A Magic of Nightfall

Nico Morel

Nico couldn’t understand what Talis was saying as the painted soldiers approached them. He could hear the uncertainty in his vatarh’s voice and the way he was speaking louder and faster, holding the magical walking stick in front of him like a cudgel. His matarh clutched Nico so fiercely that he could barely breathe as the strange men surrounded them, impossibly large and frightening and smelling of blood and death.

Nico could feel the fear rising in him and with it, the strange coldness he’d felt in the Archigos’ office, as it had when he’d run away from Ville Paisli. It began to build inside him, and he muttered to himself the strange words that came to his mind as his hands made small motions under his matarh’s clinging embrace.

“Talis,” he heard his matarh say, “what’s happening? I’m frightened…”

“It’s fine,” his vatarh said, but his voice belied that. “I just need to talk to the High Warrior. Let me do that. They’re my people; they just didn’t expect to find me here…”

He turned back to one of the painted men, the one with a red-tongued black lizard crawling from the top of his skull, around his left eye, and down the side of his head. As they half-shouted at each other, Talis shaking his stick in the man’s face, Nico felt the cold growing and growing inside, so intense that he knew he would burst if he tried to contain it any longer. Nico cried out: the strange words. He gestured.

There was no blue fire this time. Instead, the air shivered around him, rippling visibly outward, and where that fast-moving wave struck the painted men, they were thrown backward as if a great fist had struck them. “Come on, Matarh!” Nico yelled. He grabbed her hand, pulling her away so that she stumbled after him as he fled in the direction that Karl and Varina had gone. “Talis! Hurry!”

But Talis wasn’t running with them; he’d also been felled by the wild burst from Nico. The lizard-warrior had already regained his feet, and Nico-glancing over his shoulder as he started to run-could see him shouting to the others as Talis screamed something back at him and raised his walking stick. Blinding light flashed from the stick and one of the warriors howled. Nico pulled at his matarh harder. “Run!”

She took a step with him, but her hand dropped away from his. He took another step before he realized that she wasn’t with him. He heard Talis scream-“Sera!”-and turned back.

His matarh was lying sprawled on the cobbles of the plaza, a spear in her back and blood staining the paving stones. She was reaching toward Nico, crawling after him, her face drawn with pain. “Matarh!” Nico screamed, and ran back to her. He went down alongside her just as Talis reached her also.

“Nico…” she said. “I’m sorry…” Her head turned to Talis and she started to speak, but he stroked her head, cradling her carefully.

“No, don’t say anything. We’ll get you to a healer, someone who can help…” Talis looked up at the painted soldiers, who had gathered around them. He spoke to them, sharply, in their own language. The lizard-warrior scowled, but he gestured to his men. One pulled the spear from his matarh’s back, and she screamed again. Nico hurled himself at the lizard-warrior, pummeling at the man’s armor with his fist. The man grabbed Nico in one muscular arm and grunted something to Talis. “Nico!” Talis said. “They’re going to help her. Please listen to me. You have to stop fighting them.”

All the energy left him; he went limp in the lizard-warrior’s grasp.

Two of the warriors crouched down; they tore strips from their clothing and bound it around his matarh’s waist, around the wound. Then one of them gathered up his matarh in his arms; she groaned and her eyes rolled back in her head, but Nico could see that she was still breathing. One of her hands dangled; Nico wriggled in the lizard-warrior’s grasp, and the man let him go. He ran and took his matarh’s hand.

He held it, sobbing, as they walked quickly away from the plaza.