Chapter 6 : Magic out of Control.
A violent jolt ripped me from sleep—not waking, but an impact that rattled my teeth and sent my heart hammering against my ribs. Mother leaned over me, her face ghost-pale and pulled tight with a terror she couldn’t hide.
“Elsbeth… up. Now.” Her voice cracked like something already breaking.
A roar drowned her words—a deep, groaning tear of sound, as if the world itself were splitting open. Then came the crack—sharp, wet, unmistakable—the sound of a house breaking like bone.
Feverish orange light leaked through the shutters like fire hunting for a way in. Smoke coated the back of my tongue before I even stood.
We moved without thought—panic doing the thinking for us. Boots half-laced, cloaks yanked tight with trembling fingers. Father shouted something, but a blast of flame drowned it in a single violent exhale. Wilhelm tore the door wide…
…and the street glared back like the open mouth of hell.
Across the lane, the cooper’s house was a leaning inferno, its roof caving in and vomiting sparks. People staggered and ran through the smoke, their screams shredded thin by the roar consuming everything. Heat slammed into us like a fist, so hot my eyes dried before I could blink.
And inside the blaze, something moved, slow, monstrous, deliberate.
Taller than the smithy, its body writhed with molten muscle and stone splitting under its own heat. White-hot fire curled upward from its head like a crown made to blind and burn.
It prowled through the burning street with slow purpose, scanning the chaos like a predator searching for a marked kill.
Searching.
Its fiery gaze brushed past my mother’s sobbing form, past Wilhelm gripping a beam, past my father standing firm despite the heat.
Then its fiery eyes fixed on me and stopped.
The monster froze, utterly still, as though the world had narrowed to a single point, me. Even the fire around it dimmed. In its burning core, something shifted, recognition, sharp and intelligent, like a verdict already decided.
Then it came for me.
It surged forward, a tidal wave made of heat and ruin. The cobblestones sagged beneath it, liquefying under its steps. The air itself shrieked, splitting under the heat. The sharp stench of my own hair burning hit my nose.
My body refused every command. My mind screamed move, but my limbs locked like carved granite.
“ELSBETH!” Father’s voice tore through the roar.
He slammed into me, shoving me hard enough to rip my feet off the ground.
I hit the ground and skidded, stone shredding my palms open.
I lifted my head in time to see the elemental close on him.
A whip of pure sun-bright flame snapped from its arm.
The strike landed with a wet, sizzling crack that made my stomach lurch.
Father’s body jerked violently—then fell like a dropped tool.
I crawled toward him, the world shrinking to the blood-slick stones between us.
He lay on his side, shirt gone, burned clean off. His chest was a charred wasteland, black, cracked open, glowing faintly like dying coals. Blood seeped from the burnt fissures, hitting the hot stone with a soft, awful hiss.
His hands, steady hands that shaped iron, were twisted into blackened claws.
His eyes were closed, lashes clumped with soot.
His chest trembled, barely a breath, a ghost of one.
He was breathing.
But he was dying.
Right in front of me.
Something inside me didn’t crack, it exploded.
Not grief. Grief whispers.
This was rage, bright, blinding and absolute.
My vision warped; sound shrank to a thin, piercing whine. The world collapsed to two things: my father’s blood, and the monster that put it there.
Pressure surged, like a dam ripping open inside my chest.
Magic didn’t surface. It erupted.
A crack of blue-white light split the air beside me, and the G-Pen snapped into existence, floating, trembling with murderous energy. It vibrated into a blur, humming like something eager to kill.
My fingers wrapped around it, ice-cold, fire-hot, impossible.
My arm moved without permission—one violent arc carving a circle through the air. Water answered.
The drawn lines flared alive, and a torrent of phantom water erupted, hammering the elemental’s legs. Steam detonated upward in a screaming plume. The monster stumbled.
Before steam even cleared, my hand slashed jagged angles into existence, ice.
Crystal spears exploded outward, hammering its torso. One drove deep into its molten shoulder with a glass-shattering crack, leaving a dark, steaming wound that refused to close.
It screamed… a grinding, metallic bellow that rattled the cobbles under my knees.
My pen carved a spiraling vortex, wind roaring to be freed.
The gust erupted like a newborn hurricane and immediately turned treacherous, fanning the creature’s flames into a devouring inferno. Burning debris tore loose, spiraling out to strike anyone still running. I didn’t care. Couldn’t.
I wasn’t thinking. There was only the pen, the blinding light, and the magic ripping through me in savage, uncontrollable waves. Shapes moved at the edges of my vision, people fleeing, mouths open in silent screams. A wave of steam blasted past me, and someone cried out. Their pain was a distant thing, a footnote to the roaring in my ears and the fire in my veins. The world was water, ice, wind, and the monster at the center of it all. My hand kept moving, carving fury into the air.
A wave of superheated steam blasted across the square, striking the well hard enough to split the stone lip. A woman screamed as boiling water splashed her leg. A man was flung off his feet by a gust reeking of lightning and ozone.
“She’s killing us!” a voice cracked somewhere in the chaos.
Roric stood rigid beside the smithy ruins—not watching the elemental at all, but staring at Elsbeth. Horror and awe twisted together on his face.
“She’s using three elements,” he whispered. “Three…”
Old Man Hemmel crouched behind an overturned cart, tracing frantic warding symbols with shaking hands.
“Demonic,” he gasped. “No human makes magic like that!”
Petter, the one who once shoved her into the mud—vomited onto the stones, staring not at the monster, but at the white-lit girl ripping the world open.
“Elsbeth! STOP!” Wilhelm forced himself through the howling crosswind. “You’ll kill yourself!”
He tried to reach me, the moment he stepped forward, the air threw him back. I felt it surge out of me like a scream I wasn’t aware I’d made.
Heat, steam, shards of ice, everything around me twisted into a violent storm, spinning so fast the world blurred. It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t skill. It was panic given shape, terror bursting out of me because I didn’t know what else to do.
But I couldn’t hear him.
I wanted to. I wanted someone to anchor me, to pull me back into my small, shaking body, but everything was muffled, distant, as if I’d sunk beneath dark water.
My chest hurt. My throat was tight. My hands trembled around the Pen.
I didn’t feel powerful, I felt lost.
I knew my eyes were glowing. I could see the light reflected in the broken pieces of the forge, cold blue-white, nothing like the warmth I wished I still had. The Pen pulsed in my grip like a second heartbeat, one that didn’t belong to me.
I wanted to let go.
I couldn’t.
The storm kept feeding on every terrified breath I took.
And for the first time since coming to this world, I wasn’t afraid of the villagers, or my father, or being useless.
I was afraid of myself.
Then, the world changed.
No sound. No flash.
Just pressure, vast, crushing, absolute.
The sky seemed to collapse into solid weight, pressing the entire village toward the earth.
Every scream strangled into silence mid-breath. The elemental’s fire halted, flame stiffening like painted light. People dropped to their knees, not in worship but because the sheer weight of the presence pinned them down like insects.
A figure materialized between me and the elemental—sudden, towering, undeniable.
Not the dream-lit guide.
Not the harmless old man from the stall.
This was a silhouette carved from the void itself, rimmed in the cold fire of stars on their dying breaths. Where a face ought to be were two spiraling vortices of light, ancient, assessing, merciless in their clarity. Reality bent around him; cobblestones beneath his feet glazed into black glass, and nearby flames curved away as though bowing.
The Fairy King raised one hand, almost lazily. A single flick, too small to justify the power it unleashed.
Every glowing circle around me, dozens, all spitting unstable magic, came apart like threads cut cleanly. The magic didn’t burst.
It simply died, snuffed out with terrifying gentleness.
The G-Pen shuddered in my hand, dimmed to ghost-glass, and dissolved into nothing.
The backlash slammed into me like being punched behind the ribs.
My legs folded before I even felt them buckle. Wilhelm lunged and caught me seconds before my skull hit stone.
I was breathing, barely, while dark blood seeped from my nose and welled at the corners of my eyes. Hairline cracks—thin, pale fractures like stressed porcelain—marred the skin along my wrists.
The Fairy King turned toward the elemental, and even frozen flames seemed to retreat from his gaze.
“You came to taste the foreign magic waking here,” he said, his voice resonating through stone and bone alike. “You have done so.”
The elemental rumbled, a low, uncertain vibration like metal cooling too fast.
“She wounded you,” The King continued. “A child. Untrained.”
He stepped forward, and the creature of fire recoiled instinctively.
“She is under my protection. Do you challenge that?”
The elemental hesitated, gaze shifting from its cracked, smoking wound, to my limp body, to the celestial force confronting it.
A low, resonant tone rolled out, not defiance, but acknowledgment.
“Then leave. the King commanded. “Carry that wound back with you. The next time you face her, she will not be helpless.”
The elemental bowed—an impossible, deeply wrong sight for a creature of flame and fury. Its body unraveled into drifting embers that the wind lifted and carried away.
Gone.
Leaving only a scorched scar on the stones and a fading heat in the air.
The crushing weight eased.
People gasped, coughed, broke into desperate sobs.
The Fairy King turned to face the village, his shape gentling at the edges, though none of his terrible majesty dimmed.
“I have been called by many names,” he said, and his voice reached every ear as if spoken directly into each skull. “Shaper of Songs. Weaver of Fates. In your oldest myths, your Fairy King. The one you named ‘colorless’ carries within her the Spark of Creation, the primal magic that wrote the laws of this world.”
He gestured toward me, limp in Wilhelm’s hold.
“With that spark, raw, untrained, and twisted by grief—she wounded a fire elemental.”
Disbelief rippled through the crowd. Eyes darted between the scorched earth and my blood-streaked face, unable to reconcile the two.
“But such power, left wild, will devour her. It will unspool her mind and tear her body apart.” She cannot stay. “She will come with me. She will learn control—and she will learn how to survive what approaches your world.”
A thin, trembling whisper rose from someone in the back.
“What… what is coming?”
The King’s glowing eyes swiveled toward the voice. “The Demon Lord felt her awakening the moment it sparked.” His Corrupted Creator, the one who fell to pride, will come for her. To twist her gift to his purpose, or to extinguish it entirely.”
A cold, absolute silence clamped down on the square.
The King’s attention shifted to my father, where blood had spread in a slow, widening circle beneath him.
“But before she departs,” the King murmured, his voice carrying a sorrow beyond centuries, “there is something she must face.”
Wilhelm hauled me upright. My legs buckled. The world tilted, its colors bleeding together, sounds coming from far away. I couldn't feel my own feet on the ground. All I truly saw was my father’s blood—dark, glossy, spreading across grey stone.
The Fairy King knelt before me, folding cosmic power into a shape that fit the shattered moment. “You forced more raw magic through your body in five minutes than a master mage shapes in an entire year,” he said, his voice humming like distant stars.
“Your body was not ready. But you survived. That is what matters.”
“Father…” The word scraped out of me like something broken.
“He lives,” the King answered, his star-lit eyes locking onto mine with grave intent. “But only for minutes. His life-thread is nearly severed.”
A cold, ruthless clarity speared through the haze in my skull. “I can save him.”
It wasn’t a question.
“You are the only one who can,” he said. “But we must move now.”
He rose and turned toward the temple, its dark spires etched against the dying glow of the fires.
“Come.”
I looked at Wilhelm. His face was bloodless, his eyes rimmed red, but his grip on my arm held firm. He gave a single, grim nod.
Together we started the slow, agonizing walk toward the temple, leaving the silent, broken village in our wake. The true ordeal—the saving, and the inevitable losing—waited inside those doors.
The villagers have witnessed Elsbeth's true power. Will they accept her now? And will her father's life be saved? Discover the outcome in the next chapter.
Let's meet again at the same time, same place next week.
