The Looming Reaper

A dozen boulders the size of houses levitated fifty feet in the air above the dragon as Remmi gripped her warping tungsten wand so tightly that the skin of her olive knuckles had turned whiter than Yssa’s. Her brow furrowed tightly, her body trembling from casting countless spells. Opposite of her, flanking the dragon, Yssa was beginning to teeter, her once pristine ivory wand now cracked and chipped. Both women looked ready to collapse at any moment, but if my friends shared one trait other than their unhealthy obsession with me, it was their stubbornness.

With a flick of her wrist, the boulders Remmi had conjured hurled down at the dragon and though it moved to evade, it staggered as one of its front legs slipped through a portal Yssa had discreetly conjured on the ground. Trapped, the boulder’s found their mark, battering down on the dragon’s back and wings. A crack like an ancient oak tree being felled rose over the ear popping sound of the boulders splitting. Dust flooded the air, obscuring everything but the dragon’s crumpled silhouette with a twisted wing sticking awkwardly in the air.

“They did it!”

A chorus of cheers rose from the students around me and I fell to my knees, the adrenaline of the fight giving way to the physical and emotional exhaustion of it all. There had been no need to run; I’d have to make fun of Yssa’s dramatics later.

“They should be coming this way any second now,” I thought, a weak smile daring to creep across my lips.

There was no barrier to shield me from the searing heat of the flames this time. No Yssa and Remmi shield to take the brunt of the raging flames. The super-heated air cooked my lungs from the inside with each breath I took as I stared blankly in front of me at the beam of heat magic incinerating several of the students who had just been celebrating surviving their encounter with an all-powerful mythical creature.

“We’re all going to die…” was all I could mumble. I’m not sure how many times I repeated it as I rocked back and forth, catatonic and covered in soot that was probably the few remnants of my peers.

“Alva!”

“Remmi. She’s still alive. That’s good.”

“ALVA!”

A sharp sting on my cheek focused my glazed eyes in front of me.

“R-Remmi?” I stuttered, blinking to try and focus.

“Thank the gods!” Blood smeared across my cheek as she wrapped her arms around me.

“Are we running?” I asked blankly?

Remmi nodded her head, her left forest green eye looking at me in defeat. Her right was squeezed shut, caked closed with red dirt and sticky black hair. “We can’t win this.”

“Where’s Yssa?”

She turned away from me. “She won’t abandon the other survivors.”

“We can’t abandon her!”

“IT’S WHAT SHE WANTS!” Tears mixed with the blood on Remmi’s eye and she looked at the ground. “And I refuse to let you die here.”

“No. No, no, no! We’re not leaving her behind!”

“Then what do you want us to do, Alva?! We’ve thrown everything we have at it and I can’t even fight anymore.” There was a thud of dense metal hitting the dirt as Remmi threw her half-melted wand down in frustration. “Her wand is ready to snap at any second and once it does…”

“I haven’t seen Remmi this worked up since we were children.” I looked Remmi’s battered form up and down. Her robes were in tatters and she was covered from head to toe in dust and dried blood. Nothing like the chilling beauty usually feared and envied by the other students.

“We can’t surrender yet,” I sighed, walking over and picking up Remmi’s discarded wand. In the distance, Yssa was unleashing a barrage of lightning bolts on the dragon, though they seemed to have little effect beyond drawing the beast’s attention from the rest of us. Most of the other students had either died or fled. Only the bravest (or dumbest depending on your perspective) remained, casting various buffing and low-tier healing spells on Yssa. Delaying the inevitable. “Here.”

Taking Remmi’s hand in mine, I pressed her broken wand into her palm. A feeling of calm pervaded through me, a sense of clarity that I normally only felt after… well that’s not important. What was important was I had a plan.

“Do you trust me?”

Remmi wiped her shut eye clean with her sleeve now that it was moist from her tears and nodded. Her fingers clenched around her wand and the tips of my fingers. She was trembling, but my relaxed demeanor seemed to slowly make its way to her.

“Do you have a plan?”

“Yes?” I tried to hide the hesitation in my voice but the middle of the word came out as a prepubescent squeak.

The truth was, while Remmi and Yssa were popular in their own right, I had accidentally built a reputation for myself as well. While I strived to remain as mundane to others as possible, my natural talent for alchemy and enchantments had briefly put me in the spotlight of the tier-C students. Most students at my level passed their classes with mid-marks, but it was almost impossible for me to score poorly in those two courses without purposely tanking my labs and projects. A wrong ingredient here, an exploding enchanted rod there and I was back to blending in.

Except I wasn’t. Being a self described entrepreneur, I began experimenting on my own in secret. Shops need products to sell and while getting stock from merchants was a viable option, the idea of relying completely on outside sources made me anxious.

But surely people would notice? I worried about that, but then after Yssa and Remmi began their petty rivalry over me, I found myself with a powerful bargaining card. So after one thing led to another, I was given private access to an old storage room in the university’s dungeon.

“But what do I have ready?” I scanned my mental catalog of my inventory. To be honest most of it was rather mundane: mid-grade healing potions, domestic tools with minor durability enchantments, etc.

A long sigh deflated my chest, sagging my shoulders like I was going to melt into the ground like the molten rocks Yssa was currently using as a shield against a blast of the dragon’s fire. It had refrained from using the heat ray it had used after its wing bone broke, but I didn’t know enough about dragons to know how long the cooldown on the attack was.

“Alright.” I nodded to myself while Remmi looked at me with tightly furrowed brows. I couldn’t tell if she was curious or worried, but it didn’t matter. Either my plan would work, or we’d all be ash on the wind in a few minutes.

Rubbing the wood of my wand for luck, I twirled its tip in front of me until a hand-sized portal formed. Sticking my off hand through the portal, I rummaged blindly until I felt the wooden vial rack I was searching for.

“Gotcha,” I said, my voice catching a slight chipperness to it. “Here.”

There were two vials sitting in the rack in my hand. The first, the one I handed Remmi, contained a viscous fluid blacker than Remmi’s hair. With each movement of the vial it rolled against the glass leaving drops of itself dripping down. Almost like it was trying to escape.

The second vial was the opposite. Instead of a sinister looking black liquid, it was three-quarters filled with a clear fluid. Suspended in the center was a brilliant golden marble that almost looked to tremble in the sunlight.

“Wait, no.”

Remmi shook her head, eyes wider with terror than they were fighting the dragon. She tried to shove it back into my hand but I refused, pressing harder into hers.

“We’re out of options, MiMi!” I kept my voice firm and hoped that using her childhood nickname would reassure Remmi even the slightest bit.

“The last time you gave me one of these Yssa and I spent three hours burning it so it didn’t consume the school.”

“These are different, I promise. I’ve already tested them.” I pressed the vial firmer into Remmi’s hand.

“I said no!”

The sound of cracking glass between our hands when Remmi tried to shove the vial back a final time sent a chill up my spine and immediately dropped my experiment and jumped back from her. She followed suit and we watched helplessly the vial and her wand fell to the ground.

It only took a few seconds for the liquid to devour Remmi’s broken wand before it went after the wand’s owner. She tried to dodge it and when it made contact with the skin of her arm, I could see the betrayal in her green eyes.

“Alva…”