Modern Magick

The Wonders of Vale: 17

Strong enchantments, indeed.

I realised that Jay was attempting to get my attention. This occurred to me only when he put his lips two inches away from my left ear and yelled, 'Ves!'

'What?'

'Em's using the lyre,' he screamed. 'Forgive me.'

He swept me up in a brutal... embrace, I couldn't quite call it, for it was restraining, not affectionate. His hands clamped over my eyes, blocking out my view of those magnificent griffins. My objections went unheeded, and Jay proved as strong as an ox; nothing that I did loosened his grip one bit.

I was grateful for it a few moments later, for whatever Em was doing with that lyre was... like nothing I've ever experienced before. Emellana Rogan began to play; the ancient lyre's thrumming notes sounded over the arcane winds at Mount Vale; and around me, the world went insane.

It began with a heightening of the already mad winds, until a veritable cyclone spun around and around us. Only, some part of it must have been no wind at all, or we would have been swept up into the skies. A sensation as of powerful currents tore at my clothes and my hair and howled in my ears; over the tumult, I distantly heard a griffin shriek.

Then came a tide of rain, like an ocean flipped upside down and poured upon our shrinking heads. My clothes clung to my skin, icy-cold, and I struggled to breathe through air turned to torrents of water. Colours flooded my mind, rain turned moon-pale and ice-white, eventide-blue and moss-green and every conceivable variation of hue, and shining like drowned stars. Did I imagine it? Throughout, the feel of Jay's hands tucked firmly over my eyes did not lessen, and still he held on.

Emellana's music turned haunting, morose. Its melody melded with the winds, took the rains inside itself and spun it out again in a ripple of strident notes.

I began to see things.

Visions filled my turbulent mind, sense and nonsense hopelessly jumbled together. I saw a litter of snow-white cubs with striped tails, which became goldnoses — all of them my pup, like little clones — and then they were changed to lirrabirds, like Miranda's. My mind's eye filled in with gleaming, tawny-amber colour, something that shimmered like polished jewels; downy feathers ringed the gleaming sphere, a mote of black at its centre, and I realised I stared deep into the eye of a griffin.

An enraged griffin. A fathomless anger was there, and a din filled my ears as of a thousand griffins screaming in unison.

A unicorn, its hide rippling in waves of shifting colours. Its horn vanished, reappeared, multiplied; wings sprouted and faded; it melted into a pool of pale water and disappeared.

A mighty troll took its place, a figure towering so high in my mind's eye that the world fell away before him. He wore a crown I'd seen before, and in his face was a granite resolve tinged with incipient madness.

I saw a tide of magick — a chaotic flood of colour, sound, light, cacophonic music — sweep over a Britain I knew, leaving nothing unchanged in its wake.

Is this what people come to the peak for? I thought, distantly, and dissolved into a mirth I knew to be inappropriate, but could not contain.

'It's all right, Ves,' Jay murmured in my ear, and I could hear him, though he spoke softly. The howl of the winds had died. 'Are you okay?'

I wasn't immediately sure how to answer. It took me three long seconds to remember that Ves was me, my own name, and the man behind me with his hands over my face was Jay, and we'd come to this place of shrieking insanity for a good reason.