"This will not do." Leaning forward, Otoka clasped Azuri and Cyhari's arms in his cold grasp,
not the clammy touch of death, but a chilling and bracing surge which flickered, fluffed Azuri's hair into a sparking mane, then brightened his eyes until his sight was ten times bright, making the passing giants dark shadows of themselves, ebbing and dwindling until they stood waist high to the three interlopers magnified by the masterful enchantment. While Azuri felt weakened and atrophied at twenty-eight feet tall, at a yard short of sixty feet he again felt the solidity of strength, Otoka's enchantment having not only expanded him but fortified bones and muscles until he felt harder than diamonds and firmer than worlds. Even his thoughts and feelings fired with the force of lightning, so that in his swelled majesty, he believed a bauble or moon of any size might break under his heel or fist.
As Otoka advanced, the sparking folds of his electrified garment brushed the gate, and iron, wood, and stone crumbled, compacting into fragments repelled by his corruscating aura with the force of cwamtu-stones, crushing guards, hammering walls, and shattering the scaled roof of the ancient, petrified dragon.
"You must only walk, Azuri." While Otoka did not turn, his rich, colossal timbre engulfed the screams, the mangling of the gate, the crumbling stone dragon, and the stammering of Azuri's freshly grieving heart.
The wizard's slow path through the wreckage gashed the ancient monster, revealing not only snapped stone and folded steel, but dry, cracked bones. Flung javelins were diverted by the electrical field, some skidding skyward until their momentum was spent, and others flown back to their wielders' breasts.
As Azuri walked, Cyhari matched his stride. While she did not meet his glance, her stride copied his so perfectly, it was as if she had studied his personal style. As their bristling auras contacted the wreckage in Otoka's trail, the rubble dissolved into dust. As guards charged in with weightier spears, twenty feet long and iron clad, Azuri braced for the volley, but no sooner had they whistled in than they screamed toward their throwers, many of whom died with a hand still outstretched.
As the ancient dragon disintigrated, the amphitheater stood starkly revealed, like a monstrous, petrified turtle egg, and when this obdurate shell resisted Otoka's pounding fist, the wizard reached skyward with his upturned hand, then pulled down violently, unfurling a blue bolt to flicker through bone, stone, and iron, and lashing the wizard himself to little effect, save the singeing of his garments.
The arc of his hand slashed still further, until his sword-sized fingernails rattled on the cracked, crumpled amphitheater, now overshadowed by a spectral dust cloud and floating scraps, slowly twirling in the wizard's electrified aura.
As the slate gray sky was overcast with dust and debris, Azuri spiedFrellyx creeping through a fissure in the ancient scales. While he thought of alerting Otoka, vengeance stayed his tongue and quickened his step, until he had pursued Frellyx five blocks to a market square, where the noise of destruction dimmed and the chaos was obscured by the hulking businesses.
Although now twice a giant's height, and more than ten times their weight due to his knotted muscles, Azuri could have been overcome if one brave giant led the others in a swarming surge. Instead, the daunted giants hid themselves, cowed by having to look up for a change.
When Frellyx was just a fingertip away from being pinched, a tendril of electricity flickered from Azuri's hand and flung Frellyx with a snap, so that he landed down the street, tumbled still farther,
then scrambled to his feet and sprinted with renewed vigor.
As his crackling aura disappeared, the seething air enveloping Azuri dimmed to a hush.
Guessing the spell's fade might also dwindle him to the stature bestowed by Cyhari, or worse, his natural elvish size, Azuri was about to dash back to the wrecked amphitheater, when a voice brought him up short:
"Where is he?"
As Azuri diminished, his head raced toward the outstretched, mushrooming fists clutching his garment, and as he shrunk further, Eurilda shot taller and taller, until her eerie beauty was all the more ghastly for the coarse pores and leatheriness of her gigantic, ash-white face, and until her grip burst the fabric, and he dangled from her nails by the shreds.
What set his heart hammering, however, was the memory of being diminished smaller still:
tumbling in the neck of her pouch, so limp that his eyes had dwindled to dizzy pinpricks, the numbness of fear enveloping his fall through the soft tingle of black velvet to deeper shadows.
"Where is he?"
When Azuri lifted his woozy head, and her eyes stretched in a paroxysm of rage, he was again submerged in nauseous fear, which gushed out in a stream of vomit, running into the salty flow from his anguished eyes.
"Where is he?"
Having pressed her thumb to his ribs until the nail bit though his rags, Eurilda bent the welt deeper and deeper, cutting off his air and threatening to pinch him in two. While his face was wrung in an undignified, drawn out squeal, he only had enough breath for a puff, and no sooner had he exhaled
than he gasped it back with a strangled rasping—until Eurilda let loose a screech, the air slithered in with a rush, and he cracked off her hard leather boot onto the dirt thoroughfare.
No sooner had he sprawled then his hand was clasped, and he was dragged like a rag doll towards the amphitheater. When his lolling head tried to fix on his rescuer or captor, more chunks floated up, his eyes crossed, and his mind dissolved into the nauseous blur. As the loathsome details emerged, hatred surged in before consciousness, so that he wished its destruction before he remembered who he was. It enraged him more that its lies were founded on truth: its strange pallor and the deadness of its hair were pierced by a sarcasm-twisted smile; the watery eyes others might read as weak, Azuri knew for determination; and its rapid gait, more suited for a beast than a thinking being, the tilting gallop by which she hurled herself, not just place to place and room to room, but from her bed to her desk. If this was not his daughter, like her, it had never learned how to walk, but skipped straight to running. If this trait endeared the monster to Azuri, it only gave his loathing a warmer, softer edge. This abomination, built from the bones and skin of his daughter, was not Cyhari.
"Put me down." When his eyes came back into focus, the amphitheater was far behind them,
and they had reached the outskirts of the giant city, where anacondic vines and farflung stalks shot up from terrace farms notched in hillsides, and to the other side, where immense stone dikes slotted a lowland running to the briny-smelling sea, the lush blues, pinks, and violets of the Nymerean food-flowers spread profusely. Uenarak's outer wall, running to the bordering hill, towered so high, night seemed to have fallen on the strange, lunar landscape of the abomination's palm, which cradled him to her massive, sour-smelling chest.
"My master wishes you alive and free, and there is no safe haven in Uenarak." Her taut, muscular legs made not only enormous strides, but leaps that would make a cricket chirp with envy,
clearing sheds, houses, and--in a final surging burst that buffeted Azuri in gusts of speed-wind and blurred its stones into a vertical, gray road she took in two impossible steps--the city wall.
As she sprinted for the jungly tree line, her stamping feet crushed the tall grasses and crunched the undergrowth. It was some time before Azuri spoke. "Better dead than in a giant's fist."
"I'm not a giant," said the Cyhari-thing. "Not that I'm an elf, either. While I won't lie about being your daughter, memories of my father tell me truth is important to you. Your truth, anyway."
"You talk back to your father exactly like her." If Azuri's heart relented a little, his mind would not bend. Worse, his nose was in desperate revolt, for her odor was a horrific mingling of sweat clinging to damp hair and skin, with dirt trails muddied and streaked by swarming beads of sliding sweat. For while Nymerea was a small world, with lighter gravity letting its monsters grow straighter and taller, droplets clumped together only slightly larger, so that giant sweat massed many bright beads, swarming down giant skin. When the sweat seemed to creep with purpose, Azuri's skin crawled, and he looked at this imposter with renewed loathing and an outraged sense of justice. "What of your master?"
"What do you mean?"
"Do you talk back to him like you do--like you did--to me?"
As she dropped to a jog, her breaths remained even and measured. "Since coming to life yesterday?"
"Never mind, then."
"I suppose I'm unnaturally quick to comply with his requests. But I'm an unnatural being. And I'm loud about it."
"Even in enchanted obedience a rebel. If you are not Cyhari, you are exactly like her." Azuri's reluctant sarcasm oozed as he became heated. "Aside for your gangly height, your noxious pallor, and those profuse weeds giants call hair."
"I'm not a giant."
"If I must be precise, then I have nothing to call you, or must call you nothing, there being no precise word--at least hitherto--that anticipates you."
"You were never one for metaphor." The Cyhari-thing sighed. "We must coin some new neologism."
"A new neologism. Redundant. Where are we going?"
"Away from Eurilda."
"That's really Eurilda?"
"Who else would she be?"
"Everyone's pretending to be something they're not, so why shouldn't Eurilda?"
"I don't know her." Her smile double-dimpled just as her real daughter's high cheekbones could stretch a smile. "But I can surmise that if Otoka prizes her above all else, she has an inflated sense of self-importance."
"And you overestimate how much she's interested in me. While I'd like to witness her destruction, she'll never think of me again unless I'm unfortunate enough to stand in her way for a third time."
"What do I call you?" They had receded far, far into the Nymerean forest, passing trees too colossal to be seen all of a piece, so that the larger ones seemed to root in all the compass points at once, their high branches twisting deep in the vermillion Abyss. While they were surrounded on all sides by forest, the trees were too meshed and shadowed to distinguish one from another, and you could lose yourself for hours trying to trace the shape of a single tree.
"Not Cyhari." The thing's creased brow, and lips drawn flat by the effort of her run, did not conceal her wince.
"Do not think me unsympathetic, creature. I know it hurts to say so. Having awakened with my daughter's identity, you feel yourself to be Cyhari."
"You see only a giant." Her nose wrinkled in scorn. "What of my elvish eyes?"
Azuri snorted. "They are ice blue."
"I mean my elvish understanding. Do you think that I have so easily forgotten elvish ways of thinking and seeing?" She sighed. "Even an unconscious thief should wrong neither a dead girl nor her grieving father."
"Too late for that."
When her ash-white nose wrinkled scornfully, and she spat "did I not say not?", it reminded him of the true Cyhari.
His eyes drooped in a shoulder-sagging sigh. "Where are we going?"
"Maybe you're the broken one, Azuri. You asked not five minutes ago."
"This time it's a why disguised as a where. As in, where are we going?"
"We're regrouping."
"You and I were never in a group."
She rolled her eyes. "We're regrouping with my other father."
"If you mean not to disappoint me, never again call Otoka father. That wizard has created nothing but confusion, having aired out my grief by atomizing my daughter."
Her growl echoed off the papery, birch-white bark of the giant trees, shivering his already chilled spine, wet with condensation from the cavernous jungle. Sweat beads swarmed down her neck,
soaked her collar, and made a dark trail down the back of her robe. The toes of his boots dampened in a sticky puddle of palm sweat.
"As we're making good time. we could afford a few moments here." Having stopped, she bent from the waist, then lowered Azuri on her palm to the level of a low branch, fragrant of roasted nuts and burning paper.
When he hopped to the bough, its leaves rustled at the far, leafy end, where a shambling thing emerged, squawking and unfurling its wings. Feeling the insistent pull of his geas, Azuri wondered how this creature negotiated with the ties of its own enchantments. "We'd best not be late," he said.
"Fainting would be an unpardonable delay to Otoka."
"Why should you faint?"
"As you were not a giant for long, you cannot know how heavy-bodied giants can easily become light-headed. Moreover, I can't remember you ever running any distance."
"There is nothing of my daughter in you."
She took him up into her palm. "While I have never set foot on Alfyria, Cyhari's memories of there have a thinner air. While you might think it easier to run in the heady Nymerean atmosphere,
it is challenging to breathe when the air is thick as soup."
"You exaggerate." Perhaps because it distracted his grief, he allowed himself to be diverted by this observation, wiggling his fingers in the clammy, viscous airflow. Leafy branches brushed back by Cyhari's barge through the colossal forest fluttered for long moments, as if flying lazily of their own volition.
"What does Eurilda want?"
"I would imagine a meal after so long a dark sleep. On waking from my own dirt nap,
I first craved goblin dumpling soup." She sighed. "As yet unfulfilled, Azuri. Perhaps you can do better."
Azuri groaned, more from hunger than the unwilled tug on his heartstrings at this flash of Cyhari stirring in the monster, then let his groan boil into a grumble: "You know what I meant."
"Of course I don't. Did she speak to you, Azuri?"
"Yes."
"Why would she recognize you, when you were one of many elves underfoot that day?"
Azuri scowled. "She asked 'where is he?' three times. Who? Khyte? Otoka?"
When the ground rumbled, the branches shook, and the roots shivered in the glinting soil,
and as this deafening surge overshadowed their speech, a stony tremor resounded, its echo lingering until leaves snapped off wavering trees in fluttering swarms, their sharp, spiny flitting slashing near, to be batted aside by Cyhari's gigantic palm. As the lurching treetops drooped, then, with a splintering creak, dangled dangerously low before the sprinting giant, hurtling birds with rank black feathers merged with the teeming leaves in a massive tempest, and a monstrous head burst through with a thunderous roar, hair streaming alongside wet wind and wiry saliva, until Azuri was nearly blown from Cyhari's hand by the force of the monster-made gale.
When this savage beast lurched forward, snapping saplings as it slithered over tree roots crunched to powder by its long, low belied lunge, the screech of its gnashing fangs bristled the hair on the nape of Azuri's neck, and the Cyhari-thing leaped downslope, shaking from the hillside a descending wave of dirt and upturned stones. Having dashed down and down, she leaped up the vale's other side, then ridge to ridge, to the jutting promontory where she turned, setting Azuri down as the massive beast snapped up at her, its claws skittering through loose soil as it slid back down, tripped over its own tail, roared plaintively, then surged up again, its obstinacy goaded on by the four giants each saddled in a ridge on its back, three of which held longbows twisted from sanded saplings,
while their leader clutched a spear as thick as a goblin gaslamp-post, and twice as long, so that at the crest of each rush up the hillside, its blade rattled along the ridge, making Azuri dart back in alarm.
"Where is he?" cried the Cyhari-thing.
"Now you're saying it."
"This was our meeting place."
Azuri stared down just as the massive beast roared, revealing a massive chasm-mouth studded with stalactite-sized teeth. When the giants' six-legged steed reared, its middle limbs braced on the ground, holding its rearing roar in a prolonged blast that blared terror until their teeth chattered, their hands shook, and the ridge shivered.
"He said you knew spells." To Azuri's teeth, ringing from the beast's vibrating roar, the esses were harshly sibilant.
"A few."
"I only want one."
"They outnumber you."
"They are beneath me." Azuri's head tipped back in scorn."Balance the scales, and you shall see."
"That was my first spell. Does it not bother you to be predictable, Azuri?"
"If your master anticipated my request, call me inevitable."
As she plied the spell, her sing-song intonations reminded Azuri of his real daughter, who had recited conjugations, definitions, elements, and verses for years before she realized her inaptitude for magic, resigned from her apprenticeship, and accompanied him to Nahure. Without even trying, this monster had realized his daughter's dream. Whether its distorted, corpse-white flesh was a good conduit for magic was immaterial, for having stretched her from death to life, and from elf to giant,
Otoka the Wise had already shattered the mold, until anything might be made from such malleable clay.
As the enchantment merged with him, he swelled, hulked, and towered, until the ridge creaked underfoot, and he sprang like a meteor, colliding with the driver and dragging him through the archers, sliding down the beast's spiny ridge until the overborne giant was riven asunder by the jagged outgrowths, half of this gory sled plummeting into the bushes, spraying blood for yards, while the other half stuck to its saw-toothed tail, seeping sheets of blood that brightened its scales.
Azuri then seized his half of the driver in a fist blown a shade larger than giant, whirled this makeshift flail roundabout, threshed the others from the beast's back, then hurled his corpse-weapon into the air. Flung high and wide, they thrashed about, screamed and hollered. One twisted back to front in a lunge for Azuri's outstretched arm, fell short, and landed flat on his face, blood oozing from his eyes, broken mouth, and brow, while the other landed in a staggering run, and managed a few shaky steps until his head was stoved in by the hurtling corpse-flail, striking him skull to skull.
As the scaly beast slid back down, it shredded tree trunks, leaving scraggy stumps, jagged splinters, and a resinous scent reminiscent of mint and strong tea, until it fell on all sixes, crushing the dead and the living that had piled at the bottom of the hill. Fluttering down as softly as a leaf, the Cyhari-thing alighted on the beast's back, straddled its saddle, and tugged on the reins until the beast backed away from the carnage, jetted a seething growl, then pounded its crunching, branch-shaking way through the woods.
Having slid down the beast's tail head-first, Azuri gripped its spiny ridges, turned about, and mounted the tail saddle.
"We haven't much time," said the Cyhari-thing.
"We have a little now," said Azuri. "You're welcome."
"As if I owed you for anything." She glowered into the woods. "I spurted to full flesh in mere days. A corpse was my father, and a glass vial my mother."
"That accounts for your upbringing. A little gratitude wouldn't hurt you."
"Perhaps because I am so new, father--" She emphasized the lie sarcastically. "--gratitude feels like shame to me. Am I really thankful, I wonder, or only afraid to disappoint my father? Not you," she said with a scornful ripple of laughter, "but the memory of the man you used to be."
"What do you want, monster?" While Azuri did not truly care, he could not deny something stirred in his breast. Perhaps it was only curiosity.
"I don't know what I want. It's maddening. My darkened memories haunt me like flashing storm clouds."
"Like something in the corner of your eye. Something you're afraid to recognize, or only a sad tear. " Azuri sighed as he looked for the shudder of branches that might mean pursuers. While Azuri had never been a backward-looking person, neither did he want to be ambushed in the woods. "You're grieving, you stupid creature."
"But that's nonsense," she said. "What could I be grieving for?"
"For yourself. The self you'll never know, having been distilled to make your substance. You're only a memory of the only self you'll ever know, clothed in a spell-stitched skin. Reminiscence could only be cowardice to such a one, as you have no true attachments in life."
When a tumbling orb aglitter with fiery sparks clove the path ahead, the titanic groves splintered and shattered into threads of bark, filaments of smoldering ash, and leaves curling to embers.
From the settling smoke and sawdust, two giant figures seemed to mushroom from the smoldering wasteland, juggernauts three times the size of the giants milling like toy dogs at their colossal feet.
When Otoka's staff angled down, lightning arced into the ground, and the corruscating back blast strafed Frellyx, whose raised hand deflected it only just in time, sending him reeling to collide with, and half-uproot, a colossal tree rattling fruit on his head.
As Frellyx stood, Azuri could hear the shuddering pop and crack of bones enlarged longer than a house's foundation. As if hoisting a great weight aloft, Frellyx raised his hands over his head, a fiery web crackling between his fingers, hulking brighter and brighter until this enormous, brilliant crown crisped the lower boughs, blackened the tenderest leaves, and flickered with the wan light of early morning.
It was as if Nymerea, after moonless millenia, budded a moon of her own, a fiery halo coalescing over Frellyx's brow. With a grunt and a heave, he whirled this moon-missile toward Otoka, who languidly tapped it with a fingernail, unraveling the flames, then spooling them into a towering, blaze over Otoka's head, a stormy headdress that rained fiery sheets of jagged light, curling into comets and smoking hailstones. This barrage of fire and ice beheaded two in Frellyx's guard, blew a scraggy, gory hole in another, and embedded burning and melting shrapnel in the rest.
Raising his enspelled hands to his flinching face, Frellyx fended the icy fragments and fiery shards, turning them left and right to plow into two more of his loyal followers, then sang to the shards in a lilting, ancient melody, which so bent the spell to his will that the turncoat magics swarmed around Otoka the Wise. With a weary but scornful sigh, Otoka fanned his fingers, and the elements merged into a warm, torrential waterspout that hop-skipped back to Frellyx, engulfed the gurgling elf, and, with a whirligig pulse, shot him into the upper branches.
Having snagged a gnarled bough in his descent, Frellyx righted himself on this creaking perch. Water drizzled from his arched, outraged brow. He raised his upturned hands, as if lifting a prodigious weight, and like thousands of thick, brown serpents snaking from holes, the tree roots tore the soil and dragged their trees in lurching steps, enclosing Otoka the Wise.
"These trees are more smoke than your other allies." With a flick of his fingers, like brushing away a gnat, the vanguard of spiny roots and staggering trees puffed into flame, dissolving to fine, ashy powder.
Frellyx's scowl crinkled to a smile. "You were more merciful on the trees."
"They were not cannibals, unlike your friends."
"One called the Wise should know better," snorted Frellyx. "Life is a compost cycle. As for my 'friends,' whom you savagely put back on nature's menu. they were thrust upon me by our coalition. They are not only a poor grade of meat to serve these trees, I would not even have chosen them for minions."
Otoka smile broadened. "Wisdom is more than dicing down to atoms. As there is no end to analysis, you cannot help being a poor judge of character. You have chosen the wrong side."
"Me?" Outstretching his arms, Frellyx floated to the ground. As Azuri and the Cyhari-thing cowered in a bush made dry and brittle by the roaring billow of smoke, the two wizards only had eyes for each other. The sizzling ground smoldered at their feet. "I make my allies and my revenge like I brew my tea. Even my enemies have their measure."
"Next you will claim to have made me."
Frellyx shrugged, a mocking smile on his lips. "Whence came your magic?"
Otoka's smile fattened, smug and gloating. "And yet you are no master, having made less of it than I have."
"Why envy your discoveries when they will soon be mine? The power of magic is not in its puzzle, but in its purpose. As you wrestle with enchantment for complexity's sake, I overcome worlds."
"And who will be their master when they return?"
Frellyx laughed. First a deep-throated chuckle, then a full belly laugh. "Have you become religious in your dotage? The gods will never be your friends."
"Was I speaking of the gods?"
Frellyx shrugged. "I wish I chose my friends half as well as you choose your enemies, Otoka the Wise."
"Should I get into bed with cannibals and many-faced Tree-Women?"
"It would be no less wise than taking a stand here and now, as someone looses the bag, and your apprentice, no doubt after nipping over to the graveyard for a sorely needed snack, runs where she will."
"She will come to me."
"Why would she? While she takes pride in her loyalty to you, the bedrock of villains is untested faith, and a taste for the memory of love, not love itself. So long as she remains unshaken, her resolve can desire and accomplish as it wills, revenge herself on the one who bagged her, snatch up the half-man who filled her with unwilled motherhood, and, depending which side the coin falls on, either mingle her insatiable appetite with the cannibals, or wipe out the blight of her kind. To her twisted mind, existence reflects so poorly on itself that not only war, but suicide and annihilation are viable ways to eliminate the sight of everything."
"A pretty speech. The voice of desperation, like one trying to persuade himself." His hands twisted into claws crackling with eldritch fire. "You barely know Eurilda."
"On the contrary. I know her as well as the other simpletons you've geased, having had to wipe their minds of your patina, polish them aright, then burnish them to the higher gloss of my influence."
As Otoka scornful sneer drooped into a frown. "You have not geased my apprentice. You want me to second guess. Like many, you overestimate Eurilda, thinking her my trusted right hand. In truth, her gifts are paltry, and I trust her only with what little she can accomplish: flying into a rage, wrecking others' plans, instigating, undermining, and distracting, all of which she does in a most entertaining way."
Frellyx's smile shriveled as he took a step nearer. "And you underestimate me, Otoka, or would not let me get so close." From the folds of his cloak a swordpoint flicked high, and would have tapped Otoka's eyeball, had he not parried it with the flat of his hand, which closed unblemished around the blade, burned with a white hot nimbus of flame, and melted the steel to drip down the giant's forearm,
pooling around hairs as it gelled to a shining skin. If this dribbling, fiery metal discomfited Otoka, he did not show it, but only wrinkled his mouth into a growl, shoved Frellyx forty feet into a shuddering tree trunk with his free hand, then rose into the air until he overshadowed the grove.
"Our great benefactor." Otoka's sarcasm said Frellyx was anything but good. "Who taught us so much."
Frellyx croaked a dribble of blood as he stood away from the cracked bark of the tree. "Who taught you, Otoka."
"Did you?" As Otoka's upturned hand clawed inward until his nails bit into his palm, Frellyx's limbs bunched together and he loosed a wracked sigh. "What did you teach, Master,"--his voice now dripping with condescension--"other than a masterclass in hubris?"
"Says the one who styles himself the wise." While Frellyx aimed for a light, bantering tone, it was squeezed by the constricting spell into a rickety groan.
"Even as I paid lip service to your patronizing lessons, by secret glances I stole every spell I could from your grimoires. You may be older than me, but the centuires have used you up, and you are no wiser. Having lost all of your stature of old, you are no longer my master. You are only an old elf."
"If I have become bored with wizardry, and it does not come so quickly to mind, I forget nothing. While directing the deeper, darker energies of worlds, minds, and peoples is more addictive than beckoning the ebb and flow of magic, that does not mean I have forgotten how to ride, parry, or yukeri." Timed with the last word, a spout of flame enveloped Otoka head to toe, and he staggered under its eldritch influence, as if the enchanted fire was not incinerating him, but intoxicating.
"Monster, if you are loyal to your maker, not your buyer," muttered Azuri, "now is when we should act. Depending on your allegiances, I may strike with you."
"Do not question where my loyalties lie. If you haven't the love, you haven't the right."
"Then you stand with Frellyx."
"No." She grimaced. "Apparently, I stand alone. But, as you said, two in discord can hammer together."
"Then hear me now. Otoka has the power, but is too old and arrogant."
"Frellyx is older, and even more arrogant."
"You're wrong--while Frellyx despises even himself, Otoka has grown past his limits. Moreover, Otoka strives to overpower Frellyx, while the elf simply seeks to kill the giant. One proves mastery, and the other is a murderer with nothing to prove."
"Your point is lost, as I've already agreed to fight."
"Foolish homonculous," scowled Azuri. "Frellyx would kill us all. This is not a war to win, but a rescue."
By this time, Otoka had swollen to a radiant blaze, shriveling and peeling the bark of wilting trees, blackening branches, and curling blossoms into torches. Incredibly, the master wizard had warmed to the blazing death spell, and made it his own. As Frellyx cowered under a shield spell, its enchanted canopy warped under the intense heat until its translucent violet spiderwebbed, then crumbled, and he summoned another vibrant barrier, this one an opaque black that seemed to give him a moment of relief before the heat again fell on him with a shudder and a torrent of sweat.
The Cyhari-thing furrowed her brow. "You're certain."
"While Otoka marshalls energies and mounts attacks, Frellyx thinks only of winning. Otoka is powerful, but Frellyx is competent. Think of him as an older, wiser, and more deadly Huiln--who knows magic."
The Cyhari-thing's ashen face said that she clearly remembered the goblin getting the better of her on Alfyria.
"That's right," murmurred Azuri, "Frellyx doesn't fight fair, either. You would know this if you were capable of true rationality."
"I think!" she hissed, then rolled her eyes.
"Perhaps," said Azuri. "Or perhaps your thinking is only a simulation, just as you are not truly alive, but a simulacra of life. We could never know for sure. We can only speculate."
"I can say one way or the other! I'm the one living this life and thinking these thoughts."
"The foal thinks its stall the whole world, and steps one shaking hoof into the corral as if it was a green abyss. You are confined by your limits, as are we all. Perhaps none of us think, but only weave connections in the surrounding chaos. We are all sparks spinning in the Abyss. While your life is a magic trick, mine is no less illusion."
"My forerunner would be appalled to hear such fatalism in her father." The Cyhari-thing's crestfallen look was doubly alien, for Azuri had never seen such concern in his flesh and blood, whether in looking on his real daughter, thinking of his departed wife, or gazing in the mirror.
"Your forerunner--my daughter--has no being. She is only an event recorded in my history,
a memory gradually effaced with every passing hour."
"As to sparks, you may be right." Otoka's outflung hands fountained spell after spell, as if spending every pyrotechnic effect he had banked. While Frellyx's arsenal was not yielded so profusely or quickly, Otoka's efforts seemed to prolong the finish, while Frellyx seemed a maestro, unwilling to spend one note in excess of his perfected symphony. As Frellyx's precision tapped Otoka's profundity,
the giant's spell-web began to fray. From a hairline scratch on Otoka's cheek, a swarm of blood beads trickled, and when Frellyx clicked his fingers, sliding every spell into an abrupt nonexistence, his sword flew out with a flourish that nearly eviscerated Otoka, and would have, had Azuri not waded in, catching the blade on a wide branch.
Azuri staggered back not from the brunt of the blow, but the sting of the geas, which snapped taut, so that Azuri tottered, reeled, and nearly fell flat, before Otoka, having taken the moment to catch his breath, twitched his fingers, tugged the geas free from Azuri, whose deep, agonizing lurch was paired with such a sigh of release that he felt that a part of him had died, leaving him just the shell and its animating puff of freedom, as if the wizard reputed to be wise had not rescued him, but salvaged him from the wreckage of his free will. For a moment, Azuri did not know what to do; he was nowhere, no place, and no one, not even Azuri. Having been Frellyx's thing for so long, it was like the real Azuri had passed on, a realization that stabbed him with an immense pang of sympathy for the reborn husk of his daughter. Now they were both relics of their past lives.
"Cheating, are we?" Frellyx arched his eye.
"You're the one that superimposed such austere rules on him," frowned Otoka. "He's back to himself, an idiom I fear has little meaning for you, having forgotten who you are."
"Foolish old giant," said Frellyx. "I was winning."
"It would not be wise to let you win, when I have no future in your vision." From his outstretched hand, a cone of light enveloped Azuri. "This is still a battle of spells, is it not? I have not only made your enchanted minion mine, but proofed him against your mischief. Who is the fool now, Frellyx?"
"You presume only one of us is a fool." As Frellyx backpedaled, he parried Azuri's feint, then lunged, raked Azuri's forearm.
Having been cut much deeper than that, Azuri not only suffered the blow, he received it with grace, a blinding riposte sending Frellyx's blade spinning overhead, not only disarming the elf, but putting him under the immediate peril of a raining sword.
Sidestepping the plunging point, Frellyx tipped over, landed on his outstretched hands, and blurted a spell by reflex, which, as if riding his falling momentum, stretched him into a snaky beast whose iridescent scales glowered back, a shimmer rippling toward their leafy edges, making the serpent seem armored by eyes feathered and layered like chainmail. This sinuous beast slunk away, shredding tree bark as it barged through the grove.
Azuri had just dashed into the treeline when Otoka called out. "Do not go to him."
"Go to him?" Azuri spat vehemently. "I'm going to stamp him out."
"Admirable, if the wizard had not so enspelled you. You're not running him down, but summoned to your master by hypnotic suggestion. "
"I'm no spirit to be summoned."
"No spirit at all," snickered Otoka. "While you think you run into danger by your strong will, you're only a puppet tugged by strings."
"A puppet that helped you, not only tugging hard against the geas, but much against my own interest. My dead daughter is no longer at rest, thanks to you. Do you know what it is like to worry about the dead? They are meant to be beyond our cares."
"While I hoped this would please you, I suppose I knew my own hubris at every step."
"You suppose?" Had the giant's tremendous gifts, in stopping fear, crippled his vision and imagination? Was Otoka the Wise now nothing but Wisdom, his sense of limits too distant and fogged
to be ever again outstripped by creativity? Wisdom had left Otoka not only fearless but blind, all of his senses having fused into willpower. What was the point of seeing things as they were, when you could make things as you liked? The burden of his power meant he could trust his most tenuous whim, and the burden of his wisdom meant he enacted what he believed. Wisdom had become desire. The only unknowns to such an arrogant mind were the improbabilities and uncertainties he had banished by his near-omnipotence, for such magical might consumed imagination and thought in the fires of creation. Thinking differently was for the weak; Otoka's thoughts could become reality.
Azuri could end the giant now with one thrust. Perhaps the proud giant saw this, but swept his concerns aside, believing himself irreplaceable. "You used my flesh and blood as ingredients. My only child. The legacy of my dear, departed wife."
"Not without cause. I have need of one with a double nature for what is to come."
"If you see a future with that monster at its center, I will strike you dead now."
"I think you might."
As Otoka blurted two gutteral syllables and fluttered his hand, Azuri felt the familiar snake of the geas in his spine.
Otoka then brooded heavily, leaning on his staff until it buckled. "You grow accustomed to the control, Azuri. So much that you are not yourself. I have seen it in my own apprentice, once a scared girl who wanted nothing more than to prove herself to me. Alarmed by her willingness to humble her fellow apprentices the better to shine in my eyes, I strengthened her apprenticeship geas until it was three times stricter than that binding her peers--strictures so severe, that when I ultimately removed it,
she ran wild, slaying and stealing as she saw fit."
"A thing wild." Azuri snickered. "A fitting epitaph."
Otoka laughed loud and long. "Perhaps, but you will not be the one to kill Eurilda." Having quieted his mirth to a tiny half-smile, he smoothed the pleasts of his robes. "Come. We have little time."
If the wizard seemed to trust them implicitly, not looking back as he hastened through the groves, Azuri knew otherwise from the rattling geas, which, when he thought to lag far behind,
snapped taut, quickening his steps to shadow Otoka.