The Cost of Magic

Sthuna had found the mage responsible for the chaos wreathed in a blaze of glory, fire like liquid pooling over her body. 

She was tall, dark of hair and eye, her face affixed in an expression of controlled agony. Her lips moved, words an inaudible hiss within the roar encompassing the world around them.

The mage had shattered the headstone of the god, Beatitudo. Shards gleamed like angry splinters under her feet, fragile yet bladed. Her flames licked at the sleek volcanic glass, seeking purchase and finding none. The mage would burn through her very own skin before she’d be capable of creating flames hot enough to burn through obsidian.

But she might just try.

Fire was a capricious and hungry master. Those mages cursed to bear it did so at great cost to themselves. Already, angry red burns ran the length of the mage’s arms, disappearing into the dark sleeves of her vestments. Father’s movement of the forest denied her the fuel she needed. She was even working through the reservoir of mana gifted to all imperial battle mages. The silver talisman swayed from a chain hooked to her waist, growing more and more brittle by the second.

All to burn the emblems of gods that Arhra’Toar denounced.

She was distracted. Certain of the protection her flames afforded her. Confident in the power of the Executioner that she accompanied. And focused on her own personal crusade.

Sthuna didn’t have a plan. ‘Stop the mage, stop the flames’, was the plan. It was all foolishness upon foolishness. In that moment, he stopped thinking and merely acted. He would suffer the consequences later, agonize over his decisions and mistakes and missteps in the time that came after the immediate now.

The dragon dove. The closer he drew to the mage, the cooler the air became. She was only human, after all - she, herself, could not suffer the blaze and live. It was a delicate balance struck by all mages, but fire most of all.

The force of his wingbeats stirred up embers that breathed and burned against his scales.

He hissed.

She turned.

Sthuna closed the distance. As his body hurtled by her like a spear, her robes fluttered, the talisman swaying outwards. Sthuna closed his teeth over the talisman, tearing it from her possession.

Sthuna veered upwards and away, circling like a bird of prey. 

His prize was held aloft, the chain limp against his jaws. With this, she would have no further pool to draw upon but herself. Sthuna shattered the talisman with a violent twist of his jaw. It crumbled, leaving only the taste of tempered steel and charred bone upon his tongue.

The mage paused for only a moment. 

Her eyes were cold. Black as night, shot through with splinters of amber. He saw in those eyes a fierce and ugly hatred. Disgust. Darkness. The desire to hurt the traitor that turned on his own. It was an animosity that went beyond recollecting a lost imperial dragon. Those eyes promised something far worse, and far more personal.

She wanted to hurt him. To make him feel the pain she felt he deserved.

His acid bubbled at the back of his throat. His instincts told him to spit, to defend himself from her inevitable retaliation. But it was one thing to privately wrestle with his doubts about Arhra’Toar. Quite another to be confronted so directly, witnessed in rejection of the principles he had been hatched into.

Was he prepared to kill this mage? To truly become the traitor she saw him as?

The mage took advantage of his hesitation. Her answer to his question; she was prepared even if he was not. Her cause, she felt, was just where his was mere turbulence.

Tongue twisting words in the old speech, she wrenched her hands upwards. The flames shot up with her movements. A mirror image, like the dance Father had performed not so long ago. But darker. Burns like dragonscales danced over her skin, hungrily devouring her to feed the rising pulse of her fire. Yet she persisted.

Sthuna balked. He was forced to retreat as the mage traded cool air for blistering heat.

The flames followed him, like a living titan reaching out with burning limbs to pluck him from the sky. Plumes and great columns swept over him, heat curling and searing from horn to tail tip.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, the heat ebbed. For a moment, he thought that the mage had succumbed to her own magic. But as he'd circled in a wide arc through the air, he saw something else entirely. Something remarkable. And something even he himself had fallen for.

Eyna.

She charged like some avenging creature. Heedless of the danger, she tackled the burning mage to the ground. Recklessness upon recklessness. A surge of emotions rushed through him. Shock. Incredulity. Amazement. Awe. Admiration. And a tight surge of something else that set all three of his hearts pounding beyond pure adrenaline.

Fire flared to life around the wrestling pair.

He gave a harsh hiss. The mage wasn't done.

Sthuna dove, wings pinned, air rushing by him. He grabbed Eyna by the collar and dragged her back. Moments later, the fire hissed and coiled over the place where she had been struggling with the mage. Both dragon and girl went tumbling to the ground.

The mage screamed and raged. She fed her fury to the fire as surely as she fed her own blood. It grew wild and tempestuous, no longer under even her finite control. The heat of the blaze became an almost unbearable thing around them.

But it blinded the mage as much as it blinded them.

Sthuna wrapped his wings over Eyna, shielding her delicate human skin as best as he could. Eyna charged forward, arms wrapped around his sinuous neck. He just had to trust that she knew where they were going.

No words needed to be exchanged. The two of them worked in tandem to move through the swirling storm of flames.

Sthuna felt cold water rushing over his claws before he saw it. Aina had led them to one of the springs. The headstone of Mirum, still intact, glistened like a beacon.

Almost there.

The mage cursed him.

He heard her voice, a dark and twisted thing, beckoning the fires to find him by name. Like living things, the flames begin to twist and seek him out.

As with so many things before, there was no time to hesitate. In a swift movement, he tossed Eyna down to the spring. With a powerful vault, he forced his body to take to the sky once more.

The mage was almost burned through. She was lit from within, her veins like magma pulsing deep beneath the earth. Her fair features contorted, body twisting with the force it took to muster such heat. She had discarded her safety in pursuit of vengeance.

The devastating truth of magic, in the flesh.

Sthuna rolled through ocean waves of fire that funneled around him. The inferno was all he saw, the glint of stars devoured by the blaze. He tucked his wings to his body, surging with as much speed as he could muster. The heat licked at the delicate membrane of his wings. He bent and snapped them out recklessly, dodging surging tongues, ignoring the pain that tore through his body.

The only way out was up.

The wall of fire climbed higher and higher around him. It swelled as a swift tide, a building roar that buffeted the dragon, eager to devour him. The pain was a screaming, searing thing now, as relentless as his enemy. Pain in all places, in ways he could not begin to calculate the damages of.

Then, all at once, it ended.

A hush as echoing as the silence after thunder. A world once torn apart now still.

The fires flickered and died, leaving only blackened earth and the smoldering remains of the mage of Arhra’Toar. The fire was too great a blaze for her without an offering. And so an offering she became. In the end, obsidian did burn. But it was the obsidian of her eyes, twin pyres from which molten tears rolled as the flames consumed her.

Yet it came too late.

The stars shivered above him, cold as ice. The flames blazed below him, running rivers of molten gold. And Sthuna was the silver blade that cut between the two. He fell, his wings burned to ashes.