The Archmage: Chapter Thirty (Patreon)

Leaving to return to school, to the enchantments, the summoning of Oberon, and the work of saving Paerús felt… anticlimactic… after my proposal. 

I supposed that it said something about my life and priorities that proposing to someone that I was – in some ways – already married to was more tense and worrying than contacting someone who was powerful enough to kill me without much effort.

Honestly, though, that was far more in my element. I’d been working with things beyond me since I started with the entire magical side of the world. This was just another power that eclipsed humanity, and the world was full of those. Compared to Medb, I was pretty sure that Oberon would be a bit of a pushover. 

It was surprising how quickly things came together, though. I’d let my staves and the iron repelling charm charge over the break, and with their completion, my part was essentially done, apart from actually performing the ritual. 

Draven slipped out of the shadows one night, dusting his suit off, as if shadows somehow held detritus.

“We begin this weekend,” he said, giving me a stern look. I glanced at Osheen, who shrugged his shoulders. I nodded to Draven, and then set about my ordinary work for the week. 

When classes started up on Monday, I ran through the witchcraft course as normal, teaching them the basics of spell construction, but I skipped lunch in order to prepare my spells for the rings, since I had both of them now. 

It might not technically be the absolute optimal use of my time, since I did still need to build the rune-engraving spell, but… It was more important. 

Kind of. 

It was to me. Objectively, it was definitely the less important enchantment. 

When the enchanting class started, I got them working on combining two foci, which would be their last task before they moved onto the artifact creation process – that was something that I was especially excited about. 

Before I knew it, the week had flown by, my office hours came and went, and I was heading down to grab Seth, while Draven arrayed the components upstairs. When I knocked on his door, Seth looked up, lips pressed together. 

“It’s time,” I told him, and the bearlike man nodded, rising to his feet, nervously adjusting a small orb in his hand. It looked like a snowglobe, but to Oracle’s eyes, it was lit up with faerie, elemental, and even a strange strand of gray power that I thought must be from the Wandering Path. 

“You have your iron repelling charm for the sacrifice?” he asked, and I glanced at him. 

“I was planning to use that to barter with,” I said, a touch confused. Seth rapidly shook his head at that. 

“Bad idea. He’s already got some defenses against iron, all the old monsters like him do. If you were to give it to him as a gift for his time, you’re just helping shore up his defenses. But trying to barter it could be seen as an insult, you saying that he needs your paltry enchantment to survive.”

My eyes widened, and I nodded rapidly, looking like a chicken with my bobbing head. 

“Thanks for letting me know,” I said. 

“Who else is taking part in the summoning?” he asked. 

“Tara, Oracle, Draven, Osheen, a random mercenary mage, and us,” I said. 

“Seven. Good number for summoning a faerie.”

When I led Seth to the abandoned wing, he frowned at it, muttering under his breath about how he didn’t even know this was here. 

“Ah, yeah,” I said, “It’s mine. I’d prefer if you kept it… Relatively quiet?” 

“I can do that, lad,” he agreed, but his eyebrows only crept higher as he emerged to see the ritual array, and Draven filling things out. 

“How do you do it?” the older man asked, and I gave him a mysterious smile. 

“I have my ways,” I said. 

“Good, you’re both here,” Draven said as the mercenary, a man wearing nothing but navy blue from head to foot, complete with a mask and wide brimmed hat, dished out powdered aura storage crystals into a bowl. 

“Seth, take this,” Draven said, handing a pamphlet to the other man, then pointing to a spot in the array. “And stand there. Evander, you’ll be reading this and standing over there…” 

Like a master thespian preparing his stage, Draven expertly directed every component into place, every person in their spot, and had us read out each of the items we had been given. 

He’d even found a way to include Osheen into the reading and ritual chanting by referencing the time Oberon had seduced Titania, Queen of Summer, and her burning heart and fire. Perhaps not the best thing to talk about in polite company, but this was the summoning of a wild faerie king, not a dinner party. 

My part was reading a poem about the time where Oberon had challenged the leader of the Wild Hunt to find him and kill him, only to escape from the hunt’s clutches at the last moment, making him one of only three known beings to have ever accomplished the feat. The poem was written entirely in Old Bradlewyr, which made me glad that I got so much use of the language. 

Seth’s part was in a language I didn’t recognize, but that he apparently did, and told the companion story to Osheen’s poem, about how Oberon had thawed the cold heart of winter for just a moment, in order to sleep with the Matron and Mistress of Ice. 

Tara’s part was in Old Bradlewyr, same as mine, but described how, when a jilted king of the earth had tried to kill Oberon after their fling, Oberon had raised an army from seemingly nothing to stall the king’s own, and then had snuck into the king’s treasury and taken the entirety of the Earth King’s riches. 

Oracle’s part wasn’t a reading, but rather, a dance. I’d been worried that an owl would struggle with it, but Draven had apparently already thought about that ahead of time, and provided one that was not too dissimilar to an owl’s mating dance, being composed of tail-bobbing, head jerking, and elaborate wing movements.

The dance was to be mirrored by the mercenary, who would be recreating a version of a battle oberon had once fought against yet another jilted lover, this one a sovereign of abyssal shade. 

Which left only Draven, who would be conducting the ritual himself, and filling in all of the other parts. 

We ran through a test of our lines twice each before Draven was satisfied, and when everything was in order, he dusted his hands off. 

“Well,” he said. “Place your gifts in the center, and if he chooses to take them, you’ll be granted an audience.” 

“And if he doesn’t?” I asked, shifting nervously from foot to foot. 

“We’ll try again next week, and hope he’s less busy,” Draven said, sounding a touch irritated. Even still, he removed a blade that glowed with demonic magic on one side, and what I thought was angelic on the other. 

I didn’t know much about angels, as they were rare in Paerús, but it had similar runes to the only other angelic artifact I’d ever seen, the simulacra producing one that Draven had offered me for my duel with the Spring Queen. 

Seth placed his own snowglobe-like orb down, and I put down the necklace with the three sets of three metal repulsion spells. Draven glanced around, and upon seeing that nobody else had anything else to add, gestured for each of us to get to our spots. 

As Draven began the chant for the spell, I could immediately tell that there was something… different. 

The aura that ran through the runes of the spell felt different, even as I poured both silver and emerald power into the circle I stood within. It felt wilder, older, stranger. It was deeper in a way that I didn’t understand, in a way that seemed to fundamentally defy creation or destruction. 

Draven began to transform as he chanted, his suit falling away first, but rather than exposing bare skin, he was slick with blood. It was bright red, the color of a fireplace, brighter than red had any right to be. 

It slowly dripped off his form as he walked and chanted, and as it slid down his body, it grew darker. First to the color of normal blood, then to the ruddy brown-red of dried blood. From there, it darkened to a grayish-red that reminded me of the last ember in the hearth, a mere moment from blowing out.

Then the blood turned black, and surged off of Draven’s body completely, sliding along the runes and channels on the floor. But underneath, where I expected the same pale skin as Draven’s face, there was a mass of writhing blood and flesh and bone and tendrils that would have looked more at home among the demons of the Fallen Void or the eldritch beings of the Starless Night than as the body of a person.

As the chant continued, my aura guttered low, and I cut off the flow, so that I could keep working, but Seth, Osheen, Draven, and the mercenaries all blazed even higher. 

Draven threw back his head and screamed to the thin crescent moon that hung overhead, a primal scream of pain, hate, anger, pleasure, love, and above all, passion.

A moment later, Seth let out a primal scream of his own, and his aura writhed. I saw his body begin to shake as his hair grew thicker, and he seemed to be struggling to contain his werebear transformation. 

Osheen let out a scream of defiance and hate, and then Tara and I let lose our own screams. 

Finally, the mercenary let out a laugh, a dry, emotionless, cold, cruel laugh that cut throug the screaming. 

This had not been part of the rehearsal, but it flowed from us like water that had broken through a dam. 

Then Draven exploded into a fine red mist that pattered down on the runes, but before I could even process that, he was standing there again in the center, his suit back, his gloves back, and the only hint of his inhumanity the glowing red eyes. 

As if on cue, all of us fell silent but him. He began to chant, soft, but growing louder with every second until his voice thundered through the room like the voice of judgment itself.

Then his arm snapped down and pointed at Seth, who stepped out of his circle and began to pace around the ritual, calling out his poem in a voice that could very nearly match Draven’s own. 

When Seth’s chant finished, a wind rose through the hall, whipping and whistling, as the branch beneath our feet seemed to shift and writhe. 

Slowly, Draven made his way down the list of people, and each time a poem was finished, something changed about the room. 

Half of it grew hot, the other cold. Darkness extinguished the candles and light, while the other half of the room grew illuminated from nowhere at all. Shapes began to move through the darkness, yet at the same time, there was clearly nothing there at all. 

The swelling power came to a crescendo when Draven thrust his hands out and spread them, as if parting a curtain, and where he did so, the world itself tore apart. 

“Oberon, Maestro of All, Lord of Most, and King of Many, we beseech you!” Draven cried out. “Oberon, Trickster and Truth Teller, we beseech you! Oberon, greatest of the Wild Fae, thrice I ask!” 

Draven’s body locked up as a presence filled the room. Everything returned to normal in a single second, as if there had never been anything unusual about the ritual at all. 

Everything but our sacrifices, which were now gone. 

Oberon appeared in the center of the circle, behind the wards, a smile spreading across his face. 

“Thrice you ask and done.” 

Silence filled the room.