The Chain (The Secret of Spellshadow Manor #3)(82)

“Remember, Alex,” Demeter lowered his voice, as if about to share a great secret, “time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana!” He cackled, clearly pleased with himself and his joke. Alex found he couldn’t help a smile from pulling at the corners of his mouth—Demeter’s clownish humor was oddly infectious. Still, he also couldn’t deny he was glad the lesson was over; the book still tucked into his jeans had been digging a cleft into the flesh of his back, which had gone worryingly numb.

“Very good, sir,” he encouraged, as he stood to leave.

“More of the same this afternoon?”

“If your joke book can take it,” quipped Alex.

“Very good!” Demeter grinned. “You must be ready for some food by now?”

Alex nodded. “Yeah, I’m pretty hungry.”

“Hi, Pretty Hungry, I’m Master Demeter!” he howled, thrilled that Alex had walked into his joke.

Alex tried hard not to roll his eyes. “Another zinger, sir. Can I go to lunch now?” he asked, half-expecting the man to do the usual teacherly jest of, ‘I don’t know, can you?’, but he didn’t. He simply waved Alex off with a nod, returning to a box of sandwiches he had already opened on top of his desk.

Alex didn’t need telling twice. He ran off across the empty square and clambered up the wall, following it until he reached the abandoned courtyard at the far side of the school. Not knowing whether the door would be open or not, he snuck in through one of the windows instead, pleased with the quiet solitude he found within, as he landed on the familiar flagstones of the vacant bell tower. He glanced back at the window to check that nobody had followed him, before disappearing up to the very top floor and sitting back against the wall. Pulling the book, with great relief, from his waistband, he opened it in front of him, seeing that it was another history of Leander Wyvern, entitled Leander Wyvern: The Last Spellbreaker. Excitement coursed through him as he flipped to the first page, wishing he had retrieved the book sooner. It was a nice surprise, after so many bad ones, and he found that Master Demeter’s lesson had put him in a history sort of mood.

He devoured the book as rapidly as he could, knowing he only had an hour for lunch before he would be expected back at the poky little study room. To his slight disappointment, the text went over a lot of the same ground as the other books he had read containing Leander, including the notebook still in his possession. It wasn’t that he didn’t find it interesting, it was just that he wanted to know more; he was fed up with the brick wall of information he kept crashing into.

Three-quarters of the way through the book, however, he chanced upon a bombshell. It was entitled Fields of Sorrow, and though Alex began the section expecting it to be more of what he already knew of that final battle, he realized quickly that he had entirely misjudged the chapter. Instead of explaining the details of what went on leading up to Leander’s last stand, it skipped straight to the end, describing instead the Great Evil that was released in the last moments, on the final day of the battle:

Leander Wyvern, last of his kind, stood atop the scaffold as he was fettered in chains, his wrists shackled—roaring to the heavens, his eyes burned with a fearsome silver light; an unnatural, ungodly sight, terrifying to behold, though none could stop him crying out, nor the glow of his eyes.

A firing squad took position before him, though their hands trembled as they raised them to strike. They were more scared for their lives than Leander himself. Golden light filled the air as the assembled squadron fired wave upon wave of golden artillery toward the great Wyvern, but Leander had fallen silent, the magic barely seeming to worry him. His silence was more frightening than the blood-curdling war cries many heard in their last moments, face-to-face with him on the battlefield. A peace had fallen across his handsome face, his burning eyes still wide, though glassy with concentration.

With each blow of piercing golden magic, Leander’s eyes burned brighter, the glare blinding all those who looked upon him, until his whole body seemed to burn with the same glowing, crackling silver. Beneath his feet, the very earth shifted as liquid silver rose up from the death-soaked battlefield. Like phantom dust, it gathered and soared across the broken ground, swarming in the air around him, swirling like a tempest overhead.

Desperate now, the congregated Mages let their magic surge toward him, but no matter what they did, they could not get him to stop. No spell could penetrate the light spinning around him.

It was they who stopped, as a great blast, so loud it could be heard for miles around, exploded from the very center of Leander Wyvern. A bolt of unholy silver lightning shot from the sky, shivering violently through his body, sent from the swirling clouds overhead, and burst into the ground in a pulsing beam of pure energy that seemed to go on for eternity, channeled through the burning figure of the last Spellbreaker. The earth trembled and the ground cracked, though none were looking to their feet; they saw only horror as the mist of anti-magic cleared. The Spellbreaker and the tempest above were nowhere to be seen—they were gone, obliterated by the force of the final spell Leander had used against those who had persecuted his people, down to the very last one.

How were they to know what he had done?

The earth shook as wisps of shadowy silver, shot through with black, snaked away from the spot where Leander had been, undulating through the air and the grass, toward the Mages who stood before Wyvern’s place of death. As the silvery mist clawed at their flesh, biting through their skin and deep into their core, it began to dawn on them, what he had done. It moved like liquid, smothering the Mages in a poisonous mist as it snatched their essence from within, taking what it was owed.