“As amusing as this is, I’m afraid a terrible mistake has been made here. What’s that? Do I wish to enter a plea of ‘Not Guilty’ at this late date? No. That would be silly. I am quite thoroughly guilty, I assure you. 

Oh, of the charges placed against me? Well, yes, certainly of those too. Yes, with full knowledge and malice aforethought. It would be hard to imagine doing all that without malice now wouldn’t it? And, I mean, they were rather richly deserving of said malice, as I should think everyone would agree.

You wouldn’t? Ah, that’s not what this jury is here to deliberate? Yes, yes, I understand, but again, I feel it is imperative to explain a rather crucial detail which has been overlooked.

What detail is that?  

Why that consequences are what happen to other people.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame’s defense plea while half submerged in molten lead, moments before ‘The High Pass Incident’.

So I opened a rift to take the nice spider-lady home.

That sounds so easy right? Just cast the spell, make a doorway or something and send the good and valorous Miss Lilinelle back to her home dimension, rinse and repeat for the six other dimensions the rest of the ‘Reaving Beasts’ called home.

Even with a fairly good template to follow on how to weave the rifting spell and the innate foolishness to think crafting one was a good idea, I was nowhere near clueless enough to believe it was going to be either easy or a good idea overall.

To start the rift, I reached within myself. Not a great spot to begin tearing open the fabric of reality, but that’s where my magic is and sometimes you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.

Pressing my pincers together (since I was sharing Lilinelle’s giant spider form still), I called magic into their tips and held it there, giving it no form or function to flow into, letting the unnatural power eat away at the world I was standing in. 

If I’d focused on it, I could have reached through the vortex of magic to the origin of my power and pulled through the ever changing nature of that realm to give the unleashed power some shape and purpose. Without that, the hole the magic ate in the world grew and grew.

Letting uncontrolled rifts grow indefinitely ranks right up there on the “Obviously a Bad Idea” scale but, as Lilinelle was not a small spider-person, I couldn’t be anywhere near as careful with it as I wanted to be.

“What are you conjuring-crafting-calling?” Lilinelle asked, as she and rest of the people the Academy had kidnapped and imprisoned started to back away from me.

“A path-door-thread home,” I said.

“There is no safety, no home, no refuge in what you are making,” Lilinelle said.

“Not yet.” Holding a conversation while casting wasn’t making the spell any easier and with Idrina’s example of what could happen when a caster lost focus fresh in my mind, I decided that any further explanations weren’t going to do any of us any good.

Especially since I was at the hard part.

With the rift grown to about ten feet tall, it was time to make it into a proper portal.

My adopted world, the one I’d spent more than decade in, does not appreciate portals. It does not appreciate them with the fury of a blazing sun and the rancor of a room full of razor blades, both of which I felt like it brought to bear on me as I drew in a deep breath to synch with Lilinelle’s essence, reached into the rift, and finally cast a shape onto the wild magic that raged within it.

As soon as the rift had any definition whatsoever, the reality around me seized on that and tried to obliterate it. From a squishy, nebulously defined, vaguely oval-ish shape the rift shatter-froze into a tunnel of spikes and spears and blades of sharpest glass.

No one could move through that without being sliced to shreds.

And of course it was shrinking fast, as the world struggled to close the wound in itself.

Which meant I got the job of keeping it open.

And blunting the blades.

I should note that I am not uniquely armored against the damage a tunnel of rift shards can inflict. They are, in fact, perfectly capable of slicing me to ribbons, and that hurts exactly as much as you might imagine it would. Well, probably more than you can imagine since it was a good deal more than I could until I stuck my hands and body into the tunnel to blunt the crystalline edge the hard way.

Once good thing though? Screaming into a rift means the sound is cast beyond the world and no one on the originating side of the rift can hear a thing. Dignity preserved!

“It’s solid-anchored-transversable,” I said as I dropped what was left of my arms and body back out of rift, while struggling to hold it open with the two arms that I had left. “Go. Now. Please.”

“Not without you-savior-friend,” Lilinelle said.

“Yes. Without me. I need to help the others.” My breathing was not doing well. Which was indicative of all of the rest of me, so at least my body was being consistent.

“Why help? Flee now. Leave others. Too much pain. Save self.” she asked.

“Can’t. Failed before. Won’t fail again.” I said.

Which was enough for her.

With eight scurrying legs she vanished into the portal and passed through back to her own realm.  I had no idea what waited for her there but there were six more portals to open and precious little time to do so.

Releasing the form of the portal magic, I let it return to a column of reality devouring (rather than arm and body devouring) energy. Reality, as I mentioned, was unhappy with that and was doing it’s best to close the proto-rift and, with all due respect to my adopted world, it was really good at that. So much so that I had to delve deeper into my magic than I usually did.

Deep enough that the world started growing darker around me.

Like I was sinking into the Bathypelagic.

Which should have been concerning.

Like ‘flee in terror and never ever cast a spell like that again’ levels of concerning.

But I had six more to cast.

So that wasn’t an option.

The next closest ‘Reaving Beast’ (I really hate that name), was a lovely eight armed gentleman by the name of Ooasoolai.

“Us of you not are,” he said and I had to shift a little further towards him for my transformation to give me a clear understanding of his meaning.

“I am other. I change to you. To talk. To understand. To find your home. To good water and gentle flows I can send you.”

“Pain. You will suffer for this.” He wasn’t questioning whether it would happen but rather why.

“Suffering flows. Sinks away. Your safety remains.”

Nodding wasn’t something he could do, but the undulations which passed through him served more or less the same purpose.

Sometimes the first time you cast spell is the hardest. You make mistakes, you spend a lot more power on than you need to, it backlashes on you to various degrees. The next time though? With the knowledge of the first casting behind you, the next time is so much easier.

The portal spell was not like that.

I want to say I spent less time screaming into the void.

I want to say that mostly because lying makes me sound a lot cooler than I actually am.

Also the truth really isn’t that important.

All that matters is that in the end, I opened seven portals and managed to shift into the mighty form of…a small, easily overlooked pool of slime. I’d managed to attain said mighty form by the time the guards for the Reaving Beast Restraint Area returned, which turned out to be perfect since I was not only unthreatening but also pretty much noticeable in the devastation that remained of the prison room.

I was even still conscious enough (mostly) to hear just how upset they were.

Learned a bunch of new profanities that day.

I couldn’t see at that point of course. The darkness from the spellcasting had pretty much annihilated my sight no matter what form I shifted into but that was okay. I was a puddle of goo and not feeling like I had even the vaguest capability of being anything more ever again.

Doxle was going to be so unhappy. If he was draining my power at all then the poor man was definitely going into starvation mode at that moment. 

But it was worth it.

Thinking back to the people I’d sent through those portals, it was worth it.

“What in all the hells did you do here!” It was one of the guards who said that. He sounded like he was tall. Probably built like a small house too. The Academy seemed to prefer that in their guards.

I suppose I could have fired off a worry that he was talking to me but, first, who would ask that of a small puddle in a corner when the entire prison was in ruins, and, second, I just did not give a single solitary damn about what the guards or anyone else might do to me.

“I came to help get the Beasts under control,” Idrina said.

Which is how I discovered that I apparently did have the ability to worry about something still.

“Help get them under control? Under control? Does this look like we’ve got them under control?” The guard was screaming, which wasn’t a good look for a grown man when faced with what was demonstrably not much of a crisis anymore.

“The smoke is clearing,” Idrina said, her voice a bit more uneven than I could remember hearing it. That might have been residual fatigue from the spell backlash that ended our fight or it might have been shock at the state of the prison room.

The last I’d seen, before darkness had swallowed the last of my vision, the other prisoners vented quite a lot of anger and frustration on the contents of the room while I opened the portals for them. I was pretty sure the room wasn’t going to be usable as a prison again any time soon, and there was an outside possibility that they’d done enough damage that a total collapse was imminent. If so, the room wouldn’t be able to function as a habitable space of any kind within the next five to ten minutes.

No that was not enough to motivate me to get up and leave.

“No kidding the smoke is clearing! Do you notice what else is clearing!?” He was still screaming. It still wasn’t a good look. “Anything seem to be missing from here? Anything large and ugly and probably going to EAT US ALL!”

I was sort hoping that Idrina would stab him. I felt it would do him some good. Or at least let me go back to resting.

“Where did the Beasts go? They didn’t leave through the entry hatch,” Idrina asked, not sounding especially concerned with the fact that they were missing, only perplexed by the mystery of how they’d vanished.

“That’s a good question. That’s a very good question Miss Cadet. Maybe you’d like to give us the answer, seeing as you were the last one in here.” He’d stopped screaming. He didn’t sound any more calm or sane, but I wasn’t worried for Idrina yet. If he tried anything she didn’t like she would take him apart. I had infinite faith that she could take all of the guards in the room in fact.

I had missed something though.

“What is this about a cadet being the last person present during an emergency?” The voice belonged to one of the Academy’s instructors. I didn’t remember his name because I didn’t care about him.

“I took time during our meal period to familiarize myself with the enemies we would encounter, sir,” Idrina said with a crispness which told me she had snapped to rigid attention.

“And who authorized this Cadet?” the instructor asked.

“I undertook this action on my own, sir,” Idrina said.

“And were you the last one to leave this facility?” the instructor asked.

To which the answer was ‘no’ and Idrina obviously knew that. 

“I did not see anyone leave after me, sir,” she said which was technically true and something she should never have done for me.

“In that case the burden of suspicion must land on you,” the instructor said. “Guards place this cadet under arrest.”

In any sane world, the guards would have been choking on their own entrails less than a second after the instructor uttering those words, but I don’t get to live in a sane world. Instead, I got to listen to Idrina quietly submit to being bound in magic suppressing shackles.

Which was about the farthest thing from acceptable that I could imagine so I leapt back into my proper form to give them the smackdown that she, for whatever reason, wasn’t willing to.

Or rather I tried to leap back into my proper form.

My puddle body managed two ripples before I collapsed back into an inert goo.

I wanted to help her.

I wanted to fight.

I just didn’t have it in me.