Rune Mage [Fantasy/Adventure | Book 1 +2 | Complete]

Chapter 83: Hellfire

Chaos erupted.

Kommora flicked her finger. On cue, all the state mages whose loyalties she'd suspected froze, alert but rooted to the spot. The sudden flood of magic out of her body to activate the runes Maura Woodbead had prepared sucked the air out of Kommora's lungs. She swayed on the spot. Dankworth, Hatman, and the others who remained, roughly half of the original number, paused, on edge.

Bonneville tutted, annoyed.

"You think you're so clever, Kommora Haigh," she called out. "But you're all going to die anyway, so why put up all the fuss?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" said Hatman, his voice reverberating in the hall.

"You'll see." Bonneville smirked, her eyes bright with anticipation. She turned around to leave.

"I'm not done talking to you yet!" Hatman hollered, striding forward. He threw flames towards her, but she didn't even turn around to protect herself. Butterworth also had his back turned. No doubt, judging by the intensity, Hatman only intended to make them stop in their tracks and elaborate rather than to maim -- but the fire hit an invisible wall.

Runes on the archway above the king's mages' heads glowed on contact. Rinoa Gruger had runed their balcony against magic, almost as if she'd predicted the state mages would attack them.

Butterworth glanced over his shoulder, his good eye mischievous.

"It was nice knowing you, mages," he said softly, with triumph, disappearing into the shadows.

Before the remaining mages could shout, the peripheries of the hall erupted in white flames, so hot the ice remains from Bonneville's flash magic vaporised on the spot. The mages shouted, alarmed. The burst mages and those with water-based flash magic acted at once, attempting to summon enough to put the fire out, but the flames grew in intensity. Kommora narrowed her eyes, squinting on the far walls beyond the dancing light. The runes were invisible before when the mages had first set foot within the hall, but now they glowed a mix of orange and violet, lining the entire wall around them. Six locking circles, each with a power-increasing sigil. The runes would not burn for long, but with the immense heat they generated, they didn't need to. It would only be minutes before they were rendered to charcoal.

The state mages shouted in alarm to each other as each of them failed to drench the flames. Where rune magic failed in speed it more than made up for in tenacity and power. This level of rune magic could not be easily taken care of with water alone, nor any capacity of flash or burst magic to overwhelm them, not when the runes themselves still worked.

Sweat poured off Kommora in buckets. Her skin tingled as if they were already on fire, the intensity of the flames digging deep beneath her flesh. The mages' panicked voices were drowned in the roar of the fire. She thumbed the runes in her cloak. They needed a shelter until the runes burned out, but she didn't have one large enough to save them all.

A shower of thuds rained around them from above. The ground shook. Just before the runed flames exploded, huge metal jaws rose from the ground around the group congregated in the centre and swallowed them, plunging them into darkness and an eerie stillness -- and then their world lit up. The metal dome that surrounded them became red hot. The runed flames roared, furious about its cheated targets. The mages yelled, withdrawing from the edges. Kommora could only hold her breath. It was close. Too close.

After what seemed like an age, the dome dissolved away. The remains of throwing knives lay as a puddle of metal on the blackened ground, the last of the violet runes fading.

"Move it!" Kommora yelled, spinning around. The mages that support the king's mages were still rooted to the spot, only their ogling eyes giving away their consciousness. The rest of them hesitated before following. Kommora stormed across the hall and kicked the large double doors open, only to find the soldiers guarding the corridor already knocked out on the ground.