Today’s goal is to try to explain ICly Grim’s dark servant power, since I’m going to revert back to his original Dark-Dark-Dark defender. I have a few options, so these are “scribbles” that the muse is handing me with this writing prompt.
1) A ghost.
Mike was just bloody tired. His eyes burned from copying the book at Raith’s. He could have gone to a copy machine and copied it there, but there was something more powerful about copying it by hand into his own grimoire. He was a modern magician, but not so modern that he would use a copy machine. He grinned and wondered if he should add a bar code to the book and write spells in that to throw things off.
As he passed through Cap au Diable, he saw a bright light near his house. Narrowing his eyes, he flew down toward it. As he got closer, he saw they were some Thorns, in the middle of the process of sacrificing some poor girl’s life to one of their demons.
Strangely enough, this angered him. He could see her books on the ground, and knew she was a student, and had been caught by the Circle, probably just walking home, minding her own business…
“Leave her be!” Mike yelled, pulling nethermagic into him from the world around him. He pulled the life force out of the first mage in front of him, enough to stun him.
The guide shot an arrow at his face. “Not the face!” Mike said, swatting it away with his hand. The disturbance had the girl fall from the height she’d been, and he checked to make sure she was all right. Then he turned to the guides and ghosts.
“You dare to interrupt us,” said the guide. “Now you shall pay.”
“You have that wrong,” said Mike, and threw a punch at them. They didn’t expect that from a magician – they didn’t expect the strength behind it, taken from nethermagic. Mike had learned physical fighting from watching others, but was still awkward about it. He felt the cold air of the ghost moving behind him, and he whirled, shooting bolts of negative energy at it. The ghost swiped at him, cold claws tearing at his body and soul.
Mike hissed, pulled back, and the guide stabbed him in the kidneys with his dagger. A female guide then came at him next and he turned at her, giving her the glare of death. She shrieked and cowered. Ignoring the smell of his own blood, he turned to the guide and grabbed his neck, pulling his life force into him and healing himself, while reflecting his own wound on the man. More blood flowed, but at least this time it wasn’t his own.
The ghost, meanwhile, raked his back, its own nether energy combining with his, actually making him stronger. Grinning now, he turned on the ghost and yelled the spell of banishment – a little more powerful than normal, but he was angry and knew he’d be victorious. The ghost stopped short, frozen in time, and then it screamed when the spell completed.
“You’re too late, mage!” yelled the green and yellow-clad mage, holding a huge bloody thorn blade. The girl was where she had been, lying in a pool of blood, her throat cut so deeply that he could see her neck bones. “I have begun to summon the demon Valak—“
Mike knocked the man over with a burst of nether energy. “Not as long as I stop you.” More nether energy, with a roar of the beginning of a chant, erupted around him, and a monstrous snake made of shadow rose up from the ground, grabbed the Thornite mage and wrapped around him, squeezing him. Mike kept up the chant and the spell, squeezing his hand, concentrating on the mage, making sure he heard bones crack and the man screaming stop.
He ended the chant with the banishment, and the shadows exploded, flowing back into the darkness from where they came. Mike turned to the girl now, but she was so far gone there was no way he could save her. He felt a cold wind on him, and knew another ghost was nearby. He turned again, but faced the girl.
Her tether was still there, with the body.
“Am I dead?” the girl asked him.
“I’m sorry, I tried.”
The ghost knelt at the body, the wind ruffling the woman’s hair. “We both did.”
“I should set you free,” he said quietly. “But I can’t bring you to your next life.”
The woman looked behind her. “Someone is here to guide me. He says you can set me free.”
Using his own Swiss Army Knife that had doubled so often in the past as his athame, he began the cutting spell. He knelt in the blood, and made the swift, cutting motion. The woman drifted back for a moment, and then Mike saw who was guiding her back.
Wide white wings encircled the woman, and a man stood off to the side, holding her. A man with black hair, and beautiful blue-grey eyes, a sword at his hip and dressed in a white and gold toga. Mike slowly rose from the pool of blood, ignoring how wet his legs were, as he gazed up at the angel holding the woman. “Stefan…”
The angel smiled at Mike. “Grim.” And then he disappeared with the woman.
“Stefan—“ Mike choked for a minute, gazing at the area he had been. He stood there, he didn’t know for how long, until a Luddite patrol came by and caused some trouble. He flew away, to the roof of his building, and sat there for the longest time, contemplating his past, and looking where he was now.
It was dawn when he realized how long he’d been up there. By then the blood had made his legs stiff and the smell was getting to him. He sighed, looked down at the patio where he greeted people he didn’t know instead of inviting them into his home and his workplace. “I am happy for what I have,” he said quietly, echoing Tom Frost’s statement to him. “And I am happy with what I am.”