Shadows in the Smoke - Prologue

"Production and development are the keys to prosperity. If achieving these was easy, it would already have been done. That is why the Shock Worker Brigades were formed. Wherever a problem seems to be intractable, they can be deployed to overcome it. Uncountable snarl-ups, issues and stoppages have been swiftly resolved by the swift action of a Shock Worker Brigade. With their help, we continue to build prosperity for the People."

The Struggle for Freedom by Bjarne Midthun

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She squinted as she looked out across the dusty, bare ground. Anything more than a few tens of feet from her gradually merged into the background blur, which sometimes seemed to crackle and spark with unreal light, other times simply fragmenting into fractals streaking across her vision.

She was tired. Exhausted really. It ran through her, deep into her bones. But she had been tired for a long time. Longer than she could remember. She had tried to keep track at first, but like the world around her it had quickly become a painful blur. It could be weeks, it could be centuries. Just holding herself together, not allowing her mind to collapse into madness under the pressure, was the only victory she could have here.

Every moment was simply a continuation of the last. Everything around her was constantly changing, yet nothing that mattered ever did.

Today though… Inasmuch as this place had anything you could call a day, today was different. Today things were going to change.

It drained her power being there, a constant outpouring of magic at a level vanishingly few could handle. Instinct forcing her to use her Talent on a sub-conscious level just to force a bubble of reality around herself. It was all that allowed her and the few others alive here to survive, but it was what kept them there too. Anything that would let her escape would first condemn her to annihilation. An unbreakable cage whose bars were its prisoners' own determination to live.

She felt arms close around her from behind and, leaned back into him closing her eyes for a second. She could allow herself this brief moment of peace.

"Not long now my love." Even through the fog that clouded her every thought she could feel the magic thundering off him, forcing the world into reality around them. The same way she knew hers was.

She pulled away and turned to face her companion in this little bubble of reality, seizing his hands with hers. Sometimes it was hard to speak, but not today.

"We are so close, Retsin. Fresh air, the Sun, the sky, food! You and me, together!"

"I know, my love." Retsin's smile was one of so few pleasures left to her. "Are you ready?"

She nodded decisively. "As ready as I will ever be. Are you?"

His voice was distorted and crackly, as hers no doubt was too, but it was as firm as she had ever heard it. "Of course. We are going to make history." He paused, smiled and then coughed. "Or possibly die trying."

"Anything is better than staying here." They had said that to each other so many times before, but she had no intention of dying. Not then and certainly not now. Now… now they were finally ready to do something about it.

"Exactly." Retsin gave her hands a hard squeeze. "Are you ready, my love?"

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She paused. Did she truly want to do this? Was it worth the risks? Worth everything?

"Yes." It was barely even worth questioning.

He nodded as if he had expected nothing else. "I love you."

"I love you too." She held his gaze for a couple of seconds, staring into his deep, grey eyes, doing her best to block out the headache inducing flickering of the world around them. She would be free. She had to be.

She squeezed his hands back. It was time.

Without hesitating they split apart. With their feet they started to trace runes into the colourless dirt, steadily moving away from each other in a circle.

It was hard, keeping the patterns in her head. The very world seemed to fight against it, whispering in her ears to just let go and accept her fate, clouding and disrupting her thoughts. She was stronger than that though. And so was Retsin.

Each rune traced into the ground took her closer to freedom, but she could not afford the slightest mistake. That would mean death for both them. If they were lucky. Retsin was doing the other half of the circle. They needed to move fast, any delay would be as bad as an error.

It was lucky she trusted him with her life. Not something she could say about many people. She thought that was the case anyway, it was difficult to remember.

She gave herself a shake and focused back on her work, moving faster as the edges of their bubble of reality boiled and writhed around them.

In less than two hundred heartbeats they had completed their circle and stood together in the centre. They had discussed this so many times, planned every word, every motion of the ritual down to the slightest detail. There was no need to discuss anything, they both knew their roles.

"Ébair." Retsin intoned a single word. She could feel the strain on his magic, the way it grated against the world, as he yanked it away from survival and poured it into their ritual circle. At the same time she pulled her own magic back into her and shaped it. It scraped through her consciousness, feeling almost alien after so long.

Around them the runes erupted with blinding light, huge volumes of magic pouring into them to be channeled into their ritual. Without her and Retsin's magic to hold it at bay, unreality instantly leapt forward, obliterating what little space surrounded the circle and pressing in on them.

She could feel it wearing away at the ritual circle. It would not last more than a few seconds, even with Retsin funneling his power into it. But she had her own role, there was no time to worry about that.

"Dolox os'ellende jel'dil'erach. Aprainc gewaaj'fa. Sir aprainc jel'blyndin." She started to speak, forcing words of power out of her parched throat with an unwilling tongue. Arrays of runes sprung to life around her, the words of power only scratching the surface of her spell's complexity. "Gränn os'ellende aprainc sodaire bith'fa." For all of his power, Retsin lacked the knowledge for this so she had planned the ritual, starting from first principles to build one of the greatest works of her life. But she could never have done it without him. It needed two of them to work together, to trust each other absolutely. "Spiëkk gränn'alan kel'ai'dag, dachaid cobieden, sodaire spèittan jel'me."

Her voice rose to a shriek as her ritual approached its climax. Above them a pinprick of natural light appeared, widening into a small hole torn by the storms of runes raging around it, fueled by an arcane energy beyond anything most occultists would ever see in their lives.

It would not be enough. She could already feel the place wearing away at the magic, crushing it into nothing. Working to trap them once more, to drain them of who they always were. No one person could escape from this deep.

Retsin did not realise. He looked up at that bit of light, hope shining in his beautiful, deep eyes. "Aprainc di'erach'fa." She spoke the last of the words they had rehearsed together and turned to him. The ritual circle was on the edge of collapse, they had seconds at most.

With a small, sad smile she put her hand on his, skin to skin, and finished the ritual.

"Xëy blyndin'fa." As she spoke the last two words the whirlwind of her power ripped into him, pulling his magic, his very life, into the ritual.

She screamed as magic blasted through her, more than she had ever handled before in her life. There were no tools, no Schemas to help her here. For an eternity that last lasted a fraction of a second the power raged inside her, threatening to burn her away. But her will was iron, she forced the magic away and out of her.

The runes of the ritual circle were perfect. They caught Retsin's magic, his life force, and forced it into the ritual, powering it to heights that the two of them could never have managed otherwise. Even as Retsin slumped to the ground in front of her, those lovely eyes forever fixed in a look of utter betrayal, she felt it working.

"Aprainc!" She shrieked one final word and the world tore around her.

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