Bullets & Spells

''I Swear''

✨🔮✨

I look at Hollyhock on the ground, this is the best outcome and it still hurts to see. She just risked her life fighting for me and this is the reward she gets, unconscious on her floor, bound to wake up in immense pain and profound confusion.

This is the price I have to pay for involving her in my world.

She almost looks peaceful.

"Let's go," Mentor Acacia says.

I feel my heart shatter, the pieces land here in the home of the woman I love. I swallow the lump of emotions forming in my throat.

"Okay," I manage to get out. Mentor Acacia teleports us to the street, and from there she locates a ley line. Even in the world of magic, traveling by ley line is a strange sensation; it's as if your body, your entire being melts. Every molecule separates and joins with the magical veins that flow all over this planet. Becoming one with everything, yet being nothing at the same time.

Your mind reduces to only your location, where you're headed, nothing else. You can't feel anything in a ley line, besides the bits of magic from all living things, like the blood cells of a giant creature.

Without sensing the passing of time, we travel to the other side of the planet. We reform just outside of IronHenge. It was past midnight in Oleander City, so it's well into the afternoon here.

Our Arcanium is nestled in a valley in the Altai Mountains, a divide between the western and eastern steppes that overall make up the Eurasian Steppes.

Access to fresh water and tucked away from the eyes of modern civilizations, it's a place of great natural beauty. Perfect for hiding a magical city.

To a regular eye, one would see an open expanse of grassland and the mountains behind it. But I can see the slight warping around the air where the camouflage hides IronHenge. Similar to seeing heat rise but stuck in a distinct semicircle.

My things are already here, waiting to be carried back home...this is my home after all. Where I should be.

Normally there would be sorcerers on guard, watching from the other side of the invisible wall. Perhaps Mentor Acacia used her considerable influence to get them to turn a blind eye for a time, or maybe she knew the guards' patrol shifts. It doesn't matter either way I suppose, as long as no one sees the great Acacia has let her apprentice slip away from the Arcanium.

With a wave of her hand, a section of the wall that has guarded this place for millennia opens up.

Given its size, one can see most of the Arcanium from any hill.

IronHenge is a city of multifarious design. When it was being developed, magicians from all over the world brought their cultural backgrounds into their buildings. With the help of spatial magic, we haven't needed to build up as modern cities do. Then again, there aren't millions of us living here.

It's a stark difference to Oleander City, glass and steel no longer dominate the horizon. The earth breathes underneath our feet without miles and miles of concrete and asphalt to suffocate it. The air is pristine, and the weather is controlled.

When I first left IronHenge, I wondered how long it would take me to get homesick; now I can't stop thinking about the woman I left on the other side of the globe.

We walk along, my things get teleported back to my place with a snap of my fingers.

I should feel some ease being back here, but it's all I can do to keep the dread pooling in my stomach from consuming me.