CALEN

  The rock was going to miss. Calen was almost sure of it.

  Because of course the rock was going to miss. Nobody else was going to help, and Calen wasn't good enough to make a dent in the problem.

  He threw it anyways, front foot twisting on the ground, back foot leaving the mud to follow through, eyes on where he wanted it to go. His eyes traced a nice, neat little box between the hips and shoulders of a big, big target. Just was like trying to throw a pitch, he just needed to get it to go somewhere in there.

  Except the exact opposite, he was trying to literally strike the batter, not send the stone flying by in a strike zone.

  The progress was glacial. Calen counted to five, one number every time one of his fingers left the stone. Watched it begin to rotate as it left his hand, change velocity in the howling wind.

  Calen blinked a raindrop out of his eyelashes, so he wouldn't have to sit there and watch it eddy away. His brief visit to the darkness stretched, until his eyelid finished lifting again, showing none of the horrors he had time to imagine during the gap in his vision.

  Even better, the rock wasn't going to miss.

  Until the Warlord's head fuzzed too.

  Silver-flecked eyes met his, flickered to the rock, still tumbling through the rain. The rune had smudged, but the power was still obvious.

  The target moved, because it was always a moving target. Calen was never fast enough to keep up for long.

  The rock was going to miss again.

  A grin sprouted along a gray-scaled jaw, a silver feather flashing in the heat lightning above. The slow, rolling boom of thunder was cut through by light shining across the battlefield.

  Seeing what was about to happen hadn't mattered, because no one else was ready, so Calen had wasted his only real shot.

  Vertically slit pupils left him, dismissing him after the effortless counter was executed. A simple step out of the way, because he hadn't been close enough, and wasn't the only one who could do this trick.

  He was the only one stuck performing it though, watching tiny droplets of water sleet across his vision in a way that might have been beautiful, if he wasn't so absolutely terrified Emma was about to die, or that he might never hear anyone's real voice again, if he was forever stuck in this stretched, torturous reality.

  Mirri was on his left, Calen could hear the gentle hiss of raindrops failing to douse the palmful of fire she was cradling. The real threat, if she could throw fireballs anything like the Venatrix. Calen was just the distraction.

  The Warlord clearly agreed, eyes looking at the sky as he turned away. Those eyes came back down, and found the Seraph, flickering back almost to Calen, but stopping at Mirri once again.

  The sword lifted, and Mahira was still on the ground. The fight beyond their tiny stretch of grass stopped mattering to Calen, and to Sariel too.

  The Seraph was doing something, turning away from the turmoil far away. That was the light, the buzz of mana building with a ripple Calen could feel. Something big was coming, but Calen or Mirri needed to land a hit, land one hit at the right time to occupy the armor. That would help.

  That would get Em out alive.

  Calen's half-numb fingers found the last piece of plastic he owned, fumbling in his pocket as his back foot returned to the earth.

  Inhale. One, long good one.

  He had a drip of glowing paint on his left thumb. Mirri hadn't had time to yell at him yet. For her, he had only just released the stone anyway. There had been no time, Emma was going to die. And Mahira, which would kill them all anyway.

  Smudging the last bits of still-glowing paint over the dice was an act of desperation, but if he could time it well enough, maybe Mirri could land the hit, or Sariel's bolt would strike.

  A gentle purple glow invaded Calen's perceptions from the right, orange from the left. Calen shut them out, focused on his target. He couldn't miss. Couldn't afford to miss, with Em down like that, in front of the monster.

  His arm was still creeping forwards, fingers pinched around the useless nub of plastic until it was time to release.

  Mirri's firebolt streaked across Calen's vision, humming to a near-stop right in front of his face. He could see the threads of twisted mana, glowing and pulsing as they contained the rest of the power in the projectile.

  The hair on his arms stood up, or tried to in the driving rain. Mirri wasn't trying to hit the Warlord, she was casting at something past him.

  The purple light grew overwhelming as Calen finally released the dice to sail off into the wind. The fleck of glowing yellow was lost instantly.

  He finally looked, staring death in the face for one near-frozen instant before Mirri's bolt impacted the humming indigo arrowtip, less than a dozen feet from his face.

  His bare feet slipped in the mud as Calen staggered away. He got to watch the tumbling splinters tear through the air. A few flecks of pain sprouted along his face, but the broken wood did no more than that, energy dissipating rather than tearing his head from his shoulders.

  A buzzing began to build in Calen's head once again. He tried to turn back, to look at Mirri, thank her, begin navigating his way back to the ditch. Slowly, too-slowly, his head turned.

  The Seraph released the bolt, and in the corner of his eye, Calen saw a malevolent grin twitch upwards.

  Mahira's tumbling head didn't matter anymore. No one else was looking there. No one else but Mirri.

  The Warlord was turning away from the Seraph even as the plasma bolt reaved through the air. Raising the flat of his obviously cursed sword, eyes locked on the real target. The big, mostly-green alien lady who had just saved Calen's life for the third time in a row instead of helping her mentor.

  The Warden's daughter, whatever that meant.

  The pieces fell into place while Calen's knees bent themselves, sinking his hips low as he drove forwards. Another sharp bit of gravel dug into the arch of Calen's foot while his eyes measured the angles. He could feel the wound begin to close already while his stupid, slow, clumsy hands swam through the air.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  There was no time to shout a warning, even while the world crawled around him. Mirri would have to hear it, understand it, and move, when the superheated plasma was already barreling through the air, already beginning to deflect off the Warlord's sword.

  Calen had never tackled someone with wings before. They were just... hanging there in the rain, and he didn't know how delicate they were.

  The shimmering heat of the approaching bolt from the Seraph seemed like it was going to do way more damage than anything he could manage on his own, though.

  So Calen followed through, aiming low, wrapping up Mirri's waist, keeping his head to the side to avoid mashing his skull into her ribcage, and dragging her, glacially, back down into the gully, twisting them out of the way.

  He wasn't fast enough to avoid the whole thing.

  They had barely left where Mirri had started when the searing pain began, the Seraph's blinding bolt still feet away.

  Calen turned his face from the overwhelming burning sensation in the air as the buzzing in his skull reached a crescendo and snapped, dumping him back to a more normal speed of perception.

  He lost track of things, after that. For just a moment or six. A real moment, not the shuddering slices of stretched time he had been stealing from the world.

  The smell of burning hair permeated his senses. Mirri stopped holding him up, but the ground was there. The ground was always there.

  The pain was an ocean, stretching into the air behind him, pressing on his back and flooding through his nerves. Burying his face in the half-dead scrubgrass brought no relief, every layer of his flesh was sunburnt and rubbing against itself, screaming for release.

  Calen wasn't screaming for anything. It was just noise, until his lungs ran empty.

  He tried to breathe, and his body tried to scream again when the cold air hit his lungs, rejecting the oxygen and arching his spine.

  Something was missing, when Calen tried to reach for his own face, to prop himself up out of the mud.

  It was his hand. His hand wasn't reaching for his face, trapped underneath his body.

  Calen tried the other one, and that one moved.

  Emma's voice echoed, pounding its way through Calen's ears the same way Mirri's had in that tiny storage closet, half an hour and half a lifetime ago.

  "Eat your own tail if you're hungry."

  No. No, she was going to try to fight it.

  Mirri was reaching for Calen, he could see her grasping for his shoulder.

  He pointed, instead of reaching for his own face.

  "Help her!" He gasped with the only breath he had managed to salvage. "I'm—"

  Mirri was already gone, standing, turning away. Cradling a speck of fire.

  Calen didn't need to lie about being fine, while static bubbled across his back. Fixing the damage, hopefully.

  His screams turned to ragged exhales. Every raindrop on his back pounded waves of pain through his flesh, setting what remained of his nerves screaming.

  He didn't dare try to surge mana through his head, didn't need the world to slow to a crawl while he was like this. The potion would do the work on its own time, he could feel it pulling mana through his limbs, like bursts of static snaking towards the shorn-off layers of his vertebrae.

  Unless that was his body telling him he had nerve damage, or something.

  Calen's second attempt to push off the ground one-handed worked, for a certain definition of the word. Having his skin scream in protest as it rippled against itself meant he had skin again. It was still agony on his back to push himself away from the ground with weight on one shoulder, and agony again to roll up onto the opposite shoulder.

  Not knowing what was happening to Emma right now was worse, so he bore it, panting on his side for a view.

  The view was almost worse than the false visions of carnage scuttling through his mind. In those, Em had at least been fighting, if she wasn't already in pieces.

  In front of him, she had her eyes closed, crouched behind the buzzing barrier, awaiting an impact that never came. A chunk of metal larger than Calen swung up, over the shield and into the air, wasting the swing, because the Warlord didn't need a sword for this.

  He was just leaning past the silver barrier, mouth open wide to descend over Emma's head.

  The world slowed to a crawl without Calen's conscious input.

  Mirri loosed her bolt mid-stride, mana flaring behind the bundle of power.

  Sariel pivoted away, and seared a purple-wreathed arrow from the air, avoiding their own destruction.

  And Emma's eyes fluttered open, nearly hidden from Calen behind a serrated jawline.

  The armor drank the bolt of fire moments before the staticky blur clinging to the shield discharged, and Calen lost sight of Emma.

  That was fine, she was being thrown backwards. Out of danger. Away, at least.

  Writhing gray scales rolled out of a tumble too, no more grin plastered over the brutal snarl that swung to face them. The gloating was over.

  Mirri was still there, still in the ditch, right next to Calen. The firebolt clinging to the tip of one of her claws looked...

  Calen might have trusted it to light a candle.

  Rock. He needed another rock. He didn't have any more paint, but it would be something, anything to affect the fight, even as a distraction.

  The buzzing in his ears snapped again, much faster, and his deadened limbs lost their whines of protest. Calen was still fumbling his way back into the gully to paw at some of the rounded stones when he went blind and deaf.

  The flash came first, one stolen moment before the crack of thunder dulled Calen's hearing.

  Ozone roiled through the air, sending a burning sensation through his sinuses and watering his eyes. The blood rushing through Calen's ears was deafening, and he could 'hear' fat raindrops slapping the side of his head while he blinked away one jagged tear of a sunspot.

  Mirri was still clutching the firebolt, when Calen turned his head to see something, anything in the edges of his vision. He could feel pinpricks of static in his retinas, hopefully mana prickling its way through the repair process instead of nerves firing to report damage.

  The steady clearing of afterimages was slow, too slow, as Calen felt the air turn charged again.

  "Alright Isha. We can set terms."

  The brutal, gravelly voice scraped through Calen's eardrums to stretch itself across his mind, a slick and oily smudging of meaning across a slate meant to be kept clean for his own thoughts.

  "We both know you don't have enough for both of us, not in time," The Warlord continued, almost conversationally, if not for the volume. "No need to get tetchy about it, I know you'd have gone straight for it if I wasn't leaving here today. Just your daughter, then?"

  It was Mirri's turn to snarl, according to the blinking snapshots dancing their way across Calen's vision. He might have trusted the flame in her hands for two candles, before she shivered.

  Thunder rumbled from the sky by way of reply, a climbing, ominous rejection of a sound.

  "Fine, fine. Not even the little one?" The Warlord boomed, taunting tones carrying across the valley as Calen felt his eardrums finish sealing, and heard the rain again.

  Heat lightning flashed in the sky, booming back with no delay.

  "None living, then, but you'll not deny me my hunt for free," The hulking wall of muscle cast a venomous gaze over Calen, passing by Mirri, and landing over by where Emma had flown. "They don't move until I'm out."

  A softer rumble from the sky served as acquiescence.

  The grin was back, but the ridiculous twisted lump of a sword was casually slung over a scaled shoulder.

  Calen stood and stumbled, returning to the mud on his knees instead of his face. Standing was still a little beyond him, but his sister was moving. Moving was good enough for now.

  She hadn't figured out that the shield underneath her was why she couldn't sit up, but she would get it eventually. It was probably safer for them both to stay down, right now.

  Calen crawled another pace, and caught Mirri whispering to herself, barely audible over the gale.

  "No. No, you can't let him get away with it," The priestess muttered. "I have a bolt. We can—"

  A fat raindrop, carrying just a speck of mana, splashed over the geometric threads of fire mana Mirri was using to hold the bolt, dousing the flame.

  The dragonborn's entire body seemed to slump. It was like someone had surgically removed her spine in an instant, leaving a scaled mannequin in skirts to hollowly gaze at a wall of gray. Even the membranes of her wings wilted, as she lowered the hand.

  That seemed to be the final signal that whatever was happening would work.

  Calen didn't quite understand what that was, until he realized no more stones were flying. He couldn't hear the clash of metal on metal, and even the Seraph had stopped hurling magical globs of plasma, like the one that had shaved a few millimeters off Calen's shoulder blades.

  Mahira's head appeared, lifted by an arching horn, and disappeared back down into a bag dripping with rusty stains.

  Thunder rumbled when nails shaped like spades reached for more.

  The Warlord waved his annoyance at the sky, leaving the leg and its buried silver boot as he paced away.

  The far cliff was still abuzz with activity, but it was no longer the frantic breaking of stones or shouted orders to volley. It was a terrified scamper away, barring a small cluster of fighters rolling a bundle of rope over the edge, seemingly working to secure the other end to a sufficiently sized piece of rubble from the tower.

  Reaching the rope, the gray-scaled cannibal turned around and gave one final bow before being hoisted up the cliff.

  He also opened his mouth for one last parting shot to scoff its way into Calen's ears.

  "Season well, Young Immortals," The top grin stretched again, the flash of teeth visible even hundreds of feet away. "We'll meet again."

  human remains being taken as war trophies was found in Gough's Cave in Somerset, England, with modified skulls dated to 12,700 BCE.

  The Holocaust. It is also heavily associated with serial killers.

  Next chapter drops on Monday, with a reminder that Young Immortals will be transitioning to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule at that time.