“You see?” the Grand Mage said. “You see what these beasts do? They are mindless, devastating creatures that would try to destroy rather than build.”
Laric glowered at him, anger bubbling up inside him. “They would destroy? I saw what you did in Korthal. I saw the way you were willing to destroy it all. I saw exactly what it was that you, and the other mages, were willing to do.”
He focused on the flames, which weren’t consuming the stone. In fact, the stone just seemed to be concentrating the fire. And he realized why that was—there were glyphs on the outside of this building as well.
Why this building? Was it because it was powerful? Or maybe it was something else. Maybe it served as something more. Maybe it was tied to the dragons in some way.
A whip of unseen power came toward them.
Laric felt it just as he felt a warning from Sashaak, as if Sashaak knew that he was going to need to counter whatever was coming, but Laric didn’t know if there would be anything he could do.
It slammed into Rowan, but surprisingly, she had managed to create some type of protection around herself. He didn’t know what she had done, and from her widened gaze, he had a suspicion that she didn’t know quite what she had done either.
The Grand Mage laughed, his voice dark, angry, and perhaps a little bitter. “Interesting. The two of you obviously can be taught. It’s a shame that Talia didn’t bring you to me sooner. You could have learned. You could have been useful. But now you will have to stay here.”
He brought his hands up and then down in a sharp crack. When he did, the ground beneath Laric’s feet began to shift and ripple until the stone held him in place.
The Grand Mage looked at him, then Rowan, before striding out of the room.
Talia shook her head. “A shame. The two of you could have been—”
Laric focused every bit of Sashaak’s fire spellcraft form on Talia. It was rage, it was frustration, it was violence, and it all spilled out of him and poured into her.
She deflected it at first, but Laric was drawing on the glyphs and the strength within him in a way that he doubted he would’ve been able to do before. Not only that, but he was borrowing from the potential of Sashaak, and that energy continued to rise within him.
Talia cried out as her own potential, and her own power, became overwhelmed. Laric felt no remorse. She screamed as the flames consumed her, her eyes wide, the panic and the agitation all mixing in her shrieks.
Then she crumpled to the ground.
Rowan turned to him. “That… was horrifying.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did I say that I was disappointed? I was just saying that it was horrifying.”
“I didn’t control it,” Laric said.
“Well, we’ve got Talia dealt with now, and seeing as how it sounds like Daelon and the three other mages that your dragon burned were all part of the council, I’m thinking that we really only have the Grand Mage left.”
He rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know how we’re going to be able to stop him.”
The flames continued to build, the heat radiating inward. It was painful, but it wasn’t consuming them.
“I think the Grand Mage thought we were going to be stuck here,” she said.
“Well, we are stuck.”
“You just have to shatter the stone,” a voice said.
Laric looked up and realized that the headmaster was still there, though she’d gotten up.
“Change the stone to something like glass, and then you can shatter it,” she said. “It is a simple transformation, at least once you spend a little more time in the Academy…” Her voice trailed off.
“We don’t know how to do that,” Laric said.
The headmaster made her way over toward them and glanced toward the door. “Is what you said true? Did they really attack the town? It wasn’t Korthal?”
Laric shook his head. “Not Korthal. From what I’ve been able to tell, Korthal was destroyed, and has been like that for quite some time.”
She was quiet for a moment. There were only the sounds of stone groaning, flames crackling, and the emptiness that was otherwise around him.
“There were always stories, of course. Rumors that the dragon attacks had abated, but we continued to send mages.” She looked over at him. “I thought… It doesn’t matter what I thought, but know that not all mages are like them.”
At this point, Laric had a hard time believing that, but he wasn’t going to say it.
“Let me see if I can’t help,” she said. She crouched down next to him, and she began to trace a fairly straightforward spellcraft form. Laric noticed that it was a mixture of fire- and earth-based foundations, and between the two, he thought that he could actually form it himself.
“I think I have this,” he said, quickly forming it before modifying it. That was his one gift, he suspected. More so than any other was the fact that Laric had the ability to modify spellslips and spellcraft forms in ways that others did not.
As he continued to modify it, he felt a change taking hold. The stone became slick. Not glass, not really. More like obsidian. But it was smooth.
“Good,” she said. “I hope that when this is done, you might give my previous idea more thought and decide to work with some of the students here.” She coughed, and then looked up at him. “What am I saying? When this is done, I’m not even sure we will have a school left.”
“The students are going to need you,” Laric said. “And you’re going to have to try to help them be safe. I don’t know what will happen with the school or the council or any mages, but if there’s anything that you can do, we need you to try.”
“I will do what I can,” she said.
Laric sent a crackling bit of potential straight down from him into the rock, and the obsidian around his feet and Rowan’s shattered. He pulled himself free.
