The duke parried. The air sang with the sound of clashing metal. Through some gods-given holy reflexes, he managed to duck below the talons of another scarbeak, lunge forward, and wrench the spear from the celestial warrior's grip.
The warrior made no sound nor expression. It merely danced back through the air, out of range of the duke's black flames. It hovered for a beat. Vera wondered if the spear was apart of its entire essence, because its emotionless eyes tracked it intently as the duke tossed the weapon away. Perhaps it couldn't act without it.
In the breathlessness of that moment, Vera moved. She had perhaps half a minute before the duke, the warrior, or the scarbeaks attacked someone.
She scrambled back over to where the book lay face-up on the stone, plucked the quill from the ground, and made an emphatic slash across her previous instructions.
RETRACT, she wrote.
Over in the clearing, the celestial summon glanced away from the duke and back to her, as if awaiting further commands.
Vera's mind reeled. Clearly her last statement was too vague. She needed to specify the scarbeaks as the enemies and no one else.
How much of my own understanding will the page interpret? she wondered. She knew the winged beasts as scarbeaks, but did the magic of the book? It might literally interpret the description as any creature with a scar on its beak. It would be quite useless for the warrior to go after some nearby battle-hardened hummingbirds.
When the duke turned back towards another swooping beast, the celestial warrior descended to the ground and fetched the spear from the underbrush. Vera raised her quill as she tried to find the right words.
She shouldn't have hesitated. The warrior extended its arm in the air, then darted in her direction.
Shit.
Vera barely managed to scramble to her feet and jump out of its path. When she had retracted her instruction, she'd also erased the command to "protect summoner". It was now able to pick and choose its own enemy, and it seemed that it held special vitriol just for her.
"Not me either!" she exclaimed, breathless. "The birds! The obvious flock of winged monsters!"
The warrior whipped around at her voice, leveled its spear at her, and lunged again.
Dirt sprayed around her feet as she fled its attack. The tangle of dark trees had eliminated its airborne advantage, but it was still a warrior. Vera was not. It was only a matter of heartbeats before it caught her.
Then came another voice. "Catch."
It was the duke. Somewhere amid the fray, he had stepped into the treeline where Vera had left the summoning book. He now held it in one hand and flung it in her direction.
Adrenaline made her move. Vera snatched it from the air one-handed. Her quill was still in her other.
Eliminate all scarbeaks, she wrote.
The warrior careened forward. The silver tip of its spear glinted as it approached. Vera scribbled her command nonetheless.
Protect summoner and her ally.
The warrior halted in midair, then slowly turned away to face the sky. Just beyond the line of trees, more scarbeaks squawked. It seemed that when the duke had retreated into the forest to toss her the book, they had followed him.
The warrior hovered for another moment, then gave a curt nod. Vera released a shaking breath. It knew what a scarbeak was and understood her command. When the leader of the flock thundered into the forest, snapping branches in its wake, the warrior lunged.
It was not exactly fast, but it was fluid. It darted through the air with a grace that could only be attributed to its otherworldly origins. No human could replicate its movements. Not even the duke, who scanned the incoming flock with calculative precision.
Vera expected him to rejoin the fray, but he remained standing where he was. The blackfire circled into a pool at his feet, lapping at the hem of his cloak and leeching the color from the vegetation it touched until a circle of underbrush had turned bone-white.
Then, in front of him, something rose from the ground. A huge and hulking quadruped, nearly as tall as the duke himself. It had smokey-black fur, a long nose, and tall pointed ears. The way its pink tongue lolled from its mouth reminded Vera of a wolf, although approximately three times as large.
It gave its great pelt a shake, then split in half. Vera gasped. Two sides of its separated vertically then morphed into two smaller duplicates of itself. It split again, and then there were four the size of regular hunting dogs.
One of them barked, and the other three growled in response. Then, just as another scarbeak crashed through the canopy of leaves above, they lunged.
The legs on them were all muscle, and the four of them launched upward in unison. Two bit down on the scarbeak's wings. Another got its tail, and the final one got the end of its beak. They brought it crashing down to the forest floor where they proceeded to tear it apart feather by feather.
The duke, apparently satisfied with their performance, stepped back towards the clearing where the majority of the scarbeaks still hovered in a screeching throng. Vera took the opportunity to peer from around a tree to check on her celestial warrior.
Three winged beasts lay dead at its feet, and it currently faced down two more. It was as poised and steady as ever, but when Vera narrowed her eyes, she noticed that silvery blood dripped down its robes.
The Physician's Lexicon, she realized. I can help.
The first grimoire that she'd summoned by accident still lay in the mud where she had left it. She dashed in its direction, snatching it from the ground. She blew on the cover to clear away the dirt, then flipped through it.
There she found a spell titled Restorative Recall. A cursory skim over the text described it as a method to replenish strength.
She needed to be quick and precise. There was no time to dwell on the method. She would have to learn from her previous mistake and make her intention clear.
Her fingertip still dribbled blood from when she pricked it, so she scrawled a single spiral in the margin and repeated the words written down.
"Recall the living trace."
The page inhaled in response. Ink rippled as if wind had passed over it. Then faint threads of golden light coiled from the ground near her feet. She pointed with her bloodied finger to the celestial warrior. The aura around it brightened, and the trickle of silver blood ceased.
Vera hissed as pain suddenly shot through her arm. She pulled up her sleeve. The veins on her wrist had darkened.
Her warrior, though, had quickened. Between its efforts and the duke's, the swarm of monsters had at last begun to thin. It seemed that the moment of pain was a small price to pay for the blessing of renewed strength. Vera could only be thankful that she'd performed the spell casting ritual correctly on her first try.
A piercing cry came from above. Vera's head jerked up. Behind a curtain of leaves, a scarbeak shot downward, talons extended in her direction.
Heart thundering, she threw herself behind a thick-trunked tree with a larger tangle of branches, praying that it would lose sight of her. It didn't. Instead, its long beak clasped down on the branches within its path, and it began to wrench them from their tree.
Its beady eyes found hers. Vera's wrist continued to throb.
The spell, she thought. It must've sensed my use of magic.
So long as her skin still bore the mark of spellcasting, it would not leave her alone.
Vera ran. She didn't know what else to do. There was no time to summon another grimoire, no time to redirect the warrior towards this scarbeak alone. All she could do was vault across roots and ditches, willing her legs to go faster and faster as the scarbeak cast its shadow over her.
She wasn't quick enough. Talons descended from above. They wrapped around the forearm she had used to draw the spell and began to pull. Vera's heart lurched into her throat as her feet disconnected from the ground.
She wanted to scream, but no sound left her lips. She battered the scarbeak's talons with her free hand, clawing at the mud-orange feathers, but they did not budge. The beast was climbing quickly, and soon Vera would not be able to survive the fall back down.
A branch whipped past her face. Vera grabbed it. It was thick for one so high up the tree, and she pointed with the finger of her trapped hand.
"Recall the living trace," she said through gritted teeth.
The branch began to glow, visibly thickening in width. When the scarbeak flapped hard to pull her loose from it, the branch bent but did not break.
It was only a temporary solution. She'd hoped the scarbeak would release her, but it kept pulling. Her wrist throbbed, and her other arm strained with the effort of holding on. Soon the tension would rip her in half.
Then the scarbeak's feathers exploded into black flames, and it released her. Vera had to loop a leg around the strengthened branch to keep from dropping to the ground and breaking every bone in the process.
Her breath caught as she scrambled against the trunk of the tree. From her vantage point, she could see that there were no other scarbeaks in the sky. In the clearing, the celestial warrior was removing its spear from the abdomen of a downed beast. Nearby, her own assailant's eyes were burning out, its feathers falling off one by one.
Vera swallowed hard. It was over. The duke stood at the base of the tree below her. His hood had fallen away from his face, and those venom-green eyes were narrowed in obvious displeasure.
Distantly, she wondered if she should thank him. The thought made her stomach go sour. The duke opened his mouth as if to reprimand her for all that had just transpired.
He collapsed before he could utter a single word.