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Savashbahar pulled an attack hex, its wood lashing out in all directions. “Reap,” she named it and hurled it at the Hollower.
The hex transformed into spinning scythe blades and expanded beyond the length of the room. The deadly fan carved out gashes into the walls but did not slow. It careened toward the mage at dizzying speeds.
The Hollower hit the floor right as the blades shot past and buried themselves deep into the back wall. A shower of dust and stone fragments shot out from the force of impact.
The Hollower pushed up into a defensive crouch. “Ateshim gael!” he shouted and the netherfire from the channels in the floor leapt up and came to his hands. He launched his netherfire volleys at Savashbahar.
She pulled a defense hex, its wood carved in ripples. “Gust,” she named it, put it up to her lips and blew. Wind erupted from her palm, churning a narrow passage through the netherfire.
The blue flame licked on either side of her, its heat nauseating, but it passed by without touching her.
“Well, aren’t you a resourceful little hex witch,” the Hollower said with a smirk.
“So, you demons can speak,” Savashbahar spat. “Tell me, Hollower, what magic brings you here?”
“I should ask you the same thing,” he said, running his fingers through his short hair, so blonde it was nearly white. “This place isn’t exactly easy to find.”
His presence alone proved the factory mages were in league with the Hollowers. The sporadic bursts of darkness stabbing out from his otherwise lifeless shimmer proved he was more than just the average Hollower. This one could speak. He could tell her where they come from.
Savashbahar would pry the secret from his mouth. Then she would end them all.
“The restless spirit of my fallen son brought me here, to you,” she said. “He requires your life. And I, I need answers. Tell me why.”
“Why, huh? You’re not gonna like the truth, which is why I’m gonna tell you,” the Hollower said as he circled Savashbahar. “We do it because it’s fun. Killing your boy... fun for us... korkma zinjeerlair!”
His last words summoned chains from the folds of his robe, demonic, talon-clawed chains that pulsed with a dark purple glow. The chains shot out and wrapped themselves around her, the claws digging into her skin. They dragged her towards the Hollower.
Savashbahar’s anger melted into fear. This was the strength of the purple robes. They were fearmongers, using the emotion as weapons against their foes.
She fought down her fear, grabbed a utility hex and named it “weagr”. As it dissolved, she felt her muscles bounding with strength. She grabbed handfuls of the glowing chains, and pulled with all her newfound might.
She launched the Hollower at a wall. He spoke a rush of words, and as he hit the wall, he disappeared into his robe as it became a jumble of purple stormclouds.
The Hollower emerged from the clouds, holding a chain. A massive, purplish-black demon beast dog was at the end of the chain, slavering and pulling the chain taut as it strained against its master to get at Savashbahar.
The Hollower let go of the chain. The dog leapt at her, too fast to dodge.
Waves of dread and panic hit Savashbahar, so intense they drove her into hysteria. She screamed and screamed, shutting her eyes to keep from seeing the dog tearing at her flesh. She felt herself hit the ground where she scrambled backwards until she hit the wall, trying to get away as best she could from the threat.
She knew the dog wasn’t real, that it had passed over her as harmlessly as smoke. But the terror it had driven into her made these facts seem surreal, myths it had devoured as easily as it could her bones.
“Stupid girl,” she heard the Hollower say. “Someone should have told you not to bring sticks to a firefight.”
The Hollower was real, she told herself. He was going to kill her if she didn’t open her eyes and fight back. Dushunmek’s death would go unavenged. The thought of that didn’t dispel the overwhelming, impossible terror. But it got her to open her eyes.
The Hollower was tossing two chains, one wrapped around each arm, into the netherfire channels. A sickly blue and purple flame spread onto the chains.
Savashbahar looked down at her hex belt. Two attack, three defense, and three utility hexes were all she had.
She couldn’t bring down this fiend; it took a whole team of Hexenarii to defeat a Hollower.
It was impossible to separate her true feelings from the fear the Hollower had induced. What she felt didn’t care whether it was manufactured or not. Her heart beat so hard she could hear it in her ears. She didn’t want to fight, she wanted to run as fast as she could and never look back.
The whole of the Hollower’s chains now danced in flame. The fire cast deep shadows over his face, giving a frightening hue to his sinister grin.
Her trembling fingers closed over an attack hex. If she couldn’t kill all the Hollowers, she could still kill this one with a single word. Even if that same word killed her as well.
The Hollower whipped a fiery chain at her.
For Dushunmek.
“Boom!” she yelled, naming the hex as she threw it at him.
The explosion ripped out of the hex. The room disappeared in a flash of brilliance. Fiery waves of pain washed over her.
Silence. Savashbahar still felt. Pain was there, steadily decreasing. She wasn’t dead.
She raised her head. The laboratory was wrecked, bathed in dust and soot. The explosion had collapsed the roof in heaps of rubble, turned the tables and shelves into splintered firewood, and set books alight.
Why wasn’t she dead? The explosion had blasted her through a wall, into what appeared to be an old fireplace. Her clothes were tattered and smoking, but she was whole.
Only a weagr was thick-skinned enough to possibly survive a blast like that.
Weagr. She had forgotten in her fear. Weagr was what she had named her utility hex earlier.
Inside the ruined laboratory another boom sounded, smaller this time. A chain bathed in purplish blue flame erupted from a pile of rubble.
Savashbahar’s dread came back strong. One attack hex left. Dying here would not avenge her son. She looked up at the rounded hollow of chimney.
She pulled another utility hex. “Geyser,” she named it, wiping sweat from her brow on it before tossing it on the ground. The saltwater spray shot up, carrying her with it through the chimney tunnel. When she reached the geyser’s apex, she grabbed the walls and began to climb.
Soon the darkness claimed everything. She couldn’t even see the geyser below. She kept climbing. Then she heard a clinking below, the sound of metal digging into stone.
Below her, the purplish light of the fiery chains illuminated the gloom. They were digging into the stones. The Hollower followed the chains, pulled up by the snakelike tethers. His face was a torrent of rage.
He was gaining fast. She looked up at the neverending darkness. She looked at the stones in front of her.
She hoped she still had weagr strength.
Savashbahar punched the chimney stones with all her might. They fell away, and sunlight streamed through the small hole they left.
“You think you get to leave, after this?!” The Hollower shouted. He was making huge leaps with the chains pulling him up.
Savashbahar punched out more stones. It was barely big enough, but those chains were frighteningly close. It would have to do.
One attack hex left. She pulled it, named it the same as the last attack hex, and dropped it as she fell out of the hole into daylight.
She landed on her back on the grass as the explosion went off. The tower she fell out of groaned. Smoke billowed out of the hole and began to fill the sky. With a sudden crash, half of the building dropped a floor, making the whole tower look staggered.
“What the hell have you been up to?”
She looked to the side. It was Mike. He was holding the legs of the black-robed mage, the one whose shimmer was so thick and convoluted it looked like a stormy sea. Runt held the mage’s arms.
She raised an eyebrow as she spoke to Mike. “What the hell have you been up to?”
Mike looked up at Runt. “So much for the discreet exit,” he said.
They tossed the mage into a clump of bushes. The three of them hurried in the opposite direction of the people who were approaching, amassing into an ever thickening crowd around the broken tower.
*****
DRUZE’S HEAD POUNDED. More than the injury made by the club, the insult was an unforgiving lash. The insult fueled his rage.
His daughter didn’t help matters. She stormed about his den, fury etched in her features.
“So all you can tell me is someone or multiple someones infiltrated the bottom levels of the Aphelion Tower and set off an explosion,” she said, her voice climbing as she spoke. “This person or people then ascended through a forgotten, walled off exhaust chimney and set off another explosion, turning the tower into a misshapen, unusable monstrosity. But you have no idea who or why or how many or what’s next.”
“I told you, Rew, I was unconscious.”
She glared at him. “How easy is it to incapacitate a mage with five hundred years of acumen?”
He returned her glare, his blood running cold. “I will not be scolded by you, daughter.”
“Yes, you will!” she said, standing her ground. “You relinquished control of the Hierophane to me, remember? And for three hundred years it’s been me, guiding it, doing the administration, being the face of Seat Esotera while you do whatever it is you do in the shadows. So when it comes to matters of the Hierophane my say is absolute, not yours. And when my head of security lets someone destroy one of the original five esoteric towers in bold, broad daylight, I will scold him.”
She looked out the window, at the tower that now looked like a broken shoulder. “Do you understand me, Druze?”
There were few times in the last three hundred years he regretted giving up control of the Hierophane. He enjoyed moving about in the world without the recognition or restrictions as Hierophant. This time, with his own daughter talking down to him, was one of those times when he did not relish his lack of authority.
“You are Hierophant,” he told her. “And you are right.”
She turned to face him, her manner cold and business-like. “What steps have you taken since the attack?”
“It looks like hex magic was involved. I have sealed off Ardenspar. We’re coordinating with the local peacekeepers who are sweeping the city, looking for Hexenarii.”
“Keep me abreast of any development. I want answers,” she said and stormed out of his quarters.
Druze ran his fingers through his black hair. His gaze drifted to the ruined tower, one of the few that had stood since the beginning of the Hierophane.
For five hundred years the Hierophane had served as a beacon for humanity. It was the bulwark against aian aggression, nasran barbarism and megrym imperialism. Before today, it had seemed impregnable and unassailable. Now that the beacon was tarnished, what message did that send to those who sought to marginalize humanity?
The purple-robed man whose presence Druze had masked stepped out from unnatural shadows along the wall. He looked at Druze, his lips curled up into a wicked grin.
"You know, your daughter... when she's mad she is smoking hot."
"Nevermind my daughter. You should concern yourself with your own future when it comes to smoking hot." Druze opened his palm and called netherfire into existence, a spell that took experienced destruction mages an hour or longer to craft.
"You let this happen, Samedi," Druze said looking at the tower. He balled his hand into a fist, extinguishing the netherfire with his lack of will to maintain it.
"How was I supposed to know some part-time Hexenarii hag was roaming the dungeons looking for a brawl?” Samedi asked. He leaned against the window and looked out at the tower. “I gotta admit, though, she was pretty resourceful."
"I want her pretty dead," Druze said as he looked at the purple-robed mage. "Her, the megrym, the big man, all of them dead."
Samedi’s smile broadened. "Why don't you just tell your daughter who it was? Instead of sweeping the city looking for any nasran who looks Hexenarii, the peacekeepers can target a megrym, nasran lady and a big man. You’ll probably have their heads before dinnertime."
"I know why you smile,” Druze said. “You see my tactics and know I'm hiding something from Majora, something I figured you wouldn't notice. You make one fact glaringly apparent. It seems my centuries of life have made me arrogant in my own intelligence and dismissive of the faculties of others."
Druze's eyes drifted to the staggered tower. "I swallowed the megrym's bait, a ruse for fools. We all make mistakes, apparently even after half a millennium. The megrym’s mistake was injuring my pride. He must die. And no one will come between that, not even Majora.”
“Yeah, she wouldn’t kill him for a bump on the head,” Samedi said. “She kinda has that good girl aesthetic.”
Rew’s sense of truth, justice and fairness were the biggest reasons the Hierophane was regarded as a beacon of hope. She was known for making hard choices, some which had been disadvantageous to the Hierophane, for the sake of fairness and equity. This was the reason he had ceded control in the first place.
“Well, that’s where you and I come in, Samedi. To do the things in the dark that Majora and the Hierophane can’t or won’t do in the light.”
“Always more fun with the lights off,” Samedi said.
“The Exquisite Promise,” Druze said. “You’ll likely find our new friends there, with a trader named Ruki Provos. Kill him too, for bringing them to our doorstep.”
Samedi nodded and retreated into the shadows. He never complained about tasks that allowed him bloodletting.
Meanwhile, Druze looked at the broken tower. He would make some good come of the desecration. Everyone already talked about the Hierophane’s lack of master robes and their dwindling influence. Seat Esotera was an overextended, crumbling relic, lacking manpower to do much outside their own demesne.
That would change. When sacred Maltep lay in ruins and the Hierophane had possession of their hex stores, no one would question the might of human mages.