“God damnit,” is the last thing Hal hears before he begins to cast against the vault.

A slurry of words fall from Hal’s mouth with fury and vigor. If good magic was where intention and practice met, then Hal’s magic was at the intersection intention and passion. He cast against the vault door as if his life depended upon it.

And it did.

“Open sesame!” He screams. “Entrado a now-o,” he cries.

He waves a straight arm wildly through the air like a sword, casting behind it a cross-pocked afterimage of glowing red. He extends a palm toward the glowing shapes and says, “Fucking open, you god damned door!”

As his spell meets the magical defenses of the door, it erupts into a fire of white and red lightning, the spell roars and rages against the defense set by a mage of greater study, but lesser ability.

The door crumbles into a million pieces before him.

Iso opens his eyes to the mess before him. He looks up at Hal. He already knows what’s happened but, being the prudent mage that he is, confirms his suspicions.

“You get impatient and just blow up the door?” he asks mundanely.

“Er—yeah, but I mean I had to. There’s—“

“You think about the fact that you probably just destroyed the Book of the Damned inside?” interrupts Iso.

“Well, not exactly. I—“

“We’re so fucked,” says Iso.

“Look, the Kantaban guard is right outside the door and I had to act,” says Hal. “We didn’t have time to do this the right way. We needed results and you bet your sweet ass I got the results.”

Iso rises from his seated position and begins laughing. Hal is taken aback by this reaction. He’d never seen Iso laugh before. Iso puts a hand on Hal’s shoulder and looks him in the eye.

“Kowabunga,” he says simply.

“What?” says Hal confused.

“You really casted a spell with ‘Kowabunga’, dude,” he replies shaking his head. “You’re something else, you know that?”

“Look, Iso, my spell isn’t going to hold them out there much longer. Can we figure out how to get the hell out of here and debrief of my spell choices later?”

“Let’s see what’s left of the book and then you can blast a hole in that there wall so we can make our escape,” says Iso.

The Book of the Damned is badly burnt but not beyond repair. Iso’s mood improves at the sight.

Temporarily.

Try as they might, neither Hal nor Iso has any luck casting their way out of the vault.

“We’re fucked, Iso,” says Hal.

“Cast the spell you did to crumble the door, Hal,” says Iso, “surely it will work on the inner walls as well.”

“It doesn’t work that way for me,” says Hal. “I kinda just, feel it in the moment.”

“Well, you better feel it fast or we’re going to be feeling the pointy-end of a Kantaban Guard Rod,” says Iso gravely.

As if he summoned them, the guards break through Hal’s defense and enter the antechamber. Hal and Iso share a look.

They’ll have to cast their way out.

They are two powerful mages, but their odds of survival against upwards of ten Kantaban Guards are not good.

Hal turns to Iso. “The book. Throw it to me,” he says.

Iso looks at the Book of the Damned and back to Hal. He reluctantly tosses the book to Hal who catches it. Hal feels it’s power in his palms, he feels words flowing through his mind, whispering, rooting out mental corridors long-empty, burrowing their long-forgotten, ancient wisdom deep into the recesses of his mind.

In that moment, he understands the chaos at his finger tips.

Hal stares down the Kantaban guards and then closes his eyes. He says the first words that scream in his mind as if begging to be uttered.

“Ashes to ashes! Dust to Dust! Now you die, you must, you must,” he screams.

The Kantaban guards look around at one another, then down at their bodies.

Nothing.

They advance.

And then it happens.

The Kantaban guards slowly crumble into nothingness, first arms fall off and dissipate into ash on the white marble floors. Then heads and torsos dissolve into nothingness like water dissolving pillars of dust. Hal’s words had cleansed the room of any trace of the guards.

Soon the two mages stand alone in the now silent vault. Hal looks to Iso as if to confirm that that just happened.

Iso looks to Hal and smiles—another first for Hal. Iso approaches Hal and takes the Book of the Damned from him. He then puts a hand on Hal’s shoulder and finally speaks, eyebrows raised.

“Kowabunga.”

r/InMyLife42Archive