MAGUS INFINITE

The city had a name once. I could have pulled it from the map in my head... I still had that. The whole continent was laid out behind my eyes, red where I had not been and slowly, town by town, going the colour of the storm.

More souls were being added to my storm, flashes of lightning falling from the sky and touching the earth, and dragging the screaming dead to my scarlet banner. There was something wrong with this development, a vague premonition that I was about to cross a line I should not touch, but there were too many things happening at the moment, and I let this feeling be buried.

Like the name of this city, I could have pulled it from my mind, but I did not, and a part of me that should have been screaming noted that I did not want to pull up the city’s name.

It was not as if I did not know the reason, because a named city is a place people lived; an unnamed one is a target, and the cold flowing in me preferred targets, and I had stopped arguing with the cold about small things.

That should have frightened me more than it did... I thought I heard the voice of my sister; no, it should have been the fox. She was screaming something, but I could not hear it under the weight of the laughter erupting from my scarlet robes.

∞

The city was the largest Conclave stronghold I had seen. High walls, layered wards laid by people who knew their work, and other magical devices that pulsed with both mundane and demonic energies.

Thousands of mages were inside, and among them, I could feel it through the storm– real strength. Several Adepts at the threshold of crystallising, and near the centre, holding the heart of the place, one signature that was fully Arcanist.

”Finally,” I grinned, ”Would you be the stroke that breaks the camel’s back?”

There was a time, not long ago in days and very long ago in everything else, when a single Arcanist was a barrier that I broke myself against, time and time again.

I would never forget my fight with Vrakth, and how much I learned from it, but those times have passed.

I looked down at the city and the one Arcanist in it, and I felt nothing that resembled challenge. I felt the way a tide feels about a sandcastle.

Somewhere in me, a scrap of a boy said that used to be your ceiling, and the death-titan I had become did not bother to answer it.

I waited for my storm to cover the city, hearing the cries of panic and fear that rose into the heavens, but the heavens could not hear them, because I had swallowed even their cries... There was no more hope; there was just death, and death was me.

∞

I did not lay siege; why should I? Siege is for armies, and I had the storm. When the city was well and truly covered, I lowered it.

The wards met the storm first, and I had to say that the wards were good, and they would have defended against an army of mages, but the storm I controlled was rapidly becoming weather, and you cannot ward a city against its own sky.

The red cloud settled onto the walls like a hand laid flat, carrying all the weight of the dead, and the wards flared before they screamed.

My eyes could see the magic inside the wards drinking power from their anchors, trying to hold, and I simply let the storm lean closer, and one by one the ward-anchors went dark, as I outlasted whatever power was inside them. Have you seen a candle that was outlasted by the night? This was the way I defeated the wards; after all, the night that I bring would be everlasting, and their feeble candles would all go dark.

The wards shattered, and the rain of blood came down inside the walls.

∞

I watched through the storm as the city below me dissolved into chaos. The red rain fell in sheets, each drop carrying a fragment of the weight I carried, and where it touched, it drained everything it touched: the warmth from bodies, and the light from spells. I know that even the hope from hearts was taken away.

The Realm of the Dead should not be found in the mortal realm. The Conclave mages who had been ready for battle, who had seen the storm coming and prepared their defenses, found that there was no defense against the weather.

The first wave of mages closest to the storm tried to flee. They ran for the gates, their spells already forming to blast through the walls, but the storm was already inside, and the gates were already gone. The red cloud settled over the city, and the screaming began.

In the battlefields, the people I had killed were soldiers, mostly; in the city, there were others. The Conclave had taken it as a stronghold, which meant they had kept the city.

There were bakers and porters and cleaners here, the ones too ordinary to harvest or butcher for pleasure; they were kept alive to serve them, to cook and carry and clean for the men who had killed everyone they loved.

They were my people, but the storm did not sort them. I understood that this was the intuition that had been at the back of my mind for a while that I disregarded, since my storm was still spreading, far outside this city, and all the dead being added to it were surely not just coming from the Conclave.

The storm knew the dead from the living, and that was the only distinction that mattered to it. Now that I was fully aware of what was happening, I began to feel them arrive on the chains. The bakers, the porters, mothers, fathers... children.

They came up shrieking with the rest, and I found it funny that they weighed the same as my enemies.

The chains did not care, and I understood, now that I was holding a hundred thousand and more souls that now included people whose only crime was surviving long enough to be made useful.

I understood that the storm had stopped being a weapon I aimed and become a thing I was, and a thing does not aim itself. I did not choose to stop sparing the innocent... I simply grew too large to see them

That was the moment the mercy in my heart died.

My body reached twenty feet, and I understood that I had become a Death Titan.