Page 63 of Transfiguration
Seiran handed the bag over, and Con tugged out his clothes, pulling them back on with deliberate slowness to work through the stiffness. He had never struggled with his shift like this.
“Changing near this stuff is bad news,” Con said.
“The change back looked like it hurt,” Seiran agreed. “You okay?”
As okay as he would ever be with his men in the ground. He made his way to the first edge of the pulsing ink. It was tiny, less than a foot wide blotch. He wondered if the array still worked? It didn’t feel linked like runes and spells often did. More like a lingering stain of something bigger?
He reached out and thoughtbreak, using the same spell he’d broken the casting around Luca with, and that memory burned. But the pulsing didn’t stop, and no spell vanished, the edge of it still writhing like a living thing.
“Do you see that? Feel that?” Con wondered. Was it only his sight that looked like wriggling lines because of the wind?
“Feel it,” Seiran agreed. “An ache in the earth. Bryar, stay away, please. I don’t know what it will do to fae power.”
Con took a few seconds to stretch out his muscles, everything hurting, joints, skin, even his teeth, but he followed the trail around the edge of the thing, searching for a way closer without touching the wiggling things. Near the base of where Con suspected the tower had once stood, there was a larger batch of something wriggling. Had they buried an object there? Sam didn’t talk about those events much, the pain embedded deep. He had some physical scars from all the cuts to fuel spells he didn’t really know he was casting. He hadn’t thought of himself a witch at all back then.
“Can you dig up that spot?” Con asked.
“No.” Seiran said. “It’s like a dead spot. Empty? Untouchable?”
“Nullified?” Con asked.
Seiran’s eyes widened. “No… not exactly. Draining? Like where we found the Pillar of Fire? Only more broken? Like there should be a complete ley line here.”
Con thought about that for a minute as he paced. Were there pieces of Matthew here? Was his nullification ability part of what they needed in these spells?
Con clenched his fists, trying to work through a thousand thoughts and memories that still cut like a knife. Kelly had shattered this array with water. Seiran had pulled up water from the earth in California to break the old corrupt Ascendance magic. Did that mean they needed water? Or was it more of an opposite thing? Like an advanced game of ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors?’ What was the rock, the paper, and the scissors? Could his wind overrule earth? The dirt here wasn’t loose at all, but that had never stopped Con before. He’d dug a giant hole in the ground through rock and dirt to a long-buried artifact once. It had taken him a few days to work it free. This wasn’t nearly as deep.
“Stand back,” he said. “It’s about to get really windy.” He raised his hands and his focus, feeling the wind’s will slide into place, seeking and questioning how it could serve. This low to the ground, it never fought him. The voice was gentle rather than demanding as it was when he soared among the clouds, but he could pull the stronger edge of it down. He pooled that strength around them, feeling the rise of whipping air against his skin, the edge of pain always welcome, especially now that he hurt inside like he was dying.
His request was to loosen the soil and lift the mess up, to either break the bits of darkness free, or find what fueled them. It took time. He heard Seiran curse behind him, felt a shield go up. Fae magic mixed with earth. The sky changed from an early morning painting of glowing yellow and orange to a green and gray mass of threatening clouds. A tip formed high above. Con felt it inside his head. He didn’t have to look up to see it as it slowly descended. Standing in the middle of an open area, he could recycle and recharge endlessly, using the wind as fuel, and he kept pulling until the beast of a storm slammed into the ground, making it tremble beneath his feet.
A tornado of centralized power dug into the earth, pulling and yanking the bits free. A debris storm that would have showered them in chunks of dirt and wood like bullets if he hadn’t had years of fine control. He couldn’t hear anything but the whipping of the wind and the melody of it in his head, singing, happy to be raging. It wanted to expand. It could devour everything with gleeful joy, growing until nothing remained but a hurricane of epic monstrosity destroying all it touched. Con held it back, both in size and from eating up the landscape. He asked it to sort the pieces of darkness and bring them to him. He instructed softly, coaxing rather than demanding the wind, careful, like it was a puppy, eager to please.
The first small bit of pulsing darkness floated before him, presented to him like a cat would drop a mostly dead mouse at its owner’s feet. The wind didn’t like the sensation, and neither did Con as he studied the small chunk.
Bone. He blinked, holding it in a bubble of energy above his hands to keep from touching it. More arrived, like pieces of a puzzle, fitting together to form a finger? Several fingers. Would they match the piece he already had? They buzzed with the dull ache of nullification power, even within the bubble of magic. It was a battle of strengths. These pieces were too small to override his power, but maybe that’s why the array spread across a large area. Lots of small pieces required for a bigger impact?
Con knew that when a null died, as their body decomposed over time, the null ability would seep into the rocks, and dirt, and spread. It was why nulls’ remains were only allowed in special areas. Was that writhing blackness the spread of the nullification?
He had never put a body back together after using the wind to tear it apart, but the pieces gravitated toward each other like a magnet, reforming part of a hand, skeletal and missing chunks, but the wind eased as disappointment filled the melody. It could find no more chunks.
Con stood for a moment, staring into the raging wall of a tornado, letting his stores refill before requesting the power retreat. The wind gave him a moment of hesitation, like it wanted to do more, but he promised they would rage again later. After all, they had payback to give, and Con was the least conflicted of the trio about killing assholes. Whomever had killed Luca and taken Bella deserved to be sandblasted to bits.
The whipping died down, the funnel slowly dissipating until nothing remained. The pieces of darkness vanished, leaving only the partial remains of a hand, which glowed with something oily, and pulsed with an ache of nullification Con had only ever experienced in magic museums. Those pieces kept a great distance from the public and locked away beneath spells to keep the field of dead magic from expanding.
“Holy fuck!” Seiran said from somewhere behind Con. “You fucking called a tornado down like it was nothing.”
“It’s called control of my element, Ronnie,” Con said. “Thought you were the king of control? Being Pillar and all.”
“If that’s not Pillar level wind magic, I don’t know what the fuck is.” Seiran stepped up beside him.
“I’m not the Pillar of Wind. You’d feel that.” Con studied the hand. Adult sized, though it was hard to tell more from the bones. “Think this belongs to Matthew?” He added the first missing finger bone, and it, too, snapped into place, magnetized back to the whole.
“Nulls are rare. I’ve not met another in my entire time working for the Dominion,” Seiran said. “You?”
“Nope. Not a single one. Only encountered artifacts from time to time. Most of them ancient.” He kept a firm barrier around the hand, even though the nullification leached away the magic. He would have to put it back in a spelled bag to keep it from depleting his energy stores.
“It feels more like nullification now, but the ground before wasn’t the same. I don’t know how to explain. Dead magic feels like something. They ripped the ley lines apart, took the magic, drained it all.” Seiran said.