Sixty was a number I had estimated quickly when I first arrived behind the tables that I crouched against, and sixty was wrong. Sixty was the count if I limited myself to the bodies I could see clearly.
The actual count, when I let my Observation work properly across the space, was closer to a hundred, perhaps more, the corpses overlapping in places, piled against each other in low heaps where the kills had concentrated, the iron-dark hides of the smaller demons lying broken across each other in patterns that suggested the two Adepts had been fighting in this position for far longer than the eruption should have allowed.
Hundreds of dead demons, and the wave still coming was larger than the pile. It was then that the realization hit me, what I had experienced was just the small offshoots of demons reaching my position; this place was the real fight, and I could not see it until I came closer.
I could see demons surging from the primary crack thirty meters east, arriving in numbers that did not seem to ever end, and in the center were two mages.
The space around the two mages was an island in a tide, and this tide was endlessly rising, and yet, these two mages were holding it.
I had been told my whole life that Adepts were powerful, but you know, there was something missing in that narrative, because I had not been told what powerful looked like.
Adept Varis stood with no staff. The wood of it was somewhere behind him, splintered or buried, and he was casting without it, his hands extended into the air at chest height, the fingers held in a configuration I did not recognize, and the air around them was crystallizing.
At first, I thought it was ice, that he was freezing the space around him, but it was not ice but crystallization.
The atmosphere in a sphere a meter across his hands was compressing into a structured lattice of pale blue cold that had geometric precision to it.
As each demon broke through the perimeter and reached him, the lattice he had built met it, and the demon’s forward limbs, jaw, and skull were inside the lattice in the same instant, frozen mid-motion in a block of compressed crystal so cold that the air around it was distorting from the temperature gradient.
And I discovered with both amazement and horror that the demon inside did not die, not until Varis closed his hand.
The block imploded, as the compressed cold collapsed inward at a speed that I felt in my chest before I saw it, a cracking thump that traveled through the ground and into my knees, and what fell from the air after the block ceased to exist was no longer a demon.
It had been reduced to a collection of components that had been a demon, arranged on the ground in the configuration the lattice had compressed them into, every structural element of the creature reduced to fragments smaller than my thumbnail.
He did it again. And again. And again.
The pile of fragmented demons at his feet was nearly five meters high.
It was then that I realized that the number of dead demons was not just in the mere hundreds, but they were closing towards a thousand.
I had no name for what he was doing. Frost was the wrong word. The Academy taught Frost as one of the Elemental Disciplines. I had read about it in the second-year curriculum, and Frost was nothing like this.
Frost was making cold. This was making cold do work. This was using the structural properties of crystallized atmosphere as a tool, with the casual authority of a man who had been doing it for so long that the spell had stopped being something he cast and had become something he did the way another man would clench a fist.
He was the youngest of the six researchers, and he had been quiet during the expedition. I had thought of him as an academic, a measurer, someone who would be most useful for his readings.
I had not understood what he was... what any mage truly was.
Beside him, back to back, Adept Fenara was doing something I had no framework for at all.
She had her staff, and she was using it the way I had never seen a staff used. She was drawing lines in the air with the tip of it, slow, deliberate strokes that left visible after-images traced through the space where her hand had passed.
And where the lines were drawn, the air tore like a piece of fabric.
The very air itself parting along the lines she drew, and through the tears, there was nothing.
It was an absence so complete that my eyes refused to focus on it, the way a person’s eyes refuse to focus on the after-image of a bright light when they try to look directly at it.
The tears seemed not to be opening into a place; they were openings into the absence of place.
The demons that moved through the tears did not come out the other side.
They were simply gone, taken out of the world as completely as if the demon had never been there. The tears sealed themselves a moment after each demon passed through, and Fenara drew another one, and another demon was gone, her expression the focused, absent expression of someone doing arithmetic.
Okay, I revised the number of dead from nearing a thousand to possibly thousands!
I knelt behind the instrument tables with my mouth open and did not register, for several seconds, that I had stopped breathing.
This was magic.
This was what I had been trying to learn since I was fourteen years old.
Why my parents had let me leave home, what the Academy curriculum was building toward across ten patient years of Acolyte study before they would even consider letting me approach it.
Two human beings standing in a tide of demons, one of them turning the air itself into a precision instrument and one of them removing creatures from existence with strokes of a staff.
This was what I would become if I lived.
This was what mages were.
I felt something move in my chest that I had not felt since the first morning of the expedition. It took me longer than it should have to identify it.
Awe.