Guild Mage: Apprentice [Stubbing August 15th]

With a great heave, two sailors threw a barrel so high that it nearly crested the top of the glittering blue mana shield which formed a hemisphere around Wren, the waystone, young King Lucan, Chancellor Blackwood, half a dozen mages, and the cocoon that continued to pulse and quiver, almost as if it were in pain.

The wood of the barrel gave way at the point of impact, splintering and leaking brine all down the smooth surface of the mana shield. It half-tumbled, half rolled down the gold-veined curve of the hemisphere before finally striking the end of the short, paved road which connected the waystone on the beach to the streets of Coral Bay proper. At that second collision, the already-damaged barrel gave way at last with a loud crack, sending dozens of preserved, salted fish sliding out onto the cobblestones. Lucan flinched back from the noise, his face pale, his eyes wide.

The mana shield held, but only just. Wren examined the surface of the hemisphere, just above her head, where she could clearly see cracks spiderwebbing out in every direction. She’d spent decades around mages by this point - more than long enough to know that once those tiny fissures began to show, the collapse of the entire shield was imminent.

“With me!” Chancellor Blackwood shouted, urging the young mages who’d been trapped inside the mana shield forward. The men and women pulled wands from sheaths at their belts and then, wide-eyed and in some cases trembling, pushed the tips right up against the gold-veined blue inner surface of the shield. Each of them muttered softly, and pulses of mana expanded from the tip of each wand, like ripples after a pebble is thrown into a still pond. Where the ripples passed, the shield looked sturdier, more opaque, and less like a bubble about to pop.

Still, Wren knew that even the assistance of the younger mages was only a temporary measure. Shields never actually won a battle - to do that, one needed to go on the offensive, sooner or later. And that was something that Chancellor Blackwood was clearly unwilling to do.

Not that Wren could entirely blame him. One glance out through the shield was enough to remind her that the angry, blue-tinged faces of the mob were the people of Coral Bay: sailors and bakers, innkeepers and housewives, cheering children and wrinkled elders all together. The priest was there as well, exhorting them all on, but Wren noticed that the nobles and their guards had withdrawn the moment things turned violent.

It was easy enough for Wren to conclude that a few arrows might speed these angry people on their way better than simply trying to wait them out - but she wasn’t the one who had to live here, in this city. Whatever happened today, tomorrow, Blackwood would still have a school to run, students to teach, and presumably some sort of relationship with the townsfolk to manage. She wondered whether he would throw a few attack spells once the shield actually came down, or if he would just summon a mana disc to fly himself and the other mages away.

With the shield reinforced, if only for the moment, Wren turned back to the cocoon of fleshy membranes and spines of bone. The blood vessels running through the out membranes actually pulsed visibly - presumably in time to the heart still beating inside. Wren raised her hand, hesitated for a moment, and then set her palm against the delicate tissue. It was revoltingly warm, and she couldn’t suppress a shudder at the contact.

“I don’t know if you can hear me in there, big guy,” Wren whispered, leaning forward until her lips were only inches from the cocoon. “And I don’t know whether there’s actually anything you can do to speed things up or not. But I’ve got to tell you, we’re not going to last much longer out here. Blackwood’s keeping the mob back for now, but I really, really need you to finish this up and come out.”

There was another crash, loud enough to make Wren jump, and she turned around to see that half a dozen men had set their shoulders to a wagon and rammed it into the shield. At this impact, the cracks were no longer thin as spider-silk: now, Wren could actually see gaps between shattered pieces of shield where the true colors of the people beyond stood in contrast to the otherwise blue-tinted view of the riot.

“This is madness,” Lucan exclaimed. “This is - rebellion! I am their king! They should listen to me!”

“A mob, once riled and having scented blood, rarely listens to anyone, Your Majesty,” Blackwood grunted.

Wren’s hand twitched, and she nearly reached to draw an arrow from her quiver before recalling that she’d hadn’t brought it - neither the quiver, nor the bow that she’d need to fire an arrow. She knew that it wouldn’t do any good to curse her own impatience of the night before, but now she was really regretting not taking the time to be better prepared. She considered, for just a moment, throwing her daggers, but immediately knew it was a bad idea. Even if the blades could fit through those cracks, she’d make two throws, injure two people, and then be completely helpless when they broke through. No, she needed a different weapon.

She knelt down before the pile of enchanted steel, mana stone, and stranger machinery which had, until only a few hours before, made up Ghveris’s body. The mana blade which had been mounted on his arm was only a bit longer than her own daggers; in any event, it wasn’t the sort of thing that would keep a crowd back. Wren regretted not salvaging the shoulder-mounted weapons that all Antrians were equipped with, but she knew that it would have been pointless, even if she’d kept a pauldron close by. They were too complicated for her to figure out a use for in only the space of moments, particularly without any aid from Ghveris.

Finally, she came up with the vambrace which had been etched with enchantments meant to summon a mana shield. It wouldn’t be a hemisphere, to protect them from all sides, and Wren doubted that it would last long against a mob, but perhaps it would buy her a few moments’ delay if she could make the rusted thing activate. No doubt Sidonie or Liv could have rigged it up to the mana stone battery easier than plaiting a braid.

Wren, on the other hand, simply felt stupid holding the vambrace in one hand, the mana stone in the other, and touching them together. She was no mage, and she didn’t have the slightest idea what she was doing.

If only Liv were here. If only, Wren thought, I’d woken her up and told her what I was doing ahead of time. She’d have had some plan or other. And whatever that might have been, it would certainly be better than waiting for an angry mob to come at her in a rush the moment Blackwood’s mana shield came down. The thought of Liv had the effect of drawing Wren’s eyes upward, to the line of fire stretched across the sky.

She squinted, and raised one hand to shade her eyes. It was hard to tell, now that it was fully daytime, and harder still because of the blue tint and swirling whirls of gold threaded through the mana shield, but...

“Chancellor Blackwood!” Wren shouted.

“Don’t disturb me!” the old mage shouted back from behind his bushy beard. The staff he’d inherited from Caspian Loredan was planted firmly against the cobblestones, immovable as a deeply rooted oak tree. “If my concentration breaks, we’re all done for!”

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“No, look up!” Wren urged him. She scrambled back up to her feet, crossed to the chancellor in three steps, placed a hand on his shoulder and spun him about. “Do you see it? The line of fire? What does it look like is happening to you?”

Blackwood’s brow furrowed and his thick, dark eyebrows scrunched together as he squinted up at the sky. “It seems to be recoiling,” he muttered, after a long moment of examination. “Something like a fisherman pulling his line back.”

“Which means Liv did it,” Wren cried out, hardly able to keep from bouncing on her feet. “She must have beat Ractia. If we can just hold out until she gets back here -”

“Small chance of that, I’m afraid,” Blackwood admitted, sagging against the support of his staff. “I’m nearly done here, Mistress Wind Dancer.” Another barrel hit the hemisphere of coherent blue mana, and the entire structure shuddered. The widening cracks had now extended completely around the thing, and Wren suspected that it was only stubborn determination on the chancellor’s part holding it together.

“We need to leave,” the old man said. “And it is of paramount importance that we get the king away safely. I’ll hold it as long as I can. Magus Carver, make a disc for us. Once everyone’s aboard, the timing will be a bit tricky. You’ll need to get us up off the ground before the mob can reach us, but don’t slam us into the mana shield until it finishes coming apart.”

“No, we can’t leave!” Wren protested, even as one of the mages withdrew his wand from contact with the shield and began to mumble a spell. A thin pane of mana formed just an inch or two above the waystone, and one after another the mages assisting Blackwood got themselves onto it, all while desperately working together to hold the shield in place. Lucan was the last aboard, other than the chancellor and Wren.

“You have to,” Blackwood told her. “I’m sorry. We held them back as long as we could. If Father Clement hadn’t riled them up, perhaps we could have saved him. But it’s too late. I won’t risk the life of my king any further.”

Wren shook her head. “I’m staying, then,” she told him.

“They’ll rip you limb from limb, woman!” Lucan shouted. “Look at them! They’re like a pack of starving wolves, now.” The young king’s face was near as pale as death, and Wren suspected that never in his life had he been in quite so much personal and immediate danger as this.

“I won’t leave him,” Wren insisted, backing away from the platform. At a motion of Carver’s wand, the mana disc rose to nearly waist height, carrying everyone aboard so high that Blackwood’s head nearly touched the top of the hemisphere.

“You’ve got Luc, haven’t you?” Wren called up to the terrified young monarch. “Once you’re clear, you could call lightning down. Back them off.”

“I’d be killing my own people!” Lucan shouted back, his hand hesitating over the handle of the stormwand at his hip.

And then there was no further time for argument. The mana shield shattered, all at once, under the charge of five men who’d gotten themselves a broken ship’s mast, and were using it as a makeshift battering ram. Wren could only imagine that it had come off some fishing ship or merchant vessel which had made port for repairs, and she cursed whichever of the men had been clever enough to recall its existence and organize a trip to go and fetch the thing.

The broken shards of the shield dissolved into motes of blue and gold, like a cloud of fireflies, somehow caught out during the day instead of the evening, drifting up above the crowd before being caught by a stiff wind and blown out to see. The mana disk upon which Blackwood, the young king, and the other mages knelt soared up and out across the water, making for the bluff upon which the college stood. Wren had no doubt that once they’d reached the campus, that same mana shield that Liv had helped Professor Norris install, years before, would be activated until the riot had subsided.

“Burn it!” the priest shouted, and the first of the mob was upon Wren. A man with the arms of a blacksmith lunged for her, but she clicked her heels together. Moving faster than most human eyes could track, Wren ducked beneath the man’s meaty forearms, drew her enchanted daggers in both hands, and came up from beneath him with an uppercut to his chin. Rather than hitting with her fist, Wren made contact with the steel pommel of her dagger. The man’s mouth slammed shut, and she could hear something breaking - whether it was his teeth, or the jaw itself, Wren wasn’t certain. By the time he’d begun to drift down toward the ground, like a dry leaf in autumn, she’d already spun away.

Rather than use her blades, Wren punched and kicked, struck with her knees and elbows, and above all with the two pommels, one gripped in each hand. She drove the breath out of a woman in a cooking apron by sinking a heavy blow into her stomach, then spun low to sweep the legs of a sailor out from beneath him with one extended leg. By the time the magic of the Dakruiman boots had run its course, Wren had left a dozen people groaning on the white waystone. If she’d wanted to kill, it would have been half again as many, if not even more.

For just a moment, she wondered if it might be enough. Wren fell into a crouch, daggers raised, chest heaving with exertion as she slowed back to the same speed as any other person. The front rank of the mob hesitated, wide-eyed. All she needed was their fear of her to outweigh their anger, and then they would break.

“She can’t fight us all!” a bandy-legged sailor shouted, and Wren saw that he had a belaying pin in his hand, raised like a club. The man lunged forward, and the crowd came with him.

With a shout of frustration, she shifted through blood and into the form of a wyrm. Wren had been trying to avoid this, because it was going to turn things a lot more violent, but she didn’t see a choice. Rather than lunge with her jaw wide, she swung her tail in a circle, taking the legs out from beneath half a dozen of the townsfolk.

But as she came around, Wren saw that two had gone wide, just outside the reach of the tip of her tail. One stumbled, and fell off the waystone and down onto the white sand just a few feet below, but the other had a filleting knife in hand, and he stabbed through the fleshy-membrane stretched between two supporting spurs of bone. The cocoon tore, and where the knife severed one of the blood vessels, a spray of ichor spurted out into the man’s face.

Wren felt her heart, lungs and stomach all seize at once. It was all her fault. After everything, after taking Ractia’s deal, making so much trouble for her friends, downright badgering Ghveris into doing something he hadn’t wanted to do, now he was going to die, and it was all her fault.

Someone screamed, and Wren only realized it was her when she fell forward, in human form once again, scrambling toward the severed flap of tissue that hung down from where the cocoon had been struck. Maybe it wasn’t too late. If she just kept anything else from happening, kept them all away -

A hand shot out of the cocoon, strong fingers wrapping around the wrist of the man with the filletting knife. The man screamed as his arm was bent back, and his blade clattered to the waystone at his feet. Another arm came out of the cocoon, pushing back the tissue which had walled what was happening inside away from the world, and a tall, muscular man forced his way out. His hair was shorter than Wren had seen in her dreams - it had hardly even begun to grow at all, and was little more than a dark shadow of fuzz on a bare scalp. Even his eyebrows had barely begun to come in yet, but the eyes - the eyes she knew from every night of her sleep for eighteen years.

With a roar, Ghveris threw the man who’d attacked the cocoon of the waystone. With a cry, the rioter hit the sand below, sending up a spray and clutching a visibly broken arm to his chest as he rolled.

Ghveris took in the situation at a single glance, and then, for the first time ever in the waking world, Wren saw the Beast of Iuronnath shift forms. Her lover grew tall, broad and dark, taking the shape of an enormous bear, larger than any she’d ever seen before, and then he threw his head back, opened his jaws, and growled. He strode forward on two legs, swiping to either side with his claws, and sent a body flying in either direction. Whatever compunctions Wren might have had about not killing those attacking them, Ghveris clearly did not share.

He let his body fall forward, forepaws slamming down onto the white waystone, and growled again, sweeping his head from side to side as if trying to back the crowd off simply by force of will and the anger behind his dark eyes.

Wren stumbled up to his side, sheathed one of her daggers and reached out, feeling his thick, dark fur beneath her fingers. “Everyone else has left,” she told him. “Liv’s up in the sky fighting Ractia right now. There’s no reason for us to stay now you’re awake. You understand?”

The bear nodded his head and growled at the crowd again, then stomped his forefoot against the white stone at their feet. Then, he shifted into the form of a raptor, and Wren followed, taking the wings of a snowy owl.

Before anyone could stop them, the two lovers circled up above the shore, soaring higher and higher until they’d left the mob far below.