The Spell Realm (28 page)

She also comprehended that if she concentrated on the different shapes and colors, she could discern the effects these spells would have in the Physical Realm.

Someone was casting a fireball spell, which looked like a blue fractal pattern here—a pattern that didn’t resemble a ball of any kind. And yet Gala knew that it would produce a ball of fire. This pattern was more than just the shape; it was also the temperature, trajectory, and location in space and time in the Physical Realm. A lot of information was encoded in that blue pattern.

Then there was another grand display. Instinctively Gala knew that a magical object would be formed when this spell affected the Physical Realm. There was information about the permanence of this object in the Physical Realm, and details about what it would look like, with all of its various attributes. There were myriad stipulations on how and when it would break the laws of nature in the Physical Realm—how it would be lighter than air under most conditions—and Gala knew that this would be a flying chaise, like the one she and Blaise had ridden.

Another fantastic shape looked like a giant fountain, spewing colors and sounds; that was someone’s Interpreter Stone doing what it was made to do.

Gala imagined that when she was in the Physical Realm, she must have been creating displays not very different from this.

* * *

She wasn’t sure how much time passed while she admired these displays. After a while, some of her overwhelmed awe faded, and Gala began trying to figure out where she was. As soon as she focused on that, it became clear to her that the concept of ‘where’—the concept of location—had a different meaning here in the Spell Realm from what she was used to on Koldun.

She was wherever her attention was. Her thought was what seemed to determine her location in the Spell Realm. How this process worked, Gala didn’t know, but that didn’t seem to matter.

She knew she wanted to go back to Blaise. She
needed
to go back. However, focusing on getting back to the Physical Realm didn’t work the same way as simply moving about in the Spell Realm. Gala tried to demand it from her surroundings, but she had no idea how to achieve what she wanted. A disturbing thought crept in, a thought she had been trying to push away this whole time . . . What if she never saw Blaise again?

No.
Gala refused to give in to it, to admit defeat. She would find a way to get back to Blaise.

Suddenly, her attention shifted. She sensed something out there. There were things here, Gala realized, things that were not spells from the Physical Realm, but something else entirely. Something completely foreign to her mind.

There was thought here. Some kind of alien reasoning.

Fascinated, Gala tried to discern what these intelligent entities were. Their thought patterns were constantly moving and shifting, and she could occasionally glimpse something in their minds. These brief glimpses revealed intelligences that were beautiful, yet frightening in their otherness.

Intelligences . . . Something nibbled at the back of her mind, some memory that had long been suppressed. Gala had a feeling that she was forgetting something important, and then it suddenly came to her.

The dreams.
She’d dreamed of the Spell Realm before—and in her dreams, she’d interacted with an intelligence here.

An intelligence that she knew as Dranel.

As soon as Gala recalled Dranel, she sensed a thinking pattern. It was recognizable as the one from her dream, but at the same time, there were differences. It wasn’t just the fact that the Spell Realm of her dreams had been different from the way she was experiencing it now. No, it was a change in the nature of the being she now sought. There was something like a flaw in the otherwise beautiful pattern.

“Dranel,” she called out in her mind, trying to talk to the pattern as she had done in her dream.

There was no response coming her way, but Gala was suddenly immersed in a vision.

* * *

Dranel became lucid. The being he had found so interesting, Gala, was casting spells again. He had observed her do this many times, and the algorithms she produced evoked serenity in Dranel, the kind of serenity he otherwise only felt when he was not lucid.

Somehow he knew the effects these spells would have in the Physical Realm. The concepts were distant and foreign: floating, healing, thunder . . . Dranel had only a vague understanding of what those were.

He observed it all with a faint sense of curiosity, his mind sifting through the different patterns of the spells. It was only when he felt something powerful gathering out there that he realized it was not going to be a pattern that reached into the Spell Realm next—it was going to be the destructive energy of that spell itself.

He felt the jolt as the energy entered the space surrounding him, and he instantly knew that, if left alone, this force could wreak havoc on his world. Without hesitation, Dranel made a decision, taking the energy into himself.

His mind exploded in agony, and lucidity faded.

* * *

Horrified, Gala emerged from the vision, separating her mind from the shreds of the pattern that had once been Dranel.

She had done this, she realized in despair. She had sent the energy of the spell the Council directed at her into the Spell Realm, seeking to protect herself from its destructive force. And in the process, she’d managed to hurt this intelligent being.

Desperate to fix her mistake, Gala closely examined Dranel’s pattern, trying to determine what went wrong with it. She could feel the breaks and misalignments, the damage from the explosive force she’d inadvertently introduced into this entity’s habitat. She found the errors and tried to mend them, letting her mind focus on what the pattern should be. What it used to be in her dream. As she fixed the errors, she could sense Dranel changing, his mind healing in a way that felt almost physical.

After what seemed like a long time, but could easily have been a moment, Gala knew that Dranel’s pattern was as it had been before. He was not conscious yet, but that would come eventually.

She was waiting for that moment when she became distracted by something far, far more important.

She sensed Blaise casting a spell.

As she focused her thoughts on the pattern he was generating, Gala again ‘traveled’ somewhere. Wherever she now was, she saw a complex shape with sounds and tastes that she found mesmerizing. She soon knew what the spell in front of her was meant to do.

It was meant to bring Blaise to her, to the Spell Realm.

Except it was doomed to fail in its goal.

Blaise had made a number of subtle, but fatal mistakes in his calculations. It was clear to her that the spell would not work as intended. If allowed to run its course, it would end up killing Blaise’s mind, but even if it didn’t, the next part of the spell—the part that was supposed to take Blaise back to the Physical Realm afterwards—was flawed. Still, it did give Gala an idea of what a return spell might look like, and she tucked away the knowledge for later, focusing on the more immediate task in front of her.

Reaching out toward the spell, Gala tried to change it, to fix the errors that she could see as she had fixed Dranel’s pattern. She had no idea if it would work, but she had to try. Everything inside her trembled at the possibility that Blaise’s spell might go through in its current form, that he would perish in his attempt to reach her. She only had time to implement a few tweaks in his spell. Her priority was to ensure that he survived the trip in.

She focused on the problems in the fabric of the spell. Fixing the spell came naturally to her. The mistakes dulled the bright colors and the subtle patterns. All Gala had to do was make it beautiful again, like all complete spells were. Following her intuition, she broke the spell structure down into smaller parts. If she succeeded, Blaise would arrive in the Spell Realm, and no other parts of the spell would take effect. Once Blaise arrived, she would work out the other details.

Having set the fix in motion, Gala anxiously watched the pattern unweave, desperately hoping that she herself had not made any errors.

Chapter 50: Barson 

As Dara and her colleagues completed the spell to teleport them into the Council Hall, Barson braced himself. He knew enough about sorcery to realize that this was a dangerous maneuver. In a flash, he was standing inside the room. His soldiers were here as well—all except two. He could see a bloody mess on the floor, and a cold shudder ran down his spine as he understood what happened.

Two of his men had materialized in the same spot, dying gruesomely in the process.

It was an honorable death, and one Barson couldn’t dwell on now. Seeing the shocked looks on the sorcerers’ faces, he yelled, “Charge!” and started running across the giant hall toward the frightened group of sorcerers. His men followed, letting out a fierce battle cry.

As they ran, a barrage of powerful spells began assaulting them. Terrible heat, bone-chilling cold . . . Pierre and his comrades were trying every elemental spell in their arsenal. The spells slowed Barson and his men, but the enchanted armor protected them from the worst of it, absorbing the energies of the spells. Barson knew there was a threshold, a limit to this protection, but he also knew that this was one advantage of this battleground. In an enclosed space like this room, the sorcerers’ hands were tied when it came to some of their more powerful spells.

Then the attacks on the mind began. The Guard had protection for this as well, but Dara had warned Barson that some mild effects would still be felt. The fear that gripped his whole being, however, was anything but mild. Still, Barson didn’t let it stop him; he had been trained to face fear and utilize it to his advantage. Running faster, he yelled, “Now!” and lifted his bow into the air.

His men joined him, and a moment later, a small cloud of arrows flew toward the sorcerers. Instead of reaching the target, however, the arrows fell harmlessly to the ground, bouncing off the shimmering protective shield that the sorcerers managed to put up. Barson was not deterred, however. “One arrow,” he roared, signaling a different strategy—one that had been developed specifically to deal with this magical defense.

His men focused all their arrows on one particular spot, magnifying the impact of the strike. It was his sister who had come up with this strategy, and it worked. The combined force of the arrows hitting the same spot caused the sorcerers’ protective shield to weaken, and the next batch of arrows dissipated it completely, leaving Barson’s opponents without their primary defense. Now the soldiers’ arrows pierced flesh, and screams filled the air as sorcerers tried to scatter, running in every direction.

“Contain the perimeter,” Barson ordered, unsheathing his sword. And as the screaming intensified, he and his men swiftly dispatched the remaining opponents.

When it was all over, the floor was red with blood and corpses lay in piles at his feet. Surveying the room, Barson saw that all of his men had survived this portion of the fight.

The takeover of the Tower was complete.

It was a victory as grand as any Barson could’ve imagined.

Chapter 51: Blaise

Blaise slowly became aware of being conscious.

He could still think—which he reasoned meant he was still alive. However, when he tried to open his eyes, he discovered that he could not. As far as he could tell, he had no eyes . . . and no body that he could feel.

Panic came at him in waves. The sensory deprivation was so terrifying that his mind retreated into the darkness again, conscious thought fading again.

Upon the second awakening, Blaise felt a bit calmer. The realization of where he was—in the Spell Realm—was something for his mind to latch on to. And as Blaise slowly processed that fact, he realized that he did
feel
, though not in the same way as he had experienced things in the Physical Realm. It was as if the structure of his own mind was changing, acclimating to his new surroundings.

After a while, he became cognizant of shapes with colors, tastes, and smells mixed together into strange mathematical patterns. These patterns were mesmerizing in their complexity. As Blaise studied them with awe, he felt a peculiar sense of belonging, as though he was becoming a part of something bigger than himself. The sensation was soothing and frightening at the same time, because Blaise realized he could easily lose himself in this bigger whole and forget that he ever existed.

No.
Focus, Blaise, Focus.

That wasn’t why he was here. Gala. He needed to think about Gala. Concentrating on her, Blaise tried to imagine what she would look like here, and to his shock, as soon as the thought came to him, so did an avalanche of sensations.

He saw, tasted, and smelled something wonderful.

It looked like an intricate web, only it was three-dimensional, a bit like branches of a tree in the winter, and it was covering all of the nearby space. The web was buzzing with activity, small flashes of lightning traveling up and down the tiny strands within the pattern. At the same time, Blaise smelled the color red and tasted the number seven. He knew these concepts didn’t have scent or taste in his world, but they did here. In a strange twist, red smelled peaceful, like chamomile flowers, and the number seven tasted sweet, like raisins.