In the sky, the Erudite fought alone, standing against one of the most powerful monsters on the entire planet. He whipped his staff around, chanting two spells at once while shaping three more than that, and calling upon the power of his throne. Being crafted of pure ether crystal, it gave him an abundance of raw magical might. He had cut the power to every one of his simulacra across the country when the Dreki Matriarch had attacked, to give him even more, but despite all of it, he wasn't sure that it would be enough.

Before the Matriarch had killed or disabled her children for power, he could have won a one on one fight with her. It wouldn't have been quick, but it would have been certain – she had put too much of her power into her children and sacrificial immortality.

With the power of her consumed children, it had become a coin toss. He might have won, but he might not have. It would have been too uncertain for either of them to risk going that far, so he had been confident that after a few rounds and wounds, she would retreat and pay them concessions for breaking the rules of war.

But after undergoing an aberrant transformation…

He didn't have much time to think about how hopeless it really was.

In one instant, he cast a greater deflection spell to turn aside the attacks of the flaming tentacles the aberrant sent at him, conjured a series of barrier spells to stop her from fleeing in the direction of the wall, and called down a swarm of meteors each the size of her entire body to crash into her.

She unleashed waves of warped and twisted flame at him, and he used elemental immunity to defend against them, then leveled his staff and cast the ray of death, carving out a chunk of her warped life force. He mingled together a disintegration spell and a flesh to stone spell into the ray, carving out a chunk of her flesh and turning more to stone, but her bloodline burned it away and healed her in an instant.

He was swallowed by darkness as a thousand tentacles surrounded him in an instant, and only a rapidly formed impenetrable sphere stopped him from dying, and bought him an instant to teleport away. But somehow she had smelled his teleport, and more tentacles of flame and darkness and metal and blood wrapped around him. His right hand was ripped off, and he was forced to shift the four dimensional mental constructs that held his magic, casting a restoration spell, while re-casting impenetrable sphere and using a cantrip to pull his staff to his other hand.

His healing spell went to work, not to fix his hand, but to seal the wound and stop him from losing blood. True healing would take too much time, ether, and would need him to examine the wound. No, for right now, he just needed to be able to fight. In the worst case, he could try and fall back to one of his clone jars, but that would leave him weakened for weeks or months as his spirit adapted to the body.

He cast another spell, mixing together hungry light conjured from an elemental plane that bordered on the dark gods, another disintegration spell, and a spell that conjured meteors from a realm of flaming stone, then unleashed this new triad of destructive magic onto the former matriarch.

It tore her body into bits, allowing him a moment to dissolve his sphere, fly out, and cast another blend of spells, but flame was already knitting her body together. His permanent ethersight wasn't the most well suited to gauging bloodline power, but he guessed that she had spent about a fifth of hers, while he was down to about half of his ether pool.

Ah, well. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

He reached out with his mind, calling out to the school. His familiar, a dragon of the Nraig breed, answered immediately. The breed wasn't even a native to this plane, which was the only reason Henry had been able to take one as a familiar.

The dragon popped into being next to him, blinding to look at, with shimmering scales that seemed to be carved from mother of pearl, and eyes of milky white. He unleashed his breath weapon, a beam of brilliant radiance that was infused with strange magic that cut into the psychic realm.

But for all the power of his familiar, the Dreki matriarch was still stronger. A tendril of flame cracked his scales, and the opalescent claws of the Nraig dragon were barely able to scratch the warped being before him.

But his familiar, while indeed mighty, was not the force that Henry had been calling out to.

First, he called on the Tree of Truth. The ancient, many-eyed tree was from the Age of Sunder, and it carried a truly grand ability to see the future, the past, and the hearts and minds of all people. The power the tree leant to him resolved his path through the battle, though as with all power from older Ages, calling upon it did not come entirely free of certain… problems.

This gift was the safest of the options he could choose, though, so he accepted it gladly.

The leaf the tree granted him allowed him to see into the branching paths of the future, not unlike the foresight spell, but with the flexibility of a full future sight affinity, and then some.

He flickered with a half dozen arcane passage spells, teleporting from safe spot to safe spot among the web of fire and tentacles that filled the air, weaving together spells of true lightning, a formless spirit of death from one of the planes of the dark gods, and his usual favorite of disintegration into an attack right at one of the reforming parts of the Dreki family Matriarch. His mental constructs began to spin and whirl, straining as he blasted out with more power.

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She lashed down, and guided by the tree's magic, Henry guided shield spells and energy barriers to shift power, while flying out of the way of strikes, molding his body to be fast enough with the help of haste magic. The matriarch began burning her bloodline to grow faster in speed then, her tentacles of flame and teeth and goo moving easily four times the speed they once had.

Futures shifted, and Henry followed them, only to pull away at the last second with a self-banishment spell to escape into a demiplane as his left leg was severed clean off by the flames of the matriarch.

The future he'd seen had been wrong, changed by the aberrant's power. That alone made Henry break into a cold sweat. Aberrant magic was expanded and strengthened, but none of the reports on the matriarch of the Dreki family had ever suggested that she had any sort of fate weaving, fortune manipulation, or even future obscuring powers.

Then again, Henry had never seen someone as powerful as the matriarch transform into an aberrant before. Usually those who reached so high had learned to keep their impulses in check.

Unable to trust the futures he was seeing, he went for his least terrible options and cast a sending to Magda, one of his old mentors.

It failed. She must be busy with the seals on the tomb of the empty gods under her school. He couldn't blame her, but there couldn't have been worse timing. With her out, he reached for his backup option.

Cendel had two Erudite Colleges, his and Erudite Olivine's. Her ether affinity was incredibly powerful, and even if she wasn't as strong or skilled as he was, he'd welcome another ninth circle spellcaster and archmagus in this fight.

A scrying spell appeared in the air next to him as his demiplane shattered and he was spat back into reality. He wove together a forcecage, immovable sphere, and another healing spell, blocking the magic of the monster.

"By all the hells," the voice of Erudite Olivine said, her voice emanating from the scrying sphere. "What have you… Oh. Oh no."

Henry didn't have time to respond as he threw out high circle spells like they were nothing, burning his ether at a rate he'd not done in years, deflecting attacks, carving away chunks of flesh, and stopping her from escaping into the wilderness.

No matter what, even if he died permanently and used his deathspell to kill her, he would not allow her to escape into the demon wastes. Something as powerful as she was would spawn demons at a rate and power high enough to destroy all of Cendel, and probably the rest of the continent too.

He heard the chanting of Erudite Olivine, and his ether pool suddenly surged, restoring itself to full power, then expanding even more as her ether affinity pushed the boundaries of his magic.

Then her scrying sensor winked out and he cursed her.

She'd helped, but she was being a coward. He needed comrades at arms who could fight alongside him, not just a bit more ether. This wasn't enough, even with the temporary excess of power.

He hadn't wanted to do this, but he reached into his school once more, and began to undo seals. He turned off ward lines, powered down glyphs, and disabled runic arrays.

Then he conjured the cabinet in front of him.

He used a powerful force spell to knock the leg the aberrant had cut off of him into the monster's left hand.

The aberrant rushed at him, and in doing so, violated one of the endless rules of the cabinet: do not approach while carrying a human leg in your left hand. The right hand is fine, and so are non-human legs. But never approach with a human leg in your left hand. And for all his power, Henry was still a human.

The cabinet exploded open, magic strong enough to rival Henry at his very peak of spellcasting power flowing from the cabinet. A bloodline almost as warped as the aberrant's own power flowed in with the age of pools artifact, and was joined by an equally dark twisting of divinity, channeling power of a half-ascendant artifact.

A hundred magic items conjured themselves out of nothing, unleashing barrages of power and death onto the aberrant. Fireball beads, rods of blasting, helms of psionic assault, blades of demonic blood, and a hundred other attacks light up the sky with barrages of magic, enough to turn most aberrants to paste.

But this was no ordinary aberrant. She pulled herself together and lashed out with tendrils of flame, punching out at the cabinet. For all of its immense magic, it was still a plain wooden cabinet, so Henry swept it back into the school and behind the seals that would protect a student who accidentally violated the rules from that assault.

The attack had bought him time, though, enough for him to have put together a truly fearsome spell. It drained three quarters of his ether pool, even with the expansion that Erudite Olivine had given him, and merged together pinnacle attacks of flame, force, ice, light, shadow, disintegration, acid, lightning, sound, mental magic, and more into a single great sphere of multi-hued power that swallowed the aberrant whole.

It tore her apart, and kept tearing her apart, even as she restored herself.

He lowered his hand and began building up more magic, rumbling chants and gesturing as best he could with what he had in his staff and his one arm.

When the light died out, and nothing of the matriarch seemed to be left, he tensed. She might be dead, but.

There.

Seemingly from nowhere, flame bloomed to life, and the warped aberrant dragon woman released a powerful breath attack at him. She was wounded, heavily wounded, but alive.

His prepared magic snapped into place, stopping her breath and hammering her with lightning, meteors, and life-rending magic as one. This time, when one of her arms was rent off, she didn't instantly regrow it or re-atttach it, and Henry felt a moment of hope.

She unleashed more beams of dragon breath, and he diverted, blocked, or nullified them, but when she managed to get in a close up eyeball lash, he nearly lost his head, which was enough to decide for him to bite the bullet.

He used an arcane passage to teleport up and away, and began a rolling chant, but he put no ether into it. No, he was baiting her.

When she unleashed another wave of dragon breath over his form, he used magic built into his staff and opened a doorway to the library. Her flame washed over the table, over the shelving, and over the books.

And the library reached out to take its revenge. Legs of hard chitin that was nevertheless flexible, like a mix of a bug's exoskeleton and an octopus' tentacle reached for the aberrant. They locked on, gripping her even as she squirmed and burnt at the legs.

But the old magic from the Age of the Wilds would not be denied. It demanded retribution for her sins. This would cost him dearly, and likely wouldn't have worked if she'd been at full power, but she was bloody and beaten.

She squirmed and released waves of flame and tentacles from her body, but the legs of the library inexorably drew her closer and closer to the doorway that he'd conjured.

Like the gaping maw of some great beast, the library dragged the aberrant into itself, then into the darkness and shadow between shelves. The former matriarch let out a scream of pure terror, the horror sinking in even through her transformed state.

It was the last sound she ever made.

The door sealed itself shut, then vanished.

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