Spells of the Damned

Chapter Two: Smoke and Mirrors

The first thing Young Kael noticed was the smell. Not blood, not ash, herbs. Burning slow and sharp, curling through the chaos like they had absolutely no business being there.

Torch's doing, obviously.

The older man stood sideways to the battle, as if the whole thing were a mild inconvenience rather than a life-or-death situation. He rolled his shoulder like it ached, which it probably did, then flicked another spark toward a lunging chronomancer. The flame wasn't impressive. It didn't roar or bloom or light up the sky. It simply existed, small and precise, and where it touched the assassin's robe, time caught fire.

The silver hourglass embroidery blackened and peeled as the spell unraveled the enchantment anchoring the man's stolen youth. The assassin aged thirty years in a single breath and crumpled to the ground.

Torch sighed. "See? Small works."

A wrinkle deepened beside his eye. Older Kael noticed, he always noticed.

"You shouldn't have come," Kael said, not looking up.

Torch snorted. "Funny. You used to say that after every battle." He took another long drag. "And yet here I am."

Young Kael turned and stared. This man, this casual, utterly infuriating man, spoke to his future self like they were equals. Like old friends. Like brothers.

"You know him?" Young Kael demanded.

Torch squinted at him. "Know him?" He gestured lazily in Older Kael's direction. "Kid, I pulled him out of a crater twenty years ago when he decided that blowing up a siege tower was a perfectly reasonable idea."

Young Kael blinked. Older Kael winced. "It worked."

"It turned you into a fossil at nineteen," Torch shot back.

Another assassin lunged, and Borin intercepted with a roar that shook the stones. "Back off, clock-robbers!" His hammer Regret, engraved along the handle, came down with a thunderous c***k and shattered a temporal shield. "Time to make some memories!"

Sera materialized beside him in a shimmer of unraveling light. "You said that last time."

"It was funny then too!"

Up above, Lord Veyra Thalor watched all of it with the quiet, satisfied patience of a man whose long-running experiment was finally producing interesting results. His projection shimmered, an elegant silhouette completely untouched by the violence below. His gaze drifted to Torch and lingered there, and something like recognition crossed his face.

"Ah," he murmured. "Toren Vale."

Torch went very still. "...Damn."

Older Kael turned sharply. "You know him?"

Torch didn't answer. Veyra did.

"We fought together at the eastern breach," Veyra said, almost pleasantly. "You burned an entire ravine to hold the line. It was rather impressive." He paused. "And then you abandoned the war."

Torch's jaw tightened. His hand moved toward his herb and stopped. "Had my reasons."

"Yes," Veyra said softly. "Her name is Mira, is it not?"

Everything stopped.

The cigarette fell from Torch's fingers. Older Kael went completely still. When Torch finally spoke, his voice had dropped to something quiet and hard and without any warmth in it at all.

"You don't get to say her name."

Veyra smiled. "I get to say many things." His eyes moved to Older Kael. "You surround yourself with interesting ghosts."

The assassins shifted tactics then, instead of pressing forward, they began casting. Silver chains of slowed time erupted from their palms, spreading wide and low. Capture spells.

Young Kael reacted on pure instinct. Fire burst from his staff, bright and reckless and wild, and it shattered one chain, but nearly shattered him along with it. The backlash hit him like a wall. Older Kael moved instantly, catching it, redirecting it, absorbing the cost before the boy even understood what was happening. Young Kael watched in horror as age spots bloomed across the older man's knuckles.

"Stop doing that," he whispered.

Older Kael didn't answer. He couldn't.

Then a voice cut clean through the noise, snarky and achingly familiar. "Oh good," it said. "You're both being idiots."

Young Kael went cold.

A shape flickered into being beside him, a girl, translucent and faintly glowing with temporal residue, like something only half-pulled through a doorway. Lyra. But not. Echo-Lyra smirked at him like no time had passed at all.

"Hi," she said. "Miss me?"

Young Kael's breath caught in his throat. Older Kael closed his eyes, just for a moment. Some wounds, it turned out, never really closed, you just got better at pretending they had.

Veyra leaned forward, genuinely fascinated now. "An echo," he breathed. "How extraordinary." His voice softened. "You see? The river wants to be changed."

"The river kills people when you force it," Older Kael said flatly.

"And yet you keep paying the price," Veyra replied. His head tilted. "Why?"

Older Kael said nothing. Probably because he didn't know anymore.

A pulse of raw power surged through the rift, and the assassins withdrew immediately, disciplined, efficient, not a wasted movement between them. Veyra raised one hand.

"We will meet again," he said calmly. His gaze settled on Older Kael. "You are wasting your years." Then on the boy. "And you are throwing away your future." A beat of silence. "I can teach you both how to keep them."

The projection faded. The silence that followed was broken only by Borin, bent double with his hands on his knees, wheezing.

"Well," he managed. "That was unsettling."

Torch crouched down, picked up his fallen cigarette, relit it, and took a long slow breath. "He knows about Mira." He said it to no one in particular.

Older Kael turned. "You never told me."

"Didn't think I'd have to."

Young Kael looked between them, struggling to wrap his head around it. "You left the war for a kid?"

Torch met his eyes. "Yes." No shame in it, no apology, no explanation beyond the word itself. Just plain truth.

Echo-Lyra drifted nearby, arms folded loosely. "Well," she said lightly, "at least someone in this group made a smart decision."

Sera approached from the far side of the ruin, moving quietly, her expression tight. "He mentioned donors."

"He steals time," Older Kael said grimly. "Uses it to extend his own."

Torch exhaled a slow breath of smoke. "And now he wants ours."

Young Kael clenched his fists at his sides. "He's wrong about all of it."

Older Kael looked at him for a long moment. "No," he said quietly. "He's dangerous. There's a difference."

Far away, in a tower carved from black stone, a man opened his eyes.

Lord Veyra stood before a restrained figure slumped in a chair, a man aged far beyond his years, hair white, skin deeply lined, but with eyes still burning with something that refused to go out. Finn Voss looked up at him with pure, exhausted defiance.

"Finn," Veyra said gently. "You have guests coming."

Finn's jaw set. "Tell my sister to run."

Veyra smiled. "Oh," he said. "She won't."