Plague of Spells by Bruce R. Cordell Page A

more to front and center. It was maddening. He had to get free!
    He wrenched his body again, sucking in his breath against the hurt. And again. Each time he tensed and thrust with his arms and legs, he gained a sliver of additional clearance. Each effort was accompanied with a sound not unlike splintering ice. With unflappable determination, the man struggled in the grip of the strange substance.
    When his right arm broke through, extricating himself from the remaining brittle, honeycomb-like stuff suddenly seemed an actual possibility instead of a wild hope.
    Finally, the man wrenched completely free. A powder of greenish material still clung to his body.
    He examined his erstwhile prison, cradling his left arm in his right. He’d been encrusted in a cocoon-like material thrust from the earth. It wasn’t mineral, or at least, if it was, it was particularly brittle. The portion from which he’d freed himself was a hollow space, still partly molded to the shape of his body.
    The man looked around and saw he stood on a grassy plain. Here and there, other mineral encrustations broke to the surface, rising only a few feet in most cases. A few spires were larger, and reached dozens of feet into the morning light. Between the strange outcrops, prairie grass waved to the western horizon.
    A forest, apparently partly dead of some blight, lay to the south. Skeletons of trees still remained mostly vertical, though newer growth was thick beneath the dead canopy. An ocean of saplings reached up through old, dry underbrush. The man was surprised a wildfire hadn’t cleared out the detritus already. Rain and lightning seemed particularly thick in that direction. He wondered if he would witness a lightning strike touch off a blaze even as he watched.
    He returned his gaze to the strange outcrops nearer at hand. At first the man thought the extrusions must be quite old. He saw dozens of instances where greenish spires had cracked and collapsed. Other outcrops, like the one he’d just emerged from, had weathered and broken into fragments.
    Of course, as brittle as the mass he had emerged from had proved, perhaps the extrusions were not actually that old, in the geological sense.
    He stood in place and slowly rotated, looking for something or someone recognizable. His own name seemed just on the tip of his tongue… but he couldn’t dredge it up.
    He looked east to the line of the horizon. Something in the texture of the landscape, the color of the sky, a scent in the air seemed familiar…
    Bumps prickled across his arms and back as if with a chill. Something terrible had happened there. A monstrous calamity—
    The man suddenly remembered.
    Raidon Kane remembered.
    His breath came harsh. His eyes tried to spin in his skull. Nausea threatened to bend him over.
    Raidon clapped his hands to his brow, the pain in his left elbow nothing in that moment.
    The world had ended. How could he have forgotten?
    The fire. The pillar of blue fire had reached up over the horizon.
    He saw again the pillar’s fat crown of molten sapphire, tumbling and boiling upward. Closing his eyes merely brought the memory into sharper focus.
    And the blast! That awful, land-erasing storm front that had swept out from the burning spire.
    He remembered horrors: His horse, stumbling and disappearing in the azure turbulence. The woman who’d grown wings of fire, only to be incinerated. The awful, twining hair pulling a goblin’s head along the ground— His amulet! It had burned away.
    The wind tousled his hair, bringing scents of spring flowers and grass.
    “By the Ten Tenants, have I gone insane?” bellowed Raidon, his voice hoarse.
    He closed his eyes. He calmed his breathing. A monk of Xiang Temple did not comport himself thusly. Raidon searched for his mental regimen. He was a master of meditation. Images of a pillar of blue fire could not haunt him if he did not wish it.
    He visualized his legs, his arms, his head, and that immaterial part of himself that