Riselus slammed the ground, sending a pillar of rock shooting into the air, bending the collapsing ceiling briefly to a dome. The ceiling exploded as the sharp parts of the wall broke into spears of stone which flew at Ezarik. Qassot did something to the air, causing water to pool on the ground around Ezarik, then threw her sword at Ezarik and launched into the air. Ezarik neatly sidestepped the sword, letting it cleave through the wall behind him. The sword yanked itself out of the wall and began to fly around on its own.
Ezarik threw wave after wave of energy beams around the room, blocking incoming attacks with a shining translucent blue piece of a forcefield that rotated around him in a small radius to protect him. Riselus blocked the energy with spikes or rock and sent stone spears, rock cannonballs and tendrils of vines twisting out to ensnare Ezarik. Qassot had flown up in the air, commanding her sword to fly around and stab, slice and parry Ezarik's attacks away, shearing through rock with clanks and screeches of metal against metal. Surprisingly, with every pass of the swords, they duplicated; there were well over half a dozen darting around now.
"Get him on the ground!" Cyil yelled.
Cyil generated a huge fireball and launched it at Ezarik. Ezarik glanced at him and blocked it with a wave of brightness. Riselus sent an earthquake rattling around the room as soon as Ezarik went to block the fireball. Qassot sucked the water out of the air and proceeded to imbue the floor with it, creating a slippery, muddy ground. Ezarik was thrown onto the ground by this sudden combination of attacks. Cyil created a fiery sword and launched it at Ezarik to keep him down. Riselus created a cage out of stone, turned it into parts and sent it towards Ezarik.
Ezarik got back up just as the cage enveloped him. There was a moment of silence.
"I told you you could strategize," Qassot said to Cyil.
"Why are you floating?" Cyil asked.
Then the cage turned gray, cracked and shattered with a blinding flash.
"Nice try," Ezarik said.
He pointed his dagger into the air and a huge white blade appeared around it. Qassot linked herself to everyone else using dim, glowing streams, then sent a light fog around the room. Cyil generated another fire sword and set the ground ablaze, melting the rock and turning it into a lava front that spread around the room. Huge stone spikes like claws sprouted out of the ground behind Riselus. Ezarik brought the sword down on Riselus. The stone claws grabbed the sword, deflected it, but were cut through in a second. Cyil's lava front reached about three quarters of the way to Ezarik. Cyil moved both fire swords, one deflecting Ezarik's sword and the other to attack him directly. Qassot launched into the air again. Water vapor began to spread around the room, intensifying the fog as it hit and sizzled against the lava.
Riselus formed bricks into a number of stone spears, going not for Ezarik, but his sword. The sword was briefly disturbed, the light beams skittering haywire, but reformed across the room when Riselus's spears shot at Ezarik. The spears broke on his force field but took it with them. That gave the lava room to reach Ezarik. He somehow turned the lava around and directed it towards Riselus. Cyil fought back, moving the lava around the room until Ezarik was surrounded. The walls exploded as Riselus drew all the stone and brick to one source, compressing it to a small point, then stretching it into an axe as the light sword swung at him. The axe deflected it, absorbed some of the light and cleaved a chunk out of the floor.
The castle began to collapse. Qassot's swords were slicing the walls below the room to bits. Cyil took this opportunity to set the entire castle on fire with a burst of searing flame. Ezarik blocked it, but the damage was done. The entire castle was now filled with a blaze. Scorching heat, unquenchable by Ezarik's power, battered him.
"Drive him into a corner!" Cyil yelled.
Cyil began to move the fire towards Ezarik, while Riselus was building a nearly unbreakable petrified wall around him. Ezarik's light sword now strained to slice through the wall in some places, while being thwarted by Qassot's sword, which flashed in and out of vision, moving too fast to see.
The light sword kept regenerating and flashing around the room. It landed the first hit, catching Cyil with the flat of the blade on the side as he focused on keeping the fire going. Cyil flew through the air and crashed painfully into a pile of rocks. The sword hit the fire and scattered it, causing some brush to alight. Riselus attempted another cage of petrified rock. It engulfed Ezarik easily. Ezarik blasted free of the petrified prison once more and looked around at his ruined castle. Ezarik shouted out amidst the flying embers, while trying to keep Qassot's sword away from him and deflecting the stone spears.
"Look at what you've done! You've ruined everything!"
"Serves you right!" Cyil yelled back.
Qassot suddenly came streaking down, swinging the sword in her claws as she went, straight through Ezarik's light blade. He barely deflected the blow with his shield. It exploded, knocking him to the ground. Riselus pinned him there with a section of wall that grabbed him like fingers. Ezarik knocked them off with a burst of energy. Shards of rock flew at Ezarik. Ezarik blocked it and deflected them towards Cyil. Cyil set them on fire and controlled them, causing them to flame up intensely and surround Ezarik in a sphere. They blocked his beam attacks.
Ezarik used part of his concentration to build a wall of light around us, trapping us in a small area. Riselus's stamina began to fail. Qassot couldn't supply him with energy for much longer. She noticed this, so she dropped the energy going to Cyil.
"SOMEONE COME UP WITH SOMETHING!" Qassot yelled. "A STRATEGY, A PLAN, ANYTHING!"
"I'M WORKING ON IT!" Cyil shouted back.
Ezarik drew the quarterstaff from his back and spun it, flashing a number of bright spears into existence. He charged them with lightning and battled Cyil's fiery swords away. One of them burst into a number of bright shards, which then turned into a sphere, protecting Ezarik and blasting Cyil's shards away. Qassot sent two of her swords slicing through the sphere of shards, disrupting Ezarik. They missed him narrowly. One of his spears became a beam of light, which by chance ran into the last of Cyil's flaming rock shards. The beam ricocheted off of Cyil's shard and back at him, bouncing around the sphere until there was a blinding ball of light. The shard sphere exploded, stunning Riselus.
Cyil threw up in a pool of flame, turning it into a flaming blob. Nausea pulsed through him as he fought to recover.
"Fiery blob of DOOM!" Cyil yelled, sending the molten mound towards Ezarik.
"THAT'S NOT A STRATEGY!" Qassot yelled back.
It made its way towards Ezarik. Qassot channeled a stream of water onto Riselus's head, snapping him awake. Ezarik attempted creating another light shield, which was promptly melted by the fiery blob of doom. The stream of water got through, knocking Ezarik back. Riselus then entangled Ezarik with a sudden growth of vines which pinned him against the last standing wall of the castle.
He set the ground around him ablaze with blinding white flame. The fire reached extremely high, blocking him off and preventing any attacks from crossing. Then he broke free of the vines. He yelled a command. A bright flash of light hit the ground, stunning and halting all the attacks. The fire died down.
"Stop that," Ezarik ordered us.
"Why?" Cyil asked. "I was having fun."
"This is pointless!"
Ezarik was looking at what remained of his castle in anger.
Qassot glanced at him, but ignored him. Ezarik muttered something.
Cyil turned towards him, "What did you say?"
Ezarik glared at Cyil, "Why don't you think about what a person is doing before you attack them!"
Cyil was bewildered, "It might seem good in your eyes, executing your plan or something, but it's tearing the whole island apart."
Ezarik's voice took on a patient, soft tone. "What do you mean? I'm the only one trying to fix it."
Everything stopped for a while. The only sound was of the crickets chirping sadly, the faint rumbling within the earth, the fires burning, fighting and of the cauldrons of thought simmering intensely in the minds of the three creatures standing in confusion.
The silence was broken. Riselus slowly turned to Ezarik.
"What?" he snapped.
"I told you to wait," Qassot growled, kicking Cyil in the side.
"Ow," Cyil said.
"You heard me. I'm not doing anything wrong here," Ezarik said.
"But Azor said that you-" Cyil started.
"Oh, but of course. The moment Azor says anything it's automatically the truth," Ezarik interrupted angrily. "Why shouldn't he suspect a fellow wizard to be destroying the island."
"Uh…" Cyil said hesitantly.
"This goes a bit beyond sibling rivalry," Qassot muttered.
"What did he tell you?" Ezarik asked. "That there's an evil wizard destroying the island and that just happened to be me? I'm over here trying to find out what's causing all this! I even asked him for help! Do you know how hard it is to ask that stuck-up arrogant prick for help!? Huh?!"
"Well-" Cyil started.
"He's done this five times already. It's so annoying! It's like he actually believes I'm the one doing all this! Why doesn't he just come over and accuse me himself at this point, huh?"
"Then who's the one doing all this?" Qassot asked. "Weren't you controlling the shadow to-"
Ezarik scoffed. "As if anyone could control that monster."
"How do we know you're not lying?" Qassot asked.
"How do you know Azor's telling the truth?" Ezarik snapped, then took a shaky breath in. His anger seemed to be quelled slightly.
"No, actually, I get where you're coming from. The one you trusted turned out to be lying to your face, is that right? Here, come with me. Let me prove my innocence to you."
-
They followed Ezarik to where a pile of scrolls had miraculously survived the battle under a pile of shimmering rocks. He began to pull out diagrams, charts, maps, and descriptions.
"As you can see from my research," he said angrily, dusting off a map with a variety of colored circles, arrows, numbers, and words, "all of the disasters had a pattern. They all cycled around the island in a spiral, systematically."
Qassot looked closely at the clump of circles representing disasters and numbers denoting the order in which they appeared.
"What is strange," Ezarik continued, "is that there was a specific magic type that was used to cause each disaster that was consistent across all instances. They all came from the same source."
"That doesn't tell us anything," Qassot said.
"Additionally," Ezarik said, "the magic type that I found was identical to the magic type of disasters that happened a few hundred years ago. I mapped those out too."
Ezarik pulled out another map.
"As you can see, both times these disasters happened, the same pattern emerged."
"What about the dark armies?" Cyil asked.
"Those had a completely different magic type. I have been led to believe that those were created by the shadow since they first started appearing around the time the shadow returned."
"Ah, the time when you were transferring the pool to the river," Qassot said.
"Huh?" Cyil asked.
"How do you know that?" Ezarik asked. "That was well over a hundred years ago."
"Nevermind," Qassot said. "Continue."
"Well whatever," Ezarik said, "The first round of disasters stopped right after the shadow appeared. Therefore, the only logical conclusion is that someone was clearly planning something with the disasters, and the dark armies just so happened to get in their way."
"Planning something," Qassot repeated under her breath. She thrust her sword into a nearby rock, breaking apart the red shimmer covering it, then sat down to think.
"That doesn't prove that you are innocent," Cyil said.
"I think the fact that I was researching all this proves my innocence," Ezarik snapped.
"I dunno," Cyil said.
"I can't tell if you're just stupid or stubborn at this point." Ezarik said.
"I'm just being careful," Cyil said defensively.
"This is paranoia, not caution," Riselus muttered.
Ezarik sighed. "Think about it logically. I live here. What would I possibly gain from destroying the island?"
Cyil had to stop and think about this.
"I don't think he's lying," Qassot said suddenly.
"What?" Cyil asked. "Why?"
Qassot felt that Ezarik was telling the truth, and that the claim that someone was planning something that was interrupted by the shadow fit far too well with what Azor said in her memory.
"Just a hunch," Qassot said.
Cyil scrunched his nose. "That's reassuring."
"You," Riselus said, "will be coming with us to defeat the shadow."
Ezarik looked surprised. "What?"
"I will believe you if you fight with us."
Ezarik looked at Riselus as if he were crazy.
"Or do you want to keep fighting?" Riselus growled as thousands of rock shards floated into the air and pointed themselves at Ezarik.
Ezarik raised both hands in submission. "Fine. I was planning to do that anyway."
"I thought wizards were supposed to be powerful," Cyil whispered to Qassot.
A massive golden blade slammed down into the ground between them, cleaving a deep rift in the barren soil. Qassot snapped around. This attack was several times stronger than the attacks he used when fighting them, and would have easily cleaved all three of them in half without warning.
"Don't assume things just because I wasn't trying to kill you," Ezarik growled.
Cyil slowly backed away and hid behind Riselus.
The blade disappeared and Ezarik put away his dagger. He rubbed his forehead and sighed.
"Bunch of amateurs," he muttered.
"So how do we get into the void?" Qassot asked. "It was blocked last time I checked."
"Azor should know more about that stuff than I do. Portals aren't my specialty," Ezarik explained. He turned around and looked into the tetrahedron again. It changed images quickly, swapping through images of forests, the Krie River, Ysk Mountain, and a desert, before it shifted to a pure black void with a ghostly toroid floating inside it. In front of it, two black shapes were locked in combat.
"It looks like your friend is holding off the shadow as best she can right now, but it looks like she's at her limit."
"That's Dracoa," Qassot said quietly.
"She's doing pretty well," Cyil said.
Ezarik nodded. "It seems a lot weaker than before. That thing could hold off both Azor and myself on its own when it first emerged. There's no telling how strong it's gotten since then. I advise you get going. There's a tough battle ahead of us."
Ezarik handed Cyil a small crystal.
"Crush this when you get Azor's help. It'll open a portal right to me."
Cyil cautiously approached Ezarik, grabbed the crystal, and tucked the crystal into his fur while dashing away to hide behind Riselus.