Dream - 30

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Race: Saurian

Bloodline Powers: Strength, Rending, Emberbreath
Greater Mysteries: Fire (Noble) 3
Lesser Mysteries: Heat 4, Good Air 4, Embers 4, Pressure 3, Current/Flow 3

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“I still don’t see why you’re awake,” Sam said, reaching up to scratch the scales of his neck. “There should have been enough sedative in the pigs to knock any goblin in the tribe out three times over, and no offense, but you are a lot smaller than most of the goblins.”

“And that’s how I recognized the compound you were using,” Grimmshold hissed, brandishing the disease ridden chunk of flesh.  “You fed so much to the pigs that I could taste it in one bite.  The rest of the tribe didn’t have the palette to notice the change, but I’ve been working with the ingredients you pilfered for years, of course I would-”

The goblin stopped, cocking their head to the side.  They leaned forward slightly, as if peering at him uncertainly.

“You got bigger,” Grimmshold commented lamely.  “How did you get so much bigger?”

“Thanks for noticing!”  Samazzar replied brightly, raising his hands over his head and twirling quickly.  “Dussok, Takkla and I absorbed the bloodline of the scalehounds and evolved.  Now we’re all one step closer to becoming dragons.”

“Say,” he remarked.  “Dussok and Takkla are a lot bigger too.  Did you really just notice our evolutions for the first time while talking to me?”

“They were far away,” Grimmshold said defensively.  “I saw them lurking near the edge of the feast pit and infected them before hiding to wait for you.  I wasn’t really looking for changes in their bodies.  Seriously!  Only an hour or two have passed since the three of you went out looking for alcohol.  How could I have expected you to have undergone an evolution?”

“That isn’t very observant of you,” Sam chided, shaking his head.  “I’ll try to break it to them gently, but I’m sure Dussok and Takkla’s feelings will be hurt.  They went through all of the pain and effort to become an entirely new species, and you didn’t even notice.”

“I.. I’m sorry?”  Grimmshold stammered before shaking their head.

“Wait,” they shouted.  “Why in the name of the mysteries am I apologizing?  We’re about to duel.  I’m planning on killing you!  And not the ordinary kind of death, it’s going to be messy, drawn out and painful.”

“That’s no excuse to be impolite,” Sam sniffed.  “We can handle our disagreement like adults, there’s no need to be a barbarian about it.”

Grimmshold didn’t answer, instead shaking the chunk of meat in Samazzar’s general direction.  The air around the flesh changed.  Sam couldn’t quite put his talon on exactly what was happening, but the heat profile and pressure shifted just enough to alert him that the goblin was working a spell.

Samazzar flexed one hand, clenching it into a fist as he pushed air toward himself, creating a bubble of high pressure.  His scales tingled as the world pressed down on him, almost like Sam was deep underwater once again.  Only when the air stilled around him, a sphere without any current or flow as the higher pressure excluded the outside world, did he let himself relax slightly.

The ability used a noticeable chunk of Sam’s concentration, and there was only a finite amount of good air in the bubble, but no mundane gas would be able to breach the barrier.  Without some sort of magical accompaniment, any windborne attack would simply flow past his defenses like a river around a rock.

Grimmshold thrust the diseased flesh forward, grunting as he put the entire force of his will behind the attack.   The strange ripple of warmth and slightly higher air pressure rushed toward Samazzar, only to hit his shield and stop dead.

The goblin grunted, and around the edges of Samazzar’s barrier, the world warmed slightly as their magic went to work.  If Sam focused, he could tell that the shaman was using the mysteries to amplify something, but whatever it was, he didn’t have the sort of instinctive understanding and connection with it that he had for his existing mysteries.

He stood firm, grinning cockily at the straining goblin.  The edges of the pressure bubble practically thrummed with power as their wills clashed and contested, but no matter what advantage Grimmshold had in their mysteries, the shaman simply didn’t understand airflow the way Sam did, and no difference in power would overcome the fact that the ability the goblin was using needed the air to work.

Sam raised a clawed hand, twirling it once as he guided the natural flow of air past him, summoning a light gust of wind that blew Grimmshold’s attack back at them.  The goblin shuddered, lowering the meat in their hand as they began panting with exertion.  They swiped a gnarled hand through the air, dismissing the spell.

“That wasn’t fire,” Grimmshold hissed, their eyes narrowing beneath their hood.  “The last I heard, you were supposed to be a fire spellcaster, lizard.  What in the name of Grolm’s putrid soul was that?”

“A secret,” Samazzar replied cheerfully, reaching with a claw and his will toward a nearby burning hut and grasping onto the flames dancing over its filthy thatching.  He gripped the fire with his mind and threw it toward the hunched shaman.

“After all,” he continued, admiring the tendril of roiling flame as it lunged toward the shaman, “isn’t that what the mysteries are?”

Grimmshold was too busy dodging to reply, but Sam didn’t let that stop him, twisting rope of fire in midair to pursue the goblin with the same tenacity he’d used to hunt field mice as a pup.  The shaman threw themselves to the ground, abandoning all dignity and their walking stick in a vain attempt to avoid the whip of fire at the last moment.

The bolt of flame curved, arcing downward to strike the prone goblin.  Immediately, Samazzar focused on the good air surrounding Grimmshold.  The blaze flared to life, feeding on the good air as it latched on to the shaman.

They rolled feebly back and forth in the mud as Samazzar turned his attention to the embers springing to life in the goblin’s heavy cloak as the fire took hold.  He pressed with his will, pumping more good air into the flames as he expanded the small patches of embers, transforming the fire from a small affair into a blaze that lit up the entire night.

Then, the embers began to fade.  Sam pushed with his mind trying to duplicate the efforts that had created the bonfire even as the flames retracted.  Somehow, Grimmshold was contesting with will, using one of his own mysteries to undermine Samazzar’s magic.

Years and experience won out.  Despite throwing everything he had into feeding the mysteries swirling around the goblin, the last of the embers disappeared, winking out simultaneously in Sam’s magical vision.  Barely a second later, the fire guttered out, leaving a cloud of thick, dark smoke as the shaman grabbed its walking stick and staggered unsteadily to their feet.

The shaman was both filthy and naked, their warty green flesh covered in a layer of burns, and some sort of thick brownish slime.  They stabbed their walking stick into the ground breathing heavily as they leaned on it with both hands, their genitalia exposed to the smoky night air.

“Fire users,” Grimmshold spat, their face a rictus of pain under the medley burns and scar tissue that covered their bald head.  “All you want to do is strike first.  To annihilate your target in one swift and overwhelming destructive blow without any nuance or artistry.”

“From the second I confronted you,” the shaman continued, gasping for breath as he glared at Sam, “I knew your first move would be to try and burn me alive.  I might not have your flare for the alchemical, but it’s not hard to prepare oils of flame resistance weeks in advance of our little confrontation.  It might not have been able to save me from the entirety of your attack, but they certainly were enough to buy me enough time to defeat your spells.”

“If it works, it works.”  Samazzar replied with a shrug.  “I almost got you there too.  If I were just a little quicker, I would have been able to finish you off before you… did whatever that trick was near the end to kill my magic.”

“Rot,” Grimmshold grunted, slamming their staff into the mud.  Sam could feel some sort of energy pulse from the goblin, a strange sense of uneasy wrongness that reached into his stomach and flipped it over.  “Fire needs fuel to survive, and given enough of a push, any dead thing will rot.  Until you’ve reached lesser completion and become a full magi, any flame you throw at me will need a source.  All I need to do is deprive you of those sources, and your magic will be useless, a mere party trick to amuse yourself as I toy with your disease-addled body.”

A wave of nausea and vertigo washed over Sam.  For a second, his control began to slip and the boundaries of the high pressure bubble wavered, but even as he fell to his knees, Samazzar bit into the side of his cheek, using the pain and the copper taste of his own blood to help him concentrate.

He would need to find a way to break free of Grimmshold’s magic sooner rather than later.  After all, the disorientation was only a symptom of the mystery wreaking havoc on Samazzar’s insides.  That said, it was still nothing compared to the power of the shaman’s diseases.  Sam had seen the goblin infect a pig and accelerate the growth of a fever in the animal fast enough to kill it in under a minute.  The second he let the pressure field down, he would be at the naked little creature’s mercy.

“Rot doesn’t work as well on living creatures,” Grimmshold mused, limping toward Sam.  Around them, the surrounding buildings slumped, beginning to crumble in on themselves as their support beams gave way under the assault from the shaman’s mysteries.  “A shame really.  Still, it works plenty well on inert organic matter such as logs, leaves, and flesh that has begun to putrify.”

The taste of blood hung heavy in Samazzar’s mouth, but the vertigo had dropped to a level where he could actually think.  Dread still hung over him, an innate sense that something was fundamentally wrong with his body, but he was able to push that to the back of his mind.  Dragons did not live in fear.  They created it.

A building to Sam’s left collapsed in a cloud of smoke, its timbers little more than wet mulch that could no longer support a fire.  One after another, every hovel within sight crumbled into useless piles, suffering a century’s worth of decay in a matter of seconds.  The street plunged into an eerie twilight as the flames died with the houses, leaving the fires of the feast pit as their only light source.”

“Actually,” Grimmshold continued, having crossed over half the distance between their starting position and Samazzar, “putrification isn’t a bad idea.  Once I disable you with disease, I can cut open your scales and place some spoiled meat in the wound.  After that, I can accelerate the rot and monitor how it interacts with your body.  Who knows, lizard.  Maybe I’ll have the breakthrough that drives me to lesser completion while watching you die.  After all the trouble you’ve caused, that’s the least you owe me.  Becoming the stepping stone to my ascent into the ranks of the magi.”

Sam gasped for breath, glaring up at the approaching goblin.  Up close, he could see the burns covering the monster along with the tattered remains of the cloak that Grimmshold had been forced to rot off of themselves.  Samazzar truly had come close, burning away almost a quarter of the hunched creature’s skin and blackening the flesh beneath.

Unfortunately, the fires were out.  If Sam tried to reach all the way back into the feast pit for a source, the flames would die long before he could draw them toward the limping goblin.  Technically, he could use his new bloodline ability to cough up a ball of fire and try to use that to ignite his opponent, but without hair or dry clothing to ignite, in all likelihood he would only injure the spellcaster.

Anger spiked through the nausea that filled Samazzar’s stomach.  A dragon would not sit crouched here, weakened by an enemy’s magic and awaiting his own demise.  It would lunge forward and attack its hunched and physically frail opponent, rending the creature apart with its razor sharp talons.

He clenched his fangs together.  But if he did that, it would mean moving close enough to Grimmshold to let the insidious creature inside his pressure bubble.  That meant that Sam’s body would be lousy with disease in a matter of seconds.  He might be able to injure the goblin, or even strike it down in that time, but there was no question in Samazzar’s mind that he would die from whatever ailment Grimmshold managed to infect him with in those key seconds.

Time seemed to stop.  Of course.  The pressure bubble didn’t need to be around him.  It just needed to be between Sam and Grimmshold.  The realization hit him like a thunderbolt, opening up a host of options to Sam.

“You and your friends will pay for this,” Grimmshold ranted, wobbling still closer to Samazzar.  He did his best to ignore the goblin, reaching out with his mind toward the clouds of smoke coaxing them with a wind current.

“I have potions, but these sorts of wounds don’t heal cleanly,” the shaman continued their rambling as the soot fumes began to gather around their waist and legs.  Once they were fifteen paces from Samazzar, he released the pressure bubble around himself, transferring every erg of his will to the approaching goblin.

“These burns and scars will be trophies of my triumph over-” Grimmshold stopped, frowning at Sam as the air pressure around the shaman ratcheted up.  “What are you doing, lizard.  Why won’t you just give up gracefully and die.”

Sam released his mental grip on the airflow around the goblin, letting the smoke that he had gathered around their legs flow freely inside the pressure bubble that hemmed the shaman in.

“What is thi-” they broke down coughing, slapping a hand to their face.

The nausea and vertigo faded as Samazzar’s magic distracted Grimmshold.  Sam stood up, muzzle still locked into a grin as he reached out with his mind, stealing as much good air as possible from the bubble he’d made around the goblin.

That was the reverse side of the fourth tier of a mystery.  A senior student could turn a torch into a bonfire, or diminish a bonfire to a torch.  Samazzar struggled to touch the good air inside Grimmshold’s lungs, interfering directly with another living being was always more difficult that interacting with the outside world, but he could certainly rob the air around the shaman of anything that would support the goblin’s life.

They looked up at Samazzar, their yellowed eyes streaming tears and barely visible through the clouds of smoke clogging the sphere of pressurized air around them.  Grimmshold opened their mouth to say something, only to break out into another round of coughing, each spasm rocking their small body.

The shaman reached up toward Sam, hand trembling.  He wasn’t sure if the goblin was begging for mercy as they struggled for breath, or if they were trying to afflict him with one last working of the mysteries, but he wasn’t going to take that risk.  Samazzar swirled the air current around Grimmshold, creating a cocoon of circular air inside the pressure bubble on the off chance that they had some sort of concealed ability that would let their diseases reach him.

He crouched, some ten paces from Grimmshold as they clawed helplessly at their throat, glaring daggers at Sam.

“Airflow,” he said, locking eyes with the dying goblin.  “That’s the secret.  Fire needs good air to survive, so I began unlocking some of the secrets regarding air.  Apparently, goblins need good air to survive too.  What an unlikely coincidence.”

Grimmshold shuddered, slumping into the mud.  Samazzar stood up, watching over the body for almost a full minute as the heat and good air to leave the corpse.  Finally, satisfied that his tormenter was dead, he left to find his stash of potions.  If Dussok and Takkla were infected by something, they’d need a curative before they’d be ready to travel.