Fire Forged - Part V
Part V
Clank, the first sound he hears, then the sound of a heavy door being pulled open.
Charles opens his eyes. Everything is black. Around him, murmuring, faint and steady.
He raises his hand and he snaps his fingers.
He screams. Pain! A dark fire sweeping down his fingers, burning his heart!
Prick of fear at the corners of his eyes, and he raises his trembling hands. One around his throat, around the bare skin - ash and grime peeling off onto his fingertips, staining the lines in his palm. One to his eyes, gathering tears.
Shame and anger, fear and worry, the overwhelming memory of a group of soldiers: a man and a woman, scars on their bodies, hands joined over a child with vivid green eyes. A blind man, hand-in-hand with a little girl, her hair almost glowing, fine blonde in firelight. A blacksmith with scarred hands and arms, swords belted to his side and strapped to his back.
His sister, in her leather armor. The silver cuff, snug on her wrist - and that hand is clasped tightly in another’s. The boy next to her has a scar over his eye, is bleeding from a wound in his shoulder.
He opens his eyes, and - No, no!
Back in the tower! His birthday is a distant memory. Gray, gray, even the hangings and the carpets are gone, as he walks through the corridors of the tower. Men and women in tattered clothes. Downcast blue-in-blue eyes, bruises and wounds everywhere he looks.
This season, the tower has been pushing them all to their limits. Every day, he limps back up the winding stairs to his cell, and every day, he sheds even more blood. His right leg is broken and it’s been hastily set, and they’re still making him fight.
The mage who is watching over the battles is a huge man, his face a hideous collection of scars and ink and other markings. His eyes are far darker, a more menacing blue, than everyone else’s. The rest of his face is difficult to look at, ruined by age and injury. A long-bladed knife at his waist, which he has no reservations about using on those he deems weak or unworthy. Charles has felt its bite several times. The tower nurses are wearing themselves out healing him, healing the others.
“Again,” that mage roars, and Charles swallows and turns his back on his opponent. This one can summon and control the wind, and he’s especially clever with it; he likes to distract people with powerful whirlwinds and then, once they’re off guard, he runs in and pummels them with his fists.
Charles is trying to keep up, he’s using the winds as fuel and aid for his own flames, but when he blinks he knows he’s made a mistake - and he’s down in the dirt once more, grit between his teeth, and his opponent is raining hard blows down onto his back.
He shouts, “Stop!” but to no avail, and it takes him every ounce of his remaining strength to call up his flame, to form it into a blade, and he lashes out blindly at his attacker.
The only relief that it gets him is a pained howl, the weight jumping off his back.
The hulking mage laughs, and Charles tries to raise his eyes enough to see him.
And Charles is suddenly looking into his own face - twisted and evil and delighting in his fall.
The weight of it crashes down on him and he lies in the dirt, unmoving. He can feel the bruises blooming, overlaying the other wounds up and down his back.
He doesn’t have the strength to get up.
Someone is calling his name, far away.
I know that voice.
Someone I love.
Another voice, a man’s voice, talking about knife forms, demonstrating a particularly complex movement. Glitterflash of light off a long blade, and on the ground he squeezes his eyes shut.
And Charles wakes up. Someone is calling to him. A familiar and beloved sound.
“Dearest!”
Raven! Raven at his side, her eyes old and haggard - but she is herself, and she is looking at him! Lines of worry in her scarred face, an X cut into her cheek, her wounds filled with dirt. Bloody scabs.
He looks up at her, raises his hands to her face, and she smiles and she covers his hands with hers, she leans over and touches her forehead to his. “Charles,” she says, and her voice is a broken rasp, a voice that he remembers from his dreams, from his memories. “It’s me, it’s really me, I’m still myself.”
“How....?”
“They tried their hardest to break me - but I thought of you, and I waited.” She smiles, and he turns away as his tears begin to fall. Blood on her teeth, freshly drawn. “Even when they beat me over and over again. Even when they showed me such terrifying visions - they kept telling me that you would destroy the world! But I thought of you, Charles, and I fought back every time I could.”
“Oh, my sister,” and he kisses her forehead, her cheeks. “I am so weak, and I cannot help you now.”
“What?”
He draws a line over his throat. “He has me collared, Raven. Him - he’s been putting me through nightmares, I was dreaming about getting killed in the tower, and I heard your voice. I heard Erik’s.... That was how I woke up.”
He doesn’t mention the last part of the dream, the part where he looked up into his own face, mutely begging himself for mercy.
“Erik?”
“My protector, like you,” he says, hoarsely, and he still feels the dream-wounds when he lifts himself partway off the ground.
The devastated courtyard all around the two of them. Summers and Jean, holding on to each other for support, looking horrified. Eliszabeth and her escort, the men and women around her, heavy armor interspersed with bows and swords, all weapons at the ready.
Half the arrows are aimed at the source of the shadow in which he is lying.
Half the arrows are aimed at him.
He levers himself up onto his hands and his knees, and Raven’s arm around his shoulders pulling him up. He stands on his feet, shaking like a leaf.
Charles looks up, and there is the mage, and there is the chain in his fist that leads to the very real collar around Raven’s neck. The staff in the mage’s other hand. Even with Charles’s magic smothered and buried, he knows that to be the focus of his enemy’s power.
He can hear the voices of the flames burning around him. Distant whispering on the edges of his mind. Control, he must have control. A subtle fight against the magic that’s been imposed on him. And he stands his ground. He looks into the mage’s eyes.
Another flash of Erik in his mind, talking about memory, about a double-edged sword, and he smiles, though it hurts his mouth to do so, and he touches his tongue to a tooth and it’s moving, a little. He must have gone down hard, though his last real memory is of the scream, of not knowing who had been in such pain.
Or perhaps that voice was me, screaming, he thinks. He closes his eyes, he raises his hand in front of his face, palm pointing down.
And for the first time the enemy mage speaks. Not the high, cold voice he hears in his own self-imposed dreams.
“Are you truly a fool?” A low voice, dark and deep, drugging. “Even now you can feel the grip of the collar around your heart, around the source of your powers. Will you attack me, knowing I have you in the palm of my hand? That I can just as easily strike at you with your own magic?”
The mage laughs, and he twitches his staff and a bright flame appears at the end of it.
Charles drops his hand, puts it over his heart, feels violated, feels hurt. The mage reaching into him, calling out his flames without his consent. Bile rises up in his throat and he clutches at Raven’s hand, doubles himself over with the force of his own coughing.
“I can do worse to you, and you know it,” the mage says, and Charles spits helplessly into the dust. “So much worse. More terrible than anything the tower could ever dream up. Ironic, is it not? It was the tower that created this beautiful spell, but it was not the tower that refined it, not the tower that brought out its fullest potential. Only I have done that.”
Charles surprises himself when he staggers upright, when he coughs the burrs out of his throat, and says, “And to what purpose would you do such a thing? This is nothing but pain, nothing but suffering. Even if you could find someone willing to be collared, there is only so much you can do before a mage starts to fail. Our powers are not infinite; they were never meant to be.”
“How little you know.”
Charles feels his blood run cold, but he keeps up his brave face anyway. Not knowing where Erik and his group are, not knowing what else they plan to do now that Raven is here, he has to keep stalling. He has to give them time.
“Charles, stop, please,” Raven is whispering furiously behind him. She’s bracing him, she’s keeping him on his feet, and he can feel the fine tremors shaking through her arms. “What are you doing?”
“What I can,” he says.
“Why?”
“Because I have to.” He looks into her eyes. “Do you trust me?”
“Always.”
“Then wait with me. Stay by my side. Help me fight - him.”
She looks doubtful, but at last she nods, and he squeezes her hand, weakly.
Charles has not often had occasion to be collared - but he has learned something about it, and it’s a piece of knowledge that he has never shared with anyone.
And now he is gambling his life, Raven’s life, his friends’ lives, on that piece of knowledge.
In the tower, the first reaction to the collar is always naked, screaming fear. Second comes an abrupt and almost always complete submission. Only a handful of teachers at the tower are given leave to impose it, and only three of them are allowed to even teach the spell to others.
He remembers his first time in the collar vividly; he had refused to eat in the first few weeks after being brought to the tower. Refusing to follow orders, refusing to even respond to anyone or anything. He remembers being dragged out of his quarters, the pity and the apathy on the faces of the guards. His own blank look at the mage casting the spell on him.
And then the sudden surge of his own power, blinding flames and heat all around him. His captor’s shock and sudden glee. The sensation of someone taking his heart in their hands, examining it, using it.
He remembers being compelled to eat, to drink. He remembers being sick, afterwards; they had given him bland food after the weeks of starving, but it had still been too much for his stomach. He remembers the foul smell of his own sick, his own dirt, and he remembers the shock of the cold water, buckets of it being upended over him. His clothes being stripped away, and the scant comfort he took from being dressed in clean and dry robes - threadbare though they were, and much too long for him in the arms besides.
And after, sitting defiantly in his room with a bright flame burning over his upturned hand: his own creation, his own abilities, come to life at his command. They beat him for it in the morning but he remembers the fierce joy of it, the strength of his own will.
The knowledge that there were things that people holding collars could not do, could not find, inside people held in those collars. Self-awareness, of course; the spell allowed mages to keep what they had - but anyone holding him in a collar could not control him completely. All they could do was manipulate him to answer their questions, take his magical powers and use them without his consent.
But they could never compel him to do anything more than that.
He knows that he kept Raven’s existence a secret until at least the first time she’d been allowed to visit him, nearly a year and a half after he’d been taken to the tower. He remembers the whispers, people talking about the impossibility of the two of them being related. So much surprise.
So now he holds Raven’s hands, thinks about Erik and the others, waits patiently for the signal.
When Eliszabeth finally screams - and it is a happy sound, something so completely out of place on the battlefield - he screams back at her readily, and he begins to laugh, even if it hurts to do so.
Even when the enemy mage’s reaction to that is to take from Charles again, to start throwing spears of fire all over the field. Charles neither resists nor fights back; he simply pushes Raven to crouch in the dirt and he stands over her, laughing even as the flying ashes threaten to choke him.
Eliszabeth’s voice, ringing out over the battlefield, ringing in his mind: Erik says we’re all clear! The citadel’s unshielded! They’re getting the prisoners out - everyone is safe!
And he shouts to make himself heard over the roaring flames, over his enemy’s sudden bellowing rage: “Tell him and his group to get down here as fast as they can!”
“Raven!”
Charles whirls, and there is a young man charging toward him and his sister. Two swords bared and ready to attack.
Charles steps out of the way and Azzel is falling to his knees beside Raven, is pulling her into a desperate embrace. The blades fall into the dust with a loud clang. His pale face, his scar, his wounds. Joy and hope and fear warring in his eyes.
“Azzel?” Raven’s shocked whisper. Tears streaking down her dirty cheeks. Her hands shaking on his shoulders. “Impossible - how are you here?”
“I’ve been looking for you....”
Charles turns away from their frantic conversation. Keeps crossing the field even as he has to stifle a pained groan: the enemy mage pulling at his power yet again - and when he looks up, he’s looking at the steps of the citadel, at Summers and Jean back-to-back, their swords out and streaked with blood and ash.
The citadel is beginning to collapse in on itself, and he can hear and feel the great rumbling sounds of its demise, the powerful strikes booming from within, and he wonders vaguely about Shaw and Emma before he’s running forward, past the enemy mage, past the corpses of friend and foe alike.
Flames bursting up around him, his own powers resisting the mage, so the fire begins to attack the citadel itself. Eliszabeth screaming in his mind and over the battlefield: “Protect yourselves!”
Jean’s hand is hard on his arm as she catches him at the steps, as she attempts to pull him behind her to safety - and he lays his other hand on her shoulder, shakes his head. The look on her face as he turns and he pushes on the great doors; the sudden prickle of knowing on the back of his neck, the voice that bursts out of him, bigger and deeper than he’s ever heard himself before.
“EVERYBODY GET DOWN!”
Flames roaring, and he pulls at Jean, who pulls at Summers, and the three of them fall in a heap at the open doors.
Inside the doors: Erik rising from his crouch, Emma helping Shaw to his feet. The remaining members of their small group running forward. Summers barking orders: “Get Azzel and the girl he’s with here - she’s Charles’s sister, make sure they’re safe!”
Jean, seconding him, shouting at the top of her voice: “Charles’s sister is collared! Take Armand with you, have him break her chains!”
“Here you are at last,” Charles says. Erik looks like he’s been through a war himself. Red eyes, streaks of blood - not his own - all over his arms. “What took you so long?”
“I was laying old ghosts to rest,” Erik says, and his voice is rough, like someone’s been making him scream - or cry. Like Raven, there are fresh tear-tracks on his face, and Charles reaches out to one, touches it gently with his thumb, brushes it away. “And I could not have done it without Emma.” Erik looks over his shoulder, at the little girl, who is patting Shaw’s arms down for wounds. “Talented, that one. She’ll need a teacher.”
“Yes, she will,” he murmurs. “But I am not interested in her right now, not truly. I want to know about you - how do you feel?”
“Like I could fight that mage with one hand tied behind my back.”
“Let’s not try that just yet,” Charles says, and he smiles at Erik. “At least, you are very mistaken if you think I’m going to let you fight him alone.”
“I never said that,” Erik says, and he reaches for the sword still strapped to his back.
Somehow, Charles already knows what he’s going to see when the white wrappings fall away, coiling onto the stone floor.
A flash of flame and light outside the doors, the soldiers ducking and protecting each other once again. The enemy mage, roaring for his army. The sounds of people dying, Jean and Summers directing their people, Eliszabeth relaying orders.
Charles only has eyes for the sword in Erik’s hands, and he reaches for it, and draws. The elegantly curved blade, the elaborate and beautiful rippling pattern hammered into the steel. A sword that he already knows intimately: the sword he had helped Erik forge. Light sparking off the edge of the blade, throwing fiery reflections into his eyes.
It is sized almost perfectly for him, sturdy and easily gripped in his own smaller hand. The delicate red threads embedded into the metal, the outline of a bright flame.
Erik takes the sword from him, sheathes it with a clear, ringing note, and he takes sword and scabbard in both hands and he starts to get down on his knees - but Charles stops him, hands on his shoulders. “No, Erik, not this time.”
“It is traditional,” Erik says. “At least, I did this when I presented my wife with the weapons I’d made for her.”
“I am not her,” Charles says, as gently as he can, “and perhaps if you are dealing with me, it will be good to have a different type of tradition.
“Besides, I still remember what you said, on the day that we met. You said you were my protector, you said you were mine to command. You presented yourself as someone inferior to me - you, inferior? Never. Come to me as an equal, Erik. Let us be partners.”
Erik smiles, then, and he straightens and holds out the sword. Hands near the hilt and near the tip of the scabbard. “I like the sound of that. The two of us, together.
“Take this, then.”
“Gladly,” Charles says, and he takes the sword between Erik’s hands and turns it upright, draws again. The sword is just a little heavier than his knife, beautifully crafted, and it glitters in the faint light of the flames in the citadel.
“Shaw,” Erik says. He is still looking at Charles.
“Yes?”
“Get out, all of you, and get everyone out of here, too - this citadel’s not going to last, not with the way we’ve been destroying it, not with the fires. Start regrouping - take Raven and Azzel with you; collect Eliszabeth and her escort; you know what to do. Charles and I will finish this.”
“Is there anything I can do to help you, Charles?” Shaw asks.
“Do what Erik says - and then clear the way for me, if you please,” Charles says.
“With pleasure. Come, Emma, you will have to guide me out to the doors at least.”
“All right,” comes the girl’s lilting reply.
Charles smiles, and then Erik reaches up, grips his hand on the sword for a long moment, warmth like his own flames. And when Erik lets go, when he draws his own weapon, Charles lets out a wild cry, and he runs forward, half-falling down the steps of the citadel, back out into the courtyard, leaving all the others in his wake.
Except for Erik, who runs at his side, who is shouting his own war cry as they charge.
Raven on the steps, finally free, and trailing chain links behind her; she’s picked up a bow from somewhere, and she’s standing ready beside Azzel, his buckler on her hand and a heap of arrows at her feet. Summers next to Jean, the two of them covering Emma. Shaw on the steps, ready to move forward. Armand leading Eliszabeth and her escort, all of them moving away in an orderly retreat.
For a moment, Charles imagines Erik is shouting a woman’s name, his wife’s name, and he smiles.
And Erik is skidding to a halt, turning sharply, and he dodges as the enemy mage hurls bolts and spears of fire at him. A shield, lying on the ground - he picks it up in one well-armored hand and he crouches behind it; another blast of flames and this time he rolls out of the way, circles the mage.
Erik strikes, and there is a long red gash over the enemy’s knee, blood flowing bright red onto the ground, and the flames from the staff burn hotter and hotter, yellow to white in an instant.
Charles fights back the urge to scream - what the mage is doing with his powers is wrong, and insane, and it hurts!
Instead, he drops into a crouch and runs, low to the ground.
Behind him, the mage is dragging something - a long length of chain, battered and heavy - the chain that had been attached to Raven. There’s so much of it! And Charles follows it with his eyes. The other end of the chain is wrapped around one of the enemy’s arms - the one that’s throwing the flames around, the one that’s not holding the staff.
Perfect.
Charles throws his voice across the battlefield, shouting as loudly as he can, over the screams of the two men already fighting, over the screams of the dying and the injured. “Shaw! Get ready to attack! Follow my voice!”
“Ready!” Shaw shouts back.
And now Charles has to work quickly; he’s announced himself, and no matter how skilled Erik is - and he is skilled, everyone knows that - Erik won’t be able to distract the mage for long. Charles sets his sword between his teeth, draws his knife. Crouch-runs back to the end of the chain, to the last complete link - and he rams the knife down into the ground against that piece of iron. Screech of the blade against the chain - he looks around and finds a heavy stone, and with a grunt he slams it home, hammers the blade down, pinning the link to the ground.
All preparations done. He shouts, now, “HURRY, ERIK!” Pause, he draws breath: “SHAW, ON MY SIGNAL!”
He looks up, and the mage is already pulling on the chain, his wordless roaring drowning out the others’ answers.
And Charles looks down, watches as the chain goes taut, as the links begin to pull and strain against each other.
Here goes nothing, he thinks, and he blocks out the world, blocks out Raven and Erik, and he charges forward. His sword held high. A scream on the wind, still his, he now knows it’s his. Strained, raw, angry.
Erik slashes at the mage again, and this one cuts a huge gash into the arm holding the staff, and Charles takes advantage of the mage falling to his knees in pain to climb up onto his shoulders.
Charles fights for his balance atop the swaying mage and slowly, deliberately, he turns his sword point down. He holds the hilt in both hands, a white-knuckled grip - and he plunges the sword into the mage’s shoulder, and it shrieks against bone as he strikes. The blade sinking into muscle, the mage’s unearthly screaming. Fire licking along Charles’s skin, sharp and painful - and he doesn’t feel it.
He is shouting, instead. For Erik, to strike at the heart - for Shaw, to strike at the staff.
And over and over again, he screams at the mage: “Release me! Give me back my flames!”
Erik is there, suddenly, coming through the attacks still unscathed somehow, and he shares a long look with Charles.
The mage is screaming, fighting the two of them down.
As Erik draws his knife and thrusts it into the mage’s heart, Charles copies him, twisting his sword - and then they’re both being hurled away, Erik’s hand winding into Charles’s shirt and pulling him close. The two of them rolling to safety.
Shaw is getting pummelled with the staff, standing there and smiling and finally - he strikes. One clean punch to the mage’s arm, just above the wound from Erik’s sword.
The mage’s bones shattering, the staff breaking into a cloud of splinters.
And Charles gasps, and it’s like taking a clean breath of air, it’s like finally being able to see and hear and sense again. He rolls to his feet, and he smiles and he looks at Erik and he says: “Go, Erik. And take Shaw with you.”
“Burn him, Charles,” Erik says, and he’s running back, toward his soldiers, taking Shaw’s free hand and urging him away.
“For you, Erik, I will,” Charles shouts. He’s on his feet, and he closes his eyes, and he looks into his heart. The fire that is now his own once again, roaring with joy to find him again. He thinks of his body bursting into flames, powerful and beloved warmth flowing down his skin. Wings of flame - he raises his hands - and he opens his eyes, he screams to the sky.
Flames, heat and strength, life and love and his friends, Raven and Erik, and Charles flies.
To Author's Notes and Credits
[The story continues in War Between Four Walls: Crucible, Part Two of Two]