[Mkguild] Winter Assault - Murikeers sections, pt5

[Ryx]

Part 5


December 26, time indeterminate

The ocean was becalmed as far as the eye could see, the sky dotted with a
few puffy fair weather clouds but not a whisper of wind to be felt.  The water was a deep cerulean blue and upon
its glass smooth surface bobbed a single tiny boat.  Its single mast was bent, the guidelines
snarled and cut, and had been stripped of its sail.  The tattered fabric was pooled upon the lap
of the boat’s sole occupant, a slender black and white skunk trapped somewhere
between the upright stature of a human and the quadrupedal nature of a
beast.  He was garbed only in fur and bore
a look of studied concentration on his animalistic features as he deftly worked
to stitch up the multitude of small holes in it.

“What’re you doing?” asked a voice, interrupting Murikeer’s
concentration.  He blinked and looked up
to find Aniris, still garbed in the peasant clothes of their last encounter,
seated upon the forward bench chewing on a fried fish.  The skunk’s muzzle wrinkled around the
needles clamped between his teeth and he bent to his task again, threading the
curved needle in his paw through the tough canvas of the sailcloth.

“Mending m’ sail.” He mumbled around the needles.

“Why?”

“So I c’n resume m’ journey.” The skunk muttered, “Why’re you here?”

“I’m not.” Aniris offered with child-like aplomb, spitting a bone
overboard.  It disappeared into the blue
waters without so much as a ripple.  Murikeer glanced up with a scowl and paused in his work to pick up a
beaten tin cup to sip from it.  The
contents were the same shimmering blue of the sea around them.  Consuming it to the dregs Murikeer leaned
over and scooped up another cupful from the cerulean sea.  Taking another long draught he set the cup
down on the bench beside him.

“Then why’re you talkin’ to me?” the skunk groused as he resumed his work.

“I’m not, you are.” Aniris regarded the bony remains of his fish before
tossing it aside.  “You’re talking to
yourself.”

Murikeer chuffed a snort through his nose as he drew one of the holes closed
and tied off the thread.  Shifting the
sail about on his lap he sought out another hole and set to mending it.  “You’re in the Temple.” He groused irritably
and rolled his aching shoulders, “I’m dreaming.”  Not hearing a response from the figment of
his imagination Murikeer glanced up to find that the boat was again empty.  After taking another draught from his mug he
returned to his work.

“How far will you travel?” asked a voice, a different voice, causing
Murikeer to grumble at another distraction.  He did not bother to look up as he finished that rent and found another.  “How many will you leave behind to reach your
destination?”

Quirking his eyebrows Murikeer glanced up, a pithy response on the tip of
his tongue, but found his jaw unable to formulate words.  It hung in shock, needles tumbling into his
lap, as he found himself gazing at his old tutor, the mage Heiorn.  The man had lost the roguish look of gentle
age and looked positively haggard.  Gone
was the neatly trimmed beard around his mouth under an unkempt white nest that
hid his mouth almost entirely.  Likewise
his once salt-and-pepper black hair had become a long uncut tangle.  What was most striking, however, was his
absence of eyes.  Gazing at Murikeer from
the forward bench were strikingly empty pits of ravaged flesh that seemed to
look right through him.  Murikeer lurched
in surprise.  “Master?”

“Will you leave me behind, my boy?” the old man asked in a ragged croak.

“Leave you… Master, I do not understand?” Murikeer gaped.

“If not me, what of others?”  Heiorn
waved a hand toward something behind the skunk and his mending prompting him to
turn and look over his shoulder.  Behind
him was a forest clearing, close enough to step directly from the boat and onto
dry land.  It was an unremarkable
clearing; merely a smallish pool of sunlight that penetrated the forest canopy
above.  In its center was a small mound
of carefully laid stones.  Upon those
stones sat another man familiar to Murikeer, a pipe in his mouth as he looked
on.  “Will your travels leave him there,
as well?”

“Father,” Murikeer said quietly, jerking his gaze toward the bow of the boat
but Heiorn was not there.

“Don’t leave me behind, son.” His father said calmly from his seat upon the
cairn of stones, “You have a great journey before you, do not forget that I
have a journey of my own.  I cannot
undertake it where I rest.”

“Father, I –“ Murikeer turned back, but the clearing was gone.  He stared at the vast expanse of unending
blue for several long moments before he sighed and returned to his task.  The sail seemed to be repaired enough to be
usable so he set it aside and turned his attention to the mast.  It was in far worse condition than the sail;
a snarl of tangled and torn ropes festooned the otherwise undamaged spar of
wood.  Sitting he sat back to regard the
damage for a moment he raised his cup and finished what little remained.  He dipped it full from the ocean again and
sipped at it as he pondered where to begin.  Finally he leaned forward and took up the ropes, most of which had been
savagely cut.  Braiding them back
together was going to take a considerable effort.

Time passed, an accounting of which he could not make, while he laboriously
braided one rope after another.  The
clouds drifted lazily across the sky but the sunlight did not seem to waver.  Indeed, there seemed to be no sun in the
azure sky against which to mark time.  Time and again he dipped his cup and paused in his work to sip at the
cool blue water.  His body ached from
bending of his work but he suffered it; there was no other way to continue
onward if his boat was unable to move.

“Murikeer!??  Are you there?” asked a
voice insistently, interrupting him yet again.  He looked up toward the bow of his craft but no new visitor sat there.  “Are you with us, Murikeer?”

With a sigh Murikeer set aside his work.  None of it was wholly repaired but it would serve.  “I am.”

“I am glad!  Are you well?  What can you tell me?” the voice called out,
having no source but seeming to come from the very air around him.  “I am trapped in a kitchen with a drunk
opossum and, I believe, a wolf of some sort.  A very, very big wolf!”

“I am alive, what more I can tell you I do not know.  Who speaks?”  Murikeer asked of the unseen speaker as he sat back on his bench and set
to weaving the rope back into the eyelets on the sail.

“Dream!”

“I am, I know.”

“What have you seen?” the voice asked, “I know so little!  How fares Llyn?  The rest of the Keep?”

Murikeer twitched, the oceanic image shuddering and wavering under the
blinding white image of storm energies coruscating around a writhing body.  “Llyn,” Murikeer growled, feeling the
familiar dark weight of rage boiling up within him.  Overhead the cottony clouds darkened and
gathered.  Lightning flashed and distant
thunder growled.  Wind pulled at his fur
and he drew up the sail, watching as it bellied into the growing wind.  “Llyn is dead.  The Keep is in the hands of Nasoj’s
armies.”  His small craft began to slide
across the smooth blue ocean with increasing speed.

“They weaken, Murikeer.  I have done
what I can to disrupt their rest, but their most powerful, those that still
live, are guarded against me.  Beware of
them!”

Murikeer gazed up into the black clouds roiling angrily overhead, the
violence of the storm not raising so much as a ripple upon the ocean.  Only the bow of his tiny craft, speeding
swiftly across its smooth surface, cut a foaming wake.  “Where do they go to ground?” he yelled into
the wind, “Where is the one called Thorne!?!”  The ropes hummed under the strain of the mended sail but his repairs were
holding.  “Where will they strike next?”
“I know not where that one is!” replied the voice, growing distant, “Look to
the Long House, they are focusing their strikes there very soon!”
“There they shall die.” Murikeer growled as the wind of the growing tempest
yanked bodily at his fur, driving his boat into the greater darkness at its
core.

----

December 27, 7am

Murikeer awakened with a lurch and tried to pull himself upright only to
fail and flop into the straw enveloping him.  He was bone weary, weak, and ached from eartips to toeclaws.  Writhing against the infantile weakness he
pushed himself up onto his elbows and looked around in panic.  Fear clutched at his chest and sent his heart
to hammering in his chest.  His head swam
with vertigo but more from the weakness gripping his body than any sense of an
impending fall.

The interior of the building smelled overwhelmingly of horse and something
altogether different; a deep, sickly sweet stench of unwashed flesh.  He heard horses shifting about in stalls he
could not see from his nest in a pile of straw.  Somewhere a fire or lantern offered a wan orange glow to the building
etched with a chaos of stark shadows.  Something large shifted nearby and Murikeer sat up, laboriously, to see
beyond the grassy womb enfolding him.  His heart skipped a beat when he spied a huge, dark bearded head not far
away bent over some task beyond his sight.
Sensing his motion the giant turned toward him and smiled hugely, “Little
fur-man awake.” He observed with a voice like grist wheels reducing corn.  Murikeer flinched, expecting the monstrous
human to reduce him to a pulp with one swat of his massive hands.  “Sleep long, Bruug watch you.  Bad hurt, you rest.” He continued without
otherwise moving.

“I am better… mmh, Bruug.  Where am
I?” Murikeer slowly sat fully upright and saw that the giant’s soiled tabard
sported the crest of the Keep watch.

“Bruug’s home.” The giant offered slowly, “Bruug watch horses for black
horse-lord.”  One huge arm waved toward
the general dimness of the stables beyond.  Murikeer could see a few curious equine heads poking from a long line of
stalls.  None of them seemed particularly
concerned that a giant, likely capable of lifting one like a pet dog, was
seated at one end of their warm home. “No Lutin come here, Bruug no let
them.”  Judging by the various heraldic
markings on some of the stall fronts Murikeer judged that he was in Duke
Thomas’ stables.  “You hurt, little fur-man.  Bruug put liniment on back, but you rest.”

Murikeer lifted his arm and regarded the fresh pink of partially healed
flesh under the missing fur.  He had
managed to put some healing through his ravaged body while he slept and,
judging by the tightness across his back he knew that his burned flesh was in
far better condition.  The effort had
left his body dangerously short on inner reserves, however, and he found
himself amazingly hungry.  His arm still
pained him but his hand worked if with some loss of strength.  It would serve his needs.  “Food.” He chuffed as he levered himself to
his knees.  The giant, Bruug, extended a
hand and Murikeer found carefully contained strength in the fingers
offered.  Each was as thick as a large
man’s thigh and reeked of the yellowish paste that the giant had applied to his
back but not bothered to wash from his dirty hand.  With Bruug’s assistance he shuffled over to a
stool near the ferrier’s hearth that Bruug was using as a cookfire.

Suspended from a spit as thick as Murikeer’s arm was an entire cow and the
giant slowly turned it with a negligent push of his hand.  The meat was charred black on the surface but
smelled positively mouth watering.  Finding the blue stone dagger lying to one side with the Lutin’s magical
blade and a few other oddments gathered up during the giant’s wanderings he retrieved
it to carve a slab of haunch from the spit.  Bruug looked on as he tore into the steaming meat and, with a rumbling
grunt, nodded toward a barrel containing loaves of bread and cheese wheels.  “Horse-lord feed Bruug well.” The giant
smiled.  Murikeer dug a loaf from the
barrel and nodded.

“Murikeer.” He offered around mouthfuls of bread and beef, tapping his
chest.
Bruug nodded with the slow solemnity of the terminally dim-witted, “Bruug
know little fur-man, Mukieer.  Fight
brothers in holy place, not kill Bruug.”  Murikeer recalled, as well, the battle that had raged in Hough’s chapel
only months ago, not long before the Patriarch’s fateful visit.  Llyn had been placed under arrest as a result
because she had brought about the attack.  A magical sword she had stolen from a northern mage allowed him to open
a portal and through it send a force of attackers.  Only the swift arrival of capable fighters
had prevented the mage’s portal from establishing a bridgehead right into the
very core of the Keep.  Three giants had
been among the attackers, one of them being the giant who now shared his Yule
feast with Murikeer while the other two had fought to their own deaths.

As the beef and bread worked its way into his system Murikeer felt a measure
of his strength returning swiftly.  He
ate until he was so full he could barely choke down another muzzlefull but
still felt ravenously hungry.  His body
demanded recompense from him for pushing himself so hard over the past days,
moreso for the reserves tapped by the forced healing he demanded of it while he
lay unconscious under Bruug’s attentive care.  He sat before the ferrier’s hearth and waited for the strength to seep
into his weary muscles.  “Have you seen
more Lutins, Bruug?  Humans not from
Metamor?”
The giant nodded slowly and chewed on a shoulder bodily ripped from the
cooked cow.  Bones crunched under the
power of his jaws, “Some.  No come here.  Small few, some have white dogs like one Bruug
kill.”  Murikeer mulled that over while
he carved a bit more meat from the haunch of beef and wrapped it in a bit of
leather found hanging near the hearth.  That it may have been used to wipe a horse’s hoof did not cross his
mind.  Stuffing the bundle into a
saddlebag he stood slowly, swaying in place for a moment as his head swam anew,
and turned toward the door.  “Mukieer
leave?  Hurt!” Bruug protested, “Rest!”

“I cannot, my oversize friend.” Murikeer said back over his shoulder as he
stood before the slightly open door, “I’ve a life to avenge.”  He turned slightly and smiled with a slight
bow of his head, “You have saved my life.  The Duke chose well to make you his stableman.”

Bruug smiled beatifically at the compliment, “Bruug stay, keep horses safe.”

“You do that.” Murikeer slipped through the door and into the cold once
more.  Above the clouds had thinned to
dark gray tatters through which the blue of dawning sky peeked intermittently.  The storm had finally lost its strength.  Snow still fell lightly from the remnants but
it was clear that the storm was on its way out of the valley.  Murikeer stood under the icicle festooned
eaves for a few moments and scanned the park for signs of life; friend or foe.  Spying none he looked to the battlements and
the casements which looked out onto the park but, again, saw only the cold
stillness of death in the few bodies not buried in snow.

No few of them were Keepers; animal forms or otherwise, garbed in Metamor’s
colors or tattered fine clothes.  Among
them were the bodies of their foes, small and large alike.

-----

December 27 – time indeterminate

Murikeer began to fear that the castle had, indeed, fallen to the enemy as
he made his way through the corridors.  Small
clusters of Lutins, some accompanied by or accompanying human groups, moved
like packs of feral dogs through the corridors.  He could hear the sounds of battle from every side corridor he came to
but did not deviate from his course to examine them.  He had two goals set in his mind; the Long
House, and Thorne.  While he knew that
Kyia, now that she had been freed from whatever magical imprisonment that had
bound her, could guide him to the first goal he was not sure if she would be
able to point him to Thorne directly.

If the Long House was the focus of their next offensive push then Thorne
would be there, somewhere.  The mages
from the shop had said as much; he meant to join the main body of the attacking
force.  While he walked the skunk traced
upon his chest with one claw, inscribing runework into his very flesh with the
sharp tip of a claw.  Into those rune
structures he imbued as much magic as he could strip from the walls around him,
turning the surface of the stone ashen gray and leaving a pall of dust in the
air behind him.  He suffered the small
pains caused by his blood anchored spells, quickening shields both against
magic and mundane threats.  He was moving
toward the amassed enemy and could no more use spells that could be woven by
brief moments of concentration in the chaos of what could prove to be a
considerable fight.

A handful of Lutins and two humans crashed through a doorway ahead of him
and brought him to a halt.  The humans
were laughing at some shared joke while the Lutins, a bounty of captured
vintage in their small hands, chorused at what luck had brought them two.  The humans had naked swords glistening with
fresh blood and the Lutins looked as if they had rolled in it.  Before they realized that the corridor was
not clear both of the humans were on the floor crumpled up around the steaming
wreckage of their rib cages.  The Lutins
heard the sizzling shrieks of spell-spawned missiles and turned only in time to
see their taller compatriots fall.  They
turned their stunned attention toward the mage a half dozen paces away and had
a moment to register his presence before a wave of debris; broken stone and
wood, fallen torches still ablaze, and anything else not mortared to the floor
came surging toward them.  Small green
hands were thrown up before terrified green faces before the fusillade stripped
the armor from their bodies and the flesh from their bones.

Murikeer paused at the hacked doorway to look into the room, solidifying his
rage at the sight of wanton slaughter he beheld within.  A handful of adults, both human and animal
forms, lay scattered among the bodies of children within, all having been cut
down in a rage of bloodlust by their attackers.  None appeared to have had a weapon.  There were more than three dozen unmoving corpses; three dozen more
hapless victims of one man’s lust for power, left steaming in the cold air
spilling into the room.  With a snarl the
young mage turned away and trotted down the corridor left painted with a patina
of blood by his furious magic.  His paws
left red smears on the floor as he went.

A short time later he spied a lone Lutin standing sentry in a crossing
corridor and burned it down before it ever noticed his approaching
presence.  He paused and created a small
mirror spell to look around the corner before advancing.  The mirror revealed a corridor crowded with
startled Lutins and humans, all hastily hunkered behind drawn bows and readied
crossbows.  His lips peeled back in a
vicious leer as he wove a second spell and sent it into the corridor.  Someone among the waiting horde barked a
command and a whistling salvo of bolts and arrows tore through the illusion of
himself.  Before they could ready their
crossbows for another salvo he let the illusion fall and stepped around the
corner himself.  Arrows hastily knocked
were loosed but they wavered when they met his shields before lurching in mid
flight to carry on down the corridor behind him.  With a loud, animalistic howl Murikeer
extended both hands toward the crowd.  Fountains of flame erupted down the corridor followed seconds later by
the wailing screams of the burning invaders.  He left them to burn without lingering to deal with any who may have
survived.

He ran into smaller groups all heading in the same direction; some before
him and some coming from behind but all meeting the same eventual fate at his
hands.  Eventually the sounds of a hard
fought battle came to his ears and he slowed.  He sensed that the Long House, or some other embattled stronghold, was
close at hand and proceeded with more caution.  Around him his shields pulsed with so much energy they warped the very
air around him, lifting his fur as if in a gale.  His tail, the last several inches of it were
left naked by the moon dog’s bite, lashed behind him rapidly.

A rear guard of mixed Lutins and humans watched the back of the unseen
assault and let out a cry at his appearance at the end of a short, broad
corridor.  Behind them was a narrow
doorway and, beyond that, Murikeer could see forms milling about.  The sounds of battle almost drowned out the
human commander’s alert cry, and the subsequent cry that issued from him when a
coruscating bolt of raw energy struck his chest and sent him reeling backward
to fall in a heap.  His soldiers cried
out in startled dismay at realizing that they faced a mage given the fill fury
of Metamor Keep at his grasp and the rage of vengeance.  Arrows and bolts thrummed in the air but none
found a mark on the skunk as he charged into them, lashing out with bolts and
gouts of flame.  Summoning a pair of
crackling blue-white whips in his hands Murikeer lay among them with furious,
bestial abandon, snarling and kicking with magic enhanced claws.  All the while he left a conduit open to the
heart of Metamor’s well of manna, letting it flow into him unrestrained.  It was like standing beneath a torrent and
trying to direct its flow with only his hands and the weight of it threatened
to overwhelm him at every grasp upon its surging flow.

Within seconds he was standing amidst the results of his carnage but he did
not pause, continuing into the choked corridor beyond and hewing down those who
could not flee into the press of fighters trying to join the battle the dead
phalanx had been guarding.  The corridor
was too narrow to slip past his furious energies and their weapons only slid
from his powerful shields when they turned to fight.  At the end of the corridor was a larger
intersection and, beyond that, the battle was fully joined.

Warriors from the Long House, if the presence of Misha Brightleaf and his whistling
shadow axe was any indications, stood against an overwhelming force of Lutins
and human mercenaries.  A giant stood not
far from Murikeer, unable to join the fight because of the choke point of the
corridor, and looked down at him with a dubious stare of growing fear.  When Murikeer turned and snarled upward the
hulking giant dropped his huge mace and fled, crashing over the reinforcements
holding in the connecting corridor and scattering them in disarray.  Many of those, too, were routed by the giant’s
all too obvious panic.  What could
frighten such a beast into full retreat was more than they cared to face.

In the opposite direction was another force of reserves and, with a unified
war cry, charged toward the skunk.  The
vanguard came up abruptly short and those behind piled into them, their own
naked blades cutting into those ahead of them.  Murikeer pushed back against them with his shield, ignoring the larger
battle for a moment to push the reserves back.  They began to break at the rear and flee from a foe they could not face
while those in the center of the crowd were more and more pressed by the
invisible wall of magic force.  As they
reached another bottleneck, a single narrow doorway leading to an escape,
Murikeer dropped his pushing wall causing those crushed against it to pitch
forward onto their faces.  Those behind
them trampled over them at the sudden absence of the force staying them and
they, too, stumbled and fell.  A
thunderous roar of flame kept them from rising ever again and further panicked
those attempting to escape through the narrow door.  Lutins turned on Humans in a panicked bid to
escape, sparing a full scale war among the two erstwhile allies.

Extending his arms Murikeer hauled at the magics filling the walls about
him, feeling it surge into him with crushing force, and strode toward the main
battle.  “Thorne!” he bellowed, his
augmented voice causing the walls to shudder.  Fighters retreating from the fight to lick their wounds fell to blinding
bolts of magic energy and the enraged skunk strode over their twitching
remains.  “Thorne!” he bellowed again,
turning the heads of those at the rear of the assault.

Among them was his foe, the gray eyed mage turning to see what thunderous
creature called his name.  When he spied
Murikeer among the slaughter of their rear flank the mage’s eyes widened in
fear.  He turned and grasped the arm of a
mage standing at his side, interrupting the steady stream of his own magical
attacks, and turned him around.  “Sever
him, by the dark gods!” Thorne bellowed at the bald man’s face.  Around them the walls drained of color; from
the gray of neatly stacked and polished granite to the hue of rain-scoured,
aged boulders.  Wooded beams, age worn
and deep brown, became rotten lengths of ancient wood that began to splinter
under the decaying weight of stone they tried to hold up.  Murikeer extended his reach to the mages,
through them, and to the fight beyond.  He grasped every thread of manna he sensed and pulled it to himself,
sapping the stones even further, before extending his hands and summoning
flame.

Not the searing gouts that had burned down the foes he had faced before, but
a blast furnace of searing heat that turned leather armor to tinder and chain
links to molten steel.  The two mages
gritted their teeth and grasped their own magical reserves before Murikeer
could sap them but any lesser mages among the two warring forces was left
drained to the dregs.  The weight of the
energies bored a lance of pain behind Murikeer’s eyes but he pushed the
distraction away.  If he burned himself
out magically to slay Thorne it would be a sacrifice willingly surrendered.

“Thorne!” Murikeer snarled as he stepped into the void left between himself
and his foe.  Burning bodies writhed
across the floor and the Long House forces were in full retreat but Murikeer’s
vision was narrowed down to a tunnel of focus centered upon his foe.  Wrapping the stolen manna into another
crushing blast Murikeer sent it at the two mages in a torrent of flame that
would leave dragons envious.  Stone, left
cold and wet by the winter chill and blood coating it, shrieked and shattered
sending stinging splinters through the corridor.  A rumbling crash shook the floor as the
ceiling behind the two mages collapsed.  The bald mage waved his arms in a hasty, intricate spell as Murikeer
reached out further for the distant well of magic.

He found nothing.

That brought him to a startled halt as he reached once more and felt a skein
of power between himself and the magic of the Keep.  Thorne, his eyes wild with fear a moment
before, suddenly sneered in victory.  The
mage bent and picked up a fallen sword only to hiss and drop it hastily as the
fire heated hilt seared his palm.  “Very
good, my old tutor.” The mage growled as he fisted his hand to push back the
pain of his brief burn.  “It comes down
to this, at last.”

“To us, murderer.” Murikeer snarled as he drew on the energies he had
already taken into himself.  His shields
lost the distorting waver of their earlier power at the loss of Metamor’s
nearly limitless font of energies but they remained strong.  The bald mage sought to test them with a
hurled ball of flame and it spattered in the air inches from Murikeer’s
chest.  “I am going to kill you,
Thorne.  Slowly.”  Murikeer lashed out at the bald mage with a
long whip of energy.  The man let out a
startled yelp and danced back only to stagger over a fallen stone and fall to
his rump, saved only by his personal shields.  “You will scream before you die.”  The whip lashed sideways across Thorne and sparked off powerful shields.

“Tut tut, boy.” Thorne laughed, “You forget, the power of the storm is mine
to command.”  The mage extended his hand
and mimicked Murikeer’s magical lash.  Crackling energies passed through Murikeer’s shields, through his flesh,
and scored a searing line along the pale gray stone of the wall.  Murikeer did not feel the least of its
potency and the stinging splinters of rock slid from his shields impotently.  “Where is my phial?!” he roared abruptly at
the ineffectiveness of his own magic.  “Return it to me before you die!”

Murikeer barked a laugh of his own and bent to retrieve a dropped war
hammer.  He sent a short tendril of
cooling energies into the steel haft before he grabbed its naked hilt.  He bounced the heavy shaft in his hand and
circled his former student.  Thorne was
taller by head and shoulders than the skunk he faced and he massed easily twice
as much.  If it came down to a fight of
muscle and bone the human had an advantage that Murikeer was fully aware of yet
prepared to face.  Thorne’s magic could
not affect him, but the man’s shields were fully as effective against his magic
as any other.  The bald mage pulled
himself to his feet and looked around only to find that, other than the charred
and half buried dead, he was alone with Thorne against the rampaging skunk.

Murikeer marshaled his internal energies and sent a searing bolt toward the
bald mage.  If he could not kill the man
he would be limited to what he held, much of which was sustaining his shields.  With an angry snarl the mage’s shields
absorbed the bolt but wavered alarmingly; too alarmingly by far for the bald
man.  Spying a casement window he hauled
himself up onto the sill.  Thorne glanced
aside at him, “Where are you going, coward?” he snarled in fury.  With his own magic ineffective against the
lone Metamor mage his associate was the only one capable of defeating the
skunk’s power.
The bald man took a look outside briefly before looking to Thorne, “You’re
on your own, brother.” The man sneered, “He’s severed, deal with him.”  With that the man turned and threw himself
out the window.  Murikeer snarled at the
man’s cowardly act as well.  Out of sight
he could not be slain; his spell could not be broken from within while he lived.

With a yell Thorne drew a curved blade from beneath his robes and
charged.  Murikeer could see that, like
the mage Huk he had faced in the shop, the dagger was heavily enchanted.  Bending his knees as Rickkter had taught him
he braced to meet Thorne’s charge and raised the war hammer.  He poured magic into the steel and as Thorne came
in with a sweep of his dagger he struck out without making any attempt to
parry.  The dagger flared a brilliant
orange white as it lashed across his shields and the hammer’s steel head flared
a blinding blue when it struck Thorne’s defenses.  The steel spalled and melted in an eyeblink
leaving Murikeer with half a haft as they separated.  He cast the haft aside and flung out a
hand.  Another hammer rattled and lurched
into the air.  Thorne circled slowly, a
hunting cat seeking a moment of weakness in its prey, his gleaming blade
sweeping back and forth before him with the same leisurely stroke of a stalking
feline’s tail.

“Did I hurt you, boy?” Thorne taunted, “Did I cut down your precious
slattern?  Where did you hide my
phial?  Do you wear it, eh?”

“Where that is you will learn only from your dark god when you kiss his toes
in hell.” Murikeer replied.  With a flick
of his empty fingers he sent a shower of hot steel from the floor flying toward
his foe.  Thorne held up his own empty
hand and stopped every object in mid flight.  Caught between a contest of wills the weapons hovered a moment before
clattering to the floor.

“Do you think she was the only one dear to you that I’ve cut down,
boy?”  Thorne sneered.  Stone and timbers shuddered above Murikeer at
the man’s beck and a sudden collapse bent the skunk’s shields.  He darted away from the crushing weight of
denuded stone and reinforced his wavering defenses.  He could feel his magic rapidly draining away
as he tried to sustain his shields.  That
would mean that Thorne’s magic was likewise being drained; it would come down
to who could sustain themselves longer.  Murikeer knew that Thorne’s potency was considerable; he had known that
from his days instructing him in basic magic principle.  “Why am I here, then, if you left me under
that doddering old fool’s charge?” The human laughed slowly as he reached into
his robes and drew out a slender cylinder.  “Do you think I left him untouched before I left to hunt you down?”

“Heiorn was more than you will ever be.” Murikeer hissed.  A swarm of small stones, broken arrowheads,
bits of armor and bone still smoking swirled into the air around him.  “If he lives you will never touch me with
your minor power.”


      

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