Work Text:
Chrestomanci, chrestomanci, chrestomanci.
For once the familiar tug under his breastbone doesn’t come at an inconvenient moment. Or at least it isn’t as inconvenient as it could be: he isn’t sleeping, or worse, in the shower.
No, Fili is doing his groceries. Okay, so literally disappearing from right in front of the tills, just as he’s about to pay, isn’t ideal, but at least nobody is going to get hurt, or see anything they’re not supposed to see. The only victim this time is a jar of olives, which he has just picked up to scan through, shattering inconsequentially on the tiled floor where he used to be, and what is it with him and various containers shattering in his wake?!
But the pull of the magic is savage this time round. An urgent and harsh yank that won’t take no for an answer. Not that Fili ever resists the call of his power when it comes, but this feels—
He lands on his feet, just, though the world lurches sickeningly sideways just as Fili thinks instinctively to defend, his magic blocking something that hits it hard, the force of the blow knocking Fili squarely onto his arse.
The back of his head hits a knee. Fili looks upside down—
“Kili?!”
The boy—a man, roughly his own age now, (and when did that happen?!), perhaps a little bit younger—doesn’t answer, an expression of fierce concentration on his face, blood dribbling from his nose, as something booms loudly just above Fili, making the fine hair at the back of his neck stand on ends.
Fili blinks and reaches out a hand on instinct to cast another protective spell. Magic obeys him like it always does, and this time he takes the full force of whatever it is that has it in for them squarely on the chin, metaphorically speaking.
Around the neat little circle of what Fili demarcates as him and his the dust rises with the sheer power of the blow and falls back down in swirling patterns.
Fili finally focusses on their adversary. And then he wishes he didn’t.
“Shit –“ he swears softly under his breath.
“A blood golem,” Kili confirms through gritted teeth, a feeble shield of his own magic shimmering faintly just below Fili’s. Only now does Fili notice that cowering behind Kili’s back there are more people: four kids with curiously curly hair and no shoes for some reason, students by the looks of them, all huddling together like a terrified gaggle of geese.
Fili gets to his feet and almost offhandedly casts a simple twirling spell to make the creature miss its next blow. The ground a little to their right cracks and splits wide open.
Fili’s blue eyes narrow as he calls his own power forth, pulling deep this time. “Stay back,” he whispers, feeling something like electricity course through his veins.
“M’ sorry, I didn’t want to summon you, but I was rapidly running out of options–“ Kili cries after him, as Fili does the unthinkable and charges right at the beast, both his wrists glowing softly with the swirling tendrils of the binding spells.
“Well, you should have wanted to!” He jumps, manages to plant one foot on the creature’s knee, for a moment flies above it—“this should have been ended long ago!”—and slams both spells, hard, right into the creature’s shoulders, then jumps neatly off and away from its wildly flailing fists. He lands awkwardly, but manages to roll into a low crouch, facing more or less in the right direction.
The thing about golems, any golems, is that if they get going… if they build up any kind of momentum… There is no stopping them.
Which means that Fili needs to take it out hard and fast. He needs to—
He watches in disbelief as the pasty, bulging arms tense and simply shatter the glowing straps of his perfectly cast binding spells.
It’s rare that Fili has to actually fight. Rarer still that he needs to dig deep to defeat his opponents. Perhaps if there were many of them, and only one of him, that could be a problem, for the sheer speed of his reactions could fail him, but even then, it’s unlikely he’d be going in alone and without support. He knows the extent of his magic, had to explore it to the very edges as a part of his training, but it’s one thing to reach for its crackling insanity and quite another to forge it into a lightning in his hands and start stabbing with it –
Something shatters with a loud crack on the other side of the golem —Kili’s protective spell again, or what’s left of it— he and the kids were left considerably closer to it after all, and for a second Fili has failed to pay attention—
Fili draws.
On silent feet he runs towards the monster, even as Kili rolls – just, barely, too close - out of harms’ way, covering his head with his arms and curling up into a ball, as rocks that until a moment ago were the ground he was standing on, rain all around him. Behind him the students - Kili’s students?! – scream and very sensibly scatter into the four corners of the world, in a panicked scramble to get away. The golem can’t chase them all, and it won’t even try, not when it has a prone figure of Kili lying right at its feet.
“Pick a fight with someone your own size,” Fili growls.
He’s going to disintegrate the fucker. He will simply ram him through with enough raw magic, and let it rip until the thing crumbles into dust.
Chrestomanci is the most powerful Enchanter in all the realms.
At the same time, something in his very soul screams warnings at him in a way that can’t be ignored, and if he were a lesser man, he would have stumbled. As it is –
He pulls his punch. Slightly.
Because what else might disintegrate, if he doesn’t?
Hands covering a head full of chocolate-coloured hair.
He jumps, rather like a harpy, once more, fingers like claws going for the eyes, feels his magic connect with the clammy skin, feels the boom of the discharge, which reverberates through his entire body, down to his very bones -
He doesn’t quite manage a neat little hop and a roll like last time, instead feels himself effortlessly flung off like a rag doll, with the monstrous force of those bulging arms.
Fili flies.
Kili cries out, suddenly there, taking the full force of Fili’s back to his own chest, and then both of them sail back a little bit further, before landing in a heap.
There’s an arm wrapped around his chest in a death grip, made all the more obvious as Fili’s lungs expand against it to draw some much-needed air.
“Get out of here,” Fili rasps, briefly sending himself into a coughing fit, “give me the field,” he asks quietly, as gently as he can. It’s a curious thing that happens next, which Fili hasn’t sanctioned consciously: his fingers slot in between Kili’s, and squeeze briefly, reassuringly, before he lets go and gets back up to his feet, running towards the danger once more.
The golem is now pissed. And charged – Fili observes - with his own power, if the multitude of cracks in its skin glowing brightly from within are anything to go by. Which means that now Fili will have to be clever, instead of relying on brute strength.
He finds himself going from a determined run straight into a low slide, narrowly avoiding the discharge of something that feels horribly familiar, but at the same time malicious and twisted; something that would have surely decapitated him, if it landed.
The creature isn’t capable of actually casting magic; it’s merely oozing it with every hateful lunge and blow. And it gets quicker too.
Bake the bastard, Fili thinks viciously, dry it out into dust! He manages a glancing blow to one of the golem’s knees, flipping his spell at the last possible moment into a freezing spell, because fire makes him think of fired clay, and surely that would be a thousand times worse?
It stumbles, so Fili tries the ageing spell next, and these are always tricky, drawn out of him like a splinter that needs to come out, tiring him out.
But the stone doesn’t degrade, or at least not fast enough to actually weaken in the space of several hundred years that Fili slams it with. And magic that the golem is now imbued with degrades… never.
He needs to immobilise the creature, hold it still for long enough to make it lose its momentum. If only he could turn it back into stone! But if he can’t, then perhaps he can at least use stone to fight it, so he just needs to –
And then Kili is there, right behind the golem, seemingly appearing out of the thin air. He plants both his hands on the monster’s back, an expression of fierce concentration on his face –
”I’m an Ófrisi. Stone remembers better than wood –“ Fili recalls.
“Kili!” It’s like watching a particularly slow fly being swatted away. Kili tumbles head over heels backwards, roughly in the direction where Fili first found him –
- Only to crash right into Fili’s stomach, mowing them both down.
That was ‘blinking’! Fili’s mind screams at him, even as he notices that Kili didn’t quite manage to teleport out of harm’s way quickly enough. There’s a long, angry scrape along the outside of his left forearm, with the elbow having taken the worst of the damage and bleeding profusely.
“It’s enchanted!” Kili grinds out through gritted teeth once more, cradling his arm and shaking his head like a confused dog.
“What did I just say?!” Fili explodes, one hand flying out automatically to cast his shield, his barely contained rage making it easy to absorb another direct hit. “And how are you doing that?!”
“- With the blood of all those who were sacrificed to create it!" Kili chooses to answer one question and completely ignore the other. "Remember Dudek and Harmin? I’ve been tracking them since –“
This time Kili opts for a short little hop, a couple of meters to the right, well out of harm’s way, as Fili collapses his protective spell, catches one monstrous fist in his own, wrapped in magic like a baseball mitt, and starts crumbling golem’s fingers into dust one by one.
“- Anyway, the point is – it’s been enchanted with the lives of all those whose blood it absorbed! So now it has over twenty! Lives. How many are you down to?”
Fili feels the cold settle right under his breastbone, cooling his earlier fury considerably.
For some reason his eyes lock in on the ring and little finger of Kili’s left hand, dripping blood in slow rivulets into the dirt where his left arm hangs limply. A flicker of doubt appears in his mind, a traitorous little voice that whispers about how he has failed in his mission to protect. At least the other four kids are nowhere to be seen any more –
That momentary distraction costs him dearly. The kick is aimed at his ribs, and without the protection of his magic, Fili is nothing more than an ordinary human being.
He grunts as he feels the bones snap: one, perhaps two, wonders if some unconditional magical response does kick in after all, or else his internal organs will have been crushed into a mush –
“Chresto -!” Kili blinks, but overshoots this time, and Fili rolls and then scrapes along the unforgiving pavement, until he hits something solid.
Kili is there in the next moment, and it’s fascinating to see, really: there’s a clap of vacuum, a faint whisp of darkness and then Kili is right by his side. Fili has read about this sort of thing, of course he has, but blinking is rare, even super rare, with only a handful of cases recorded in all of history.
It would be easy to assume that teleportation is a form of power like any other, available to any magical users with a natural inclination for it, or prepared to put in the effort required to master it. But it simply isn’t true; to the best of Fili’s knowledge, he’s currently the only person in all the realms, capable of actually physically travelling between places instantaneously, and even then, he can’t control it.
“Fili,” Kili whispers, careful hands touching, searching for injuries, trying to check over all of him at once –
The next heartbeat they are elsewhere. Well, not elsewhere. Not far, anyway. But far enough for now.
Fili wonders dimly if he’s ever seen case of someone blinking with a companion, but then Kili’s fingers brush up against his broken ribs, and for a moment Fili isn’t capable of any further conscious thought.
“Sorry. There?” Soothing cold seeps into Fili’s skin, bringing with it a momentary sense of relief, but also an unusually intimate touch.
“Give me. The field.” Fili repeats once more with an effort, blue eyes finding brown, pinning them in place with all the weight of the Chrestomanci authority that Fili is capable of summoning in that moment. “I can’t really fight it, risking getting you caught up in the cross-fire.”
Kili swallows.
And then he grabs Fili’s hand -
- Pulls at one of the fingers, never breaking the eye contact.
Fili gasps, when the dislocated digit he hasn’t even noticed yet is popped back into place.
“Just… be careful,” Kili murmurs, and then he simply isn’t there.
Fili looks down at his left hand, where the joint of his ring finger is already swelling up. He touches his side, gingerly, muttering the formula for a quick numbing spell, because Kili’s magic is fast disappearing, and he doesn’t have the time to look into his injurues properly now.
He’s always ‘careful’. Isn’t he?
He needs to focus, he needs to think.
Kili’s own left ring and little fingers dripping blood into the dirt flash in front of Fili’s eyes.
Fili throws out a hand almost nonchalantly, not even looking in the direction of the enraged monster coming at him fast. There’s a dull thud as the clay-and-blood golem meets nearly a meter of solid bedrock which Fili has yanked from right underneath its feet and placed in its path. The problem with having that much momentum is that you can't very easily... stop.
So now it has over twenty! Lives.
Perhaps stone can fight stone.
It takes speed, and precision, and a fair amount of careful manoeuvring to dodge the wild lunges aimed at him whenever he steps out into the open, as he constructs his cage, and for the moment Fili is choosing to ignore how that first wall he’s erected is already showing some fine cracks.
Contain it, he thinks instead, force it to stop. Don’t let it gain any more momentum.
The magic resists him now, feels drawn out from his very core, but then using it to shift objects has never been Fili’s forte, especially not huge and heavy stuff like the giant blocks of rock he’s basically hewing from under the golem and slamming into place all around it one by one.
Or perhaps he’s just getting tired.
For a moment a wet cough rakes his form, making him wince, as it makes his ribs move, and he thinks that perhaps there’s something not quite right with his lungs –
It almost costs him everything, again, when a sizeable rock hits him in the jaw with staggering force, making him stumble back a couple of paces, before sinking heavily down to his knees. Still, it’s only a glancing blow – a moment earlier, when his head was a fraction lower, and it would have probably bashed his skulls in.
Bastard’s learning new tricks, Fili realises, spitting blood and wiping distractedly at the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand.
For a moment he stares at the bloody smear left there, beginnings of an idea forming in his mind –
Fine! Fili thinks vengeful and slightly unhinged. The only thing stronger than the blood magic is blood magic performed using Chrestomanci blood. So, if that’s what it’s going to take: a blood magic spell performed with his own blood… then so be it.
And isn’t that what they were after all along? Ever since Fili was still only in training…
“Tom, how much blood do we need?”
“We could just take it all.”
“How many are you down to?”
Seven. Fili is down to seven lives. And these fuckers, who aren’t even brave enough to be here to witness the carnage wrecked by their own sick creation, don’t deserve any single one of them.
He sighs, already imaging just how much paperwork this is going to take. He finds the exact spot where the blood he spit out a moment ago has landed and draws his first sigil around it, with the tip of his boot. The dark spell Fili has chosen requires five sigils to work, each of them smeared with Chrestomanci blood, and although it’s one of the simpler ones he can think of, he’s going to have to be quick about it.
There are situations when a Chrestomanci is allowed to operate outside the law, fight fire with fire, so to speak. It is commonly referred to as the Rule of Conscience, and it applies where multiple human lives are at stake, or the very stability of an entire realm is threatened. Fili has never had to resort to it, but he knows that the last Chrestomanci did, on at least three separate occasions. And the truth of it is: if he can’t stop the creature, then nobody else will. Ever. It will plough through this world like a hot knife through butter.
”But there are always consequences”, his old mentor used to say, ”and honestly, if you’re only options are: illegal magic, death of many, or a realm lost, then you don’t have any options left anyway.”
He throws a quick glance at the golem, takes in how the entire structure of the monoliths he’s used to contain it is positively vibrating with a twisted version of his own magic, how a multitude of little stones tumble down to the ground from the top, how several of Fili’s boulders are sporting sizeable new cracks…
He’s out of time. He fires his two next sigils directly into the walls of the surrounding buildings, roughly were he judges he needs them to be. One more can be made out of a garden hose, pinned into shape with Fili’s magic. He briefly wonders how to actually draw his own blood – it’s not like he’s got any weapons on him; a Chrestomanci is the weapon. The last sigil -
It’s a good thing that Fili is ambidextrous, but even then, trying to split his attention between shielding himself with his left hand and burning the last sigil into the grass of somebody’s front garden with his right, means that he does neither one of those two things particularly well.
And in any case, he vastly underestimates how much magic compounds, when whipped up by the frenzy of relentless, building momentum, and without a conscious thought to guide or shape it. Even if all of his focus and power were thrown into protecting himself in that moment, he still isn’t sure that it would have been enough.
The blast is instantaneous – more a flash and the sheer kinetic energy, than a release of magic, and Fili has just a split second to think: there goes life number three, before he hits something with so much force that his entire world very nearly curls up around its edges for him.
There’s a ringing in his ears. He’s upright, and that is strange, until he realises just why he’s upright.
He can’t quite stop the agonised cry, as he finds himself impaled on the savagely twisted bars of some old railing – black, Victorian, little round ball on the end – he observes dimly, and one of those has gone into his side, the one already injured, while another scraped a deep gash in his skin but didn’t quite penetrate.
And four, Fili finishes the thought, even though this doesn’t feel like dying, not yet anyway, but by then the golem is upon him, frighteningly fast, now that it is completely unbound and Fili’s magic –
Fili’s magic just won’t come.
And all the rest of them, he thinks, because if he can’t even defend himself –
The golem may be fast, but Kili is faster. Brown eyes, arms wrapped around him in something like a hug, a little zap of brief non-existence and Fili’s side… well, Fili’s side feels like something has been ripped out of it, and none-too-gently.
“Uhhhngh…” he topples over just as soon as he exists once more, falling back and making Kili overbalance and tumble down after him, blood splattering all over a bright green garden hose.
Sigil number 4. Interesting. Coincidence, or -?
The thought dis-integrates, as he feels some crude healing magic just rammed into him by a warm hand, unceremoniously pressed to his bloodied side, and you just don’t do magic to other people like this!
“Kili! Kili, stop!” he grunts out, as his own magic returns as if it had never left him now that the metal has been removed from his body, and naturally takes over, licking at his injuries like a cat might lick at its own fur. “I thought I told you –“
“I was watching from the rooftops. It didn’t even see me. What do you need? I saw you making signs –“
It’s a curious thing that Fili hasn’t invited or authorised: his magic settles down alongside Kili’s own instead of fighting it, and now it’s like two sets of little kitten licks numbing and healing him in turns, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. Even when professional healers tend to him, it’s never like that.
“Sigils,” Fili corrects gently, before his blue eyes fly wide open and he rams all he can pull in that moment into reaching out a hand and spreading out his protective spell over both of them. The force of the golem’s blow makes his teeth ring, and he’s vaguely aware that Kili, who has been facing away from the danger, instinctively ducks and tries to plaster himself flat on top of him.
“Blood. They need blood, Kili. M –“
Another hit rains down on them and Fili rises his other hand as well, effectively bracketing Kili on top of himself, trying to reinforce his shield and keep it steady, because his elbows are trembling now, while his magic pulls uncomfortably and stretches thin.
Kili’s eyes fly to his side, before his right palm comes into Fili’s view, completely covered in blood from where Kili has been trying to stop Fili’s bleeding and mend him like one might try mending a pair of socks.
For a moment Kili’s eyes lock on Fili’s, as if to say are you sure about this? -
“They just need… a few drops each…”
Yes, Fili is aware that he’s asking a civilian to perform blood magic and that is an awful thing to ask of someone, but frankly, they’re both perhaps two heartbeats away from a gruesome death, and yes, he truly is out of options now.
“Scamper!” he grunts out with enormous effort, and Kili’s weight disappears from his chest at the exact same moment as his elbows give way and his defences drop down to barely a few inches above his own chest.
It’s going to be three, Fili thinks once more, watching his death hurtle towards him, almost certain that he won’t be able to take one more.
But the golem may be fast, but Kili still is faster.
A quiet clap, like a snap of fingers, and Kili’s right next to the wall on Fili’s right with one of the burned-out sigils, and he doesn’t even bother looking at it, his eyes trained on Fili instead, as he taps it with his bloodied right palm, leaving an equally bloody handprint.
Another clap, and he taps the one on the left in the same way –
Another clap -
Fili cries out and yanks on the very last reserves of what he has left to give, fighting to the last, because he’s damned if he’s going to gentle into that good night.
A knee comes down this time, and he just knows that he’s going to be crushed into the very ground, sigil and all.
Chrestomanci, chrestomanci, chrestomanci.
It's that close that he feels simultaneously the familiar pull under his breastbone and the unbearable weight settling down on top of it.
“S’not how it works! It’s not for yanking me around!” Fili hisses out, one hand flying automatically to his blood-soaked shirt – good, he thinks, feeling the warm rivulets run wetly between his own fingers and drip to the ground, that will be the last sigil activated then -
“Fili!” strong arms catch him before Fili can keel over once more, and it’s in that moment that Fili feels it.
The rush, the deafening roar of power, which he isn’t sure he could master and bend to his will even at the absolute height of his abilities, never mind now. He knows what he’s summoning, what the exact sigils he’s used are for. Fili knows all the magic, even that which is forbidden. As a Chrestomanci, it would be a suicide to not know it. It doesn’t come to him easy, and it does feel wrong, but if it must be this, then at least it should be effective.
He startles at the loud bang, a crash, and a cry that sound almost simultaneously all around him, and realises that the golem is upon them once more, that they’re out of time again, and that Kili must have seen it coming and raised his own shield to protect them both, in any way he could.
But by now the golem is no longer the main thing that draws Fili’s attention.
It materialises into existence slowly, accompanied by some revolting wet and crunching sounds, as it unfurls to its full height, crimson feathers glistening sickeningly in the setting sun.
A blood eagle.
Objectively, it’s magnificent, but also terrifying, with its giant talons, and the horrifying strength of its wings, as it beats them furiously, to immediately lift itself out into the skies.
It’s the downdraft that saves their lives one more time. It practically flattens them against the building’s wall, while the golem, however powerful, has nothing to press against. It stumbles sideways, as it tries to land one final blow, only managing to crumble a substantial chunk of a wall a few feet to the right of Kili’s head instead.
For a moment there’s a complete and utter deadly silence.
And then death does indeed descend on silent wings.
Blood eagles, as the very name suggests, are drawn to blood, and there is one creature among them which has absorbed enough of it for over twenty people.
Fili catches a glimpse of flesh - clay, he corrects himself – being ripped to shreds, and blood, so much blood spraying everywhere, and power, power unbound and deadly, ricocheting through their surroundings like some supercharged shrapnel.
He raises his bloodied hand one last time on auto pilot. He doesn’t know where his power to summon the shield comes from at this point, only that some strange peace descends upon him, as his immediate surroundings dis-integrate in parts.
And then Kili – on top of him once more – wraps his arms around Fili’s head, around his own head, and Fili sees nothing more.
It dies down slowly, among wet, squelching sounds. Fili wants to be sick.
On top of him, Kili shifts imperceptibly, but it’s enough.
Fili’s blue eyes catch the inhuman gold of the eagle’s beady eye and he freezes, suddenly hyper-aware of the warm thrum of blood in both their bodies and there is no lore he knows of, that would suggest any kind of loyalty or obedience towards the one summoning the eagle -
"And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." crosses Fili’s mind in that moment.
The creature shifts, but so does Fili, and if Kili had the presence of mind to blink them elsewhere, perhaps this next moment would have been their last –
Fili’s fingers close around a burned clump of grass and he pulls at it with all his strength, disrupting the one sigil that is still directly beneath them. There’s still enough magic for one, two, powerful beats of crimson wings and then –
It disappears, with one last piercing cry.
Fili’s eyes slip closed, as the weight of his exhaustion and his injuries slams into him savagely, when the adrenaline starts wearing off.
Kili sits back on his haunches, dazed, still entirely on top of Fili’s hips.
Fili idly tosses the clump of grass in his hand further to the left and away from the sigil. It lands with a wet plop. Impossibly tired now, Fili opens his eyes and stares at it dumbly.
There’s a small puddle of concentrated blood splatters a good two feet away from the edge of the sigil, right over the spot where Fili reckons his magic had summoned him to Kili.
He shifts with a groan and tries to look himself over.
Under his breastbone a familiar pressure starts to build.
Not yet, Fili resists, like he so often does in those moments when the job is done.
Sure enough, Fili is lying in a small puddle of his own blood… but that puddle is more than a foot to the right of his sigil. So how –
“Fili? No. Don’t go. You’re hurt –“ Kili’s concerned voice is the last thing he hears.
The last thing he sees are two smudged bloodied fingerprints directly on the burned outline of the last sigil.