“At least we found an actual oasis for a few minutes' respite,” I said.
“This isn't an oasis,” Axer said, slowly rotating his muscles, letting the vibrating magic simmer into a continuous thread that rotated across his skin—a world class athlete pulling his body back into peak shape. For now. He made his own magic bow to his control, thinning it into the loop easily, unlike my fledgling efforts.
“But we need you not obliterating the landscape,” he said. “And if we hit another sand vortex, you were going to say screw it and start remaking the layer right then and there.”
His statement wasn’t...incorrect...and the earth did feel like it was moving beneath me. I shook off the mesmerizing sight of his magic and looked down.
The ground was moving, all at once, like shifting tectonic plates. A horrible, enraged screech split the air, and rotating blades spun in my peripheral view.
“Um…?”
“Death tortoise,” Axer said, not sounding at all stressed about an animal with death in its name and spikes of saw blades rotating along its sides.
“Is it going to eat me?” I let my eyes slip shut, feeling the adrenaline of the last half day start to drain. “I feel like I might let it.”
There was something cathartic about traveling through a landscape where everything wanted to eat you because it was hungry, not because it could use you for world domination.
And maybe because you deserved it.
“Not today.”
Thinking about fault made me go down darker, unhelpful paths, and I had to forcefully corral my emotions. Control. Control, Ren.
“How do I not become...” I shook my head. “How do you do it so well?”
“What, control my desires?” he said lightly.
I regarded him from the ground—or, from a death tortoise shell, I supposed—looking up as he was haloed by the light. “Balance your abilities,” I corrected. “How do you forgo the emotional path?”
He crouched next to me. One finger lifted a lock of hair that had blown into my face and tucked it behind my ear.
“All choices are about emotion. It is how you use your emotions that make the impact of the choice.”
I swallowed. “I have lost my balance.”
“No. You haven’t lost it, you simply have yet to fully gain it. You see balance in me, but I was trained from birth to hide all that I am. I’ve never been allowed to be all I can be.” He raised his hand and I could see a phantom of magic coil there—a wisp of illusion that held a deep crimson hue. “Because of fear. Even my mother, whose powers are known, restrains her abilities to appease the masses.”
He cocked his head. “But now there is you—you who can wipe entire worlds from existence. Sending ten armies to fight you means nothing, for a single assassin would have just as much luck—for the only way to win would be the element of surprise. You have an ultimate power. And no way to hide it. You can use that.”
“Might makes right?”
“Even under a benevolent rule, might always carries the edge. You have a clean slate, in a way, because everyone already knows. They already fear you outright, instead of just fearing the possibility of your power. You have the chance to use your abilities without the firestorm of discovery,” he said, intensity underscored by deep desire. “For the firestorm has already come.”
I watched him. “You suck at motivational speeches.”
He smiled. “I'm not trying to motivate you. You see balance in me, where I see hidden, inactive potential. I see freedom in you, where you see fear.”
I touched his hand. “I don't want you here. Either of you. For your own safety.”
“I know.”
“But you won’t leave,” I said, somewhat wistfully.
“No.”
I stared at him as the sky moved with the lumbering gait of the turtle, and the deadly spikes whirred. “I'm a weakness for you. For all of you.”
“Yes.” He curled a lock of hair around his fingers.
“They will get to you, and your mother, through me.”
His eyes tightened. “They will try.”
“Stavros has already used me against you.”
“And he failed. He will fail again,” he said with certainty.
“I want to believe that. But that means...”
“Yes. It does.”
“Your turn to drive,” Constantine said flatly to him, as he folded elegantly next to me on the other side and stuck his hand into one of the baskets that had been attached to the bike and withdrew a sandwich.
I let my hand drop.
“Vine mayonnaise?” Constantine made a face, and Axer rolled his eyes as he pushed himself to his feet. “Who puts that on caperly bread?”
I felt around the grass, then raised my hand around a stick, offering it to him.
Constantine’s sensibilities were overly offended by the suggestion—roiling over him in a quick, visible wave. I started laughing, some of the tension in my muscles easing.
Not accessing simple magic was slightly hilarious in certain instances—such as watching Constantine's eyes narrow in on the offending sauce and how he was going to get rid of it without calling magic down upon us or using a stick to scrape it.
I was going to have to thank Frost Viper for more than just the supplies.
Axer grabbed several things from the basket and headed to sit behind the tortoise's head.
I sat up and accepted a sandwich of my own—some strange meat substitute and pseudo-vegetable combination that Frost Viper had included—concurrently checking the passive magic of Will's encyclopedia bracelet as we began rolling back and forth across the landscape—like a giant pirate ship in search of rabid world-eating sardines.
“So... It says death tortoises dive into the sand. Should we—?” I rolled a hand back-and-forth.
“I put a compound on its neck that prevents it from being able to put its head in its shell,” Constantine said, carefully using one of his recycling containers and touching a rod to the mayonnaise. The tiniest stream of magic from the rod inched the offending sauce onto a leaf held next to it. “It stops it from diving.”
I stopped mid-bite. “I already checked torturing the wildlife off my agenda.”
“It's a temporary and reversible torture,” Constantine said, removing the last drop of sauce, like every bit was a poison that would kill him. “Furthermore, it is in the animal's best interest to have you survive. The corporatists hate them, and anything that infringes on their profit-only views. Look at this beautiful landscape on which they could construct luxury homes,” he said, pointing at the deformed wasteland of pits, traps, and decay that we were currently tromping through. “Besides, Stavros has never shown a love for anything non-mage... I can guarantee the animal's demise if the Second Layer gains control of you and somehow completes their plan of folding the Third Layer into the Second.”
It was a reminder that I wasn’t the only terror-inducing mage in this game.