“I’m an angel with a highly-developed imagination.”
“Well, you’re not wrong. This city does possess an ominous aura. But that is more likely the stench of demonic schemes than it is the postmortem wanderings of vengeful spirits.” Colonel Spellstorm glanced at Damiel. “It has the feel of Chicago, twenty years ago.”
Damiel nodded. “Indeed.”
“What happened in Chicago twenty years ago?” I asked.
“A multitude of simultaneous natural and supernatural disasters,” replied Colonel Spellstorm. “These disasters kept the Legion occupied for days. Almost every Legion soldier stationed in Chicago was out in the city, busy fighting one disaster or another. The situation was completely out of control, so the First Angel sent in Dragonsire and me to assist.”
“We soon learned the Dark Force was behind it,” Damiel added. “They’d created these disasters to draw as many Legion soldiers out of our Chicago office as they could. Very few remained behind to man the building.”
“That’s when the Dark Force stormed the office?” I guessed.
“Yes. Led by two dark angels,” Colonel Spellstorm confirmed.
“They killed most of the remaining soldiers that were in the office,” said Damiel. “A few they left alive, those they deemed worthy of interrogation. The Legion hadn’t yet developed small Magitech generators that could envelop a prison cell. So the Dark Force nailed their prisoners to the walls.”
“The Dark Force had the office securely locked down,” said Colonel Spellstorm. “They weren’t leaving, and we couldn’t get in.”
“What did they want?” I asked.
“They were trying to find something in the office,” Damiel told me.
“Dragonsire and I used a little-known back way into the Legion’s Chicago office. We made our way through the dark halls. We managed to capture one of the dark angels, one of the traitors to the Legion, but the other evaded us. He escaped into the library archives.”
“It was Leon Ironfist,” Damiel told me. “Or Leon Hellfire, as he’s been known since his defection.”
“We did battle with Hellfire, but he was armed with several immortal weapons and he’d set many magic snares. Dragonsire stopped me before I fell into one. He saved my life.”
“And you took enemy fire for me, shielding me with your body,” Damiel countered.
When they spoke, they looked at each other with mutual respect in their eyes. After all their bickering, that surprised me.
“Hellfire escaped, we retook the Legion office, and so our mission ended,” said Colonel Spellstorm. “After the battle with the dark angel, the library was a mess. At the time, we didn’t know which book he’d taken, but we soon found out.”
“And that is how the demons learned how to give dark magic to humans,” Damiel said. “They modified the secret, special formula, using Venom rather than Nectar to level up humans’ magic, one power at a time.”
My mind worked through their story. “Up until that point, every member of the Dark Force, those two dark angels included, had been turned, not made. They’d all once been Legion soldiers, and the demons had inverted their magic, turning it from light to dark. They’d developed the technique long ago, but they hadn’t yet figured out how to give magic to humans. That’s why they needed to steal the knowledge from the Legion. They modified the gods’ methods to work for their dark magic.”
“And it was so that they grew their Dark Force.” Colonel Spellstorm’s eyes fell on the daggers that Damiel and I carried. “And yet neither gods nor demons are as powerful as the Immortals from so long ago—nor as the weapons they left behind.”
Several small boulders, each one as large as a wolf, rolled down the street toward us.
“Remainder parts from one of the monsters you blew up,” I said to Damiel as I drew my sword.
He shot the rolling boulder monsters a scathing look. “These sea monsters are more persistent than other beasts.”
“We should return them to the sea before that monster puts more of itself back together,” said Colonel Spellstorm.
The three of us went to meet the boulder beasts. The battle didn’t last long. The monsters had attacked us too soon, before they’d had a chance to reassemble properly. Their bodies might have appeared to be solid rock, but our weapons cut right through them like they were made of soft, wet sand.
“And here we are,” said Colonel Spellstorm.
We stood before a cathedral. Like the sea monster, it had once been grand too, but years at the mercy of the wild lands had taken its toll.
Shattered glass domes sat upon thick towers. Faded paintings decayed within cracked arches. Seaweed dripped from the cathedral’s tall spires. Some of those spires were cracked, or even completely broken off. One spire looked like a big mouth had taken a very substantial bite out of it. Apparently, the monsters were equal-opportunity consumers. They didn’t only eat the land; they also consumed manmade structures.
The large concrete bricks that made up the wide, open path to the cathedral had turned green due to being regularly submerged in water. Sea weeds grew between the bricks. Small pools of water collected in recessed potholes, home to little microcosms of sea life—tide pools waiting for the sea to rush back in and consume the city once more.
We passed under one of the faded, cracked archways to enter the building. Inside, the ceiling extended many levels up. Along either side of the cavernous chamber, balcony alcoves were set into the walls.
These walls were painted too. And faded. I could just make out the rough outline of a figure with wings. An angel.
Most of the windows were broken, and some of the columns that held up the ceiling had holes in them. It was questionable how long this cathedral would remain standing. It was no more than a shadow of its former glory, a work of art fallen from grace, a victim of a civilized world turned savage.
Being here, I felt like I was standing in a tomb. It was so quiet that every breath we took roared like an avalanche.
Light danced across the pictures, like a flame casting shadows on a wall. It seemed to come from everywhere at once. All the walls were blinking, like we were in the middle of a shadow play.
I pointed up to one of the balconies.
Damiel responded with a silent hand gesture, signaling that he and I would fly up there, each entering the balcony from an open archway on a different side to surround the enemy.
We flew up and landed on the balcony.
No one was there. All we found was a single torch, enchanted with magic to put out more light than a normal, mundane torch ever could. A glyph flared up on the floor, and streams of magic shot across all sides of the balcony, trapping us inside the stone box.
I glanced at the glowing barrier. “Magitech. This ward is powered by Magitech.”
“Which means it can withstand anything either of you could throw at it,” Colonel Spellstorm said.
He was hovering before the encased balcony, his wings beating steadily, victory burning in his eyes. He was the traitor after all—and he now had us completely trapped.
9
The Earth’s Savior
Colonel Spellstorm hovered in place, his bright red wings treading air.