Once again the armies of darkness are sweeping across the world and this time there may be no stopping them. Only by standing together can the heroes of civilization hope to prevail, but at this hour of their greatest trial the mightiest of their nu...
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No students were allowed within a mile of Lexandria University's research buildings. The magics practised there were so powerful and dangerous even in the best of times that only experienced wizards could be trusted to enter those hallowed halls. This wasn't just for the protection of the apprentices. Some of the experiments conducted there required magics so fragile and delicate that the slightest trace of residual magic left on a student who hadn't cleansed himself properly after a spellcasting lesson could wreck them irretrievably. In the best case, this could merely result in weeks of work ruined, leaving the wizards unhappy but otherwise no worse off, but a malfunctioning high level spell always had the potential to cause terrible destruction and loss of life.
Today, even these stringent precautions were redoubled, however. Every proctor in the valley was put on duty patrolling the empty fields surrounding the research complex to make sure no exceptionally resourceful student found a way to sneak in, and the teaching wizards made especially sure that every pupil was accounted for. The reason for all this was that the main conjuration room was filled to capacity with wizards and priests preparing to cast the most dangerous spell they'd ever dared to attempt in their lives.
Tragius watched the preparations from the neighbouring observation room, wishing he were twenty years younger. Now that they knew that a Demon Prince from the Pit was in command of the Shadowhosts, now that they knew his name, they would finally be able to hit back at him. Deal him a blow that would, hopefully, temporarily loosen his hold over his army, the first time anybody in the world had been able to do so since the Shadow had first formed over a century ago. All this time, the Demon Prince had sat, snug and safe in his monstrous and diabolical palace in the depths of the Pit, secure in the knowledge that, no matter how his armies in the worlds of the living fared, whether they won or lost, there was no way that his mortal enemies could hit back at him in his impregnable stronghold in the Inferno. He was like a klann player, the old wizard mused. Pushing pieces across the board. Hoping to win but knowing that even if he lost, there would always be another game, another chance to win. The mortals he fought were merely pieces on the board, not capable of striking back at the entity moving the pieces, not even supposed to know that such an entity existed. Tragius smiled grimly. That was all about to change. The pieces were going to hit back at the player, and hit him hard. He only wished he could be a part of it.
There were two teams of spellcasters in the conjuration room, a dozen wizards and priests in each team, forming two concentric rings around the circle of arcane symbols drawn in chalk on the floor. It had taken three days to draw those symbols. Each one had been drawn with exacting, agonising care from a set of templates normally stored in a massive steel safe in a cavern deep under the mountain, where they were guarded by deadly warding spells and magically created guardians so dangerous that they were themselves imprisoned by a whole array of warding spells. Another team of wizards had then spent two days checking and examining the symbols to make sure that they were as perfect as it was possible for imperfect mortals to make them. The tiniest errors, even a bit of graininess caused by the stick of chalk crumbling, would ruin the spell, with consequences so terrible that the word 'disastrous' was totally inadequate to describe it. Several symbols were erased and redrawn simply because the examining wizard didn't like the look of them, without being able to say why, and the erasure was so thorough and complete that the area of floor on which it had been, and on which it was redrawn, shone like a mirror. Even now, minutes before the ceremony was due to begin, the examining wizards continued to scrutinise them, and a single word from any one of them would be enough to postpone the proceedings indefinitely, or even cancel them altogether.
