Shadow Magic (Darkling Mage 1)

I stayed out of the way, watching and clinging to the wall behind me as more of the chains crashed to the ground, as my protectors capably disabled and destroyed every threat that approached us. The three Hecates motioned continuously with their hands, sending salvo after shrieking salvo of the chain-beasts after us. I was expecting her to be enraged by how many of her pets had fallen, but she hardly seemed bothered at all. Hecate – all three of her – they were laughing, with all the glee of a child at play.

Then all three turned their heads, fixed me with six wet, black eyes, and smiled.

“Fuck.”

Six hands extended towards me, fingers like talons outstretched, and as one the chains suspended in the sky soared into life, screaming through the air in a groaning frenzy of metal and carnage. From somewhere in the stadium I could hear Prudence and Bastion shouting, warning me to run. I pressed up against the wall, the stone of the columns cold against my back, the sweat like ice on my forehead. I waited.

As the chains drew nearer they coiled into a twisting slurry of living metal, like a giant, writhing spire that came to a point, a gleaming, gray tentacle. Hecate’s laughter danced across the stadium as the chains rushed for me, aiming, I thought, for my heart. Their shadow approached, a spreading pool of darkness beneath this comet of steel. There was only place I knew to go. I stepped.

I rushed through the Dark Room, knowing that my timing had to be precise to make sure this would have even a chance of working. I emerged from the shadows cast against the far wall by Hecate’s apparitions. The three of them looked around the colosseum in synchronized bewilderment, searching for a trace of me. By all appearances, I had simply blinked out of existence. They hadn’t spotted me standing behind them just yet.

But the chains had.

I only had time to look for my destination before the chains hit their mark. As I shadowstepped again I heard Hecate scream in three voices, the noise cut abruptly by the collision of so much metal against earth, then against stone. I emerged at the far end of the stadium, panting from the effort of both running and taking the shadowsteps, and watched mouth agape as the hulking mass of twisted metal kept scraping across the ground, grinding its way through the side of the colosseum like an airplane skidding across a runway.

The wall didn’t stop its descent, and the stone columns of the colosseum cracked, crumbled, and broke apart under the gargantuan assault. A fresh breeze blew in through the breach made by the tangled mass of chains, all of them rendered still and lifeless now that their master was nowhere to be found. The only trace that Hecate had ever been here was the long smear of blood spattered ungracefully across the ground and the rubble.

Bastion threw his hands up to his temples, clutching at his hair, his eyes huge. “Holy shit, Graves. What did you – holy shit.” I could almost hear what he was really trying to say: “That was awesome.” Or maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part.

But then Prudence spoke up. “Good going, Dustin, but – she was our contact.” Her hands were at her waist, her face grim as she assessed the situation. “Even if she survived that, I don’t think Hecate’s going to be very happy.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

The voice echoed from around the stadium. The earth began trembling again, a slow tremor, at first, as the stone columns began to crumble, not into dust and rubble, but into shards and fragments of bone. Had this colosseum been built out of

the skeletons of those who didn’t win at Hecate’s game? I wrapped one hand around my wrist, feeling for my bones through my skin, and swallowed thickly.

As the columns receded, the broken bones fell into squat piles, until we could finally see the sky around us again. The cool breeze of Hecate’s endless night blew across a meadow left grassless and scarred by her chain-beasts. Then out of nowhere a pale green fire consumed the bones, the flames emanating a faint chill.

Within moments the bones were burned to nothing, dissolving into the earth, and fresh, dewy grass sprang from the ground, green and vibrant as spring, like death completing its cycle. It made no sense at all, but in the maddening perpetual midnight of Hecate’s domicile, I was starting to worry at how my mind accepted it as being totally logical.

One pile of bones remained. I thought nothing of it until Prudence and Bastion crowded around me again, flanking me, hands raised at the ready.

The bones rattled, then started snaking across the ground.

“Great,” Bastion grumbled. “What is it this time?”

The bones caused the grass to sway as they passed through, rustling against it the way an animal might in tall rushes. Prudence held a hand out against my chest, a protective stance, as the bones began to pile on top of each other, haphazardly, it seemed, until I realized that they were reassembling themselves into the size and shape of a skeleton.

“Hecate,” Prudence said. “If you’re around here somewhere, if this is another one of your games, I swear I’ll punch that thing to bonemeal before you can – ”

The skull came last, topping the macabre assortment of self-levitating bones, and its jawbones clacked as it opened its hinges to speak.

“No more games,” the skeleton said in Hecate’s voice. “You’ve already won.”

I wiped the sweat off my brow, the moisture gone cool in the meadow’s air. “So,” I ventured. “No hard feelings about me crushing your body? Er, bodies?”

The skeleton’s laughter was good-natured, and deeply eerie considering the context and the messenger. “None at all, fleshling. You cannot kill us here. Not by normal means, anyway. You have earned our curiosity. And perhaps – a gift.”

I had no real way of telling, but I knew that Hecate’s skull was smiling at me. It was creepy as hell. More unsettling, though, was how tiny particles began moving across her bones, like thousands of ants marching over her skeleton.

“Oh God,” Bastion muttered to himself. My thoughts were very much the same.

They weren’t insects, but bits of Hecate’s flesh, reassembling and knitting over her skeleton, filling out her frame and reforming her body. My stomach churned as muscle, sinew, and fat stitched itself into existence, as her organs materialized seemingly out of thin air, then began pulsing, beating. All the while the death’s head of her skull kept grinning at us, until it too began closing over with ribbons and ridges of new flesh. Grossest thing I’d ever seen, at that point.

“Don’t be so perturbed,” Hecate said. “We only take this form because it is so familiar to you. This is what you fleshlings look like on the inside, is it not?”

“Sure,” Prudence said cautiously. “But we don’t tend to see our own insides unless it involves injury. Or death.”