The Laws of Wizardry

[Caden Law]

"The sentence is as follows!"

The trial took about five minutes. Caden went as himself, leaving his Hat and coat and remaining gear in his brother's hands. Dresden and Ogden were the only members of the family who even showed up -- and Ogden hardly counted since he was there by mandate.

"The vagrant rogue Wizard Blueraven is to be beheaded for the crimes of attempted murder, attempted assassination, Clerical desertion and the wholesale use of Unsanctioned magicks! His body is to be burned for purity's sake due to suspection consortion with Unholy influences!"

Caden said nothing in his own defense. No-one raised a voice in his favor either. He spent the whole trial, if you could even call it that, with swords at his throat in a triangle pattern and crossbow bolts aimed at every major organ. There were three Wizards on hand just to subdue him if that failed. He was only barely relieved to see that Cadence wasn't one of them.

"Sentence is to be executed immediately!"

And that was that.

Within two minutes, they'd slapped the chains on him and frogmarched him all the way out of the courthouse, across the square and onto the chopping block -- because magical criminals weren't just hanged. You could never trust something simple and easy to do the trick with them. You head to behead them, and that was just step one.

"Good-bye," Dresden said to him as they passed. He wasn't going to stick around for the execution, which was just as well. He tossed Caden's wares onto the ground in front of the execution stand.

"Tell Lucretia I'm sorry," Caden asked, and found himself surprised to actually mean it. "I left you a coin purse in one of the drawers. Good-bye."

Dresden nodded and left. Only Ogden remained, and only because he was the man to give the final order. They lead Caden up the stairs and brought him to a kneel, forcing his head down until the block was thrust up into his neck. It was all he could do to stop short of a quip about being choked to death instead of beheaded, but Caden managed. He didn't want to anger the executioner. Chiefly because the guy was big an mean and his axe looked suspiciously blunt and there were so many things that could go wrong with all of this.

They waited until a crowd was present.

They waited until there was a crowd for this.

Caden grinned to himself in disbelief. He muttered, "Nobody ever said Salvic justice was perfect. Or good. Or effective."

"I heard that," said the executioner.

"Damn."

Ogden cleared his throat. Silence took hold, and Caden dared to raise his head -- just enough to look at them. All of them.

"Have you any last words, Wizard Blueraven?"

Veshua was there.

"Yes."

She had brought her entire family.

"Then hurry up and say them."

Her daughter, her husband...

"...it's just one thing..."

...her father-in-law and his coven...

"Run."

Nothing happened. Very pointedly, nothing happened. Ogden sneered.

"Be done with it then!"

The axe came up.

Caden smiled.

The axe came down.

[Caden Law]

Light shined off the axe's blade. It thumped once. There was a collective intake of breath, and then someone screamed.

The executioner dropped dead with a hole straight through his chest, as neatly made as if someone had rammed an oversized cookie cutter through his left breast and shoulderblade, taking the internal organs, sections of bone and muscle and a pint or so of blood in the process. The man didn't even have time to scream, and it didn't take long before blood was soaking into the wood of the gallows. Almost at the same instant, the chains fell off of Caden's wrists and ankles. The crowd was already snapping out of shock and into panic, and there were three Wizards all readying spells, and Caden counted no less than ten crossbows aiming for his head and--

And he ducked.

Ogden's truncheon passed just a few inches short of his scalp, and Caden blindly reached out. He drew his brother's sword backhanded, came up with a twist and broke Ogden's nose and cheekbone with a good hard smack of the pommel. Then he sidestepped, smacking Ogden again as he went, and a flurry of crossbow bolts missed both of them. The guardsman dropped with a grunt, Caden jumped off the platform with a shout, and people started scattering. Civilians, that is. The Watch, the Wizards, and most importantly the Warlocks...

They all stayed put as best they could. Some were shoved around, some weren't. The only reason Caden wasn't killed three times in a row was because the Wizards were all too busy trying not to be trampled, while the Watch struggled to multitask crowd control and then some.

"Kaganis!" Anton's Voice bellowed. "The Wizards!"

This was followed by a shrill cackle of acknowledgement, and then people started getting thrown out the way like rag dolls in a tornado. Caden tensed, and the Warlocks all looked to their master, and Raun finally deigned to draw his sword. All of them followed suit accordingly.

"Not as planned," he phlegmatically declared. Caden caught sight of Veshua scooping her daughter up and backhanding someone out of the way; Nildinar was just a few steps ahead of her, clearing a path with a pair of blurs that were probably his arms in action. Caden looked back to the head Warlock and readied his sword. "But I will make the most of it."

Caden smiled. "Didn't see this one coming, did you?"

A second later, Anton burst through everything atop a great big violet-skinned thing that was equal parts bull, elephant and demon; four-limbed with a long serpentine trunk ending in a four-digited claw, bearing colossal spikes that arced forward from its shoulders, a set of tusks around its mouth and elkish horns from the top and back of its head. It had four eyes, each one red on blue or blue on red. Anton steered the monster from atop its shoulderblades, one hand on its horns and the other bearing his Magicide Blade high. Jumping about behind him was an obsidian-skinned gremlin with an oversized head, feet and hands, and a halo of gray fire around his head. Green ones burned like tiny suns where his eyes should've been.

"For Warlock Lord Raun Yenuial!" Anton laughed. "The Wizard Blueraven must die!"

Which framed it all like so: There were now three Wizards, an unknown number of Watchmen, and plenty of civilians to attest to Raun's Warlock status. He might've been able to get by as a Seer, but a Warlock is just a death sentence that hasn't been carried out yet as far as Salvic laws are concened. To top it off, Caden himself was now named as an enemy of the Warlocks in question, which might just weigh against his own death sentence if he could just survive the next five or six minutes before the rest of Evernorth's Clerical Wizards came to bat.

Here goes, Caden thought, just before the battle was joined.

[Caden Law]

In the months that Caden spent running and fighting for his life from battlefield to battlefield, being pawned around by one higher power or another, virtually all of his battles had been uncomplicated things. Magic missile this evil overlord here, fireball that necromancer there, stab that one to death and so on and so forth. He had almost forgotten what it was like to wage war as Wizards and Warlocks do, in the shadows and spotlights of politics and perception; where truth was a dagger best hidden in a cloak of lies, and the only people you can truly rely on are your enemies. This is the environment that breeds paranoia among Wizards and their ilk, not to mention the reason that murder by shady means is considered a perfectly natural way for them to die.

Older magi, the ones like Greyspine or even Warlock Raun himself, called this the Game. The rules are, quite literally, ineffable: You can't speak them or write them, and if you have to ask then you've already lost but don't worry -- nobody ever wins the Game anyway. Not for long. To a Wizard, playing the Game is like a combination of breakdancing on a tight rope over a pit full of flaming metal spikes and having mindblowing tantric sex with Raiaeran twins who wouldn't know what the word inhibiton means if you beat them over the head with it. It is what you fear and what you crave.

And Caden Law -- the Wizard Blueraven -- had been absent the Game for far too long.

He charged into the frey with the nearest Warlock, a Drow initiate by the look of things. The boy looked thirteen, but he met Caden with a series of lightning quick dagger thrusts that were entirely too professional for his age. Caden sidestepped most of them, parried the last with the back of his hand on the boy's wrist and swiped the dagger from his grasp in the same motion. The kid jumped back and tried to duck, but a Wizard's bolt frost-glassed his entire upper body. He toppled over and was shattered from the waist up by trampling feet. Caden didn't spare him a second's notice. He was already onto the next opponent, another initiate, and this one was a slightly older Elven girl with red eyes. She had a dagger in one hand and a fireball already clutched in the other, but Caden killed her before she could make good use of either. The third initiate, a burlier Wyrmian Warlock-to-be, shoulderchecked him as he made the kill. Caden lost his sword in the girl's throat, twisted awkwardly with the impact and sank his stolen dagger into the initiate's neck. This one screamed and staggered away, but did not go down.

"Die, Wizard!" Anton howled, which was actually a pretty nice warning. Caden turned and jumped out of the way just in time to avoid being flattened to pulp by the Warlock's demonic steed, which was conveniently bad at slowing down or cornering. The third initiate -- the one with Caden's stolen dagger in his neck -- went from being six and a half feet tall to an inch or two thick, give or take. Most of his guts splattered out into the snow. Caden watched Anton's mount demolish the executioner's stand, and Ogden was sent flying by the impact but Caden didn't see where he landed.

Show or no show, that deserved some kind of retaliation.

Caden thrust his hands out to either side, brought them back in and shifted his feet abruptly, the whole act looking more like a dance or martial arts display than anything else. Rock shot up from underneath the snow, big and heavy and nowhere near as cooperative as the ground had been in Raiaera, especially not without a wand or rod to focus through. He was just quick enough with it too: Anton's ugly little gremlin cackled as it threw a spell at him, and green flame burst all around the boulder's sides. Caden grimaced and shoved forward, putting his entire body into the effort. The rock went from zero to sixty in the time it takes to blink, and the gremlin let out a shrill scream and POP -- it was gone.

Anton laughed and his demon ground to a halt before turning around, its trunk lashing a six foot long hole into the city hall's front wall as it went. The thing reared up on its hind legs and came down hard enough to shake the entire square, and Caden gulped hard.

He turned, started to run, and immediately stopped and jumped out of the way as a Warlock tried to blast him with a green fireball. Caden hit the snow rolling, then kicked as much of it as he could up into the Warlock's face. This was met with indifference and the drawing of a Magicide Blade. He threw lightning at Caden and missed, then charged in for the follow-up. Caden dodged his swing, tripped him with one foot and grabbed him by the shoulder. The Warlock was bigger, stronger, meaner, but Caden was just that much more of a clever bastard.

He dragged the Warlock further off balance, leading him in a wide circle and then throwing him away at just the right moment for one of Anton's spells to hit him. Caden didn't actually see the magic's approach. All he saw was the effect: Heatless purple fire that burst out of the Warlock's chest, shoulder and waist in lopsided ring-patterns, each one expanding out from the surface by three or four inches before fading away. The Warlock vomited smoke and collapsed in a dead heap.

Anton was charging him again.

Caden dove for the Warlock's Magicide Blade and grabbed it, reached down into Father Salvar and pulled the ground up beneath his own feet. He was standing atop a cresting wave of stone within seconds, and Anton was laughing like a maniac as his demon barreled into it at full speed. Enchanted dehlar came perilously close to chopping Caden's pelvis in half between the legs, even as the pillar of rock collapsed beneath his feet. He jumped backwards, screaming until his voice cracked, grabbed hold of the demon's hide and held on for dear life.

Conveniently enough, Anton apparently took a hit across the head from debris right as this happened. He fell over and slid back along the demon's spine, until he and Caden were close enough to exchange death threats without being heard. Among other things.

"I'd say this is going about as well as it could have, all things considered," Caden said.

"Agreed," Anton said with a smile. "It's been far too long since I merely played the brute rather than acted like one. But it's only a matter of time before the Coven begins summoning up its demons, and then the Wizards will arrive in force." He began to sit up, and Caden was able to scrape and pull himself onto the demon's hind quarters by then. They'd left Town Square and were now riding hard down the streets of Evernorth, with traffic clearing from their path or being crushed underfoot. Anton grimaced. "I don't think he'll risk the use of my Name as long as I'm fighting 'beside' him," he added, complete with spoken quotation marks.

He was Sideways illiterate, but Warlocks are still perfectly capable of speaking the way Wizards do.

"Get us back to the fight," Caden said.

And then he attacked. Anton met him in kind, holding tight to one of the demon's elk horns to stay upright while Caden fought to keep his balance with every other turn, bump or hard stride. Dehlar whistled past dehlar, the swords missing each other almost as often as they clashed. This was intentional, mostly because real swordsmen don't go edge-to-edge if they can help it. Anton nicked Caden's face, Caden came to within an inch of slitting Anton's throat. It was enough for the Warlock to admit, "You've gotten better."

To which Caden replied, "Told you I'd kill you next time."

The Wyrm grinned at him.

"My brethren!" Raun's Voice suddenly interrupted them as they neared the square. There were bodies strewn about all over the place, plenty of them Watch but a disquieting number of civilians as well. "CALL UP YOUR FAMILIARS!"

[Caden Law]

A Warlock summoning a demon can be a subtle thing. Most of the professionals simply phase one in as simply and silently as they can. It takes more energy to do it this way, but it's a lot quicker and the demon in question can arrive in the middle of an attack or spellcasting of its own, fresh to the field of battle with murder and mayhem in its eyes and a song of war blaring like death metal in its heart. Even if said heart happens to be in a jar under the Warlock's desk, and even if its only the demon's heart from a strictly technical standpoint. Rookies do things more spectacularly. So do the big leaguers when they want to scare or impress someone. There's a lot of fire, brimstone, maybe a bolt of lightning or a small tremor.

When an entire Coven does it, you get mixed results that are like the Fourth of July in Hell.

Literally.

The sky above Evernorth turned a putrid mix of radioactive green and pitch black, the dividing lines between them all purple and red. Lightning rained down into the town square and corpses exploded left and right, some burning first but most simply turning to showers of bone shrapnel and bloody vapor. Snow turned to crimson fog as the temperature in the square skyrocketed, and it felt like the whole earth shook in that city. Smoke billowed and rippled and violently twisted into tornadoes, each of which collapsed into shapes that were nightmarish almost as often as they were humanoid. Two by three by five and then some, every single one of them erupted into a demonic familiar. There were things that looked like alligator-dogs without skin, hovering gargoyles with seraphic patterns ofbat-wings, succubi and incubi, Haidian gladiators and body-horrors that looked as if someone had welded them together from the dead. And maybe someone had. They came to the Warlocks two and three to each, and even the lowliest of initiates were at least flanked by demon-dogs and molten gremlins.

The remaining Watchmen fled in terror. No exceptions. Only a few clerical lunatics and the stubborn, bloodied and blooded Wizards of the Church of Ethereal Sway held their ground, meeting the new arrivals with a combination of furious determination and spell after ruinous spell. Voices called out and power came to bear. One Warlock turned to order her gremlin squad to begin fire-support of another's brutes and her head flew off in layers, as if swiped away by something unseen from a higher dimension. A demonic oliphaunt, like Anton's own, charged one of the clergymen and had its legs blown off by a nearby Wizard.

Caden and Anton re-entered the square just as the demonic hordes started to rally against the Wizards. Anton kicked Caden off of his steed with a maniacal laugh, and Caden hit hard-packed dirt rolling. He came up to his feet unsteadily and screaming obscenities.

A fireball missed his head by about three inches. Caden screamed again and took a blind swing at the source, and the Magicide Blade didn't block the next spell so much as it ate hellfire and vibrated a little bit for the effort. In any other situation, Caden would've probably stopped to marvel at his new toy. Right now, he just used it to block another spell, and then another and another one after that. All the while, he was working his way closer and closer to where the Coven was thickest.

He didn't know how many of them there were. Only that they had an army of those fireball-hurling gremlins and most of the initiates seemed to be casting long-ranged spells with them. The target was one of the Wizards, a tall young man who was protecting a pair of clergymen. They either didn't notice Caden or Raun had assigned someone specific to take him out.

Caden assumed the latter and ducked on the general principle of the thing. This was the only reason he didn't die horribly as a bolt of silver flame zigzagged through the space he had been standing in. Frantic on reflex, Caden broke into a run towards the Warlocks and reached out with his senses...

...but there was hardly any power left in the area to call upon. Salvar didn't have the kind of background magic that made spellcasting as easy as breathing in Raiaera. The coven and the other Wizards had already used most of it and almost all of them were running on fumes, while the demons had their own reserves to draw upon.

Dammit, Caden thought, I don't want to use Necromancy!

Thankfully, he didn't have time to debate it with himself. Caden stopped in mid-run, juked to the left twice and then the right once. Thin strings of violet lightning ripped past him at every step, all of them arcing back to the fingertips of a High Elven Warlock whose face was all business. Said Warlock was standing behind demonic lines, attended by a nine foot tall humanoid thing that looked like some kind of gladiator. It had violently pink skin, wore black platemail leggings and the sleeves to match, its chest left bare but for a plate of metal nailed over one side. The thing had a sword with a blade longer than its own body, and wider than Caden's arms stretched and measured fingertip to fingertip. The Warlock said something, and it looked at him with eyes that quite literally burned.

"Shit," Caden said.

It was like being back in Tembrethnil with a demonic hound-steed coming down on him, except no Circle of Power or friendly Ranger to use to his advantage.

"Nash malal!" the Elf yelled, and the gladiator lurched to one side...

Caden felt the air ripple in a curve that lead from his left side around his back to the right, and all he could think to do was lunge blindly in that direction. An instant later, the gladiator's sword gouged down into the ground and ripped a twelve foot long trench into it. The thing slowed to a stop at the end of its swing, stood upright with arm and blade held high, then craned its head back to look at him.

"Dolomen sorai!" the Warlock cried.

Which was followed by, "WIZARD!"

Which was in turn followed by the gladiator twisting in a blur and cleaving through the head, neck, shoulders, chest, stomach and hips of Anton's demonic elephant, all so quickly that Caden didn't even notice what happened until it was over with. At least a ton of dead monster went bleeding sidelong through the air, hit the ground near the edge of the square, ripped apart and finally splattered into an ectoplasmic goop all over a fishing shop. A lesser man would've thrown up just looking at it. Caden was too busy looking back to the gladiator to care. Which is why he saw Anton go careening into the thing's chest, not quite accidentally stabbing it in the exposed flesh with his Magicide Blade. The gladiator didn't move and Anton looked like a man crashing into a brick wall for all the good it did him, but he didn't let go of the sword either. His weight dragged it down a few inches.

The demon screamed and collapsed into a messy of greenish-pink blood and gore, most of which immediately caught fire.

"Ah," Caden said, then blocked what looked like, for lack of a better description, a soccer ball-sized mass of purple strings. "Thanks," he said.

"Don't mention it," Anton replied.

Caden smashed him in the face with the butt of his sword, then took Anton's own Magicide Blade and managed a very, very deep breath. "Wasn't planning to."

If Anton had a reply to that -- if he was even conscious at this point -- he didn't say. Just as well, since that was when the Wizards of Evernorth arrived in force.

[Caden Law]

There is a saying, very well known, that goes Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

It's good advice.

And if you've ever actually seen a Wizard in action -- let alone twenty of them on the warpath -- you'll know that the original speaker never knew what in the hell he was talking about.

"FOR THE SWAY!" was the battlecry as the Clerical Wizards of Evernorth charged into battle. The Wizard's Voice quite literally boomed, shaking the ground and breaking glass all on its lonesome. It really was spoken in all-caps, the size overblown and the letters bolded for emphasis -- the kind of speech that only a skilled arcanist is capable of, with the kind of power that only zealous faith and blinding rage can bring. Several of the lesser demons exploded the instant they heard those words, and all the rest shifted attention whether their masters wanted it or not.

Caden dropped off the radar, and he knew it. The Wizards came calling and he simply did not matter anymore.

"Rally, Coven!" Raun ordered, and the Warlocks did. One by one they turned with their demons and charged to meet the Wizards head-on -- and it was ugly.

The first Wizard rode in on a pale horse, a holy tome in one hand and a tangle of fire and lightning in the other. He unleashed it in a wide cone, and one of the larger demons plowed right through with a roaring scream of pain. A Warlock clung to its back, swung up onto one of the shoulders and blew the Wizard's head off with an eldritch shot, just before a blinding ring of letters ripped out from his chest and cleaved him in half. He fell, and the demon followed, and they weren't the last.

Another Wizard met two Warlocks head-on, spells blazing between them as they closed to melee range. He smashed one down with a mace-headed staff and the other took his throat with one good dagger's thrust, and then the Warlock hid under his body amidst a barrage of magic missiles. Two demonic gremlins standing nearby didn't have the advantage of cover, and the spell blew them both back to Haidia even as it took chunks out of the dead Wizard.

Caden was, if only for a few seconds, stunned to inaction by the sight of it. A gladiator demon fell dead just a few yards away from him, and a Wizard's litanies caused a flier overhead to simply explode into a shower of burning gore not too much further from that. For the first time since he stood in the Deathlands of Raiaera, his jaw went slack.

...and then, as is often the case, someone remembered that he existed and posed a threat. He heard a buzzing whistle, stepped backwards and closed his eyes. Something hot and bright and green shot by his face, its shape visible through his eyelids, and Caden bit back a scream of fear. He ducked and turned, just in time to both the follow-up and see his attacker. It was the same Warlock as before. The Elf had his hands drawn back to one side, and he was calling up heavy artillery magicks from the look of it.

Caden felt the ground shake and decided not to be a sitting target any longer. He charged. The Warlock screamed again, "Niai!" and Caden drew up his swords -- and when the eldritch cannonball came, it split and shattered on their blades. The Warlock tried it again but got the same result, and by then Caden was point blank.

Man to Elf, he struck.

The Warlock parried it with his elbow. Caden had no idea how, even though he watched it happen in what felt like slow motion. He followed up with a thrust and the Elf sidestepped it, pirouetted around him like a dancer and kicked one of his legs out from behind. Caden fell, blindly thrust one of his swords back, and missed again as the Warlock jumped out of the way. He landed in an artistic crouch on one foot, hands cupped forward and power already built. Not for the first time, Caden watched his life flash before his eyes.

"Ni-"

Caden took the Elf's right pinky off, along with a chunk of his hand. It wasn't much in the grand scheme of bodily injuries, but it was enough to break the Warlock's concentration and send him screaming to the ground in pain. In another time and place, Caden might have hesitated. Here, he did not.

Enchanted dehlar broke through the Elf's skull twice, lodged three inches into the dirt and slit through gray matter somewhere between. The Warlock gasped and the sound trailed off into a pathetic squeak that was lost to the din of battle. Caden stood, yanked the sword loose, looked for another target and got a running start.

"Doyle, Kresch! To me!" someone Said, and as Caden slammed into an initiate with both swords through the back, he looked up to see something he probably wouldn't live long enough to forget.

She was a short girl. Couldn't have been older than twenty -- hardly looked older than seventeen. Light blonde hair and pale blue eyes, the former butchered tomboyishly short and the latter cold like a winter sky. She had a band of freckles across her cheeks and nose, and she dressed in a Wizardly cassock colored white and gray: the colors of a storm. She wore a stovepiped hat with a wide brim, something puritanical and distinctly masculine, and boots that had metal plates bolted to the toes. There was a battle-axe in one of her hands, its blade shaped like a pinwheel and its handle bearing a chain fixed to an iron band on her wrist. Lightning and ice danced around it -- around her -- and she was wreathed in power and glory the likes of which Caden couldn't compete with on his best day. The air didn't burn around her so much as it froze in the opposite direction.

She stood her ground with cold fires burning all around her, and a great beast circled her with something like fear in its every step. The thing was taller than most buildings in Evernorth, moving on two thickly muscled legs and huge feet that looked well suited for the terrain. It had stubby little arms -- human-sized arms -- tipped with four-clawed hands. A row of plate-like spines rose from its shoulders to its hips, then sank to a set of vicious spikes on its tail. Its head was topped by a massive bony crest, and its teeth were bigger than the swords in Caden's hands. It had four eyes on either side of its head and smoke rose in green streamers from two rows of nostrils beneath them.

It circled her and it was afraid. Even though Raun himself rode the thing like a mad surfer. He called up a blast of violet wind, turbocharging a flame spell that struck down one of the original Wizards from the start of the battle, but he never once looked away from her.

"Cadence?" Caden asked, staring at the Wizard Weatheraxe and realizing for the first time that he no longer knew his own sister.

"Steelheart! Whitesnake! To me!" she called again, more from impatience than fright.

Caden looked around and saw a burly Wizard on a white horse turn around and come charging for her. One of the gladiators appeared in front of him and that was the end of the cavalry. The other was nowhere in sight.

"Dammit all," Caden said.

He charged the Tyrant Wyrm and its Seering rider without anoher word. It never actually occurred to him to run away.

[Caden Law]

Raun saw him coming. He didn't actually waste the effort of looking, but he still saw Caden's approach. The hand without a sword came up and violet winds danced around it, arcing high -- and then igniting as they supercharged a fire spell that raced through their original path. Caden barely had time to slow and swing one of his own swords up, and even then it was a near thing.

For all the power he had seen Magicide Blades absorb and outright negate, the Warlock Raun's magicks still hit hard enough to knock the weapon right out of Caden's hand and embed it hilt-deep into the ground behind him. Caden screamed and drew his hand back in, ducked low under the remainder of the blast and kept running. Raun cursed and Cadence took a swing with her axe. Arctic lightning shot up from its blade like a maniac aurora, and Raun was too busy countering it to get another shot off.

The Tyrant still hadn't noticed Caden's approach. He sucked in a breath, took sword in hand and came in swinging. Enchanted dehlar smacked into the huge demon's shin, sank about an inch through scale and hit bone -- and it didn't do a damn thing. The foot came up, Caden took a hit that was like being smacked by a brick wall, and he landed several yards later on his side. He was bleeding from a broken nose and the teeth in the front of his mouth felt loose, but it could've been worse. The Tyrant could have noticed the mosquito's sting. It could've turned around. It could've even decided that it wanted a snack.

Incidentally, things got worse.

Caden came up to his feet on wobbling knees, just in time to see the demon lizard's jaws bearing down on him. And it probably says something that this actually was the most terrifying experience of the day thus far. Caden jumped to the side and took another swig, nicking the monster's cheek with a cut that smoked and bled green ichor. It reared up and roared loud enough to shake the whole battlefield even as Raun jogged down its back, trading spells and litanies with Weatheraxe the whole way.

"Strike me," Caden mumbled. He couldn't hear the sound of his own voice, but he could feel the roar vibrating its way up through his feet and down through his scalp, the echoes meeting somewhere in his bowels. It was about as pleasant as Orc cooking. "Strike me..."

The Tyrant looked down at him again, emerald fog seeping from between its teeth. Caden gulped.

And an idea struck, awful in its simplicity and vile the whole way through. Caden grinned.

The Tyrant opened its mouth again and the world turned acid green.

[Caden Law]

...and what began as the arcane equivalent of pressurized radioactive gas hit the ground in a spray of what looked like cheap dry ice, its path warped beyond all belief around a clear, empty space where the light itself seemed to be warping. Just a few inches behind the distortion, the Wizard Blueraven stood with his empty hand outstretched, his entire right arm a bloody mess and his face a mask of determined glee. He had taken the energy of the Tyrant Wyrm's eldritch breath, negating the worst of its damage with a combination of his own Gravity Gambit and the enchanted dehlar sword.

"Blindsighter's Cage Arcana!" Blueraven shouted, and Raun actually paused in his duel with Weatheraxe. "HALLUCINATORY BINDINGS DON'T COUNT, PRICK!"

The first Gravity Gambit faded and the Tyrant lunged in without pause. Blueraven willed up another one and met the monster head-on with it. The spell was designed to deflect physical attacks; anything with mass to it. It was unpredictable though. The angle and direction of deflection were random, and the spell wasn't meant to handle anything bigger than a person. It had trouble with horses. The Tyrant was bigger than your average inn. The only thing that kept the Wizard from being splattered was Caden's skittish reflexes. He jumped to one side even as the Tyrant's nose hit a bubble of clashing gravity and anti-gravity.

Gambit popped.

Tyrant's nose and the front of its upper jaw were ripped apart, sending shards of bone and whole-sized teeth in every direction. Caden felt his shoulder and the side of his chest both open from cuts too fast for his nerves to notice until after the blood was already leaking, but he didn't let that stop him.

Blueraven ran up to the Tyrant Wyrm and sank his Magicide Blade straight into one of its eyes, pushing until the sword was completely embedded in the monster's skull. Then he pushed some more. Something popped once he was wrist deep, and then Caden twisted and tried to pull out. He had to leave the sword behind just to get his own arm free. The Wizard fell down and the Tyrant never got up -- it made a slow growling sound and simply...broke down.

The result looked like a small mountain of toxic green slime, most of which started steaming away as soon as it formed. Within a minute, only the Magicide Blade remained. Caden sat up, wheezing and trying not to pay attention to the pain in his arm or the taste of blood in his mouth or the blur of his vision. He didn't even remember where he'd lost hi glasses, or if he was even wearing them when the fighting started.

Incidentally...

[Caden Law]

Twenty Wizards had started the battle against at least as many Warlocks and probably as many initiates, and certainly two or three times as many demonic familiars. The number jumped to twenty-four if you counted the three Wizards from the execution and Caden himself.

By the time Caden sat up and realized that there was still a fight going on, it was practically over. And the only ones left standing were Raun, Cadence, and four or five bloody, bruised, angry looking academics who looked like they knew how to carry axes, maces, polearms, daggers, swords and staves of power very, very well. And even deprived of his dread steed and his army of minions both mortal and abyssal, even after slinging spells for Sway only knew how long...

Raun was holding his own against the best Evernorth could throw at him.

He had picked up a steel dagger from somewhere while Caden was out, and now he wielded that and his Magicide Blade against the Wizards -- and they couldn't touch him. Spells were cut to ribbons, and anyone foolish enough to try melee was made into a fool at best. Assuming they got back out of it alive. Raun moved with all the grace and finesse of a High Elf, and he fought with the benefit of Seering Eyes. The Warlock would've probably been at home in the halls of Istien University, both before and after its ruin. As Caden watched, he parried an axe with nothing but the tip of his dagger, stepped up shoulder to shoulder with the Wizard carrying it, then took the man's nose, eyes, forehead and Hat in a swipe that looked too artistic to be murder. He had already moved away from the body before it could collapse, batting away a fireball as he went. Dagger twirling, he summoned up an arcane cyclone and set fire to it, but two of the Wizards shut the spell down just as quickly.

Caden smiled that nasty Wizard smile, reaching out with one hand...

...and his Hat came, easy as that. Blueraven put it on, then daubed blood from his arm and mouth and started tracing runes into the ground. When he was done, Blueraven planted his red-dripping hands onto the words and twisted them out from each other. The letters smeared.

The ground beneath Raun's feet moved. It was so quick that the Warlock fell to his knees before he even knew what was happening.

Blueraven pushed down and swept his hands to the right.

The ground collapsed as Raun tried to get back up. It enveloped him like quicksand, and he sank straight to the neck. The last few inches came slowly as he fought to keep his head above the dirt, even as the ground twisted until he and the Wizard faced each other.

"I'm suffering just fine, Pointy-ears," Caden spat.

One of the Wizards came in swinging his staff, and the last thing Caden saw was the Warlocked Seer's head exploding. It really does say something of his lifestyle that this was one of the least disturbing things he saw that day.

[Caden Law]

Anton fled and as a result he became the only survivor from the losing side of what would be known as the Battle of Evernorth. He ran as fast as his legs could carry him, laughing mad with tears in his eyes. Through streets that were long abandoned, past houses and shops where people were huddled in prayer beneath tables and behind counters, clutching holy books and arming themselves with feeble knives, cleavers, hooks and the occasional and inevitable pitchfork. He ran all the way to Inhuton, past the makeshift encampment of the Orc traders, where Redhide greeted him with a risen spear and a shouted warning. He ran and he ran and he ran.

And he was free.

"Free at last," from his obligations, "From the coven," from his Brood, "From Raun!"

From living.

He made it half-way past an alley near the edge of town before a spear thrust out from the darkness and caught him in the side of the head. The shaft snapped against the corner wall of one of the buildings and Anton crashed in mid-stride, his body tumbling through a stack of fish-filled crates and coming to an inglorious stop in the snow. His last action, last thought, last anything was to reach out just that little bit further -- until his fingertips at least, would meet the sun's rays. If and when the clouds ever cleared before the Wizards found him.

"And thus ends the story of the Warlock Banebram," his murderer declared as he stepped out from the shadow.

Anton stared at his own corpse -- at the thirteen-year old initiate who, in another Time and place, would have become him. He watched the blood leaking and congealing around where the spear passed through scale and bone, and he thoughtfully considered what to say next.

Eventually, the battered Warlock just smiled to himself.

"You were right, little one. I am free."

He put a hand to the Magicide Blade tucked in his belt, a new one swiped from a corpse on the edge of the battlefield. Kissed one of the rings on his free hand, and the sigils burned pale blue for just a second. He made a gesture to the Trinity of Gods that had been his guidance back in N'Thayn'sal; to Draconus, the Drowned Justice; to N'Jal, the Whispering Queen; to Jomil, the Dancer in Chaos. And then he headed for the gate, and whatever lay in the world of Althanas.

Anton's uncharted yesterday, and now...the Nameless Warlock's unforeSeen future.

[Caden Law]

Caden awoke to the view of a wooden ceiling and the sound of a woman humming quietly, beautifully. His heart ached on reflex and he closed his eyes, but it was a moot point and he already knew it. The humming stopped and patient silence took its place. Caden shuddered and tried to ignore it, focusing instead on what he could feel of himself and his surroundings.

Someone had cleaned him. His clothes had been changed. And he was lying in a bed beneath two layers of blankets with his arm completely bandaged. Someone had healed his nose, if only because he could smell whatever reagent they had used. There was a bandage fixed to each of the cuts on his shoulder, chest and face.

"Half-ass," he finally muttered before opening his eyes to the inevitable. First the ceiling.

And then Veshua, who sat on the side of the bed. She was knitting something. The woman that Caden had known to knock out Trolls in bar-fights was knitting something.

"You were asleep for three days," she said, then started in on her knitting again. "Dresden and his family stopped by for each one. The little girl with the broom, Lucretia? She's very fond of you, Caden. She and Justina became friends easily." Here a smile, not wistful or sad, just...knowing. "They've promised to write each other often, once they know how."

"...that's nice," Caden said uncomfortably. He sat up. Something in his stomach felt like an overstretched rubber band, but that didn't stop him. "Maybe when her own journey begins, she'll have a friend to visit on her way out."

Veshua smiled. "Yeah." A long pause. "I'm...I don't know what to say, Caden," she put the knitting needles down and straightened up, though she did't turn to face him and the battered Wizard was thankful for it. "It's been so long..."

"Five years, sixty-two days, twenty-three hours, forty-three minutes and twelve seconds. Unless you want to count extenuating circumstances," Caden answered. Veshua almost looked at him, but he could still see the raised brow. That expression used to make him blush. Now it just made him lamely admit, "I picked up a few tricks abroad. And I guess I counted," which was about as close as he would ever come to telling someone uninvolved about his trip to N'Thayn'sal, or the strange sense of timetelling it had left him with.

"...Nildinar is a good man," Veshua said. Caden waited. "Even though his father was...was that Warlock, Raun...Nildinar never joined the Coven." She smiled uneasily. "They went over him with everything the Church could spare, but...they couldn't find a trace of magic."

Caden remembered Nildinar's crowd clearing exit from the riots preceeding the battle. He didn't buy Veshua's explanation for a second, but he didn't push either. "That's good," he said. And then he lied straight through his teeth. "I'm happy for you, Vess."

She tensed.

And finally, the lost love of Caden's life turned to face him. She was as beautiful as ever, and just as far out of his reach. And when she smiled, it still lit up the room and made his heart do backflips, but Caden showed nothing. Deception is, to a Wizard, a lot like breathing. You can hold off on it for a while and you can learn how to perfectly control it, but sooner or later everyone has to.

He didn't ask about whether or not she remembered their promise to wait for each other. He didn't ask her how she and her husband had met, how they'd fallen in love, or why they named their daughter what she and Caden had picked out if and when they married. He didn't even ask her if she still thought about him during all those nights. He boxed it up, the way scholars box up outdated records and athletes put away old trophies. He cut himself off from it the way that men do, until all that remained was a numb ache that never once glistened in his eyes, dried on his tongue, or wavered in his voice.

All he did was to ask, "What happened, who's pissed off, and how long do I have to run like Hell?"

Veshua stared at him for a few seconds, then chortled, and then burst into laughter. Caden joined her not long after that, and for a while it was like old times.

Even though it wasn't and it never would be again.