Multiverse of Magic & Mistakes (Completed)

Part Two - The Battles of the Three Realms - 2.2.12 Chapter 12

The Red Dunes, Ashein, 328 years ago.

"Shit!" swore Lissa loudly as with a screech of flapping wings, a shower of projectiles hit her shield, causing her to lose focus and the portal not to appear. She shook her head at the awaiting group of mages, all five of them heavily laden and very anxious to start their new lives in a new world. They would have to wait a little while longer before she was ready for another attempt to pass them through.

Those fucking shifters! Ceaselessly, for over the past two days, they had been bombarding the mages camp, out in the dunes. Lissa barely had a moment of peace, let alone long enough to pause and enter the deep spell trance require to open a portal into the forest land. Only two groups of mages, including Calem, had made it through so far.

What the shifter's lacked in number's they made up for in the sheer desperation and audacity of their attacks. There was no pause in the showers, the calm of the dune field was now forever broken. New members of the Echelon and those unskilled at shielding were fainting left right and centre, unable to constantly protect themselves. Those stronger or more experienced were using all their energy in protecting the camp, and in protecting their most important asset, the only mage capable of getting them all out of here.

Reinard had insisted that they make their grand exodus from this realm into their new one from the location out in the dunes where Lissa had created the first portal from. This location was safe, they knew that casting portals from here lead them into the centre of the forest clearing. Who knows what would happen if they tried to cast the inter-world portal from a different location? It was not worth the risk, trying something different with the portals when any small changes at this end could have unknown consequences for where they emerged into the new world. Lissa and the Echelon had reluctantly agreed. And so that meant, they needed to leave the from Lissa's spot out in the dunes.

Being out here in the desert left them sitting ducks for the shifters to attack, hell-bent as they were that the mages should not be leaving.

The first wave of attack had hit them all by complete surprise. Lissa knew Caeli was desperate and loathed her plan, but no one had expected that they would go as far as to attack. Lissa had just successfully cast the first portal allowing for Calem, and four other mages to step through into the other world. She had been sitting on the sand, gathering her energy and her support, when the shifters hit them all on mass with a wave of bricks and boulders and other material gathers from the crumbling city.

Lissa had thrown up a quick shield charm, preventing the shifters from causing her any damage. Many of the other mages had not been so skilled or so fortunate. At the first sight of blood, and brain matter splashed across the sand, Lissa had collapsed to her knees retching and sobbing and shaking until Reinard found her, placed his arm around her shoulders and dragged her into a tent to recover.

Life in the red dunes was never going to be the same again.

Reinard and Lissa met with Caeli, who was somehow now the shifters de-facto leader, in a last-ditch effort at peace talks. They stormed back to the camp, less than twenty minutes later, with Reinard in a rage, unlike anything Lissa had ever encountered before. "They attack again, and we blow those fuckers straight out of the sky!" he had exclaimed, kicking up great clouds of sand "Fair enough, if they do not want to join us, but to actively block us.... The only thing those shifters will be transforming into if they attack us is corpses... We will be leaving the desert, and there is nothing they can do to stop us!"

When the next wave of shifters was spotted, flying out from the Towers, nets of rubble hanging beneath them, an alarm was raised. The mages set their shields and were ready to retaliate. Seventeen mages had been lost in the initial attack. Reinard was not going to let them lose any more. He would stop at nothing until all the mages were safely settled in the new land.