Gauntlet

San tried to look over her shoulder in the cramped space. Marko was fidgeting as he had just watched the most powerful witch he had ever known easily get shot down with lighting.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” San whispered as he shot back a glare and his patented cheesy smile.

“Like climbing into a vent with a magical ticking time bomb like you? I know your armor has been itching to kill me since the moment I rode up with pongo, and now you’re probably minutes away from losing full control and killing anyone you see.”

San didn’t know how to react—as he was right… for once.

“I’m going to drop down, try and get the jump on him, you need to follow me. I’ll be the distraction, you finish him off.”

“Please don’t, you’ll die, I don’t want to lose all of you over this,” San cried as tears welled on the rims of her eyelids.

“If I don’t, your gauntlet is just going to smash my head in any way,” he said, winking before lowering himself somewhat carefully out of the vent, he dropped to one of the large bookshelves, running across the thick top to get to a ladder.

The wizard only watched. San assumed he didn’t want to hurt his collection. Marko recklessly slid down the ladder not even touching the bars to climb down. He serpentined his running to try and anticipate another lightning bolt from the geezer.

But the wizard hesitated, absorbed in the moment by Marko’s wooden leg.

“I’m sorry to have to do this Marko,” Quinton said to himself. Across the library’s open space, across the unconscious bodies, Marko tried his best to anticipate what might come, while also putting everything he had into going one step further, sprinting full force at the old man who simply raised his two fists, pressed them together and separated them, opening his palms as his hands parted.

Marko waited as time seemed to slow around him, he didn’t see a bolt of lightning or a ball of fire, no whip of water or chunk of earth, so he continued his sprint as time continued on its normal rhythm, only to take his last step with his wooden leg. As the magical hinges that held it together crumbled before his eyes, a hundred pieces came loose and spread out onto the floor around him, leaving Marko to skid as the stone floor grated his face.

This being the distraction San imagined he was talking about, she too tried to slide down onto the bookshelf, going to the other end to slide down the opposing ladder, hopefully out of the old man’s line of sight.

Suddenly, like an angry disfigured bear, Marko galloped on his three limbs, picking up almost as much speed as he had before, the wizard watched as he subtly tapped his foot, halting Marko’s efforts again as his hands smacked the stone, lifting him closer and closer to avenging Alizar, but the granite beneath his left hand felt soft… well as soft as sand would feel.

The wet grains absorbed his hands, as the wizard had disguised a layer of bricks around him to look solid but was magical quicksand after watching Hyde get too close. Now with his wrists and ankle devoured by the hungry stone, the wizard tapped his foot again to re-solidify the tile, locking Marko down as the lightning surged between his aimed fingers.

A wave of overpowering primal anger had bubbled up within San as the final link of mail climbed over her big toe, she felt her control lifted as she stopped telling her legs to move, but they stepped forward, cracking the tile. Her thoughts became a red hurricane, swirling with intentions to kill as she spied one feeble old man and a trapped cripple.

“ENOUGH!” San cried as she flung her massive fist into the air with her body trailing behind, aimed perfectly to shatter every bone in the blackmailed old man’s body. As he took the aimed lightning off of Marko, without bothering to look at San, his open palm caught the gauntlet, and San hung without the pull of gravity, trapped in the air.

Turning to look her in the eye, the old man muttered with a tear falling from his dry eyelid “you shouldn’t have come,” taking his free palm spread flat, he slapped it on the edge of the gauntlet, San’s heavy armor disintegrated off of her body in a cloud of iron dust, her year of growth gone in an instant and the thoughts of murder were washed from her mind.

Dangling, as her tattered clothes hung in the air, the wizard took the open palm he’d slapped the gauntlet with and paired it with his open palm that somehow held her now light frame, squeezing his hands, the master ejected San, like she was shot out of a cannon, the force taking her through a bookshelf, an avalanche of text marking her grave.

“Well done, old friend,” a frail voice came with a meager clap as his twig like legs stepped from a balcony above. The Prince blew Hyde a kiss as he remained trapped to the sealing.

“We’re not friends,” the Wizard grumbled as he watched the Prince shuffled down the steps toward him, an obvious spring in his step.

“So kind of you to take out the trash like that for me,” he said while looking down across the bodies of the crusade, the royal library destroyed not fazing the Prince as he continued to approach the old wizard still leaning over his book, The Prince continued his monologue, “You’ve served my family for a very, very, very, long time, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but please, I think I’m ready to retire. Please, you said you would set my family free,”

“ Ohh, I only want to congratulate you,” the Prince hissed, holding a gleaming dagger now to catch the light, “because of your keen eye in identifying this once powerful longsword, now shriveled to a dagger after grandfather’s wars all those years ago, this artifact that has the unique ability to dissipate any magic, shrinking as more and more gets thrown at it, seemingly useless in a world with a handful of wizards compared to the other treasures I’ve gathered from across the globe. Except in this example,” he said, now within striking distance, reaching out as the old man frantically threw every spell he had at the Prince, cracking bolts of lighting, shards of icicles, waves of magma, all sucked into the vortex emitted from a jewel in the center of the hilt.

As the Prince’s slow march reached an end, he gutted the old man with the remaining shard of metal. As the defeated wizard bled through the pages he once stood over, the Prince yelled “It’s mine! The gauntlet is mine!”

Bending down across from the wizards oozing body, he ran his finger along the scaled trim of the gauntlet as its metal opened up, consuming his thin boney hands much faster than he expected. Panicked, he now attempted to drag it with all of his nervous energy along the ground back to his study.

“Gupo, oh Gupo! be a dear and help your future king with world domination,” the Prince called out as the pooling blood around the old wizard ceased to flow. It was clear his life had faded, and so did his magic, as a faint pop echoed across the rafters from above.

Hyde’s long suffocated body was falling like a meteorite, crashing straight through the already questionable stability of the magically affected floor, falling into a room or two below it.

An incredibly short hunched creature scurried from a large wooden door after the crash. Rushing to the Prince’s heavier side, he seemed upset that the old wizard was murdered.

“Ohh sire, why did Quinton have to go, I quite liked him.”

“Shut up, Gupo, don’t question your king, now quickly, to my study.”

Helping his friend lift the gauntlet, the two disappeared behind the same thick wooden door and the room fell silent.