Episode Thirteen: MASTERS!
Going through the ordeals pushed Hamar to the limits of his personality. In the final months he began letting loose on the others. Not enough to call down the Master’s wrath, but just enough to shake off any last holds of the place.
Every one of the underground inhabitants had a weakness he could exploit. So he did.
“You are too trusting Diagones, surely you knew more power would be needed against Ifrin before he’d locate right spells for you from his precious library,” he told the head student of the Conjuring school, and Diogenes did a fire spell that burnt Ifrin’s eyes every time he looked at a scroll.
“Nightmares, Baliac, really? Well, you did do an enchantment on that Soothsayer, didn’t you notice him weaving a Celtic hex to get you back?” Then he increased the nightmare attacks, sending a hippo monster to lie across Baliac so that Baliac nearly suffocated trying to get it off, and Baliac then ended up inciting his fellow Enchanters into a minor war against the Soothsayers.
Hamar set Muti witch doctors against Tibetan brahman about the power of their prayers, so they each sat droning for hours invoking demons against each other. “Pathetic, ridiculous. Now you’ve filled your chambers with the wretched things. Such faces. And now you can’t get them out! How do you sleep?”
The most advanced adepts had him invisibly whispering in their ears that their teachers favoured someone else and jealousy lowered their auras. Afterwards they worked on inner peace with a vengeance, finding that it only particled their auras away into nothing.
It all amounted to small power plays, busyness against madness, as he awaited his fate. Amongst such beings of lesser power his own personality faults, which he thought he knew, didn’t leave him vulnerable to them. Besides, his protections were formidable.
He finally conducted one last scam cleverly set up to fail. “You each have been specially selected, tell no one,” he said to a hand-picked few. “Aktiarh has acquired the Szechuan Mandragor spell, I saw it, and he’s only done temporary bindings around it. Think, my friends, we can spirit into his chamber and then back out, a fast reading, and the words for nullifying all Chinese majicians will be ours for life. You, Druid Janix, can silence the red sentries and the sound of Aktiarh’s power arcs crossing, and then we can see to the rest.” He scrunched his face tattoos into a vivid snake-face glaring at them and they readily joined in.
Janix used his Druidic poetry to explain the necessary manoeuvres to the rest of them, “Down amongst the fiery rushes come the breezes whispered low; O bend, reeds, to pass the sunset power on,” symbolic words which the more practical-minded Egyptian, Phut, angrily couldn’t decipher;
The Athenian mystery school student Tychicus complained, “Just line up the spiritual costs, will you? What are the hazards involved!” – wanting them to reveal all their secret protection rituals to each other first, it amounting to a showdown;
Then Hamar sent in a goon named Heli Calor who could be relied on to maddeningly keep joking to jolly-up all angry sides in the room and it caused a free-for-all fight, each of them ridiculusly firing curses and trying to out-mind-stun the others. Their powers smashed up their meeting place and woke the whole corridor. The Red Priest was furious. Punishments happened.
Such petty chastisement from Aktiarh proved the last straw for Hamar.
Standing alone at the darkest end of the caverns he set up an incantation that started a low throbbing heartbeat growing and growing throughout all chambers, which none of the teachers understood or could stop. It built up pressure inside and outside everyone with no way to escape the increase. Juniors ran the hallways, cowered low by the walls, masters came out of their doors chanting their most potent spells, to no avail. It relentlessly thumped their bodies, thumped their minds, set the thick stone walls ringing, – small rockfalls happened.
In a final burst of anger Hamar opened his mouth and fired out a tunnel of red flames that spiralled down the hallways filling every open door with the blast and flashing all over everyone inside the rooms! Each corridor was filled by the speeding fire dragon as it rampaged along, and it even sought out the Red Priest, encircling him and leaving him stunned.
Then Hamar shut his mouth and cut it all off. As he re-entered the main hallway a few scorched individuals managed to peek out at him as he blew thick, grey, smoke out of his nostrils, his eyes gleaming, before he strode on to his room.
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