Fire
She crouched upon the rocky promontory, back-lit by the light of the silver moon.
A storm was coming in from the west and lightning flashed. A long shuddering peel of thunder marched across the heavens seconds later.
The girl's short wiry form was concealed in tattered black robes, which were blown about as she stood. They covered her body completely, her slender hands emerging from bilious sleeves to grip a charred wooden rod three feet in length. Beneath, she wore a beast-hide tunic and buckskin breeches over sturdy leather sandals laced up to her calves, a hallmark of her tribe. Upon her head was a wide-brimmed hat tapering off to a high point above her head. Her lower face was concealed by the stiff high collar of her black robes, her upper face covered by the strip of a black mask which revealed only her most striking feature...
Her eyes glowed brightly yellow with the eldritch power that swirled within her.
Lightning flared again, and the girl looked down upon the forest below. She smiled wickedly.
The girl could see the gnarled little creatures scurrying about their ramshackle village. They were nothing but filthy vermin, little monsters that had harried her all the way up from her tribal lands in the south. Goblins had never been such a problem for her tribe... not like they were now. There seemed to be more of them than ever. They were nothing more than annoying little insects, and she would step on them hard.
It would be gratifying. Her journey had spanned nearly two months, and she was near the so-called 'civilized' lands, where the weak city-dwellers lied to each other and grew fat off of their own conniving.
The girl's lip quivered in anger as she thought about being surrounded by such fools.
Still, the elder had spoken. The stranger had come to the village with the wooden box, dressed in an outfit somewhat like the girl's, with his dark hooded cloak. He had given the box to the elder and then departed without a word. The old shaman had had a vision quickly after. In it, he knew he was to grant the box – and what was in it – to the strongest member of the tribe.
That was she. Only the girl wielded the power of nature's wrath; only she had kept the tribe safe from all the new dangers rearing up in the land. The old shaman had granted her the box and had told her that she must seek out the Chosen of Earth... or all things would end.
That is how she had come to possess the orb. Grasping it had granted her her own vision, where she had flown over the land like a blur, racing toward a black and angry mountain, wreathed in smoke and flame.
With the vision in her mind, the girl's smile deepened and she began to chant softly to herself. Runes of orange flame flared in a nimbus about her, energies both raw and terrible being focused by her will into a ball of writhing incandescence that hovered before her.
The goblins had been a thorn in her side for too long. No one incurred her wrath so and survived.
The little monsters went about their inane business unaware as the girl flung her ball of fire down upon them before calling another. An explosion shattered the night and she could hear their cries...
Good... but she needed more.
She sent another ball of flame down and it blew a tree in half, felling it into the midst of the goblin village. Afterward, she changed spells, and electric blue runes replaced the writhing orange. The girl moved down a rocky path as she called upon the electric power before flinging forth her hand. A blue-white bolt of energy sizzled from the tips of her fingers, so hot that it melted through bodies and bark alike, setting fires to foliage and searing flesh to ash.
The girl laughed, summoning another lightning bolt. She singled out one frightened goblin, cowering down in a dilapidated hut and flung her devastating magic, incinerating it and three others. She summoned another ball of fire and sent it exploding into a second hut, blasting it to flaming debris.
It wasn't enough... still not enough...
She changed incantations again and cold winds surrounded her. Icy runes appeared and energies frozen and blue solidified. She summoned the frosty power, pointing out her targets with her rod and freezing winds coalesced about several goblins, flash-freezing the life out of them, their corpses entombed.
Terrified, the little beasts fell over themselves trying to get away, but the girl was having none of it. With a gesture of her rod, the ice shattered, firing out in arcs before her, shooting through flesh. Goblins howled as they were sliced to ribbons.
Out of their minds with fear, the creatures cowered and cried when sigils of fire surrounded the girl again.
With an outstretched hand, she summoned a cone of flame so hot that the water in plants evaporated as it touched them. Those goblins caught in the blazing spray were seared to ash, the air in their very lungs exploding.
The girl felt the heat, reveled in it, in the cries of terror, in the devastation she wrought. She laughed throatily as she came up to a half-burnt goblin still writhing where it lay. She looked down at it, her glowing eyes ablaze as she stepped down, grinding the creature's ruined face beneath her heel.
"I am the end of you," she growled, quivering, as she slammed her foot down again and again.
Afterward she looked up with a sneer. Nothing was left of the village but a smoldering ruin. She smelled the char and tried to calm her breathing, her hands shaking as they gripped her black rod with white knuckles. It took her a while to calm herself, and she decided she was satiated for now.
She walked through the ruin, not bothering to avoid the flames. It did not touch her, the fire. She felt a slight warmth, but nothing more. She used to wonder at the reason for this, but her power was intuitive, a part of her... not like the White Art.
Yes, she had learned her tribe's history well. The white mages had pushed her people out of civilization, bringing them to ruin and driving them from their ancestral lands. There had been a great war between the two arts, a war that had spanned more than a century.
At the end of it, those of the Black Art had been driven back into the wilderness, exiled from their own settlements.
It was something Robin Magus could not understand. If many of her people had possessed the awesome power that she wielded now in the distant past, how could they have possibly lost to the weakness of the white mages? Just thinking about it built an incredible fury within the girl, and she had to clench her jaw to force the shaking from her hands.
She would never forgive the lesser mages. She would find and destroy them to her last breath, she would blow through whatever defenses they had and burn the air from their lungs! She would freeze them in shards of ice, entomb them in it, and flail them with bolts of energy!
Robin had to stop walking to lean against a tree for a moment. She had to remember her training. It was too easy to lose herself to the rage otherwise. The power within her was a constant threat that she had to reign in. Her strongest emotions were the trigger to awakening it, but she had at all times to maintain a balance lest she lose herself. Her immunity to flame notwithstanding, the eldritch energies would consumer her inside out should she ever lose control completely.
Ah, but it felt so good to wreak destruction, to revel in crushing weakness all around her, for it was ever-present and she could not abide it.
Perhaps it wasn't such a mystery then, why her people had lost to the lesser mages. They hadn't possessed her control... they let themselves be consumed by the rage within them, the fury, the draw to reduce everything around them to barren ash.
If so, then they had been weak, and had deserved their defeat. Robin was nothing like them, if that had been the case. She had built up her will of iron and forced the primal energies to her command. Without guidance, she had learned on her own how to use the incredible destructive power of nature, placing it at her beck and call.
All she had to do was remember the balance, and it was hers to do with as she pleased.
Robin sneered. Yes, let one of those lesser mages come before her might and they would quickly discover to their destruction that there was no weakness in her. She would exact her own vengeance, not for history, or her people, but for herself.
Snarling, the girl pushed off the tree and continued through the veiled wood, moonlight coming through only in speckled shadows from the canopy overhead. It was darker down here, but she saw everything well enough. Her eyes glowed with baleful light and showed her the way.
There was very little, even in deepest night that her eyes could not see. She moved quickly.
After heading away from the devastation, the silence within the woods became palpable. The girl moved quickly over the uneven terrain, having lived in the wilderness all her life. She circumvented trunks, and ducked under branches, all ready feeling her strength return from the use of her power. She leapt over the exposed roots of old oaks, and scurried through hollows, often running on all fours like a beast when the terrain required it, all the while keeping her senses poised for any incoming threats.
She moved like this for sometime, before stopping to take a rest in a narrow hollow. The ground beneath her sandals was a wet mulch of leaves, and she stopped with her back to the fallen trunk of a massive tree. Her heart beat in her ears, but she kept her breathing regulated, allowing it to slow as her stamina replenished.
The night all around was dark and cool, a breeze blowing through the wall of trees all around the hollow. She knew the wind would be much stronger outside the wood. A flash of lightning illuminated the forest suddenly, causing strange shadows to flicker through the silent wood before another oppressive peel of thunder blasted the sky. It was considerably closer now.
The girl got up and moved again, climbing out of the hollow and running low through the trees, dodging passed trunks and underbrush until she suddenly stopped and looked all about. Her head swiveled a few times to confirm her intuition. Yes, she was being tracked.
This was not the first time. Robin had grown up in a wild land where savage beasts preyed upon men, and one did not survive long unless one learned of all the local hunters and their methods.
The girl moved again, quickly, running and then nimbly ducking down behind a tree to listen.
There was a wood some miles from her tribe's village where it was known that the local wolf packs had been displaced by larger nastier creatures, often called worgs. Wolves did not hunt humans unless they were starving, but worgs killed anything they could get ahold of. Wolves might have died out had it not been for the viciousness of the worgs to often turn on each other. Wolves, therefore, worked together better, and were actually able to hold their own against the larger, albeit less organized, wolf-beasts. Robin had seen this for herself. Another thing that queued her was the fact that worgs sometimes worked with goblins. How such cowardly little runts could bring themselves to capture and raise worgs was a mystery to Robin, but it somehow happened.
Now, the girl was in a forest occupied by at least one goblin village, and so the presence of worgs was not out of the question.
Nodding sharply, the girl ran and leapt, grasping a low hanging branch and pulling herself into an oak. Along its limbs, she moved nimbly, and jumped to another tree, grasping it and then heading upward. She moved from tree to tree much more slowly than along the ground. Hating to do so, she sheathed her rod in a loop on a slender leather belt around her waist under her robes, for it was hindering her climbing too much. She always wished for the rod at hand because it was her focus, enchanted specifically to allow her to channel the power within her into directed bursts of magic. Without that focus at hand, her spells would be impossible to direct, increasing the probability of them going wild in the process. Still, she needed both hands free to move faster.
The first piercing howl split the night, and a clap of thunder punctuated it.
Robin froze where she was to look down into the night-darkened forest below her. She felt the first drops of rain as lighting flashed, distorting the shadows of the approaching beasts, and making them appear ghostly for the space of an eye-blink. In the following darkness, the worg's large lean forms padded forward, golden eyes seeming to glow in the night, a wall of them looking up toward the one they hunted in the tree above.
The girl glared back with her own glowing gaze, from where she balanced upon a thick branch and took out her charred black rod. It would hinder her, but she would not be without it now. Only two more trees remained between her and a massive clearing, perhaps even the end of the forest all together. Robin was not familiar with the land this far north, she just knew the White City resided somewhere beyond.
The mage did not bother to chant a spell at this time, for the creature's scattered without a sound, gone before the next flash of lightning.
Robin nodded. Though they were beasts, worgs were not wholly stupid creatures. They could not reach her in the tree and they would not bother to attack her there. No, they would wait until she was beyond the forest, in the open, and then they would surround her and tear her apart.
Or so they thought. She knew of their nature, but they did not know hers. They thought her a lone, weak, little human in their domain, but they were wrong. Just the fact they would deign to underestimate her made Robin's lip curl in a snarl. They were so very wrong.
The girl growled like a wolf herself and moved on, awkwardly, with her magic rod in one hand, but she managed the edge of the forest. She squatted upon a low branch like a hunching beast and readied herself. It would take timing and superb concentration, but the storm provided her a rare opportunity to show her enemies what true power was.
She leapt from the branch into the thick grasses of the plains, coming into a roll. With one hand on her wide-brimmed hat, the girl came to her feet and ran before turning to face the edge of the wood, chanting all the while.
The worgs glowing eyes suddenly shown all throughout the tree line and she figured there was a whole pack. They crept forward slowly, growling, large and terrible with coarse dark fur and lean bodies, muzzles pealed back to reveal fangs as they snapped and snarled.
It was almost too good, and the girl readied herself. A magic circle of blue-white runes, thirty feet in diameter, suddenly appeared to rotate slowly around the mage at its center.
The worgs paused at the sudden appearance of this light, but nothing further happened and they continued to creep up, snapping and growling at their certain prey.
Robin's eyes glowed like balefire, and she did not move from where she stood, holding her rod out parallel to her body in both hands, chanting under her breath. Up above, lightning crawled across the tortured sky, but the thunder had suddenly ceased...
All was silent in the night.
A particularly large worg padded boldly ahead of the others, before crouching low and springing forward, moving like a dark smudge against the night. Then it entered the edge of runic circle and there was a flash overhead.
A bolt of power lanced from the heavens, and the worg was suddenly flying back through the air to slam against a tree and fall in a smoking pile.
Robin had not moved.
The other worgs hesitated now, as if they were not certain what had happened. Another large worg came up, however, and headed around Robin's side, and the rest split up to circle her.
The mage smiled. They are merely beasts after all; too stupid to know when they are far outmatched.
The monsters suddenly charged from all sides at her, but Robin did not blink. At the speed of light, each beast that entered the runic circle died, some struck directly and incinerated, other struck indirectly and flung back by shockwaves of pure power. Attacking as a pack, none had gotten the chance shy-off. Robin saw their smoldering corpses all around and ended her spell. The runic circle flickered and vanished and suddenly a massive roaring peel of thunder blasted across the sky as if the very air had been holding its breath, pent up for this one monstrous release.
Lightning flailed across the heavens, accompanied by the cacophony of thunder, and a burst of rain suddenly flooded the world below.
The black mage lifted her head to the thundering sky as it roared upon all things below, her arms upraised as she howled in raucous laughter. The storm, it seemed to her, laughed with her, the booming guffaw of an angry vengeful god.
Afterward, Robin Magus lowered her arms, her glowing eyes ablaze in the night. Even soaked, she turned with a sneer and headed north.