Page 54 of Sun Elves of Ardani

As they got closer to the spiraling clouds, she realized that the temperature was steadily dropping. It had been hot enough earlier that she’d been sweating slightly in her light vest, and now she found herself hugging her body to conserve heat. Cold prickled the skin of her exposed arms. A few of the elves made fires in their hands. Kadaki would have done the same had she not been afraid to waste her magic. She suspected she might need everything she had left for whatever awaited them in town.

Beside her, Neiryn produced a flame in his hand that was big enough for her to take advantage of its warmth. She glanced up at him, but he was making a very good show of not paying attention to her, as if he hadn’t even noticed she was there.

Except for her comment earlier, she hadn’t spoken to him since the previous day. Currently they seemed to have silently agreed to pretend it hadn’t happened, but she wasn’t sure whether that agreement would still apply once they were alone again.

“Going to need help from the human again, Eliyr?” said one of the soldiers, in Ardanian, as if to make sure she heard. There were snickers from the group. Eliyr glared at the road.

As they reached the outskirts of the town, it became clear why Gregoris had been having difficulty describing their problem.

Hail was falling, and a sheen of ice covered the town. Pockets of magical light hovered in the air, crackling with lightning now and then. A cottony fungal substance had attached itself to a few buildings and was slowly growing. Huge slabs of a purplish, crystalline material had appeared at random throughout the town with no regard for gravity or space. Pieces of it floated ominously above houses and cut straight through buildings as if the walls weren’t there.

There was no logic to the things anomalies manifested. It was chaos, plain and simple.

Most people had run indoors, but Kadaki could also see at least two people lying unmoving in the street. A mountain ox and a horse nearby lay dead also, presumably victims of the occasional flickers of lightning. Gold-and-red armored Ysurans were running here and there, apparently trying to do something to combat the uncombatable chaos, and several Ardanians were doing the same. But there were no other mages in town. No one except Kadaki and Eliyr would be able to fix this.

“Holy hells,” Neiryn murmured. Hail hissed as it hit his flame.

“What?” Kadaki said dryly. “Looks like completely normal, everyday, non-magical weather to me.” Her hair was already getting wet. She pulled a leather cord from her pocket and tied it back.

She had never seen anything like this. Most anomalies were small, harmless things. But this… She could see the fractured bits of magic energy all over the town. The tangle was huge.

She turned to Eliyr. She knew him just well enough by then to see the nervousness in his eyes.

“You!” someone shouted. Kadaki turned to see Sergio approaching. He’d put on a fur cloak to combat the weather. He stopped a careful distance away from the elves, glaring at them before shifting his gaze to Kadaki. “It’s about time you got here. Are you going to explain this?”

Kadaki bristled at his tone. Gregoris inched away, looking uncomfortable. Sergio must have sent his apprentice to fetch them.

“This is a serious situation,” Rhian said. “Civilians should return to their homes. We’ll deal with this.”

Sergio looked up at her, anger flaring in his eyes. “Did you elves do this to us, or did one of the mage’s spells go awry? Or do you not have the decency to tell us?”

Rhian rested a hand on the hilt of her sword. “Return to your home, human. I won’t tell you again.”

Sergio sniffed disdainfully, but retreated, ducking under the eaves of a nearby house.

Rhian, to Kadaki’s surprise, began directing her soldiers to help with the people who were injured. Everyone spread out, each having their own tasks to complete. Eliyr was the only one who remained with Kadaki. With Neiryn’s fire gone, her skin began to feel like ice. She hugged her chest.

“You take that half?” she said to Eliyr, jerking her chin toward the east side of town. He nodded, and they got to work.

Slowly, Kadaki began unraveling strands of magic, setting them back into neat, placid patterns. She worked on one of the crystal-like objects for several minutes, and then, as the magic finally righted itself, the crystal disappeared.

Only a hundred or so tangles left to go. Simple.

The longer she worked, the more she felt herself weakening, both physically and magically. Her arms started to shake. Her cold, damp vest clung to her skin. Her fingers started going numb.

She looked across the street and spotted Eliyr engrossed in another bit of anomaly. She was both relieved and frightened to see that he seemed to be struggling as well.

Unraveling anomalies was not without risks. Doing any sort of spellcraft while exhausted could mean making a mistake—putting bits of magic together in a way they were not meant to go together, which could have effects as catastrophic as any anomaly.

Freezing and tired and probably bruised from the pelting hail, she managed to clean the majority of the magic on her side of town before she felt herself slipping. The magic grew more disobedient. It started sliding out of her grasp more often. And finally, she made a mistake.

Something in the air snapped. A spell had formed by accident. She felt it immediately, but it was too late to take it back. She braced herself for an explosion or a bolt of lightning. At first, nothing seemed to happen. Then, strangely, a twig on the road began to float into the air in front of her.

And then she noticed the potted plant on the windowsill beside her begin to float, too, and then the water in a rain barrel. Everything that wasn’t tied down was slowly rising into the air. Including herself.

Her legs flailed as her feet left the ground. There was nothing to grab on to, nothing to stop her from floating up and up into the sky. She snatched at the roof of the house, but it was just out of reach. She gathered a fistful of magic, but couldn’t think of what to do with it. In her panic, she’d suddenly forgotten every spell she knew.

A hand closed around her ankle. She jerked to a stop in the air. Objects continued floating past her into the sky.

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