Alistair didn’t grace that with an answer. Instead, he cast his Dragon’s Breath curse, and the darkness of the night suddenly grew impossibly bright. A rope of flames coiled around Finley’s feet, spiraling up into a vortex. Alistair took a step back from the heat of it, squinting into the light.
A torrent of water doused his curse and flooded the bottom of the quarry. Alistair grimaced at his soaked-through socks and trainers and looked up to see the smug smile of a girl Alistair genuinely did not recognize. Process of elimination told him she must be the Thorburn champion, but he swore she’d looked different at the banquet.
“The Lowe champion,” she murmured, stepping forward. Definitely not the same girl—this one was muscular and intimidating in a tank top and joggers, nothing like the meek-looking champion who’d carved her name into the pillar. “Wounded and alone.”
Alistair fortified his Exoskeleton, a stronger version of the Shark’s Skin he’d obtained from Isobel, and considered the rest of his arsenal. The Thorburn was right. He was hurt, and it was two against one. And the Blair wielded the strongest offensive Relic of the tournament, capable of cutting through any shield, bursting into flame, and inflicting wounds no magick could heal.
The smart choice was to flee back to the safety of his lair.
But his gaze flickered to the Cloak, so near his reach. He thought of Isobel’s frightened face. And vowed to finish what he’d come here to do.
In times of crisis, Alistair defaulted to what he’d always known. There was one cursering in his arsenal that he hadn’t needed Isobel’s help to craft, one that he knew well from his childhood.
At his command the water levels rose, and the quarry began to fill. It inched up his calves, his thighs, his waist, and it transformed from clear as rain to an inky black.
“What is this?” the Blair asked sharply as the Thorburn fired another curse in Alistair’s direction.
It was called the Conjurer’s Nightmare. Whether it was truly a spell or a curse was a matter of opinion, but it allowed the caster to engineer a vision so vivid it fooled all of your senses. The water rising to their throats wasn’t real. Its coldness, its sliminess. Every detail was the fruit of Alistair’s imagination, and they were all very convincing.
As the levels rose high enough, all three champions were forced to tread water. The Thorburn frantically cast countercurses that fizzled out while the Blair strapped his Sword onto his back again.
Something splashed behind them. A tail.
The Conjurer’s Nightmare was obscure and powerful, a combination proven perfect by the panic on the Thorburn’s and Blair’s faces. Even as the Thorburn cast spells to drain the water away, the vision ignored her. After all, the water wasn’t real.
But the curse came with a vicious disadvantage. Because it was cast over a location, not a person, the caster found themselves within the center of the vision, too. And once cast, it was very hard to stop.
A line of sharp fins appeared in the water, drawing closer.
“Shit,” the Blair cursed, swimming in the opposite direction.
Alistair swallowed. You are the only real monster here, he reminded himself. He searched and found the faint glimmer of red light at the lake’s bottom.
The Cloak.
The Blair looked at him wildly. “Are you doing this?” he demanded. Alistair, after all, was helplessly treading water six meters from him.
“Finley, come on!” the Thorburn called, climbing atop the rocks. The water only continued to rise.
“But this is our chance!” He glared at Alistair. “The Lowes will not keep Ilvernath at their mercy.”
Then the monster—the leviathan, one of his mother’s favorites—reared its head from the water. Higher and higher, until it loomed nearly ten meters above them. Its eel-like face was as black as the water around it, and it opened its mouth to reveal hundreds of sharpened teeth. It let out a vicious shriek, and Alistair’s fear coursed inside of him. It was his own spell. His own imagination. But he’d felt that sound rattle in his ribs; he felt the water soaking through his clothes, the duffel bag weighing him down. It felt so real.
The Blair let out a wordless noise of panic, then swam furiously for the quarry’s edge.
The leviathan’s head snapped in the Blair’s direction, hungry and eager to have prey to chase. It bent low and lunged toward him.
Alistair seized the opportunity and dove.
He kept his eyes open as he swam, squinting into the murky light. The leviathan’s enormous body swept past him as he descended lower and lower.