Damiel watched me, his face contemplative as he listened to my comments. He must have found my notions to be so silly.
And maybe they were. I didn’t know what it was about that beautiful night sky with its two moons that made me think of harmony and peace. Maybe it was just its beauty. And maybe beneath its beauty, this world was every bit as discordant as ours.
“There’s a town nearby,” Damiel said.
I looked where he was pointing. In the distance lay a small village. It had a certain rugged charm about it, not unlike the Frontier towns on Earth that sat at the edge of civilization, at the doorway to the plains of monsters, with only a Magitech wall separating its citizens from the monsters they could see and hear from their houses.
Except on this world, there was no Magitech wall. And no monsters, at least not that I could see. It was like…like what Earth would have been if the monsters had never overrun our world.
The small village probably boasted no more than a few hundred residents. The small wood houses, none higher than two stories, were topped with snow. Smoke billowed from their brick chimneys; icicles dripped from their roofs. They must have used firewood to heat their houses, not Magitech.
“You have been to other worlds?” I asked Damiel.
Such was the rumor. I myself had never traveled beyond the Earth.
“Yes, I have been to several worlds.” He looked around. “But I do not recognize this one.”
“I wonder which deities these people worship: gods or demons.”
There were so many worlds. The battlefront of the Immortal War between gods and demons was vast, spanning hundreds of worlds. Had we traveled to another world ruled by the gods—or walked right into a demon stronghold?
“There is a building in those woods, to the side of the village,” Damiel said, pointing to an evergreen forest. “The building is large and kept apart from the smaller houses. It might be a temple to whichever deities the people here worship. If we got a closer look at the temple, we’d have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”
So we bypassed the village and headed for the forest instead. As we got closer, I realized there were symbols carved on the temple’s stone walls.
“I don’t recognize these symbols,” I said.
“The language is not used by either gods or demons,” replied Damiel. “And yet it bears some similarity to both.” His eyes panned up the temple wall. “I think I have seen it before…” His head snapped around to me. “There.” He pointed at the Diamond Tear dagger strapped to my thigh. “Some of the symbols are on that dagger.”
“So these are Immortal symbols. But what are they doing on this temple? The Immortals have been gone for millennia.” I looked at the temple. “And this building looks so well-maintained. People still worship here.”
“The people of this world apparently never got the message that their deities are gone.”
A world not ruled by either gods or demons. I’d never heard of such a place.
“The other dagger is in that temple,” I told Damiel.
“How do you know?”
“The Diamond Tear knows. It’s telling me.”
Not in words, but in… I really wasn’t sure what it was. A feeling. I just knew the other dagger was inside the temple. It was accompanied by another feeling: the burning urge to run in after it.
“Someone’s coming,” Damiel said.
“From all the rustling and sloshing, it’s a lot of someones.”
They walked between the trees—fourteen people in fur-trimmed hoods and hats. Their coats and snow pants were thick. Their boots were high and warm, good for treading through deep snow. A few of the people wore scarves or gloves.
“Why are there only two of them this time?” one of the strangers asked another.
“They might be scouts.”
“Or spies.”
“They’ve been watching our town!”
“Spying on us!”
“Following us.”
“Hardly.” Damiel coolly considered the red-coated woman who was pointing a gun at us. “You followed us here.”
“They might be here to test a new weapon on us,” the woman in blue said to the woman in red.
“Let’s not lose our heads,” said a young man with a smooth, bald head. Dressed in a long, fur-trimmed robe, he looked like a priest. “They have not done anything threatening yet.”
“They are here, at our sacred temple, Illias,” snapped the blue woman. “They’ve clearly come to steal our treasures!”
The crowd—or perhaps mob would have been more accurate—erupted into angry jeers. Several people drew their guns. One of those people fired.
Damiel and I moved to defend ourselves. Magic flared up on our hands.
The villagers grew wilder.
“See the glow on their hands!” shouted the woman in red.
“They are Casters!”
“Warmongers!”
“Aggressors!”
Snow began to fall lightly from the sky.
“You see,” said the woman in blue to the priest named Illias. “They have come to pillage. They’ve come to defy our holy temple!”
The young priest frowned. He waved his hand. “Apprehend them.”
Damiel calmly watched the restless crowd. “I believe it would be best to extricate ourselves from this situation. At least for now,” he said quietly to me.
I nodded. These people were out for blood. Even the priest, the mob’s voice of reason, had turned on us the moment we’d shown our magic. We might have been able to talk our way out before, but now we had no choice but to fight our way out.
Another shot fired. Damiel blasted the bullet with his psychic magic, shredding it apart.
I hurled a lightning bolt at a man who was about to shoot us. But the lightning bolt didn’t hit its mark. The man opened his arms wide and grabbed the bolt, pushing it into his chest. His whole body flashed bright gold, then he opened his mouth and spat my spell back at me.
“They are eating our magic,” Damiel said.
Eating indeed. I tried a few different spells. A fairy curse. A few vials of potions. I even tried shifting one of the angry villagers into a tree. But nothing worked. They devoured any and all varieties of magic I shot at them.
Nothing either Damiel or I did worked against these people. Theirs was magic unlike anything I had ever seen—or knew existed. Sure, I was resistant to magic, but I could not absorb it and shoot it back at someone who’d cast a spell at me. Not like these Magic Eaters.
The blue lady sneered at us. “How weak you are without your pack.”
Pack? What did that mean? I glanced at Damiel. He shook his head. Clearly, he didn’t have any idea what the woman was talking about either.
A pack often meant shapeshifters. The Magic Eaters might think we’re shifters. But why would they? We’d used other kinds of magic as well.
A red woman’s whip snapped like an exploding firework. I jumped aside to evade the lash, but my back grazed one of the Magic Eaters’ recycled spells. My skin grew numb, my movements slow. Gods, this was annoying. Anything we sent at them, they only used against us.
Damiel roared. I pivoted around. Two Magic Eaters had wrapped their whips around his arms. Gold sparks sizzled up and down the braided ropes. Damiel was motionless, frozen.