Revelations

[Magus]

Magus reached down and grabbed the handle.

He took a breath, and pulled. The door pulled up but then a searing spear of agony blasted up his arm and through his entire being, assaulting him along with a blast of light and sound which left him blind and disoriented. The wizard stumbled back and toppled onto the floor.

The Black Wind. Magus silently cursed himself; he should have noticed it earlier. The Black Wind – he could hear it for the first time since he’d entered the Omniverse – and the howl it made was near deafening. It was the last thing he could hear before everything faded to black.

A high-pitched ringing echoed around his skull, rousing him from unconsciousness. He opened his eyes to a blurry, unfocused world. He attempted to rub his eyes and found his arms restrained at the wrists. Magus squeezed his eyes shut in an effort to clear his vision.

Once he could see, Magus found himself in some kind of dungeon. He was chained to the wall, hanging limply from his wrists. Even slouched down as he was, his feet hardly touched the floor.

The wizard was in a tiny cell, with nothing but a small table set out off to the side. On the table were more than a dozen sinister-looking tools and implements. Magus frowned; from the sight of the tools and the old, dried blood on the floor, he was very clearly in a torture room. The trap door must have actually been a trapped door. Perhaps it was some kind of sick joke on the creator’s part. The irony, however, was lost on Magus, who felt like he was suffering through a seven-alarm hangover.

He thrashed at his restraints, knowing it wouldn’t do him any good. The sudden motion sent a flame of pain needling through his head and a cascading wave of nausea washed over him. Though he tried to hold himself up, Magus slouched toward the floor despite the pain that screamed across his wrists and shoulders as his entire bodyweight pulled down against his upraised arms.

Magus closed his eyes and slipped back into unconsciousness. In his dream, he thought he’d seen Schala’s face. A vague shriek of a heavy door opening stirred him from his reverie, and he opened his eyes to see three men gathered outside the bars of his cell. One of them produced a key, unlocked the door to Magus’ cell, and pulled it back to let the others through before stepping inside himself.

Magus raised his head and faked a smile. “Well hello there, fine accommodations you’ve provided here for me. But typically, the help doesn’t visit the suite without knocking first.”

One of the newcomers, a big, burly, bearded man, slugged across the face. Magus coughed and gagged as blood spluttered from his mouth and lips. The scarlet seemed to burn on Magus’ ivory skin.

“Ah,” he managed. “I take it this is my wakeup ca-”

The man slugged him again, setting off another attack of nausea and pain through his skull. Blood streamed down his chin now, and his lips and jaw were already swelling and dolorous. He would have liked to make another quip, but he wasn’t too keen on losing any teeth today.

His vision seemed to double and then merge back into one, then double again, as if he was idly crossing his eyes out of boredom, except that this exercise came with a weapons-grade headache.

“Who are you working for?”

He’d heard it, sort of, but he hadn’t really heard it. It seemed like it was a line spoken on a television show in the background, heard but not absorbed like so much other white noise.

Maybe they thought he was ignoring them. Maybe they were worried he might slip back into unconsciousness. Either way, the big man was kind enough to drive his fist into Magus’ face a third time, exacerbating the jackhammering, airhorns, and various nails on chalkboards that were already all clamoring about in his head.

He choked, coughing on his blood, spitting flecks of it onto the floor and on his clothes. Magus took this last punch to the orbital bone of his left eye, which was now swelling shut quite nicely. Despite this, he struggled to look up at his aggressors and fought to maintain his degrading vision.

“Who are you working for?”

Magus really did hear it this time. The man in the middle, a small, thin, older man with an unflatteringly receding hairline and a long, white beard was the one to ask the question. His clothes were fairly simple, heavy cloth robes, but nearly hidden beneath them were finely polished black boots. Magus narrowed his one good eye – this man was not as he appeared.

“I… had come…” he trailed off. He didn’t want to, truly, he was prepared to answer the question, but the agony rippling through his synapses was elegant in its ability to overwhelm the victim. “I…”

“You set off quite the potent trap. It’s designed to overwhelm the senses. It took quite a lot of tweaking to make sure the wards didn’t simply kill the victim – or render them vegetables,” the old man smiled cruelly. “This way we can extract some information as to why the victim tried to invade our privacy before the victim expires.”

“I came here…” Magus slowly shook his head, fighting mounting frustration and fatigue. “I wanted to meet with the… People’s Army-”

“Why?”

“I want to find Omni.”

That seemed to strike the old man down into a dumb silence, before he and the others laughed a derisive laugh. The old man waved his hand over his head and the laughter stopped immediately. “And why would you meet with the People’s Army to find Omni?”

“Because…” Magus groaned. “I tried… other routes. Tried to work with the authorities. They reneged on… their end of the bargain. So… if their enemies are strong enough to make them worry… perhaps they’d also have access to… information. Information I can use… to find…”

“A likely story. An agent of Camelot who happens to be conveniently upset with their leadership, and then just happens to stumble upon a secret outpost used by their enemies.”

“Yes… it seems… fabricated. I accept that. I had been a king, once. Before coming to the Omniverse. I’d have tortured and killed someone in my situation in order to extract information that could prove he was lying. I’ve done it, actually, more than just a few times,” Magus spat a weak bleb of spittle onto the floor. “Usually I was right, and could extract information I could use against the enemy. And if I wasn’t, a casualty of war was a casualty of war.”

“Are you… are you seriously advocating for us torturing you?”

“No,” Magus growled. “Just that I understand your concerns. Still, I’m a Prime, and a very dangerous one at that. I am offering you my cooperation in exchange for yours, as I have no faith left for the government of Camelot. You can make a powerful friend or enemy today, the choice is yours.”

“Powerful? You’re broken, bloody, and in chains,” the old man retorted. “A powerful enemy, indeed.”

The two bodyguards – or whatever they were – again laughed in derision. Magus thought about tying them both to a Roman breaking wheel and rolling them down a hill just steep enough to ensure they died slowly and in immeasurable anguish.

“And what if I were to simply vanish from these chains?” Magus inquired, already channeling negative energy into his body, pushing it up through his core and out of his flesh. The thug who’d been striking him snorted a false laugh, which Magus ignored. Instead, he focused, willing the energy to build and coalesce around him. “I cannot ask you to trust me, not yet. But I can be useful. Let me help you with something.”

The old man sneered and nodded at the thuggish bodyguard, who drove a fist into Magus’ gut, eliciting a wheeze and an oomph!! from the restrained wizard. He shuddered under a hacking cough as he fought to catch his breath. Magus’ concentration nearly collapsed under the weight of that last hit, but still the energy quietly gathered.

“You can help, alright, Camelot spy,” the old man rasped, glowering down at Magus with a suddenly darkened countenance. “Talk. Tell me what you know,” he looked at his other bodyguard, the one who had been silently standing there the whole time. Magus looked up at him, too. The man had a shaved head and pale skin. He wore nothing but a pair of leather pants and heavy leather boots. Scars crisscrossed all over his rippling muscles. The old man nodded at him, and he picked up a sinister looking brand, which suddenly glowed red-hot as if it had been sitting in the heat of a forge for a long time. Magic torture tools. Great.

“Are you fucking kidding me?!” Magus retorted. “I worked for the Librarian! I fought the Rathalos! We killed it! He was to give me a way to Omni in exchange but decided I wasn’t to be trusted with the information. I was hunted by guardsmen in Dalaran but I escaped and came here. What the hell else do you want? What could I do to prove I’m n-aaaAAAAAAAGGH!!” he screamed as the scarred man lifted Magus’ shirt and pressed the brand against his flesh.

Magus gritted his teeth and set his glare on the old man. He thrashed against his restraints, and loosed a bolt of energy at the chains. Upon striking the metal, the energy simply fizzled out.

“Your bonds are wizard-proof,” the old man declared in response to Magus’ quizzical expression. “No harm will come to them through magical means, spell-caster.”

No harm will come to them, Magus turned the phrase over in his mind. No harm…

He thought about something he’d seen Schala do. Sometimes she would step into the plane immaterial – step into the shadows themselves – to channel energy for their mother. For her goddamn Mammon Machine. But Schala could slip between worlds, even if only for a moment, and could pass through walls and other such obstacles. She’d have made easy work of these shackles.

He closed his eyes and concentrated. He could hear the ugly scarred man approaching to brand him again, and Magus let his Miasma befall them, plunging the room into soupy darkness. He blocked out the shouts of confusion, the cursing, and focused.

Schala had always warned him when he was a child to never attempt to cross into the realms of shadows. That even with the protection of her amulet, she wasn’t safe there, and had to take care to hurry, lest she be twisted by the Eldritch reality – made weak, or mad, or worse.

Magus could feel her amulet resting beneath his shirt, against his chest. Maybe he wouldn’t be safe there. He opened his eyes. The hulking, bearded thug had backed the old man out of the cell and against the far wall, using his own hulking frame as a shield between himself and the old man. The torturer was inching closer to Magus, his searing-hot brand raised up in front of him.

Magus wasn’t safe anywhere, it seemed. He closed his eyes again, concentrating on his well of energy. He drew his power from negative energy – hate, terror, suffering, and the like. Some of it was ambient – the worse-off a place was, the more power would readily be available. It was part of the logic behind his genocidal campaign against Guardia in the middle ages.

But negative energy seeped out of the cracks between realities. In planes immaterial, energies coalesce and polarize. Eventually, one type overpowers the rest. A great deal of negative energy pushes out positive, and so on. Entire planes of one type of energy. Entire planes filled with nothing else except fuel for a mage’s power. Magus tapped directly into one such plane, filled with dark energy, and instead of drawing from it, he attempted – for the first time in his long life – to reverse the flow. He attempted to push into this plane immaterial; to step from his reality into one whose very existence was driven by destruction, madness, and sorrow.

One such crack between realities seemed to appear. Although his eyes were squeezed shut, it felt as though he could see it. He fixated on it, thought about drawing nearer, into the void between existences. He drew closer, closer, until he felt resistance. It was strange – almost elastic. He pushed.

Suddenly, he was very cold. Magus opened his eyes. What he saw before him was a disturbing facsimile of the world he had just been in. All color had been washed away and only grey remained. Everything and everyone seemed to be stock-still; the three men in front of him seemed frozen in place.

Despite everything being static, the entire world around him seemed to shudder and cast ghost images. Objects blurred and refocused with no rhyme or reason. Things seemed to creep and crawl just at the edges of Magus’ vision, and it took all of his will not to try to swat at them. Whispers seemed to quietly creep through his ears while an unseen wind droned on, almost deafeningly, above it all.

Magus lowered his arms. His wrists simply passed through the shackles as if they weren’t there at all, and suddenly he realized that the world he was in now wasn’t frozen, it was merely moving in slow-motion, at a speed so slow he could hardly perceive it at all.

The wizard simply walked around the man with the branding iron, and, once behind him, struck out, driving a savage punch to the back of his neck. He could hardly see it, but Magus knew the man was falling forward, millimeter by millimeter.

He stepped out of the cell grabbed the huge thug who’d beaten him. Magus grasped both hands behind his head and drove his face down into his upraised knee with a satisfying crunch. Magus let go, leaving the man bent over and slowly beginning his glacial reaction to the attack.

Finally, the Fiendlord walked down the corridor a few paces before turning around to face the old man, who was pressed up against the wall. Now Magus stood between him and the only exit from the tiny dungeon he’d been locked in.

There were two cells in here, one next to his own, divided by a brick wall. It was empty. But Magus didn’t have any more time to assess his surroundings or to marvel at this bizarre pseudo-reality. He knew he was chancing it as it was being here this long. He released his Miasma, closed his eyes, and pushed himself back up through the seam in realities.

Before he could open his eyes, he heard two simultaneous cries of pain followed by dull thumps. Magus opened his eyes and cracked a wild grin at what he saw. Both the men he’d attacked had collapsed in heaps, and the old man was left staring at an empty cell where a man had been shackled to the wall just moments ago, wisps of soupy blackness fading away into nothingness.

“Do you really think,” Magus began. The old man gasped and whirled about to face Magus, before taking several hurried steps backwards, away from the man. His face was etched with horror and confusion. “That a man who could do what I just did would bother wasting his time as an agent of someone else’s kingdom?”