Mother of Magic

Listen to the Falling Rain

It seemed the gathering of Witches liked the idea of what Monte had been trying to do when he lost alignment with the rest of his Sextet. Knock down the Ward with sheer mechanical force. Not his fists of course. The rest of it. If magical pressure from an aligned group of Witches could not do it, perhaps the forces of nature would. Lightning. Thunder. Rain. The accumulation of what a large group of Witches could stir up. Did not require alignment. The elements were the intermediary. Like building a building, conjuring bad weather could be subdivided. Any Witch could contribute.

The attack started as a hail storm Lighting flashed in the sky dramatically as the weather was magically massively changed. Cold fronts that were not there before appeared in the sky. Layers upon layers of air masses. Individually created by hundreds of witches collided. Rain fell and froze.

From the street in front of the bar, a small group watched the drama above them. When the first hail fell the Ward filtered some of it. Anything too big or too fast was treated the same way a bullet or an arrow would be, and shunted aside. Losing energy, the hail would then fall through the Ward, perhaps downslope.

"I am not going to keep flying up there to adjust the Ward. Who knows what they are going to toss at us next." Ava said.

"Cows?" Silena guessed.

Ava went to a porch support for the sidewalk and gestured Stephanie and Le over. Touching her two aligned friends, Ava built an invisible Ward extension. A magical pole that extended up from the porch support to the sky. It connected to the Ward and became part of it.

"There. Now: No Hail." Ava gave the Ward new instructions via her new Ward communication pipeline.

Above them, the hail stopped coming through and joined the rivulets of water cascading down the dome.

The flatter parts of the dome directly above the city began collecting ice and turning white.

"We are turning into an inside-out snow globe." Stephanie said. "Dome with the snow on the outside."

Vivian asked a good question. "I wonder how cold they have made it out there/ All those Witches doing all of that Weather stuff? May need to go get my winter gear."

"Or: I can have the Ward do double duty." Ava said. "Let's see here..." She touched the wooden porch support now doing a double duty of its own. Stephanie and Le touched Ava in an almost automatic way. They were used to augmenting Ava when required. "There. I created an inside layer. It will keep inside the Ward a nice steady seventy-two or so. Whatever it is right now."

"Nice! Thank you!" Vivian enthused.

"Glad we set up those generators! If this keeps up for long, we may need the power. Going to get dark out there with all that BS going on. Thunder and lighting and a thick coat of ice? Going to be weird in here." Silena said.

The Witches quickly realized their hail was doing nothing but piling up or sliding off because the attack added electricity. Lighting lanced down. It sprayed across the skin of the dome and was grounded by the Ward. The ice accumulation did nothing to stop the electricity. The water portion spread it out. The Dome of the Ward pulsed.

"Reminds me of one of those holiday yard shows. Just need some music to set it to." Stephanie said.

"Few more colors." Le said

"That would help." Stephanie agreed.

"People on your world do shit like this for holidays?" Silena asked.

"Does not seem very holiday-like." Tasha said.

"Yeah, well, they set it to music, and sequence it so that the light plays along with the music and sort of dances across their yard. For Halloween, they have singing pumpkins and stuff. You have to be there I guess." Stephanie told the doubters.