The Magic Circle Disaster: Jed the Magician (Part 1)

The magician walked into the woods. The air was crisp and clean. The night was dark. In the distance stood a stone circle. It was filled with flashing lights and a mist that looked like ozone. Indistinct figures moved quickly within it. Shouting voices could be heard, but not the words being yelled.

As the magician approached the circle the air became charged with a sensation of something like electricity. Magical tenson they called it. When he was about 50 meters away, the noise emanating from the circle reached a crescendo. A huge flash of light exploded from within the circle. The air in the night roared. Everything turned white.

The magician woke on the ground sometime just after dawn. The pinks and blues in the sky were just finishing giving way to daylight. He thought, “My name is Jed, and I am not dead.”

Jed sat up and looked out in front of him. His body was automatically going through the patting routine he’d learned in the military to look for wounds you cannot feel when recently injured. Everything checked out. He did not appear to be bleeding. Then again, he thought, if he’d been bleeding out, he never would have woken up in the first place.

The stone circle had not faired as well. Several of the pillars had fallen outwards like children’s Legos thrown loosely on a lawn. Others had stood shattered with burn marks on the inside wrapping their sides. What looked like a hole, or perhaps a pit, was on the left-hand side. A kind of white clay, and dust, was scattered everywhere.

Jed stood up, drew his pistol from his waistband, and slowly approached what was left of the stone circle. “Better safe than sorry,” he silently said to himself. Although whatever had generated this kind of a charge was unlikely to be impressed by a firearm, he didn’t think he could tackle whatever it was using a linked circle of thirteen let alone himself. Akashic banishing wasn’t going to whisk this away.

As he treaded forward, the old mantra of “slow is smooth and smooth is fast” raced through his mind in the background. He kept his mind wide and felt the energy in the background pickup as he got closer. Around ten meters out the Akashic penetrating vibration of the place amplified. Ensure of what was happening he stopped.

He let his eyes go slightly out of focus while holding the pistol at eye level in a isosceles lock. Kicking on the internal mudra for clairvoyance the world shifted in front of him. The deep electric purple of the Akash wreathed everything, but something was wrong.

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Slowly Jed moved forward. Things were moving in the periphery of his sight. It was as if reality was attempting to nit itself back together. Where the various energies normally flowed into one another, everything here had jagged edges. He stopped just outside the circle and peered in over the top of a pillar that had been blasted in half.

On the left-hand side of the circle was a hole…. that led to nothing. It hurt to look at. A hole had been blasted into reality and was slowly coming back together. And then he saw it on the right edge of the formation.

The boot just laid there. A bone was sticking out of the top. Bleached white as if it had been drying in the sun for years. Not a drop of blood appeared anywhere on the boot or in the area around it. Something that looked like the remains of a sword, or maybe a long dagger, was twisted and broken a meter away from the boot. Those were the only remains in the circle.

“Looks like someone was trying to do this old school,” he thought. It always amazed him that modern people, when it came to magicians, kept acting like it was 1395 A.D. A short barrel AR-15 would have done this poor devil a lot more good at close quarters. Not that it would have saved him from the blast and fragmentation.

The place was oddly sterile smelling. No whiff of smoke coming from any of the now ruined pillars. The pillars themselves were oddly free of any markings. Unusual for a ritual place. No other signs of evocation equipment. But given the nature of the destruction probably shouldn’t be surprising. That made the damaged blade and boot even stranger.

Just as Jed was about to cross into the circle a high-pitched whining sound broke out. It was ear splitting. He quickly shut his subtle senses down just in time to see something race out of the hole in the ground towards dust covered mesquite trees outside the circle.

Whatever it was didn’t waste any time. He watched the dark form race across the arid dirt and grasses of the desert like a gunshot. It was out of his sight in seconds. He didn’t even bother trying to shoot. He had no chance of hitting that. The jacketed hollow points in the P320 probably wouldn’t have done anything anyway. Frankly he was glad it hadn’t closed in on him. Although whatever that thing ran into was going to create a bad day for someone.

As the sound from his clairaudience died down, he noticed that whatever it was had physically run into bushes on its way out and left a streaking line in the dirt. This is bad. Really bad. This means it can touch the physical world. One more thing from the other side that didn’t belong here. And the fact that it could remain corporeal in broad daylight meant it was strong. No telling where it got its body from. Although the lack of remains in the circle did give Jed one idea that he didn’t want to linger on.

“What the hell were these idiots up to?” he said to himself as he dropped his pistol back into its holster. The tip from the local apothecary about someone buying several pounds of Dittany of Crete had been a good one. He’d need to thank Wallace the proprietor. He slowly started walking in a spiral pattern out from the broken circle. By the time he made it around once the empty spot in the circle had closed.

“At least nothing else is going to make it out today,” he said to himself once again.

He’d need to come back out here later at night to make sure the portal stayed closed.

To be continued…