The Archmage of Brechtmal

Here's another fantasy fiction short: In this little piece we meet the evil Archmage of Brechtmal, one of the powerful leaders of the Confederation in The Great War.

The orc to her left hit her in the back with his pole axe, dropping her to her knees with a squeal of pain. She'd already been beaten bloody, and she suspected "orders" were the only reason she hadn't also been raped. Her dress had been cut and ripped and torn in so many places it clung to her sweaty, bloodied body like limp, wet leaves. In front of her was a dais and throne. On it sat a pale karnis¹ whose name was Tachlachan. He was the Archmage of Brechtmal, a world in another dimension that was, at the moment, a grave threat to the allied powers fighting The Great War on Menelon. He was bedecked in fine clothes and jewels, and in his right hand he held an ornate metal staff, over which he bent to leer cruelly. The self-satisfied smirk on his face, and cold, callous gleam in his eye was devoid of anything resembling compassion.

"So this is Æmbra Oännelè, the great mage sent by the tonissen² of Menelon to prevent my reinforcements from gating to their pathetic little world. How very disappointing," he said, sneering pompously. "I expected at least something of a challenge. I suppose I should have known better." He arose, and walked to a nearby window, the brass shoe of his staff clicking loudly on the marble floor as he walked. "One cannot expect a species that does not understand the value of a well-ordered society, where everyone knows and understands their duty to the whole, to comprehend its overwhelming power."

The skyline beyond Tachlachan's palace was gray with smelly smoke and ash, and festooned with the belching chimneys of factories, tucked in between row after row of multistory work houses. Even from this remove, the rumble of factory machinery could be heard. In the distance, the whistles of trains competed with those of the factories that ordered the dull eyed workers too and from their dorms, cafeterias, and work shifts.

This was life on Brechtmal. Everyone had their place in the great industrial machine that ruled the planet, be it in the factory or on the farm; be it in the bakery or running the trains. The objective was to extract as many resources as possible during the useful life of the planet, and it was the human and orc populations who provided the labor. Those who fawned over their karnissen masters won favors, rose to positions of power and privilege, and became the most equal of all the equally subordinate species. Those who caused problems fell to the bottom and became object lessons for everyone else. The least equal of the equal, they were the ones chosen first when the wise and benevolent masters of Brechtmal decided lives needed to be sacrificed for the benefit of the rest of society.

And on Brechtmal, Tachlachan was the master of masters.

He was also intent upon doing his part to help export this great social order to Menelon, to benefit and aid the pathetically agrarian planet. Preventing him from doing that was why Æmbra was here. "You will not open a portal to Menelon," she hissed thickly through broken teeth and a swelling jaw.

Tachlachan's answering laugh was as cynical as it was cruel. "And how will you stop me?" he demanded.

"I have already stopped you," Æmbra replied thickly. Her answer caused a stir among the sycophants present in the throne room. Even Tachlachan paused, and she felt his magical touch, searching her for signs of illusion or hidden power. But she had planned for this, and the matrix of magical energy that held together the illusion of her physical self was well-warded against even his most intense scrutiny. Unfortunately, in order to make it work she paid a very real price. The pain and suffering was real, dulled only by her mental remove.

"You're a fool!" he finally pronounced. She felt the energy he had gathered dissipate back into the power circle that surrounded the palace.

"I am very glad you think so."

There was something in the way she said it that again gave Tachlachan pause. He looked at her warily, now sure there was something going on that he didn't understand. So once again he focused his power on her, determined to find something, anything that could explain this broken tonis' dogged defiance.

He had taken the bait, which gave Æmbra time to study the power circle in which the palace had been built. Power circles had just as much personality as people. They were all the same, but they were also all unique. To complete her mission, she needed to understand this one, and how Tachlachan used it, much more clearly than she did. Not an easy task, given the amount of pain she was in, but his own dogged determination to discover her secret bought her time.

The first thing she noticed was that Tachlachan pulled energy from the circle as naturally as he breathed, and let the circle absorb it when he was done with it just as unconsciously. Again and again he tried to penetrate her defenses, and she let him look while she studied. Was she using magic? No. Was her presence an illusion? No. Was she lying? No—and that disturbed him. For if she wasn't lying, then she really had somehow managed to block his access to the planet of Menelon, or at least believed she had, and that was infuriating.

It was also revealing. In all open power circles, some tendrils of dimensional energy radiated out into the multiverse like a fountain, while others radiated in. In this one, she could feel them all, pulsing through her like a great heartbeat, or pulsing thought. Time and timelessness, consciousness and senselessness, order and chaos, certainty and uncertainty; they all pulsed through the power circle like the breath of life itself. So, this circle was open and accessible. That was good. It was also Tachlachan's fatal weakness. Because, rather bizarrely, he had found almost none of these things, all of which were essential to controlling the circle, interesting. Rather, he dismissed them as unimportant to the aggregation of his power. His only real interests seemed to be in the realms of the damned. The anti-worlds, where devils and demons and the great undead all resided. That narrow view, focused only on power and control over others, on hurtling power across the dimensions, left huge gaps in his awareness, gaps she could exploit to take control of the circle without him even knowing.

It was time, but given the the state she was in, it was not going to be an easy task. With great effort she defied her handlers and levered herself to her feet. "And now…"

Tachlachan's reaction was faster than his orcs, and even more violent. A bolt of light flashed from his staff and hit her fully in the chest.

It was the moment she had been waiting for, and had planned for, as agonizing as it was. She screamed involuntarily from the pain as the bolt hit her, did her best to ignore the searing fire that was trying to rip her apart and forced herself to yield and lean into the absorption field she had erected long before allowing herself to be captured. The energy fractured on impact, then exploded out into the circle, lighting up the air around them like a great cage.

For Tachlachan, the strike was his first mistake. "What?" He had detected the ruse too late, but still didn't fully understand exactly what had happened, which led to his second, fatal mistake. Preemptively, he struck again, this time with fire so hot the marble floor melted beneath Æmbra's feet.

On impact, the bolt of white hot fire shattered the illusion and her material body vanished in a blinding ball of light, leaving only the transcendent energy that had inhabited it behind, complete with the blazing blue staff that was her trademark on Menelon. Now she had him trapped in a feedback loop. The energy Tachlachan had so obligingly pulled from the power circle in one dimension burned like fire as it passed through her, then back out into the framework of the circle itself, the circle she now controlled.

At first, he fought to break the feedback loop he'd unwittingly created; Æmbra countered by dropping her now unneeded defenses against detection and pulled hard against the open  energy circuit. Unable to close the loop, he then attempted to use the energy itself to reach the dark dimensions and call forth a devil from the abyss; only to find that, move by move Æmbra cut him off and redirected the energy into the warp and weft of the prison she was building.

Beads of sweat began to form on Tachlachan's pale brow, and his staff began to glow from the energy pouring through it. "You… Can't…"

"I… Will!" Æmbra shot back.

Unable to reach the abyss and desperate to escape the trap he'd unwittingly fallen into, Tachlachan turned to the cruelest dimension of them all, where consciousness itself touched the anti-worlds; where life met unlife and being, unbeing. The horror of it roared through Æmbra like torrent, and it burned like unholy fire; it tugged at her spirit, threatening to forever sunder body and soul. Suns exploded, and worlds were incinerated . Loved ones were ripped limb from limb before the eyes of their families. Whole oceans boiled. Armies battled and the dead rotted in the fields like decomposing wood.

Tachlachan laughed.

There was only one counter, only one way out, and she wailed like a broken child whom Hell itself had come to claim. She yielded to the inevitable—and opened herself up all the abuse the underworld could throw at her from its deepest pits of despair.

Around them the palace began to shake from the power pouring through the two great mages. Æmbra's transfigured body glowed like that of a deity, and Tachlachan's staff burned like a pillar of fire. Æmbra's handlers and Tachlachan's sycophants ran. In the city streets people watched in awe as clouds of energy radiated out in all directions. The air around the palace began to glow, then it darkened. Murmurs of worry turned to concern, and concern turned into panic as the palace shook, and the glowing darkness grew like an incoming storm.

Within, Tachlachan's laughter died in his throat as, all too late, he began to comprehend what Æmbra did. He began to panic as the horrors he'd unleashed turned from her to him and, with the darkening of the light, grew ever more powerful. Now they sought to damn his unprotected spirit to an unknowable, but horrible fate, while within the darkness, Æmbra, having reached for the only lifeline she could, radiated light like a star, becoming the only point of light in the darkness that encroached on Tachlachan's world. In the end, even his palace and all within were no more than a shadows moving in an inky blackness filled with all manner of unholy horrors.

The green trees and blue oceans, bird song, and the soft purr of a cat, the softness of her lover's touch, and the sexy rasp in her throaty voice. Against all the horror and despair, against the total onslaught of the damned, whose aching desire was to devour her spirit and grind it into dust, she clung to those things that were so incomprehensible to the denizens of darkness that they made her unassailable. Unlike Tachlachan, for whom the horrors of the abyss grew ever stronger, for Æmbra they faded, and the path back to Kliy, her lover, and to Meril, her beloved city, grew clearer and clearer. Until finally, even as Tachlachan saw only darkness and despair, she could point unerringly through the swirling energies of the circle, across many dimensions of time and space, to the planet she now thought of as home.

"Where are we, tonis?" Tachlachan demanded.

His voice jerked her back to Brechtmal, complete with all the torments she had endured at this... this karnis' bidding. "You are now in a time out of time, in the place you created out of the warp and weft of your own dark power," she spat furiously. At his bidding, she had been beaten bloody and her body broken. She had been forced to surrender to unimaginable horrors from the dimensions of the damned. For all of the love and light in her world, it had left her righteously angry. "Here I leave you to unpick the threads of your own evil. You'll make a fine memorial to the cruelty you've visited on the planet of Brechtmal, Tachlachan. Good bye!"

It took but one final flex of her power to slam the dimensional gate behind her, and slam it she did. Tachlachan's palace and most of the industrial city were vaporized by the explosion. Only a shimmering black dome where the palace once stood remained, with Tachlachan imprisoned inside.

A heartbeat later she was back in the tonissen city of Meril, in the middle of the Sea of Orahn in the Empire of Sudaan, and the power circle of Meril was still ringing like a bell from her profligate use of its power. She could still feel every bruise from every blow and every broken bone, though there was no actual physical damage. Her insides felt like they'd been burned to cinders from the power that had poured through her. Now that the encounter had passed, remembering the nightmarish horrors, and the cruelty of the damned  creatures that had tried to rip her soul from her body left her shaking in terror. Only now, she was defenseless. She had nothing left with which to fight. Even lifting an arm to brush the hair out of her face took more strength than she had left. She had expended it all to weave together Tachlachan's prison of the damned.

Fortunately, she didn't have to brush her long, crimson curls out of her face. Kliy was there to do it for her, and to wrap her up in her arms and hold her while she shook violently from the memories of the nightmarish hell she'd just escaped. She was home. She was safe. She was in Kliy's arms, and the threat of Confederation support from the world of Brechtmal was gone.