“Reinheiser is in here,” the Black Warlock began, “and he is not. There is only we, two together in one.”
“Two smells for a single stench,” the witch mocked.
“Impudent!” Thalasi roared, his bony hands clenching his sides. He composed himself quickly, though, knowing that a calm attitude would be necessary in dealing with Brielle so very near her domain.
“Why have ye come out?” Brielle asked him earnestly. “What do ye hope to be gaining? Suren ye’ll kill thousands o’ men and talons alike, to yer pleasure. But suren ye’ll be driven back as e’er before.”
“Not this time,” Thalasi countered, his voice a hiss, his eyes angry dots of simmering fire. “I… we are stronger now, Jennifer Glendower. The time has come for Morgan Thalasi to claim the world that is rightfully his.”
“Never it is!” Brielle snapped back, equally enraged. “Twice before ye’ve made the claim; twice before ye’ve been sent slinking back under yer rock.”
“Third time is the charm,” Thalasi purred. “This time I will get that which I deserve.”
“Ye’ve long ago been given more than ye deserve,” Brielle countered. “Blessings o’ the Colonnae upon ye, but did ye put them to rightful use? No, not a one such as yerself! Ye turn the powers for whatever’s pleasin’ yer whims and with not a care for those around ye.”
Rage bubbled inside the hollowed sockets of Thalasi’s black eyes. Again his bony hands shook and clenched.
“If ye truly are to get what ye deserve, Morgan Thalasi,” Brielle continued, undaunted by the growing volcano that was her enemy, “then me thinking’s that ye should be feeling terror.”
“You puny…” Thalasi stammered, barely able to spit out the words. “You are nothing more than a sentry, a guardian for powers you cannot begin to understand. You dare to taunt me? Look upon me, Jennifer Glendower. Look upon the godlike being that is the Black Warlock!”
Brielle’s answer, an overripened apple, splatted into Thalasi’s face.
His roar bent the mightiest oaks and sent Brielle’s golden hair standing out straight behind her. She squinted through the blast to see the Black Warlock polymorph, bending and stretching his form to gigantic proportions.
A dragon.
His inhale sent the trees back over the other way, and the return blast of his breath came out in an explosion of searing fire.
But Brielle was ready for such an obvious attack. She threw her hands out in front of her and called upon the element of water. A geyser erupted from her fingertips, meeting the dragon breath halfway between the combatants in a snarling hiss of harmless steam. Still Thalasi breathed his fire, and still Brielle’s water gushed forth to beat it back.
Even dragons run out of breath.
He was Thalasi again, in human form, soaking wet and with wisps of steam trailing out of his nose and mouth. “You have survived only the first round,” he promised, and he clapped his hands together, sending a shower of sparks flying into the night air about him.
Feeling the sudden collection of his power, Brielle burst into her own somatic gestures, waving her arms in a circular motion in front of her.
Thalasi’s lightning bolt thundered in, but Brielle’s conjured mirror blocked its path and sent it back toward its caster.
As soon as he loosed the bolt, Thalasi had set up a defensive pattern of his own, and the lightning bolt found yet another enchanted mirror blocking its path. It ricocheted back and forth between the two magic users, seeming no more than a singular cracking light until its energy dissipated in a shower of harmless sparks.
Blind anger launched Thalasi’s next attack; if he had taken the time to think, he never would have used this particular method. A black vine lined with rows of cruel thorns dripping poison rocketed out of the ground and rolled out menacingly toward Brielle.
The witch laughed and snapped her fingers in response to the spell. “Ye mean to use me own earth against me?” she asked incredulously. The vine still came on, but Brielle accepted it.
For soft flowers now bloomed where the thorns had been, and the stem’s sickly color now showed bright in vibrant green. It encircled the witch, a triumphant wreath.
And now it was Brielle’s turn to attack. She lifted her hands into the air, and the grass around the Black Warlock responded by growing to the height of the man, each blade reaching in to entwine him with razorlike edges.
“Damn you!” Thalasi roared, and a ring of fire started around his feet and swept out in a wide arc, destroying Brielle’s grass.
Brielle struck again even before her enemy’s fires had completed their work. She pointed a single finger at the ground under Thalasi’s feet and spoke a word of doom. The hard ground became mud, and the Black Warlock dropped in and disappeared from sight.
Brielle replaced her finger with a clenched fist, and the ground returned to its previous solid state. Then the witch waited cautiously. She may have humiliated the Black Warlock, but she did not believe for a minute that her simple trick had destroyed him.
A rumble under her feet confirmed her belief.
The ground exploded into man-sized divots, and Thalasi, a dragon once again, roared up into the air. His fiery breath came on, its fury tenfold. But again Brielle met it with a thick and unrelenting spray of water.
And so it went, back and forth for many minutes, each magic-user assuming various forms or manipulating the environment to strike out, and the other inevitably countering with appropriate and cunning defensive actions.
And then they were both in their human forms again, facing each other and gasping too hard for breath even to shout out further insults. Thalasi slammed his bony hands together, and the lightning crackled and built.
Brielle put up her mirror in time, and Thalasi created his before the bolt came thundering back. But this time neither would let the charge dissipate. It was time, they both understood, to finally determine who was stronger. Brielle added a second bolt to the dizzying volley, Thalasi a third. Back and forth the lightning crackled, every circuit exacting a toll upon each of the defensive shields.
Brielle stood resolute, drawing on Avalon for further power. Thalasi, though, so far from Talas-dun, his bastion of strength, eventually began to weaken. The witch recognized the waver in his defensive field, and she added yet another blast on the very next rebound.
The darkness of the night was stolen away in the instant of the explosion; the ground rumbled as far away as the talon and human encampments across the Four Bridges, and up in the Crystal Mountains, where the elves were preparing their march. And when the smoke cleared, the Black Warlock sat on his butt, many feet back from where he had begun the encounter, his clothes burned and smoldering.
“You have not seen the last of me!” he cried in defiance. He slammed his fists on the ground, sending two cracks in the earth rushing out toward the Emerald Witch. Brielle easily halted the charge of the gorge, but when she looked back after casting her countering spell, the Black Warlock was gone. She spotted him high in the distance, in dragon form again, flying far away off to the north.
Brielle turned her attention back to her forest, and to the blackened, savaged oak tree that had absorbed the brunt of the Black Warlock’s initial assault on the wood. The witch stroked the charred bark tenderly, hearing the painful mourn of the great tree’s death throes. For centuries it had stood, one of the cornerstones of Avalon, one of the very first trees nurtured by the magics of Brielle. It had performed its task to perfection, pulling in the wrath of the Black Warlock, accepting the assault of flames with its wide branches so that other, younger trees might escape the devastation.
And the oak had paid with its life.
Brielle remained with the tree until it cracked apart, sending a renewed shower of sparks flying into the air, and toppled with a heavy crash onto the open field beyond the forest’s thick borders.