Out in the Grand Hall his waiting audience sat frightened and eager as the pulses of power increased. The attendees passed short whispers amongst themselves, did chants hoping they’d be able to stay conscious when the power surge came, and here and there some of them deciding to squat further back from the dais.
The exhibition started with the customary fanfare and pronouncements. Minor heroes among the majic orders, known names, were hailed to come represent their systems, and they performed well on the whole, although the pressure in the room toward the end caused one old man to take more than ten minutes to change a skink creature into a gargoyle, after which he fainted. The tension after that was heavy.
No one was speaking any more when at last Hamar’s entry was most salubriously announced by the Red Priest. Horns were blown, their low notes vibrating the room.
Hamar kept the assembly of elders waiting after the fanfare ended, long enough for Aktiarh to look unsure of himself and to wonder whether to order the horns to start up again. When the young Majus finally made his move, he didn’t just walk into the room…
… from where he was standing out in the corridor, Hamar swung his hand and conjured a rod of water to fire horizontally into the room ahead of himself, shocking them all as to what was meant by it! It drummed loudly on the floor. When he cut the flow the watery column stood upright in front of them halfway to the high ceiling, its form snake-like, pole-like, charming them as it undulated there. As they watched, it next broadened out into a sheet of water like a huge door. Then it blimped into a sea-green tidal wave curling high over them all!
It held itself there, imbedded with grotesque sea creatures pacing within it as its waters shimmered and rippled with unearthly light. Then Hamar called for a shaft of hot sirocco wind to blast down into the room to push the huge wave over, exploding on the marble, spraying and soaking the front rows. Its tide instantly flattened out to nothing and disappeared into the floor, the wriggling forms in it thrashing and biting and then disappearing as well. The wind’s duty done, it dropped to a whisper of a breeze, moaning as it died, and riffling the crowd’s hair in its passing.
Still out of sight in the corridor Hamar put his arm out straight and reconjured the water, this time as a thin creek whose gallons rose in surges within invisible banks, and then he put a slippered foot up onto its surface, leapt up on its rocking skin, and calmly walked into the room along its path. He stood facing them while the creek continued to fill up and raised him high. He disdainfully looked down into their fearful faces. Pulses of power haloed his body and made bright flickers into the water, its dancing beams projecting wildly all over the room.
He drew his black cape around himself till he stood like a chrysalis, only his tattooed face still fiercely staring down at them from within the slit of the hood. Then his aura increased and his form began to ignite, a ring of little flames rising upward from his hem and rippling up to engulf his body, until his dark eyes alone remained glaring at them through the roar of orange fire! He flared the flames bigger still!
Beneath his feet the glowing wall of water shone yellow as the fire majically extended down inside its depths. His audience were desperate for it to quench the awful heat in the room, then dreaded it scalding them instead as the creek squealed steam-hot and filled the room with suffocating fog! Hamar kept penetrating his heat downward until the cloud of steam impossibly contained all of him and his blazing bonfire within it!
Suddenly the flames burst out! At the front of the room scorched students clambered backwards with nowhere to go, yet he flared the flames even more until everyone’s gowns in all the rows were furiously smoking. In the next instant he caused the fire to snuff-out. Gone.
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