Bannity had to admit the archmage was as impressive as legend had promised. He strode into the forest with no weapon but his staff of gnarled birch, his long hair blowing, his sky-blue robes billowing as though he still stood on the heights of Thundering Crag. Bannity looked at Dondolan, whose face bore a carefully composed expression that betrayed nothing of what he was thinking, then they both followed the Archmage Kettil into Squire’s Wood.
To Bannity’s astonishment, Eli himself stood in the doorway of the tent, looking out across the great clearing.
“Ho, Devourer!” Kettil’s voice echoed, loud as a hunting horn, but Eli only looked at him incuriously, his large hands dangling from his sleeves like roosting bats. “I have found you again at last!”
The hairless man blinked, turned, and went back into the tent. Kettil strode after him, crossing the clearing in a few long paces. Bannity started to follow, but Dondolan grabbed his arm and held him back.
“This is beyond me and beyond you, too.”
“Nothing is beyond God!” Bannity cried, but Dondolan the Clear-Eyed looked doubtful. A few moments later little Feliks came stumbling out of the tent, flapping his hands as if surrounded by angry bees.
“They stand face to face!” he squawked, then tripped and fell, rolling until he stopped at Bannity’s feet. The priest helped him up, but did not take his eyes off the tent. “They do not speak, but stare at each other. The air is so thick!”
“It seems…” Dondolan began, but never finished, for at that instant the entire clearing — in fact, all the woods and the sky above — seemed to suck in a great breath. A sudden, agonizing pain in Bannity’s ears dropped him to his knees, then everything suddenly seemed to flow sideways — light, color, heat, air, everything rushing out across the face of the earth in all directions, pushing the priest flat against the ground and rolling him over several times.
When the monstrous wind died, Bannity lay for a long, stunned instant, marveling at the infinite skills of God, who could create the entire universe and now, just as clearly, was going to dismantle it again. Then a great belch of flame and a roar of rushing air made him roll over onto his knees and, against all good sense, struggle to sit up so he could see what was happening.
The tent was engulfed in flame, the trees all around singed a leafless black. As Father Bannity stared, two figures staggered out of the inferno as though solidifying out of smoke, one like a pillar of cold blue light, with flame dancing in his pale hair and beard, the other a growing, rising shadow of swirling black.
“I knew you but pretended, demon!” shouted Kettil Hawkface, waving his hands in the air, flashes of light crackling up from his fingertips. “Devourer! I know your treachery of old!”
The shadow, which had begun to fold down over the archmage like a burning blanket, instead billowed up and away, hovering in the air just above Kettil’s head. A face could be seen in its roiling, cloudy midst, and Bannity could not help marveling even in his bewildered horror how it looked both like and unlike the silent Eli.
“I will make sure your dying lasts for centuries, Hawkface!” shrieked the dark shape in a voice that seemed to echo all the way to the distant hills, then it rose up into the air, flapping like an enormous bat made of smoke and sparks, and flew away into the south.
“Master!” screamed Feliks, and stumbled off through the woods, following the fast-diminishing blot of fiery blackness until he, too, disappeared from sight.
Kettil Hawkface, his pale robes smeared with ash, his whiskers and hair singed at the edges, strode away in the other direction, walking back toward the village with the purposeful stride of someone who has completed a dangerous and thankless job and does not bother to wait for the approbation he surely deserves.
As he emerged at the forest’s edge, he stood before the hundreds of onlookers gathered there and raised his hands. “Elizar the Devourer’s evil has been discovered and ended, and he has flown in defeat back to the benighted south,” the archmage cried. “You people of the Middle Lands may rest safely again, knowing that the Devourer’s foul plan has been thwarted.”
The crowd cheered, but many were confused about what had happened and the reception of his news was not as whole-hearted as Kettil had perhaps expected. He did not wait to speak again to his colleague Dondolan, but climbed onto his white horse and galloped away north toward Thundering Crag, followed by a crowd of children crying out after him for pennies and miracles.
Bannity and Dondolan watched in silence as the ramrod-straight figure grew smaller, and then eventually disappeared. The crowds did not immediately disperse, but many seemed to realize there would be little reason to collect here anymore, and the cries of the food sellers, charm hawkers, and roving apothecaries became muted and mournful.
“So all is resolved for good,” Father Bannity said, half to himself. “Elizar’s evil was discovered and thwarted.”
“Perhaps,” said Dondolan, “But a part of me cannot help wondering whose heart’s desire was granted here today.”
“What do you mean? Do you think…they clasped hands?”
Dondolan sighed. “Do not misunderstand me. It is entirely possible that the world has been spared a great evil here today — Elizar was always full of plots, many of them astoundingly subtle. But if they did touch hands, I think it is safe to say that only one of them was granted his heart’s desire.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Elizar may not have seemed entirely happy as Eli the dumb miracle-worker,” Dondolan said, “but he did seem peaceful. Now, though, he is the Devourer again, and Kettil once more has an enemy worthy of his own great pride and power.”
Bannity was silent for a long time, watching the sky darken as the sun settled behind Squire’s Wood. “But surely God would not let Elizar’s evil back into the world simply because his enemy missed it — God must have a better plan for mankind than that!”
“Perhaps,” said Dondolan the Clear-Eyed. “Perhaps. We will think on it together after we return to the church and you find the brandy you keep hidden for such occasions.”
Father Bannity nodded and took a few steps, then turned. “How did you know about the brandy?”
The priest thought Dondolan’s smile seemed a trifle sour. “I am a wizard, remember? We know almost everything.”
Bad Guy Factory
Issue #1: “Heatseeker”
PAGE 1
PANEL ONE: SPLASH — the SEVEN ROOKIES (HEATSEEKER, DOLLY, MINK, COLDBLOODED, CELL, THROWBACK, SNAIL) are standing by themselves under a SPOTLIGHT, looking UP at BYZANTINE, a nasty, COLD-FACED old man in an ornate bronze battlesuit standing on a platform; next to him is his right-hand man, FARSIGHT.
(WE DON’T HAVE TO SEE BYZANTINE’S FACE IN THE FIRST PANEL.)
A CROWD of other COSTUMED VILLAINS fills the huge, warehouse-sized room, the main meeting space of the FACTORY, watching this SPECTACLE — most with amusement or disdain. (We might see PRETTY BOY, TIME MASTER, WALRUS and CARPENTER, FLAK, SAILOR, OCHO, MADAME MIRAGE/MIMOSA, PROFESSOR NACHTIGAL among them.
CAPTION 1: There are some things you never like to hear…
CAPTION 2: “Your credit card has been declined.”
CAPTION 3: “Your tests are back, but we didn’t get the results we’d hoped for.”
CAPTION 4: “You’re being deployed to the Middle East.”
CAPTION 5: This is a new one…
BYZANTINE: In less than two minutes, one of you is going to be DEAD.
A) TITLE: BAD GUY FACTORY
1: HEATSEEKER
B) CREDITS
PAGE 2
PANEL ONE: We see a GLOVED HAND, powerful-looking, raised to knock on a door.
CAPTION: Hakim Anthony — now calling himself Anthony Hack after being reported AWOL from the military — should have seen it coming. After all, the day pretty much started OUT like shit…