Light flared out across the chamber, a blinding coruscation of silvery blue that swirled into vortices of wild energy or formed ghostly shapes with jagged claws and bestial fangs. The deafening sound of crashing thunder and the angry crackling of lightning reverberated madly around the room. Flashes of rose pink and lime green shimmered in fiery lines across the veins of crystal that formed the walls of the chamber, as they did the entire tower, giving the appearance that they were grown rather than built. Where the light escaped into the clear night sky of a planet unpolluted by human habitation, it refracted against the crystal dust blown by the chill wind to form an aurora. The night was silent apart from the omnipresent background hum, the song of the wind, the crystals resonating with each other and something else unseen that had been there since the dawn of time. Its one sentient humanoid observer could not appreciate it fully, as he was busy trying to hold off the furious attacks of a being of pure energy and information whose physical body had been constructed specifically so that its defences were strong against his usual methods of attack.

Rune sprang out of the way of the Legeon and Hewn spells. Well aware that he could not avoid being hit entirely, and that the specific forces he could defend himself against did not cover this focussed barrage of pure light, he was grateful for his innate magic defences that dampened the blow somewhat, as well as his quick, if not intensive, command of healing magic. All of this took less than a second. He was already focussing his mind and gathering his own pool of psychic energy, far beyond the limits of even those of another Esper, a magically gifted race, in preparation for a counter-attack of equal force. Not only did Rune Walsh have more battle experience than most Esper wizards his age, having seen real combat behind enemy lines rather than training or guard duties, there had been a time when he could draw upon the memories of another, a revered, almost legendary ancestor whose role he had been chosen to fill. Five years ago, the process had malfunctioned, but he still remembered a lot of the wisdom imparted exclusively to him, and had since spent most of his waking hours training to be a worthy successor to, if no longer the living embodiment of, the great wizard Lutz.

Not that Lutz's memories could have helped him much here. The millennia-old Guardian of Algol would never have encountered such an enemy, and would not have left advice on how to fight such, any more than most armies taught you how to take down their own leaders.

"Nawat!" he yelled, reaching his arm to point his outstretched palm at the part of the twenty foot tall, vaguely human torso shaped pillar of light surrounded by a thick skeletal armoured carapace that looked most like the head. The cobalt-blue orbs that swarmed around it looked vaguely like eyes and there was one that tended to hover in the centre, so Rune preferred to aim for it. It probably didn't matter which part of the construct he hit; its only purpose was to allow its inhabitant to interact with the physical world at all. He doubted that an entity as old as the solar system that probably had a say in its creation, even one that was notorious for having no imagination and constantly complaining about how it was only ever assigned to guard duty, would be stupid enough to build weak points into its entirely optional physical shell.

As he spoke the ancient word of power, a ray of solid blue light shot from his palm. The air inside the column instantly supercooled, forming giant shards of ice that flew towards the now freezing vacuum around Sa-Lews' head with all the speed that Rune's prodigious mental energy could fling that much mass. While the ice shattered on impact, Rune saw with some satisfaction that the bone armour chipped and cracked, the light inside fluctuating like a flickering candle flame about to be put out by a sudden draught. It took a lot of structural damage before he could even tell that he had injured Sa-lews. He threw up his mental shield against the attack he knew would inevitably follow. After so long with Sa-Lews as a sparring partner, Rune was beginning to predict the Rykrosian guardian's attack patterns. Not that it really helped him. His true enemy wouldn't be the same as Sa-Lews, they would be ten times as powerful, intelligent enough that they had already managed to insidiously corrupt the entire planet on one occasion, and would really be trying to kill him. Not that Sa-Lews hadn't tried to kill him once before, but he had been in a team of four back then, so the fight had only been long, painful and terrifyingly close, rather than a guaranteed loss if he didn't retreat.

"Enough!" Sa-Lews exclaimed. The note of impatience in his tone of voice, crackling slightly as it boomed around the chamber with no particular point of origin, betrayed Rune's suspicions. He was still taking too long and not doing enough damage. He was a lot closer than he had been when he first fought Sa-Lews, especially as he was now alone and Sa-Lews was no longer restraining their power, but Rune would never be able to survive a battle against the Great Light.

"The trouble is, most of the techniques you've been trained in, were designed to battle the Profound Darkness," Sa-Lews told him for what must have been the fifth time, "If we could only teach you some of the techniques used by the Profound Darkness. We have some of them in our memory banks. Not as many as we do light-based techniques, but..."

"It would take me a long time to learn an entirely new set of spells," replied Rune as he finished tending to his wounds with healing magic. Rune had never been very good at healing magic but fortunately, Lutz was a lot better, and had managed to pass down some of his training before the two of them were forced to separate again, "You said yourself that we don't have much time left."

"It's Le Roof who keeps lecturing us all about the oncoming inevitable battle," said Sa-Lews, "He knows what's going to happen. I just train warriors and guard relics. He also told me to pass on the news that he's found some more of the people he's been looking for. People who are latently gifted in dark magic, or who are even actively practising the arts, and who aren't complete psychopaths."

As Le Roof had explained to Rune several times in order to reassure him, dark magic and its use did not inherently corrupt a person, drive them insane or tempt them into evil, any more than learning to use Foi turned you into a pyromaniac. It tended to use more brutal and instinctively fearsome aspects of the world and less savoury human emotions, but there was nothing pleasant about the extremes of fire, wind or water when you were a small, fragile entity with a brief lifespan, especially when you routinely used the concentrated essence of that aspect of the world to cause large amounts of death. If Hahn could learn Savol and be perfectly fine, Le Roof told him in a rare demonstration of humour in a supragodlike ethereal intelligence, there was nothing wrong with someone randomly picking up Deathspell or Corrosion. During the accidental release of the Profound Darkness, there had been a definite statistical correspondence between people learning Dark techniques and being corrupted by the malicious entity. However, this was more to do with the much closer presence of the Profound Darkness, her habit of getting everything done by possessing and brainwashing people, and the lack of anyone else to teach Dark techniques that led so many mages to listen to her dark whisperings. Now that the Profound Darkness was banished once again, the only things that really made Dark techniques any more sinister were the pressure of prejudiced societal expectations and the endless problem with the uprising of neo-Zioist cults in Kadary. Elite Hunters such as Chaz were doing their best to deal with the latter.

"I still don't think it's actually going to work," said Rune, leaning on a wall as he suddenly realised how exhausted his magical reserves already were. The orbs surrounding Sa-Lews fluttered in a wave that passed through the entire swarm; it was hard to make out emotions on a Rykrosian, but Rune could have sworn that Sa-Lews looked taken aback at the idea of someone trying to argue with Le Roof. Of course, he thought with a smile, only Chaz ever argues with Le Roof. He suddenly realised how much wisdom there had been in the young man's rebellion against his destiny, a sentiment that the rest of the party had seen only as teenage mood swings. Now exactly the thing that Chaz had warned him about was happening to the solar system.

"What I mean is, I don't think just turning the powers of the darkness against the light will work, any more than using the light against the darkness really solved the problem," said Rune, "Sure, it allowed us to survive the battle, even win an important victory, but it didn't really help Algol in the long run. It probably even caused a lot of the problems we're having here."

"Okay then, Lutz, what do you suggest?" the enunciation of the title sounded sarcastic, another emotion that sounded odd coming from a Rykrosian.

"I'm not sure. I just don't think that it's a good idea for different parts of Algol to be in conflict with each other when it's Algol that is under attack," said Rune, "The enemy isn't really the Light, or the Darkness, it's this virus, these events in history and these intruders that are always coming into Algol. My sister... Doran said so. Before she... anyway, Le Roof said himself that he didn't really know that it would solve the problem if we fought the Great Light. What if we just tip the balance in favour of the Profound Darkness and get attacked by her again?"

"The battle's going to happen whether you like it or not. You're going to have to fight the Great Light, or entire planets, millions of people, could die."

"I know, and I know we have to do this in the short term. I just wish there was a weapon we could use in the long term. Something that can fix the whole of Algol."

"It sounds just the sort of thing your sister would come out with. I think that might even be what she was looking for up here in the first place."

"Did Doran ever find anything like that?" Rune said, choosing his words carefully. No matter what she believed, and had apparently managed to convince a Rykrosian of, Doran was not his sister, she was Lutz's sister. Rune hated people mistaking him for Lutz. It was almost as annoying as Rune mistaking himself for Lutz.

"Not in weaponised form, no."

"I'm glad. I wouldn't trust her with a weapon," he said, shuddering as he thought back to the time when Doran had used a corrupted Re-Faze to launch an enormously powerful Megid technique straight at Motavia, wiping out Monsen and half of Aiedo, in an overenthusiastic attempt to stop an invader from outside the solar system from brainwashing and corrupting most of the planet.

"She meant well, though," he said, mostly to himself, "She was trying to protect Algol, in her own way. She was just bat-shit crazy."

"And Re-Faze was encouraging her," added Sa-Lews, "He should know better than to get himself corrupted."

"You don't say that about Le Roof," noted Rune. Sa-Lews did not respond. As well as occasionally displaying human emotions, he was learning that Rykrosians also had a strict unwritten hierarchy, formed cliques and had such things as personal favourites and rivals. No other Rykrosians apart from the Profound Darkness and the Great Light had ever attacked each other before, though. It was the worst crime imaginable for them. The energy released by attacks powerful enough to damage the true form of a Rykrosian could accidentally annihilate a galaxy. Petty arguments, however, were expected to last for millennia.

"Speaking of Le Roof, he has summoned you. He has important information for you."

Rune sighed, stood up and walked out of the door. He hoped that the urgent summons meant that practice was over for today.