The great river of Syncha has seen plenty of blood enter her waters. Many cities stood upon her banks; some have long since crumbled to dust, some were only just about to mature, and all dumped a fair amount of bodies and waste into Syncha. Many people traveled up and down the river, often not mindful enough of her bends and waterfalls; some were swallowed and never seen again, some were thrown out onto the beaches like rejected offerings. And then there were the battles. Rivers often happen to serve as natural borders; and where there is a border, there will, inevitably, be people wanting to cross it and take what’s on the other side. 

So it was nothing new to Syncha when twenty thousand men gathered on her banks and started shaking bared steel at each other. It was a story as old as time. She eagerly anticipated human blood mixing with her waters once again; she’d grown quite a liking for it.   Blood always caused a change. The fish here would come out different next year, needle-toothed and dull-looking. The leeches would multiply a hundredfold. The river wanted it to happen. Fresh blood was always so much more delicious than slowly swelling bodies.

Two armies met at a river crossing; the only one in the area that either of them could take. They postured on their respective riverbanks, they rattled  their sabers, they both tried to send agents to the other’s camp at night and they both vehemently denied doing so the next day. For weeks twenty thousand men went to sleep wondering if they’d be given the order to cross first thing in the morning. Warriors on both sides desperately hoped that if a battle were to come, they wouldn’t be the ones going across to the other side. The water was just shallow enough for people to simply walk through it—but it inevitably meant moving under fire and getting one’s boots wet. 

Those positioned on the eastern bank of Syncha called themselves Arcenians; they wore black and gold, and were primarily comprised of mercenary forces. They were led by noblemen of Arceni, a squabbling, rowdy bunch rife with selfishness and mutual suspicion. 

Their opponents on the western bank carried yellow banners and marched to the sound of a war drum mounted onto the back of a massive, spiny, small-headed reptile. They were the Jeolarians of the Jeolarian Union, and they were led by a single large man named Bask. 

The leaders of the two armies met every day at a barge constructed in the middle of the crossing. They huffed threats and puffed their chests as they tried to convince one another to leave as soon as possible. 

Every day they would argue for hours, neither side willing to pull the trigger and order an offensive—yet both needed to cross, and their interests were at odds with one another. But the generals leading the armies were neither idiots nor butchers, and didn’t want to see men die for nothing. The status quo would make their respective rulers unhappy, but those rulers were too preoccupied with other matters, and could be pacified by a forged report: “we attempted to cross the river every day, but the enemy forces were able to push us back; for months we struggled to take control on both sides of the riverbank…” And so the generals happily argued, and eventually the arguments transitioned to wine talk, and they would all have to be carried back to their camps. At least one such wine-sodden general almost drowned in knee-high water. 

They didn’t want a fight. Most soldiers didn’t want a fight. But others did. 

The most important of those “others” went by the name of Firecracker. She was a battlemage in the Arcenian force. A mercenary—one of the most expensive ones out there. Unlike the soldiers and officers around her, she wasn’t a fan of the delay. She thought she’d gotten a good contract on this, a sweet deal, but days were ticking one by one, and she was wasting time doing nothing. 

She grew tired of waiting. True to her name, she had an explosive personality. She held people’s lives in much lesser regard than the generals,  and was possessed by pyromania. Growing increasingly bored and angry, she went ahead and talked to those in the Arcenian force who were hungry for battle too—because they wanted to make names for themselves here. Youngsters hungering for fame and glory.

One day she was standing on the riverbank, watching the generals meet on the barge in the middle of the river; from this distance, she could barely see their silhouettes. She saw hands being shaken, gifts being exchanged, flags being waved around. Just like every other day. And she knew for certain that they would not settle the matter today either. 

A man stood next to her; he was thin, pale, and sickly. A thin goatee on his chin made him look like a teenager trying to pass as a man. His regalia identified him as an Arcenian officer. Lower-ranked than anyone on the barge. A petty nobleman. She’d talked to him for days by that point; she knew what occupied his thoughts, she knew he was aiming higher than he could reach, and she only had to give him a hint for him to swallow the bait. 

She would finally have some field work. And, more importantly, she would get out of this damp hellhole. 

Her hair billowed in the wind. For the last twenty minutes or so, she had been reading her spellbook. It was an elegant palm-sized notebook she carried around in a secret pocket on the inside of her coat. It was surprisingly heavy for its size due to the cover of black slate. She scrolled through the pages; her thin fingers, clad in white leather gloves, very carefully separated the pages one from another. 

“I thought, to you casting spells would be second nature,” the sickly man said. 

“It is,” she murmured, shooting him a threatening glance, which precluded any further questions. For several minutes, she kept scrolling through the notebook; sketches of fireballs, firecurrents, and entire walls of fire could be seen. Then, she shut the book with a loud thud and put it back inside the pocket she produced it from. With a smile on her face, Firecracker flicked her fingers.

With a horrifying howl, the barge erupted in flames. The officer, Shink, recoiled in horror. Firecracker laughed as she flicked through the pages again; it was time to prepare. “That’s your cue, Lord Shink”, she murmured under her breath. “You’re the highest ranked commander now. It’s time to cross Syncha.” 

He didn’t fail her. Not then, at least. 

As Arcenian brass sang their ominous song and the troops advanced into the crossing, the Jeolarians, aghast at what just happened, started lining up on the bank, ready to meet their adversaries with staunch lines of spears. The war drum stirred them into action. The barge was anchored in place, so even as it burned down, it did not move, remaining a bonfire at the exact midpoint of Syncha. The black-and-gold Arcenian tide were now knee deep in water; front ranks lifted up their shields in anticipation of a rain of arrows. They were right to fear; arrows flew. First bodies fell face down into the water. First blood trickled into the river.

(Syncha loved it). 

Firecracker didn’t move from her position on the riverbank. None of her spells had the reach to target the Jeolarian positions, but she didn’t want to risk moving into the crossing herself. Just like her namesake, she was useless if she got wet. She intended to stay behind until Shink’s forces took the opposing riverbank, allowing her safe passage.

The same could not be said about her colleague. Arcenians hired more than one mage. A man named Turtleshell was in the vanguard of the advancing force; a master of telekinesis and defence, he was popular among soldiers for every one of them hoped he could protect them from enemy fire and steel. 

About half an hour after the barge exploded, the lines clashed as the tired Arcenians reached the opposite bank. The bloodshed began. 

Jeolarians didn’t have mercenary mages. In fact, within their borders the free practice of magic—the way Firecracker and Turtleshell enjoyed it—was almost entirely forbidden. Jeolarian mages were strictly controlled by the government of their city-state, and only learned precise techniques with very narrow applications. Jeolarian armies were typically accompanied by small squads of such mages—or, as they were referred to in the military, “trops”. 

They started getting ready for battle the moment the barge blew up. By the time the black-and-gold forces started moving across the river, they were ready and waiting. They hid themselves several hundred meters upstream, invisible as they wore masking cloaks and hid among thick reeds. 

“Still nothing,” one of them said, a slender, long-haired man. His eyes were pitch-black; his sight was projected elsewhere. “Lines will clash in several minutes. Ours are still firing on them. Casualties few.”

“There’s definitely two,” a woman replied to him. Her name was Adara, and she led the group. She was petite and dark-skinned; a black bandana held her hair down. “Kest, can you examine the opposite bank right now?”

“I’ll try,” he replied. “Taking wing.”

Far above the crossing, a crow took a shallow turn towards the Arcenian camp. Adara saw it as a tiny black dot against the azure. She clenched her fists, an uneasy feeling coming over her. The beating of the war drum was getting more intense; it called upon her and made her want to spring into action. But she couldn’t. She briefed her squad before the army even left Jeolar; mercenary mages commanded more power and would be on the lookout for their rivals on the other side of the barricade. If they gave their presence away, the opposing mages would do anything in their power to deal the first blow - and, most likely, wipe Adara’s team out. 

They had to wait. They had to see Arcenian spellcasters in action and find a way to take them out. That’s what they trained for.

“Taking a bit lower,” Kest said. Then his tone changed; he spoke faster now, frantically giving one piece of information after another. “Reinforcements prepping at the camp. They are also making defense lines in case we hit back and follow. More heavies. And at the frontline—I see one now! People flying! Adara, it’s a tele! Oh I see the officer—fuck Adara she’s gonna burn me FUCK!!!”

The last word turned into a blood-curdling scream as Kest fell to the ground, clutching at his face. Adara exhaled.

“Gather up.”

A medic assigned to them rushed over to Kest; the others stood up, an expression of grim resolve on their faces. Three men, one more woman, and Adara herself - there were five of them, and the fight was on. 

Lines clashed. Credit where it’s due, Arcenians didn’t break their formation despite having to trudge through cold water while being peppered by arrows. Armed with large shields, sturdy helmets and unwavering morale (fueled by deep pockets of their lords), they crashed into the braced Jeolarian ranks. The battle started as men screamed and roared. The steel sang.

And then there was a god amongst men. He appeared out of the black-and-gold formations, dressed in monkish fighting garb; his head was clean-shaven, his arms were bared up to the shoulders. He walked through water like it were air, and it splashed everywhere around him. His name was Turtleshell, and he was the fist which was meant to punch through the spearwall. 

A pale-blue field of resonating energy appeared around him, barely visible to the naked eye. He leaped forwards, covering some ten meters in one go, and collided with the enemy formation. His arrival had the effect of a bomb being set off in a crowd; people were thrown in all directions, some of them—shocked and broken. Turtleshell didn’t stop there; he walked on, his hands in constant motion as he hit and pushed at the air around himself. It would look like he was practicing a martial art, except that every movement of his sent dozens of Jeolarian infantrymen either flying or simply hewed them down to the ground. Their armor ripped with horrifying metallic twangs; their bones broke and their blood left their bodies through the bone-ripped wounds, immediately soaking into the ground to start making its way to Syncha. 

He was a whirlwind of force. An avalanche. He sowed chaos in their ranks, plowing a trail through their defenses, and the black and gold tide poured after him, finishing up those knocked to the ground and taking hold of the bank. 

The trop squad was moving in on him. One of them, Feriel, concealed them from either friendly or enemy eyes with an invisibility spell. Another, Serana, was holding up a warding spell, which flicked aside stray arrows and bolts. Miglav was ready with his healing art. Those three (and poor Kest) formed the supportive part of the group; offensive tasks were delegated to Kane, a joyful, slightly plump man with a bright red beard, and Adara herself. She played a special role; she was the tip of their collective spear. 

It wasn’t hard to find their target; where Turtleshell went, bodies went flying. Another hundred meters separated them from him as they hid by a Jeolarian barricade; a troop of archers was still holding this position. 

“Such force,” Miglav noted. “Such senseless violence.”

“He’s moving fast,” Kane observed. “If we let him rampage another five minutes, he’ll get too deep in. Arcenians are having trouble keeping up with their dog.”

“You can’t,” Miglav said. “He’s killing them”.

“He’s right,” Adara sighed. “We’ll have the best chance of taking him down once he’s isolated a bit more.”

“Lives are being taken.” 

She snapped. He was new to this, but she didn’t have time to argue. 

“Shut the fuck up. We get one shot at him, otherwise we’re dead. We’re taking a good shot. Let’s follow.” 

They were right. Turtleshell wasn’t stopping, intent on getting to the backline to silence the war drum and, perhaps, capture whoever was commanding this bunch after Bask’s death on the barge. The Jeolarian soldiers peppered him with arrows and even attempted an occasional stab, but his reserves of energy were still plentiful and he easily repelled their attacks. 

He enjoyed himself. His relationship with war was fully self-centered; he didn’t care for causes for conflicts or goals of those he served. War was a method of self-improvement. His ability to do magic had allowed him to exceed what was normally possible for humans; now he aimed higher. He wanted to be above all men and women, above mortality, above anything that has ever came of humanity. He saw himself as a transcendental being, he desired perfection, and impeccable control over his body and over the forces he commanded were his path towards that. 

That and drugs. Unfortunately, he still needed money for drugs. Hence the whole mercenary gig.

Another pass of his hand, and a unit of heavy infantry is blown apart. Neighboring units dropped their weapons and ran. “Where are the trops”, he heard, and smiled to himself; trops, right. The chained ones. The meek puppies unwilling to take what was theirs by right. Oh, how he despised trops; just like him, they could be people with the keys to Heaven itself, but they rejected that, they followed those who had no right to lord over them… 

A disturbance. A movement. Turtleshell’s instincts screamed. He turned on his heels and kicked at the air. A sonic boom followed. Twenty meters away, a man and a woman appeared out of thin air; both in simple uniform, he—slender and curly-haired, she—short and blonde. Both fell to the ground, screaming. He probably blew up their eardrums. Maybe raptured some organs. He hoped so… 

The air right in front of him suddenly turned into a mirror. He saw himself; only dead, decaying, rotting, with pus flowing out of his opened-up gut. The reflection reached out towards him; a foul-smelling hand rested on his shoulder. Turtleshell shook it off; several fingers remained lying there. He felt the contents of his stomach rising violently and felt anger like never before; he was Turtleshell, the perfect one, he was not supposed to vomit! 

He struck out, and the mirage disappeared, and he saw there were more of them. There was a red-haired fat man looking right at him; eyes dark, palms flat against each other. There was a big guy kneeling down by those Turtleshell knocked to the ground. And there was a woman, dark-skinned and lean, running towards him. 

Turtleshell reached towards her—and bent in half as spasms shook his stomach. A burst of energy hit the ground, which exploded in a cloud of dry earth. And then there was the woman, right next to him, and her hand was on his arm. 

The world shifted then. Changed. Warped. Gathering his will together, he let a portion of his own power exit in an isotropic burst. The woman was thrown aside; her companions fell to the ground, as if hit by an unusually powerful gust of wind. Finally, his stomach calmed down. Turtleshell looked around. 

And roared in disgust.

She made him smaller.

He was maybe three feet tall now. At best. The size of a child. A pygmy. 

He was perfect and she took that away.

His gaze found her. She was just getting back onto her legs.  Turtleshell wanted nothing as much as rip her apart, slowly, letting her feel every second—but first, he wanted her to undo it. 

“I will cause you unimaginable torture, you fucking worm, if you don’t give up immediately and…”

The woman disappeared.

“…reverse this spell”.

He blinked. 

“Invisibility,” he realized and stepped back. Couldn’t be her; trops were all one-trick-ponies. He had to finish the other ones. He blasted the ground around himself once again, hoping that he at least would shake her off for a second. It worked—but the pulse was weaker than he intended and another wave of anger rose within him. And fear, too. 

He’d always tied his power to his body. Now his body was smaller and weaker, and so was his magic. 

What a fucking disgrace. 

He couldn’t lose any more time. Or height.

Turtleshell turned to the woman’s allies—they were still there, huddled next to each other. He smiled as he brought his hands together, getting a force grip on them, intent on picking them up and launching them two hundred meters into the air. But one of them—the blonde woman, who was now half-sitting, with blood coming out of her eyes and ears—met his gaze. He felt her push against his force. Resist it. 

The red-bearded fattie gathered his wits, too, and the vision of his own death visited Turtleshell again. He tried to shake it off. Overcome with wrath, he pulsed energy again, trying to get them, trying to destroy them, trying to win more time… 

There was a hand on his neck. 

He suddenly tasted acid.

“Hi,” a woman’s voice said as she appeared next to him. Her simple uniform was sprayed with dust. Her expression was perfectly calm. 

The world shifted. Turtleshell screamed, changing the direction of his applied force towards her. She flinched, clenched her teeth. He tried to throw her away… but he could not. His magic was sluggish. His body gave in.

He was getting smaller.

Shrinking away. 

The weight and strength of her hand increased. 

There was no more ground under his feet. His magic gave out; he lifted his hands and clutched at her suddenly so-thick wrist. He couldn’t do anything. 

“No…” he whimpered. “You have no right…”

Her hand didn’t fit around his throat anymore. She was holding him with her fingers now. 

And then—she dropped him. He must have been inches tall by that time. He fell like a rock, landing in a mound of fresh ground that he, himself, created when he was blasting power everywhere. The fall knocked the air out of him; it would have been worse, but he managed to cushion his landing with what remained of his power. 

Turtleshell turned around—and his jaw dropped. 

She stood above him, incomprehensibly massive, distorted from this point of view. Her dark face loomed above him, her facial expression stern. 

“Die,” she said, as her leg rose. 

“No!”

But then the world - impossibly large, and suddenly so beautiful to him, was replaced by the dark, dirty underside of her boot. The ridged sole hovered for a second, then idly went down. 

“No!” - he cried, gathering all he had left and projecting the power above himself. He channeled more than he’d ever channeled before; his eyes glowed faint blue as his psychic force manifested in the air above him as a thin azure shell. It formed a dome above him; perfectly round, seemingly immaterial. But when the woman’s sole collided with it, it held. It sparkled, crackled, hissed, burned, but it held as Turtleshell screamed and cursed. The strong odor of ozone filled his lungs, and then it was replaced by the metallic scent of blood as it gushed out of his nose; his eardrums popped, eyes bulged out, his teeth clamped so hard they were crumbling, but he held… 

A thought visited him then; in his wildest, drug-induced dreams, whenever he dreamed of being perfection manifested flesh, whenever he desired godhood, whenever he wanted to transcend beyond anything humanity had ever known—perhaps this was what he always wanted to be, a giant, with the entire world tiny and completely subject to his whims, reduced to a scale on which they could no longer comprehend him… like he, right now, could not comprehend the deadly giantess trying to stamp him out. This was downright offensive! She was a fucking trop, a chain-wearing slave of Jeolar, it was all wrong, so utterly wrong that he almost believed that his tiny defensive field was going to explode in a cloud of raw power and vaporize her, so that everything is back to normal and he, Turtleshell, can continue his ascension… 

And just like that, the pressure went away. His eyes could barely focus. Beyond the forcefield, he saw her face against. No boot. He’d won. She couldn’t do it. 

Turtleshell let out a maniacal laugh. 

Then he choked as he saw her raise her leg back up—high up, her knee just below her breasts. 

“Please no!” he screamed in horror as the hard heel of her boot smashed into the forcefield at full speed. The shimmering dome broke like an eggshell, folded inwards, and her boot followed, and now the man was the only thing in its way. His last plea fell on deaf ears as the rough and dirty sole collided with his flesh and pushed him flat into the ground. He felt his bones breaking, joints popping, muscles tearing, organs bursting; acidic vomit and liquefied innards came out all the orifices (ripping some new ones) and Turtleshell was finally pulverized, leaving nothing but a gory wet spot. His last thought was of how this was the worst end his quest for perfection could have possibly had.

About a year ago Adara described her typical missions to her dear mother while the matriarch of the family smoked a thin rolled cigarette. As Adara recounted her lengthy stories, her mother burned through several cigs, dropping each one on the ground and grinding it beneath her sandal. Pointing down as one such cig was reduced to ashes, while explaning exactly how she usually got rid of the enemies of Jeolar, Adara noted: “Kind of like what you’re doing, exactly the same way.” It was the truth. 

Experience proved mages could be really stubborn when it came to dying. Sometimes killing them once wasn’t even enough. She had to ensure she destroyed whatever was left of him, reduced it to shreds, so she idly ground her foot in place as she assessed the battlefield. Squelching sounds let her know this time she really had disposed of him. The man was smashed into bloody paste.

“How was the crunch?”

Kane’s red hair was dulled by the dust. He was still smiling. It was how he reacted to stress. Always that fucking smile. She got used to it. 

“I’ll never get tired of this,” Adara replied.

It may have been a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. There was a specific moment when free mages understood that they’d lost the fight and were about to be snuffed out, and she guessed that most of them found her method of execution to be rather humiliating. Hell, she hoped they did. Knocking them down a peg (or a hundred) was perhaps the most satisfying part of the process. 

You’re no better than the rest of us… 

But Heavens, this guy was a piece of work. Serana got hit the worst; she took the brunt of Turtleshell’s assault. Her upper body was one giant bruise. Miglav was already channeling his healing art. Adara nervously bit her lip. She’d rather lose Feriel at this stage. Serana’s shields and wards would have been so useful against their second target …  but the woman was incapacitated. And Miglav had his hands full now… 

Adara moved; for the first several steps, there was soft smacking under her foot, then whatever remains of Turtleshell that stuck to her sole got mixed with the dirt and, probably, became entirely unrecognizable. Kane followed her. They approached Feriel, who propped himself up next to a tree stump. He silently nodded at them. 

“No time to recuperate,” Adara announced. “If the second mage is worth his salt, this place will be hit with something bad in minutes, if not sooner. Miglav! Take Sera, take her to safety, then support the troops however you can. Feriel, Kane, we go find a frontline commander and ask for latest updates. If Arcenians are still pushing through, there’s a good chance the pyromancer will risk it and cross.”

The men nodded. The trop squad split; Miglav sprinted away with Serana held firmly in his arms, the other three cautiously moved back towards the frontlines. Their fight with Turtleshell naturally created a clearing, a sort of a vacuum on the fighting front, where no common man dared to come close—but now the mage was dead, and warriors from both sides rushed to take the position. Jeolarians prevailed. 

They were now pushing back all along the riverbank. Arcenian heavies held firm, but they were picked off one by one by massed crossbow fire; Jeolarian commanders wisely have been holding those in reserve until now. Then the pikemen came out again, and the strategy was to simply force the Arcenians back into the water, force them to fight knee-deep in the river. That would probably force their enemies to regroup. Crossing the river was always going to be hard; despite the initial success, Arcenian forces were now reaping the bleak consequences of their decision to force the assault. 

And the consequences would be bad—if not for River Syncha, which still hungered, which still desired its waters to run red. And so the River warped, changed and rerouted itself, and the crossing, which used to be knee-deep, was now barely reaching the men’s ankles. Reinforcements ran in, fresh forces, even some cavalry. The fighting continued for another ten minutes, and then the Jeolarian pikes finally routed, incapable of prolonged combat with the heavies. Arcenians gained a foothold on the riverbank again. 

The warriors of Jeolar took the forestline then, hoping that the heavies’ formations would get disrupted here, that it would be easier to slow down their adversaries’ advance. The combat intensity went down for a brief time; both sides considered their options. 

Nobody noticed the Arceni forces transporting the sack. 

It was a giant sack, made entirely of fresh cowhide, sewn shut at the top with thin thread. Not a single drop got onto it – or into it. This wasn’t strictly necessary; it was, in fact, excessive, but excessive safety measures were just in line with Firecracker’s general paranoia.

They cut the sack open once it was on dry land again. She stepped out, giving everyone around the angriest glare they’d ever seen; this glare promised a terrible death to those who thought of telling the story of the Mage-in-the-Sack to their families and friends. She flexed her gloved hands, then pulled out a hand mirror and checked herself out. She fixed her collar and adjusted her hair. Then, with a snap of her fingers, she set the forest on fire. 

Smoke and flames forced the Jeolarian forces to retreat again; some poor souls ran in the wrong direction and were skewered on the swords of advancing Arcenian army. The treeline rapidly receded, reduced to black ash much faster than should have been possible. The air was so hot that simply breathing it was painful. But, eventually, all the overgrowth and the shrubbery were destroyed, and Jeolarians regrouped to face the enemy onslaught. 

This was a painful fight; soldiers choked on the ash, burned their feet, sometimes – erupted in flames. Many ran right there and then. The battlefield was quickly turning into a desolate wasteland. The architect of this destruction wasn’t going to stop; she was literally in her element. She ramped it up, too, sending new fiery waves rolling away and along the riverbank, quickly turning the surroundings into a hellish landscape. Even Firecracker’s allies received scarce warning she was about to immolate their immediate enemies. 

The young noble, Shink, that ended up in command after the original army leadership perished on the barge was still around. He followed Firecracker, sometimes trying to stop her, sometimes trying to give orders. Most of the time his voice got lost in the roar of the flames. Chaos quickly took reign of the battlefield as the chains of command were broken and adjutants could no longer find the regiments they were supposed to deliver orders to. In some areas the men realized that burning alive was worse than anything they’d known until then; and so Jeolarians and Arcenians alike would throw down their weapons and run away together. But the cores of the two armies still persisted, still moved forward, still clashed against one another. Warriors would use smoke as cover. In their battle rage they ignored the burns. 

Firecracker walked forward, and any time she saw a man who wasn’t wearing black and gold she’d send a fireball flying. Much of the time, she merely glimpsed silhouettes in the smoke and hurled a fireball anyways.

As she flaunted her destructive art, the expression on Shink’s face kept getting gloomier and gloomier. The wails and cries of the men, the sight of dozens of them crawling around on burned stumps, with armor fusing to their skin, made him sick to the bone. He kept grasping at his sword and then slowly letting it go. There were two men fighting  in him; one wanted to be victorious, the other started asking the hard questions about the meaning of this all. This wasn’t what he was told about mercenary mages. This wasn’t what he expected when he allowed her to start this battle with a violent signal. 

“Firecracker, you have to stop,” he said once again, and that was enough for her to give him a deadly look. His heart sank. But as she kept going, some of his bravery came back.

So at one point he unsheathed his blade—as silently as he could—and approached Firecracker from behind. He lunged forward. But a charred bone betrayed his attack with a sickening crunch under his step. The magisterix turned, her eyes narrowing to snake-like slits; she jumped away with inhuman speed, and, before he could lunge again, she spat:

“Conflagrate!”

The man disappeared in a fiery inferno. His ashes flew up in a cloud; a gust of wind sent them towards his killer, but, miraculously, none of it got stuck to her clothing. Unbeknownst to anyone but herself, Firecracker’s lithe body, concealed with exquisite clothing, was covered in warding tattoos - one of which prevented her from getting dirty. She wanted to walk around battlefields looking impeccable. It elevated her above the mortals she incinerated. Or so she thought. Some of her thought process was similar to Turtleshell’s, except instead of ascending through eternal self-improvement she just wanted to look good while burning everything around her and everyone lesser than her. After all, she was Firecracker, the Last Light, the False Dawn, the Strolling Sun, Ember-in-the-Dark, Dragoness of Sheltyar… and all the other poetic titles given to her by traveling songstresses. 

That is, those of them, who never saw her in action. Those who did usually would not sing songs about her; they’d talk in hushed whispers that she is a mad dog and ought be put down. 

Firecracker and her dead colleague shared one other similarity. She was quite fond of drugs too. Shink’s ashes didn’t even have time to cool down and she was already happily holding an Emerald Joy under her tongue. 

River Syncha wasn’t happy. Syncha miscalculated. She didn’t realize that there would be a great fire. She enjoyed bloodshed because it satiated her; fire curdled the blood, cooked it, depriving Syncha of her favorite treat. 

Adara sincerely hoped that the thin noble would get it done for her. Alas, he didn’t succeed. She, Feriel, and Kane would have to end the magisterix themselves. 

This second mage was nothing like she expected. A bit too much even by mercenary mage standards. She strolled along the immolated battlefield in a ridiculously (given the context) fashionable attire: black leather wedge boots coming up mid-calf, narrow black-and-white striped pants, oversized burgundy jacket, long hunting gloves with decorated cuffs, tons of jewelry, jewels in her hair… and she looked pristine. Kane even suggested that the woman was so hot anything that touched her instantly burned away. Adara wanted to punch him. The smell of burning flesh and the sheer cacophony of screams made her feel like she was going insane; she coped by telling herself she needed to stop this right now, and Kane probably coped by joking. 

All three of them managed to get behind Firecracker’s back about a quarter of an hour ago. Since then, they tried to get closer, but constantly had to fall back because of Arcenian reinforcements and/or deserters running back and forth. 

Feriel was running out of his reserves. Soon, he’d have to drop the cloak. They didn’t have much time. And every second wasted meant that this walking torch was incinerating more lives. 

“This is why the Jeolarian way is correct,” she reminded herself. “Because otherwise I’d turn into someone like her.”

How would power corrupt Adara? Would she reduce entire armies to ant colonies, and then stomp through them, men’s blood painting her soles rich red? She couldn’t really think of much else. “Maybe I should ask Firecracker.”

She didn’t want to know. She wanted to stay just Adara the trop, she wanted to defend and protect what she loved, and this required stopping this maniac. 

“We have to move in”, she declared. “Feriel, hold the cloak just a bit longer. Kane, spook the shit out of her.” 

“How are you grabbing her? Not an inch of bare skin that I can see”.

“Going for the face,” Adara mumbled. “Give her hell. I want her fucking paralyzed. Gotta be in sync, Kane. Give me as much time as possible”. 

“You got it, boss”.

And so they ran forward just as Firecracker took a moment to rest atop a hill’s crest; from here, she could see most of the remaining forces on either side. The battle was reduced to a shieldwall fight; most of the ammunition was spent, most pikes were broken. It wasn’t clear if anyone was still giving orders. In many places, wildfire herded people into inescapable flaming rings, where they cried and pleaded for this to stop. Firecracker watched, amused and pleased with her own handywork, when suddenly her world plunged into darkness. 

And she was a little girl once again—a girl afraid to go up the stairs in their old house, because all the candles were out, because the windows up there were boarded up, and there was nothing there, nothing but all-encompassing darkness, which could hide anyone and anything. Monsters. Or people, who are often worse than monsters. People with swords, people with belts, people… a man… with a terrible, perverted look in his eyes, eyes that looked so much like her own. She turned around—and at the base of the stairs there was nothing but water, cold and still, except its level was rising, forcing her to make a decision: up, into the darkness, or down, into the flood. 

She screamed in shock and rage, trying to feel the fire within her, but it did not respond. It did not obey. She wanted protection; the fire couldn’t grant her that. The fire was an instrument of pain and destruction, one she could use to get back at the world, to burn it to the point where it could never again hurt her.

Firecracker stood there, shaking, weak, empty-eyed—and then two hands were roughly planted against her face as someone approached her from behind and got her by the head. 

And then there was a flash. 

The ringing in Adara’s ears was deafening. Her head was killing her. Her body felt like it was on fire (and, terrified, for a moment she thought it really was, but it turned out to be just an incredibly powerful itch). She wanted to vomit. 

It was ironic. These feelings were very familiar to many, many people she’d met in her life, but not her. She’d never been hit with her own art before. 

The realization hit Adara only seconds later, when she opened her eyes and took in her surroundings. Immense mounds of dirt, giant charred bones, a handle of a buried sword right next to her, a broken crossbow bolt longer than she was tall… She was tiny, inches at most, and lost in the hellscape. 

She heard a thud. 

“Where ar-ar-are you?” teased a singsong voice. 

Adara froze in place. Slowly, very slowly, she turned her head just enough to catch something in the corner of her eye. A titanic black leather wedge boot settling in the burned sludge that probably used to be a person. A colossal pillar-like leg rising from it towards the sky. 

“How the fuck?” – she thought.

Her thoughts raced. She closed her eyes, praying that she wasn’t noticed yet. Her prayers didn’t go unheard as the pissed-off giantess stepped right over her, heading further downhill. 

“I see you, you little shits”, the magisterix said with glee in her voice.

Panicked, Adara looked around. But there was no giant pair of eyes staring down at her. Instead, Firecracker looked elsewhere… but still towards the ground. 

“My magic hit me back”, Adara realized. “And it probably hit Feriel and Kane, too. How? What did she have? Why didn’t it reflect Kane’s fear instead?..”

Questions were like flies; she had to swat them away for the moment. Now confident that Firecracker wasn’t looking at her, Adara started slowly trekking across the landscape, following the giantess. Nothing mattered. She was small, but she wasn’t dead. The mission had to be completed. She couldn’t allow this woman to incinerate what was left of the two armies.

Firecracker saw them almost instantly. Two men, pale faces easily visible on the blackened ground. Both tiny. 

She’d not felt this excited in a while. She’d never even known this type of magic existed. This was almost as good as commanding the flames. God, she could do so much with this. If she could shrink her enemies? God, that would be so fitting. She would put them all in their place and drive it in. She would have them fall into a living carpet for her to walk on. She would pulverize them en masse and force the survivors to clean the gore off her soles. She would be worshipped as a cruel deity, a goddess of war, who only has one reward for her followers: a little more time to be alive. 

God, how much she could get off on that power! Images and fantasies rushed into her head; tiny bodies at her feet and in her grasp, in her control, following every order, placating every whim simply out of fear and reverence for her, Firecracker, because she was a mage, she commanded their reality. It could be a new world order! Mages lording over commonfolk, worshipped and adored, placed on the highest pedestal. Former kings and queens locked into the tiniest articles of her jewelry, armies of worthless specks serving as her target practice, hordes of servants licking her soles clean… she’d always hated water, too, always looked for other ways to stay fresh… 

Alas, she didn’t have any of that. She had a one-time way to protect herself from falling victim to that sorcery, though. And, as a result, she had a couple of trops to play with. A meager treat, but a welcome one.

“I see you, you little shits”, she said, walking towards them. 

It only took her a couple of steps. They were trying to help one another, but as she closed in, they both were seemingly paralyzed by her presence. At least, that’s what she wanted to believe. She hoped with every fiber of her soul that these two were literally shitting themselves at the sight before them. She hoped that their minds were already full with every possible horror she could inflict on them.

Of course, she contemplated conflagrating the two right off the bat, but this seemed almost too easy, particularly with all of those fresh fantasies invading her mind.

Plus, she had a question. 

“Fucking trops”, she murmured, stopping right in front of them. “You thought you could touch Firecracker? You? You wanted to shrink me?”

She licked her lips. “You. The lanky one. Stop moving. Lie down.”

She saw the tiny figure hesitate. She stomped her foot in place, showering the duo in charred, greasy ashes. They were so dirty. 

“Lie the fuck down! On your back!”

He obeyed. 

“There”, she cooed, before reaching down to swiftly pick up the second man; a pudgy ginger. On close inspection, it turned out that he had a beard. Firecracker despised beards, so she blew a gust of flame at his face. The man shrieked, his hair burning away like dry hay. The magisterix lifted him up to her face and blew air over his face, extinguishing the flames. Her breath reeked of Emerald Joy, she realized. She wondered if he’d get high from it. 

“Didn’t expect reflective wards, did you?” she asked. “You’ll never guess where I have them tattooed. Now, you”, she brushed her finger against the ginger’s burnt face. “How many of you were after me?”

“Two”, he squeaked. 

She moved her right foot forward, inching it closer to the other guy. 

“If you don’t tell me the truth, I’ll flatten your buddy’s legs.”

“Two. I promise!”

She pinched him between her fingers, let him hang in the air, let him watch as she dropped the toe of her boot on the lying man’s legs and pelvis. The bones crunched. There was a surprisingly loud squeal. 

“Holy shit,” she said. “Like a fucking pig. You’re all pigs to the slaughter. On my fucking altar…”

In a sudden motion, she pulled him back up, almost directly to her lips. 

“WHAT DO YOU SAY NOW?”

“Two! Two, I swear it’s the two of us!”

“Who did what?”

“What?”

“WHO TRIED THE SHRINKING? WHO GOT COUNTERED?”

“…Me! I was! My name’s Kane!..”

“I don’t give a shit about your fucking name.” 

She felt rivulets of sweat forming on her forehead. She absent-mindedly dragged her fingers - along with her captive - along her forehead, hearing him whimper. She giggled again, then looked down. The other man was trying to crawl away, to pull his legs from under her unforgiving sole. 

“Like a worm,” she said. “A pig-worm. Fucking trops. Pa-athetic. You tried to fucking scare me?”

Her own voice trembled at those words. She was vaguely aware she wasn’t holding together very well; her thoughts were growing ever more scattered. 

“Am I losing it?” she thought. If the guy under her boot was the one who woke up fears she’d long forgotten, he deserved death. A slow, painful one. She had to wrestle control back. She had to show him. Them. All of them. 

She looked down at the crippled tiny figure and flicked her fingers. What was left of his legs started to smolder; ember light started creeping up his flesh. Another squeal. 

“Now, you…”

She positioned Kane in the middle of her palm; his dirty, burned, pitiful figure contrasted nicely with the pristine white of her glove. She wondered what it would be like to curl her fingers and burst him like a grape. She almost wanted to find out. 

“I think I believe you. Shame you got hit with your own spell, trop. Nicely done on getting to me, too. Wanna live?”

He nodded feverishly. She smiled. 

“I might just let you. Unless you give me a reason…”

Her voice trailed off as she watched him wipe his face. It was red. Right, she burned it. But before she burned it, it was pale. Pale white.

The palms that came together on her face… They were darker. And so slender.

She looked down again. The other man was lanky. But so pale, too. 

“Fuck”, she said. “You’re not the shrinker. You’ve lied to me”.

“I am…”

“You have FUCKING lied to me!” she screamed in his face again, hoping he was losing his hearing. Then, just as suddenly as she burst with anger, she forced herself to calm back down. “Is there another one of you?”

“No. No, I swear. There isn’t…”

“That’s a lie, isn’t it? Tell me. What’s her name? Tell me and you’ll live.”

“I don’t believe you.”

There was tiredness in his voice. 

“I won’t tell you.”

“We’ll see about that. Have you ever played Hangman, Kane? A simple game. I’ll ask my question again and you’ll be the hangman.”

He curled up, suddenly so small, so weak under her gaze.

“That’s no Hangman.”

“I make the rules. Now tell me, is she still around?”

With that, Firecracker’s fingers pinched his elbow. She bent it in the wrong direction before pulling on it. 

“ADARA! IT’S ADARA! HER NAME IS ADARA!”

Adara winced. This was the first time she’d heard him, and she suspected it was about to become the last, too. Firecracker stood very still for the last minute; she was doing something unspeakable to Kane and was entirely focused on that. 

“And what does she do?”

“SHE NEEDS TO TOUCH YOU! OH MY GOD, PLEASE, STOP IT! PLEASE!”

Kane’s voice went through multiple shifts there: from shrill yelling to hoarse whimpering.

“Good,” the giantess cooed. Adara took a brief look up and saw the woman turning her palm over. A heap of torn-off limbs and a pool of blood fell off her gloved hand. Not a single red spot remained. 

Adara’s plan was simple. Whatever reflected her magic once must have been an incredibly powerful warding spell. Perhaps a rune, perhaps a glyph, perhaps a blessing—whatever it was, she didn’t believe it’d work a second time. And she still had her magic, however weakened by the shrinking. She had a chance—but she needed a second attempt. 

And that required touching Firecracker. Skin on skin.

She figured she’d solve it once she reached the magisterix. But now that she was standing right next to the woman’s shoe, she had no more time to think about it. Adara jumped onto the boot, clawing into the leather with her bare hands, climbing up, towards its rim, where a pant leg was tucked into the boot. Smooth leather was treacherous; fabric would be so much more reliable. She’d stay there for a while. Maybe she can even reach the giantess’s calf though the pants… 

She basically ran up the boot, threw herself at the ankle section, climbed up - and then Firecracker started moving. She turned on her heels. Adara’s hands slipped and she found herself plummeting towards the ground. She hit it hard, clipping something solid with her shoulder, which exploded with pain. 

An ember was not far from her. She squinted. Then she raised her palm to her mouth. It was Feriel - smoldering away, turning to charcoal. 

“Please, let him be dead already.”

He wasn’t. His eyes still moved in the sockets, his chest moved up and down. He was staring directly up. Wasn’t looking at her. She noticed his lips move.

“Please,” he was whispering. “I beg you, kill me. Please, I beg you, kill…”

A shadow fell over them. Adara lifted her eyes just in time to see the boot sole falling on her. Then there was darkness - and the roar of the flame.

There was a time when Firecracker considered calling herself Flamethrower. The reason was that one of her original trademark tricks was something far less elegant than long-range explosions, high-speed fireballs and moving, roaring wildfire walls. At the beginning of her career she used to simply point her hand at something and say “poof”. And then, a stream of fire so dense it was almost liquid in nature would erupt off her palm and pour outwards in a cone, obliterating anything and anyone unlucky enough to be in its way. 

Right now, those cones were firing off both of her hands. She flooded the ground around herself with this fluid hellfire, immolating anything that still remained there; the ground grew so hot that everything carbon-based down to the depth of about half a meter got either burned to ash or pyrolyzed. The air became so hot that faint mirages could be seen above the crest of the hill. The only cool spot was where Firecracker herself stood; her magical fire wasn’t supposed to hurt its mistress, and, despite her anger and frustration, she retained enough control to make sure she was comfortable where she stood. 

“How do you like this, “Adara””, she said through tightly clenched teeth. “How do you like this!”

She stopped in several minutes, when she felt like there was no more chance for her last enemy to have survived. Firecracker sighed, calmed her breathing, pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat off her face. She felt a bit hot so she undid the top button of her shirt. 

The magisterix took a look downhill. The fight was still going on. She didn’t feel like rejoining it just yet, though. The trops spoiled her fun with their inadequate attack.

Still deciding what to do next, she started slowly walking down the hill, her feet sinking deep into the ashes and dust.

When Adara was a child, her father would frequently take her hiking through the local woodlands. While out there, they’d often cook wild yams by burying them into the ground next to the fire. It’d take several hours, but they were always delicious. And kept very warm for a while.

She now knew what those yams felt like (if yams were sentient). She ended up pressed deeply into the charred ground, which had just enough give for Adara to survive. The wedge of Firecracker’s boot rested on top of her, pressing her down with the weight of a mountain. She started screaming but hot ashes flooded her mouth. The ground here kept cool enough to keep Firecracker safe, but it still got very hot, and Adara felt like she was cooking alive. The saliva in her mouth was like soup fresh out of the pot. 

Feriel, she knew, was dead. When Firecracker clumsily stepped on them, he died instantly, and probably for the best since by that time he was a sorry sight. 

She suspected that nothing remained of Kane, too. She was completely on her own now, and she had a truly monumental task. But she still had a chance, because the roar of the flame finally stopped, and the Firecracker shuffled in place, and Adara was free again. 

With her limbs trembling, she lifted herself out of the human-shaped indent her body made in the blackened ground. Pain shot through her body. Probably a broken rib. Shoulder still hurt, too, but it’d have to do. Her skin itched. She looked around, assessed the situation – the magisterix was still right there, and now Adara was staring at the heel of her boot. 

The back of the boot there had fanciful decorative ridges in the leather. She groaned. Why didn’t she notice earlier?

Limping, cursing under her breath, she rushed over to the heel of Firecracker’s boot. She jumped, got hold of the ridges, climbed upwards. The smell of the expensive leather hit her nostrils; against the backdrop of burning flesh and heavy smoke this was almost pleasant. She kept moving while the woman above her was gathering herself. But Adara was still tiny, and it took a while to get anywhere, so when she was about at the ankle-bone level, the giantess started moving.

It took all of Adara’s strength to hold on this time, but she managed it, groaning and fighting the soreness in her own muscles. Every time the magisterix’s foot settled on the ground, she covered another half an inch. She couldn’t stop. She had to keep moving. If she didn’t fix her mistake, Firecracker was bound to go back to slaughtering people.

Eventually, her hands grasped the rim of the boot. She pulled herself up, reached even further, felt the fabric of the pantleg. She expected to be able to slip her fingers between the threads… but she ran them along the smooth surface and didn’t find anything. It was thin, but solid, tight, impenetrable.

“What the fuck? Where’d she get pants like this?”

The fabric was too smooth, too. She couldn’t keep moving up. 

Desperation hit her over the head. Adara contemplated releasing her hold and plummeting down to the ground. Perhaps the magisterix will end her beneath her boot, after all, just like Adara ended so many enemies of hers. It would be poetic. Firecracker would get a fitting revenge for all of her colleagues who perished squashed into the ridges of Adara’s shoe soles… 

She blinked. Wait… 

Firecracker stopped just then – probably decided something. Adara could wait no longer. She slipped her arm between the rim of the boot and the leg going into it, feeling nothing but the boot lining and the familiar pant fabric. She tried to throw her leg over the rim too, then, cursing, kicked off her boots and tried it again. This way, sideways, she managed to get there, and then she started climbing down, into the boot.

Firecracker looked over the battlefield; the desire to participate was coming back to her. She pulled out another Emerald Joy and popped it under her tongue, and instantly felt even more vigorous and ready to rock. “One final act,” she thought. “Show them what I’m actually capable of.”

Arcenian victory wasn’t something she really concerned herself with at that point. In Firecracker’s mind, the battle obviously went sideways through no fault of her own. Idiots who are supposed to be on her sides ran themselves into her own firewalls and fireballs. If they weren’t so suicidal, they’d already be celebrating on top of Jeolarians’ charred remains. Well, if the black-and-gold force isn’t willing to value Firecracker’s efforts, there’s no point in caring about them anymore. Whatever happened next was to serve only her purposes. 

At this point, those mostly came down to showing off.

So she raised her hands towards the sky, which immediately darkened; the effect was purely visual and wholly unnecessary, but the Deluge of Fire would look incredibly stupid against the happy blue sky. She laughed as she saw the first orange sparks appear in the air. She made sure she was standing firm – she was about to channel a lot – and placed her feet at shoulder width, wincing as she felt a stone or something make its way past her anklebone into her boot. She’d deal with that later, though; right now it was time to rain death. 

Down at the riverbank there was chaos. Hundreds of  people ran this way from the hellfire that Firecracker unleashed, and now Jeolarians and Arcenians slaughtered each other for the right to cross. One would think that they’d forget their differences here, but the level of water in the river was rising again, and there were too many people who wanted to flee right that second. So they fought. Injured, burned, maimed, they lifted their weapons, or, if they didn’t have any left, bared their teeth and went for it. Blood finally spilled directly into the river just as Syncha wanted. 

And yet the River was not sated yet; and she was banking on so much more blood eventually reaching her  groundwaters by seeping into the ground. There was a problem, though. The pyromancer that had already spoiled the River’s fun was now planning to finish the job by starting a local apocalypse. Syncha roiled at the thought of all that delicious blood being evaporated to nothing by the roaring flame.

So Syncha made a decision. The people were still fighting when they saw it; a massive wave rolled downstream, foamy at the top and glassy black at the bottom. Many of those men thought they saw a face in the wave; a woman’s face distorted by anger. Moments later, the wave rolled over them. The crossing was no more. Few survived.

Impossibly, the wave changed direction then. The River spilled out and advanced towards the lone figure on a hill. 

Subject to Firecracker’s smallest movements, Adara lost whatever control she had over her own movement and started sliding past the giant woman’s shin. She slowed herself down at the anklebone and closed her eyes, half-expecting the magisterix to reach down and take the shoe off to check what was going on. But instead she heard a distant maniacal laugh – something right out of a street theatre play, where the main villain laughs as they announce they are about to Commit to the Final Stage of the Great Evil Plan. 

Whatever that was, it wasn’t good, she decided. 

She crawled further into the tight, claustrophobic darkness. The odor finally hit her; sharp, acrid, musky smell. Adara kept going. She felt the texture under her hands change; from the smooth pant fabric towards fuzzy, soft wool. Wool!

Her hand easily slipped between the threads. Her fingers brushed against warm flesh of the top of Firecracker’s arch. Adara felt triumphant.

And then she was violently thrown further down…

…because Firecracker started running. 

She didn’t know what to think. She’d never heard of trops this powerful. She didn’t think the Jeolarians had a real mage, either. This meant someone else summoned the wave; some bleeding heart samaritan, another magister, who was, perhaps, just passing by and decided to stop Firecracker’s show. Or steal it. She had many enemies.

Hoping that she was right, she rushed towards the area where the remaining regiments of both armies were still locked in combat. Her Deluge didn’t yet wreak much havoc here. She hoped that the master of the wave would stop it. 

That ended up not mattering, because she didn’t even make it in time. The water was fast. The woman was tired, her legs sank deep into the ashes and dust, her feet ached. She turned around halfway down the slope and raised her arms. Fire poured off her fingers once more. 

The giantess must have been running. Her heavy steps threw Adara further and further into the shoe; she slid and tumbled deeper in, fruitlessly grasping at the woolen threads and boot lining. Firecracker’s sock was wet with hot sweat; the salty dampness immediately overwhelmed Adara. Her clothes were soaked all the way through. Her eyes, lips and lungs painfully burned; she felt light-headed, deprived of breathable air. Whatever strength she had left was quickly leaving her. 

Being in this shoe while Firecracker ran was like being trapped in a tumbleweed during a hurricane. She didn’t know what was up and what was down. Terrible nausea tied her stomach into a knot. She couldn’t move. She was like a piece of debris; helpless, mottled, almost mindless by that point. 

Luckily for her, Firecracker stopped. Adara came to her senses as she slid down onto the boot’s insole; it squelched under her touch. By some miracle, she ended up under the magisterix’s arch, where the crushing weight of the giantess wouldn’t turn her into a red splotch.

But by then she felt like she had nothing left. So she remained there, soaking, cooking in the larger woman’s perspiration, praying for this to end. 

Cones of liquid flame came off Firecracker’s hands and hit the incoming wave. A pillar of steam shot up in the air. Her fire formed a blazing hemisphere which evaporated the incoming water. She didn’t know how long she could last. If the entire river was coming at her, she had no chance. But surely no one could possess the power to send entire rivers crashing into a single target?..

She fired away, silent at first, screaming obscenities later. “You fucking pieces of shit,” she raved as she channeled more and more energy into maintaining her fiery shield. “You think you can drown Firecracker? You think you can get to me? I’ll destroy you, I’ll immolate you, I can burn fucking water…”

The magisterix, as stubborn as ever, did not falter.

…Adara had nothing left, that much was true. Feriel and Kane died horrible deaths at the hands (and feet) of this murderous sorceress. Serana got some of her insides pulverized by Turtleshell. Miglav, she suspected, died in the fire. He’d never have the heart to leave all of these people to burn to death, and probably got caught by a firewall… 

And she was going to drown in footsweat; her lungs felt horribly moist and gurgled with every breath, she constantly coughed, eyes were in pain. She’d never really allowed herself to feel humiliated; she was known to be steady, rational, able to stand up for herself. But this was eternally humiliating; dying here, in the moist, stuffy prison of a boot, beneath the socked sole of her nemesis. After her own spell backfired, nonetheless.

“Spell? Right. I wanted to try again. I wanted…”

She wanted revenge. She wanted this all to end. She wanted Firecracker to die. There were still things she had to get done.

With a roar, Adara grasped at the woolen threads, pulled herself up and reached through the sock mesh with both of her arms. Her fingers met slick flesh. She felt dozens of mighty muscles flex and shift. She heard and sensed the blood rushing through the vessels. Shockingly, she found the skin to feel soft even at her current size. For a moment, she got lost in the sense of the sheer enormity of the woman above her. It was like besides Adara herself, her entire world shrunk to this odorous prison; like the level she occupied in the hierarchy of nature shifted several steps down, and now all she knew was this tiny, cramped space between Firecracker’s sock and insole. It was mindblowing; she’d never shrunk herself and got close to another human being before. She wondered if this, in a way, was what her victims felt when their worlds, their lives got reduced to those of insects meant to be snuffed out under her tread. She’s now learned both sides of this disparity in scale, and found allure where she’d previously seen close to none.

But Firecracker was not to be admired. She was to be destroyed. Eliminated. She didn’t deserve a single chance at doing something like this again. 

So Adara channeled all she had and used her magic again.

And this time it didn’t hit her back.

Firecracker endured. The waves hissed as they evaporated into thick white clouds. The space around the magisterix turned into a sauna. Her ears hurt from the thundering explosions which happened any time her heat caused a bubble to form in the incoming wave. 

She felt like she could do it. Withstand. Assert herself over whoever was directing all this water at her. She never knew she could, but here she was, winning. She laughed and gloated and insulted her invisible enemy, and her glove-clad fingers still sent a steady stream of fire forth. She’d never be afraid of water again; hell, why did she never think of surrounding herself with a fiery aura to simply walk right across a river? “I could probably evaporate an entire lake,” she thought gleefully. But her joy was short-lived.

There was a steaming border where fire met water; and up until now, the border only expanded. Now it started receding again. 

Shrinking.

She didn’t understand it at first, she thought she was simply facing a particularly strong wave; but then she tried to change her stance and discovered her legs sank way deeper into the ash than she remembered. She almost panicked, but caught herself. Emerald Joy crunched between her teeth; clarity came to her light a ray of sunshine in the darkness. She concentrated. And then she felt it – itching sensation in the arch of her left foot. Gentle touch. Soft… 

“TROP!” she screamed. “STOP IT!”

The trop did not obey. Firecracker lifted her leg, stomped it back. 

Adara roared in pain as her tiny world went up, then down; she almost bit off the tip of her own tongue. The sole flexed, flattened a bit, forcing the tiny trop into the moist insole. Sweat poured into her ears, nostrils, eyes. 

But she held on. 

The itching sensation did not go away. It was getting stronger. Firecracker’s clothing was shrinking with her, but the boot, strangely, was getting tighter… there was only so much space there. 

“NO!”

But she was helpless; she could not stop pouring fire. And she could not ignore Adara. She was caught. Something was going to give.

It all failed in spectacular fashion several seconds later. From behind the shroud of steam, water rushed forth and slammed into her. The sigils tattoed on her skin – the ones that protected her from getting dirty – failed instantly. Cold, foul-smelling water blinded her, choked her, killed her flame. The wave sent by Syncha lost most of its bulk by then, but it did not matter. For all of Firecracker’s boasting, she was easy to extinguish.

And, as she fought against the water, she was still getting smaller. 

Water came in. Water receded. The wave dissipated. The crest of the hill was now an island sticking out of a massive muddy puddle. Ashes and pyrolyzed earth mixed in with the water, creating a terrible black quagmire. It was more solid in some places then others, owing to rocks… or pieces of someone’s armor. The bodies were literally burned out from inside their steel shells, but the chestplates and shoulderguards remained. 

Firecracker slowly crawled out of the mud, ending up on a flat chunk of slate. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Her eyes were red, her hair turned into a mop; she lost her coat and shoes while fighting the current. And, worst of all, she was small. So small… 

With a splash, another figure rose from the mud – also puny by human standards, but almost three times Firecracker’s height. The sorceress wailed as she turned onto her back and tried to get as far away from Adara as possible. Her enemy was already making her way onto the solid ground too, shaking the wet dirt off herself as she went. She kicked her shoes off, too, so as not to drown, and her bare feet were slapping loudly against the rock. 

Firecracker looked into her eyes and saw death. She shot up, lifted her arms, pointed them at Adara, screamed in rage – but only tiny puffs of smoke appeared. 

“This is not fair!” – she complained immediately. – “It’s not! It can’t be! You can’t do this to me! Rev-Reverse it! Do you fucking know who I am?”

“You ripped my friend to shreds,” Adara replied. “You burned thousands alive. You don’t get to cry victim”.

“This can’t be,” Firecracker repeated. “You were in my fucking shoe. How did you not die? How did you even get there?”

“I have my ways.”

The memory of that particular experience was all too clear. Damp, humid darkness. Acrid odor burning her lungs. Salty liquid seeping past her lips. Compression. Once again she thought of it… the sheer presence of the giantess, her immense bulk, the power in her every little muscle, the effortless way in which by simply wearing her boot she unknowingly brought Adara lower than she’s ever been. She’d always thought that crushing her enemies underfoot was a symbolic, fitting, humiliating way to end them, to bring about a simple message that insane mages who try treat other humans like insects end up like insects themselves – crushed, mangled by the unforgiving sole of her boot. 

This definitely gave her a new perspective. It drove a point in. It was far more humiliating to live and think while being reduced to something akin to a piece of lint. Back there, trapped underfoot, worn… And the magisterix hadn’t even known. 

“I should do it,” she realized. “I should wear someone like that. Let them die slowly, choking on my sweat, losing their minds…”

Someone. But not Firecracker. This bitch killed her friends in front of her. 

So Adara advanced on the smaller woman, her hands clenched into fists, her expression grim. 

“You can’t do anything to me!” the magisterix spat. “I do not allow you! Stop! Back off! I’ll incinerate you! No- back! No! NO!”

It was almost laughably easy given the difference in size. Adara closed in and slapped Firecracker across the face, sending the woman to the ground. Then, she leaned down, got Firecracker by the arms and dragged her to the edge of the rock. Mud flowed there. 

“You can’t! I b-beg you! Don’t!”

Adara pushed the magisterix forward, sending her face first into the mud. Then, standing on the edge of the rock, she extended a leg and firmly planted her bare foot on the back of Firecracker’s head. Then she pressed down. She relentlessly pressed down as violent tremors shook the mage’s body, as she wildly flailed her arms and legs wildly, as she made muffled sounds and as she broke in tears. As seconds passed, the final moment was getting nearer, and then it came, as Firecracker, broken and humiliated, inhaled the watery sludge and, with a last gurgling noise coming out of her throat, went limp. 

“Finally”, Adara murmured. “Done”. 

“NO. NOT ENOUGH.”

“NO. NOT ENOUGH.”

The voice sent shivers down her spine. It made her heart skip a beat. It forced her down to her knees, caused her to frantically look around in search of its source – but she found nothing… except that the surface of the muddy water rippled in a way she’d never seen before; millions of tiny ripples, like if there were drums beating in an incredible tempo beneath the surface. Then she saw a thin mist forming in the air. It was glistening, and, for some reason, it was a sickly pink colour. 

“What…”

“QUICK. PULL HER OUT.”

She obeyed before she even processed the order; Firecracker, still and pale, was now lying next to her. She had to grab the woman by her feet; it was so strange to feel them fit within her palms, when one of them so utterly dwarfed her minutes ago. 

“YOU MUST RIP HER OPEN. SPILL HER BLOOD. DO IT NOW. I’LL HELP YOU IN RETURN”.

“What are you?”

“QUICK!”

“What are…”

“I’LL REVERSE YOUR OWN SPELL. RIP HER. SPILL HER BLOOD”.

Gusts of wind were tearing through the mist, throwing little clouds of it into Adara’s face. It should have felt refreshing. It didn’t. Her skin felt oily. She sensed a faint odor of rot. 

“FEED HER TO ME. SHE OWES ME”.

The voice got loud, she realized; it reverberated in her head. The amplitude of the ripples in the puddles got larger; in some places the mist was getting noticeably thicker. 

“NOW”.

When the entity wasn’t speaking, she could hear it breathing heavily, in a longing, somehow indecent way. Every sigh was followed by a sound similar to the burble of a river. River… All this time they’ve been fighting so close to the riverbank. 

Adara nervously licked her lips, turned towards Firecracker and punched the dead face as strong as she could. It wasn’t enough; she had to take the woman’s body into her hands and start bashing it against the stone. She beat the corpse down, broke it, trampled it, smashed it, and as she committed her bloody handiwork, she heard the breathing of the mist become louder, faster, more and more… perverted. 

Soon, her arms were covered in viscera up to her elbows. The mist grew so thick around her that she could barely see. A sudden calm came over her; the mist was giving her a soothing touch. Adara stumbled, fell, curled up and let the cold darkness take her. 

Firecracker woke up. 

She’d never expected to do so. She remembered her last moments all too clear: her mouth and nose full of wet dirt, her eyes itching, her lungs on fire as the merciless trop stomped her head into the mud, smothering her. Killing her. 

And yet, here she was. Floating. Floating downstream… She panicked, started thrashing, and if this were normal water, she would have surely sunk. But she didn’t. The stream easily supported her even as she flailed and rebelled. The quieted down then, because the strangely dense and supportive water was not the only thing that was wrong. 

The world was a slowly moving blur in infernal tones: from deep crimson to indigo. The only source of light here was a faint pink. She raised her hand to her eyes; her white glove was covered in dark red liquid. The smell hit her then; meat and metal, blood and mold. Not a single whiff of smoke. She gagged. 

Then something touched her foot. 

She wasn’t one to easily get scared, but she was on edge right now – so she jerked her leg away, rose in the water, took a look at what was there. She saw a man. And, beyond that man, she saw many more. Most were blank-eyed, their faces bearing idiotic emotionless expressions. Some of them spoke, but none of it made sense; belligerent babble, mad ravings of people who’d lost their minds. A shiver ran down her spine. This was all too surreal… and somehow she doubted that it was a hallucination, either. She was educated in the magical arts, after all; she could recognize the fact that the world she spent most of her life in was not the only world out there. She got transported to a different realm… 

“FIRECRACKER.”

The pink glow became stronger. Brighter. With her blood running cold, Firecracker turned, looking downstream, to where the dark river was carrying her. She saw nothing at first; and yet she sensed a presence there, a presence so titanic, so mesmerizing, that her mind could not take it in in one piece and had to process it all in small pieces. Those pieces appeared one by one. A silhouette, first; mountain-sized, androgynous, vaguely inhuman in how long and spidery and numerous its limbs were. A flat, navel-less belly. Heavy, immensely wide thighs. Fingers with thick webbing between them. Sleek and smooth facial features. Lipless mouth. Slits for a nose. Skin blue and translucent; internal organs impossible, long, winding, shining pink. 

Terror washed over Firecracker. The river was speeding up. 

“What are you?” she whispered. Her teeth chattered, despite the fact that the bloodwater around her was getting warmer. 

“I AM LIFE”, the entity said. Every word it spoke caused the surface of the stream to ripple in many of tiny, sharp ridges; Firecracker felt her clothing turning to tatters, her skin breaking and bleeding in thousands of tiny cuts. She tried to protect herself by swimming to the riverbank – only to realize there was no riverbank. “I AM THE CYCLE. I CONSUME. I AM CONSUMED.”

The current was still quickening. It was bringing Firecracker directly to the monumental figure ahead. Every time she glanced at this being, she noticed new details. She saw reeds sprawling out of the creature’s hands; they carried impaled bodies. She saw great boils on that translucent skin; within their murky depths, monsters chased after drowning humans. She saw river lilys blooming on the being’s sole breast; their petals were red, and they seemed to be watching her.

“I AM EVER-CHANGING. I AM ANCIENT. MY THIRST IS ETERNAL.”

Firecracker called upon her magic, trying to summon a firewall. Anything to shield herself from this demonic vision. Anything to hit back. 

“I AM THE STEALER OF SOULS. I TAKE THOSE MEANT FOR STYX. I MAKE THEM MINE.”

The fire never came. 

“YOUR FIRE TOOK SO MUCH FROM ME. WELCOME, FIRECRACKER. I EMBRACE YOU.”

The bloodriver took a sudden turn and now Firecracker saw.

The being was straddling the current, leaning slightly back. The stream was taking her to a great orifice between its legs; it was a sight as vulgar as it was terrifying, as the fleshy cave was rimmed with tentacles and blade-like teeth. Beyond the folds of the entrance, she saw pure darkness; even looking at it hurt her head, made her feel cold, her breath actually frosting. It was pure nothingness, a pocket of space reserved for her, a prison eternal within the creature’s sex.

She screamed. 

River Syncha laughed.

Adara trudged through the dirt. 

She was normal-sized again – well, maybe she’d lost a couple of inches, but she couldn’t tell for sure. The river – she was sure now, it must have been the river itself – held its promise. Though, thinking back on it, Adara wasn’t sure she should have agreed. She may have made a deal with a devil. She closed it immediately by goring the magisterix, true, but she wasn’t sure this would safeguard her. Adara was taught that any sort of a compromise between a human and an otherworldly spirit – like the one which inhabited Syncha – basically was as good as set in stone. She may have fulfilled her end of the bargain, but the River certainly put her details down and tucked the contract into a drawer. Chances are, there would be a time when Syncha needed a mortal for its purposes – and then a former associate would be the first one to be called on. 

That being said, Firecracker was worse than any demon Adara’d ever heard of. 

She managed to make her way out of the flooded area. By then the battle had finally ended. It took her a while to find the victors. She passed the place where they stopped Turtleshell, though she didn’t immediately recognize it; everything there turned to ash. Back by the hill, she’d stopped momentarily to scavenge boots from a man who’d never need them again; they were a couple sizes too large for her, but at least she wasn’t burning her feet on the charred ground now. 

At the crest of the hill, she looked around. She saw what remained of the Jeolarian wardrum, now just a bunch of bent metal rods as all the wood and the hide and the people manning it disappeared. She saw fields of shiny metal reforged in the firestorm where entire regiments fell to the flames and the smoke. She saw charred remains of people hugging each other, trying to hide from the fire in a friendly embrace. By then, she was desensitized to it all; she could no longer connect what she saw to all the people who’d gathered here recently. War has always been horrible, but she’d never seen devastation of this scale before. The free mages were getting better, deadlier, and with that, it seemed, they were losing the rest of their sanity.

The sight drove a point in; Adara had failed. She couldn’t stop the magisterix in time, and, once she got there, she almost got killed and only won by chance. Her eventual victory felt hollow. Firecracker’s destructive performance lasted for too long. 

“How can they allow mages to get to this point? How do they not realize that their power will eventually corrupt them? Their side of the world will probably see a new order soon, with mages taking the reins of rule. What then? Women like Firecracker in charge of entire countries? How are we meant to stop them then?”

She hoped that enough Arcenians survived to tell stories of a mad pyromancer burning her own alive – but that hope seemed bleak. There was something Adara understood now. Her thoughts kept coming back to the time she spent buried beneath Firecracker’s boot and the subsequent trip inside. The magisterix didn’t even have to do anything; when magnified, everything above her was overwhelming to Adara, so much so that she almost gave up entirely while lying there, in the sweaty, hot, dark prison, reduced to unnoticeable lint… 

“If Firecracker didn’t die,” she thought, “she could go back to Arceni and declare herself their new mistress, and if she had my powers and told people she wants an army of tiny servants just to pamper her, people would fall in line.”

She shook her head. 

“Yes. Because, to them, her mastery is enough to elevate her similarly to how elevated she was compared to me when my spell backfired. Beautiful, powerful, and so, so… above. How can an insect stop a goddess?..”

Her vision went dark for a moment as she felt dizzy. She had to get out. But where? She leaned down, held her own knees for a moment, then went upright again. Upstream, she thought; upstream, where she left Kest at the beginning of the battle. There were medics there, too, and maybe some of the injured from today managed to regroup there. If Miglav was still alive, she’d find him there, too… She started walking, quickly returning to the riverbank; the water was flowing again, and it was dark and dirty, with a reddish hue to it. She’d wanted to wash off the ashes, blood and sweat covering her, but she shuddered at the mere thought of walking into this water – and not just because it wasn’t all that clean. 

She thought she saw people moving on the opposing riverbank, but she wasn’t sure. She hoped enough Arcenians escaped that the tales of Firecracker’s madness wouldn’t be dismissed. 

It took her a quarter of an hour to reach the place where the trop squad was lying in wait this morning. She didn’t find a trace of Kest or anyone else alive, which instilled hope in her; at least it seemed like they managed to escape. She was ready to leave, too, to walk away in hopes of catching up to some of the remaining Jeolarian forces. 

And then the river stopped. 

Firecracker was a little girl again, and she stood on the staircase between water sloshing at the base of it and the darkness on the top floor. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to run. Two of her greatest fears; both trying to get at her. The fire was gone. The fire has long been her only answer; she didn’t have it here. The bloodriver carried her right into the toothy grin of the creature’s lower lips; she saw juices dribbling, tendrils flexing in anticipation of their prey. She saw no escape. 

“No escape,” she repeated to herself, and then she forced herself to move. “No escape.”

Right.

As the bloodriver tightened up, the corpses of the men also captured by Syncha started piling up behind her. She turned around and crawled up, her hands and feet swiftly carrying her up the quickly growing floating mound. This was a stream of bodies now, and she quickly topped it. The River was still laughing, but now it seemed amused, too. 

Firecracker looked up at the monstrous face.

“You can’t leave,” she announced. 

The answer came with a delay. 

“YOU ARE THE ONE TRAPPED. YOU ARE THE ONE WHO CANNOT LEAVE. I SHALL FEAST ON YOU. COME IN.”

“No, you’re the trapped one, demon. And I have a way out.”

“EXPLAIN.”

The shifting of bodies under Firecracker’s feet slowed down. 

“You’re the embodiment of the river,” Firecracker spoke, raising a hand to take a lock of hair off her sweaty forehead. “Or whatever. You’re tied to the river, aren’t you? You’re thirsting, agonizing for more blood ever since you’ve tried some, but you’re at the mercy of the men who slaughter each other here. But guess what?”

She caught her breath.

“All over the world I saw humans enslaving rivers like you. I saw them chaining rivers like you. They put dams, and they block the flow to create lakes, and they put bridges like shackles, and… all sorts of things. You’re lucky it hasn’t happened to you yet.”

“QUICK.”

“Okay, okay!”

The bloodriver froze in place. The first bodies were already at the entrance to the cold, dark beyond. If Firecracker slipped and fell forward, she’d roll right down into the embrace of the teeth and the tendrils. With shivers going down her spine, she continued.

“You’re nature, and nature will lose. You will die. Your waters will run dry. You’re the trapped one. You need to leave. I know how it happens. You need a vessel.”

“NO MORTAL CAN HOLD A RIVER.”

“I can.”

There was a deep rumbling within Syncha as the beast leaned down to look at Firecracker up close.

“YOU.”

“Me. I can. I am one of the most powerful mages in existence. I am the Last Light.. Bring me back. Take me back, and I will take you anywhere. Join me!”

They remained eye to eye; the titanic demon of the river and the woman staring it down – not without fear, but also with excitement and pride. They both thought, and, unbeknownst to each other, they thought the same things: of how they would use each other. They nodded at the same time. 

It was impossible. Unphysical. Couldn’t be real. But the river stopped, froze in its tracks. Adara watched it with horror slowly rising within her. 

Then she saw a bubble. 

Another one. 

She stepped forward, and then it hit her – there was steam rising from the surface of the water, it bubbled as it boiled, bodies and all, quickly forming a fowl broth. She held a hand up to her mouth. In the water, she saw the corpses moving – they coalesced, agglomerated into a single, writhing, fleshy mass. 

Adara turned around and ran as fast as her legs could take her. She was gone, and the meaty blob in the middle of the river was still growing. Its outside turned dark red as it formed a floating cocoon; within it’s foggy walls one could see shapes moving together, churning over, melting over and over. But there was no one to watch. 

Many hours later, the cocoon popped, and a pale woman stepped out. Her skin was pristine; blemishes gone, tattoos gone too, for this was a body totally created anew from spare flesh.

As she left her crib, the water started flowing again. The woman walked away from the water, naked and calm; as she walked, she continually licked off the ash settling on her lips, and one could see that her tongue was unusually long and pointy. But there was no one to watch.