The Wizard and the Void - Chapter Sixteen
Author: Milady Dragon
Phil had no idea what had just occurred.
One moment, Pierce was accusing him of being like the Deathless, and the next…he was standing, staring at Clint, seeing the badly hidden horror in his eyes and feeling Lola's distress through their link. Something had happened, but he simply couldn't recall what it was.
Then Garrett had announced they had Daisy.
The Wizard didn't even think.
The Void magic was so powerful around him, he had no issue with grabbing onto it and using it to supplement his own power. He soaked up every bit of Void he could, and used it against the people who'd dared to kidnap his daughter.
The other Void Wizards must have known what he was doing, because they were retaliating, dodging for cover even as they let loose their chosen spells. Raising his left arm, Phil triggered the spell on the bracer he was wearing, and his strongest shield was up and covering himself, Clint, and Lola, supplemented by their proximity to the Void Point. It flared a brilliant blue, tinged with black, as the thrown spells impacted against it, but it held easily.
He bent over to pull one of the knives from his boot. With a flex of his magic, Phil sent it unerringly toward Ruby, who had thought she could attack him and get away with it. Phil was a highly powerful Void; Ruby Hale was a child, and no matter how advanced she was in her training she was still a Novice, and she didn't stand a chance against his Void-fueled throw. He'd aimed to incapacitate, however, not wanting to kill a youngster, and the knife embedded itself into her upper thigh, effectively taking her out of the fight.
The unmistakable singing of Clint's bowstring sounded just behind his ear, and Phil trusted the Elf implicitly not to accidentally hit him; Clint Barton never missed, and this time was no different. The arrow, one of the enchanted ones Phil had given him, penetrated the hastily thrown-up shield that Whitehall had erected, to slam home into his shoulder, sending the man to the carpet.
Two down.
Lola wasn't one to be left out of the fight.
Dragons sometimes had an extra ability beyond the usual fire breathing, and Lola was one of them who did. It was to embiggen herself, so that she towered over even the largest dragon in the room, a steel gray one who wasn't afraid to confront the other dragon. They clashed, Lola screaming out a war cry as she went on the offensive.
Clint sent more arrows out toward their attackers even as Phil was calling more of the Void magic to him. He cast a Blast spell, which sent Garrett hurtling backward into the wall, rattling the drinks cabinet and breaking several of the glasses and bottles. He went down and didn't get back up again.
The door behind them slammed open. Phil had guessed there would be reinforcements, and he called back over his shoulder, "Can you deal with the new quests?"
"Wizards are more your forte," the Elf replied. "Go get 'em, I've got this bastard."
Without saying anything else, Phil grabbed up more of the Void force, shaping it into thick bands that he used to wrap around Pierce and the Novice, Stephanie, pinning them to the ground. He followed suit with Malick and Ward, wanting to get them out of the fight before they could attempt to overwhelm both him and Clint. The dragons were next, but to his delight Lola had managed to wound the gray one, long bleeding scratches along its flank that had it floundering a little in the fight.
It was over.
"Stop!" the shout had him hesitating for a moment, as he turned to face one of the other Novices, Raina. Her dark eyes were shining, and in a heartbeat Phil was caught up in them, mesmerized by the magic he saw.
He'd lost track of Raina.
"Don't you want to know what was done to you?" she murmured, words like the sweetest honey dripping from a fresh comb. "Don't you want to know what happened after you were killed? You know your heart cries out for the answer, and we can help you find it…"
Phil had always wanted to understand just what had happened. He'd convinced himself that he hadn't truly died, that it had been a mistake when they'd put him in that morgue with all the rest of the bodies. That Loki's spear hadn't really skewered him like a pig on a spit, that he hadn't seen the tip of that weapon emerge his chest from the back, where Loki had attacked. Gods, Phil had been so arrogant into thinking he could fight off that mad Wizard, because he hadn't taken the time to study his opponent, and hadn't known about the Asgardian's own power of illusion.
Had he died? That was impossible, despite what Loki had told Whitehall. Because only the Deathless came back from being killed, and Phil wasn't the Deathless.
Still, there was a part of him that felt as if they were right. That, somehow, he had died and the Void had brought him back. What Raina was offering him…the chance to understand, to figure out just what had happened during the battle, and why he'd awakened in that morgue…
Without even thinking about it, Phil let his shield sputter out, leaving himself and Clint defenseless.
"Phil!" a voice was calling out to him, but he couldn't respond. He was trapped within Raina's mesmeric gaze, and she whispered words to him, promises to figure out what had truly happened to him, all those years ago, to make sense of it in a way he could finally understand.
Gods, he wanted to know so badly…
The fight around him no longer mattered.
None of it mattered.
Only his need for answers did.
But someone called out to him once more, a voice he loved, demanding his attention away from the woman who was making such dark promises to him that he wanted to ignore whatever the other voice was saying.
"Remember, they have Daisy!"
Daisy.
His daughter.
They had his daughter.
And that reminder was from Clint, the man he'd cared for longer than he'd ever admit, back when he was lost in his anger and feeling as if he didn't have the right to love and to be loved in return.
With a painful, mental snap, Phil was back in his own mind once more. He raised a fist and would have slammed it into Raina's smirking face if not for the fact that someone had grabbed him from behind, slipping something around his neck that, suddenly, made him lose all connection with the Void.
He felt his heart sputter in reaction, his chest tighten with pain, as if he'd been stabbed all over again, the agony spiking throughout the rest of his body, fear and acceptance and loss drowning under it.
Phil dropped to his knees, unable to breathe, his lungs seizing under the sudden lack of the Void magic that had flowed through him like his own life's blood. His heart labored to beat, and his left arm went numb with cold. His head began to pound out of time with what was left of his heartbeat, his hearing fading away and his sight darkening.
Someone was screaming his name. A dragon was shrieking in agony. But Phil couldn't react. There was nothing left within him to do so.
The Void closed over him, welcoming him to the soft darkness of death.