Laura Resnick - The Purifying Fire

Fighting exhaustion and struggling hard to call forth more power in her weakened condition, Chandra spread her arms, then uttered a short spell that Mother Luti had taught her. She simultaneously clapped her hands together as she stared hard at the six wizards, keeping them all in focus. Her sheet of fire sprang around them like a trap, coiling to encircle them.

Their menacing hissing grew panicky as the fire closed in on them. Chandra clasped her hands together and squeezed hard, commanding her flames to embrace and consume her enemies. As the giant hooded snakes and their robes caught fire, their bodies writhed frantically. They clawed at each other, and their gaping jaws opened wide in agony, exposing their terrible fangs. The stench was unbelievable, and Chandra found it somehow disturbing that they didn’t scream or make any noise beside that tortured hissing.

The burned soldier was still howling in pain, and the cowed one wept, openly terrified. The Enervants were still alive, but writhing in their death throes as the flames consumed them.

With her captors all but vanquished, Chandra fled past her fatal fire and out the door of her cell. Fortunately, the soldiers had left it unlocked when they entered.

Beyond the door was a narrow corridor that led in two directions. She looked to her right and could see a dead end. She had no choice but to go left. When she reached a corner, she was spotted by two soldiers standing guard in the intersecting hallway.

“Prisoner escaped!” one of them cried.

She ran straight into them, hurtling her full body weight at them before they could unsheathe their swords. Her best chance of staying alive now was to planeswalk out of Kephalai, and she needed to conserve what was left of her power if she was to enter the?ther. She knocked one of them against the wall as hard as she could, and stomped on the other’s stomach when he fell. Hoping that would at least slow them down, she ran onward.

She saw a stone staircase at the end of the corridor where four more guards waited.

Behind her, the soldiers she had just knocked down were shouting, “Prisoner escaping! Prisoner escaping!”

The soldiers she was approaching clearly heard. One of them, at the top of the stairs, shouted this same phrase through the bars of the door up there and called for help.

Another of the soldiers guarding the stairs saw her and warned her in a loud voice, “Within moments, thirty soldiers will come through that door! Surrender now!”

He was wrong. It didn’t take moments. He had barely finished speaking when the door opened and armed soldiers began pouring through it.

And, if anything, he had underestimated their number.

Chandra turned around and ran back the way she had just come.

Fortunately, the two soldiers she had just knocked down hadn’t expected her to turn back and trample them again. This time their feeble interference barely slowed her down as she dashed past.

Chandra knew she couldn’t deal with all those reinforcements. As Gideon so obviously had understated, she had made herself conspicuous. She had to assume this was just the first wave. Now that the alarm had been sounded, the Prelate’s entire army would be devoted to keeping her a prisoner or dispatching her. And in her current condition, they would succeed-not immediately and not without pain, but they would succeed.

She didn’t have time to search for another way out of the prison. There might well not be one. And even if there were another way out, she had no chance of evading dozens of soldiers while she looked for it.

Her only remaining choice wasn’t a good one, but at least there was a chance she would survive.

She turned a corner and ran back to the large cell where she had been held captive. Behind her, she could hear the footsteps, rattling swords, and shouts of a lot of soldiers.

In front of her, blocking the door to the cell, were the the two original guards, the coward supporting Dirk. When the coward saw her, a new look of horror washed across his puffy, sweating face.

“Out of my way!” Chandra snapped as she moved forward. They might have fully obliged had she not reached them before the two could move, shoving them to the floor outside the door.

Once inside she slammed the door shut. No lock on this side. Of course not. Dungeons were built to lock prisoners in, not to lock soldiers out.

A fetid cloud of smoke hung in the cell. The Enervants were dead, but their smoldering remains filled the room with an odor so foul Chandra could scarcely bear to breathe.

Coughing as the smoke and stench assaulted her, Chandra pressed her back against the door and heard heavy footsteps approaching. She had only moments now. A short controlled burst of fire welded the door to its jam. It wouldn’t hold for long, but it would have to do.

She concentrated with all her might as she forged a path to the?ther. The soldiers were pounding on the door, but Chandra was able to reach the meditative state she needed. Breathe steadily and regularly. At her first glimpse of the void, she hurled herself recklessly into it.

Behind her, on Kephalai, two guards-one an emotional wreck, the other gruesomely burned-would insist they had seen her enter the chamber. Their account would be dismissed as attempt to cover up incompetence when she wasn’t found inside the cell. Nevertheless, there would be a thorough search of the whole prison, and that would take time. In the end, they’d never know how she had disappeared. And when the Prelate received the report of Chandra’s escape, she’d only be able to guess what had happened. In any case, without the mage who had followed Chandra back to Regatha last time, they’d never find her. She was out of their reach the moment she entered the?ther.

Which wasn’t the same thing as being safe.

Chandra fell through a tunnel of flame. And, having had no time to prepare herself for planeswalking, she was unprotected from the raw, red, furious force of this fire. It scalded her so brutally that she cried out in agony, feeling it burn through her flesh, her blood, her bones, and sink into her soul with angry, destructive heat.

Disoriented and in pain, she kept plummeting through the endless reaches of the void between the planes of the Multiverse. Her whole body felt consumed by fire and torn apart by her relentless fall. She had entered the Blind Eternities in sudden desperation, without sufficient power or focus, and now she was paying the price for such a rash act.

She had only entered the?ther without preparation once before-the very first time she walked-and it had come close to killing her. Then, as now, she was fleeing death. But now, at least, she knew what was happening. This time, she didn’t feel the blind, animal terror she had felt then. This time, she struggled to take charge of her planeswalk, rather than simply succumbing in helpless fear to its effects.

Chandra tried to focus on her breathing, her heartbeat, her body’s rhythms… but the air in her lungs felt like boiling water, fire scorched her belly, and ice filled her veins. She tried to concentrate on her mana bonds to maintain her power, but the Blind Eternities flowed around her with the brilliance of a billion suns, blinding and stunning her, while at the same time soaking her in dark fatigue. She tried to reach out and sense the energy of different planes, to seek out a physical reality where she could anchor herself, but everything around her tumbled in a multicolored chaos.

The channel through which Chandra plunged became fearfully black, an entropic void sucking at her life force. Just as she thought she would lose consciousness, fire became water, cold and viscous. Chandra panicked as a drowning sensation enveloped her before everything became white, binding and smothering, and surrounded her like an unbearable weight. A shift to green created pain she didn’t understand, as if her bones were trying to push through her skin. And when fire engulfed her again, she welcomed the familiar agony.