Knights of Alchemy
Chapter Eleven: Once and Never Again
Cata was sceptically looking over Dagna's device. The sodium, she had been told, was a type of mineral that burst into flames on contact with water. Her views on this could best be described as mixed. On the one hand, it seemed sort of right that something didn't just get damp when soaked, or else the world would be too boring. On the other hand, she was also making a note never to swim after eating salty food.
"That sodium are just what I've been needin' these past years, somethin' that nae a one o' the competition's ever thought ter use, somethin' that requires a real creative mind -'ere, hold this bit fer me while I tighten the screws 'r the crowd's goin' ter be feelin' a refreshing breeze in bits that shouldna see daylight about thirty seconds after I flip yon switch- an' ye'll see that no' a one has got e'en half as complicated a design as meself-"
Her thoughtful mood, already under assault by a talkative dwarf who was clambering around in a maze of axles and wheels all designed to do some really unpleasant things to people who were off their guard, was obliterated like an icicle in a fire dragon's mouth.
It was afterwards that Cata understood the significance of what happened. A great block of granite struck the ground beside her, digging in deeply and spraying dirt in all directions, and then the shockwave rolled over them from the blast that had just torn through the palace wall. Where a strong granite face had once extended the ruler's palace into the coliseum, there was smoke, fire, and a serious absence of stone.
That was because it had been blown apart, some of it at supersonic speeds, and was now digging into the crowd like a meteor shower that hadn't bothered to burn up in the atmosphere. Things would have been bad, except that most of the gathered spectators and competitors were Adepts. As it was, they started off well and then went very bad.
The first few seconds were pure chaos, and with so many people gathered, it was inevitable that many of them were struck by wreckage, but most every Mars Adept in the blast radius had soon shouted "Protect!" or whatever version of that Psynergy they had available. The rest of the debris that fell ended up being deflected off a dozen overlapping Psynergy shields until it crashed down at the very edges of the crowd.
"What do you suppose are the chances that the crowd's going to be rational about this and leave us behind?" asked Cian.
"You want to stay here?!" Howl blurted. "Did you get clipped by one of those rocks?"
"This is obviously Jastyx and Dullahan's work," Cian countered.
"Obviously," Meg agreed, but didn't get the chance to see if anyone noticed her ironic tone. A line of flames rolled across the ground like a trickling stream, splitting the group and slithering on into the crowd, leaving a firewall in its path.
"Something's strange about this," said Elys, slowly.
Cata took a breath, trying to gather as much sarcasm as possible before unleashing it on her friend and getting down to work, but Lynn cut her off. "You don't mean the obvious stuff, do you?" asked the Jupiter healer. "Something more subtle?"
Elys nodded. "And it's got to do with that fire."
"Well, I've never seen fire flow before," Cata admitted. "But hey, Psynergy is Psynergy."
"Jastyx and Dullahan are both Venus Adepts," Zak pointed out, wishing he hadn't.
"…Okay, I'm starting to see your point. So what?"
"Also, stone doesn't burn," said Lynn.
"Can I ask 'so what' again?" Cata inquired.
"Well… that fire's getting bigger," Lynn explained, pointing to the blazing palace walls.
"Why aren't these people leaving? There's been an explosion and there's a rush to get closer?"
"Meg, these are Adepts," said Cian. "A lot of them are just as… nearly as stubborn as you. Even the inventors."
"On that particular topic, where's our dwarvish friend?" asked Padriac.
"Probably in the chaos, looking for someone to be affronted by. Dwarves can get into the spirit of disasters, but they just don't have the same perspectives," Cian remarked, leading the way through the crowd, hoping more for a bit of clear space than to find Dagna.
"We're never going to find them in this sort of mayhem," Meg stated, angrily.
"That's their idea, I think. So we have to see that it doesn't work. What's the best thing to do when you've got a covering distraction?" asked the Lemurian.
"Escape?" Howl suggested. "I've had some good escapes."
"No," Padriac realised. "No, the dangerous thing is escape. The tricky one, type of thing you get with your real pirate types, is to stay right where you are when everyone expects you to escape."
"You think this is like those Psynergy auras she could see in Contigo?" asked Cata, a few steps away from Elys. It wasn't hard to slip aside; Elys seemed to be half in another world at the moment.
"Exactly like that. Only not."
"…When I do create an entrance test for the Knights of Alchemy, you're going to take it every morning for a month."
"I'm doing my best, but I don't really understand either. Elys has gifts with Psynergy that no one her age should even know about, that much is clear. If she says there's something weird about the fire, I believe it."
"What do we do?"
"Look out," Elys stated conversationally. Lynn grabbed Cata by the arm and dropped to the ground as a gout of flames burst out of the still-raging fire and over their heads.
"I believe it too," Cata decided, feeling rather singed.
"It's not really working…" Dullahan said, doing his best not to sound worried.
"We need more," Jastyx told the Tomegathericon.
Its pages flipped and released another blast of wheezing words all at once, that constructed themselves in Jastyx's mind as "You need more? You do not demand of me!"
"We ask only in your interest!" Jastyx insisted hurriedly. If the Tomegathericon wanted them dead, she was all too certain they would never even find out.
It was silent for a long time. Then another salvo of words: "So be it. You shall have more."
The lines of fire that had been looping through the crowd turned as one and raced back into the flames and stone. When they connected, in the centre of the blaze, another shockwave rolled out, though there had been no explosion. This one had an attitude, as well- it pushed every Adept in the crowd backwards as solidly as an expanding wall, until a circle of a hundred feet was bare to the ground around the broken palace.
The smoke had been billowing up and out into a vast black pillar, but it sucked back together now, condensing into a shape as though filling a mold. When it was as opaque and black as it could get, the shape took a step forward, and a great beast shook the ash from its hide.
A round of swearing rolled through some of the crowd like a profane choir, but the few historically well-read Adepts were beyond words. Howl was in neither group.
"What the hell's that?" he demanded.
"Chimaera," Cian gasped eventually.
"Oh. That's not so bad. I've heard of chimeras."
"No. Chimaera. It's important."
"How?"
"Chimeras are a seriously diluted and cut-down version of an ancient and original monstrosity of darkness and flames."
"And chimaeras?"
"You have to ask?"
"I was hopeful."
It could have been worse, though, and because the Tomegathericon is not the type of literature to assert something without evidence, it went on to prove how much worse. The smoke was now gone completely, was not even rising from the flames, but those flames weren't done, either. They lifted off the ground and swirled together into a single point that rivalled the sun for brightness.
The biggest difference was that if the sun ever exploded, it probably wouldn't form wings and shape itself into a phoenix.
"That is so-" Elys began, and then collapsed.
"At least that simplifies things," said Cata, while Lynn checked to make sure Elys hadn't twisted anything in the fall.
"Yes. Or complicates them. Maybe both."
"You're doing it again…" Cata stated in a warning tone.
"You do realise you're ignoring a pair of giant fire monsters?"
"How the hell do I fight those?!" the girl burst out. "Swords melt, and I sure can't call up enough wind to blow them out, what do I do?!"
The chimaera seemed to have cleared its head of the first dizzying moments of creation, and so leapt out into the crowd, chasing the fleeing Adepts like a demoncat after mice. The eagle head let out a shriek of wrath and hatred. The goat head… well, admittedly, just sort of hung there and tried to look menacing. Goats can only do so much at a time.
"Drench!" came the shout, and several others along those lines, as the Mercury Adepts in the throng lashed back at the great beast, but it took no notice except to hiss and spew out a Dark Blessing. Black fog rolled over a swath of Adepts and dropped them to the ground, weakened into unconsciousness.
"All right!" Cian shouted, and he had just the right voice for it, "everyone get out of the coliseum and block the exits! We aren't going to solve this problem as a formless mob!"
A few voices of derision sniped at Cian, but they were quickly silenced by most of the others in the crowd, who had a deep respect for Lemurians. "Are you blind? Blue hair means do what you're told!"
"Is there something about you I'm just not getting?" asked Meg.
"Could be," Cian agreed, slightly embarrassed about being seen 'taking charge'.
"Whatever, as long as I'm not tripping over prone Adepts anymore," said Howl. "Of course, now I'm going to be locked inside a big ring-shaped building with a beast composed of smoke and fury."
Meg had drawn her swords and was debating whether setting them aflame would be any help when she noticed Howl was right. The fallen Adepts were being picked up and carried along with the rest of the tide without a word of complaint. Maybe cities weren't always so bad after all.
"What's the plan, then?" she asked. Cian had just fired Froth Psynergy at the chimaera, which didn't harm it, but at least drew its attention away from the fleeing crowd.
"Try to defeat those things and avoid dying," he replied.
"So in fact your plan is to rush into battle while you think of a plan, am I right?" asked Padriac.
"I was hoping someone else would be doing the other part of the planning, but yes."
"You're the old adventurer, haven't you ever slain one of these before?" Meg demanded. The chimaera had been stomping toward them purposefully, and was getting close enough for them to feel the heat it projected, but running wouldn't do any good either.
"I might have if they weren't supposed to have been extinct for a millennium and a half," Cian replied.
"And a half? How specif-" The rest of Meg's comment was cut off, as she leapt aside from a fireball launched by the lion-head.
"Spire!" Padriac hurled a large stalactite at the beat, and wasn't particularly surprised when the eagle head blasted it apart with superheating lightning. "Hmm. I suppose you think being indecisive about what the hell you are gives you the right to multiple elements? Briar!" A gout of flames incinerated the plants. "Earthquake!" The chimaera avoided the shifting earth altogether with a few flaps of its wings.
"It's playing with him," Meg stated grimly.
"He's playing with it," Cian added. They were both right. The chimaera countered or avoided everything Padriac could throw at it, but the captain was grinning widely, and wasn't losing his enthusiasm, either. "Pirates live on adventure, and nothing stops them but death. And even then watch your back."
"Lemurian saying?"
"How did you know?"
"…Neither of us is helping."
"Only a problem if there's any way we could help. Right now, no one's getting hurt, either."
"Hi! Remember us?!" Cian and Meg whirled to see Cata, split from them by a still-crackling firewall. Elys was down, Lynn was kneeling beside her in best healer fashion, and Zak was trying to find an escape route.
And then there was the phoenix.
It dove about them, screaming like any other bird of prey, if twenty times bigger and flaming furiously, and the only reason Zak was alive to be terrified, instead of being a large meal was that Cata had fended off every swoop with her blade.
"You help Padriac, I'll help them," Cian decided immediately. "Because water will do more good than fire," he explained, before Meg could even ask.
This wasn't quite as true as he hoped. Drench wasn't bad as water Psynergies went, but the firewall didn't even bother to flicker, and Mad Froth flew uselessly past the swift bird. Cursing the Tomegathericon twice as much as it already was, Cian ran to look for anything else that might be useful in the forest of inventions that filled the coliseum.
"Wild Growth!" Padriac cried, and watched his attack burn with an ever-increasing grin. The combatants were into a pattern of attack and defence now, and could predict each others' moves quite well. The chimaera knew what he'd do the same time he decided.
Padriac did so love underhanded tricks. "Unleash Hail!"
"It's about time, ye blackhearted plunderer!" Hail shouted as she leapt forth, hurling a tide of ice and freezing water at the chimaera.
"Just beat that thing and leave the pirate talk to me, savvy?" Padriac commanded. The Djinni and Adept watched as their enemy struggled to escape the frozen mass that had formed around it. "Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn't it?"
Meg whirled in from the side, a spiral of steely doom. She hacked through the ice layer and began a frenzied assault that might have finished the chimaera off, except that either by reflex or a moment's oversight, she set both blades ablaze.
The moment a flaming edge touched the chimaera, it turned too bright to look at. The incandescence turned Hail's ice cage into a veil of steam, and by the time either of the fighters could see a thing, it was free, angry, and about twice the size it had been.
"You just love to help, don't you?" asked Padriac. He made it sound like 'you just love to grease our weapons before we head into battle, don't you?'
"Oh, bloody-" Meg began before the chimaera's powerful claw sent her sprawling into the oblivion of unconsciousness.
"This has stopped going to plan," Padriac muttered, advancing on the chimaera, more warily than before. "This would be an excellent time for you to explain how we're going to save her."
"Arr…" Hail grumbled. "Accordin' ter all the usual rules an' suchlike this are not somethin' I should be telling ter yerself, but the Spirits know I'm a pirate, an' pirates don't much care fer the rules." She brightened a bit. "Which is meanin' they must 'ave known all along I'd choose ter tell ye."
"Are you going anywhere with this?" Padriac asked, taking his eyes off the chimaera to glare at his Djinni. Hail looked back, and gave him a truly piratical grin.
While he didn't like the idea much, Cian thought he had finally found a way over the firewall. A quick double-casting of Froth and Frost froze him a pillar of ice, and after a slippery moment or two, worrying all along that the phoenix would notice and turn him into an elegant Lemurian entrée.
"If this is where it ends, that spring water's not all it's cracked up to be…" he murmured, and leapt over the flames. He narrowly missed being sliced by Cata, who thought the phoenix had managed to swoop around behind her, and hit the ground rolling with only a slight toasted-leather smell coming from his boots.
"How's she doing?" he asked Lynn, who was looking far more singed and shaken than he was.
"Bizarre. It's… there's no good reason for her to be down. She's not injured in the slightest."
"Well, I suppose Spring could try to help. There aren't many injuries he can't handle."
Being one of the few people on Weyard who could speak from experience, Cata had decided that she preferred fighting a dragon to fending off a phoenix. The creature truly was fire in the shape of a bird, and so while her mythril sword hadn't even been warmed up much, even a perfectly aimed swing through its wing left no mark.
"That's it…" she growled. "There's something weird about your eyes, so that's where you get it next." The phoenix turned its circling path on its side, looping down to slash at Cata with talons that were very good at cutting (for lines of yellow fire). Cata readied herself, not wanting to dodge until the last moment, to keep the phoenix on a vulnerable course-
"Sckeer!"
"What in the-"
There was a moment's confused tangle, and then the firebird lifted up again, this time with her sword in its grip. The phoenix dropped Cata's weapon outside the firewall and then dove back, driving the knight to the ground.
"Unleash Spring!" Cian declared. Spring answered the call, hovering over Elys and letting blue twinkles of Mercury Psynergy flow down into her.
Instantly the girl jolted up, so awake and tense that you'd think she had just tripped in the middle of battle. "That's it!" she said, and didn't seem at all worried that neither of her healers had the slightest clue what she was talking about.
"Fine, if the sword's such a problem," Cata muttered to herself, watching the phoenix as it chose the course of its next diving attack, "we'll see if lightning makes an impression." Jupiter Psynergy for a Storm Ray attack began to gather around her hands, and as the phoenix dove, Cata raised her arms to cast.
"No!" Elys yelped, pushing Cata aside. She reached out, called the electric power from Cata's hand, and released it into the bare ground nearby. Another shove from Elys sent her friend staggering away, and then the phoenix was on her.
"Elys!" Cian shouted, but before he had taken a second step, he knew he couldn't do anything. The phoenixfire had engulfed her.
Strangely, Elys didn't seem to mind. She stood in the raging flames without flinching. Instead, she calmly reached up and grabbed at some not-quite-thing in the phoenix's head, around the bluish glow of its eyes. "Pure Ply." The strongest healing power Mercury could offer surged and swirled into the firebird, and a moment later Elys was standing in mere smoky air again, holding what might have been a torch.
"I told you there was something strange about her," stated Lynn, flatly. She was too busy being astonished to put any emotion into her voice.
"You were in some trouble there, weren't you?" she asked the flames in her hand. "Well, you haven't hurt anyone, so that's all right. It'd be nice if you'd help out, though."
"You're sure about this?" asked Padriac, sceptically. He leaned out from behind a large stone wall that had once been part of some inventor's Colosso entry, but was now serving as a shield to keep the Venus Adept from being made one with his element.
"Arr," said Hail.
"That means yes?"
"Means 'I'm inclined to agree that your statement is accurate'."
"You never told me you ever spoke without a certain level of piratical accent."
"Aye. Oh, an' me feelin's that Cian's called up Spring, so ye'll have twice the power."
"All right, just get on with it." Padriac took a couple of deep breaths and edged out to see if the chimaera was waiting for him. Its attention had been called away by something happening beyond the firewall, so he didn't waste the opportunity.
"Arr, not good timing…" Hail murmured. The chimaera glanced back and caught sight of Padriac just as he emerged from hiding.
Not to be deterred at a time like this, Padriac shouted "Water Power Rise!" The chimaera seemed startled at the cry, and sucked in air for a fireball. The captain fought down an urge to point out how overly dramatic these words were, and dove ahead. "Padriac summons Nereid!"
All three mouths opened in a panic as the two Mercury Djinni fused their powers and the princess of the sea rode out of nothingness on the back of a great turtle. Her fan snapped open, and she flourished it at the mixed-up beast like a deadly weapon. In her hands, it was.
The chimaera released its blast at the last moment before water exploded from the ground underneath it, an unstoppable torrent that it could not withstand. When the water turned to blue light and vanished into the sky, and the princess returned to whatever place she had come from, all that was left of it was a monster-shaped ashen statue, which Lynn blew apart with an arrow-guided Whirlwind.
And Padriac lay scorched and battered on the stony wreckage, where he had landed after the chimaera's fireball caught him.
"Oh no…" Cata moaned, seeing the captain's condition.
"Do something!" Zak shouted, and slammed his hoof into the ground. A Psynergy tremor ran through the earth and into the support of a damaged trial-device, which toppled and provided a bridge over the still-crackling firewall.
Elys was the first to scramble over it, running to Padriac. Psynergy was still in him, and so he wasn't gone yet. She looked at the flames in her hand. "You have to help me."
"Name… me…" it wheezed, as though on the edge of death itself.
Elys nodded gravely. "Unleash Tinder!"
The sputtering flames vanished completely, but in their place a much greater light was born, a mighty red that shone on the fallen Adept and rained phoenix feathers on him. At their touch, his burns healed, bones mended, and skin sealed. His breathing strengthened, and it was clear that the captain wasn't nearly dead yet.
Elys turned to face the other Knights, and held up -no longer clutched, but standing proudly on her palm- a Mars Djinni. "Got one of my own. I'm good now."
"Oh, is that what this was all about? Djealousy?" asked Tinder.
Elys stared. "Oh, great, mine has the worst sense of humour yet."
Dagna marched into the burnt battlefield of the coliseum and surveyed the destruction. "Well, a fine mess this lot is! If ye've dealt with that goat-cat-birdy now, would yer like ter explain what in blazes are goin' on ter meself an' the rest o' the city?"