I had never truly seen Fossor angry before. Annoyed, perhaps. Arrogant for sure. But not angry. I’d never seen him actually upset and ready to unleash on anyone, let alone me. He’d always been in control, had always been at most amused by the thought of anyone standing against him. I’d never been in a situation where he’d actually been hurt by something, even tangentially.
But now I saw it. Now, in that single moment, I saw the look on Fossor’s face and knew that if he had the chance, he would hurt me. More than hurt me. In his mind, I was going to pay for even thinking about disobeying him, let alone everything I’d actually done. I had put his home in danger, had actually beaten his security and brought his enemies down on his head. And he was going to make me pay for it.
Fire, the flames violet and silver, sprang to his hands at a word. There was anger in his gaze, actual, genuine anger rather than the casual contempt I was used to. Before I could so much as think about moving, the flames rushed at me, ready to envelop my body in fire and pain.
But my mother was there. She interceded between us, hand raised to catch the violet-silver flames on a shimmering white forcefield. It flickered slightly under the force of his attack, yet held. And my mother’s voice rose over the sound of that fire, filling the room around us like the crack of thunder. “No!” That was all she said. She didn’t give some diatribe about protecting me, about how he would never hurt her children again. She didn’t threaten him, or say anything about all he had done to her. She didn’t need to do that. Everything that needed to be said was in that single word. That single word that rebounded throughout the chamber, echoing repeatedly. The force of her voice propelled me to my feet, just as the forcefield Mom had been using exploded. Fossor was blown across the room, even as my mother and I were hurled in the opposite direction. Mom caught me in the air, flipping over to land on her feet while setting me down. The two of us slid backward along the bone floor another few feet before coming to a stop. The center of the room was filled with smoke, which gradually faded to reveal Fossor on his feet as well. He had a dozen or so ghosts with him, including Jorsher and Ahmose (whom he had apparently felt was useful enough to expend the effort of summoning back after that banishing spell). His frontline, immediate troops, summoned to his side in an instant. They formed a semicircle ahead of him, while Fossor himself cracked his neck.
“You…” His words were dark, filled with clear rage that he was barely containing. “You have been such a disappointment. But you will still fulfill some purpose, at least. You will still be the catalyst for the spell that will finally put this world into my hands.”
Mom gave a short shake of her head. “The Heretics are coming, Fossor. You know that what few defenses you have left on this place won’t hold them back. Your spell in this room has been broken. You don’t have time to reconstruct it before they get here.”
“Time?” Fossor gave a low chuckle, seeming to consider something for a moment. “Yes, well, we’ll see about that. I hate to tell you, but while a setback, your actions here are hardly the end of the line for my endeavors. You may have shattered the prepared spell, but the body of it still exists. Given another few days to repair it, and everything will be set right.”
“Few days?” I shook my head. “You don’t have a few days. You don’t have a few hours. You’re on borrowed time, Fossor. Any minute now, this place is going to be swarming with a whole lot of people who want you dead and buried.”
His stare seemed to burn through me, the anger in his voice almost enough to make me take a reflexive step back. But I barely held my ground, even as the man himself snarled, “You would be surprised to find what I can accomplish with limited time. You will be corrected, your actions punished. Then the three of us will retire to one of the… summer homes, where you will find the accommodations far less pleasant than these have been. At least until the spell is complete.”
Even as he said those words, more and more ghosts kept filling the room. He was summoning them a dozen at a time, flooding the room with an army of his ethereal troops. It was clear that he knew he’d have to go all out to overwhelm my mother (and me, to a lesser extent) in the time that he had left. And he was ready to do just that. More and more ghosts arrived. Some had powers of their own, while others held things like swords and spears. All of them surrounded their master in a horde, ready to swarm over my mother, Kendall the golem, and me.
And it was more than just summoning frontline ghosts. The house ghosts were mixed in there too. All the ones I had banished with that first spell. Fossor was spending power and effort that he didn’t have to waste on standard ghosts, just to prove that he could undo anything I did by pulling those ghosts back.
Just as Mom had said he would.
In any case, there were so many of the ghosts that there was no chance we wouldn’t be overwhelmed, simply through sheer numbers. The man obviously wasn’t taking any chances now. Not after what I had just done. He intended to tear us down and drag us out of here to his secondary home to continue this psychotic fucking plan.
“We are not going anywhere with you.” That was Mom, her voice hard as she stood protectively in front of me. She ignored all the ghosts, her gaze centered on Fossor.
As soon as she said that, two more blasts of deadly fire shot toward my mother and me. Again, she summoned a shield that flickered a little under the assault, yet held steady. The twin fire blasts were followed by what looked like a giant spear (it was a good fifteen feet long and at least a foot thick around the shaft) made of bone and covered in glowing blood that flew at us. That one, Mom didn’t stop with her shield. Instead, she created a localized whirlwind that sent the spear up into the ceiling. Upon impact, it exploded, sending a wave of nasty-looking gas everywhere. But with the whirlwind still active, the gas was pushed away from us.
“I know your tricks!” That was my mother, her voice thundering through the room. “You spent a decade showing them to me! And you don’t have time to play these games now. You have a chance to escape this place before the others make it through your defenses. But you don’t have a chance to take us with you.”
“I don’t?” There was a soft chuckle from the man, after he had tested my mother once more with a quick lance of flame that she caught on her shield. But it didn’t sound like his normal, collected and unflappable self. He was angry, barely keeping himself in control. Good. That meant he was right on schedule. “I think you’ll find I am more than capable of putting the two of you in line quite quickly.”
As he said it, the man raised his hand, clearly about to send his ghosts at us. But before he could, Kendall moved ahead of my mother. The reanimated dead girl’s body looked almost laughably inadequate, standing against, by that point, over a hundred armed ghosts that were clearly one word away from falling onto us like a tidal wave of malevolence.
Hand raised, Fossor paused, staring at the golem in front of him. “I realize I’ve taught you quite a bit, Felicity. More than I should have, perhaps. But sending your little friend here to stop these ghosts is not going to end well for you, regardless of the tricks you’ve picked up.” Again, the words sounded just like they probably would have at any time, but his voice was wrong. It shook a bit, cracking just as the facade of control around the man himself had cracked. He was emotional, annoyed. He wanted to smack me down and have me know that he did it, that he beat me. He clearly wasn’t thinking as straight as he should have. There were Heretics coming for his home and he was delaying because he was pissed at me.
Finally. After all this time. After everything this psychotic, evil piece of shit had done, I had made him feel something. I hurt him. I wounded him, even if it was simply by delaying his plan and injuring his pride. I still affected that fucker.
And I was about to affect him again. Because the next words that left my mouth were, “Who said I moved her?”
Fossor didn’t understand. He couldn’t. But that didn’t matter. He still focused on Kendall, instantly lashing out with his hand, the order to destroy her on his lips. But it had only half-left his mouth before the spell from the runes that had been secretly carved into her body ignited. The erupting greenish-blue necromantic energy was entirely directed forward, washing over Fossor’s army of ghosts before flaring almost blindingly bright for a moment.
Then it vanished. And with it went those ghosts. All of them.
“They’re free, Fossor!” I called, my voice filling the room even as the sound of the eruption faded. My whole body was shaking from the rush of adrenaline and emotion. “That spell tore your tether away from them. Jorsher, Ahmose, all those other ghosts you summoned to deal with us, they’re gone. They’re free of you. That spell right there, it banished them and tore your tether away. You can’t find them again. They’re invisible to you. You’ll never hurt them again.”
It wasn’t even close to all the forces he could send at us, of course. He had an entire planet full of people he could use, to say nothing of all his other victims. But Ahmose, Jorsher, and the other immediate house ghosts were freed. It was the least I could do, after getting to know them these past few weeks. Setting these few ghosts free wasn’t much. But it was something. And after all the time I’d spent here in this hell, being able to do something… well, that was everything.
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“No.” Fossor’s voice actually faltered a little bit. “No, you–that’s not… you don’t have the power to do something like that. You don’t have that kind of power, or the skill! And I would have detected it! I would have sensed that kind of spell, I… someone has been aiding you. But who could…” He snarled, snapping his fingers to summon a rush of flame that moved faster than I could possibly have intervened. The fire tore through Kendall’s body, turning it to ash while the man bellowed, “Show yourself!”
The dust settled, leaving behind a single glowing figure. That of a teenage girl, whose appearance made Fossor abruptly freeze. He went completely still, staring as the flames he had summoned vanished in an instant.
“Hello, brother,” Rahanvael greeted simply. “It’s been a long time.”
Yeah, of course it was Rahanvael. She had helped with everything. Drawing energy from her allowed me to set up spells that Fossor couldn’t detect, thanks to his blindness to any energy involving his sister. That included both the still-active beacons that were already drawing the others here, and the ghost anchor-severing/banishing spell that had sent his summoned army away. That and Shyel’s tutelage were the only real advantages I’d had in all this, and I’d used them both as well as I could, by preparing the spells taught by Shyel, and keeping them hidden with Rahanvael’s energy. We’d used the basic concept of the way that Rahanvael had been freed of her brother’s control and turned it into a spell to permanently free those other ghosts, including Ahmose and Jorsher.
There were other ideas I’d had to level the playing field a little more. Mom and I had both intended to be in a much better position to actually escape the second all this went down. Or even trap him for the others. But Fossor sort of forced our hands. We just had to hope that what we had now was enough.
“Rahn.” Fossor’s voice was… pained. He pronounced what was obviously his sister’s nickname like ‘rain.’ “No–no, it’s–that’s a trick. You can’t be here. You aren’t–I didn’t–No, no, that’s wrong. No…” If it was almost anyone but him, I might’ve felt sorry for the effect seeing his millennia-dead sister suddenly appear in front of him was having. First I broke his spell, then I banished his front-line ghost army. Now his dead sister was in front of him. He was staggering, the cracks in his armor breaking even wider.
“You summoned me before,” Rahanvael was saying. “You brought me back. But I hid from you, because…” There was pain in her voice too. “Because you are not my brother anymore. You are a monster. You are not Mera!”
“I am better than Mera!” Fossor’s rage broke through his shock, the explosion of his voice literally rocking the room around us.
Wait. No, the room was actually rocking. Explosions. There was something going on upstairs in the main palace. Our–the others! They were here! They were tearing through what remained of Fossor’s defenses.
But Fossor wasn’t paying attention. He was focused entirely on the ghost of his sister. The man was literally trembling with emotion. “You–you are… I am better than I was. I made them pay. I am making them pay. All of it–everything for you, Rahan. For you and our mother.” He said something else, but it was obviously in their own language, because I couldn’t understand. But it sounded like a plea of some kind. Pleading for her to understand? To come with him? To abandon me? I didn’t know.
Either way, Rahanvael shook her head. “You are not my brother,” she repeated. “And I will see you destroyed so that he can finally rest, as he should have so very long ago.”
“See me destroyed?” Fossor’s voice cracked. He was clearly losing it. Or had already lost it. “You will come to me!” There was indescribable power behind his voice, as the man stretched out his necromancy to force his own sister to bend to his will. He was breaking. Everything happening so suddenly, everything hitting him rapidfire like that, it was getting at him. Now he was going as far as attempting to enslave his own already-dead sister to his will.
But it didn’t work. Rahanvael stood strong against the onslaught. Her voice cut through his bellowed demand. “I am anchored! I am anchored to the one you taught! I have had your entire existence to know you! I have known this ‘Fossor’ since you existed, and I knew Mera before that! I know everything of you. You cannot bend me to your demands!”
Fossor’s response was a snarled, “You… you will…” He trailed off, his eyes flicking over to me. “Anchored. You won’t be anchored for long. Then you and I will have our own reunion.” There was a crazed look in his eyes. I was pretty sure he’d almost entirely forgotten about his home being under attack. And I was also fairly confident that he wasn’t thinking about keeping me alive either. He wanted the anchor broken so he could yank his sister away.
He wanted me dead.
That much became perfectly clear in the next moment, as Fossor launched his next attack. This wasn’t like the others. This wasn’t meant to teach me a lesson, it was meant to kill me. He’d summoned a single giant bone spear before, and a couple flames. Now there were twenty flying spears, all coming at me from every direction and each covered with fire so hot it instantly turned the massive chamber into an oven. The flames erupted from the weapons as they all converged on me. I would have been dead in an instant, before I could even move.
Would have been. Except for my mother. She was faster, moving in a blur to intercept each and every one of the projectiles. She doused the flames, redirected the explosions of gas, caught every piece of shrapnel from the bones that blew apart, summoned a glowing sword that cut through a blood-tentacle that tore its way up out of the ground right in front of me.
Everywhere there was a threat, she was there. Everything that could possibly have harmed me, Mom cut it down. She was a force of nature. Because as angry as Fossor was in that moment, my mother had had a decade of anger. More than that. My mother had had a lifetime of people threatening or outright hurting her children, and she was not going to let it happen this time.
Then I felt it. Fossor’s hands reached out to either side, and he summoned every last bit of power in the chamber. No, not just the chamber. Everywhere on the grounds. Hundreds of years worth of residual magical energy, everything he’d put into this place that wasn’t already going toward those beacons. Everything he had, all of it. He summoned it all for one spell.
“Mom!” I blurted out loud, “Look–”
She was gone. My mother vanished in an instant, there and gone in the span of a blink.
With a scream of rage, I hurled myself that way. Fossor had actually doubled over, and my fist collided with his face. I’d forgotten my staff, clutched tight in my other hand, as I collided with the man and knocked him to the floor. My fist hit his face as I screamed, “Where is she?!”
“When,” Fossor snarled, his elbow hitting me in the face hard enough that I saw stars. “When is a much better question!” As I recoiled, his hand caught my throat, squeezing tightly. He squeezed until I couldn’t breathe, until I could barely see through my dimming eyes. “Thankfully, there are still remnants of the spell I used to bring you forward to me, carved within this very room. Remnants I can shape and fill with power once more. Your mother has been sent forward a couple of days, and to a safe location. I’ll collect her when she returns, and we will finish the spell.”
“Others… coming…” I managed to force out while being choked. “… Stop… you.”
“Oh, I’m afraid they won’t know anything about it,” Fossor insisted. He was choking me even more, so hard I could feel myself slipping away. “I’m certainly not going to tell them. And you–”
“Fossor!”
Abruptly, his grip loosened just a little. He was still easily holding me. But his attention was on Rahanvael.
“I am life-anchored to Felicity. If the girl dies,” she informed him, “you know what that means. You will never find me again.”
Even as she said those words, a portal appeared. Then another, and a third. I saw Gabriel Prosser, Athena, Nevada, Avalon, Shiori, Wyatt, Sands and Sarah, the others. I saw them. They found me–us. They found us, they were right there. They were here! I heard my name shouted from several of them, everyone converging on the point where I was being held by the throat.
Fossor’s gaze snapped back to me. I could feel the rush of power he still had. He’d summoned everything in the house, and it was still swelling in him. With that much, would he be able to fight that many people out for his blood?
No. That wasn’t his style. He wasn’t going to fight them head-on. He was going to retreat. But first, he smiled at me. It was a pained, clearly deranged and damaged smile. I’d hurt him really badly, and we both knew it.
With his free hand, the one that wasn’t tightly clutching my throat, he produced a small white orb. “I admit, you are forcing me to reach deep to my reserves for this power, my girl.” He snarled the words, his eyes and voice both half-crazed, even as Prosser hit the glowing dome-shaped forcefield that Fossor had clearly summoned around us. It almost shattered from that single hit, so it obviously wouldn’t hold for long.
It didn’t need to. Fossor hurled me away from him, while hurling that orb to the floor. It shattered, and the area around us was suddenly flooded with so much stored magical power that the air literally grew burning hot. He sent it all at me, using the same time-travel spell he’d just used on my mother. The same one he’d used to send me three weeks into the future almost a month earlier.
Time travel. He was sending me through time, again. But this time felt different. This time, there was a hell of a lot more power involved. That orb, the magic battery or whatever, had held more power in it than had been in this entire house. I could feel that, even as the spell took hold. Even as the others shouted my name, as Avalon and Shiori were right there, just breaking through the forcefield separating us. I felt a rush of power that made what I’d felt during the three-week jump seem like a light sprinkle of rain.
How far was he sending me?
The last words I heard were Fossor’s, his voice echoing through my head with a simple, “I will be around to collect my sister soon enough.”
As before, a floor came up and smacked me hard. I was lying there, sprawled out haphazardly while some kind of blaring alarm filled the air. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t just in my head.
“Felicity!” It was Rahanvael, floating in front of me. “Get up!”
Groaning, I rolled over. Everything hit me at once. “How… how many weeks ahead did he send us? Gotta… gotta find one of my friends to send us back. Someone… someone…” Only then did I glance around. The room we were in was gleaming silver, with holographic control panels, and obvious viewports overlooking millions of twinkling stars.
“It is not a question of weeks, Felicity,” Rahanvael quietly informed me. “It is a question of years.
“And I am afraid that we are nowhere near your world, or any of your friends.”