374. Resonance
With almost two decades to plan for a second fight against Ractia, Liv and Sidonie had plenty of time to prepare. It would have been a glaring oversight not to experiment with the Interdiction spell at least once during all of that time, even for people who weren’t fascinated by magic.
In fact, the two archmages had made no less than four trials of the magic, not counting Sidonie’s constant tinkering with incantations and enchantments. For a few years, Liv recalled, her friend had been absolutely convinced that she could get an enchanted version of the magic functional – a sort of spike that one would jam into the ground, temporarily preventing any magical travel into or out of the area.
That hadn’t worked, but they had made us of the waystones at Bald Peak, Valegard, and Al’Fenthia to perform extensive tests – sometimes using just two waystones themselves, and other times employing those among Liv’s personal guard, or among the Mages Guild, who could use a tether. They’d never found a way of breaking through the spell that Archmagus Loredan had given them, which was comforting in the sense that they had a good degree of confidence that using it would indeed pin Ractia in place. It also gave them a good idea why the old man hadn’t wanted this particular bit of magic to become widespread.
As a result of all this, Liv knew exactly how being within the area of an interdiction spell should feel. She’d felt it before, tried to break through it herself, and cast it herself. Having an active tether to a waystone – such as the one she currently maintained to Bald Peak – resulted in a very peculiar sensation. The best she’d been able to describe it – and though they debated the best metaphor, everyone who’d had the experience more or less agreed – was that her tether melted.
It was still there, and when the interdiction spell was gone, the tether would come back – much like a puddle of water in spring. During the day, under the warmth of the sun, any ice that had formed overnight would melt – but if the water was still there by the time the sun set, and the temperature plummeted, it would freeze all over again. Nothing was being destroyed: merely changing state.
Except that when Sidonie cast the spell, deep beneath the surface of the moon, in that cavernous chamber lit by the glow of incomprehensible Vædic machines, where an orb of absolute darkness slowly swelled like bread rising in an oven, that was not what happened. The spell rang like a bell, but without any sound – only vibration. The orb hanging at the center of the room screamed in response, and everything shook as the discord between the two physically shook the room. Liv felt it in her ears, and clapped her hands against the side of her head in a vain attempt to shield herself. Her swords clattered down to the ground. Dimly, she heard her father, Sidonie, and even Arjun, all the way back in the corridor, screaming in pain. The bear of ice that her father had conjured shattered into a million pieces, scattered like frozen dust across the floor.
If Ractia had struck them right in that moment, Liv knew that the goddess would have been able to kill them all. Not a single one of them was in a position to defend themselves: they were utterly vulnerable.
But the goddess was screaming too.
In a thousand voices and one, Ractia shrieked. Where the effect, when she spoke, was something like a chorus, with notes that complimented each other to make an ethereal melody, this was the sound of an entire world, an entire people, all of a universe wailing in pain. She stumbled forward out of the darkness, and just as Liv was vulnerable in that moment, so was the Lady of Blood.
Liv tried to focus her intent on just one of her blades, to force it up into the air and into Ractia’s pale throat. It shivered, skittering across the floor of the room for just a moment before coming to a halt again.
“What have you done?” Ractia demanded, pressing her own delicate fingers to her head, burying them in her dark hair. The pressure, the discordancy between the spell and the swelling orb of darkness built, until Liv could feel that one or the other had to give.
Sidonie’s wand shattered, splinters of wood flying in every direction. Some of them whistled off into the darkness; one shattered a glass pane, and the colorful sigils which had danced across it only moments before faded. Another hit one of the metal pipes, where it was secured to the wall, and a shrieking burst of steam erupted where the sprinter had somehow been driven through the metal.
Nearly half the splinters tore through Sidonie’s flesh, shredding her hand until it was little more than a bloody claw, with scraps of meat and skin hanging from exposed bone. Other splinters took her in the chest, or in the face, and she staggered backward, then fell to the ground, wheezing and choking on blood. Her spectacles, lenses spiderwebbed with cracks, tumbled across the floor.
The horrible pressure collapsed as Sidonie’s interdiction spell fell apart. Liv could actually feel the growth of the black orb surge: whatever the interdiction might have done to slow it, whatever impediment might have been provided, was gone now. The plan they’d made was already useless, but it had created a single moment of vulnerability.
Liv twirled her wand in a circle, dove to the left, and sent every one of her blades flying directly at Ractia. Her head pounded, she was certain that her ears were bleeding, and some part of her body, or perhaps her spirit, ached on such a deep level that she didn’t even have a word for how it felt – but she’d gotten very used to fighting through pain as a child, and she wasn’t going to let it stop her now.
Every broken bone that little girl had suffered, when she’d slept next to her mother in the servants’ quarters beneath Castle Whitehill, every ache and pain she’d endured, every bit of suffering that Liv had worked so hard to make certain that her own daughter would never know – it all ensured that following the collapse of the interdiction, she was the one who moved first.
Ractia saw what was coming in time to dissolve into a vapour of blood, but not quick enough to launch any sort of counterattack. Six blades shot through the red mist, and that gave Liv another opening to act while the goddess pulled her body back together.
“Arjun, save Sidonie!” she shouted. “Dāēt Aiveh Æ’Orvis Merg Ea!” The word of time surged within Liv, and then encompassed the roiling cloud of blood that was just beginning to rebuild a body, slowing the process nearly to a halt. It was a variation on the spell that Miina had taught Liv, years before: a bubble of time slowed to the point that it was nearly stopped. She could actually watch infinitesimal particles of blood assembling, changing color, building from the tip of one elegant finger down past the first knuckle, recreating a body for Ractia from the outside in.
But more than that, Liv hadn’t bothered to anchor this bubble of slowed time to the moon. If you don’t anchor it just right, the world moves on without you, Miina had told Liv, so long ago during the battle at South Pass. And you’ll find yourself somewhere out among the stars. And dead - very, very dead. For a moment, Liv thought it might even work.
Then, with a flex of her Authority, Ractia broke the magic, and the red vapor sucked in all at once, turning into a beautiful, if inhuman, woman, swaying as she caught her balance.
“You’ve gotten better,” Ractia gasped. “I suppose after twenty years –”
With a wordless shout, Liv’s father charged forward. Twin shafts of ice, each with a tip formed in the shape of a spear, appeared in his hands, then shot forward, as if he’d conjured shards of ice to fling at an enemy. The movement pulled Valtteri off his feet, carrying him along with his weapons, until he was right up alongside the goddess. A flicker of gold mana knocked his attack aside, and Ractia slipped back to let Valtteri’s momentum sweep him past her.
Stolen story; please report.
There was no way that Liv was going to let her father fight a goddess alone, but his assault did give her time to glance back at the entrance to the chamber. Arjun had dragged Sidonie back out into the corridor, and had his wand in hand, pressed to her head. Liv wanted to run back herself, and make certain that one of her oldest friends would survive – but there was no time. That brief glimpse would have to be enough.
“Don’t give her a moment to recover!” Liv’s father shouted. Valtteri ripped a piece of bone off the end of one of his braids, then flung it at Ractia’s feet. Ice erupted around the goddess, surrounding her, encasing her in a pillar, where she was visible as a mere shadow.
Liv could see what was going to happen just a heartbeat before it did, but it was all she could do to protect herself. Golden spikes erupted out from within the frozen pillar, sending shards of ice in every direction. She allowed her body to slip away, and the fragments – as well as the golden spikes themselves – simply slid through her storm, no more able to touch Liv than a ghost.
Her father, on the other hand, was flung backward by the explosion. Valtteri raised his hand, and every shard of ice which rebounded on him melted before it touched his skin. An enchantment – it must have been a contingent effect, Liv realized – flared to life, the sigil burning bright from one charm hanging at the end of a braid, and a sphere of adamant ice snapped into existence around him. It deflected the first golden spike, but not the second, which shattered the globe and took her father through the left arm.
“I said you’d gotten better,” Ractia panted, picking her way out of the half-melted, broken shards of ice in which Liv’s father had attempted to imprison her. “Not that you could beat me.”
Liv met her father’s eyes, and jerked her head back toward the doorway. The cloth beneath the plates of his armor was already soaked in blood. He needed to get back to Arjun immediately, and she could give him the chance to do it. “I’m not the one who ran away at Nightfall Peak,” she said, turning back to meet Ractia’s eyes.
“One has to wonder at the state of a woman who would use the greatest disaster her world has ever known as inspiration for a spell,” the goddess taunted. “You’ll notice I made certain that we’re buried deep underground here. As I told you before, there is no atmosphere, and far less gravity. That particular spell of yours won’t be a factor in this fight.”
“Godsgrave wasn’t a disaster,” Liv shot back. “Not for anyone but you. For the rest of us it was freedom.” Her eyes flicked over to the black orb. It was half the size of a person, now. What was the balance between giving her father time to pull back, and giving Ractia’s machines too much time to work? “You told me that it isn’t a weapon. You called it a bridge. It doesn’t look like any bridge I’ve ever seen.”
“Existence is filled with all the wonders and terrors you’ve never seen,” Ractia said, with a sneer. “You’ve been trapped on a single, pitiful planet your entire life. And now you’ve come to – what? Destroy the only way you’ll ever leave?”
Liv circled to the left, and saw that, rather than withdraw, her father had torn a strip of fabric from his breeches and bound it around the wound in his armor.
“You should just walk away, you know.” Ractia’s harmony of voices drew Liv’s gaze back to the goddess. “You lose nothing, and win everything. I leave, and I leave you this world. My followers will be broken by the time we’re done here, if they aren’t already. And when the day comes that you’ve grown tired of this place, you can follow me.”
“Why in the name of the Trinity would she want to do that?” Valtteri asked, levering himself up to his feet by leaning against one of the humming machines. “This is her home. Her family is here.”
“For now,” Ractia conceded. “But she’ll outlive them all. You’ve realized that by now, haven’t you, Livara? Does the horror of it gnaw at you – the knowledge that you’ll not only bury your parents, but your children, as well? You may think you’re still one of them, but in time you’ll realize the truth.”
“And what’s that?” Liv asked.
“That in a thousand years, when they’re all dead, I’ll be the only one left you can talk to about all of this,” Ractia told her, with a smile. “When everything on this world is dead, and you remain – when no one else in existence remembers how that orbital ring looks at dawn, how the golden light glitters off it – you’ll come looking for me, out among the stars, just to have someone to talk to. That is what it means to be Vædim.”
“I hate you,” Liv snarled.
“You hate me, for now,” Ractia said. “You might be surprised how that can change when you’ve lived long enough. And I’m the only one who can introduce you to all the others, tell you where they are. Tell you why we came and hid here in the first place. Kill me, and you consign yourself to an eternity of loneliness, until the very end of time.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Liv’s father broke in. Valtteri’s face was pale, and though he was clearly doing his best not to show how much his wound hurt, Liv could tell.
Liv looked to Ractia, raised her hand, and held up one finger. She didn’t even think about how bizarre the motion was until after she’d done it – decades of being a monarch, of being absolutely certain that anyone else in the room would wait for her to be ready, made it automatic. She walked over to her father.
“Go back to where Arjun is waiting,” Liv told him. “I’ll handle this.”
Valtteri clasped one hand against her helm, drawing their faces close together. “Don’t listen to her,” he repeated. “No matter what she says. She killed your grandfather. Killed so many of our people.”
“I know.” Liv smiled, nodded her head, and then gave her father a push back toward the doorward. Only once he’d staggered away did she turn back to Ractia.
“It was always going to be the two of us, anyway,” the Lady of Blood said, while they waited.
Liv nodded. “You’re wrong, you know,” she said. “When you say that some day I’d go looking for you. That I’d forgive you. I might seek out the Trinity, wherever they’ve gone. I might even try to find Bælris and Veitha. But not you – no matter how long it’s been.”
“You don’t understand yet,” Ractia said. “You’re too young.”
“I’m old enough to know things didn’t have to be like this,” Liv told her. “The Day of Blood was an accident? Fine, maybe it was. But everything you’ve done, or ordered done, after that, is still your responsibility. You hired Manfred and sent him to Coral Bay. You woke Keris up, you promised Aariv power. You sent Calevis to the Hall of Ancestors. You could have tried to talk to us – you could have negotiated, or you could have hid in Varuna. You try to act like you were forced somehow, and maybe you even believe it, but it isn’t true.”
“Be careful, girl,” Ractia snapped. “You don’t know me.”
“I’ve known people like you my entire life,” Liv said, with an exasperated laugh. “People who think they’re better than everyone else, because they were born noble or born wealthy. People who think they can do whatever they want, and then act surprised when the consequences come home to roost.” She thought of Guild Master Harrow, Milisant and Bennet, of Keri’s aunt, and everyone else who’d been blinded by simple, self-centered arrogance.
“You think because you're more powerful than us, because you’ve lived longer, that you’re the center of the world,” Liv went on, her voice rising in volume and gaining in speed. “You call yourself a goddess, but you aren’t. You aren’t brilliant, you’re just as flawed as any of us, but you don’t want to admit it. But you know what tells me, beyond any other excuses you make, that it's all lies?”
“Go on.” Ractia’s face hardened.
“What you did to Wren’s father. Right after you woke,” Liv said, raising her hand to point a finger right in the Lady of Blood’s face. “He was already yours. He’d just worked for years to bring you back, if there was anyone who’d freely help you, it was him. And what did you do? You enslaved him, broke his mind and forced him to give you a son. Long before anyone was fighting you. That was your choice, and it tells me exactly what kind of person you are. You disgust me.”
“Fine.” The goddess’s face twisted, distorted by anger and contempt. “Foolish of me to even offer a hand to you, I suppose. Simpler to kill you, so you can never stand in my way again.” She raised a hand, and chains of golden mana, affixed to great spears, coalesced around her, and shot toward Liv.
With a thought, Liv raised a mana shield, shining blue with veins of gold. She could see Ractia’s lips curl in a smile, her eyes widen in anticipation of victory, as the spears shot forward – because any normal construct would break, against those spears of gold. Just like when Liv had fought Genevieve Arundell.
Liv exhaled, and all the blue flushed out of her mana shield, bathing her in golden light. The spears hit, and were deflected aside without even making a crack in her defenses.
“I had almost twenty years to prepare for this,” Liv told the stunned goddess. “Did you really think I wouldn’t do everything I could to get ready?”