Lyra fell to her knees, having been forcefully disconnected from her own body! She’d never experienced it, but she’d once seen her sister’s soul leave her body, during a desperate, long-range attempt at telepathy!
It felt strange, being a disembodied soul, hitching a ride inside the mind of another being.
She took a moment to right her mind, then looked up. She was kneeling in a black void, though she was somehow lit from above. The invisible surface she knelt on was cool and felt like metal.
She still had one hand tightly clenched around the coin.
“I AM KURG!” The angry shout was almost deafening, but Lyra wasn’t deterred.
“I am Lyra Jacobs and you are hurting my child!” She screamed back!
The coin in her hand grew hot and she felt it tug, trying to pull itself from her grasp, but that only caused her to tighten her grip. Smoke rose from her hand as the metal began to cook it! Whatever the thing wanted, she wasn’t about to hand over her only child without a fight!
The voice sounded a little less confident, “I am Kurg!”
“I don’t care who or what you are! You will let go of Nicole’s mind or I will kill you from the inside out!”
Anyone that knows much of anything about mammals knows a simple fact: never get between a mother and her child, unless you wish to court death. This is such a plain and obvious fact that only the very stupid or the ignorant would fail to comprehend it. In this instance, the coin demonstrated its stupidity, by resisting.
Many voices spoke at the same time, each of them an angry call in the void, some of them relatively close, while others sounded very loud, but distant, with the burning coin in Lyra’s hand as the loudest, “I am Kurg!”
The cacophony of shouting didn’t even give Lyra pause and she started to sing the verbal equivalent to a war drum beat!
Scared out of her mind, Nicole tried a little telepathic magic of her own, quickly confirming her mother’s body was an empty, soulless shell, without even a single scrap of memory!
As she climbed out of bed, Ustrina leaped onto Nicole’s shoulder and dug her claws in, like a cat. Nicole hardly noticed, despite the fact she started bleeding.
She knelt beside Lyra and checked her pulse, finding it steady and even calm, but that meant very little; a troll’s heart would keep beating even if the head were severed, allowing it to be reattached, if held in place.
Not knowing what else to do, Nicole screamed, “I need help in here!”
Lyra still had the original coin in hand and as a result, the air of the void had filled with a scent not unlike a mixture of cooking beef and pork, but now there were dozens of the things zipping through the void, like angry flies, intent on cutting her to ribbons with their edges, which had somehow become quite sharp.
She bled from dozens of cuts all over her arms, legs and face. Her song had allowed her to kill dozens more of the things, which now lay dead at her feet, having effectively had all ability to think stripped away by her attacks, but still, the stupid mind she’d gotten trapped in attacked!
Lyra knew she could kill the coin in her hand at any time, but also knew if she did, it would wipe Nicole’s mind. On the other hand, the rest were too stupid to even realize they’d effectively lost the battle, though she doubted she’d actually done any permanent damage. In time, she suspected the dead coins would be revived by the others.
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In truth, it was a stalemate and Lyra knew it, so she shouted to cut through the throng of screaming, angry voices, “Shut up!”
For the moment, she had the full attention of the coins, which stopped and hovered, as though confused. Lyra had a look of unbeatable determination on her face, born of a mother’s protective instinct.
“I can’t win this war,” she pointed out, “but neither can you. However, I could just keep killing all of you, until there’s only the one in my hand left. Do you really want that?”
There was a pause as one of the coins flew down to those that had been killed and scattered on the invisible floor. It poked at them with an edge for a bit, then floated back up, among the others. The air filled with the strange sensation of shared fear and Lyra knew she was the focus of it.
Knowing she had their full attention, she demanded, “Let Nicole go and I’ll let you all live.”
The air filled with animal-like confusion and Lyra began to suspect, despite the fact this ‘Kurg’ creature could speak, it wasn’t actually all that bright, because it was starting to resemble the mind of a primitive animal, like a lizard, more than anything else, having attacked her out of instinct, rather than reason.
She sighed in defeat, realizing there was no point to arguing with the lizard-brained idiots surrounding her, because they were too stupid to even grasp her threats.
As far as she could tell, the one inside Nicole’s head was smarter, but only marginally, while the rest were total morons.
Since there was nothing more she could do, Lyra focused her mind on the coin and worked to force her way back out the way she’d come.
Lyra’s eyes snapped open as she looked into a flashlight, as held by a pointy-eared, blond-haired elf doctor, who’d been shining it in her eye.
The doctor stumbled backwards in surprise as she pushed him away, insisting, “I’m fine! Go away!”
“What happened?” Nicole asked from where she sat on the edge of the bed, with Ustrina on her shoulder.
Lyra brushed herself off and stood, “I accidentally entered some kind of shared hive-mind, connecting that spell in your head to countless others of the same kind. As a result, my soul left my body for a bit.”
“But you’re okay?” The doctor asked.
“I’m fine.” Lyra glared at him and made shooing motions, “Now go away.”
Looking slightly offended, the doctor and the dwarf nurse stepped out, with the doctor grumbling to himself.
“So, did you find an answer to my troubles?” Nicole asked, hopefully.
Lyra shook her head, “Kurg is too stupid to reason with.”
“I knew that.” Nicole sighed.
“I think I’ve got an idea to buy you some time, at least.”
“What’s that?”
“I can at least confirm that thing feeds on magic. When you tried to control your powers, all it could do was a series of small, rapid-fire strikes. What do you think would happen to it if you entirely starved it of magic?”
Nicole smiled, “I need an anti-mage.”
Lyra shook her head, “No, you need an anti-mage to train you, so you can control it, yourself. We know you have that power, based on what happened during your birth, but you’ve never learned to control it. Now’s the time. I’ll see if I can track one down. I’ll also see if I can get a wearable magic nullifier built for you. Your grandmother used to use one to control her own magical gifts, so if I can find the design, I should be able to get something similar made for you. Meanwhile, you need to focus your mind on controlling your magic, to slow that spell down.”
“Thank you.”
Nicole still looked worried, but also mildly hopeful.
On the other hand, Lyra felt crushed and was doing all she could to prevent it from showing on her face. She’d given her daughter as much hope as she could, but everything she was thinking of was a stop-gap measure, to buy time, because she had no idea if it was even possible to cure Nicole.
They could stop the progression of her illness by blocking her magic, but without some way to detach that spell from Nicole’s subconscious, sooner or later, she’d lose herself to it. Even worse was the fact the spell was an enchantment, the magic equivalent to an electrical circuit; without magic power it was useless and couldn’t function, but as soon as the magic was back, it would activate again.
It was a crying shame they couldn’t block Nicole’s magic without also blocking Lyra’s or she might have been able to perform the delicate, surgery-like work required to remove the spell, one tendril at a time, over the course of many hours, if not days.
Stepping into the hallway, Lyra managed to keep things together right up until she reached the stairs, where she sat down and started to sob. She missed her husband, Levi, because at a time like this, he would surely have known what to do, but he’d been gone for more than a year and…Lyra cut that thought off, before it ballooned into something just as painful as the current situation.
