Authors: Cory Herndon
She thought she felt a tiny flare of warmth in her breast, but had to be imagining it. It wasn’t every day you learned you possessed the rare, innate ability to become a planeswalker. But one crisis at a time.
Glissa flopped back onto the blasted ground and stared up at the green moon. “Okay, compromise. We rest now, check on Memnarch later. But it has to be a
sooner
later, huh?” Her vision was filled with the green orb. “It’s going to need a name,” she said.
“What needs name? That hole? All right, we call it green lacuna,” Slobad mumbled. “That tree? Let’s call him Leaf-face.” He made a show of covering his eyes. “Now just let Slobad sleep, huh?”
“The moon,” she said softly, gazing up again at the radiant emerald light. The green glow invigorated her, she could already feel her sore muscles becoming relaxed and her skin began to warm pleasantly from the inside. “There’s the Doom Bringer, there’s Ingle …”
“Right,” Slobad replied. “Oh, right!” Squinting and keeping his eyes averted from the green glow and, he sat up and hugged his knees. “We the first to see, huh? No one else around, that for sure! What about—?”
Glissa saw Slobad’s eyes widen with shock despite the glare, and the goblin let out a small gasp of exclamation. The little artificer’s eyes slowly tracked upward from a point just behind Glissa’s ear.
The elf girl froze for a heartbeat and raced through her options. Lying propped on one elbow on her side gave her lousy leverage, and she didn’t even know what kind of enemy she might be facing. If it was four-legged Memnarch, a swift kick to the ankles wouldn’t help at all. Even if he fell, he might land on Glissa or Slobad. But she had to do something.
Okay then, not a kick.
Glissa shoved off the ground with her elbow and rolled hard in the direction Slobad was staring. With luck, she might be able to slam into her foe’s ankles and knock his feet out from under him, maybe even give Slobad an opening to try a more effective attack. Like a fire tube to the groin.
She slammed into a pair of muscular, armored legs covered in reddish-green wool with the consistency of tangled wire. It took Glissa a few seconds to comprehend what she was seeing. Vorracs were common throughout the Tangle, and Glissa had dispatched her fair share on the hunt. But she’d never laid eyes on a vorrac with a head as big as her family’s house.
“What that, hu-hu-huh?” Slobad stammered.
The vorrac turned its shaggy head to the green moon and let loose a screaming howl. Glissa had heard that sound countless times, but as a high-pitched squeal at the end of an arrow or hunting knife.
Glissa slowly raised one claw tip to her lips. The enormous vorrac finished its eardrum-piercing cry and shook its neck like a soggy khalybdog, clanking large misshapen plates of armor together and knocking loose scattered chunks of debris and filth that rained down on the prone elf girl. Glissa carefully began to scoot back to Slobad, her eyes locked on the vorrac’s jaws. The creatures were omnivorous, though the only animals they were fast enough to catch were small arboreal rodents or fat insects like copper beetles.
The vorrac didn’t look like it was hunting to Glissa. The creature was ignoring her, and seemed much more interested in gazing around at its surroundings, drooling, and breathing with heavy chuffs that reminded Glissa of the Great Furnace in the Oxidda Mountains.
“That doesn’t sound healthy,” Glissa whispered when she
reached Slobad. “Something’s wrong with that vorrac.”
“No kidding,” Slobad hissed, gaping at the massive creature. “Vorracs usually big enough to eat, huh? Not big enough to eat goblins?”
Glissa jumped as the enormous creature shifted its weight on thick legs, causing the ground to jolt with each step. The vorrac turned around with a heavy shuffling dance that looked as painful for the creature as it was slow. “But I also mean that’s not a healthy animal, big or not. Did you hear that breathing?”
“Elf magic,” Slobad said, “Make stuff big, that’s elf trick, huh? How that vorrac pull it off?”
“I don’t know, but whoever it was
didn’t
pull it off. The job’s only half done. Flare, that poor animal,” Glissa sighed, relaxing her grip on her sword hilt.
“What? I’d give an ear tip to be that big,” Slobad said. “Then they’d all answer to Slobad.”
“The spell wasn’t done right. It can’t take in enough air, and its skeleton is giving under the weight. See the way its legs are bowing under the pressure? No one with the skill to perform a growth spell of that magnitude could possibly botch it that badly. It’s…it’s obscene.” Glissa shuddered.
“Weird,” Slobad said, relaxing enough to lean up against a nearby iron boulder. His eyes remained trained on the slow-moving creature receding into a shattered tree fall. “Some elves crazier than most, huh?”
“What makes you think it’s an elf?”
“Couldn’t be a goblin.”
“No, but—trolls, it could be trolls.”
“Doubt it,” Slobad said. “Kaldra took care of them, huh?”
“Oh. Right.” Glissa had tried not to dwell on the toll of their latest costly victory, which saw the destruction of the legendary artifact creature that Slobad and Glissa had reactivated to fight
Memnarch. As soon as they’d tried to use Kaldra against Memnarch, their enemy seized control of the enormous construct, which had finally been destroyed by the erupting lacuna in the center of the Tangle. Before that, the trolls had held off Kaldra long enough for Glissa and Slobad to reach the Radix and help trigger the explosion of the new green moon into the sky.
The mighty trolls had lasted but a few minutes. Glissa and Slobad had to assume their strongest allies were dead. Surely if any had survived, they would have seen one by now. Trolls were hard to miss.
“We were pretty lucky, huh?” Slobad asked.
“Lucky,” Glissa said. “And I think we still have the edge over Memnarch when it comes to sanity. He was just begging for a moon in the face, if you ask me.”
“Hey, Glissa?” Slobad asked.
“Yes?” Glissa replied, still tracking the monstrous, snuffling vorrac.
“Just me, or this boulder feel … warm?”
As he spoke, the heavy rock supporting Slobad moved of its own accord and growled. The goblin jumped directly into the air and landed in a roll, coming up on two feet and facing directly away from Glissa and the giant glimmer rat he just realized he’d been using as a pillow. Glissa drew her sword as the fat, muscular creature’s snout turned to face them. The glimmer rat’s rusted fangs dripped corrosive acid that sizzled in smoky droplets in the underbrush, while the thick, spiky hairs that covered its back flared and bristled. A tail as thick as woven cable slashed noisily in the underbrush.
“Glissa, look out!” Slobad shouted. Glissa whirled and came eye-to-compound-eye with a half dozen gold and iron wasps, hovering just off the ground. Like the rat and the vorrac, the magically enlarged insects seemed to be having a little trouble
operating as they should. The insects’ wings flapped mightily and blasted Glissa’s face with a dusty breeze, but their venomous stingers only just cleared the ground. Glissa muttered a quick oath promising vengeance on the fool that was torturing the creatures of the Tangle with inadequate magic, and her sword appeared in her hand.
“Slobad … I think it’s almost …” One step back. The wasps didn’t move. The glimmer rat crept closer, snarling and slavering. “Time for us to …” Another step.
“RUN!” the goblin cried then whirled and dashed into the dark woods.
Glissa ducked her head and charged after Slobad, wondering what else in the Tangle might have suddenly grown to an impossible size. “Slobad, wait! You can’t just—ow—run
anywhere
in the Tangle! We have to find a trail!”
“There are trails?” Slobad hollered back, but didn’t slow down.
The elf girl heard a shriek, and felt the heavy footsteps of the giant glimmer rat charging into the thicket behind her. A low drone almost out of the range of even Glissa’s sharp ears told her the wasps were following closely behind. She risked a look back over her shoulder.
One of the wasps was buzzing and dive-bombing the rat, which swatted at the mammoth insect with its cable-tail. The hulking rodent couldn’t seem to score a hit, but kept the insect at bay without slowing its own charge into the brush. The other wasps were heading straight for Glissa, but the thick undergrowth was slowing them down. Their thin wings, already straining to keep their heavy bodies in the air, were too wide to slip easily through the thick undergrowth.
Glissa couldn’t risk her own growth spell in the middle of the thicket; she could end up impaled on a tree. But she didn’t need
magic. She knew this forest better than anyone. She could make it through. But where would they end up?
When she turned back, Slobad was gone.
“Slobad?” the elf girl hissed into the darkened woods. “Slobad, this isn’t fu—hey, back off!” One wasp had gotten close enough that Glissa had to swat at it with her sword, but the creature sluggishly avoided the blade. “Slobad, where
are you?”
Another wasp moved in too close and Glissa whirled, slashing backward furiously and feeling the sword tip connect with a thin metal exoskeleton. The wasp shrieked—Glissa was surprised to hear the voice of an insect, she hadn’t realized they had them—and turned in mid-air, crashing back the way it had come like a drunken goblin. Half of a translucent silver wing fluttered to the forest floor. There, it joined a severed stinger six inches long that twitched as it pumped wasp venom into the ground.
The other wasps swarmed on their fleeing cousin, stinging the defenseless insect repeatedly. The savaged creature dropped onto its back, kicking spasmodically as its kin tore it to pieces with powerful mandibles. One of the wasps, the smallest, couldn’t get to the cannibal feast—twice, the other wasps batted the runt away with legs and wings—so it turned and continued to chase Glissa, followed closely by the rat, which gave the insect feeding frenzy a wide berth.
“Up here!” came Slobad’s voice up ahead, about twenty feet in the air if her ears weren’t lying. Glissa kept running and craned her neck to see where Slobad had found refuge.
He stood upside down on the bottom of a tree branch, his arms crossed and the worn satchel hanging awkwardly from his armpit.
“How—?”
“Just run up that tree! Trust me! Straight up! Meet you there, huh?” And with that, Slobad turned—still upside down—and ran
toward a wide Tangle tree trunk directly in Glissa’s path. The tree was ancient, and had no low-hanging spikes for leverage. Her claws would be useless in the bark of a tree that age, hardened and weathered by centuries of moonlight.
But she trusted Slobad and her eyes. Claws would not be needed.
Glissa reached the tree in seconds, swatting blindly with her sword but never feeling contact with the giant beasts she knew were right on her tail. She kicked out with a flying leap, extended one foot parallel to the tree trunk, and hoped she hadn’t been hallucinating.
Her foot found solid purchase and gave no resistance as she pulled it loose, brought up her other foot, made firm contact with the tree trunk, lifted that foot …
If she hadn’t been running for her life, Glissa would have slapped her own forehead. She was using a climbing spell. Or rather, one was affecting both of them. Glissa looked over her shoulder and saw the ground like a wall receding in the distance. Her horizontal had gone vertical.
The wasps finished off their cousin’s corpse, and now four of them buzzed lazily around the base of the tree, but their wings couldn’t lift them clear of the ground. One still dive-bombed the rat, which had been forced to slow its pace and fight back.
All giant creatures. All obviously subjected to growth magic. Glissa had seen no mage, and the creatures had materialized seemingly out of nowhere. And now she was running easily along narrow, spiky limbs and boughs that should never have supported her weight. Stranger still, so was Slobad. Suddenly, it all clicked.
“Slobad, wait up! I think I know what’s happening!”
The goblin skidded to a halt when he saw Glissa had lost their pursuers. “Yeah?” he asked as Glissa bounced off a
springy tree spike, somersaulted, and landed in a crouch on a small, flat terrace. “Slobad thinks it’s all that elf-magic floating around back there.”
“It’s all the magic floating around after the—” Glissa stopped. “What did you just say?”
“Elf-magic. So thick back there Slobad could smell it, huh?” the goblin continued. “Was going to tell you, but didn’t want to slow down.”
“Right,” Glissa nodded, casting her eyes about the forest canopy lest a giant beetle or wall of spiky thorns pop up out of nowhere and take them by surprise. “You can, uh, smell magic, Slobad? I didn’t think you and magic got along.”
“Know how elf magic smells, huh?” Slobad said, wrinkling his nose with distaste.
“How does it smell?” Glissa asked.
“Like rotten moss mixed with rat dung,” he said. “Sorry, but true.”
“Huh,” Glissa said. “Never noticed that. Do you know anything about mana? The elemental forces that give magic its energy?”
“Like blast powder and a fire tube?” Slobad asked, arching a spiky eyebrow.
“Sort of. Mana’s more like the ingredients for a good stew. You can make a stew out of almost anything, but to make something good, you’ve got to use the right vegetables and meat.”
“So different magic needs different meat, huh?” Slobad said. He began to turn his foot on one toe like a nervous student.
“And I’m attuned to Tangle magic because this is my home. And that moon, it’s made of pure green mana.”
“So why don’t all the monsters go there?” Slobad asked, jerking a thumb upward in the general direction of the dazzling emerald orb.
“The lacuna,” Glissa said. “The moon had to burn right through the surface to get out.” She gazed back down through the thick trees and saw the slow-moving wasps and the shambling rat buzzing around below them, unable to resist their instincts but equally unable to actually reach their prey.
“So the magic burned into the ground, huh?” Slobad said.
“To put it simply. That much energy floating loose, it’s trying to coalesce. To take shape before it dissipates.” Glissa began pacing, and took two steps up the side of the tree, deep in thought. “But there’s no intelligence behind it, so the spells aren’t entirely taking sha—oooOOF!” Glissa’s feet slipped as though on ice, and she dropped three feet back to the terrace, landing on her rear. She shook her head to clear the ringing.