View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
(Week 6)
Alexius wakes with a shudder on a sweat-dampened mattress. He had never before experienced a nightmare that vivid. He lies still, panting, and waits for the feeling of stabbing pain to subside.
It doesn't.
Alexius thrashes in a panic - a mal, it has to be a mal, it got in through the vents or under the door - but it's like moving through syrup. Syrup filled with knives. Pricking his skin, cutting, draining.
Poison? Some kind of paralytic? Think, you have an eidetic memory, what sort of mal - no. No time. Desperately, hoarsely, Alexius grinds out the syllables of his affinity-boosted antitoxin. He has no idea what's affecting him, but it feels toxic. His only option is to dump what mana he can into an antidote and pray it sticks.
Nothing changes. As if mocking him, another wave of agony scrapes across his skin. But something isn't right. The pain clears his head, lets him focus on the wrongness. Alexius has been cut before; the pain doesn't match. And Alexius doesn't smell blood.
He has exactly one weapon that might work, if he can keep his head and mana long enough to use it. He gasps out the mal-solidifier and feels something slimy and cold materialize on his forehead. He grasps at it with clammy fingers and rips it clear - there is blood, this time, but only a trickle - slamming it into the wall.
He can't afford to spend more mana on this; he'll be back in debt as it is from those two spells alone. Swearing, he draws his knife from its bedside sheath and doesn't stop stabbing for thirty seconds straight.
Night hag. An invisible, incorporeal mal. Juvenile, this one, barely old enough to pose a threat to freshmen. Small enough, and subtle enough, to get past the school wards - through the vent, or under the door, or hiding in the room since the door last opened. Subtle enough to dodge or delay the wake-up ward, too. The antitoxin couldn't work, because the drain wasn't physical. But that fact had probably saved his life; the antitoxin wasn't potent enough to handle most full-blown mal venoms anyway, not at his level. The mal had tried to drain Alexius, not through his blood, but through his lifeforce - like a maleficer. And like a maleficer, it had caught on his affinity and choked.
Alexius leans back from the Mal Studies textbook with a worried sigh. He'd been lucky - on many levels. Lucky the mal was young and weak, lucky his affinity bought him the few seconds he'd needed to wake up and fight it off. It would have gotten him, he knew, affinity or no, if he hadn't reacted in time.
Not today, damn school. Not today.
