191 — Book 4, Chapter 35 — The Black Vault, Pt 8

Even with his spells, Cale found himself enough on the back foot that he was annoyed. It had been enough to give him a small advantage, certainly—and the look on Valev's face when he started using magic had certainly been worth it—but the surprise was not enough to push Cale to overwhelming victory.

Or even just victory. It did, however, leave them at a frustrating stalemate. Valev no longer seemed certain he would be able to beat Cale, but that also meant he was no longer holding back. It seemed that even in the Nothing, he had been able to pick up a few tricks.

Cale wasn't really sure how that worked, but he wasn't surprised that Valev had figured it out.

The biggest problem he faced now was that he couldn't come up with anything new. Any spell he used was a spell Valev immediately developed some sort of counter against; not even the likes of [Fangs of the Festering Fields] had been enough to get through the paint mage's defenses, though he supposed he shouldn't have expected Valev to let him get close enough to bite him in the first place.

The spell was still powerful enough that he managed to rot away one of Valev's favorite spells before it could affect him, so it wasn't like casting it had been a waste. In the depths of the Black Vault he didn't need to worry about accidentally shattering Utelia, and Valev was powerful enough on his own to stop it from breaking the Vault.

He was pissed about having to do that, though. And probably about the fact that Cale had bitten into one of his favorite paintings like some sort of feral goblin.

"That was—" Valev cut himself off with a snarl of fury. "Do you know how long that spell took to prepare?"

"Seventeen years and eight months by the standards of that realm, if I remember correctly," Cale said, listing the first numbers that came to mind. He did not, in fact, have any idea how long it had taken.

Valev faltered for a moment, surprised. It took him a moment to gather himself. "And... and you would destroy my masterpiece, knowing that?!"

...So Valev had no idea how long he had taken on it either. Cale snorted; he supposed it had been a very long time since he'd last painted it, so it was only to be expected.

"Yes," he said plainly. "It's a beautiful painting, Valev, but I'm not going to stand there and let it kill me."

"You bit it!" Valev said, and now there was a distinct note of a whine in his voice. "You could have just dispelled it!"

"Then you'd just cast the spell again," Cale said patiently.

[Manifest Canvas] was a powerful spell. It took any painting its caster had worked on and transformed it into a magical construct. The greater the painting, the greater the cost of the spell, and the greater the resulting magic. Cale hadn't lied about the beauty of the work: the feathers alone must have each taken Valev hours to paint and detail, and the resulting creation...

If only Valev had been able to turn that talent toward anything besides his obsession with attaining true power and immortality. Perhaps if they had never met, Valev-yetah would have been hailed as a savior and a genius. Instead, he had fallen into an obsessive need to build a legacy that could match Cale's in some twisted need to become his equal.

It was one of Cale's many regrets. He had saved Valev, once upon a time, but in doing so he had broken something within the mage. Had shown him a glimpse, perhaps, of something unattainable.

He had since learned that there were those for whom even that small glimpse of what he was proved too much. Cale wondered, sometimes, if the gods of the Outer Planes felt the same at times. There were tales of them driving their supplicants to madness, but perhaps it was simply a mirrored version of the same obsession.

Cale could not help what he was. There were those that saw it and envied it, and that envy drove them to madness. Valev's own downfall had been slow. It had started as no more than a simple curiosity, but it had grown and grown... If only he had seen the signs sooner.

He remembered the painting Valev had sent against him, even if he didn't remember how long it had taken. It had been called the Infinite Phoenix, and every one of its feathers represented a different spell, a different aspect of magic. Valev imagined a version of the Source that was animated with life, one that could act as guardian over the Realms and exercise its judgement on those who would abuse magic for their own ends.

It was a pity, truly, that Valev had fallen so far.

Cale needed to end this. In a strange way, it had been nice to see an old friend again, though things had ended so terribly between them. There was still some semblance of their old banter in the way they spoke and fought with one another, and despite it all, it remained a reminder of a time when Cale had not been so heavily weighed down by his mistakes and by the tragedies of the Great Realms.

But it couldn't last. He knew that, and so did Valev, though neither of them said the words. They had once been close enough that they could each see the intent in the other's eyes.

Only one of them would walk away from this.

Cale let himself focus entirely on the fight, on ending the threat that Valev-yetah posed. Opposite him, he could sense that Valev was doing the same. The space between them filled with a flurry of magic, both ancient and new—

—and Cale found himself being pushed back.

There was no single spell that pushed things over the edge. Instead, it was a matter of limitations. Valev-yetah had more spells than Cale did, and he had greater experience when it came to casting those spells. Cale was a powerful mage in his own right, and he had once been able to fight Valev on equal standing without any spells at all, but things were different now.

At the time, he'd been able to fight without holding back. He had friends and Monoliths that could minimize the collateral damage he would do when unleashing his magic, and he had tools made for him by those friends, whose genius with magic nearly rivalled Valev's own. What they could not accomplish alone they were able to accomplish together, and through that combined effort, they had designed for him a tool that could pierce Valev's invented invulnerability, one that disrupted his connection with the Outer Plane bound within him.

Stolen story; please report.

None of Cale's spells now could target that connection. It left him forced to search for other weaknesses in Valev's magic, cycling through all the spells he's learned to find something that could pierce that armor.

Blasts of pure prismatic power were no use. Valev knew Cale well, and he had long ago adjusted the planar realm within him to reject that power.

Decay magic did nothing. Valev's entire goal had been to give himself true, eternal life, to make himself a fixture unto the Great Realms much as the Monoliths and the Laws they embodied did. In his vicinity he was a fact of reality, and no amount of decay or entropy could wear away at him. In that, Cale supposed, he had succeeded at his goal.

Fire and draconic magic—it had surprised Valev when Cale had first used those spells, but fire spells were standard for all mages, and he had defended himself easily. Draconic magic was not, but Valev had once fought off an army of dragons sent to eliminate him, and he knew well how to counteract their magic.

Cale's spells worked to keep Valev busy, at least, and he did have a plan. The only problem was that they both knew what that plan was. It was the only option Cale had: no matter how invulnerable the Outer Lord was, he had to defend himself against Cale's magic. If he allowed Cale to overwhelm him, even for a moment, Cale would take advantage of that gap to push him back into the Nothing.

That rip in space was still there, after all, and his magic did not protect him from the void of nonexistence.

But because Valev knew exactly what he was trying to do, he knew to be cautious of every spell Cale cast. They knew one another too well for him to do anything else. Just as Cale could see through every trick Valev pulled, so too could Valev see through his own attempts to hide and layer his spells, and the exchange of magic only grew more fierce as a result.

Valev's spells, for instance, grew increasingly bizarre, forcing Cale to spend more of his attention and energy defending himself. They began including aspects Cale was certain Valev had never wielded before, esoteric ones he wasn't even sure had existed during Valev's time alive. It was just another example of Valev's genius, really; even now, he was somehow tapping into the leylines, learning about the new, evolved version of the Source and incorporating it into his magic.

And so that meant that Cale found himself pushed back, forced to contend with yet another layer of deception woven into each spell, to find counters to magic he had not been forced to deal with in centuries.

It did not, however, mean that Cale was helpless.

An array of barriers bloomed before him, lighting the void of the Black Vault in striations of prismatic light. He had once been known as the Barrier-King for a reason, after all; without the ability to cast true spells, he'd been forced to learn how to maximize the potential of the one form of magic he could utilize.

And barriers were a flexible magic. More flexible even than the spells he now had in his repertoire, though he continued to use those, too, where their specific abilities were necessary. If not for that, he might not have been able to handle the sheer variety of magic thrown at him.

A hundred spells shattered against a hundred barriers, each one tuned to block whatever specific quirk of magic Valev tried to exploit. His old friend had claimed he had learned from Cale's methods and developed a means to counter them, but the same was true in reverse; Cale knew the weaknesses of his barriers, and over the centuries had developed and refined them until he could create filters and rules that could counter these spells meant to target barrier mages in particular.

In this regard, Cale was far better a mage than he had been when last they fought. If these spells had been used against him then, he would no doubt have suffered yet another death at Valev's hands, but now he had an eye for them. A great many spells he recognized on sight or by feel, though some of them were attached to some truly unpleasant memories.

A basic [Fireball Swarm] flew toward him. Once more Valev had hidden a second array of spells within the first. Cale wove a great barrier that filtered out the fire, leaving only the spells hiding underneath; as he did, he flicked out a few enhancement spells to boost his own speed and reaction time, dodging the few physical spells meant to pierce his barriers.

Cale followed up with [The Scale of All Things], the spell he had used against Astiviya; this he leveraged against Valev simply to force him to counter. It would not kill him, but Valev could not afford to ignore a spell that would otherwise make him small and helpless. His ego simply wouldn't allow it.

While Valev was distracted by that, Cale followed up with [Spellfist Strike] and [Colossus Impact], both spells he'd evolved the last time he trained with Syphus—both aimed at pushing Valev back.

That was all he had the time for before the bulk of Valev's spells were upon him. First came the [Barrier Blister], a nasty spell he had encountered a dozen lives ago that infected the barriers of any given mage and spread from one to the next, acting as a plague that lived within the barrier magic itself. Then came [Dead Man's Tale], a spell that wrapped its target in a narrative and forced them to follow its path right to their deaths. Third was [Painted Reality], which Cale suspected was Valev's true target: the spell could capture the essence of its target, transforming them into a literal magical painting.

[Barrier Blister] was easy enough to counter. He remembered how he had beaten it the first time: by transforming his barriers such that they became poison to the foreign magic, killing the plague before it could truly begin. [Dead Man's Tale] was a little more complicated, because it couldn't truly be blocked by something as simple as a barrier; last time he'd been forced to face it, it had been nullified by the Thread of Fate, but within Valev's domain Cale had no such advantage to draw on.

That was fine, though. He had methods to circumvent magic like this. The trick was to introduce a twist at just the right time, a tempting turn of events that the spell could not help but want to follow. By its very nature it was magic that wanted to tell a story, and through that weakness it could be directed. Cale let himself follow its steps until just the right moment, where he turned its power on [Painted Reality] instead, snuffing out the last threat.

By then, Valev had managed to overcome his own spells and had started sending out distracting blasts of brilliant flame, each one designed to play into some sort of ritual magic that was designed to capture and suppress Cale. Cale recognized the pattern as soon as it began and sought immediately to disrupt it—[Auric Dominion] flicked on, distasteful as he found that spell, and with it he tweaked and adjusted the ritual until it was targeting Valev instead.

Their back and forth kept going, both mages filled with razor-sharp focus. Any observers they might have had would have struggled to discern exactly what was happening or how many layers of spellcasting they reached. Every so often Cale would reach for something of absurd power, and Valev would invent some clever twist of magic to countermand it. Then the reverse would happen, with Valev somehow harnessing leylines and the fabric of the Nothing to bind Cale, and Cale would find a loophole in that magic just in the nick of time.

Every advantage was met with an equal disadvantage, and every step forward was followed soon by another step back. They were at a stalemate.

Or they were, at least, until the words flickered across Cale's vision.

Reconnecting...

[Sourcefire] has been integrated into the Gift. Also, your apprentices have arrived and will likely soon require your assistance. Valev-yetah is not a threat that can be left standing.

That said: Welcome back, Cale Cadwell Cobbs.