Wizard Trials: Chapter 151 (Patreon)

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          “So how is this going to work?” Draevin asked.

          Caelnaste reached into her pocket and pulled out a small glass vial with a black liquid inside. “You will drink this,” she said, setting it on the table in the middle of the room and stepping back.

          Draevin glared suspiciously at the vial. “What is it?”

          “A mild poison,” Caelnaste said with a smirk. “Don’t worry; it will only put you to sleep.”

          “Not happening,” Draevin declared firmly.

          “It’s part of our deal,” Caelnaste insisted. “I can’t get you close to Chaska’nal without it. Quite impossible.”

          “Then find another way. If you think I’m voluntarily drinking poison you’re out of your mind.”

          “But I’ve already seen you do it, my dear. I assure you, it’s the only way to get you close enough. Her security is rather stringent.”

          “You said she’d be asleep, just use the shadow girl to teleport me there.”

          Caelnaste drained the last dregs from her wine glass and set it down forcefully. “I may have… simplified the true process. Chaska’nal would detect your presence immediately if you approached her demesne while awake. All Shalieh can do is get you into position to strike once you’re in the room. To get you there you simply must be unconscious.” She gently laid a hand on her temple and looked to the side. “Were there but another way…” She trailed off dramatically.

          “I don’t believe you,” Draevin said seriously. “I don’t believe she would ‘feel my presence’ from the shadow realm. All Shalieh needs to do is open a portal for me.”

          “Draevin, Draevin, Draevin,” Caelnaste said, sounding disappointed. “I know you think you know a lot about magic, but you really don’t. One cannot simply access that realm from this world. You will be traveling by shadow, and I assure you, Chaska’nal will be able to sense your arrival. If you drink that poison, I can convince her you are a food delivery.”

          “There has to be a better way,” Draevin said, “because I’m not drinking that. No way. You’ll cut my throat as soon as I fall asleep.”

          “Drae, dear, why would I go to all the trouble to get you here if I was just going to kill you? If you think you can reach the arena from here on your own, you’re welcome to try.”

          “Yeah, I’m thinking we go back to that old deal. The one where I kill you if you don’t open a hell rift right now.” Draevin raised his staff, really intending to use it this time.

          Caelnaste let out a heavy sigh. “Very well, have it your way. Tell you what I’ll do, Draevin. I’m leaving this vial right here. If you change your mind all you have to do is drink it. I’ll come get you as soon as you’re asleep. Decide fast, though, the clock is ticking.” She turned to her shadowy ally in the corner of the room. “Shalieh? Time for us to go.”

          Shalieh dropped into her own shadow and reappeared behind Caelnaste, then put her hand on her master’s shoulder. Draevin had seen them do this before. He fired off an Icicle Spear as they sank into the floor. “Wait!” he said. It was too late. They were already gone. His spear blasted into the wall, shattering against the red rock. Draevin scanned the room desperately. They were gone. Just like that, gone.

          “If she thinks this is going to change my mind, she’s an idiot,” Draevin said to himself. He didn’t bother searching through the room for them, it was clear he had no hope of finding them. Instead, he hobbled over to the door and pushed it open. It wasn’t even locked. Outside he found a hallway. Strangely, the mentally-deficient Tomrha was no longer standing there. In fact, there wasn’t even more to the building than that. The hall branched off in two directions, both ending some ten paces from the doorway into the open, blasted landscape of Hell. Draevin looked down the hall, then back in the room, confused. “What? Where’s the rest of the building?”

          He ventured outside, only to find he was standing on the flat top of an empty steppe, surrounded by lava fields. The “building” where he’d been having his meeting with Caelnaste turned out to be a plain box. There was nothing else to it, just a single room in the middle of nowhere. Nobody ever accused Draevin of being quick-witted but even he was starting to piece together the trap he’d walked into. Caelnaste was gone, and he was left abandoned in the middle of nowhere in Hell with zero chance of making it to the arena in the time he had left if he didn’t take her deal. He would have liked to fire an Icicle Spear through her forehead right about then, but she wasn’t even around to give him that option.

          Just to be sure, he blasted off into the sky on a jet of steam. He flew maybe half a league up and looked around, confirming that he was indeed surrounded by empty lava fields from horizon-to-horizon. “That bitch,” Draevin cursed to himself when he saw how screwed he was.

          She was right. He didn’t have a choice. With the utmost reluctance he returned to the isolated room and drank the poison vial. In a pointless act of rebellion, he only drank half of it, wondering as he did if she’d known he would do that and actually doubled the dose in the vial.

          His consciousness faded.

          When Draevin awoke next he was lying on a hard floor, his cheek smashed against it. Someone was talking, but it took him a second to clear the cobwebs from his mind enough to hear what they were saying.

          “…believe I was making a deal with him to betray you. It was the only way I could get him to disable himself without a fight.” Draevin recognized Caelnaste’s voice. He blinked his eyes open and looked around. From his vantage on the floor, all he could see were rocks and what looked like stalagmites sticking out of the ground. It was too dark to make out many more details than that, so he guessed he was in some sort of cave.

          “Your cunning is quite useful to me, Caelnaste, but Kelak’an still insists you will use it against me.” The voice that responded to Caelnaste was much louder than her, with a sinister, hissing undertone. It sounded like it was muffled, as though the speaker was talking with their mouth full.

          Caelnaste barked out a laugh. “Please! That idiot? He wouldn’t know cunning if he ate it for breakfast, least of all how to ‘use it’ on anyone. Have I not proven my worth, Master? Here I bring you this prize without a single casualty, the very same champion who smote your army on Howling Hill and killed my commanding officer, Zratinos. Kelak’an wastes lives fighting the Black Prince even now. He says he values might, but what might has he shown you? Not every enemy can be crushed by your legions. Sometimes a little cunning can cut with a sharper blade than legions of loyal demons.”

          Draevin craned his head to the side to get a look at whoever Caelnaste was talking to. He assumed it was probably Chaska’nal, but he’d never actually seen her before. What he saw was a massive spider-like creature standing over a pile of bones, crouched between stalactites. She was massive, at least as large as a two-story house. Though she had the body of a spider, with a bloated thorax, an elf-like torso seemed to be grafted to the spot he would have expected to find the face of the spider. Half of an elf woman—complete with arms—looked down at Draevin with an amused smile. Though she was elf-like in shape, even that portion of her body didn’t completely resemble any species Draevin had ever seen before. She was covered in shiny black chitin armor that shimmered purple as it reflected the weak light in the room, had a pair of curved horns sticking out of her forehead, and a mouthful of wickedly sharp teeth. It wasn’t that she’d been talking with her mouth full, Draevin realized, but that imitating speech with teeth that massive was probably hard for her. Her eyes were the most frightening part about her, as they glowed with pure white light like an eldrin, likely indicating she was brimming with power.

          Chaska’nal’s legs chattered as she moved closer to Draevin. Her elf torso leaned down and sniffed the air above his head. “Yes! This one has Champion’s blood, I have tasted him before. You have done well, Caelnaste. You shall be rewarded for this.” She either didn’t notice, or didn’t care that Draevin was awake. Draevin’s limbs were still stiff and numb from the poison he’d ingested, but the feeling was quickly returning to them.

          “There is one final matter, Master,” Caelnaste said. She bowed low, making eye contact with Draevin while she did so and giving him a sly wink. If she had been in his reach he would have strangled her. Delivering him, mostly unconscious, at Chaska’nal’s feet was not their deal! She was supposed to be sleeping! “I found this on his person. I do not know how it works but it looked powerful. I thought it might be useful to you.” She tossed Draevin’s staff onto the ground next to him. It clattered against the rocks and settled right next to Draevin’s only remaining hand. The limb he’d constructed of ice was gone.

          “This is—” Chaska’nal shuffled back a few steps and hissed. “That is a piece of the Elder Tree! Why did you bring that foul thing into my demesne?” She actually reared back away from it, like she thought it was made of poison or something.

          That was the best chance Draevin thought he was likely to get. He reached for his staff, grabbing it by the handle. There was power waiting for him within. He sucked it in greedily, then used a burst of steam to blast himself to his feet. His body still wasn’t fully on board with the whole “moving” thing.

          “Blaurr eh buubbuu,” Draevin said dramatically. It wasn’t exactly the pithy one-liner he’d been aiming for. His mind might have been clearing up, but even his tongue was still stiff and unresponsive. He’d just have to use magic to make up for the shortcoming. Chaksa’nal brought one of her long, sharp, spider legs forward and tried to impale Draevin with it. A burst of steam pushed him out of the way. She hissed in frustration when she missed.

          Draevin conjured the largest icicle he could. It was pathetically small, no larger than his staff. There was just no moisture in the air to draw on. Hell. He should have seen that coming. He sent his icicle forward anyways, aiming at Chaska’nal’s face. She effortlessly blocked the attack with one of her many spider limbs. Draevin’s ice shattered against the thick chitin armor. Normally he would have fired off dozens more icicles, but with little moisture to work with he had to grab the shattered remains of his first spike and reform it into a dozen smaller shards. He sent them on different curving arcs around Chaska’nal’s limbs, looking for an opening. He thought if he got her in the eye, that might limit her effectiveness.

          Chaska’nal shook her body, managing to dodge out of the way of most of Draevin’s incoming spikes. A few still hit her, though he didn’t get her in the eye like he’d been aiming for. He managed to sink one spike into her throat and another under the soft skin of her armpit. He drew blood, but she only looked incensed by the injuries, not incapacitated.

          An arrow whizzed past Draevin’s face. He looked over and saw that Caelnaste had drawn a bow and shot at him. She was already notching another arrow. Draevin instinctively blasted her with a thin stream of steam, which she was already moving out of the way of. He realized something odd about her attack though: she’d missed. Caelnaste was known for a lot of things, but missing with her arrows was not one of them. She’d even gotten the drop on him, which meant she hadn’t been trying to hit him. Draevin decided she must be trying to play both sides. That meant she only wanted to appear as though she was helping her master, while still allowing Draevin the best chance to kill her. Conclusion: it was a waste of time to pay attention to Caelnaste. Draevin mentally dismissed her and went back to focusing on the giant spider monster currently trying to stab him. He had to jump out of the way with another jet of steam as another leg tried to impale him.

          “Blood ish water,” a voice whispered in Draevin’s ear. The slurred voice sounded feminine, but didn’t belong to Caelnaste or Chaska’nal. He couldn’t see where it came from.

          Across the room, Chaska’nal was gathering some kind of bright red energy in her hands. “Do not worry, my master,” Caelnaste called out. “He is harmless without a source of water. His magic requires it. You are in no real danger.”

          A hot beam of demonic ichor fired at Draevin from Chaska’nal’s hands. Draevin tried to blast himself out of the way with another jet of steam, but this time he was totally dry. He held up his staff as a flimsy shield and braced for impact, only to instead get wrapped in a veil of darkness and reappear on the other side of the room, behind Chaska’nal’s back.

          “Where did he go!” Chaska’nal hissed, looking side-to-side and not finding him.

          The shadow vampire, Shalieh, stood over Draevin protectively, pulling back the shadows she’d used to save him. “Blood ish water,” she whispered again, pointing insistently at Chaska’nal. Draevin understood what she was getting at the second time. Blood. Chaska’nal was still bleeding from the wounds Draevin had given her in his opening salvo. Draevin realized what he had to do. He was out of moisture and had lost his frozen arm when he’d been knocked unconscious, but he still had the enchantments in his hair he’d summoned when he saw Tomrha. It was almost as though Caelnaste had planned each of his steps from the beginning. Why else put Tomrha in the room with him?

          Draevin flashed the little bit of ice in his hair into steam and blasted himself straight at Chaska’nal in a desperate gambit. She didn’t notice him until he was too close to stop. Her spider limbs lashed out at him, but he was inside their range. He slammed into her elf torso. Her hands grabbed him around the throat and started choking him. She was impossibly strong, her bright eyes flashing with anger. “You dare attack me?” she demanded. “I am Tul’shan of this domain, Fifth of the demon lords of—”

          Draevin jammed the end of his staff into the bleeding wound under her armpit. He could only just reach it. He let the power of the Elder Tree flow through him. He forced the magic into her body, into her blood. Freeze, he told her blood, and freeze it did.

          The only thing the “all powerful” demon lord managed to do before her body stopped working was to spread her eyes in surprise, a gesture that was locked into place as Draevin’s ice enveloped her. It actually took decidedly more power to freeze a demon lord than Draevin would have guessed, but the Elder Tree was good for it. Draevin’s staff turned the cavern from darkness to daylight as that power coursed through it. When the light faded, Chaska’nal was a solid statue.

          Draevin easily commanded the frozen hands to release his throat, dropping himself roughly to the ground.

          “Well done, Draevin,” Caelnaste said. She gave him a slow clap. “Very well done indeed. I never doubted you for even a second.”

          “Why bother pretending to play both sides if you knew I’d be successful?”

          She rolled her eyes. “The future is never so certain,” she explained, giving him that same wink she’d flashed him while pretending to turn him over to her master.

          “Whatever,” Draevin said. He hobbled over to Chaska’nal’s body. “I’m not taking any chances with her.” He brought his staff up and knocked it against her frozen thorax, commanding his ice to shatter her to pieces as he did so. Her remains crumpled to the ground, leaving behind a little ball of pure white light, floating in the air.

          It looked so pure, nothing like the foul monster it had come from.

          “What is that thing?” Draevin asked Caelnaste. “Why didn’t it freeze?”

          Caelnaste chuckled darkly. “Silly elf,” she said, “you can’t freeze godly essence.” She whipped her head to the back of the room and shouted, “Shalieh!” in a commanding tone.

          The dark vampire oozed out of the ground and placed her hand on Caelnaste’s shoulder. Their dark form shot across the ground towards the little ball of light. Realizing what Caelnaste was after, Draevin turned and blasted himself forward on a jet of steam, racing against them. Both of them straining; trying to be the first one to claim the divine prize.

          Draevin didn’t know if he could get there before her. It was going to be close. It was going to be so close.

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