The ray
changed shape as it squeezed through the gaping hole that it had made in the
vault. It became longer and thinner and more cylindrical. As it wriggled to
break its way inside it was causing more and more damage – John could see that
the fabric of the vault was shattering, with giant cracks appearing in the
walls. It really didn’t look good.
‘First thing – stop the creature’ he thought and raised his hands to
cast a barrier spell – ‘atalfa’ he whispered. The properties of the air in
front of him changed, it began to take up a treacle-like consistency, and dust
particles in the air began to slow in their random motion through the
room. The ray was now almost through the
hole and its snout hit the strange sticky air. ‘Just another second’ thought
John ‘and then I can tackle it at my leisure’. This usually stopped anything,
but it required a lot of energy and he was already very tired.
The ray slowed in its movement, its fluid wrigglings were being
perceptibly hindered. It looked for a
second as if it would be stopped by the barrier. But then it began slowly to
change shape – first it became even more cylindrical and then more and more
globular. By now the creature looked very little like a ray – it was flowing
like a blob of glycerine through the air in front of the barrier. When it reached the magical obstruction it
stopped very briefly before it began to flow, in tiny streams, through some
invisible tunnels in the structure of the spell. John watched, horribly
fascinated, while the rivulets of the creature made their way across the leaky
barrier. He’d never seen anything like this before. As the streams passed to
the end of the barrier they began to reform, like tributaries of a strange
river. This thing could separate and re-coalesce. At any other time this would have been fascinating,
but at this moment, it was just terrifying.
John took two steps back and thought rapidly – time for a tactical
retreat. He jumped back to the base of the Zymena tree. Now it might really be
rather sensible to use his reinforcements. He looked up at the enormous
floating tree and felt somewhat reassured. This should stop it.
‘Baffio cas!’ he shouted at
the tree, pointing at the rapidly re-forming ray.
The tree twitched and raised its two great peripheral branches. The
tree and the suspended vault convulsed, but the tree held on to its burden. The
huge branch on the tree’s left hand side flicked forward and struck the ray a
direct blow. It would have cracked a wall, but all it did to the ray was slide
inside its solidifying matrix. Where the particles of ray were in contact will
the tissue of the plant there were little flashes of light, firefly-like. Stuck
inside the ray the limb of the tree began to go brown and sappy, the branch was
clearly decaying and at an astonishing rate.
In turn the parts of the ray that the tree was touching were fading to
blue clouds and then curling in on themselves and disappearing. Worlds collide thought John. This thing
was clearly made from the blue sky outside, which appeared to be the same
material as the blue discs, but it had somehow been coerced into becoming
something solid and more like the normal material world. This was extraordinarily powerful magic.
Both the tree and the ray were now locked together in a destructive
embrace. The branch withered rapidly inside the ray, but the effect on the ray
was much more catastrophic. It was being violently disrupted and little shards
of material were being thrown out across the room. Where the shards landed they
sparked, and faded into blue smoke. More worryingly they each took a bit of
matter with them – the vault was being slowly eaten alive. John realised that if
any of the ray landed on him then the same thing would happen. He dived back
behind the Zymena tree. It was too late to stop it now, but the fight looked
like tearing the vault apart.
The tree began to shake as if in pain and it struck forward with its
other free branch. As the branch hit the creature a huge ball of light formed
inside the ray. The beast writhed for several seconds and continued to try to
move forward. However, something terminal was going on its guts. It began to
lose all form, shifting back and forth as if uncertain about which way to move.
A moment later it lay still. The white ball of light inside it decayed as John
watched. John knew that he had no choice
now – there was only one way to try to save himself and the scroll, but it meant
giving up any hope of saving anything else. That poor tree!
John scrambled to his feet. The slow motion explosion of the dead ray
was beginning. Shards of deadly ray flesh began to fill the air like fatal
confetti. Behind the ray part of the vault had shorn off and the last third of
it, a vast hunk of disintegrating masonry, was falling away into the blue
sky. It was now or never. He knew that it couldn’t really work, but he
tried to teleport home.
‘Amranta’ he moaned, and then
his world turned inside-out.
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