“Chandra! What’s happening?” he shouted from a distance.
An illusion!
“All right, mindbender… You want to play?”
With a quickness to match her temper, Chandra leaped into the air, an aura of flame surrounding her as she recited a spell. Spreading her arms and expanding her chest like a bellows, all the air in a thirty foot radius went dead as she sapped the oxygen she needed as fuel for her fire. She paused at the top of her breath until it felt like she would explode with the effort, and when she let go, explode she nearly did. With all her might she exhaled, eyes wide, tongue extended like some primal totem. Her breath had the force of a cannon and burned with chemical intensity.
The stranger balled up, shielding his body with his cloak. The force of the blast unsteadied him, but he obviously had been able to conjure some protection. He emerged merely singed when everything around him had been reduced to charcoal. The scroll had fallen from his grasp, but lay out of both their reaches.
“Nice trick,” he mocked. “I bet you’re a big hit with the boys.”
Jokes? This guy has to go down, Chandra thought.
But he was just getting started. The mage’s eyes glowed brightly, and his skin changed, newly streaked blue-grey. Chandra knew something was coming but she didn’t know what. Still, she should have known this guy wouldn’t fight his own fights. He summoned an massive cloud elemental that swooped down to knock Chandra off her feet before veering to where the scroll lay on the ground.
Two can play at that game, thought Chandra as she summoned her own fire elemental to meet the cloud. The two titans collided with a sharp hiss, flame and vapor locked in a mercurial embrace.
With the elementals occupied, the mind mage made a move to recover the scroll himself, but Chandra was on point as she raised a wall of fire between him and his quarry.
“You’re going to have to work for it, mindbender.” Chandra was just starting to have fun.
Still, the stranger was undeterred. He ran down the wall to where he had last seen the scroll and stepped through the flame, an icy corona surrounding him. Chandra was waiting, though, her fist cocked, blazing hot. She hit him with a left cross that had the weight of the world behind it, and sent the mage flying backward, his body like a rag doll’s as he tumbled over the rocks.
As the flames died down, Chandra surveyed the scene. She had done well. The elementals had died fighting and there was plenty of scorched earth, but she had done well.
“Chandra, that was amazing!”
She turned to see Brannon. “You shouldn’t be out here, kiddo.”
“What happened to him?”
“He took a nasty spill. He won’t be back again.”
“Are you sure?” he asked pointing in the direction of the mage. There were several cloaked figures, all exactly alike, moving in different directions.
“He’s just trying to trick me. He doesn’t want me to know which one is actually him,” said Chandra pointing to the illusions. “Look, he’s running away.”
“I don’t think so,” said the boy in a strange voice. “I think he’s going to get that scroll.”
When she turned back, Chandra saw the familiar eerie blue glow in Brannon’s eyes and she knew… But right in that moment of realization, the mage hit her with a mental attack that caught her completely off-guard. She crumpled as her vision faded to black.
“Chandra, are you all right?” The real Brannon reached her side and started helping her rise from the ground. “What happened? I saw your fire elemental. Wow, I’ve never seen anything that big! Not even Mother Luti can make ’em that big.” The boy was nearly ecstatic. “And then there was a sort of… a blue wave of light or something. What was that?”
“That was the stranger,” Chandra said grumpily. “Being… clever.”
“The scroll!” Brannon said, seeing that her hands were empty. “Where’s the scroll?”
“What are you talking about, Brannon?”
“He got it. He must have taken it!”
“The scroll?”
“I know you said the monks finished their work. But don’t we need it any more?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Did they copy it in their workshop? Is that what you said?”
“Kiddo, this is crazy talk. Everything is all right. He’s not coming back,” she assured him.
“Well I hope so, ’cause he was creepy.” Brannon asked, eyeing their surroundings a little anxiously.
“Yes,” she said. “But he’s gone.”
Chandra tried to clear her head. Something was missing. Why did that fight just happen? Who was that guy?
But the more she tried to think about it, the more it hurt. What is that kid talking about with the scroll?
Chandra was mad. And when she got mad, she liked to set things on fire. Call it her little weakness.
She felt heat racing through her, turning her blood into curling flames of power that sparked out through her fingertips, her eyes, and the auburn tendrils of her long hair.
“You’re saying you copied down the scroll wrong?” she demanded of Brother Sergil. “After all the trouble I went through to steal it? After how important I told you it was? You’re saying that you and the other brothers made a mess of your part of the job? After I nearly got killed doing my part right?”
Brother Sergil, who evidently didn’t feel deeply attached to his mortal existence, snapped, “Perhaps if you hadn’t let someone steal the scroll back so soon after you brought it here, we wouldn’t have a problem now!”
“Oh, really?” Chandra could feel her skin glowing with the power that her anger unleashed. True, she had lost the scroll, but that mage had been good. “And if anyone had bothered to help me fight off that mage, maybe the scroll would still be at the monastery, instead of who-knows-where?” Her memory of the scroll had not come back. The mind mage had been thorough in cleansing it from her mind. She remembered everything she had done retrieving it, everything about the fight… But he had cut the scroll out with artisanal precision.
“All right, that’s enough,” said Luti, the mother mage of Keral Keep. “From both of you.”
Chandra said, “What’s the point of my bringing you something so valuable if you can’t even-”
“Stop,” said Luti.
“We’ve done our part as well as anyone could expect!” Brother Sergil said. “All I’m saying is-”
“Not as well as I expected! How did you-” Chandra stepped back with a sharp intake of breath as a small fireball exploded between her and Brother Sergil. The monk staggered backward, too, stumbling on the rough red stones that paved the monastery courtyard.
They both looked at Mother Luti in surprised silence.
“That’s better,” Luti said, her fingers glowing with the lingering effect of forming and throwing that fiery projectile between them. Her glance flickered over Chandra. “Quench your hair, young woman.”
“What? Oh.” Chandra became aware of the haze of fiery heat and pulsating flames surrounding her head. It wasn’t a roaring blaze, but it was certainly a loss of control. She took a calming breath and brushed her palms over her hair, smoothing the dancing flames back into her auburn mane until Luti’s nod indicated they had disappeared altogether.
“Until you can master your power better,” Luti said, “it would be a good idea to learn to manage your temper.”
Chandra let the comment pass without protest. She didn’t like orders or reprimands, but she had come to the Keralian Monastery to learn to master her power, after all. And she had once again just demonstrated how little control over it she had.
“You have an extraordinary gift,” Luti said. “Tremendous power. But as it is with our passions, it is with the fire you wield; they are good servants, but bad masters.”
“It would help,” Chandra said, glaring at Brother Sergil, “if people wouldn’t-”
“Nothing will help,” Luti said. “Certainly not other people. Only you can change the way your power manifests. Only within yourself can you find a way to master it in a reality which will, after all, always contain annoyances, distractions, fears, and sorrows.”
“Right.” Hoping to avoid another of Luti’s lectures on the nature of life, Chandra hastened to change the subject. “Now what about the scroll?”
