City of Steel by Heath Pfaff

Author:Heath Pfaff [Pfaff, Heath]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy
Published: 2015-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

After Xandrith had finished catching the others up on his own journey to the Forge, Haley set about retelling the path followed by herself and Crow.

“After Tilda found us in the woods we spent the next few days tending to Crow, and I spent the time working on my magic. I broke Tilda’s silence curse, and then set to work on breaking the hold the bonesteel weapons held over us. I knew that it needed to be done. I was afraid of what I was becoming. When Kassa attacked us, and I realized that she’d lost herself like she had back when I’d first met her, I decided I didn’t want to be like her. I’d already been looking at the magical ties my weapon had. I think that’s what triggered Kassa’s attack to begin with.”

Haley held her axe up in front of her. “The spells around the weapons are really complex. They’re tied to the weapon, to the wielder, and to something distant. I could trace all the lines of energy from the weapons, but I wasn’t certain what they all did. The symbols were far beyond anything I’d been taught. That single strand that flowed off into nowhere, though, was suspicious. I couldn’t think of any good reason for the weapons to be connected to anything far away. I wasn’t certain, but I guessed that was the part of the spell that attached the intelligence to the weapon.”

Xandrith raised an eyebrow. “It could have been attached to the source of the weapon’s power.”

Haley chuckled nervously. “I hadn’t thought of that at the time. I was angry about what had happened to Crow, and I just went and broke that strand of magic. The first few times I did that, the magic unbalanced and exploded. It was like breaking the leg off a table. Without the support the whole thing just fell apart, but I was more cautious this time. I severed the line of power and then grounded the spill of magic, letting the energy flow back into neutral paths.”

“Neutral paths?” Xandrith was more than a little bewildered.

Haley nodded. “Yeah, the world is full of neutral magic paths. I don’t know how they got here, or what they do, but I can feel them reaching up through the soil, hungry, like they’re looking to reclaim lost magic. When I send the energy back into the neutral paths, there isn’t an explosion. The spell just falls apart. The first time I used that technique was on Tilda’s binding. There were several different strands of that spell that I had to direct out. I could tell immediately that it was dangerous work. The whole thing looked like it had been designed to break violently.

“Using the same system on the weapons was much easier. Whoever had weaved the spell on those had done so with the assumption that the magic could not be tampered with. The spell that connected the intelligence to the weapon wasn’t even bound in with the other parts of the weapon’s magic.

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