Chains of Illusions

Night came down over Solard and on a hill outside the walls a figure knelt over a circle of runes that gave off a sickly green light.

He traced the symbols carefully, murmuring in a language older than the continent. As the words went on, shapes started forming around him. Figures in black cloaks, indistinct at first, eyes barely lit. One by one they took solid form and stood waiting.

"Find the Marked,"

he said.

"The rest follows."

~

Far across the continent, in a ruined valley, Veyren watched a shape approach through the broken ground. Cloaked. Moving like smoke.

His aura flared faintly as he took its measure.

"I'm not letting you do this."

He lunged before the figure had finished closing the distance. Power went up in bursts that lit the valley from one ridge to the other.

The figure stepped back just enough to avoid the worst of it.

"You think you can stop something which is already in motion?"

The voice came out distorted and somehow still persuasive.

"The Marked will awaken. Everyone standing in the way of that will fall."

Veyren's eyes went dark.

"If that's the case, then I will decide the outcome."

He shifted his stance and focused his aura down into a blade of condensed mana. The fight that followed didn't reach any city. It still moved the ground for a long way in every direction.

Behind him the remnants of something that had been a settlement once sat in the dark, the way they always did, reminding him what misused power cost and what it looked like afterward.

***

In the command room at the Azure Wardens' headquarters the Guardian of Peace had his hand on the transmitter and his voice went out across every branch at once.

"All captains. Dispatch everything available. Citizens are under threat. Shadowed forces inside the city. Contain the source before the damage spreads. Move with caution. These are not ordinary attackers."

Responses came back in a rush. Orders acknowledged, squads forming, the whole apparatus turning over.

The Obsidian Death Warriors checked weapons and wards in silence. The Onyx Sentinels moved out scanning for traces of dark mana. The Crimson Blades were already at the gates with runes glowing along their blades. The Azure Wardens formed ranks with the calm efficiency they were known for.

Talen's voice went across the training hall where the younger recruits were still drilling.

"Gear. Now. This isn't a drill. Move like everyone's life depends on it, because it does."

Kaelra was beside me while I pulled my gear on.

"We've handled threats. If this is the same people we've been tracking, don't underestimate them."

A pause.

"And be careful with your mana."

I nodded. The familiar weight sat in my chest. The pressure to hold back against the pull to act. Every flicker of shadow in this city was going to test that and I already knew it.

In an alley in the eastern quarter the first of the cloaked figures had already arrived. Silent. Not moving. Blending into the dark well enough that you could walk past one without registering it. Only the faint light in their eyes gave them away.

Their orders were simple and they had been given without elaboration. Locate the Marked. Take him or break him, whichever the situation allowed. Withdraw only when it was finished. Nothing about the citizens either way, which told you what the citizens were in this arrangement.

Veyren's fight in the valley kept going and the disturbance it made ran out through the magical currents of the continent. Even at that distance he felt the answering pulls in Solard. Small shifts as the summoned figures moved into position.

The new Marked's presence came through the interference clearly enough that he adjusted his direction without thinking about it.

The city started reacting before the Guardians had finished deploying. Shutters coming down along whole streets at once. Merchants pulling stock inside and abandoning what wouldn't move fast enough. Families closing curtains and putting out lamps. The city guard moving at a run to bring the defensive wards up to full strength.

Panic spreads in a specific way in a city that has walls. Not outward from a point. All at once, everywhere, the moment enough people decide it at the same time.

The three of us moved through it together. We had done enough of this by now that the coordination didn't need discussing. Kaelra took the angles, Talen took the front, I took whatever was left and tried to make it look like less than it was.

Talen cracked a joke that didn't land and served its purpose anyway.

I could feel the pulse of the cloaked figures' mana in the streets around us. They weren't killing indiscriminately. They were probing. Testing responses, measuring where the wards were thin, adapting to what the Guardians did.

"Stay close,"

I said to Kaelra.

"And don't let them see how much I'm holding back."

She gave a small nod. The confidence was there but tempered.

"I trust you. Just don't let the caution turn into hesitation."

Talen, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet:

"If anything breathes wrong I'm making it regret it. Right?"

The grin was wide. The tension underneath it was obvious.

I nodded and kept moving. My mind was already running through combinations and contingencies, the list of things I could do without revealing what I actually was. It was a shorter list than it should have been and it got shorter every time something like this happened.

Every shadow that moved in the wrong direction mattered. Every gap in the ward line. Every second between where we were and where the green glow was sitting.

From a rooftop above the eastern quarter the summoner watched the Guardian deployment spread across the city. The wards were visible from up there, faint glows at the strategic points, the shape of the defense laid out like a diagram.

"He's active and he still can't see the whole of it,"

the figure said.

"Soon."

The city came apart in pieces after that.

From the rooftops down through the alleys, squads from all four branches engaged the first wave. The Obsidian Death Warriors went through clusters of the shadow cloaks with brutal efficiency, their presence alone scattering formations. The Onyx Sentinels cut the escape routes and held the perimeter so nothing slipped through the wards.

In the market districts the Crimson Blades carved paths through the mass with the agility and precision they were known for. Citizens crouched behind shutters and overturned stalls while guardians threw up wards of light and controlled bursts of elemental magic to keep the streets clear.

Every corner of the city was a fight.

Above it the Azure Wardens coordinated through magical signals, keeping the perimeter tight so nothing could flank inward.

The three of us moved through the chaos staying close enough to react as one unit. I kept my eyes on the faint green glows in the distance. That was the source. Everything else was noise between us and it.

"These aren't ordinary enemies,"

Talen said, crouched behind a toppled cart, wiping blood off his cheek with his sleeve.

"They move too well. Like copies of something. I can't explain it properly."

Kaelra scanned the street.

"The glow ahead is the target. Whatever's controlling these things is at the other end of it. Let's make this count."

We pushed toward the source. The hum of magic got stronger the closer we came.

"Those lights,"

Kaelra said.

"We stop what's making them before more of these appear."

Talen rolled his neck.

"I hope they don't run when they see me."

A ripple of darkness pulled together in front of us and became the first figure. It lunged.

I put a controlled burst of fire through it before it reached us and it came apart, and what it came apart into told me something.

"Summons,"

I said.

"Not real bodies."

Two more formed and came in together. Talen went forward, his legs glowing faintly with elemental enhancement, and caught one with a spinning kick that put it back down the street. He followed it with a burst of wind that took the second off balance.

Kaelra threaded between them, daggers cutting arcs of light that disrupted their shapes from the inside.

I worked the space. Fire and water woven together, controlling the field without opening anything up.

Talen was grinning through the sweat.

"Watch this."

He went up, spun in the air, and put a lightning-charged fist through the last summon. It shattered into mist.

"Stop showing off,"

Kaelra said.

"Can't. It's too satisfying."

I said, quieter:

"Don't get carried away."

Even with the three of us working well the air around us stayed thick with the presence of whoever was directing it. I could feel the source pulling at the summons, the movements almost puppeted. Every strike we made was being watched by something further up the line.

The last of them dissipated into nothing. The street went quiet again in the sudden complete way it does after a fight ends, and the distant glow was still sitting there in the dark, waiting, unchanged by anything we'd just done.

Talen landed heavily and stayed on one knee for a second, breathing hard. His fists still sparking faintly. Bruises coming up on his arms. He coughed and there was blood in it and he smirked anyway.

"Terrifying. Also excellent. You alright, Kaelra?"

She nodded, pushing her hair back. The worry in her face didn't go anywhere.

"We keep moving. The source isn't far and I don't want more of them arriving."

I adjusted the small amount of mana still leaking past my control. Even that much drew attention from things in the streets around us. But between Talen's raw strength and Kaelra's precision we'd gotten this far without me opening up.

"Let's go,"

I said.

"We're out of time to waste."

Each of us was calculating the same odds as we moved. The summons had been the opening. Whatever was at the source would require everything we had, and we still had to survive it long enough to learn anything.

The streets warped into light and shadow and before my eyes had adjusted, the cloaked figure was standing in front of us.

One gesture. Black symbols rippled outward from his hand and anchored into the cobblestones in a ring.

Kaelra and Talen went down, gasping like the air had been taken out of them. They clawed at the ground and their magic wouldn't come. The weight of the spell had it sealed.

I staggered and stayed on my feet. My whole body was shaking under the pressure of it.

"Why them? If you want me, leave them out of it."

His voice came out layered, two registers at once.

"You still don't understand. This isn't about them. It's about you. They're anchors. They hold you in a shape that doesn't belong to you and you put them there yourself."

"I belong with them,"

I said, and pulled light into my palm. The spell fizzled out like smoke.

"You resist. It's pointless."

He said it softly. Almost gently, which was worse.

"Don't you get tired of lying to yourself? You dream about being a Guardian. Wearing the robes, following the rules, playing their game. You are something considerably older than that."

"Shut up. I decide what I am."

He tilted his head. Something under the hood that might have been amusement.

"So stubborn. Words are wasted here, I think. You've built walls. Let me remind you what's outside them."

A pulse of energy left his hand and hit my chest and my vision cracked apart like glass.

The world went dark.

When I opened my eyes I was standing in a classroom.

Wooden desks in rows. Chalk dust moving through the light from the windows. The buzz of the fluorescents overhead, steady and familiar and completely ordinary.

I didn't move. My breath had stopped somewhere in my throat.

"Yuu!"

Aki waved from across the room, grinning like nothing had ever happened. Daiki leaned back in his chair with a yawn. People I hadn't seen in what felt like a different lifetime were here, talking, living, the whole other world apparently never having existed at all.

"Finally awake?"

Aki laughed and threw a paper ball at me.

"You slept through class again."

My knees went weak and I had to put a hand out. My fingers found the edge of the desk and gripped it hard enough that the wood pressed white lines into my palm.

This felt real. That was the problem. It felt completely real.

"You see?"

I turned. The cloaked figure was at the back of the room, standing where the sunlight didn't reach. None of the students so much as looked at him.

"This is the truth. The other world. The Guardians, the beasts, the sigils. A dream. Something your mind built while you slept."

"No,"

I said.

"I remember it. Kaelra. Talen. Solard."

"Faces and names your subconscious made. They never existed. You wanted to matter, so your mind gave you a place where you did. Look around you."

My friends kept talking around me. Aki threw another paper ball and laughed at her own aim. Daiki said something at my expense in exactly the tone he always used, the one that meant he'd been saving it.

The warmth in it twisted something in my chest that I would have preferred stayed where it was.

"This is your home. This is who you are. Why hold onto shadows when this is right here?"

His voice dropped.

"Or is it that part of you liked being powerful? Being feared?"

My fists tightened until my nails were into my palms.

"I don't want to be feared. I want to protect people."

"Protect who?"

He stepped closer and the edges of the room frayed slightly where he moved.

"Names that aren't real? Bonds that were never made? Or are you lying to yourself as well as me?"

My heart was going hard. The laughter around me was getting louder and starting to sound wrong.

For one moment a thought went through me like something cold: what if he's right. What if all of it was in my head.

Then, faint, almost not there at all.

"Yuu."

Kaelra's voice. Shaking.

I blinked and the classroom flickered. Aki's smile stretched too far for an instant, past where a face went. Daiki's smirk froze and cracked.

My breathing steadied.

"You're wrong. This isn't real. If it was I wouldn't be hearing her."

The figure went still. When he spoke again the tone had changed for the first time. Annoyance in it.

"You keep fighting. Every wall has a breaking point. When yours goes you'll understand I was never your enemy."

The classroom shook.