The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 465

Chapter 465

Chapter 463: A Cage of Light

CECILIA

My impatience stung like nettles under my skin, but watching the surge of effort from the Instillers and their Wraith protectors was a balm to my nerves. The last two weeks had passed slowly and with increasing frustration, but it was finally time. Everything was in place within the Beast Glades. Although complicated by the dragons’ increased patrols and taking over the flying castle hovering to the east, we were ready.

Under a shroud of mist that hid our signatures, swallowed the noise of our passage, and obscured us from view from above, my people moved into place.

There were at least fifty Instillers, Agrona’s most trusted and knowledgeable servants, all carrying a plethora of dimensional storage devices. I flew above while they marched in jagged lines like many ants below. Ten full battle groups of Wraiths flew around us, keeping to the cover of the drifting cloud of thick mist so their signatures wouldn’t be noticed by any dragon guards.

I could neither see or sense any dragons—not nearby, anyway. A patrol of guards was passing over the encampments built by the defeated Alacryan soldiers to the north, and a few blurred together within the flying castle some way to the east.

Just above us, suspended in the sky a hundred feet or so above the trees, a very different sort of mana signature seemed to simmer just beneath the surface of what was normally detectable to the bare senses. There was no visual distortion, at least not from within our misty cloud and beneath the canopy of thin, half-dead trees.

It was fascinating, really. Although we’d been calling it a “rift,” it was more like the mouth of a waterskin, and through it—within the waterskin—was all of Epheotus. The magic required to bend space in this way, forcing a piece of our world to bulge out into some other realm, was incomprehensible to me. But the mechanism by which it remained hidden, that I now understood.

The presence of the rift, or rather the intense pressure of the mana flowing into and then back out of it, caused distortions that rippled out for a hundred miles in every direction. When the inward flowing mana—which was being drawn into Epheotus—was balanced with the mana being projected back out of it by the asuras, that equilibrium disguised the rift’s real location in the midst of all that disturbance happening elsewhere. It required only a bit of effort on the dragons’ part to bend the light so that there was no physical manifestation of this.

Once found, though, it was now impossible for me not to see. Neither Nico nor any of the Wraiths who had already been here could sense it, no matter how specific I was or how much they stared, but when I looked beneath the surface of what was shown, I saw the cyclone of mana beneath, simultaneously being drawn in and expelled.

I indicated exactly where the rift was, and the Instillers got to work. Spreading out, they began to rapidly withdraw equipment from their dimension artifacts, assembling large devices in a circle around where the rift hovered high above. The mist spread as they did, creeping across the hard ground and between the crooked and dying trees that dominated this section of the Beast Glades, ensuring they remained obscured and undetectable.

As I watched the Instillers set about their work, I thought of Nico, hoping he would be safe. Dicathen’s defenders had been busily scuttling into strongholds across the continent. As Agrona had anticipated, Grey seemed to have vanished, going underground, but the information from our spies was conflicting. Even his own people seemed convinced that Grey was in multiple places at once.

My lips curled into a sneer. As if Agrona would be fooled but such a weak attempt at a diversion.

The closest location was the Wall. As I waited, I expanded out my senses. It took time to go so far. The feedback was weak—a dim cluster of distant signatures. I could feel Nico and Dragoth, as well as a bright spark of mana that must have been a Lance. It was subtle, but beneath the undercurrent of everything else, there was a small distortion in the mana, like an opposing force pressing against it.

Grey and his dragon companion? I wondered, trying to parse what I was sensing. I’d tasted the dragon’s mana, and there was a hint of it there, but it felt as if they were shrouding themselves somehow. Surely it won’t be so easy as that…

My eyes snapped open and my thoughts wrenched back to my own task. The ring of artifacts was half in place. It was time.

First, I felt for the edges of the spell distorting light to wrap around the rift. Though powerful, it relied largely on the swell of magical energy to disguise its very presence. Once I had the spell in my grip, I dragged it aside like a curtain over a window. Unexpectedly, the spell resisted, as if there were someone standing on the other side holding it closed.

I pulled harder, and the spell ripped, pulling apart in a visible shower of pure mana. White light sparkled out in every direction to rain down on my people, and a sickening twist of mana seemed to churn the air inside my lungs.

The white sparks burned brighter, hotter, as they fell, and I realized the danger almost too late.

“Shields!” I shouted, waving my hands to conjure a protective barrier over the Wraiths and Instillers. Wherever the white sparks settled, they burned against the shield, mana crackling and popping against mana.

After a second of surprise, the Wraiths began to conjure their own barriers, buttressing mine against the intense potency of the falling sparks.

Above, the rift was now fully in view, a gash in the sky, the air seemingly to fold around it at the edges, like flesh opened by a sharp blade. The sky beyond was a slightly different shade of blue, just alien enough to conjure gooseflesh along my arms and neck. Inside the ripple in space, three distorted figures floated.

The Wraiths burst into action, four battle groups remaining at ground level and focusing purely on defending our Instillers, without whom everything would fail, while the other six broke and flew away, maneuvering around well outside the shower of sparks and flying high, encircling the rift.

I floated upward after them, moving the mana barrier with me, warping it to envelope the remnants of the strange burning-spark spell, the opposing forces grinding against one another like two tectonic plates. As the sparks failed and faded, the shield broke down, and I absorbed the remaining mana; it was tinged with a draconic attribute.

The three figures flew free of the rift, and the atmosphere—the very fabric of reality itself—seemed to tremble at their presence. Inside me, Tessia stirred in response. She was afraid.

They spoke as one, three voices echoing over and under and through each other. “This holy place is under the protection of Lord Kezess Indrath. To attack it—to affect it in any way—is sacrilege of the highest order. The punishment for your presence here is immediate death, reincarnate.”

I smirked up at them, enjoying the theatricality of it all. They were even dressed like they were in some kind of play and not on the field of battle, their ceremonial white robes gleaming with golden embroidery the same color as their golden hair. “The bravery of your words is only just a little bit spoiled by the fact you were cowering behind a spell to keep you hidden from me. You know who I am, but maybe you don’t know what I can do. If you did, you would have turned around and flew right back where you came from.”

Mana rippled in the way it did around Arthur and his weapon, and the three dragons blinked away, appearing outside the ring of Wraiths. Their amethyst eyes lit from within, and violent purple beams of light blazed between them, creating a triangle around us all, with the rift at its center.

Panic surged up from deep within me, sudden and visceral and so certain. “Attack!” I screamed.

The sky transformed with dozens of spells as six Wraith battle groups unleashed their full offensive power on the three targets.

A cage of light spread from the beams of what could only be aether, spilling down to the ground and closing over our heads. The Wraiths’ spells burst against the inside of the cage, sending soft waves undulating across its surface. The sound of hissing acid and crashing thunder and blood iron shattering against the aether made my ears ring, and the smell of toxic water and scorched ozone burned my nostrils.

On the other side of the barrier, the three dragons seemed in a trance. They did not blink or flinch as so many powerful spells crashed into their conjured barrier. They didn’t chant or gesture with arcane meaning. Except for the breeze blowing through their gleaming golden hair and white robes, and a subtle pulsing inside the brightness of their glowing purple eyes, they were motionless.

My heart hammered inside my chest as something clawed up at me from my guts. There was a feeling of wrongness within the cage, a sense of inevitable ruin. The Wraiths fought through it, but the Instillers on the ground had ceased their work, paralyzed by the oppressive force of the aetheric spell.

Something was growing inside the cage with us—an empty nothingness, like a hunger that couldn’t be sated.

Reaching out with desperate claws of mana and pure force, I ripped and tore at the inside of the aetheric walls, willing the mana to dissipate the aether. The aether rippled forcefully, but it didn’t break.

The Wraiths continued to bombard the walls as well, and I could sense my own desperation bleeding into them as they grew first uncertain and then panicked, but I struggled to rein myself in.

Abandoning my attacks, I grasped for the mana on the other side of the barrier, but I couldn’t reach it.

And still, the three dragons were cold and emotionless. No glint of victory reached their eyes, no grimace of strain bared their teeth. They were like three frustrating statues emanating their aetheric spell. Even as I thought this, though, all three sets of eyes shifted slightly, darkening and focusing on the rift. My own gaze was pulled slowly along behind theirs.

Black-purple light began to emanate from the rift, which was within the cage with us. The something that was being called, that I had felt from the instant the cage appeared, was coming through, closing in on us. I felt hunger gnawing at me, the bitter coldness of it gripping my bones in teeth of fear.

I stared into the void, conjured through the walls between the worlds to swallow us whole. It spilled from the rift like a dark cloud, like blood from a cut, like fetid breath from a rotting mouth.

Reaching out, I took hold of as much mana as I could and condensed it around the rift, a storm of ice and wind and shadow. The void consumed it, dragging the mana into itself, where it was snuffed out. And I suddenly understood. The void would spread throughout the cage, devouring all within. It was a trap from the beginning.

My fear gave way to anger and frustration. I slammed a wall of mana into the void, attempting to disrupt it or push it back into the rift, but the emptiness only swallowed my mana, and my efforts only seemed to speed its growth.

I needed to subdue it, delay it—anything to give myself time to think. How did one stop nothing?

I vacillated rapidly between wanting to keep attacking the cage in an attempt to break free or focusing on the growing black-purple darkness.

“You, you, and you, bombard the barrier! Focus on a single point—make a dent, a crack, anything!” I ordered, gesturing to three battle groups. “All the rest, hold your positions!” I finished, watching breathlessly as the cloud of purple-black nothing spilled down from above.

All the beautiful blues, greens, yellows, and reds of the atmospheric mana dissolved to colorless nothing as the cloud crept down the sky. Soon, there would be no mana left inside the aetheric cage with us at all, and then…

Knowing that I would need that mana, I pulled it away from the void, emptying the air around it of mana, matching it with a void of my own making.

Its progress seemed to slow, oozing left and right, spilling outward like a puddle, and I startled. It reminded me of nothing so much as a wild beast sniffing around for prey.

“Wrastor, take your battle group and circle around. Get above the emanation, above the rift,” I ordered.

The Wraith did not hesitate, snapping into motion as he and his brethren skirted around the edge of the darkness, disappearing from sight above. But I could feel the signature they were giving off, and so, apparently, could the void, because its downward progress gusted to a halt while it began inching its way up toward the Wraiths, expanding as it did so, filling up every space it passed over.

The five Wraiths conjured barriers of protective mana around themselves so that they were wreathed in flame, shadow, and wind. I drew away the mana between them and the void cloud, but this time, it did not stop. They were too close, perhaps, their signatures too strong.

Tendrils of black-purple darkness reached for them, forcing them to fly up, but they were near the ceiling already. So close, the void seemed to be dragging the mana away from them, their shields spilling into it, the mana particles blowing off them like dandelion seeds before vanishing.

A tendril brushed against a Wraith’s foot, and the appendage dissolved, conjuring a surprised scream.

The mass of hungry emptiness sped toward the five Wraiths, spilling up into the sky above the portal.

“Everyone, focus on the walls there, there, and there!” I shouted urgently, pointing to the spots closest to the dragons.

As if broken out of a trance, the other battle groups joined the first two I’d assigned to attack the walls, bombarding the aetheric barrier with every spell at their disposal as they released a colossal outpouring of destructive mana. Blood iron, soulfire, void wind, and bile water-attribute spells struck, hammered, splashed, and sliced the walls containing us, all contained to those three narrow points.

But my thoughts were condensing too slowly. There was only so much mana in this small slice of ground—only so much in me—and the void cloud was consuming it rapidly.

Cursing under my breath, I wished suddenly that Nico was there. He was the smart one, the one with the plans. He would have some clever idea, some way to turn the void against them…

Outside, the three dragons remained in their trance, apparently concentrating all their effort on maintaining their spells.

The dark cloud spread above us, cutting off the five Wraiths. The wounded woman attempted to fly around it and rejoin us, but the void moved with her. She tried to reverse course, but too late. With a truncated scream, it subsumed her, leaving nothing behind but more emptiness.

In doing so, it brushed against the outer walls. When the first tendril of the moving void touched the aether of our cage, the vibrant purple energy shimmered, trembling outward across the entire surface of the vast magical structure, and the void recoiled, drawn toward four remaining Wraiths instead.

Outside our cage, the dragons shifted for the first time, a trembling tension shared between the three, as if concentrating on their spells had just become that much more difficult.

It was confirmation enough.

Grasping the mana around the four Wraiths, I plunged it like a tether into the gnawing emptiness. As I’d expected, it took in the mana hungrily, drawn naturally upward to fill the space above the rift. One by one, Wrastor and the rest of his team vanished within it. With the void suddenly expanding rapidly, it couldn’t help but press against the walls and ceiling, sending crackling waves of energy rippling across the outside of the towering pillar of purple light that entrapped us.

One of the dragons shouted in dismay.

“Ready your spells!” I screamed, my voice cracking with fear and anticipation.

The remaining Wraiths paused in their assault, focusing instead on the dragons as they waited, buzzing with tension and magic.

Sweat trickled down the dragons’ brows, and their statuesque stillness gave way to geriatric quivering.

What I had learned about dragon aether arts returned to me through the fog of war. They did not control aether in the same way I controlled mana, only coaxed it to do as they wished. This spell was incredibly powerful, so much so that it took three of them to conjure it. And the void…whatever dark arts they used to summon it, surely their control over it was limited. I could see that in their strained and fearful expressions through the transparent walls of aether.

This was an act of desperation. They were pushing themselves and their magic to the edge of their control to destroy me.

Even as I realized what I needed to do, the darkness began descending yet again, creeping into the emptiness I had conjured between us and it.