A. C. Rosenfeld

Vega didn’t mean to unleash the unholy horror. 

Well, she did. She had thrust her arm into the soil and awakened the power from beneath the ground. She had felt the movement of the magma, miles below her, as it tried to push away from her grasp. She had pulled until her arm was close to popping out of its socket and woke the being from its slumber.

But she had wanted it for herself. She didn’t want the being to form its own body and force her to the brink of survival, bleeding out onto the forest floor. Now she lay still, her good hand clutching the torn fabric that covered the dark wound on her thigh, mind wandering across the possibilities that floated there.

One possibility remained. She was going to die here. Alone. Thousands of miles from her home, her familiar lost somewhere along the Wide Sea, her enemies laughing at her demise. 

Vega felt her stomach clench in shame. They had been right about this journey. Perhaps they were even right about her – that trio of fools, always blocking her way forward. Perhaps they had always known she would fail. The upstart mage, searching for a power that shouldn’t exist in the natural world.

The shame burst into a fury, reignited by the icy pain that ripped through her right arm. She wouldn’t let herself die here.

Her last magmite obsidian clenched in her first, Vega took a deep breath and tried to concentrate as the pain continued to sprout throughout her body. It had never been easy to heal, but it never was for those who studied unnatural affinities. Especially ones with mortal injuries.

The obsidian bloomed with heat, and Vega pushed it against the wound on her thigh. A scream rippled out of her throat, but she kept the rock there, pressing as hard as she could with her left hand. It took ages. A new sweat stain had blossomed across her shirt, and the wetness grazing her skin caused her to shiver uncontrollably. But finally the wound closed, a white pucker forming where there once was a jagged tear. 

Her right hand was another story entirely. It was beyond repair, even with the pure obsidian stone she held in her left fist. Finally able to sit up and move both legs, Vega pulled her discarded cloak up from the ground, placed part of it in her mouth, and tore another strip off. After she finished wrapping her right hand, she used a tree to lean on as she stood slowly and began to limp in the direction she had come from. 

The hotspot that the unholy horror was born from was not far from a town. It hadn’t erupted in many millennia, which made it hard to find, but the pattern was undeniable. It moved in a clear eastward path, creating small mountains every 200,000 years or so. 

But now that Vega had unleashed its power source, she wasn’t sure if it would ever erupt again. That’s what made her power unnatural – it disrupted the true cycle of the earth. 

Caster was a small town, not large enough to house more than one doctor or witch, but small was what Vega needed. The smaller the town, the less likely there would be someone who would recognize her affinity for unnatural magic. She arrived just after sunset, to the sounds of muffled merriment coming from the tavern at the end of the road.

She had been to the town on her way to the hotspot and knew where the witch lived. Her vision blurred as she navigated the alleyways lit with the dark-blue hue of the twilight. 

Three triangles on the door. The witch. She knocked once, twice, thrice, four times before collapsing to the ground, blackness circling her sight until nothing remained.

Nothing remained – but someone was talking. A familiar voice. The witch? No. It was someone else. The memory that bobbed into her subconscious was blurred, something that Vega had tried to forget. 

“She looks like shit.”

~~~

Vega dreamed of flowers.

Leaves, too. Plump, filled with water and nectar, bending between her thumb and forefinger. The smell of bitter honey as pollen brushed off the daisies tucked behind her ear. Her cheek to the ground, the tang of grass in her nose and mouth, the stifling humidity of the late-spring sun.

But she woke to cold and dark.

The room was small but echoed as she shifted on the slab she had been laid on. She resisted the urge to scowl at her treatment – the witch had at least four beds when she last visited him – and raised her right hand to see what damage had been done.

Nausea curled up her throat. 

There was no right hand.

Vega retched and stumbled off the table, raising both hands to stop her head from ramming into the hard floor. But the stump wasn’t long enough to brace her and she fell onto her side. Pain radiated through her arm and she vomited onto the floor, tears springing to her eyes.

Light flashed into the room as the door opened and someone spoke, their voice dripping with exasperation, “I should’ve left someone in here to keep an eye on her. Now look at what she’s done.”

Vega lifted her head and saw the outlines of two men in the doorway. The taller one began to speak, and she recognized it as the voice she heard before she passed out, “She might have not reacted this way if you had given her a real bed, Vesario.” 

“Don’t place thinly-veiled judgment on me, Francis. There were no beds available.”

There was the sound of fabric rustling and another said, “She can have mine. My fever’s been gone for a day now, I can sleep on the floor.”

Then there was the firm grasp of a hand on Vega’s shoulder. Through her tears, she could see the witch looking at her with his dark brown eyes. He asked, “Can you stand, mage?”  

She nodded. The cut on her thigh was fully healed. She didn’t stand easily, but her stance was firm once she was up. The mage cradled her stump-of-an-arm and tried not to let more tears fall in front of these strangers.

The tall man, Francis, stepped to the side as the witch led her into the larger room. She snuck a glance at his face and felt her face burn.

“You.” Her voice slithered with disgust.

How could she forget? The trio of fools had followed her. The woman who had given up her bed was Antonia. Terragon must not have been far behind. 

Francis smiled, leaning on the doorframe in an act of nonchalance. “It’s good to see you this way, Vega. I prefer you in this state.”

Vesario continued to lead Vega towards Antonia’s vacated bed, but she pulled out of his grasp to face the upstart swordsman. “Don’t trick yourself into thinking I’m weak because I lost a hand to a primordial being. You would have fared much worse.”

His gaze hardened and silence stretched between them. 

“It seems the unnatural mage has found her voice,” Antonia quipped. “Vesario, some payment might be in order. Francis’ grating personality has done the trick.”

Vega broke their eye contact and made her way to the bed in the corner of the room. The sheets were still rumpled from Antonia, but there was no point in caring. Compared to the slab in Vesario’s surgery, the straw-filled mattress felt like the grassy knoll she would nap in when she was younger.

It was a foolish idea to sleep in the company of one’s enemies, but Vega knew Vesario wouldn’t let them harm her. They had no reason to harm her anymore. She had done what she had said she would do. Anything now would just be vengeance, and the fools were not ones to fall prey to that.

So she slept. Flowers crept back into her dreams. Honeysuckles, this time, their syrup slipping through circles of her mind, down into her heart where it gathered until it wouldn’t beat anymore.

The mage awoke with a gasp and brought a finger to her neck.

Thump-Thump-Thump. She could hear the drum of her heart matching the pace of her pulse. Her eyes flickered across the room. Antonia was on the floor, three beds were filled with lumpy silhouettes, embers crackled in the fireplace. 

But one bed was empty, and a candle bloomed through the window by the front door. Vega slipped out of the bed, tugging the blanket behind her, and followed the candles warm, low light into the cool night air.          

A figure sat hunched on the bench placed up against the witch’s house, a cup of water balanced precariously on the seat next to them. The moon was a just over half full above them, its light casting shadows on the cobblestones.

“Are you really the type of man to brood in the dark?”

Francis flinched and the cup clattered to the ground. Vega kicked it to the side and sat next to him, bringing the blanket to just under her chin. She closed her eyes and continued, “Are you scared of me?”

The swordsman began to splutter, but she stopped him with a shake of her head. “I am not teasing you, Francis. You don’t have to lie to me.”

When Francis spoke, he was looking at her. “Is that what you want? For people to be afraid of you?”

Vega met his eyes and was startled to see flecks of silver in their light blue. “I didn’t know you hailed from Moranthus.”

His gaze flickered back and forth between hers. “Vega. Do you wish to be feared?”

The mage shivered and looked away. She thought for a moment before replying, “No. I want people to respect the power I hold.”

Francis didn’t hesitate. “I don’t respect you, but I do fear you.”

Vega held back the rage that bubbled at his rudeness and said, “Good. You should fear me.”

 There was an icy silence.

“Why don’t you respect me?”

Francis coughed out a badly-disguised chuckle. “You unleashed a primordial being for no reason other than to gain power, which you could’ve gained through practice and study. I don’t respect those that take shortcuts.”

Vega twirled the braided edges of the wool blanket and replied, “You know so little about me.”

“Pray, enlighten me.” Francis could no longer hide his frustration with her. “Tell me everything I should know about the woman who spent the past year trying to begin the end of the world.”

The mage didn’t answer right away, instead pulling out the magmite obsidian she still had in the pouch tied around her waist. Francis jerked away from the unnatural object and began to stand.

“Wait. It’s almost destroyed.” Vega said, lifting her head to meet his gaze again. “I’m not going to hurt you, Francis. There’s no reason left for me to. Please sit back down.”

After a moment of contemplation, he did as she asked.

“I have tried many things,” the mage began. “I began with the clouds and the condensation within them. I learned how to harness the power of rain, how to form lightning and thunder, how to create fog at a moment’s notice. But so many practiced this type of magic, and it never suited me. I would never be truly great at it. And I knew I could be great at something.”

“My teacher was a kind woman. She was frightening, but I knew that there was so much kindness behind everything she did.” Vega smiled at the memory. “She knew I wouldn’t stay with clouds for long. She knew it from the moment I started learning with her. She was the one to introduce me to the mountains, and to the molten rock.”

“I realized almost immediately why it had been so wrong.” Vega turned towards Francis, her eyes suddenly bright. “Clouds were always new, always ending and beginning again. But I saw the lava and felt the truth in its slow, undulating movement. There was solidity in the creation of lava, the cycle of the creation of rock and its destruction under the world. Its rehabilitation as it became magma, then its introduction back into our world. Lava, again. Again and again and again. And how it was always old. The energy held within that lava, Francis, gods.” The mage sucked in a deep breath. “There was so much there. I could feel it standing at the feet of Bellum, just emanating out towards me, waiting to be held in my body, asking to be held in my body.”

She paused, daring a glance at the swordsman. Francis was watching her intently. She continued, “The problem was, the energy I felt coming towards me wasn’t the lava. It was the magma calling to me from underneath the mountain.”

Francis interrupted, “You were preyed upon by the divine interlopers.”

“Stop that,” Vega snapped. “You aren’t a mage, Francis. Ask Terragon how they feel when storms gather, our descriptions will be the same. Unnatural or not, energy is energy. There are no divine interlopers who can replicate that feeling well enough to trick mages. Will you let me continue?”

The swordsman nodded.

“Magma is different from lava. It’s unnatural because it lies in a plane separate to our own, like the stars above us. There are mages who harness the light that comes from the stars, the energy that makes its way to our plane, but there are also those who are able to harness the energy that lies just outside of it. Unnatural energies are much more powerful than natural energies because they still hold the potential energy that is lost in their journey to our plane. For lava to reach the surface, it exerts a certain amount of energy which is given back to the earth and the magma. The same goes for the stars.”

 Vega sat forward. “Mount Bellum was where I knew I had to step off the path my teacher had carved for me. The moment I took energy from the magma, she left. She didn’t even try to stop me. She just left. Didn’t even give me a chance to explain myself.”

Francis spoke again, “I don’t mean to interrupt in rudeness, this time. I am merely curious. What would you have preferred her to do? To watch her student fall prey to something that she had spent years trying to keep her away from?”

His questions were impertinent, but there was a sense of understanding in his tone. Vega didn’t answer for a while, the braid of the blanket still caught between her thumb and forefinger. 

When she did answer, her voice was low, “I- I don’t know. I think I would have preferred her to listen to me and try to recognize why I was feeling this way. No mage has a perfect introduction to their most powerful energy.”

“And you think magma is where your true power lies?”

“I’m not sure. I think I would be very lucky to find it now, after straying so far off the natural path.”        

Vega let go of the braid and let the blanket slide off her bad arm. Francis leaned over and pulled it back over her, wrapping it in a loose knot behind her neck so that it wouldn’t slip again. She looked up at him in surprise, but his face had already regained the hardened look of contempt that he often held in front of her.

After another stretch of silence, Vega murmured, “I know I was wrong in unleashing the unholy horror. I don’t know if you’ll ever truly understand why I did it, and why I antagonized you and your friends so brutally. You don’t have to forgive me.” She paused, then continued, “But I do wish to fix my mistake.”

Francis raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

“You need a mage to kill the horror. Terragon’s atmospheric energy is too far removed from the magmite horror to do any damage without help, and you won’t be able to touch it with your steel sword or Antonia’s arrows. You need me.”

The swordsman stood and stretched in response, his arms reaching up over his head before falling back down to his sides. He turned towards her and held out a hand. “I know. We all knew. That’s why we stayed behind. We may be stubborn, but we’re not stupid.”

Instead of taking his hand, Vega placed the obsidian in his palm. The swordsman let out a yelp and dropped it, cradling his hand as though he had been burned. 

The mage let out a bark of laughter, picked up the obsidian, and walked back into the bedroom.