I whirl toward the sound, my stomach turning to lead as Cal slinks out from behind a tree, little more than a dark shadow against the deepening night. Two more shadows follow closely behind him, and something small and shiny in one of the boys’ hands catches the moonlight.
A knife.
Terror finds me as I realize that they’re here to kill me. My mind races faster than I can keep up, but my body stays rooted to the spot. I stare at them like a fool, quaking as they prowl toward me.
“Did you think I was going to let you get away with killing my mom?” Cal hisses at me. I shake my head violently.
“I didn’t- I swear I didn’t kill her!” I plead, fearful tears already gathering in my eyes.
“You’re the reason she’s dead, you and your curse,” one of the other boys says as he circles behind me. “You’re the reason my baby brother died. You’re a baby-killer!”
“We’d be better off without you- we’d probably get better crops too, without you poisoning the land,” the third boy says. I clasp my hands in front of me, keeping my eyes on Cal, hoping I can appeal to the boy I’ve known nearly my whole life.
“I would never hurt anyone, Cal, please! You know me, your mom-” The rest of my sentence dies in my mouth as Cal strikes me across the face, hard enough to send me sprawling across the earth.
“Don’t talk about my mother!” he bellows, his foot catching me in the ribs and knocking all of the air out of my lungs. The two boys behind him laugh as I gasp for breath, writhing away from Cal’s foot and trying to protect my face. The three loom closer, bloodlust twisting their features.
Adrenaline pumps through me, a wildness surging deep in my core that I can’t explain. It’s like a wildfire is eating me up from the inside out- is this how everyone feels before they die? My fingertips begin to buzz, my senses heightening to the point of pain before whatever leash was on that feeling inside me snaps.
A multicolored, iridescent nimbus explodes from me, enveloping Cal and his cronies. Their eyes widen in shock, and their stupefied gazes turn to me as everything goes to hell.
The boy on the left is struck first, his feet turning into translucent glass. He begins screaming and thrashing, trying desperately to move as the glass crawls up his legs, solidifying everything in its wake into what looks like a morbid sculpture. As the glass inches past his throat, his screams stop. A few seconds later, he’s nothing more than a glass statue.
Cal and his friend aren’t fast enough to escape their fates, either.
The one with the knife begins screaming, the sound louder and more nauseating than anything I’ve ever heard. At first, I think he’s screaming because of what happened to his friend- but then I hear the snapping. His bones are breaking, one by one, the skin going loose in all the wrong places as his body caves in on itself, folding itself smaller and smaller until there’s nothing left of him but his knife, still clattering on the ground.
Cal only has enough time to turn a horrified look on me before the magic comes for him, too. His limbs begin to stretch too long for a human body, appendages bursting from his ribcage and tearing through his shirt. Spindly barbs protrude from his arms and extra appendages, his skin morphing into a hard, mottled brown carapace as he writhes in pain.
His screams transform into an awful, grating, chittering sound as his body takes on the shape of a roach and begins shrinking down, down, down until he’s hardly visible in the dark of the night. My eyes strain to keep track of him, my own horror turning my stomach as I spot him skittering wildly on the ground, his human head still attached to the cockroach body beneath him.
I’m frozen to the spot, not sure if I should pick him up, squish him, or throw up when a green, bulbous brox leaps from the undergrowth, croaking in question at the Cal-turned-cockroach. Before I can react, its elastic tongue lashes from its mouth, sticking to the shrieking Cal-bug and swallowing it whole.
It stares at me for a moment, it’s three yellow eyes blinking at me, before it hops away. That's all I can take. I throw up, the adrenaline in my veins making me dizzy, a cold sweat clinging to my skin as I empty myself over and over onto the grass until I’m dry-heaving. Where that awful, wildfire inside me once burned is only emptiness, like a well drained dry.
I don’t have time to think about it further as the terror of the night’s events drag me into unconsciousness.
2
Tolmond
The faces in the lecture hall all begin to blend together as my own voice echoes through the space. Of all the demonic sorcerer apprentices gathered in the hall, only a few seem to be paying any real attention to my lecture on energy expenditure.
“Trergonuth!” I call, halting my lesson to call out the Soz’garoth. A pair of pitch black eyes meet mine warily from the back row as the demon raises himself to his full height.
“Master?” Trergonuth responds cautiously.
“Come stand up here with me,” I say, motioning to the front of the lecture hall. “Choose someone to join you as well.” The class grumbles, heads turning toward the demon as he picks his way down to the lectern.
He motions to a matron by the name of Azzod, no doubt in the hopes of being able to out-muscle her in the exercise I’m about to put them through- a deadly mistake on his part. I have to turn toward the blackboard to hide my smile.
As soon as both of the apprentices are standing beside me, I raise my voice loud enough that it echoes through the lecture hall.
“We’ve been discussing energy expenditures in terms of chaos magic. Just like with all magic, however, it’s one thing to host a discussion- and something entirely different to put it into practice.” I turn toward my two students.
“The point of this exercise is to see who can hold their spells the longest. One of you will hold a singular spell that requires a higher magical output. The other will hold three small spells simultaneously,” I say, looking between them. The words are hardly out of my mouth before Trergonuth steps forward, a smug look on his face.
“I’ll hold the smaller spells,” he says, casting a gloating look at Azzod. Her face is stony as she nods, though I think I detect a spark of humor in her violet eyes.