Ashfire

The mage approached, but as he reached out for him, Varion bent on his heels and hauled back, escaping the mage’s graze by a finger’s breadth. He did not believe, like many a commoner, that mages spread the pest and eluded for that reason. He knew they were far worse.

As Varion marched across the field, the six magistrates disappeared beneath the protection of their guards. The prosecutor whirled around, his hand finding the grip of his short sword, malice written in his face that foretold of battle instincts kicking in. But Varion had already dashed past him.

Limber and quicker, he punched Maron beneath his ribs where the stitches of his armor were, smashing his organs against his solar plexus. Eww, he thought. His stomach was so soft.

Maron toppled forward; his breath cut off. Varion hushed behind him and planted his fist once more into the jelly belly before pivoting his head around in a choke hold and kicking his spine. Outcries followed.

He hurled his hand forward, where it pushed Maron’s arm off the handle. His other hand, meanwhile, had shot past the prosecutor’s right hip, where it caught the freed blade and moved it up. With his left he grabbed the bulk warrior and pressed him to his chest. A rivulet of blood began to pour down the silver blade, catching bits of bronze sunlight on a steel mirror.

“What is this?” the female magistrate demanded.

“The beginning of a bargain,” he said while stepping backwards, but always keeping the mage at the corner of his sight, should he try to brush him. “Your precious prosecutor dies here and now if you don’t hand me what is mine.”

“Have you no honor!”

There was no time for rational thinking. This was the best shot he had, and he’d not let it go away empty handed. He seethed, “I will have his life unless you obey.”

Angrily, the female magistrate replied, “You will never be allowed to own land here!”

“That’s not what I want. Give me my chicken!” Varion shouted.

The people surged forward like a beaten wave. They spat at the soldiers to let them through, but the Ashlanders did not bend to their will.

“What do you have to say to this, Mage? Talk sense into your peer!”

He shrugged. “Seems determined. I would grant him his wish.”

The magistrate removed herself from safety, her intonation stern. “The bird is of the Ashlands and not yours to possess. We were inclined to grant you leave, but this goes too far. Let this be over with, I say.”

“First, you hand me my chicken!” They had poked it too often. Its chest had started beating again, but every cruelty they had committed on the biddy had been a piercing sting in his core, surging into violence. He would not take it any further, so he spoke directly to his hostage. “My hen survived each thrust. But speak in earnest, bedeviled prosecutor. Will you survive, too, if I am to pierce the flesh of your throat?”

“Help!” panicked Maron. Every bit of authority had left his voice and, in its stead, the act of emiction gave it personality.

He hadn’t known what kind of man the prosecutor was. His first impression of the bulk giant had him stricken with awe and a fraction of hatred. Now, in his deadlock, Maron felt tinier than a bird wrapped by a gigantesque snake. His heartbeat was flighty, and Varion smelled the pungent sting of fear in his sweat. Maron froze, a pitiful resemblance of a lawman who had ruled illegally, deeming trial unnecessary and demanding the sentence to be carried out instantaneously.

“Your spirits are small, prosecutor,” jeered the mage. “A girl’s ghost could slap you around.”

“Hand me my bird!” Varion shouted blithely over him and sliced the skin of the leg. The prosecutor squirmed. The magistrates, as well as the rumbling soldiers, came to a halt. Nobody moved, even the villagers shunned a confrontation now that more blood dripped to the edge.

“They shall hang you and your lot for attacking a servant of the law.”

“Says the man who held an entire tribunal against a single suspect, without so much as clearing the evidence,” he barked back, and the bulk man decreased in spirit, the acrid note of his perspiring forehead betraying him. There it was. The lever Varion had been looking for so dearly. His nostrils stung, he had never smelled the breaking into panic quicker and thus repeated firmer. “My animal. Now!”

Arrows were shot, and Varion thought one would go right through the prosecutor, but they were repelled. The projectiles rotated through the atmosphere, feathers in an airless sky. The people clamored.

“Death!”

“The gods may curse you!”

“The gods are on our side, it appears,” laughed the mage.

“Ready yourself for the Gates of the Deathhall,” Varion pushed the blade deeper. “Soon, your ancestors will welcome you, Maron. What will they have to say about your last moments?”

“Gods’ graces, men! Give him his gods forsaken hen!” begged Maron, his voice a sequence of edging tones.

The magistrate bent beneath the podium and crammed out a tiny cage consisting of ash wood. The shriveled bird peeped high pitched noises of fright; a harmony of delight cleared Varion’s mind, as he saw the biddy well. The young animal had grown white, fluffy feathers on its body except for its chevelure, which still shriveled in nudity.

All the while, Varion steered the prosecutor towards the tribunal. The mage remained in his rear at a safe distance, whereas the metic was now at their imminent disposal. Pushing him away, he relinquished his hostage and hurried to the brittle construction of sticks that functioned as a cage.

Freed and unmasked, Maron turned. The bird, constrained between the grid, beeped a hapless dirge as Varion, barely gaining possession of it, let the cage slip out of his grasp. He lost sword and breath, tripped and fell back, a fist striking his sternum, aided by a pivoting force.

Painful, breathless seconds felt like minutes. He reminded himself that he’d been through this several times and that air would fill his lungs again soon enough. The pressure in his chest subsided, and Varion came back to his senses, seeing a grinning man. It was the kind of smirk people produced before taking life. He crunched his teeth like a wolf, eager for the moment of ripping a hare.

The mage halted, for Maron held his hostage high.

The soldiers shifted their positions. Infantrymen and hoplites, ready to pounce, neared down on him like a thickening mist of bronze and steel. Their armor clanked with their gradual tramping as though they were straining themselves for the battle march, but Varion focused solely on the chicken. He couldn’t flee as long as they kept hurting it. Without it, he was forced to face a whole new level of solitude. Something he had not known before.

He’d go mad.

Maron wrested the shrieking biddy away from its cage, where it dangled from his wrist. Its neck squeezed in between; the animal crowed like a rooster. It scratched and stirred, its lungs whistled, and he could feel its heart racing like that of a hummingbird. The prosecutor pressed. Snap and a hollow bone broke. Then he crushed its neck, killing the bird, and Varion felt like going on a rampage.

He heard a ripping that sounded like the atmosphere’s curtain was being torn to pieces, and the mage appeared before the prosecutor, sparks lifting his cloth. Angled like a swinging slaughter hammer, the mage smashed his fist into the side of Maron’s face.

He yelped.

The distinct cracking of his nose swallowed the dirge of death of the bird, and Maron clapped on dry earth. Blood swelled in streams from his nostrils as he remained as he should. Aswoon.

“How dare you!” The mage unleashed himself, and his dithering arms snarled. He swung his hands, and pressure intensified the atmosphere, pushing sand and planks away, keeping the soldiers at bay. He intensified his magic and jeered, “Ashamed, you ought to be! You dare accuse somebody of hurting the environs, yet you feel pleasure at torturing a biddy?” The mage spat. “Just like all humans! Killing and destruction are all you know. Animals are free too, you idiots!”

Varion hurried swiftly towards the bird and placed the biddy under the cradle of his arm. There was nothing in it. No pulse and no heartbeat, no chest heaving with breath. Just fringed, torn feathers and motionless wings. The drop from his face fell on its soft chevelure.

Moving back, he realized the surrounding soldiers had left the barriers they had secured mere moments ago. The people ran away, a panic taking over. Within one swift moment of deft precision, the hoplites lunged, raised their shields, and thrusted their spearheads inside the shield notches. The impenetrable phalanx of the warriors lunged again in a loud stomp, cornering Varion and his dead chicken, moving against the density that the mage was building. They would overcome the obstacle inviolately, for their grimaces that he could’ve dealt with had been replaced by something worse. They wore stern masks of verve.

Hunt was their command from the female magistrate, and without a flinch, they acted it out. Steadily, they crossed the space and would mow down anything in their way like the rolling trunk of a tree. They circumvented the table, then their footsteps swallowed the prosecutor.

The mage bound the atmosphere to his spell, but his song was not persuasive enough. No spark eroded the shield wall.

There was another sound, dampened by the thunderous phalanx. Flinches made the mage withdraw, and he broadened his legs next to Varion. Moments away from their demise, the mage seemed relaxed. He didn’t address the phalangites. This, he asked Varion. “Do you love them?”

“What?”

“I spoke in anger before. It is not my place to hold off the likes of you, and I must say your restraint fascinates me. If it’s love you feel for them, I shall not harm them but be sure that if you choose to unleash, I will cripple those who’d move a hair on you.”

The query came at an incongruous moment. Soldiers surmounted the dense atmosphere, the sun turned brighter at their increasing shadows, and Varion reckoned soon they would reattempt to poke through the density. Only this time, javelins would cleave a fierce path through the spell. There were too many soldiers, naturally resistant to theurgy. They had gotten too close for magic to do the trick. He didn’t like the solution that came to his mind, but it was better than before, when he had nothing to resort to. The gift of a Xeldar would help.

He turned to the mage and raised his palm, ready to be clasped. “I respect them.”

The mage grabbed Varion’s hand, spoke loudly, though without screaming, as a tight expression wrapped around his lavender face. It was reminiscent of a silent disagreement.

“Let’s hope they revise,” he said, and a soft whiz tore them to pieces.