[A short story (the third I’ve done so far) based on the artwork of a wonderfully talented artist and all-around nice guy.  You can find his work–including the piece below–over on his blog.]

I’m not sure how they found me, or how long they had been tracking my movements, but as my feet splashed down on the rain-slick concrete of the sidewalk on the other side of the beach’s retention wall, I spotted them.  Shadows in the fog that drifted out of the city behind them, moving easily among the floating orbs of headlights that burned through the stormy afternoon as vehicles zipped passed; drivers unaware that a war which started hundreds of years before their births was about to spill into their daily commute.  There were four of them straight ahead of me, clustered together in a way that suggested squad tactics at play.  The idea of fleeing briefly flitted through my mind but was quickly burned away as I spotted the gold scarf fluttering around a fifth figure across the street, standing between myself and the rest of the squad.

Slatyr.

The name was like a match; a spark that ignited a fire in my chest.  Within a few heartbeats that fire was coursing through my veins, burning away any fear I had, any doubt that after all these years I would be capable of taking on four TechMages by myself, let alone four TechMages and one of the men who had been responsible for the death of everyone I ever cared about.  Everyone I’d ever truly known.

Slatyr!

Again the name sent a wave of rage through me, tightening my muscles.  I felt my hands clench into fists beneath the long leather gloves I was never without these days; felt the scratch of their fabric against the charred skin of my forearms.  The rain pounded the hood of my coat, matching the thundering of my heart.  No.  There would be no running.  Not today.

I shifted my gaze off Slatyr and settled it back on the four mages on my side of the road.  They had begun a slow, deliberate pace toward me, calmly spreading out.  The one on the end moved into the oncoming traffic without so much as a glance over his shoulder; the wail of a horn cut through the cacophony of the storm as a commuter frantically worked the wheel of his vehicle to avoid hitting the man.  As the squad drew nearer I started making out details through the fog.  They were all sporting the black uniforms of the TechMage Legion, with the high collars and silver piping that marked them as Specialists; which was just a fancy word for murderers.  Aside from their uniforms, they shared only one other trait:

Each of the four men standing opposite me had the same liquid-like metal flowing across their forearms from fingertip to elbows.  The metal was what had given the Legion the power to wipe out my people and it was as unnatural a thing as I had ever seen in all the hundreds of years I had been alive.  It glistened, catching any nearby light and reflecting it in a constantly shifting pattern as it flowed across the skin of any who bore it.  The first time I had seen it on a man–so long ago–I had thought it held a certain beauty.  But, that was before I knew of the terrible power it granted the bearer.

Before I witnessed the horrors that would be wrought with that same power.

The four mages continued toward me with that maddeningly casual pace and I noticed that one of them–the man who was walking in traffic now–held a long-barreled rifle.  I noticed because this man–shorter than the rest and of an all-around smaller build–stopped suddenly and dropped to one knee, bringing the rifle’s barrel up with a sickening speed.  As his knee splashed to the pavement, the air before him suddenly exploded in brilliant red light as energy was made tangible and a small ballistic barrier materialized out of thin air; I didn’t have to look to know that the barrier was comprised of angry red energy and, while transparent, would be as solid as any steel plating.  Nor did I need to see his arms to know that whisper-thin tendrils of red lightning would be dancing up and down his forearms as he utilized the power of that strange, alien metal.

I didn’t look, because in the instant that man’s knees twitched with movement, my mind flooded with the warmth of an old lover’s touch.  It had been nearly thirty years since I last called on the neomynari–the lifeforce of the planet and the source of my people’s power–and my glow had long since faded, but as that TechMage’s gun rose into place, I had no trouble diving into the endless depths of that pool of life.  I instantly felt the power flood into my body and, though I couldn’t see them, I knew that the cracks in my arms–a byproduct of harnessing the neomynari–would be glowing with the brilliance they once had.  And that glow would be a vibrant green; the color of Earth.

I felt the familiar tickle–like someone pouring sand down my arms–start at my elbows and trickle down to my fingertips as the Earth mynari’ethra flooded them with the power to manipulate that element.  Without thinking, I brought my right leg up while sweeping my hands downward and then, as if I were lifting something heavy, I cupped my fingers and shoved my arms over my head while stomping my foot onto the wet pavement.  The entire motion panned out at the exact time the gunner mage was falling to his knee and as his weapon’s muzzle exploded with the flash of his first shot the pavement directly before me erupted and a pillar of stone and dirt wider than me by half shot up out of the ground as if pushed by some massive hydraulic piston.  I heard the wet thwap-thwap-thwap as the gunner’s burst found its mark in the muddy surface on the other side of the pillar and knew instinctively that the placement was right where my heart would have been.

I didn’t have time to process that thought, however, as a rage-filled roar suddenly cut through rain and traffic.  The cry rose in volume and my eyes were drawn to the top of the pillar as a blur of glowing red flashed into the sky above it.  One of the remaining mages had donned a suit of armor comprised of glowing energy plates that hovered two finger-widths from his body in any place.  The armor was all sharp angles and angry lines and was something I had become intimately familiar with during the Extermination.  While intimidating in appearance, the energy armor most Specialists constructed had a weakness in the gaps between each of the energy plates that I had learned to exploit a full century before this man had been born.

The sandy sensation of Earth was washed away by a cool, wet flow—not unlike lifting your arm out of a tub of water—and I knew that the earthy green glow would be fading to an icy blue.  I was calling on the Water mynari’ethra and by the time my brutish new attacker cleared the upper lip of the pillar, I had full control.

“Hi, there,” I said as the big lug reached the apex of his arc and started down toward me; now that he was fully above the pillar, I could see that this man was a living tank of chorded muscle beneath his glowing armor and black uniform.  As he descended, he reached back over his head with both arms and a flash of red light filled the air as he materialized a set of energy blades and brought them crashing down toward my head as he neared the ground.  But I had seen weapons like these burn through flesh and bone like a hot wire through rice paper and I had no intention of being in their path when they came down.

A heartbeat before the brute landed, and with my body flooded with the power of Water, I gracefully sidestepped the attack.  Letting my muscles ebb and flow, I bent at the waste and let my head fall out of the way while my feet deftly traced a tight circle along the wet pavement.  Twirling, I straightened my back once more and made a wide arc with my arms, using my power to gather the falling rain as I went, trailing ever-growing tendrils of water.  Then, as I completed my spin, I brought my hands together and exerted my will, wrapping the tendrils together and freezing them at the same time; to me, Water always had a certain beauty to it.  By this time, the brute was crashing to the pavement where I had just been standing, his energy blades cutting easily into the ground and flash-frying any of the rainwater it came in contact with.  His knees buckled under his weight and he doubled over with the force of his attack which, as I knew it would, exposed a gap in the energy plates under his shoulder.  Before he had a chance to pull his blades from the concrete, I thrust the spear of braided ice I had made through the gap and between his ribs.  The man’s eyes went wide and he made a gagging sound as the deadly icicle pierced his lung, and then went completely limp as it passed through his heart.  With no lifeforce to sustain them, his energy blades and armor dissipated and he fell to the ground, dead before he landed.

However, before I had could celebrate, a second attacker darted around the pillar, kicked off the retention wall now behind me, and sent himself flying straight at my lower back.  His hands held together before him and a red energy cone glowed around them.  The man had made himself into an arrowhead and was closing in for the kill.  I didn’t have time to think and, instead, gave myself over to Air.  A sensation like someone gently blowing on the skin of my arms washed away the coolness of Water and I knew the icy blue would be shifting to a soft purple and I felt myself getting lighter, as if my bones were suddenly replaced with hollow reeds.  With no time to plan my next move, I simply launched myself into the air, tucking my knees into my gut to clear the man’s attack.  I coiled my arms and, as the TechMage passed under me, thrust both of them downward, palms flat and sent a blast of Air into the man’s back.  The wind attack hit him like an invisible fist and slammed him to the ground, abruptly halting his forward momentum.

Instantly, I knew I’d made a mistake.

Since using the Air mynari’ethra made me lighter, the force of my wind attack sent me into the air and, unfortunately, over the top of the pillar and directly into the gunner’s sights.  Luckily I was moving with such a speed that his first shot was a fraction of a second slower than needed and the round caught me in the meaty part of my shoulder.  The kick from the slug coupled with my lighter mass spun me on a canted axis and gave me the second I needed to make a defensive counter.  The odd angle of my spin forced me to use my legs and I snapped an awkward kick toward the gunner, thrusting a shockwave of wind which bucked the barrel of his weapon up away from his energy wall.  Making the most of my very brief respite, I filled myself with Earth once more and sent myself crashing to the top of the pillar.  Exerting my will, I used the neomynari’s power—and the redoubled mass Earth gives me—to push the pillar back into the ground and, as if it were a counterweight on some massive underground level, sent another pillar erupting from the street directly below the gunner’s position. I hit the ground and threw myself into a forward roll and came to my feet in time to shift back to Air and send a powerful blast in the falling gunner’s direction, which caught him mid-fall and sent him bodily into a nearby traffic light.  I couldn’t be sure, but I think I heard his back snap as he hit the light’s pole with the small of his back and bent nearly in half around it in a manner his body wasn’t meant to.  His gun–sent twirling away from his grip when my blast hit him–landed with a wet smack in the sand beyond the retention wall.

Once more, my time for celebration was short-lived as the arrowhead mage, now recovered from his crash landing, shouted out an order to the forth and last member of the squad; this one was a female.

“We do this together,” he shouted to her.

“No shit,” she snapped.  “I was trying to tell you lug-heads that there’s a reason he’s the last Neomyn!”

Her words hit me like a rock to the head.  It wasn’t that I was surprised to hear I was the last—I hadn’t seen another of my kind in nearly ninety-three years—but in that moment I realized that I had been harboring hope.  Hope that somehow more had survived the Extermination.  That, while we were few among many and always on the run, somehow we survived.  But, most of all, that I wasn’t the last of us.  I didn’t deserve to have that right.  To be that lucky.  I wasn’t special; not by a long shot.  But the female’s words proved I was and it filled me with anger the likes of which I had known only one other time.

When he had cut her down.

I had never liked using Fire.  It was the hardest of the four mynari’ethra to control and, by far, the most destructive.  Fire was, in essence, the distilled rage of an entire planet given form and for most of my life I had actively avoided using it. However, as that woman’s words smashed my hope like a hammer on a turtleshell, rage was all I had left.

And I used it.

It started in my elbows, like all the sensations do, and worked its way toward my fingertips.  But, unlike the grainy dust of Earth, or the gentle breath of Air, and vast leagues from the cool moisture of Water, Fire burned.  It rolled over my arms like lava over grass and burned with an intensity I could never describe accurately.  It matched the fire in my heart and focused it.

“Flank him,” the arrowhead attacker said, circling to put me between himself and the female.

“No,” I said in a whisper barely louder than the pounding of the rain as I pulled my elbows into my gut, curling my torso over them as the pain flared.  I clenched my fists tight enough to cause the leather of my gloves to creak.

“I know what I’m doing, you idiot,” the female said, squaring her stance and spreading her arms slightly at her hips.  Red lightning crawled along her forearms and a suit of energy armor—sleeker and tighter around her body than the brute’s—materialized over her uniform; complete with a transparent helmet.  After the armor was in place, another flash of red filled the air as two thin blades extended from the tops of her fists.

“Then prove it,” said her counterpart.  A red flash flared from where he was standing, too, and it was obvious from the rise in his voice that he had launched his attack; coinciding with the sound of feet on wet pavement from the side the female was on.  I didn’t check to see if they had indeed moved, however.  Nor did I make any effort to escape; I didn’t need to.

I simply screamed, “No!”  Then, exerting all of my will against the power of Fire, I thrust my arms out to my sides, fists balled as if to punch my attackers.  The air around me exploded with intense heat and light and my ears filled with a roar of pure destruction as two massive jets of roiling flames spewed from my fists; each enveloping an oncoming TechMage.  I held the flames, pushing against the mynari’ethra with all of my will until the power contained in my forearms was so intense it burned away the leather of my gloves and the ends of my coat sleeves, slowly revealing the blindingly bright orange glow beneath.

Finally the pain that was synonymous with Fire became too much for me to bear and I released my hold on it.  The sudden halt of so much power left me—as it always did—feeling nearly wiped.  I was dimly aware of the acrid smell that filled the air from the now-smoking remains of the last two Specialists; whom had succumbed to the heat of my flames.  I let out a grunt as my knees buckled beneath me and I splashed down to the pavement of the now-deserted road.  The thunder of the still-falling rain seemed infinitely quieter in the absence of Fire’s roar and somewhere from within the jungle of steel and concrete that stretched into the distance beyond the beach, I could hear the wailing of approaching sirens.  I knew that I would have to get up again, but in that moment, all I wanted was to fall to my side on the street and go to sleep.  As it stood, I fell back on my haunches and stared down at my arms as they lay in my lap.  Since I was no longer pulling on the neomynari, the orange glow of Fire was being pushed slowly away by my personal mynari’ethra—Air—and I gazed down at the lines of purple light that cut through the charred and cracked skin; the power of the neomynari long-since blackening the skin from elbow to fingertips, they looked vaguely like the layer of cooled rock floating on a river of violet lava.  My mind was pulled from the beauty of it—something I hadn’t truly taken the time to do in decades—as the steady psh-psht of footfalls in the rain grew louder behind me.

“Slatyr,” I said aloud, my voice spitting the word like a piece of rotten meat.

“I’m impressed with the…finality…with which you handled those Specialists, old friend.”  The voice was electronically filtered through a helmet or mask of some kind, but my spine still tingled with the spark of barely contained hatred.  “Though, I have to say, I’m not sure there was anything really special about them.  Not after that messy display, anyway.”

“They were enough to soften up an old man,” I said, not bothering to lift my head from where it hung.  “Didn’t want to break a sweat taking me on yourself…old friend?  Was a tired old Neomyn who hadn’t called on a single mynari’ethra in longer than most of the people in this city have been alive too much for you, traitor?”

I couldn’t see him, but I heard the pause in his step as he made his way around me and I knew that I had gotten one last blow in.  The pause lasted only a heartbeat, though, and Slatyr finally made his way around to stand before me, several paces away to give him time to react should there be any more fight left in me; Slatyr always had been a fast learner.  As he came to a stop, I was vaguely aware of the sirens growing louder.

“Nonsense!  You and I both know you look and feel as young as you were when we met.  That said, unfortunately,” Slatyr paused, drawing he words out as if he was forcing himself to speak them, “I won’t be killing you today, Raez.”

This did bring my head up and instantly I regretted the impulse.  Before me stood a man I had once considered a friend; a man who had, long ago, stood at my side as we used our gifts to bring peace to the people of this planet.  But, where once stood a man of honor and inherent goodness—a beacon of justice and life—was now a twisted amalgamation of all the elemental power of a Neomyn and the unnatural destructive force of a TechMage.  He wore the same black military-cut uniform of the Specialists, but where theirs had silver piping, his was gold and of a style that less-than-subtly spoke of his rank; up to and including the long golden scarf draped around his neck and shoulders.  It had been nearly a millennia since I had last seen him, though, and it would seem that our last interaction had left him with a need to wear a cybernetic respirator; a sleek, yet angry looking thing that rose up from beneath his uniform’s high collar and enveloped the lower half of his head, snaking up beneath his ears and rising up to cover his mouth and nose.  The respirator was of the highest level of technology I had ever seen and looked custom-built for the man who wore it.  A vicious spider-web of scar tissue crawled up the right side of his face to his short-cropped black hair, narrowly missing the eye on that side and rendering that ear a twisted, red version of the opposite ear.  The scar was a glaring sign of the injury that forced the use of that respirator and a nice reminder of the last time he and I had parted ways.

“You look just as pretty as I remember, too,” I said, waiting for the blow that I was sure would come, regardless of his claim otherwise.

 However, rather than anger him, my comment seemed only to amuse him.  Instead of lashing out with the killing strike I was waiting for, Slatyr straightened out his stance and reached up with his left hand and stroked the jawline of the respirator with the back of his knuckles.  His forearms bore the same alien metal coating from elbow to fingertips as the Specialists, with one exception; where theirs was an ever-shifting pool of chrome, Slatyr’s had ribbons of gold that continuously danced along the length of his arm.  Many believed this to be a sign of his rank among the TechMage Legion, but I knew that it was a sign of something far more dangerous.

“You like that?” Slatyr asked in a proud tone that was twisted by the mechanical filtering of the respirator.  “It’s my latest upgrade, actually.”

He stopped to glare angrily down at me, the fleshy web of scarring lending the look a sense of darker purpose.  I simply gazed lazily back at him; my mind partially devoted to gauging the distance of the still-wailing sirens.

“I got it just yesterday.  Fitting considering I was also given news of your impending arrival to this little beach-side paradise on the same day.  I thought, ‘who better to see my new upgrade than the man who took off half my face?’”

“Yeah, well,” I quipped, “in my defense, I was aiming for your heart.  Not my fault you moved.”

Without warning, green lightning flared to life and snaked down Slatyr’s arms and he stomped his foot, causing the ground beneath me to erupt with a pillar much like the one I’d used earlier.  The world pitched sideways and I was airborne, twirling end-over-end.  Instinctively, I called on Air, but just as the purple light in the cracks of my forearm brightened, I felt something the size of a brick slam into my ribcage, the impact cracking a rib as well as instantly halting my forward momentum and slamming me to the ground.  The world went dark for a minute, then blurred and, as it finally cleared, I found myself gazing up at Slatyr, a red shaft of light protruding from his left hand and pinning me firmly to the pavement.  With his right—now wreathed in thin streamers of blue lightning—he pointed at me and a familiar crackling could be heard as I watched him slowly freeze the rain in a tight path, making a smooth claw of ice that came to a needle-fine point inches from my throat.

“I am under orders to leave you alive this time,” he barked.  “But I wasn’t told I had to leave you in one piece!”

Equal parts confusion and head trauma, I simply couldn’t pull the words I needed out of the maelstrom of thoughts that roiled in my shaken mind.  I had been running from this very man and the one pulling his strings for longer than I could remember, living life day-to-day, staying in the shadows of the world’s cities, dodging the ever-watching eye of the TechMage Legion and its seemingly countless Specialists.  Yet, here I was, pinned down by the one person who wanted to see my immortal life extinguished by his own hands more than anything, and all he could do was stand here in the rain and make threats over the growing sound of sirens and the slowly growing crowd of spectators that had begun to gather in small groups as close as they dared.

“Why,” I finally choked out between painful breaths.

Suddenly the glowing red shaft dissipated and the pressure on my chest eased and I had to turn my head to avoid catching the water of the icicle claw as Slatyr released his hold on Water, instantly melting the ice.  Slatyr stepped over me and wordlessly began walking toward a sleek black vehicle I hadn’t noticed in all the excitement.  Angry, I rolled to my side and started the slow process of getting to my feet; my energy had already nearly replenished itself, but I wanted to maintain the illusion of weakness.

“Hey,” I called after him, letting the rage I still felt carry my voice over the wail of the sirens.  The vehicles they belonged to were close enough now for the red and blue flashes of their lights to be seen through the fog that still drifted out of the city proper; idly I wondered in irritation at just how far from the beach any emergency dispatch locations were.  “Answer me you son of a bitch!  You owe me that much at least!”

Now rounding the side of his vehicle, Slatyr spun on his heels and cast another glare back at me.  He had to yell to be heard, but his words made it to my ears.  “I owe you?!  You took my face from me!”

This time there was no need to search for words as the ones that I spat at him had been bouncing around in my head for a lifetime.  “You took everything from me!”

I couldn’t see his lips, but I knew Slatyr was smiling when he replied.  “And I intend to take more still!  Just not today!”

With that, he ducked into his vehicle and the familiar magnetic whine of anti-grav coils fired up.  Vehicles with hover capabilities weren’t uncommon lately, but they were still too expensive for wide-spread use.  As it was, I wasn’t surprised as Slatyr’s vehicle rise smoothly into the air.  I briefly considered using Earth or Air to knock the vehicle out of flight, but the crowd of people had grown so much that the risk of his car slamming into one of the tightly packed groups scattered along the beachfront road was too great to justify; as he had known it would be.  So, instead, I watched as the underside of his vehicle shrank in size and was then swallowed by the fog.

The screech of tires pulled my attention back to the road just in time to see a trio of black and white squad cars slide to a halt at the edge of our impromptu battlefield.  The driver’s door on the nearest of them flew open and the officer stepping out of it, seeing the destruction before him, leveled his weapon at me.  While my people were no longer known in this world, the TechMage Legion ruled it and, though I had no real idea why it was that Slatyr left me alive to begin with, as far as these officers were concerned, I had just fought and killed a squad of Specialists.  At best, that meant answering a whole lot of questions that none of them would believe and ending up in a Legion prison waiting for Slatyr to come and finish the job.  At worst, it meant injuring or possibly killing one or more of these men if a fight broke out.

Out of options, I pulled on Air and the violet glow in my arms intensified once more as I waved a casual salute to the lead officer.  He yelled something, but I didn’t here it as I thrust my hands toward the ground and sent a powerful blast of wind into the ground below me and propelled myself into the air.  Not even a Neomyn can fly unaided, but one with personal Air mynari’ethra and hundreds of years of experience using it can make it look like he can.  And I imagine that is exactly what it looked like I was doing when I bounded away from the beachfront road and deeper into the fog-shrouded city that hugged it.

I had come toValkyrie City hoping to blend into the population like I had with countless other populations across countless cities around the world since the Extermination.  I hadn’t come here looking for a fight.  But, as I moved through the city—once again one with the flow of the neomynari after decades of shutting myself off from it—instinctively using a combination of Air and Water to glide over and around and run and slide along the massive skyscrapers, I made a decision; like consciously flipping a switch in my brain.  It was time to stop hiding.

No more running.

I hadn’t come to Valkyrie City looking for a fight, but I was sure as hell going to find one before I left.