Illusions of Grandeur - Part 2
Part two of a Mage Hunter mini-series
Hello readers!
Today I present to you part two of this thrilling three-part mini-series, involving a group of dangerous illusionists who are siding with the Thieves Guild.
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Index: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
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Days bled into nights since the brutal murder of Magistrate Gimbly, yet the key lead, a professor named by his spirit, remained elusive, lurking somewhere in the shadowed veins of the city. The Mage Hunters, relentless as hounds, offered their most valuable hunting asset: Steppenwulf. The wolf beastman, with his acute nose and his golden amber eyes, prowled the witching hour. To the untrained eye, he seemed aimless, a hulking figure draped in leathers over his ruffled grey furs drifting through blackened alleys. However, his nose told another story as it twitched and sifted the damp air, chasing the faint musk of Ingsbald’s scent he’d memorized from the suspect’s journal.
It struck him like the blade of an assassin: an iron tang, sharp and primal, burrowing into his snout like a mole. His pupils flared wide, black pools swallowing the gold. A flash of violence roared — not memory, but instinct, raw and untamed. He surged forward, claws scraping cobblestone, a storm of fur and muscle tearing through the quiet streets. The scent wove a jagged path, pulling him past shuttered shops and under sagging overhangs, until it sharpened at the base of a bell tower. There, sprawled beneath the tolling shadow, lay a fresh corpse, his limbs skewed, blood pooling like wine spilled out of a casket. By scent alone he knew who it was. “Ngh… of course,” Steppenwulf snarled, voice gravelly with disgust and annoyance. “Guards!”
The convenience of the dead of night spared them the gawking of the citizenry this time. The crown guard and Mage Hunters descended on the scene, swift and undisturbed. Tychon, Horner, and Bella joined the fray, alongside the same investigator from Gimbly’s case and another priest of Yul. As the priest began his death speak ritual, muttering incantations over the body, coaxing Ingsbald’s spirit to rise, Horner caught the slump in Bella’s shoulders and the distant glaze in her eyes. “Hey, you holding alright, shortie?” he teased, nudging her with a grin meant to crack the tension. She barely twitched.
And with a hesitance, she replied, “I’m fine.” She relieved a sigh; her voice failed to hide her somberness. “I learned so much from Ingsbald. Can’t believe they did this to him.” Her words hung heavy as they turned to the priest’s ritual, the air thickening with the hollow hum of the spirit’s voice. But Bella’s mind slipped elsewhere, dragged back to a sunlit classroom years ago.
***
“Bending light is a trivial matter when it comes to the… practice of magic,” Ingsbald had lectured, his voice a lilting dance of amusement. In one of Bella’s earliest lessons, he’d conjured a glowing orb as small as a peach, pulsing with a soft, pearlescent sheen. It hovered above his palm like a captive star. “When you all began, this was one of the first spells you may have learned.” With a swift flick of his wrist, the orb drifted free, landing on Bella’s robes. The light spilled over her like liquid gold, and before her classmates’ gawking eyes, her drab blue cloth shimmered into a cascade of purple and gold, a chromatic tide that rippled with every breath. Gasps rippled throughout the room, Bella’s own eyes alight with wonder. “Illusion magic is simple to learn,” Ingsbald continued, pacing with the ease of a showman, “but devilishly difficult to master.” Another gesture, and the light twisted. Her robes morphed again, hardening into jagged, iridescent scales, as if she now wore a legendary armor forged by the scales of dragons described in tales of ancient heroes. The weight wasn’t real, but the sight was electrifying, a mirage so vivid it begged to be touched. The class buzzed, caught in the spell of his whimsy.
His lessons were always a spectacle. Once, he’d staged a trick to hammer home the importance of discernment. “So, class,” he’d begun, smirking that signature smirk, “what did you think of Chapter 1? Tell me, what was the first object Magus Brelmore conjured with light?”
An elven student shot up her hand. “A wine glass.”
Ingsbald’s shot a sleazy grin. “Oh? Open your book to where you learned that.” The elf flipped pages confidently, only to freeze, her face crumpling. “A black cat? Wait, that can’t be right…”
“Anyone else want to confirm?” he pressed, voice dripping with mischief. Hesitant hands turned pages, and he called out, “Page eleven, if you please.” The room erupted in murmurs as the text shifted before their eyes. The letters melted, reforming into new words, new lies. With a theatrical wave, Ingsbald dispelled the illusion entirely. Covers dissolved, revealing a jumble of mismatched tomes: cookbooks, romance novels, even a child’s fable. “Information is the first casualty of illusion!” he performed, “Empires can vanish, histories rewritten before your very eyez! What is real? What is truth? That’s the mastery you must chase, if you are indeed sincere in aspiring to be a master of illusionz. Now. Look around this room. Your assignment: find what is real and what iz fake!”
Years later, Bella’s fascination deepened as Ingsbald blended illusion with other arcane arts. “Play with their senses,” he’d said, standing beside a senior elementalist clutching a ball of fire. “Turn a battle into a jest.” With a flourish and a guttural chant, the fire morphed, the flames hardening into a crystalline orb of ice, gleaming like a frozen moon. “Fire to ice! Or… izzz it?” He beckoned them closer. Bella reached out, expecting frostbite, only to flinch at the radiating heat masked by the icy sheen. “The eyez are our most precious sense, yet our weakest link,” he’d mused, then whirled his hands again. A chill swept the room, and the orb’s heat vanished, replaced by a biting cold that nipped at her fingertips. “Reality bends to your vill. Not just the eyez, but the earz, the skin, the noze — all can bow, only to a master illusionizzt!”
***
The memory jolted Bella out of her self-induced stupor, her brows knitting as she tuned her ears to the spirit’s voice, hollow and echoing through the priest’s ritual.
Her heart stuttered, as she realized something was amiss:
“Not just the eyez, but the earz, the skin, the noze — all can bow, only to a master illusionizzt!”
Where’s his accent? She’d spent years under Ingsbald’s tutelage, his thick, rolling “z’s” and his almost nasally tone was as familiar as her own heartbeat. She failed to gleam this pertinent detail as the ritual had already droned on for minutes, precious time wasted, only now did the realization crash over her: this was no spirit. It was a fraud!
Her gaze slid across the scene, slow and searching for something, or someone out of place. Feigning a stretch, she pivoted her small frame. Then she saw it: a predator in cloaked curiosity, perched on the bridge above, hooded and still, and a faint glow pulsing from his palm, its hue a perfect resemblance to the “spirit” below. Their eyes locked, and a decision of haste had to be made. “Up there!” she shouted. Her voice shattered the night, and the figure bolted, the illusion unraveling as the spirit winked out like a snuffed candle.
“What the —?!” the priest sputtered, stumbling back as the guards gaped. The Mage Hunters, ever sharp, had weapons drawn before the crown guard could blink. Steppenwulf exploded into motion, a blur of fur and fury, scaling the cobblestone to the bridge’s upper path. The trickster flung up a spell that caused his form to shimmer, melting into the air. However, Steppenwulf’s speed was a force of nature. With a perfect tackle he pinned the illusionist, his spell fizzling into sparks. “You ain’t going nowhere, punk!” he snarled, teeth bared an inch from the man’s throat, spewing a thick breath that nearly made the trickster choke.
The other Mage Hunters caught up to their frenzied friend, though Bella struggled to keep up thanks to her small legs. Tychon strode up, his shadow a looming specter across the stones, cast by the yellow light of the street lamps. “A fake spirit, layered over the priest’s death speak ritual. Impressive,” he spoke coldly before he crouched beside the captive. “Now tell me. Who are you, and why you’d taint Ingsbald’s testimony with your cheap parlor tricks.”
The hooded figure squirmed, a brittle laugh slipping free. “Taint it? No, no! I’m simply enhancing the truth.” His voice quavered beneath its mockery. The discomfort and the itch for freedom lead him to struggle.
Steppenwulf’s claws pressed against the man’s neck, like razors hungering for flesh. “Keep squirming kid and you’ll hate breathing for a while.”
Horner yawned, fishing arcane cuffs from his belt. “Hey it’s late. Can we nab this guy already and call it a night?” Two guards flanked him as they stepped past Bella, their steps heavy with fatigue.
As she lingered at the rear, her pulse quickening. Something gnawed at her, beyond his trickery of that false spirit. The air felt oppressive, thick and charged, like the pause before lightning. The sense of flowing arcana was subtle, but it was familiar to her. Bella’s eyes caught the illusionist’s fingers twitching, subtle, almost imperceptible, yet carried an estranged blur of motion beneath Steppenwulf’s grip. Even the words that came from his mouth had an alien undertone. An incantation? “Look out!” she cried.
A high-pitched whistle pierced the night — sharp, unearthly, a sound that slithered from everywhere and nowhere. Tychon and Steppenwulf moved as one, not even requiring Bella’s cry to sense the assault. Their instincts were honed by years of bloodshed, both by experience and genetics. The wolf beastman roared as he was forced to release the illusionist, claws slashing at empty air as a shimmer darted past, nicking his ear with a razor’s kiss, “Ambush!” Tychon sidestepped, his sword arcing to parry nothing — a clash of steel rang out, proof of unseen blades.
Horner’s sword was half-drawn from his sheath, yet froze as blood sprayed. A jagged gash tore through his ribs, hurling him down with a gurgling cry that echoed off the stones. The guards beside him crumpled, clutching wounds that bloomed from thin air, carved by phantom edges. Bella stumbled back, her heart a war drum. She was distant enough to see it, the light fracturing, bending around shapes that shouldn’t exist. How could he attack from his position? How could he cast such magic while restrained? There was no time to think. Bella rushed over to her wounded partner with a worrying panic. “Horney! Stay with me, Horner!” she yelled, hands diving into her kit to staunch the bleeding in hopes the priest will arrive in time.
Tychon whirled his blade in a defensive blur, parrying strikes he couldn’t see, while Steppenwulf snarled, slashing with his claws at the rippling air that silently mocked him. The illusionist cackled as he hauled himself up from the cold ground. “You hunt shadows,” his teeth flashed in the moonlight, “but shadows strike first.” Light flared around him, his form fading once again into translucence, another attempt to escape.
Tychon, however, would not allow it. “Dispel!” A ripple of snapped the trickster solid again as Tychon’s counter-magic defeated his ploy, and defeated his smirk.
While Bella’s hands shook during her treatment of Horner’s wounds, the answers she sought about this trickster were made clear when Steppenwulf sniffed it out in the brief reprieve from the invisible onslaught. “Careful. He’s not alone.”
Tychon’s claymore gleamed under the stars and lamps, a spell crackling around his free hand. His eyes burned onto the illusionist who stood deceptively alone. The night pulsed with unseen threats; a stage set for a battle yet to unfold.
These are the kinds of dangerous magi for why the Mage Hunters guild was formed.