Chương 79: Chapter 75.5: The Flight

++Necessity is the mother of innovation. That much is truer than I could ever have known. In both of my lives, it was always the periods of great need that led to my largest leaps forward. Estalia was a perfect example of this. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E.

I reached Agrian as much from being flung towards him through the air as under the power of my own legs, landing hard beside him and sparing myself from a nasty set of scrapes, possibly broken bones, only with a hastily-formed shield. I took a moment to replace that with a sturdier, more reliable shield of the sort that would hover just above the skin to provide full coverage. Then I turned my focus onto Agrian, and found out whether my older brother had been destroyed in the fighting.

Luck smiled on me however, I soon found him not only breathing, but awake and active.

"Agrian, up!" I snapped. He looked at me half-dazed and frowned.

"Isabel, it's too dangerous for a girl here, you need to leave." I decided to ignore that remark for the time being, on account of his possibly having a head injury. I did hope this was not evidence I was growing soft. I hauled my brother towards me with bands of aether and shook him until he stopped being stupid.

"There is a fight we cannot contribute to going on, and standing near it may well kill us, we need to leave." Even as I said it, explosions were rippling out through the air behind us. A dozen each second, I thought. So many so fast that they simply melded into each other, sounding more like a single, continuous burn. Agrian frosted into practicality soon and turned, helping me either wake or drag up our downed comrades and yank them after us.

He was big and strong, hauling both Bagran and Korig after him with brute muscle alone. I, smaller, made do with creativity instead of force, wrapping Varnel in a plane of near-frictionless aether and simply dragging him along after me. He would jerk up, on occasion, where I dragged him over a particularly protruding rock, but I did not think he was at risk of dying, and this was by far the fastest way to move. After a few paces I risked a glance back at the fighting.

It was glorious, magic flying in all directions like someone was running pure aether through a centrifuge. Walls had long since finished exploding outwards, and had Agrian and I not been standing in the hallway just beyond the main chamber we would have been buried when its ceiling collapsed. Aryqatan and Sakhent were not; where the rock fell upon them, it simply sizzled and burned out of existence.

Their limbs were an imperceptible blur as magic and muscle worked against one another, creating an ever-widening space around the duo that exposed the innermost ruins to skylight for the first time in millennia. I could not follow it with my physical eyes, and so I did not bother trying. Instead I traced the magic. And that told me that Aryqatan was losing.

"Faster!" I urged Agrian. In the grand scheme of things, the lich known as Sakhent was a potential ally, but that did not mean I wished to meet him under these circumstances. I would sooner negotiate from a position of strength than one where he might simply decide my magic would serve him best enthralled rather than allied. More glances over my shoulder tracked the progression of the violence, and then revealed something interesting to me. Wherever Sakhent drifted from the altar, his powers weakened.

The closer he was, the stronger he was, and if he moved so far as the edges of the room it seemed that he lost his advantage against Aryqatan. Whatever magical working had resurrected him, apparently it was not quite finished. And the Demigod knew this, because she had begun targeting the altar. I did not stay and watch more to see how well her efforts paid off in that regard, just kept moving. Less than halfway through the ruins my body started to slow as exhaustion ate into it.

Agrian, damn him, was moving just fine, despite his heavier load and less efficient method of carrying it. He took note of my struggle and wordlessly snatched the bands of aether connected to Varnel's platform, hauling him along behind him too. We sped up from there, right until finally bursting out of the ruins and into Estalia's scorching heat. Ahead, I almost dared not look.

Waiting for my eyes would be the barrier that had trapped us here, either gone, as the ritual magic fueling it was expended on completing Sakhent's resurrection, or still there and strong. I could not control either scenario. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. But the barrier was gone, and so we were able to tear past out of the ruins.

I was conjuring a wind behind us at this point, nudging myself along with aerial currents as strong as I dared make without the risk of toppling myself over. How I yearned for flight. Even as I started to formulate a few new techniques for managing it, a great rumbling came out from far behind us and spun Agrian and myself to stare at the ruins. Something hurtled out of them fast and far, like it had been shot out of a cannon. Had it hit us directly I had no doubt we would have been obliterated on impact.

A second stroke of luck saw it impacting the desert ten paces away, and even that sent sand flying out fast enough to rattle my shield slightly and leave Agrian crying out as it hit his skin. He fell, but I had already seen that he was not badly wounded and ignored him as he writhed in the sand. My focus was purely on the thing that had just impacted beside us. It lay in a smouldering crater, rimmed with molten glass where the sand had melted on impact.

Even still, despite absorbing enough energy to leave any human reduced to swirling gas, Aryqatan's body was largely intact. Golden blood oozed from a great many gashes and her bronze skin had taken on a slightly pale tint, but she was breathing and moving, and clearly awake. The greatest damage by far was her left arm. It was broken at the elbow, and turned one hundred and eighty degrees to protrude in the wrong direction.

She gritted her teeth and winced each time a movement sent it shifting even slightly, but did not cry out. That made me respect her just a little bit.

"The lich?" I asked her as she stumbled from the crater. Her hair was on fire, though the flames quickly died down as they failed to actually fuel themselves by consuming anything.

"Alive," the Demigod hissed through gritted teeth.

"Or, undead, you understand." I did. And I was not surprised, Sakhent seemed rather too competent to allow something as stupid as a Demigod to kill him.

"We need to move then," I said confidently.

"The ritual that resurrected him is still ongoing, but it is in its final stage. The longer we wait, the larger the radius around his altar that he can move at full power will grow. Eventually there will be no radius and he will be fully restored." Was that suspicion I saw on her face? The unasked question as to whether I had orchestrated this all deliberately, allowed the ritual to finish knowing that it would sap the energy fueling the barrier that trapped us? If so, she was right.

Perhaps revealing myself so soon after the conflict broke out had been a mistake, the timing was awfully convenient if nothing else. I would have to tread carefully.

"What do we do now?!" Agrian asked. Beside him, lying in the dirt, were our comrades. They were all relatively unhurt, though still thoroughly unconscious somehow. Perhaps the sheer mana blasted out during that fight had been enough to overwhelm their senses. Aryqatan did not even spare them a glance as she answered.

"There's a field army convening a few dozen leagues to the east, we meet up with that and join it. It was the initial plan after this mission in either case, that we have such powerful pursuit on our heels only makes it even more important now." I noticed the genuine fear in her voice, and felt another stab of bitter rage. Once, I had inspired that emotion in the world's Demigods. Now here I stood with less than a tenth of this minor one's power.

"I will follow you always, your Divinity," I intoned. She looked at me like she was expecting to see mockery. Which, of course, was there, but purely in my head and thus undetectable. After a few moments the Demigod seemed to decide I was being serious and nodded with something close to satisfaction.

"Then we go." She took off at a quick march, and Agrian and myself spent a few moments preparing a more effective means of transportation for ourselves than merely scrambling on atop shaky legs. Magicians can do a lot when given time, even if it is only a minute. In this case, we only needed to make a primitive sled. The main body was made from aether, with the bulk of it being lighter material weighed down by denser blades at the bottom.

It had enough room for our unconscious companions, Agrian and myself, and even with all of us loaded onto it the vehicle distributed its load across enough land that there was very little friction as it started moving. Either of us could have driven it faster than a train for hours, though that would have been hard to control.

Instead we took turns nudging it forwards with bursts of force every few seconds, channeling the magic into new chunks of aether we formed inside the vessel itself before propelling them out behind us to launch the rest of it forwards. Smaller chunks of aether, fired as a torrent of dust particles, were easier to produce but boasted far less mass, and the speeds they provided were a good deal lower.

Making larger ones was more mana-intensive, but they had proportionally that much more momentum to send us shooting along all the quicker. We ended up finding a compromise. Beads of aether just a few times larger than grains of sand and sent flying out like bullets, actually leaving the air steaming around the chute after a few minutes as resistance turned into heat. We were moving a good deal faster than a galloping horse and not straining ourselves too much in the doing.

It gave me a few ideas about propelling myself in combat. What made these ideas seem less promising was the sight of how easily Aryqatan kept pace alongside us. Her legs were flitting along invisibly fast, and even wounded the Demigod did not seem to be exerting herself matching our speed. Fortunately, she was on our side for the time being, and we soon left the ancient city far in our wake as we returned to the shoreline.

The cloudscraper was right where it had been, hovering just beyond easy reach of the ground, even for men who came with grapples, and effortless for us to board with a combination of magic and inhuman strength. It was taking off again minutes after we reached it.