THE FOUR SECTORS WARS - Sample Chapters

THREE

"I thought you quelled the storm!" Raikin said, surprised, shouting over the clamor. Outside Pilmadrin's protective interiors, Mother Nature raged with the fury of angered gods. 

"Just a children's spell, for helping kiddies sleep past fears of boogie men. I have a way of replacing reality with illusion." 

"Handy trick. Only I fail to see how it serves us in this context." 

"Wait and see." 

She led Raikin by the hand. At first he found the gesture demeaning. It was the second time in as many minutes that he'd been compared to a little child. But seconds later she slipped and, had he not been holding onto her, she would have cracked her skull on the polished stone beneath her feet. 

"Thanks," she said, as he lifted her up. He yanked a little too hard and, the next thing he knew, her lips were pressing against his. He moved to continue the kiss, and she was already pulling away from him.  

"Honestly, it was just a kiss of reassurance." 

"We must hurry," she shouted over the winds. "There's no surviving this storm out in the open!"  

"Now she realizes this," Raikin muttered under his breath. 

Inside of two steps, he lost sight of her. Raikin bolted forward and caught her arm, this time holding on for dear life. 

"Wait!" He waited for her to pause in her mad flight long enough to focus on him. "Instead of fighting this storm, we use it to our own ends." 

"What do you mean?" 

He grabbed her hands. "Shinadra Schlera Crarrara Spunden!" And they were off, riding the gale force winds.  

They didn't land for a long time. When not cursing him, she laughed from the adrenaline rush and for the gift of flight, clearly something neither of them had experienced before now. 

By the time they descended, they were clear of the valley, touching down on a butte that appeared to enclose the valley below.  

"What made you consider such madness?" she asked. 

"Just a theory I've been working on that the thing you're fighting is the very thing you should be embracing." 

"That's crazy talk." 

"Is it?" He pointed to the lightning touching down a good fifty feet from them, close enough to make her hair dance with static electricity. He broke free of her hand and ran to stand in the spot blackened by the lightning strike. He bore his chest by ripping open his shirt and he extended his hands to the heavens. "Here I am! Give it to me!" 

"Such bold talk for someone who must surely know lightning never strikes in the same place twice."  

She no sooner said the words than lightning struck a second time exactly where he was standing. Raikin tilted his head back and his eyes rolled as the lightning flash held seconds longer than it should have. When it released him, he buckled to his knees, laughing. 

"How is it you're alive?" 

"I just opened myself to the experience without fear. I didn't resist. So there was nothing to push back against the lightning." 

He was giddy from adrenaline. His mad laughter served as a Geiger counter for just how sauced he was on his own spiking hormones. 

"It pickled your brain all the same. God knows if you'll ever find sanity again." 

He was still laughing when she brought him to his feet. "Behold!" he shouted, pushing her away. He held out his hands much like he imagined Moses did in the desert when he parted the Red Sea, and split the butte down the center, channeling a bolt of lightning that fed through him from the sky above.  

The butte continued to widen until there was a lush valley in the center at the same depths of the valley from which they came. "I am a shaper of worlds! A creator of life! I am that I am!" he said.  

She ran up to him, shaking him to see if she could clear his head from the ambrosia pouring over his brain courtesy of getting a lightning bolt to the head. "Snap out of it!" 

"Whatever for?" 

He slung her arms over his shoulders, and dove over the butte's side into the new valley he'd opened up with his nature-infused magic.  

Seconds later, wings sprouted from his sides. They flapped a couple times before stabilizing, allowing them to glide on the updraft of wind.  

"You will exhaust yourself, and then your magic will not be there when you need it! All your showing off will be for naught. You'll wish you had an ounce of humility." 

And still he couldn't stop laughing. 

She hasn't grasped that everything I've done so far is but an aspect of my magic aimed at binding her heart to me!  

"Fly us up, not down," she said. "The magic of Hitara is defined by geography. The canyon lands below will have magic different from the valley whence we came. It's vitally important we learn the rules of the land before we show our hand, lest we expose ourselves to wizards who've mastered the rules of their dominions well enough to break them, while we're fumbling to learn the basics." 

He smiled in response, refusing to take her seriously, still too high on his own endorphins to think straight.  

Tired of arguing, she whispered words of magic that couldn't be heard over the sound of the wind. "Prelandris faracas mundi clavos!"  

Suddenly, the wall of water coming at them up the center of the canyon left nowhere for Raikin to go but up. So he went up, herded by Linara's enchantment spell that made him see things which weren't there.  

Once they were flying above the butte, she needed to get him higher to ride the trade winds upon which they could soar much faster toward Rimron - a transition zone between grassland and mountain steep where the magic was more familiar to her. It was almost a second home, after the Rosan Valley, where she had spent most her life, and Raikin had spent all of his. 

Before Raikin knew it, he was flying through a field of giants tending their crops. They swatted at him as if he were a tiresome wasp. He furiously beat his wings to climb above them.  

Once high over their heads and reach, he found the air much easier to stay aloft in, and it was carrying him along at a much faster rate.  

Linara looked back at the giants with a twinkle in her eye, pleased with her magic, though surprised it worked at all this far from the Rosan valley. Or that her spells didn't backfire and conjure all manner of things as the acoustics affecting her words were shifted by the ever-changing topography of Hitara. Her only explanation for it was that she was and had been every time she had exercised her magic within bodily contact of Raikin. Somehow, like an ember thrown from the fire, Raikin sill glowed with the magic of the Rosan Valley. Soon enough that ember would die out and they would want to be lower to the ground. She could only pray that they would reach Rimron before that happened.