Argentorum
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Chapter 64: Contingency
🕑 Added 2020-02-04 18:53:46 +0000 UTCThe situation was, in a word, dire.
I was trapped with no recourse in a ritual circle. My friends and teammates were trapped inside a simulated dream that they believed was real. Martian Manhunter, the one supporting the dream, was trapped by some device in the hands of an unresponsive Red Arrow.
And all of us together trapped in a mountain, while the league looked elsewhere for enemies that had already come home to roost.
I’d already tested the circle, more than just being a simple barrier, it reflected my magic back at me in a way that destabilized the careful balance of chaos and order magic making up my body. It tethered me as well.
No doubt they’d noted my ability to teleport, the ward felt general, but it was layered into the warding circle adroitly. I could not shatter one before breaking the other.
And beyond the transparent pain of magic, Wotan and a the cowled form of Felix Faust smirked back menacingly at me. There had been a few other mages in the room when they’d first trapped me, but by now they’d left the room, doing something in the rest of the mountain.
I couldn’t deal with that problem without handling this one first, though.
“What did you do to Red Arrow,” I asked at length. The ‘hero’ in question was already at one of the computer terminals. He silently followed whatever orders the villains had for him, all of his earlier emotions subsumed beneath a void of silent obedience.
I may not have liked him, but no one who called himself a hero would do something like this of their own free will.
“Whatever are you talking about,” Faust said with a dry laugh. His face crinkled into a wide smirk. “We didn’t do anything, he was one of ours from the very beginning.”
“Somehow, I doubt that,” I said. I brushed against Red Arrows thoughts. Unlike a normal person, even one with no special abilities, he offered no resistance. His thought patterns entirely smooth and artificial in a way that could only be produced if… “He’s a clone.”
Wotan and Faust shared a glance. “What did you do to Red Arrow,” I asked again. This time, I let my agitation show, even as I started worming my telepathic fingers into Red Arrows thoughts.
There were traps and snares baked into his psyche, but not a single drop of passive resistance.
“You are in no position to make demands, child” Wotan said, relaxing again. “Besides.” He pointed lazily back towards the rest of the team. “Shouldn’t you be worrying about your own body?”
My eyes narrowed, turning slightly, “What are you talking…about.”
I was still there, lying on the table, as if I hadn’t moved. I hadn’t woken up. They’d pulled me from the dream, but not back into myself.
The tether stopping me from walking, I realized, was only working because I was not in my body. It could sink it’s hooks directly into my…my…
“Yes,” Faust said. “We have snared your very soul.” He let out a rasping chuckle. “Such powerful mages this time has, and yet they are all so ignorant of the true font of power.”
Before my eyes, my body, one made entirely of magic, began to flicker and lose its shape. Slowly, it’s color began to leech into red and gold.
Then, it solidified again, back into flesh and blood.
And a prosthetic arm dropped to the floor with a clatter.
I blinked. I looked down at my soul, at my two arms, golden fingers trembling.
When had I…
“Interesting,” Wotan stroked his sharp goatee. “I expected the body to evaporate, still, it appears you were right about her sorry state, Felix.”
The other man laughed. “I too was curious.”
I looked back up to my form, now sans an arm, and to a prosthetic that I hadn’t removed or serviced or even thought about for…for weeks? For months?
How long had it been since I’d forgotten about losing an arm?
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Did you ever wonder, little girl, why there were not more mages on Earth who consumed the power of elementals and other such things?” Wotan asked. His voice was light, conversational, even as I struggled to regain my equilibrium.
Had I really just forgotten that Klarion had taken off an arm? Yes, I’d become Fate soon after, and absorbed Klarion shortly after that.
But that wasn’t when I’d forgotten, when I’d stopped taking it off at night or…or…
“The reason,” Wotan continued. “Is that no matter the ritual, or the power or skill of the controller, we are ever the ones who are consumed.”
“It is only a matter of time before all that we were is subsumed into the elemental, and the being the mage tried to tame is born again from the ashes.”
“No,” I said. “That didn’t happen to me.”
“You were more stable than most I’ve seen,” Faust said. “Chaos and Order, hmmm? Perhaps should sacrifice your soul to angels and see where that leads…but in the end, you were merely going about it slower than most. Already, your astral body was beginning to absorb your physical one. I wonder, were your thoughts effected? Were Chaos and Order slowly beginning to twist your mind?”
I wanted to say no. That there was no way I’d been changed, that I’d made decisions because the magic coursing through me had altered my state of mind.
But on the other hand, that’s what mana did, didn’t it? I’d learned that all the way back in Ivalice, when I’d sought out red motes—red mana—because it helped me live in the moment, helped me forget the past.
How much more potent would an entire plane of chaos and order be, two endless streams of mana constantly being refreshed as they cycled through me.
Immediately, I began to doubt.
There were times, looking back, where my choices seemed…different. Like when I’d let the Dragonborn go. I’d justified it, to Raven and to myself, that it wasn’t my job to play Judge and Jury.
Or when I’d gone so quickly from killing supremacists in Atlantis to shopping with my friends, without a single care of the blood I’d spilled.
The things I’d done, none were so odd that I could say they weren’t my choices. Any one of them looked like something I might have done anyway, if I’d still been entirely human.
But were all of them?
Was every single action I’d taken, since usurping the might of Fate and Klarion both, was every action the same?
Forgetting that I’d lost an arm certainly was not.
And realization crystalized.
I’d compartmentalized.
Pushed the thought of my own amputation to the side, until it had been swept away by the throes of chaos within me. Until the weight of order sought to impose upon my physical form the internal reality that I’d unwittingly created for myself.
Even now, the material of the prosthetic was changed. The metal was curved, almost organic, though nothing like how it had looked while I still wore it, when it had looked like it was my arm.
“Someone would have said something,” I murmured. But even as I said that, I remembered.
‘I might be able to regrow it’ I’d told Batman and Red Tornado something like that.
No doubt that little tidbit had made its way to the rest of the team. By the time I got to Ritz, she might not have even noticed the difference between my fake arm and my real one.
“Poor child,” Faust said. “Yours was the slowest of changes, and all the more insidious for it. It might have even been a decade before the shifts in your personality could no longer have been excused as mere human change.”
Wotan smirked. “How fortunate for you that you will not live long enough to meet that end.”
I snapped back to the now. Even though I was still reeling inside from the idea that my very mind might be slowly changing into something that was not me, that was not the closest fire. Not by a long shot.
“And what are you going to do to me, then?”
Felix Faust laughed. “Why, I am going to sacrifice you to a demon, of course.”
I winced, Faust was known for that, after all.
With a frown, I took up my attack on Red Arrows mind once more. The time for subtly had clearly passed. With a grunt, I bulldozed past the clone’s implanted defense, a dozen thought traps going off against my psyche.
But as Wotan and Faust had been so kind to point out, my mind was hardly a human one.
Even as Wotan felt what I was doing and raised his hand to cast, I broke through.
A surge of orange light leapt through the air.
But not before Red Arrow’s had came down on the panic button.
Chains slammed into his form, throwing the clone against the wall. The alarm was already blaring, lights flashing as the mountains own security systems were made aware of the breach.
Wotan spat. “Finish here, I go to help thorn with the defenses.” With a twirl of his cloak he flew from the room.
Faust sighed. “And here I thought I’d have the time to properly set up a ritual for each of your little friends,” he said. Raising his arms. “A mass sacrifice simply does not have the same power, but don’t worry, at least your friend will be joining you in hell sooner rather than later.”
“Don’t worry,” I parroted. “I’ll be sure to drag you down with me.”
Internally, however, my thoughts were far away.
With Red Arrows jumbled mind as a relay, I reached my Telepathy out past the boundaries of the mountain. The circle I was trapped in had constrained it, but with Red Arrow to function as a hole in the defenses…
‘Ritz!’
I felt a tenuous connection snap into place.
“Child, you are a century too young to get me monologuing,” Faust said. Then he began to chant.
‘What? Taylor, what’s up?’
‘Listen. They’re stuck in a dream, I need you to get them out!’
‘A dream? Who, get who out?’
In front of me, Faust’s voice began to rise, and I felt the shackles in my astral form pull taught. I fought against the pull, but here I had no leverage, no power.
Faust had the lever and the place to stand, and I was much lighter than the entire world.
‘No time, Ritz.’ I sent. ‘I need to pull your mind into the dream, but I can’t do it on my own. I need you to trust me.’
If she resisted, even a little bit, I wouldn’t be able to do it.
‘I’m ready’
I allowed myself the smallest of smiles. I knew I could count on her.
‘Good luck, I’ll try to make my way back as soon as I can, but after this, you’re on your own’
I yanked, and Ritz ‘jumped.’ Letting me pull her mind back to the mountain on a tether, slamming it into my own body and into the dream just as Faust’s voice rose to a fevered pitch.
With nothing left for me, no way left to resist, I pulled my astral body tight in against myself, hardening my soul as some terrible presence from the void rose up to grasp it.
I felt claws closing in around me in a vice, but they would find no crack in my armor.
If they swallowed me, they would choke.
Then I heard Ritz in my mind, saying ‘Um, Tay, if you’re out there, why the heck are you also in here?’
I had enough time to blink, but even the feeling of surprise I tried to send back was swept away as the circle flashed a bright and bloody red around me.
And I was yanked into the depths of hell.
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A/N: Sorry for the delay. I've been working on finding a balance between keeping up on my commissions without letting Well Traveled to slip. Unfortunately I had to shuffle around my schedule some this weekend and it cut into the time I was planning to write this chapter. Shouldn't happen again.
Next up: Where in the World is Taylor 2?
