The Very Wise

  “I can handle myself. Get some rest,” I said, running down the steps of the Guild.

  “I don’t rest. And no you can’t,” Hannah said, easily keeping up with me.

  “Don’t you have anything better to do?” I said.

  “Sure. But you’ll need to be carried,” she said. While her argument was greatly improved by the fact that her voice retained a gritty monotone, while I was starting to run out of breath as we hit the cool night air outside, it was the principle of the thing.

  “Ridiculous. I’ll be fine, I just need to hurry,” I said.

  “Tired yet?” she said. I was absolutely not. I just needed to get into the rhythm of the jog was all.

  “Look, if it comes to it I can just warp back to Nowhere and try again tomorrow. This isn’t an emergency,” I said.

  “That’s how it always starts,” she said.

  And we stopped fighting about it, because I knew how it was going to end- the same way it would have ended had our roles been reversed. If you have the chance, you go with your friends when they’re going out into danger. Or they will probably die. Sure, I had the tendency to split off from the main group more than the rest of us, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t started thinking like every other half-decent person in the Guild. Besides, Hannah knew where we were actually going.

  As soon as we left the town, the night became pitch black but for the stars above. Chum was keeping up well enough, and he cast that infernal halo spell on me again. It lit our path in a red glow and together with my glowing rat boots, we more or less could see where we were going.

  We went off the road almost immediately, into the woods, and the uneven ground slowed us down immediately, even as arcane lights and/or glowbugs flittered around the edges of our vision. The forest smelled of conifer and decay, with a strange floral scent that could have been connected to either of the former.

  “So, the anomaly wasn’t the giant glowing beam of light?” I said.

  “You went that direction,” Hannah said.

  “And?” I said.

  “Either you’d deal with it or call for help,” Hannah said. Which was a pretty good point, even if I was pretty bad at keeping everyone up to date through the chat. If it was a real, time-sensitive issue that involved the whole of the Guild I would have sent something.

  “So, what was it?” I said.

  “Cabin,” Hannah said.

  “The whole of the wizard council went out in the woods to check out a cabin?” I said.

  “Emma found it. She said, I quote, ‘get every fucking spellcaster here right the fuck now!’. She looked serious. Ajit sent everyone,” Hannah said.

  “Fuck. Good call, I guess. If not for me needing all of the mana immediately,” I said. I was starting to lose my ability to hide that I was out of breath, and so I slowed down the jog a little and kept my mouth shut for the rest of the run.

  It took us about an hour, and even with my Nerd trait blocking physical advancement of attributes for now, I had still increased my athletics and survival skills enough that I was only really fucking out of breath instead of too exhausted to stand by the time anything changed. Or, well, the second time anything changed. The first time was when Hannah decapitated something massive, dark and furry without even slowing down. What the hell had she been up to this past week?

  Anyways, after about an hour of running we began to see a pale blue light in the distance and hear chanting of dozens of voices. Which was odd. Everyone in the Guild had more or less the same spellcasting abilities as I did when I had left. Group rituals were something that had been vaguely hinted at by the Tower, but it wasn’t like we had many useful rituals among the lot of us- indeed, I think mine was among our best, and the Goblin Feast ritual just fed you and made you better at causing chaos. We hadn’t even tried it out.

  So it might have been some enemy spellcasters instead, even if it sounded like human voices, and so I called my book to float in front of me and clasped my staff to my wristband, ready for a fight.

  We arrived on the scene, me panting and Hannah, uh, sort of stopping still without any indication that she’d run through the woods for an hour just now. There was a vortex of green and white light, through which ran what I could have sworn were faces. In the center of the vortex was a simple cabin, it could not have been larger than ten feet tall and twenty across. It menaced with spikes of bone and horns, hung up or nailed to the building as decoration. I could sense something really fucking wrong coming from within the building, and I did saw fifty people, the members of the Wizard’s Council of the Guild, who had clearly got a lot of new blood- there’d been around twenty four of us when I left.

  Ajit was running from one person to the next, shouting orders, correcting their postures and hand-movements, all the while chanting his own part of the ritual. For that clearly was what they were doing. He saw us arrive, and his face lit up as he motioned for me to come closer. I cast my HUD spell, not really knowing what else to do. As expected, the spell didn’t reveal anything about the world that wasn’t creatures. The ritual was still a mystery to me, but at least I could be sure that there wasn’t anything about to jump us from the woods.

  The chanting came to a crescendo and the vortex exploded in a blast of what might have been pure light, or green mist, and the spellcasters of the Guild noticed I was here. Ajit rushed towards me first.

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  “You’re right in time. Where is Anna?” Ajit said.

  “Still in Nothing,” I said.

  “Nothing?” Ajit said. Right, that place wasn’t anything like common knowledge.

  “Don’t worry about it for now. What were you up to?” I said.

  “Emma noticed a pattern. There are these places of dark power scattered in the woods around Checkpoint- that’s what we decided to name the town- and we finally figured out what is going on,” Ajit said.

  “What’s wrong,” I said.

  “They’re building a sigil. Emma is the only one who does much innovating with arcana for her artifice. So she noticed a big circle common to summoning magic,” Ajit said.

  “So where does Anna come in?” I said.

  “This ritual. We got it for Artemis, a cleansing ritual for- you know- her condition,” Ajit said.

  “The bitch inside her head,” Hannah said. She’d moved closer to the conversation, looming over it like a silent guardian.

  “Just so,” Ajit said, “And it works for purification, but it is too slow. They are re-building these dark sites too quickly.”

  “They?” I said.

  “It could be Xem. But we don’t think so. When he makes things happen he’s all like ‘so I say and so mote it be’, you know, there’s a lot of spellwork here,” Ajit said.

  “Sure, maybe, so what is it?” I said.

  Ajit motioned us to approach the now much less ominous cabin. That is not to say it was charming or comforting. It was still an eerie cabin of dark wood, decorated with bones and suspicious herbs and dried mushrooms, but it just looked like an old abandoned building now, when before I could feel an ominous presence emanating. In the middle of the room, on the floor, there was a large sigil. It reminded me of Icelandic witch runes, interconnected, intricate and vaguely circular.

  “I’ve never seen this pattern in spellcraft,” I said.

  “Intent and expression, you know, mate,” Ajit said.

  “I guess. But why this expression?” I said.

  “Our working theory is that it’s one of the out-worlders. You know, someone from a universe with a different system of magic, using it here,” Ajit said.

  It made sense. We already knew that magic didn’t have to function like it did in the Tower. It was just so time-consuming to experiment with it as to make it impossible. But if someone already had a method they’d developed elsewhere and tried applying it here, it might work.

  “So, you never actually explained why you need Anna,” I said.

  “This ritual takes an hour to complete. Two more points in the pattern will have been made by now. But I got to talk to Anna. She has an ability with her fire magic that disrupts defensive wards. If she has a spell big enough, we could burn several of these down per hour,” Ajit said.

  “Oh, she has a fire spell strong enough. It’s just-“ I said. And the air started smelling of ozone and vibrating.

  “Summoning,” Chum called, “A big one, hold on to your britches!”

  There were dozen simultaneous popping sounds, as creatures from beyond and beneath started apparating into our reality.

  “No, we should have still had time,” Ajit said.

  “Let’s hope it’s just a normal spell to keep you busy instead of the main ritual going through,” I said, “Hannah, I’ll need you to protect me.”

  “Of course you will,” Hannah said.

  “I can negate magic. If they try another spell, I’ll just suck it in. And I’ll need all of your mana too. So, apologies, but I will just be taking-“ I started, and a beast in the rough shape of a man, but with the muzzle of a wolf launched itself at me from the darkness. Ajit was quicker on the draw than either myself or Hannah and impaled it with a stone spike from the ground.

  “Less talking, do what you have to,” he said.

  “I’m getting help. 22 hours from now at the latest. Keep them off me,” I said.

  And as if on queue chaos broke out. Summoned monsters rushed the spellcasters, but we were each a veteran of the Tower by now. Lightning and fire, frost and wind, and stranger arcanae yet lit the night as the creatures of Nordic nightmare- trolls, werewolves and wretched worms- attacked our group and were held back.

  “Hannah, you might have to defend everyone in a minute. Be ready,” I said.

  “Just do your fucking thing,” Hannah said, already fighting off several enemies.

  I began casting the spellrod spell. It was why I had come here and right now it might be of great use to the Guild. Even if it might also leave them drained of mana and defenseless after I was done. But I trusted them to survive here more than I trusted the people in Nothing to live if they got kicked out of my home. And so I chanted hands outstretched, as fire and lightning and bodies of enemies and allies alike were thrown towards and past me.

  It took nearly a minute for me to cast the spell. In this sort of rapid, brutal fighting a minute was an eternity, hundreds of the conjured monsters died, as I held on to the image of the sigil in mind and chanted the words of the spell. And then it was done. The rod extended in the air, and instantly every spell cast within its radius was sucked inside it. I felt the rush of mana bursting through my body, even as everyone else looked around with confusion in their eyes.

  The dead monsters disintegrated. They were made of spell-stuff, and so even if they weren’t individually spells as such, apparently they were close enough for the rod. The teleportation spells funneling monsters to us didn’t work. Indeed, when another ozonous popping came, I felt only a surge of mana entering my body as the spell of the enemy fizzled. But the fight with the remaining creatures continued.

  “Great job, Alex. What do you need from us,” Ajit said, binding a truly demonic looking creature in what appeared to be glowing golden rope and strangling it with it and his hands.

  “There are more of them out in the woods. I’m not leaving you like this,” I said.

  “I’ll find them after we're done. Get out of here,” Hannah said, slashing her oversized greatsword in wide arcs, avoiding allies by mere inches at times, and always striking killing blows.

  “Alex?” Ajit said.

  “Blast as many spells as you can afford to, please. The mana is going to me. I’ll use it to get everyone back,” I shouted. The Guild was now decidedly winning this fight, but it was not over. Without their magic, I might have fucked them harder than I imagined. But all of them had back-ups- enchanted items and permanent abilities that worked still. They would win. Hopefully not many would die. And they heard me.

  At first nothing happened. But in a moment, the spellcasters of the Guild did one by one push for space in their individual melees and blasted magic my way, all of it draining into the spellrod. I raised the Heart of my wizard’s tower aloft, and awaited for the magic item to activate.