Jett and Daeva held Zerys under her arms as she clung to Dana and began flappnig her wings. She built up tempo, the colored feathers of her wings making them appear like a hazy rainbow as the two of them slowly lifted from the ground. They gained speed as they soared skywards over the barricade, and the battle headed in the direction of the library ruins.

  From the sky, Dana could see just how the battle had progressed, all over the huge campus students and teachers fought desperately not knowing it was all in vain. Family members fled, hid, or lay injured on the ground with very few attempting to stand by their children and defend them. In times like these, he thought, we could really use the monsters of old, not the more civilized peoples they had evolved into over the centuries.

  Other creatures in the sky noticed them making their way and swooped in their direction to intercept them. Zerys pulled her wings in closer to her body, spinning into a barrel roll to avoid the incoming combatants. Dana’s extra weight made her maneuver slow and clumsy as she flapped her wings to gain speed, the library within sight. As they approached several arrows were loosed in unison from the ground at them.

  With a grunt of effort, Zerys pulled her wings tight around Dana, cocooning him in their feathers as they dove through the hail of arrows. Inside he could feel the impact of some of the arrows finding their mark before her wings snapped open once again to slow their descent. The force of the sudden maneuver sounded a crack through the air as one of the harpy’s wings bent back at an impossible angle, dropping her to the earth on her injured leg as Dana rolled free of her grasp.

  With a cry of agony, Zerys’ leg gave out beneath her, collapsing her to the ground outside the former library beside Dana. He got to his feet, seeing a rush of bodies heading directly for them, and tried to drag her somewhere more safe… away from the conflict. Behind the bushes he tore a strip of his shirt, hoping to staunch the bleeding at least somewhat. But she put a hand weakly on his… taking the makeshift bandage.

  “No time, I’ll make it… just go. Stop this.” She pulled her damaged wing closer, wincing at the damage it had received. “That’s not good.”

  He left her, tending to her own wounds as he slipped into the small hole they had left. Grunting, he landed in the passage much harder than he had intended and made his way down to the Iris. Once down there he found a surprising sight, a figure clad in a deep hooded crimson robe spreading the glowing liquid sun in a circle around the perimeter of the iris, the scroll of the lost spell lying in the center of the closed iris.

  “Ah, the human teacher that keeps poking his nose where it is not welcome. I wondered if anyone would see through the hollow distraction above.” Finishing the circle the figure stoppered up the flask in his hand, slipping it back into an inside pocket of his robes. “But for the one bearing the last item I need to exert my will upon this world just shows me the righteousness of my path.”

  “You seem to have me at a disadvantage, who are you?” Dana stepped farther into the room, trying to catch a hint of what may lie in the deep hood obscuring the person’s identity.

  “Centuries, I have strained for literal centuries to erase all traces of my identity from this world.” With a turn, the figure pulled off the hood. Below it was a featureless head… no hair, nose or ears lay on it to recognize, empty eye sockets above a plain hole for a mouth. “I am not even sure I remember who I was at the beginning… but identity can be used to target a spell and I will not be caught unaware by my enemies.”

  A shiver went through Dana’s body at the sight of the disfigured look of the caster. “You did this to yourself from a paranoia that people might be after you?”

  “Not paranoia, no… but an amount of hiding who I am and what I do from any others until it is too late.” The odd hole that served as the thing’s mouth curled into what could be interpreted as a smile.

  “And here I thought you magic guys were supposed to be smart. Hiding who you are? So you get rid of any identifiable marks you have, right? No eye color, no hair or teeth to tie to you.” Dana looked over the misshapen person he couldn’t even tell if it started as a man or a woman. “All the while, you made yourself so unique that any basic tracking spell could find you with a description. You overthought everything to the point you ended up right back where you started… but way uglier.”

  “That is something to keep in mind when I remake everything to the way I desire it, isn’t it?” The robed figure came down the small set of steps from the platform overlooking the iris. “Now, the key if you please.”

  “And if I were to refuse to hand it over?”

  “Then things get unnecessarily complicated. I bring someone you care about here and hurt them until you inevitably give me what I want anyway. Make no mistake, human, the only power you have here is to delay this working, not stop it.” The figure moved closer to him. “So what will it be?”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “No need to hurt anyone any farther… but before I hand it over let me show you something.” Dana dug into his shirt, pulling forth the scarab he was never without. As he suspected, the entire spider web pattern on its back was fully lit up. “Had this thing for years just as a memory but once I got here it started acting very strange. And I think I know why.”

  The entity before Dana observed the scarab impartially as it glowed before him.

  “This here…” He pointed at the center of the web. “That’s me… each one of these meeting points are people in my life and when our purposes align… these connections light up between them empowering us both. I am pretty sure that at this moment, everyone fighting on this whole campus aligns with me in my want to stop you in this moment. That makes me stronger than ever before.”

  Dropping the scarab once again as it hung from his neck, Dana cocked back his fist. Strength he had never known before filled his entire body, flowing through his arm as he swung his cestus-clad fist with all his might at the caster standing mockingly before him. The air compressing before his punch collided, making a huge clap of thunder as he drove a right hook into the person… only for his strike to stop entirely just before making contact. The slit in the blank face opened and a wispy laughter bubbled out.

  “You fool… to think a wizard of my stature would not be protected against a physical strike?” The laughter deepened as if the creature could not believe the audacity. “Now, you have wasted enough of my time human… give me the key so that I may take my place in this world.’

  Resignedly, Dana pulled the ring out of his pocket, holding it out to the wizard who quickly plucked it from him. Moving back to the circle again around the Iris covering the Fount. Standing above the circular opening in the floor as he began chanting. The perimeter of the liquid sun glowed brighter as its voice rose in pitch. The beams emitting from the liquid shot up and lowered down as one converged on the center of the iris where the first spell waited. Dana watched in shock and horror as the spell rose into the air to hover over the very center of the iris.

  “Now, at long last, I will complete my life’s work, giving me the ability to change anything and everything to fit my own desire.” It pulled the ring of the former President onto its finger, holding its hand out, fingers splayed as he shouted. “Open!”

  Purple energy spewed from the ring on its finger towards the portal, enveloping the spell hovering in the air and changing to a deep firey orange. Slowly that orange energy traced its way back up to the figure on the dias… his body language changing from confident to much less so as it covered over its body. The light built in intensity as another figure seemed to form in it directly in front of its blankly staring eyes.

  “Ah… so you are the one… the being that took my life simply because I might become an inconvenience.” Eterna Revi, the previous owner of the ring on the wizard’s hand appeared before him, her face still tired… resigned. “But you didn’t anticipate me cursing the ring, did you?”

  A jolt went through the wizard’s body, jerking him spasmodically as if electricity were flowing through him.

  “No… I made sure the first to use my access to the Fount would lose any magic they had stored in them…” The older woman stared at it, almost as if she could somehow see from beyond the grave. “You may have killed me… but you will not emerge from this unscathed.”

  Dana stared in amazement as the identityless figure seemed to shrink as more and more energy was siphoned from its body. Its mouth opened in a silent scream as its very essence was torn away.

  “There’s an old adage that seems to fit here, whomever you are… ‘Never mess with an old witch that has nothing to lose.” With a loud cackling laugh the form of Eterna dissipated, flowing with the last of the energy into the center of the iris before rocketing off up into the sky through the ceiling.

  “No…” The thing said, a voice suddenly shaky and frail. “You can’t… not when I am this close…”

  “Bad news ain’t over I’m afraid…” Said Dana walking up to him and tapping him on the shoulder. He hauled back once more and hit the malformed figure with all his might exactly where his jaw should have been. He could feel something crunch and give way as its body was launched away from him, smacking into the wall with a resounding clap before turning into black smoke and vanishing. Dana looked down where it had stood and saw Eterna’s ring lying on the stones, shimmering lightly in the light of the chamber.

  He bent down, picked up the ring, and turned to make his way back out to the school. Once he emerged back into the night air he looked around to see the remnants of the battle… the false army had vanished along with the person who had summoned it. Students and teachers looked around in various states of confusion as their opponents vanished into the wind. Slowly and cautiously some of the people who had hidden during the fighting emerged from their hiding spots… some calling for help for injuries while others just looking happy to have survived.

  Hurrying to where he left Zerys, Dana picked up the harpy hoping to get her back in the care of the healers as soon as possible. Some of the girls from the class came running over now that the fighting was at an end.

  “You did it, Boss.” Sally Mae grinned, her face a mask of cuts and bruises already in the process of healing.

  “Does this mean it’s over?” Jett asked, not wanting to celebrate too early.

  “I hope so…” Dana got to where the rest of the injured students were and lay Zerys back down, trying to call over one of the healers over to look at her. “I am pretty sure the… thing behind all this is gone. Maybe even for good if what President Revi said sticks.”

  “It’s not really done though…” Laverne came back up to them, the golem looked exhausted after all the fighting. “The ritual is out there, plenty of people working with whatever that guy was know about it. If we don’t seal off that possibility then we could be fighting this battle against a new enemy every year on this date.”

  “So we have to complete it, don’t we?” Meira said quietly. “Use the ritual to erase itself so that no one can use it ever again.”

  “Can we even finish what was started?” Dana sighed, his grasp on the magics that ruled this world was still rudimentary at best.

  “In theory, the ritual needs to be completed the night of the Equinox… we have until dawn to figure out just what we want to do.”