lay clawing ineffectually at my neck and chest until the burning need to breathe gave way to formless darkness.