God
Math learned more about wild magic in the first five minutes of his existence as Oak’s child than he had in all the twenty-two years before.
He couldn’t blame the Idallik Order for trying to contain a wild talent—but he could never return to them, either.
For so many reasons.
Traveling back to the palace was easy. They didn’t travel over the earth but under it, emerging near the palace.
The sun was setting and everything was chaos.
Sanistral had not been idle. He had reassembled another transport pattern on the roof, using it to bring in an army from Lomar to guarantee that no one could disturb the ritual.
As said army consisted entirely of the dead, they were doing a good job of it.
Fortunately for everyone, Sanistral was still bound by all the difficulties of being a graven wizard in a world where such power was dying.
He could and did reanimate anyone so foolish or unlucky as to die within the boundaries of his domain in the palace, but most of the fighting was happening outside on the streets.
There, it was mostly Idallik Knights and Rokasmaa soldiers facing off against Kaliri invaders, but there were far more Kaliri wild mages than Idallik Knights. With the addition of the deadly black-powder weapons, the battle did not seem to be moving in Rokasmaa’s favor.
Math had no idea if reinforcements from the other cenobiums had already arrived. He prayed to the Tri-Mother that they had not, because if such help had already come, it was also leaking blood into the streets.
With no small amount of difficulty, Math forced himself to focus on his own battles.
On Sanistral.
Finding him was easy. Sanistral wanted to be found, or rather, he wanted to be found by the Queen of Oaks.
The entire top of the palace—normally a rooftop garden—had been cleared of all plants and converted into a ritual site, with a speed that made Math suspect such had been its original intended use.
Math saw something else familiar too: all the corpses from the pyramid back in Lomar had been relocated.
Math understood their purpose now. Sanistral had his own equivalent of the Queen’s forest children, except Sanistral’s had been crafted from the cursed corpses of every graven wizard foolish enough to trust him.
Somewhere out in the world was a tablet graved with the gray sigils that ensured that Sanistral would continue to be mobile, continue to think, continue to function, even while dead. Sanistral wouldn’t be foolish enough to carry that tablet on his person.
Kai stood next to her former mentor, looking exactly the same as when Math had last seen her.
She held herself with statue stillness, but he could see no sign that Sanistral had done the same thing to her as he had to the other graven wizards.
They reached a point in the ritual where Sanistral pulled power through his network of unwilling donors.
While Sanistral leached his energy from them, Kai lifted her hand and gave him her own contribution.
She was helping Sanistral. Even through their bond, Math couldn’t tell if she did so willingly.
Math pulled himself up onto the roof and advanced.
No one tried to stop him. No one attacked him or fired so much as a single shot in his direction.
Why would they? He looked like a giant oak tree.
He only looked like a giant oak tree. In truth, he was hidden behind an illusion, less a trick of the mind than a trick of light. Math knew how Sanistral liked to set up his defenses. Any attempt to magically influence Sanistral’s perceptions within his domain was futile.
So Math didn’t. He used his magic to shape how light reflected off Math himself.
The illusion wasn’t perfect, but Math hoped that Sanistral would be too distracted by the dragon to notice that the giant tree walking into his meticulously crafted trap was not the Queen of Oaks.
The Queen of Oaks? She was the dragon.
Oak trees were beautiful, but not precisely the most mobile or appropriate creatures for a battlefield. They had both agreed that all eyes needed to be on her. Personally, Math also suspected that she wanted her last moments of existence to be glorious.
And oh, how they would be.
Dragons weren’t creatures of myth to her, even if they had only existed in children’s stories for all of written history. She’d grown in an age when they’d ruled the land and skies.
She made an excellent dragon.
The signs of her arboreal nature were still present if one paid attention to the way her horns were branches or the thornlike shape of her claws.
Most probably only noticed that her scales were shiny and hard, shifting between brown and green, and her tail was fast enough and sharp enough to kill a dozen men with a single flick.
Sanistral saw her and began laughing.
“Beautiful!” the necromancer announced, turning to the giant tree now standing on the roof and bowing. “Truly magnificent. I cannot hope to match such splendor, but I hope you appreciate my paltry efforts, Your Majesty.”
It seemed like the grim lord had fallen for their ruse, but Math’s sense of triumph was short-lived.
Boxes that had been scattered around the rooftop opened. Corpses spilled out. Many corpses. Math could only guess that they numbered in the thousands.
The bodies began assembling themselves into a giant.
Careful, Math warned as the giant stepped too close to an attacking battalion, killing them instantly. It didn’t crush them so much as pull the life out of them.
He couldn’t help but flinch when the undead conglomerate impacted against the Queen’s scaled side, but fortunately its deadly touch seemed proportional to its victim’s mass. The attack left nasty blackening gouges in the Queen’s scaly sides, but was incapable of killing her in a single hit.
Eventually, the damage would prove too much, but they weren’t at that point yet.
The undead-body giant stepped down into the street, swinging a fist consisting of dozens of corpses intertwined with each other, and connected with the dragon’s side.
The Queen staggered, crashing into the wall of a nearby building and causing the front of it to collapse in a shower of broken stone and mortar dust.
The Queen reached out with a taloned hand, each claw the size of a thirty-year-old pine, and ripped the hand of the giant free, flinging it away even as the necrotic flesh blackened and withered her claws.
Sadly, the giant neither bled nor was particularly inconvenienced by the attack, shifting more bodies from the dead squad of soldiers, causing a ripple through its form as new bodies displaced older ones. The hand regrew almost instantly.
Unless she could rip the thing apart faster than it could keep replacing its parts, there was no way the Queen could win this fight. And already, even after only a couple of exchanged blows, much of her exterior was rotten, wilted.
While the two behemoths fought, Math advanced on the cursed tree branches floating above a glowing spectral pattern of graven magic. He didn’t do so purely because it was the expected behavior. Math needed the Queen to live for long enough for Sanistral to complete his ritual.
Sanistral smiled indulgently at the scene before turning his attention to the oak tree on the roof. “I don’t believe your dragon is going to win this,” he told Math, “but I acknowledge it was a far worthier effort than I expected.”
It was fortunate that Math’s disguise required his silence, because he didn’t know if he could have kept himself from saying something nasty.
Sanistral made a gesture—no, the gesture was a distraction.
He touched a bracelet on his wrist. The curse pattern turned from silver to red and the Queen screamed in agony.
Fortunately, Sanistral was facing the wrong way, so he hadn’t been able to see that no blow from his giant had prompted that reaction.
If Sanistral kept torturing the Queen like this, however, it was only a matter of time before he realized that he had the wrong Parnathi on his roof.
Math needed to do something about that.
To anyone watching, the oak tree would have seemed to bend over in a way impossible for oak trees. A set of branches bunched together in a manner suggestive of an arm slammed down against the stone-and-plaster roof of the palace.
Sanistral was unimpressed. “Centuries of gravings protect this place. You cannot hope to damage so much as a single speck of stone.”
For obvious reasons, Math didn’t correct him.
A mixture of hot mud and ash bubbled up from the surface of the roof, flowing with shocking speed over the plaster surface. The mixture raced toward the marble slab that Sanistral had engraved with the Queen of Oaks’s curse prior to transferring it from Lomar to Bashan.
Math had to hand it to the man: he had a keen eye for craftsmanship. The engraving was an evil, twisted, and elegant creation; smooth, sharp lines carved deep into stone.
Sanistral scoffed as he saw what Math was doing. “You cannot remove a graving by covering it, or half the enchantments on this domain would have been erased by accident centuries ago.” With a contemptuous flick of his wrist, he activated some unseen graving on his person.
Fire raced across the roof of the palace and burned up Math’s legs.
The only thing that saved Math was the root-and-vine scaffolding he’d grown to lift himself high enough—and make him weigh enough—to mimic the Queen’s impact. The false limbs shielded him just long enough to finish his own spell.
That spell summoned a lahar of fine, hot mud that flowed into every elegant, curved line of the marble slab holding the Queen’s curse. Then Math transformed all that mud into marble again. Not just any marble, but the same marble as the original block.
He knew better than to try to damage Sanistral’s graved work.
Instead, he healed it.
The cursed faltered, failed.
Kaiataris watched it all, expressionless. She had never looked so much like a statue as she did just then.
The Queen let out a scream of victory just seconds before the massive ball of undead bodies, now resembling nothing so much as a sinuous, six-legged worm creature, leaped at her from a rooftop, sending them both tumbling down the street.
The worm left a trail of broken bodies as everyone it touched—everyone who wasn’t a very large dragon—died instantly.
The passage of that death worm probably killed more people than all the fighting previously.
As Math straightened, Sanistral scowled and said, “Enough!” He crossed over to the largest ritual circle—the one that Math knew was meant for the ascension spell. “Let us finish this,” he said to Kai.
Kai nodded once at her mentor and teacher, then stared to the side, straight at Math. In theory, she didn’t know it was him, but through their bond, Math felt a flicker of sorrow, threaded with quiet resolve.
Math wanted to scream for her to stop, but he couldn’t.
She began the working.
Meanwhile, the Queen of Oaks leaped into the sky, unfurling wings of woven branch and frond. It wasn’t enough to allow her true flight, but she could glide, banking sharply around the vast plaza in front of the palace, away from the undead abomination.
The corpse giant humped in on itself, becoming a ball with dozens of legs, and scuttled toward her even as she landed on the roofs of several buildings across the plaza.
The bodies on the undead creature’s “feet” grabbed sills and pipes and ledges, allowing the thing to “roll” up the side of the building.
The Queen leaned over the side and vomited forth a torrent of hot, sticky sap followed by another of sharp slivers of wood.
Had the bodies of the giant creature still been alive, it would have been a devastating attack.
Instead, it merely slowed the creature momentarily before it could absorb the bodies covered in sap and replace them with clean ones from deeper inside itself.
The monster heaved itself onto the roof, and the battle resumed.
Math bent over again. Sanistral saw the motion, realized that it must have meant the “Queen” intended to try the same trick a second time, and triggered a spell of his own. A silvery iridescent wall sprang up around the circle, enclosing Sanistral, Kai, and all of Sanistral’s murdered peers.
The mud that Math conjured splashed against the magical barrier like floodwaters against a stone levy—loud, violent, and utterly useless. Math suspected there was very little that could penetrate that field while it was fully powered and intact.
Math also suspected that if Sanistral could have kept that field up for long periods of time, he’d have done so at the start of the fight, rather than waiting until now.
This was a last line of defense, a way to buy the last few valuable seconds needed for Sanistral to finish the ritual and become a god.
Sanistral glared at Math, raised a hand, and triggered another spell.
For a brief second, Math didn’t know what Sanistral had done.
Then Math collapsed—still none the wiser.
He didn’t collapse because he was weak or injured, but because the plants underneath him had been crushed.
It felt like a terrible pressure was bearing down on him, like some kind of invisible giant foot was slowly descending, trapping the air in his lungs, preventing his heart from beating.
An invisible mountain was slowly crushing him.
It took everything Math possessed not to drop the illusion, but even so, he saw the form of it waver and shift in strange ways.
He’s changed your gravity. The Queen of Oaks’s voice sounded distant and faint. He didn’t know which of them was the cause, but he didn’t like it.
The Queen stripped the spell away like fog, although not without cost: her branch-like horns burned.
That confused Math, because she should have been all but immune.
Whether they were her children or simply her drones, the Queen still had a web of living beings spread out across a thousand acres of wilderness to quench any fires from reaching for too much wild magic, too quickly.
Math carefully pushed himself up on his root stilts.
He didn’t have to fake how tired he was, but it was absolutely vital that Sanistral think that even with the curse broken, the Queen of Oaks was all but dead.
Too weak to defend herself against all the horrible onslaught of energy that would be released when the ritual finally caught.
Tragically, Math suspected that might still be true.
He reached the wall of energy and began smashing his fist into it like his father’s hammer against the forge, each blow strengthened by magic into an earthshaking reverberation.
Sanistral glanced up at him and smirked.
“Too late.”