Draining the Node

The shield came down as soon as Morgan’s spear pierced it, and then the room was bristling with people, Orphan mages armed with all manner of arcane, banal and bizarre foci. One boy was swinging a pair of fuzzy dice as if they were hunting bolas.

Lyle’s magic was on the ball. “Take the node!” He lunged at the nest of voodoo dolls and scattered them with a swift kick. Then he had to hop aside as someone let loose a blast of mage fire.

“Node it is,” Cyrus said, and Selene was momentarily distracted by the graceful arc of his arms as he slid into a kung fu form - pheonix, from the looks of it.

One of the Orphans laughed. “What are you going to do, dance us to death?” And he was knocked backward by sheer percussive force of Cyrus’s elemental projection.

Curses littered the air. “He’s Akashic! Take him down!”

Morgan bared her teeth in a fierce grin. “You’ll have to get through me first,” she said. With a twining of her hands, one over another, running up her forearms, she was armed with a pair of scimitars. The battle cry she loosed filled the cathedral to the ceiling, and then the screaming began.

Selene fanned her cards with a quick flick of her wrist, and then she braced herself behind Lyle while he worked on dismantling the node. He had Tass to transfer the node’s contents, but a transfer for a node this big took time, and they were starting to run high on paradox. The Orphans were half-trained and their lack of shielding on the place ran up the vulgarity cost of casting exponentially, and Selene could feel the warp and weft of the Tapestry begin to protest.

There was one thing she could do, one last thing before the universe slapped her in the face for her audacity. She knelt and dealt a wheel of life, slapped an incomplete Celtic Cross down in the middle, and then everything -- stopped.

“The hell?” Cyrus asked.

“I froze their time,” Selene said. “Now get over here and help Lyle.”

Morgan, whose forearms dripped with blood, looked surprised. “You can do that?”

“I’m gonna get paradoxed into next week, but yeah. So hurry!”

“Hurrying, hurrying,” Cyrus said.

(380 words)