NOVEL SIMPLE Chapter 85: Gnolls
[A picture of lightning striking the tip of an island mountain in a storm.]
B is for Bond primals from the Iron Vein isle so remote, they share their home with a breed of Bond primal goat. The tribe is a strong noble warrior folk, and to them, honor and courage are no joke.
-Sally Rider’s ABCs of Magic
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The caravan guards began patrolling around the circle of the wagons each night that followed, and the adventurers in training joined them in pairs. No attacks came over the next week, as the lone mountain in the distance grew larger and larger.
Kole spent his free time working on improving Thunderwave. Now that he’d completed the spell’s path to the Font from his bridge’s natural opening location, he could try to find shortcuts that would reduce the cost of the spell. He’d made little progress though, only shaving a few fractions of a Will off by the end of a week and resolved to research the process more when he returned. The pathing components he’d learned had been general ones, applicable for navigating around a variety of obstacles in the Arcane Realm each, meant to help complete a spell before improvements could be made. Now, armed with a completed path, he needed to learn more efficient solutions to his specific problems. He was also vaguely aware that the spell component itself could be modified in some instances to simplify the spell as a whole.
He hadn’t read up on this yet—otherwise he’d simply recall the information by copying it into his spellbook. Instead, he’d had a conversation with Theral about it, which he’d of course written down verbatim with the aid of his magical book in hopes it would give him some insight.
“Spells are like umbrellas,” Theral had said. “You know what those are… right?”
Kole had rolled his eye at the comment and nodded, not sure if that had been a dig at his dome life origins or a genuine concern he might be unfamiliar with the popular device.
“Good. Well, for umbrellas, if you want to fit them into a building, you can either find a bigger door to walk through or finagle it in with some effort and time to squeeze it in. Alternatively, you could redesign the umbrella to be collapsible and simply close it and take a direct path. With the nature of spell Will costs being multiplicative—not additive—based on the path and effect components, the decrease of the path and the expense of the path can decrease the overall cost while being a net increase of the two parts.”
Kole had been thoughtful after the explanation, and Theral, misinterpreting the silence added, “Two times two is four, but one times three is three.”
And then, Theral had disappeared, frustratingly in the middle of the conversation.
So while armed with only the general theory and no specifics, Kole was studying the spellforms he had access to in his spellbook for ways he could alter Thunderwave so it could more directly navigate the arcane realm. He was making very little progress.
Zale had thrown herself into her own magical study. Her senses had increased greatly in the past few weeks, and she could now detect even Kole’s failed Thunderwave attempts without straining to focus as she needed before. This sensitivity though only applied to the Font of Sound. She couldn’t sense at all when Kole cast the cantrip for the Font of Air, an experiment that cost Kole two-thirds of his available Will for the day.
On top of that, she’d discovered that the area she could affect with her silence aura had increased alongside her awareness of the Font, though the two might not actually be related. Her aura could now extend six inches from her in all directions, not enough to include another person but it suggested that might one day be the case. In experimenting with the extended bubble, she found that sound could still exist inside the aura—something she’d been aware of but had no application for when it only extended an inch around her. Now she could activate the aura, hold her hand close to the mouths of others, and hear what they had to say.
“Runt’s going to be so mad when she learns about this,” Zale said with uncharacteristic malicious glee.
Rakin and Doug continued training in their own ways as well, with less noticeable progress. Doug had—unbeknownst to Kole at the time—unintentionally teleported a few times during the battle against the gnolls, most of them landing him somewhere inconvenient but at least once had saved him from a blow he’d been unable to avoid. That last occurrence had given him some small hope that he was gaining the ability to control his magic. Kole was fairly certain it was a coincidence but kept that opinion to himself.
With the mandate from Pale Oak to make Kole less of a scourge upon Assuine’s creations, Doug would direct Kole to plants he found during their traveling and have him harvest them under the ranger’s careful supervision.
And so, they traveled on, adventurers resting fitfully in the back of the carts by day, and watching the darkness beyond camp by night.
Three weeks into their journey, Kole was walking the perimeter with Zale, holding a torch in place of his lost rune light—a travesty he’d yet to get over—when suddenly the world grew silent.
Zale noticed it first, and she drew her sword, scanning the darkness beyond their light. Kole only realized he couldn’t hear anything when Zale’s sword left her sheath without a sound. Before either of them knew what was happening, roots burst from the ground beneath their feet and held fast to their legs. Zale immediately began to hack silently at the roots with her sword, but the slashing weapon lacked the heft to bite deep. Kole drew his rod, and scanned the darkness around them, catching the shifting blackness of movement beyond his vision. He held his rod in one hand, and torch in the other, running through his options, realizing quickly all he had was his rod. Thunderwave was a spell entirely of sound, while Shield and Magic Missile required verbal components to cast.
Fade? Could we hide? He thought as he pointed at the darkness.
Zale, seeing something Kole couldn’t yet detect stopped swinging her sword readying herself for a charge Kole saw come shortly after. Gnolls, standing tall and wearing leather armor and wielding clubs—a stark contrast to the near-feral beasts from before—advanced into the bubble of silence.
Kole fired a blast of his rod into one of them, where it struck its leather armor with hardly an effect. He tried to gesture to Zale to flee with her vanishing ability, but she closed her eyes, focusing on something instead. A moment later, the air around them seemed to erupt in pain, and then sound returned to the world. Kole couldn’t describe what had hurt or how he’d felt the pain, but only that he’d experienced some sort of full-body agony for a moment that quickly vanished. The gnolls and Zale had experienced it too from the looks, but Kole quickly threw thoughts of the phenomenon aside as he began to cast Thunderwave.
The gnolls’ eyes widened in recognition a moment too late, and as the thunder roared from Kole’s hands, the warriors were thrown back. Zale vanished in a cloud of motes, and reappeared a pace towards the gnolls where she ran at them to capitalize on their tumble. She reached one and pierced its leather armor before it could rise, and then retreated back. Kole fired another blasting rod bolt, striking armor once more on the gnoll’s arm, but clearly harming the creature’s ability to wield its club.
Behind him, Kole could hear the camp reacting to the sound of his spell, and more battles broke out around them.
“We have to get out of the open!” Kole yelled to Zale as he scanned the darkness for more foes as Zale faced off against the two remaining gnolls.
It was because of this, Kole caught the lick of flame a moment before it came streaking toward them.
“Bo!” he said firmly, raising his hand to intercept the spell as he stepped closer to Zale to cover her in his protection.
The mote of flame grew as it flew at them, the size of Kole’s torso by the time it impacted his shield. The Firebolt exploded on impact, clearly outlining the faintly visible dome, the flames wreathing around the sides of the protection and warming the air around the pair.
Zale wasn’t as protected as Kole, and let out a hiss of pain at the heat, but the gnolls who were closing in were far less lucky. The flames singed their fur, and that had to give a precious moment to beat them out, a moment Zale capitalized on to land a surprise blow on the one Kole had injured. It raised its weakened arm in defense, but it gave out under the weight of Zale’s blow, dropping the club and taking the sword to the neck.
Kole had enough Will left to use the blasting rod once or turn invisible, and he chose the latter, hand bringing a potion of clarity to his mouth as soon as he finished drawing upon the Font’s power.
The headache of Will drain surged only briefly before the relief of the potion’s renewal overtook him. Now invisible, Kole ran towards the source of the firebolt in the darkness. Another bolt shot past him, revealing the caster out there to have moved, and saving Kole from taking the blast despite his invisibility. Zale saw the bolt coming, and stepped out of the way, easily dodging it even as she battled the last gnoll.
Strafe, Kole reminded himself, recalling one of Underbrook’s lectures on magical combat.
Kole reoriented and ran to the new location. His ears found this target before his eyes and he homed in on the sound. As he drew closer, his poor human eyes finally caught sight of his foe. A gnoll stood chanting. At first Kole thought it some feathered monster with patches of fur and skin all over, but quickly realized it was covered in trophies. Its gray streaked fur was knotted around the mementos of what Kole presumed to be victims, and it stood with eyes closed, chanting words Kole didn’t understand but knew to be the verbal components of some tribal spell.
The sound of battle filled the night, and Kole had no fears of being heard by the gnoll as he closed in with his rod drawn. He got within a few paces before stopping, aiming his rod at the gnolls head. The shaman’s nose flared, and its head turned to look in Kole’s direction, but it was too late. It had just enough time to yip in surprise as Kole’s use of the blasting rod made him visible once more, the bolt shooting from the device and striking the enemy spell caster in the face.
He took a moment to ensure the gnoll had truly died. He almost hadn’t believed it was that easy and had really expected his blast to miss once the gnoll had smelled him.
Satisfied the shaman was dead, Kole turned back to Zale, and found her standing over three dead gnolls, watching the darkness for signs of new attackers.
“Let’s go!” Kole shouted, and the ran to join the others in battle.