“Death magic is constantly created from the skull—the being this belonged to shouldn’t be dead; it’s an abomination of the laws of life and the natural world.” Ezra looked up at the sky. “When they were alive, they would have been a continuous fount of living energies, but dead, the artifact is nothing but a constant supply of magic that spills over into the living world with the intrinsic aspect of whoever this was.”
“How the hell do we turn it off?” Grendel was almost shouting to be heard over the wind.
“I’m not sure it can be!” Ezra replied, just as a huge gust of wind smacked into his shield, reverberating all the way to the ground. He felt the strength of it in his bones and almost dropped the skull. They all ducked, crouching and eyeing the storm clouds with wary suspicion. Ezra very carefully opened his inner vision a bit more and looked deeper into the skull, staring into empty eye sockets.
The darkness within was mesmerizing, but he resisted the urge to get lost in the swirling ouroboros of magic. The blue flames mixed with the deep red of the death magic in a slow, rhythmic dance, creating a fusion Ezra could hardly explain, much less decipher. This wasn’t going to be an easy fix.
The skull was emanating its own energy. And that energy was being expressed out into the physical world as raw elemental magics, far less structured than anything a human practitioner could create, by accident or design. Humans used magic by shaping it into spells, runes, shields, and wards. This was wild magic, raw, chaotic, and as ancient as the skull in his hands.
The blue flames grew, curling around his wrists as if seeking. Looking for something. His inner vision flared to life, instinct saving his aura from being sapped as the artifact in his hands tried to consume the part of his aura closest to it. He raised a thinner shield between his hands and the skull, keeping the fires from eating away at his personal energy field.
It was hungry.
Ezra dropped the skull into the tote, blue fire splashing about as if he had tossed the skull into a burning vat of oil. The flames died out almost instantly, but not before scattering the MERS officers to the very edge of his shield.
“Sorry!” Ezra grimaced at their wide-eyed stares of alarm, and Grendel’s morphed into a narrow glare of annoyance. “It’s okay. It just tried to eat me.”
Owens and Brown both stared at him and then the tote, gripping their weapons tighter. That probably wasn’t the best explanation. “It tried to eat part of my aura where I was touching the skull. Don’t worry, it didn’t do more than nibble.”
Neither of them looked especially soothed by that explanation, either. Though the artifact attempting to eat his aura solved one mystery—that of Monica Blevins’ aura. She released the skull from the chest holding it in stasis—which must have been a reliquary—and the first thing the artifact did was consume her aura. She probably held the skull in her hands like Ezra did, but without the ability to defend herself. He reaffirmed his guess that she must have been standing right beside Simmons and in the area of affect for the nullifier charms, sparing her life.
“Quit fucking around Redmayne and turn that damn thing off!” Grendel shouted. “If you can’t turn it off, destroy it!”
“Okay,” Ezra replied, already distracted, frowning down at the tote.
The huge tote suddenly looked flimsy and small, too small to contain the magic it held. The death magics spilled out into the world, the ancient magic a stunning cobalt blue engulfing everything around the four of them before rising into the sky, the storm clouds overhead a hue that wouldn’t be unusual in the ocean. The clouds roiled, cobalt lightning lancing through the dark skies.
So much death magic. Far too much for a spell made by mortals. No mortal practitioner could ever harness so much death magic, keep it functioning for centuries, and then have it erupt with cataclysmic strength once released. He had a powerful suspicion the skull was less an artifact purposefully made by mortal hands and more a one-in-a-billion accidental, naturally occurring object. One made by the collision of a species meant to live forever and an artifact that never failed to kill.
There was only one thing it could be, the proof of its existence staring up at him from the tote, and he feared that artifact more than any other he’d ever come up against. The thin line in the bone came from forged metal—a sword. He knew of only one sword capable of killing anything living, and had been fascinated by it since he was a child. That would explain the third type of magic along the wound track in the bone.
“Too much death magic,” he whispered, his words lost to the wind. No such thing for a necromancer. He did not call himself such, but that was what he was, in theory—he used his death affinity to dismantle dangerous artifacts, cursed items, hexes, and malicious spells, and got paid well for his efforts. His fire affinity came into play when he used it to incinerate the object in question when the spells were broken, if it was too dangerous to leave intact. And sometimes he simply combined his affinities and eradicated both spells and objects, the nuclear option of curse-breaking.
“Why did it eat Monica’s aura? It has plenty of power,” he spoke to himself all the time when working, and since he did most of his work alone, he rarely had to contend with people thinking he was talking to them. Thankfully no one was interrupting him. “Was it to jump start the process once it was freed from the reliquary? What is it trying to do?”
The storm overhead was a by-product of the dead fae’s magics, and not a spell crafted to cause destruction. It was uncontrollable, though some ancient fool probably tried to use it as a weapon, and likely carved a path of environmental destruction through the countryside before it was locked away in the reliquary. And since he didn’t have the chest that it was bound in—that was probably buried under a dozen feet of snow and ice several miles away at the original dig site—he was going to need to interrupt the process somehow.
A seemingly immortal being had been killed, and the remains were trapped in an endless cycle of life and death.
He sucked in a harsh breath and fell on his ass. Luckily the mud had re-frozen since he melted the snow away and he didn’t soak his rear in a puddle, but that was only a small consolation against the deep shot of melancholy his epiphany lodged in his heart.
It was trying to heal itself. The last bit of the ancient being, the skull, was fighting back against its own death, constantly generating life magics which was then converted into death magics. That was a natural cycle for mortal beings, but something that the most ancient of the Elder fae species never experienced. There was a reason that the remains of deceased Elder fae species were never found—their own peoples recovered them, they disappeared, or the peoples in question never died out…merely moved on. To what, Ezra could only guess at—and here he was, sitting in front of an abomination of the natural order. Everything he thought he knew was tornapart, as bare as the gaping maw of the blue flame-wreathed skull in the dingy tarp bag.
“I don’t have the reliquary chest it was in originally,” Ezra said loudly enough for his companions to hear. “I need to break the cycle it's trapped in.”
“What does that mean?” Grendel shouted.
“Whatever you do, do not touch it. After I pass out, keep it in the bag, and find the strongest reliquary you can to stick the whole mess inside. It should be out of power long enough to get one flown in before you move it to a secure location.” Ezra closed the tarp bag up, securing it. He didn’t need to see or touch it to interrupt the cycle. MERS was the magical response team for Canada—thankfully, they had ready access to magical reliquaries. “Make sure no one messes with my cat, okay? I shouldn’t be out for more than a day or so!”
“What the hell do you mean?” Grendel leaned down, gesturing wildly. “We can’t carry you out of here in this storm and worry about the artifact!”
“You won’t need to worry about it once I’m done! Don’t touch me until the storm stops!”
He fell into a trance faster than Grendel was probably expecting, but the discomfort of falling backwards to the ground wasn’t that bad considering he was wrapped in several thick layers and already sitting down.
The living world had many layers to it, and with his inner vision blown wide open and his mind no longer preoccupied with running his body, he was able to sink deeper into the many layers of their dimension and see the skull in all its glory.
Sometimes it really sucked to be right.
