Chapter 44

Akeelay

And so, we come back to me. I never wanted this. I didn’t set out on a quest in order to get all of you killed. But that was how it ended up, and this is probably going to be fatal for most of you.

I’m sorry,

Akeelay Pather

Chapter 43

Kaolin

Chapter 43

We can, in fact, blame you for trying, Lymlock. So don’t even think about it.

But anyway, the sorcerers are coming to your world. Of course, it’s not like they’ll be able to use that much magyk there. Your world doesn’t have magyk in the air, so it’s impossible to refill their “battery” on your world.

But we’ve never sent such a large group before. We have sent some sorcerers over there, by themselves, or in a small group. The most is about 3 or 4 at a time.

And, having the unfortunate experience of meeting and knowing Lymlock, I know that he’ll wait and save his magyk for the “proper” opportunities.

I really am sorry about this, people of Earth. It’s not your fault that this happened. We’re in a completely different galaxy than you, with a completely different star system, on a completely different world.

Had we not written to you, you would have had no idea about what was about to happen to your world, or where the mysterious strangers that seemed to have magyk came from.

My advice? Run. Run and hide, and good luck. But it’ll be hard, because you’ve never faced this level of annihilation before.

My condolences,

Kaolin Claystone

Maybelle

I really am sorry about this too. I don’t know why the king and queen won’t listen to reason. We ought to just send them to a different planet, where the people actually deserve it a little more. Just because you’re the closest, that doesn’t mean you should pay for it.

Oh, yeah, by the way, there are a LOT of other planets with life out there. If you survive the coming months, have fun looking for them.

Like Kaolin mentioned, there have been other sorcerers sent to your planet. Sorcerers have led many of your countries, especially communist ones. There was one a few decades back that caused a lot of strife. I believe his name was Hitler, and he had the gift of persuasion.

But that’s beside the point. I truly believe that once the sorcerers get to your Earth, then they will do their best to destroy the world. And that’s the best that they’ll do. If you’re unlucky, they’ll still look to Lymlock for guidance, and he’ll get them to help him rule the world. That would be your worst-case scenario, trust me.

I hope that whoever finds this letter will share it with the world. Everybody ought to be warned of the coming disaster, and if not…well, like I said, you’re doomed. There aren’t many more ways to say it.

I will keep trying to convince the king and queen not to send them there after all. But I believe they will, and the four of us have gotten permission to write you this letter.

After all, if the world ends, it’s not like there’ll be any need for secrecy anymore. Other worlds have been destroyed by us, but never like this.

In other news, most of the kingdom is back to normal. There have been funerals held for the ones who died, human and wizard, and Rhellens is back to normal – as normal as it ever gets when you’re surrounded by magyk.

Dossik and I are now a couple. Kaolin’s prediction from a while ago was true, and we did have a ‘thing,’ as I think he put it.

He’s so cute.

But anyway, a team was dispatched a while ago to take care of the sorcerers in the place where we were held by Lymlock. They succeeded, and they’ll be sent to Earth as well.

Things really aren’t looking good for you, are they?

Well, again, I’m really sorry about this.

Good luck,

Maybelle Collins

Lymlock

This is going to be fun. I’m going to save my magyk for the perfect occasion, and I’m going to get revenge for what Akeelay, Maybelle, and that traitor did to me. I’m taking it out on all of you.

I’ll see you soon,

Malin Lymlock

Chapter 42 (Part 3)

-->

Lymlock

You can’t blame me for trying, can you? I had to try something. It’s not my fault that annoying girl got out before I could kill her. I could see it in the traitor’s eyes, he was going to let me go. He cares too much about that girl to not do it.

So, I guess now I have to finish explaining what’s going to happen to the sorcerers and I.

We’re being banished, but the king and queen, after a long while of pondering, have decided that they don’t want to give other kingdoms the burden of watching out for us.

So, instead of sending us out of the kingdom, they’re sending us off the planet.

That’s right.

We’re coming there. To Earth.

This is going to be fun.

Chapter 42 (Part 2)

-->

Akeelay

Hey guys, sorry about that short break, although I guess you didn’t notice it, because you’re reading, not here with us. Funny.

Well, anyway, Kaolin was writing, and Lymlock, like he’s been for most of the day when he wasn’t writing, was off sitting in the corner, angry at himself and us. Especially us.

I was sitting right behind Kaolin, watching him write, when suddenly somebody grabs me around the neck and yanks me upright.

Of course, it was Lymlock. I couldn’t say anything, because he was nearly strangling me.

Gasping for air, I heard him hiss, “Let me go, traitor. Or I’ll kill her.”

Kaolin spun around, jumping to his feet. He looked at me uncertainly, then at Lymlock.

“Don’t try a spell, unless it’s to unlock the door,” Lymlock warned him.

He stood there, unsure of what to do. I understood why, of course, but I was going to die.

I grabbed for my knife at my belt. Even though this had nothing to do with a spell, it was still a knife, and it would still help me escape.

I found an empty belt, no sheath, no knife, and I cursed my earlier self for leaving it in my room. I had no weapon.

Lymlock increased the pressure around my throat.

“Do it!” he demanded, but I barely heard him at that point.

Suddenly, out of options, I jerked my head forward as hard as I could, then yanked myself out of his grasp.

He glared at me resentfully. I shrugged in response, acting like it was no big deal.

“If you try anything like that again, Malin,” Kaolin said coldly, emphasizing the first name he knew Lymlock hated, “I will kill you. I don’t care what the king and queen say.”

“And then you’ll be ‘banished’ too.”

“He can claim self-defense,” I said calmly. “And trust me, you won’t be missed. At all.”

“Fine,” he growled, still glaring at me.

Right now Kaolin is watching him, but I should probably let him write now. Or Lymlock.

Chapter 42 (Part 1)

-->

Kaolin

Chapter 42

First, you have to understand about the relationship between our worlds. It’s very one-sided, but very thorough.

If we’ve done our job right, this is the first time you’ve ever heard about the world of Mithden. This is perfectly fine by us. We don’t want your world to know about us. The reasons for that are many and varied, and they’re mostly political stuff.

But the point is, we know everything about your world. We know about your advancements in science, we know about your languages, we know about your people. We’ve referenced your measurements  (hours, minutes, feet) throughout this letter, and that’s because those are what you know, and you’ll understand it.

We’ve sent things over to your world. Batteries. Light bulbs. Caerthin, even, although you know it by a different name, which it probably wouldn’t be good to tell you about. People, too. The very first humans on your world came from Mithden.

You do, however, have things that we don’t. Plastic, and certain metals that prevent us from ever having things like guns and cars and computers, and maybe it’s better that way. I certainly don’t miss them.

We have to get rid of the sorcerers, though. That’s the main point. We don’t want to kill them, because we’re wizards.

(Actually, a lot of us, including me, would much rather kill the sorcerers than what we’re going to do, but it wasn’t our decision.)

Hold on!

Sorry about that. The...weirdest thing just happened. Or not, if you know Lymlock.

The three of us who’ve been writing this letter, me, Akeelay, and Lymlock, are all in a caerthin-lined room, the door locked from the outside. This way Lymlock can’t escape, but if he tries anything, I have magyk to stop him. So I was writing, and, well, maybe Akeelay should write this.

Chapter 41

Chapter 41

Of course, it didn’t end there. There were a lot of loose ends that had to be tied up. Maybelle and the rest’s fight with the other sorcerers had gone well, luckily, even though most of the wizards didn’t have much magyk.

But eventually, all of the sorcerers were knocked out, and only a few wizards killed. Shield spells really do help.

Maybelle was shocked, just like we were, to see that Dossik had been switched over. She unfroze him and tossed him an apple, which he ate greedily, and a few more. He became good again.

Lymlock and the other sorcerers we locked up in the caerthin cells.

Benjamin found that very appropriate, and took every opportunity imaginable to go down there and laugh at them, claiming it was “only fair.”

None of the other wizards objected in the slightest, and many joined him.

But now we’re getting to the reason we wrote to you. Like the title claims, you’re all about to die.

Chapter 40

Akeelay

Chapter 40

Of course, everything had to happen right at that moment. I was still frozen in shock. Why was Dossik there? Then I remembered what he had told us just  before we left with Neyolc. He had said he would try to meet us back at the castle, and all three of us had completely forgotten about that.

I couldn’t believe that Lymlock had found him, realized that he was the same centaur we had been traveling with, and turned him. But he had, and now I had to turn around and face him, because he had just burst into the room.

“And now, you die!” he shouted, always the dramatic one.

“Not yet,” Kaolin growled, and shouted the spell for the signal we had arranged. “Tiffirma!”

We all waited. Even Lymlock paused for a second, expecting something to happen. But nothing did. Neyolc didn’t burst into the room like we had planned, and everything was exactly the same.

“That was effective,” Lymlock sneered. “Any other brilliant ideas?”

At that point we were all desperate. We had no idea where the king and queen were, and we had no way of finding out quickly. And Lymlock was blocking the only exit.

“Sensih!” one of the wizards shouted, aiming the spell at Lymlock.

But before it reached him, he threw up a hand and shouted, “Tarka!” The shield spell was effective, and nothing happened.

I pulled out my knife, not knowing what good it would do. But at the moment I did so, words burst into my head, and I spoke them without thinking about it.

“Ego spiritu liberabit vos!”

There was no effect for a beat of silence, everyone looking at me in confusion.

Then, colors exploded in the room. Running over the walls, racing through the air, rainbows of color shot out like fireworks going off. One big massive flash, and everyone passed out except for me, even Dossik, breaking his spell.

“That was effective,” I murmured to myself. I realized what had happened in that moment.

The knife had been possessed by a spirit. Spirits are magykal creatures that possess inanimate objects. They choose an owner, a certain person that, for whatever reasons they want, will somehow come to own that object, which reflects spells. That was why Maybelle and Kaolin had said that there was magyk on it, but not an actual spell. Eventually, if they need to, the owner can speak four key words to release the spirit to help them.

It didn’t really help me much, though. Obviously, Lymlock was out of the equation, but so were Kaolin and all the wizards that could help me. And now, I had a useless knife and a completely differently colored throne room, and no idea of how to find the king and queen.

I didn’t know where the other wizards and sorcerers were, or who was winning. I had no special talents, really, that had gotten me this far. It was all the spirit and Maybelle and Kaolin with the talents.

All I had was the dedication not to quit. And I guess technically I had started the quest, and I should finish it.

I had no idea what to do at that point. I looked around the throne room. Most of the colors in the room had switched, so there was little I really recognized.

A rectangle stood out to me. I hadn’t noticed a differently colored rectangle ever before. It was on what used to be a blank white wall, but was now fuchsia, and the rectangle was bright green. I walked over to it and realized that it was a door.

A door I had never noticed before. What better place to hide the king and queen if you wanted them out of the way?

I slowly walked over to the door and opened it, holding and twisting the ridiculously colored doorknob.

A small room, containing a bed and a few tables, stood behind the door. On the bed lay the king and queen. I rushed over to the bed and pulled out the now-dirty blue feather.

Realizing that I didn’t know what to do with it, I passed the feather an inch over their bodies.

First the king, then the queen opened their eyes.

Our quest was over.

Chapter 39

SO sorry for not updating in forever. Life got in the way. I'll catch up and probably finish the book today. :)

Kaolin

Chapter 39

And, yeah, we fought. Magykal fights are hard to describe or explain if you can’t see magyk. Fortunately, I can, but you wouldn’t truly understand anyway. Spells were sent back and forth, we fought, and that was pretty much it.

There were two of them for every one of us, but we had a cause. Defending is harder than trying to get through, especially because we didn’t care about killing them, we just wanted to get through.

So we shot ‘unconscious’ or ‘freeze’ spells, trying to get them out of our way.

And we got through eventually. Pushing them aside, literally and magykally, the 5 of us not dead or unconscious got through.

And what we saw...was a surprise at the least.

It was Dossik. Seriously. He wasn’t like he used to be, though. The sorcerers, probably Lymlock, had turned him.

He wasn’t on our side.

It was a bigger surprise for Akeelay and I than it was for the other wizards, though. We stopped in our tracks, shocked, but the other wizards just kept rushing forward.

“Stop!” Akeelay commanded before anybody could kill Dossik with a spell.

Each of the wizards was so stunned at her tone that they halted. Dossik kept running, so I took the liberty of freezing him with a spell.

“Istiva!”

Dossik stopped, unable to move but still looking mad, in both terms of the word. He seemed both furious and crazy, his eyes dilated intensely.

“What’s going on?” the same wizard who had led us to the throne room demanded. “Do you know him, and what is he doing here?”

“Yes, we know him, but there’s no time for that now,” Akeelay said urgently. “We have to find the king and queen! Where could they be?”

And, of course, it was at that exact moment that Lymlock burst in through the doors behind us.

Chapter 38

Maybelle

Chapter 38

Hi, I’m Maybelle. Obviously. So, I’m just filling in a few things about how our fight was going, because it was actually pretty interesting.

We broke in through the window and turned off our levitation spells. The people in the area dropped everything they were holding and staring at us in shock. I looked around. We were a messy, unorganized bunch of wizards, but we were most likely the only wizards they had seen for nearly a month.

I felt sorry for them in that moment. They probably had it much worse than Akeelay, Dossik, Kaolin and I did. At least out there, sorcerers were just hunting us down – we had a decent chance of escaping them. But here, they had to face the sorcerers each and every day, knowing that they might not survive to see another sunrise.

But that wasn’t the point. In only a few moments, sorcerers flooded up the stairs toward us, looking ready to kill whatever and whomever they saw.

They weren’t ready to see us. It seemed to be as big of a surprise to them as it was to the nonmagykans standing around, still in shock.

“Now!” I called to the wizards, supposedly the same way Lymlock had done when the sorcerers had attacked from the same direction.

“Sensih!” we all shouted, aiming our wands or hands at the sorcerers.

Many of the near-100 strong band of sorcerers went out, just like that. It really was that simple. I could understand how easily Lymlock took over, especially with only 37 guardians.

But this castle was ours to take back, and we would do it. I didn’t see Lymlock among the crowd, which slightly surprised me. I would have expected him to be one of the first to push through and attempt to kill us. Perhaps I didn’t know him as well as I thought I did, I mused as we sent out more unconsciousness spells.

But then, maybe he was just busy.

Struck by the sudden thought that Kaolin and Akeelay could be in trouble, I redoubled my efforts.

All of we wizards were fighting as hard as we could, but the strain was just too much. We hadn’t truly fought a large group of either sorcerers or other magykal creatures in a long time, and it showed.

The sorcerers were starting to overpower us. I watched many of my best friends die, and that was when I snapped. Even though I knew that Group B might need her later, I signaled Neyolc.

Everything continued the same way for a moment, and then bricks and stone fell everywhere. I created a quick physical shield.

Note on shields: There are two kinds. One blocks all magyk (well, spells at least, other magyk, such as from different magykal creatures, is a whole other chapter – literally, there are books about it), for which the spell is Tarka, but the other kind blocks actual objects in the vicinity, which is Rotegu. I had just created the latter.

As another side note, I have no idea how I, or other magykans, know the spells. When we know what spell we want to use, the appropriate word just flows out.

But let’s get back to the fight. Neyolc swooped in, breathing flames and looking terrifying. If I didn’t know her, I would be deathly afraid. Actually, I did, but I was still scared.

She burnt a lot of the sorcerers, but I doubted any would mourn their loss. With the possible exception of their living friends, who were cowering in terror as the dragyon rose back out of the castle after only a few moments.

After that, it was easy to capture the rest of them, shooting them into unconsciousness.

The whole battle took almost one of your hours, but it seemed longer.

“Now what?” Edina asked. We really didn’t have a plan for what to do after the fight. The point was to get the sorcerers out of commission, so that the others could awaken Demivid and Reyna, the king and queen.

And we got the sorcerers out of commission. We had achieved our goal, and now I had to worry about how the others were doing.

Chapter 37

Lymlock

Chapter 37

Yes, I had been expecting them. I knew those wizards, Maybelle and the traitor, and the girl. They would have a backup plan in case the direct attack didn’t work. And I knew exactly where they would be going.

I’m smart. I figure these things out.

So anyway, we fought. My sorcerers outnumbered them 2 to 1, so we had a high probability of success. The sorcerers were all overly confident, of course. They normally are.

But like I said, I knew them. They would have a plan in case something went wrong, probably an extra resource or reinforcements. But that would be all right. I had backup plans too.

Chapter 36

Akeelay

Chapter 36

I led the other members of my group, 7 wizards and Kaolin, around to where the pegasus stables were. I didn’t think Lymlock knew about the secret passageways throughout the castle, so I wasn’t worried about going in.

Actually, it was just the opposite: I was anxious to begin. We had gone through this whole quest, fighting off enemies left and right, and we were too far in it to fail now. So I wanted to go before too much time passed.

I yanked open the heavy trapdoor that concealed the entrance. I wondered for a moment why this felt so familiar. I had never entered through the hatch.

Then I realized that it was the same type of door that had covered up the lair of the sorcerer who had captured us back in Melzult.

Shaking off the bad memories of that place, I started down the stone steps of the secret passageway.

I guided my team down the path I had traced so long ago, fleeing from the castle from Maybelle’s room.

It was amazing how much had happened in such a short amount of time. But I’ve said that before, so I’ll just continue with the story.

We walked down the hallway, footsteps echoing in the cold silence of the tunnel. Eventually we came to the trapdoor leading to Maybelle’s room. I cautiously pushed it open, hoping there would be nobody on the other side.

There wasn’t, luckily enough, and I breathed a sigh of relief before looking around. Seeing something so normal after all that time was just surreal. It was just strange, thinking that Maybelle would come in any minute and knowing she wouldn’t.

“Come on, let’s go,” I whispered to the others, afraid someone would hear even through the soundproof walls. It was good that they were soundproof, but we had no way of knowing if there was an army on the other side of the door waiting for us.

Kaolin pushed in front of me and opened the door first. He really seemed to want to protect me.

“All clear,” he informed us quietly. “Let’s go. I think I know the way, but you probably know it better than I do, Akeelay. Or the rest of you.” 

“I know the way really well,” I murmured back. “But the other wizards live along this corridor too, and maybe it would be best if one of them led.”

“I’ll go first,” a tall woman said. She wove through the small group and walked out of the door, turning left.

We followed after her. Not knowing any better place to start, we had decided to go to the throne room first, and go from there.

The wizard in front turned the corner, and I heard her say, “Sensih!” If she needed the unconsciousness spell, there must have been a sorcerer. The wizards and I rushed around the corner to join her and saw only one sorcerer lying on the ground. The rest of the hall was empty.

“Only one,” she reassured us. “Let’s keep moving.”

The moment was tense. We had just made our first real move in what we were all thinking of as a war.

“We’ll be fine,” Kaolin whispered to me. “If we really need help, anyway, we can just signal Neyolc.”

“Right,” I responded, smiling up at him. He was a few inches taller than I was, and that could seem comforting or annoying, depending on the situation.

But I digress. We kept carefully walking down the hall. There were no more sorcerers walking around, which was good. Until we rounded the final corner to the throne room, and each of us stopped in surprise, shocked into motionlessness.

The sorcerers were waiting for us.

There weren’t very many there; most had probably gone to stop the intruders upstairs, the same way the wizards had so long ago.

But they were there. Lymlock, too. In his oh-so-dramatic way, he said, “Hello.”

Nobody moved.

“We’ve been expecting you.”

Kaolin unfroze and yelled, “Sensih!”

There was a beat of silence, and then, as a sorcerer fell, Lymlock yelled, “Attack!”