Millennial Mage

Chapter 454: Need

Chapter 454: Need

Tala held Terry within the white of the Bonding Void, her hand stroking over the manifestation of his feathers.

Terry was reliving his own life with the new perspective and cognition afforded him by his new bond to Tala.

Tala couldn’t see everything by any means, but she was getting flashes of the highlights, even if they lacked much of the detail that she was sure he was privy to in his own re-experiencing.

She’d already seen a few key points that she knew he couldn’t have remembered as even she was able to see. That made it obvious that something fundamental was happening.

Something within the magic of the bond—or something else—was allowing him to truly experience everything again.

That made the next part all the more heart-wrenching.

Young Terry had felt like he was grown.

He was out of his sire’s nest, on his own in the woods, and in the woods, he was supreme.

Young Terry had been wise enough to avoid those who looked like where he’d gotten his power. Those humans seemed to have power that he didn’t yet understand, and until he did, he would give them a wide berth.

Since they didn’t reside in the woods, he still considered himself supreme.

Older Terry seemed to grimace internally at his younger self.

Humans had been beyond him, then, but he’d felt like they wouldn’t be forever, and once they were understood and overcomable? He would have a whole new set of prey.

His internal need had been quiet since he’d passed through the fount three times and left it behind. Time passed, and he had left his sire’s nest.

He had found a group of other young males, and they’d gathered for comradery and safety through the dark of night, even if they hunted and ate separately.

On that day his need fired off once again, drawing him further afield than he was used to traveling.

But that loose collection of half-formed nests was far behind him now.

Still, his need drew him on until he came across the not-trees that the magic creatures used—a human caravan.

It had been circled to form a protective formation for the night, and it was clear the humans were at the ready.

There were several creatures of power—Mages—and they seemed to be working to corral a group of terror birds together, drawing and driving them toward cages and other humans waiting with strips of leather—magical collars.

Terry was about to retreat from the clearly dangerous beings when he saw her.

She was the most stunning creature that he’d ever seen, and he knew, in that moment, that she was the reason he was here.

He had to save her from whatever fate awaited her.

Tala felt Terry realize that the female terror bird would have probably been fine, brought into a flock to be tamed in Manaven or elsewhere.

Young Terry hadn’t saved her in the end, not really.

Terry shuddered within the white void, that knowledge striking him deeply.

Regardless, young Terry hadn’t hesitated once he’d recognized what was drawing him onward. His need had never led him wrong, the overt magic within the feeling making it distinct from his mundane needs and wants.

In the memory, Terry flickered forward, talons and beak flashing.

The humans had wielded magics that he didn’t understand. They had weapons he didn’t comprehend, and some parts of them were oddly resilient when they should have been soft and vulnerable. Even so, it wasn’t hard to follow his need and flicker whenever it prompted, striking when he could, to mixed results.

He was clumsy at first. The most he’d hunted before were singular, small animals, and they hadn’t been a challenge for him for a long time.

Now, these bipedal things were actually a true threat, a true challenge.

Fire flashed, ice lanced out, and air solidified trying to trap him and end him as a threat.

They failed, and they fell.

More humans came to try to deal with him, but he didn’t care. His earlier caution was lost in a storm of violence, need, and blood.

The other terror birds were forgotten, and they scattered to the four winds as Terry made a menace of himself.

In retrospect, Terry felt embarrassed at his ineffectiveness. Young Terry had been fighting for nearly three minutes and not a single human had been killed yet, despite what the screams and the amount of blood might have implied.

His enemies kept coming, but his goal was already accomplished.

She was free.

He felt the need to keep fighting, but he also felt the need and desire to follow her.

He made his choice.

With one last flicker, he arrived behind the monster who had seemed to be the leader. Terry lashed out, severing the man’s spine before he struck out, biting off his head entirely, the dimensionality of his beak expanding to be large enough to accomplish the task.

Tala felt Terry’s remorse at the action, not that the man was dead, but that he’d shown them such lethality and then left witnesses.

He could now see and understand that his need had bent to his will. He should have either left without doing much damage or stayed and killed them all. The middle ground… that choice had been his mistake.

There had been a moment of stunned, horrified silence as all the humans stared in disbelief.

Terry took that moment to flicker away after her.

As soon as he’d disengaged, his need began drawing him away, and he followed the promptings.

She hadn’t been an arcanous terror bird, and so he’d led her to the fount that had given him power. He stayed away—as his need indicated that he must—but he watched as she went forward, gaining a measure of dimensional power.

That had sealed her fate from a future-knowing perspective.

She had been unalterably branded with the taint of dimensional power, and he had demonstrated to the Mages just how dangerous that power was.

She and Terry had had such a short time together when weighed against Terry’s long life, but it had felt like they had forever at the time.

They hadn’t rushed, but eventually, it had been time, and they’d hunted for a site for their nest. An alcove in an all-too-familiar cliff was chosen, and Terry worked with her to make it large enough even as they built out the nest.

It was time to build their flock, and soon the eggs were there. She was confined to the nest, so he hunted for them both. He was more than up for the task.

Each day he would leave, gathering prey from the surrounding area, making sure to keep away anything that could threaten the hatchlings that would soon arrive. It had become a regular pattern for him, but that morning he had felt the need to go further afield, and he had listened.

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Terry hadn’t returned until early the next morning, lugging a dimensionally shrunken corpse for her to consume.

He’d found the clearing before their cliff ravaged.

Tala was momentarily confused as she got a flash of just how destroyed the clearing was in Terry’s memory, but then she realized that it was so long ago that all evidence of the destruction had been long since expunged by the passage of time before she saw that clearing with her own perception.

Still, in Terry’s mind, the picture was clear. There were no human bodies left, but the ground was liberally coated with enough blood that either there had been hundreds of attackers or his mate had killed more for every foot of ground they advanced.

Tala couldn’t tell all the clues that Terry had been able to put together in the moment—or in looking back—but the story that he put together was one of woe.

His mate had detected the interlopers coming and had gone out to meet them. Her eggs were at risk, and her mate should be close at hand.

She only needed to call for him and hold on until he arrived. Then, all would be well.

Tala felt tears filling her eyes, knowing that Terry both then and now was adding the assumptions atop what he’d seen, but she couldn’t argue with the likelihood.

The battle had been fierce as she used her fount-acquired might to strike down those who had come for her and her clutch. All the while, she had filled the air with cries of rage, cries of battle, cries for her mate to come to her aid and the aid of their clutch.

Despite her ferocity, despite her undeniable prowess, she’d been driven back step by bloody step, her cries becoming less defiant and more desperate with every bit of ground surrendered.

Finally, she’d made her last stand over the eggs themselves, somehow forcing the assaulting Mages to bleed and die even in those tight confines.

Her final cries had been laced with confusion even in her final defiance. She’d been cut down rather than let the eggs be struck by an attack that she’d moved out of the way of.

Her mate hadn’t come.

That meant that he was dead, for only death could have kept him from her side, from the defense of their flock.

At least in death, she would be with him again, and her last acts had spilled yet more blood before the final darkness claimed her.

Obviously, Terry didn’t actually know that such had happened exactly in that way, but both newly cognizant Terry and Tala agreed that the story which young Terry had built within his mind seemed to line up with the evidence.

The eggs were shattered, her blood painted the remnants of those who had been growing within.

The air was filled with evidence of so many magics, but one stood out above all. Magic pertaining to light had been the end of his mate, and it had come from one far, far too powerful to be within his reach.

Young Terry had stood, trembling, looking down upon all that was left.

Nothing.

Nothing was left.

His flock was dead.

Something more had been done to them besides the slaughter. There had been not even a single trace of magic left on their bodies, even though Terry could still identify her well enough to have no doubt or concern of a swap of some kind.

His trilling, shrieking cry had torn his throat as the very world twisted around him, bending to his magics in a way that he’d never been able to replicate, Reality itself seeming to resonate with his hatred of humanity.

Even young, animalistic Terry had realized that the hunting of his flock had something to do with the dimensional fount. When he’d checked, the fount had been gone, confirming his suspicion.

In that moment, his rage had known no bounds.

What followed was even more flickering than what came before, and Tala witnessed Terry ruthlessly—but cunningly—hunting humans.

His need tried to keep him away, but when he ignored it long enough to get into battle, the need came to his aid despite his choice.

The result was Terry fully wiping out several caravans over the years, even if his targets were more often individuals or smaller groups who foolishly wandered into the woods alone.

In order to better understand his chosen prey and exploit their weaknesses, he began to pay attention to their grunts and utterances.

While they were still always a bit nonsensical, he was able to pull enough from it in the end to find more targets with very little work.

He was the vengeance of the land, and even though his need tried to keep him away, he ignored that to seek a venting of his rage.

It wasn’t enough.

She would never come back.

No amount of blood could turn back time.

The eggs would never be whole again, and he’d never get to see his hatchlings. He would never meet those who should have been his, who should have been hers, who should have been theirs.

Time passed in a haze, and his vengeance cooled, not because his hatred of humanity lessened, but because he simply couldn’t bring himself to continue to rage. He could only burn for so long before he was spent, and he had long since passed that point.

He spent decades—possibly centuries—wandering the Wilds, gorging himself on prey that was never as challenging as he’d have liked.

He never truly followed his need after that, afraid that it would bring him to something that might make him forget her. Even so, he learned to discern when its promptings were about staying away from some great danger or other, and he did follow those promptings.

Young Terry grew, finding petty diversion in hunting, finding ways to fill time even with prey that couldn’t possibly be an actual challenge. Only occasionally did he find opponents worthy of his time, through which he honed his abilities.

Tala frowned as one particular encounter flashed by too fast for her to really see. All that she pulled from it was a relatively ordinary bunny—except it had been violet—and the fact that Terry had fled from it at the nearly irresistible prompting of his need.

Time continued to pass, and Terry occasionally still killed humans when he came across them, but he did so only when they were targets of opportunity, and he did his best to get in and out without being noticed, leaving no witnesses.

That was its own sort of diversion.

Tala felt conflicted as she witnessed this. She could completely understand young Terry’s perspective, and through the lens of his memories, she had a hard time relating to the humans that he had seen—or those that he had killed.

Terry had killed hundreds of people, maybe thousands, and yet she struggled to see him now as the monster that she knew he’d been to them in their last moments.

Then—as his memories continued to flicker past—she saw a caravan that looked familiar.

Terry had felt drawn to it, and she saw herself, a young human Mage.

He had burned with anger and felt a need to attack. That had almost caused him to pause. His need hadn’t drawn him into a fight for a long time.

Still, the human female was alone, at the back of the line of wagons. He should be able to strike her down and get away without being noticed.

He stopped hesitating.

But nothing went as he expected it to. The human didn’t die. She wouldn’t.

Terry had been entirely confused. She had broken under his strikes, but he hadn’t been able to cut her open. The guards had been fast enough to react that Terry couldn’t capitalize on what weakness he had seen, and worse yet, she’d been able to temporarily delay him, making him fear—in the time—that she could figure out a means of doing so more effectively.

He’d had to flee.

Still, even after he’d fled, he couldn’t get her out of his mind.

How had she lived?

The fact that he’d left witnesses also didn’t sit well with him. The last time that had happened…

He couldn’t allow that. He had to solve the issue.

That night, while she slept, he’d crept close and tested if he could kill her unawares, but her defenses were too good for a quick, stealthy kill.

She’d woken, and he’d had to flee again.

His need wouldn’t let him leave, though. His paranoia also pulled him to remove those who knew of his existence, and it was rare that those two aligned so fully.

He’d thought that meant he had to kill her, but when he’d returned to finish the job one way or another, he’d found… meat.

She’d left out food, and it had clearly been for him.

It had made absolutely no sense at the time, and even looking back, Terry didn’t know why she’d done it.

The gesture was such a surprise that he’d stood staring at her in her sleep as the stars moved overhead.

Finally, at the prompting of his need, he’d eaten the food and found that it was fantastic.

Tala watched as Terry relived his time after they’d met.

He followed her, trying to grasp what was different about this human, what was different about his need.

No matter what he saw, he still didn’t understand her, and eventually, confusion and exhaustion from all the strangeness overtook him, and in frustration, he’d curled up and fallen asleep against her for warmth in the middle of the autumn day—it was only right for her to warm him before she died—waking only to flee as the human woke as well.

Terry… wanted to know more about this human. As he observed her, he heard what he thought was her desiring a thunder bull.

He didn’t see her doing well against such a creature, but that would certainly be interesting.

During that night, he was able to separate one from a nearby herd and drive it to await her beside the caravan.

Ha! I knew it was Terry… fine, I just suspected.

Still, the girl had killed it, poking it with a stick and somehow making it kill itself?

It made no sense.

Terry had broken many sticks on thunder bulls over the following day, but he couldn’t replicate her success.

Looking back, Terry once again felt a bit foolish. It was fairly obvious that she’d used a stick from an endingberry tree, but that thought hadn’t even crossed his mind at the time.

Tala thought it was pretty funny, even as she continued to hold her feathered friend.

She caught flickering flashes of him butchering the woodsmen outside of Alefast and was able to see just how much confusion Terry had felt about her.

She was human, but she didn’t seem to particularly like her own kind.

Ouch, but… fair.

She was a young fighter with survivability but not much experience.

Again, ouch…

And she had given freely to him, even after he’d attacked her. He didn’t understand, but he wanted to.

That is why the woodsmen had been killed.

Terry couldn’t let others kill this odd human until he understood her.