The Archmage: Intermission (Osheen) (Patreon)

Osheen paced up and down the classroom in front of Tara, shaking his head. 

“We have to go after him.” 

“I agree,” Tara said. “But they’ve been leaving either Edward or his wife on the premises at all times, alongside a full contingent of guards.” 

“That doesn’t ma–” he started to say before being cut off by Tara. 

“It does matter,” she said. “The Elides have already made official inquiries about someone with the realm-reaching arch-star, and less official ones too, inquiring about a blonde haired, short man who likely graduated in the last two or three years with ties to house Byron.” 

“Nobody knows Evan had the realm-reaching arch-star,” Osheen said.

“Other than us, his enchanting teacher, and anyone with a brain,” Tara snapped waspishly. “His dealings with the fae were well known. Falsifying the records was the easy part, but if Draven hadn’t stepped in to help us, we couldn’t have handled the social aspect at all!” 

That caused Osheen to pause for a moment. Tara hated nobility to a near fanatical degree, and if she was willing to admit that Draven had done something she couldn’t, it had to be serious. 

“He gave us his cloak and belt,” Osheen said. “I don’t understand activating all of the functions, not the way he does, but it’s still a powerful defensive and stealth tool.” 

“It’s an archmage level artifact, and one of the best I’ve ever seen at that,” Tara acknowledged. “But I don’t know if it would be enough. It wasn’t before – what makes you think it will this time?” 

“Their defenses haven’t reacharged,” Osheen said. 

“Which is why they’ve supplemented with more guards,” Tara said. 

Osheen threw his hands up into the air. 

“It’s like you don’t even want to save him! Do you want him to die?!” 

He regretted the words the moment they were out of his mouth, and Bridgette mentally chided him for them. Tara’s face went expressionless and flat, and before she could say anything, he rushed to appologize. 

“That was out of line, I’m sorry. I’m just tense. I know you care a lot about him.” 

“I think,” Tara said carefully, “that the best chance we have is for me to continue to study the ward scheme. The rotation is semi-random, but there are a limited number of possible permutations. Once I figure out how many, I can take down their full wardscheme in a single swoop, rather than just standing back and holding them off. That would significantly improve our chances, and give time for my archmage killing suits to recharge.” 

“But how much time will it take?” Osheen said. “We only have a week. If we don’t act soon, then he’s going to wind up converting completely.” 

It was still hard for him to believe that Evan transforming into a faerie could have such catastrophic consequences as he predicted. Evan was a good person, kind, and put others ahead of himself most of the time. 

But he wouldn’t be Evan if he transformed. 

It didn’t seem possible, but it was true. The best way Osheen had mannaged to think of it was that if Evan converted, then he’d die, and a parasite would start to wear his body as a fleshsuit. It might not be perfectly accurate, magically speaking, but it helped the foreign concept make sense. 

Osheen was really starting to hate Faeries. Elementals were so much simpler – if they said they’d do something, they’d do it, even if there was a verbal loophole. 

Tara studied him, and let out a long, slow sigh. 

“I am… reasonably… confident I can get it before the week is done,” she said. “If this was the schoolyear, no, but I’ve been throwing everything into this, just like you.” 

Osheen paused to study the older woman. 

When had the bags under her eyes gotten so deep? They were ringed with black, almost like she’d had a black eye. That wasn’t possible, but she must have been skipping out on way too much sleep. 

He had as well, but he felt guilty about it. At least Tara was doing it productively.

But he also couldn’t accept reasonably confident. Reasonably confident had been how he’d felt going into Medb’s party, and look how it had turned out. He needed certainty. 

But he didn’t say as much, instead simply nodding and pretending to go along with what she’d said. 

That evening, he pulled on Evan’s cloak. 

It was a bit small on him, but the power it offered was too great for him to pass up, even if he didn’t understand how to use all of it. 

He put on the belt as well, with its array of elemental and paralytic knives, then flexed his fingers. Bridgette slipped out of reality and into his Aura. 

He was as ready as he could ever be. 

He left their room and was heading down the hall when he heard a silky smooth voice float from the darkness. 

“Going somewhere?” 

For a moment, he thought it must be Tara, here to stop him, but… No. He recognized that voice. 

He turned to see Draven holding up a flickering orb of power. 

“I’m not going to try and stop you,” Draven said. “But at least don’t be a fool. Take the myriad mind-illusion boon with you.” 

“What’s the price?” Osheen asked warily, and Draven’s smile grew a mile wide.

“Oh, I’m not asking you for one. If you succeed, all the better. We can kill off a random noble and everything’s fine. I come out with a Spring King boon and the flushed power of a Spring Queen’s Aura spark, alongside a spot with the revolutionaries.” 

“And if I don’t?” 

“Well, I don’t think those cells were meant to hold a Faerie,” Draven said. “Your new King would find himself indebted to me for the free help.” 

Osheen snatched the orb of shifting runes from Draven’s palm and let it float around gently. 

“I won’t fail,” he said seriously, and Draven simply gave another ear-to-ear smile, his pointed teeth on full display. He began to fade into the shadows – at first the tips of his feet, then his legs, torso, and head. The last thing to vanish were his eyes, glowing blood red out of the shadows and slitted like a cat stalking prey in the right. 

That was creepy, but Osheen didn’t let it get to him. He couldn’t afford any distractions as he marched down to Draven’s portal array in the root of the tree, and actiaved the long-standing enchantments, then blasted through the Wandering Path as fast as he could.

With Bridgette’s evolution the previous year, his flight had significantly improved. He wasn’t quite as fast as the archmages who were using flying spells, their power outracing even the newest models of steam trains, but he was fairly confident that he’d be able to outpace a slower model. 

With the Wandering Path shaving off hours of flight time, it only took him half an hour to be within sight of the portal in the nearby town. He slapped the boon that Draven had let him borrow, and felt the Dreamscape magic sink into his mind. 

It was a strange sensation, and his vision blurred slightly, but it would be important to maintaining his disguise. 

In the same moment, he activated the assassin’s cloak function in Evan’s cloak. It took him a few tries to thread his will through the right enchantments to get it to activate, but he did eventually manage.

With that, he burst from the portal and soared overhead. He started spellcasting.

He couldn’t use any of the spells he’d designed with Evan – those were too distinctive – but he was still a strong sorcerer. 

And he could still call upon those principles. 

First things first, he envisioned the spell array for a simple fireball, then he started making tweaks. A nudge here, a rune rotated slightly there… With those tweaks in place, he began to add more lines in his mind, directing the Aura’s movement patterns, then the runes for expanding it and combining it in just the right way. 

Then he started repeating the pattern, weaving the sympathetic linking spell in between the parts of the fireballs. 

By the time he finished, his spell was large enough to drain his entire aura just in holding it, let alone firing it. 

He began to add one final set of runes into it, allowing his aura to act as a charge for the spell. Power wove through it slowly but surely, even as his own gradually regenerated from the ambient heat in the air. 

It was a cold night, so it only gave a trickle, but Osheen was patient. He could wait an hour or two. 

He pushed stored power into the spell to speed it along, though. He could wait a while, not for days or weeks. 

When the spell completed, Osheen took ten more minutes to let his Aura recover a little bit, then unleashed the spell. 

Ten fireballs, all linked together, overpowered, and tapping into his tattoos to unleash and fuse with a force beam, exploded from his hand. They slammed into the defensive dome over the house. 

The Elides had put it up when they’d made their escape, but it was too expensive on their aura reserves to keep on permanently. Still, a lower powered version of it for a week or two? 

Well worth it. 

His spell shattered the dome in a moment and slammed into the house. The entire house shook as the wards drew more power from the reserves, but his spell had already wasted energy pushing through the dome. 

But it sure drew attention. 

Moments after his attack hit, a dozen guards flew into the air on force, wind, or other flight methods, and at the head of the pack stood the husband-wife duo. 

But Osheen hadn’t been idle. He unleashed a force beam at the wife, while firing off a dozen fire orbs. They spun past Edward, who dodged them easily, then Osheen snapped. 

The orbs suddenly tripled in speed and impacted all around Edward, exploding in a large ball of flame. 

Edward’s arch-star was good, though. It already shelled him in protective domes, and even as his fire from the first spell punched through, the second was up in place, while Edward turned his attention to casting – at least, probably. The blank look on his face either meant he was focusing on building a spell, or that Osheen had somehow managed to give him a concussion. 

The guards, slower and weaker, finally unleashed their volley of spells too. Most of them went wide, since they had no way to track him, but the few that did hit bounced off of Evan’s cloak’s defenses like nothing. 

Then Edward thrust his hand out, and the air filled with power. Another one of his absurdly massive force beams, so large that multiple feet all around Osheen were filled with its power, roared to life. 

Osheen couldn’t figure out how to reverse the spell like Evan had, so he just unleashed all the abjuration functions at once, setting them loose, while empowering his own personal force armor and trying to move out of the way of the attack/

Edward’s wife was doing something, that much was clear, but Osheen couldn’t tell what. Not for the first time, he wished that he could see magic – she had to be building a spell of some sort, though.

The massive force beam was starting to die down as Evan’s cloak, even in his inexpert hands, was showing its worth. 

Then a single ball of force, only the size of a pea, fired from the wife’s fingers. It moved through the air with a speed that left Osheen utterly unable to react. If he’d understood the cloak a little better, maybe he could have reflected or broken it. Probably not – without Evan’s eyes to see and start working on the spell before it even finished forming, he was always going to be a step behind his boyfriend. 

The wife’s spell was so concentrated that it ripped right through the defenses and punched a hole in his gut. 

The pain was so immense that he blacked out for a moment, before realizing he was falling. 

The fall felt oddly lucid, though.

The blood started gushing from the wound – more blood than even a gut wound should have had. A part of her spell? That was annoying. 

He was going to die. That was worse. 

And he was going to die for nothing, having not even saved Evan. 

That was the worst bit of all of it…