Curselock

Chapter 244: Renewed

Four days later, as the boys and Gelo continued through the wilderness to the first of the two Tears, Leland felt something stir inside his Legacy.

“Hold up guys,” he said, pulling out his grimoire. Opening the newest page, he found an updated contract.

Cursed contract of the Lord of Magic (Renewed):

Use: Gain access to the spell Dual Mind Resonance.

Dual Mind Resonance: While active, your brain splits in two, offering dual thought processes.

Spell’s duration is limited by proficiency and base contract duration.

Return: Contact the Lord of Prismatic Evolution, the Lord of the First Druid, and the Lord of the Zephyr. Speak with them and attempt to end all of their Legacies’ inquiry into the mana being released by the worldly Tear. Specifically, put a stop to the raids on the Lord of Magic’s Legacies.

Note: The Lord of Magic understands that this contract favors you in many ways. He is trusting in you not to take advantage of that.

This contract is now active.

He hesitated, a churning pulling at his guts. Far and away, this contract was the one he dreaded the most. It was one thing to head blindly into a strange unnatural storm or assist a Legacy of Nature to destroy a Harbinger construct, but to stand before other Lords and barter for them to stop doing something?

He just knew he wasn’t going to make many friends doing this.

But there was no time like the present. “I’ll be right back,” he said to his group before muttering, “Lord of the Zephyr, I humbly wish to strike a contract with you.”

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Why did he choose that Lord out of the three? The reason was simple. Zephyrs were supposed to be gentle, right?

After traversing the Void, Leland appeared in the Lord’s domain… and was blinded by the wind. Like an invisible fist punching him in the nose and eyes, he somersaulted backward, heels over head. Distantly, he felt the wind die back a bit, but the damage was already done. With a flick of his wrist, and the ever prevalent Lord of Nature contract, he tapped himself with a green-glowing finger.

Relief was instant, yet the blood soaking his shirt was not. He groaned at the sight. “Did I just get punched by the wind?” he whispered to himself, his voice catching and filling the area.

It was then Leland looked around. He stood before a temple of sorts, a massive structure made of white and sandy stone. Golden inlays rested comfortably on the many pillars keeping the roof in place, the wind causing no sway or flex. A staircase sat before him and above that a doorway leading to an amphitheater.

As the wind pushed at Leland’s back, he understood what the Lord of the Zephyr wanted, and he entered the amphitheater. Many times had he entered a Lord’s domain and many times had he been surprised by the façade the place took.

This was not one of those times.

Sure, the place looked nice. The stonework was well made and the scale of the area opened many possibilities. But the amphitheater reminded him of a different amphitheater his parents took him to when he was young. The event was a grudge match between two pit fighters. And even though magic was set in place so that they couldn’t actually kill each other, he remembered his mom being mortified by how much blood was spilled.

Apparently ten year old Leland was too innocent to see such a thing.

His dad thought it was awesome, though.

This place was like that – an oblong shaped area with seats trailing up a sloped curved. And while the one from his memory was built so long ago the stone had cracked and weathered away, this one looked brand new.

Where the fighters might do battle stood a woman whose hair mixed with the wind. She smiled blazingly at Leland, her piercing eyes like cotton balls or clouds. Wearing armor that was slick with wind, the Lord of the Zephyr stood tall and firm. Hands outstretched and clasped together, she pushed her cane into the sandy arena all the while keeping it perfectly in line with her nose.

“Cool armor,” Leland said, his voice carrying over the wind. “Very… chic?”

As the woman raised an eyebrow at the, what she considered to be, an infant, Leland couldn’t help slightly blushing at his comment. Her armor was made of wind. And it was cool looking. And it somehow, despite obscuring the true armor underneath, looked stylish.

“Apologies,” Leland muttered, his voice still making it to her. “I do not know much about style. M-my girlfriend has mocked me about this a few times, actually.”

Gah, he cursed at himself. Now he was bringing Sybil up to a Lord he’d just met? What was wrong with him?

“Charming,” the woman finally spoke, her voice oozing with a timeless grace. A sort of cadence that made flowers bloom and people stare.

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Leland, however, flinched slightly because her voice emanated from everywhere, almost like she herself was the wind.

“Hmm. Right. Lord of the Zephyr, my name is Leland Silver and I’ve come today to speak with you on two matters.”

“Leland Silver,” she tasted the name, her hands still clasped tightly on her cane, “Legacy of Curses. Grandson to the Calamity, son of two Legacies of magic. Acquaintance of the Lord of Magic.”

She looked him dead in the eye. “Or should I say, errand boy to the Lord of Magic.”

Leland made himself tear his gaze from her hair and his thoughts wondering how it blended into the air like it did. Instead, he wondered how she knew he was here on request for the Lord of Magic. Moreover, what did that mean for their negotiations?

“I like to think of myself as a commissioned broker.”

“Uh huh. And what, pray tell, might you be brokering?”

“The Tears. Or better yet, the raids from your Legacies against the Lord of Magic’s solidified claim—”

“The Lord of Magic holds no claims over a new world. That would be like me saying I have claim over the wind on the moon!”

Leland paused. While he understood what she was saying, he still had to argue in favor of the Lord of Magic. “He holds no claim, you’re right. Allow me to rephrase. Please stop raiding innocent Legacies who are just trying to understand this new world we are living in. Or rather, new worlds we are living in.”

The Zephyr Lord’s lip pulled back at the corner. She stared Leland down, but there was no malice in the gesture. Was she actually considering his words? He didn’t know. But how could she not? Everyone wanted a piece of the new worlds, that was obvious. But killing, maiming, or hurting each other for them? Mana was never destroyed. There’s no point fighting over something that will never run out.

But at the same time, he also understood it was a gold rush. An unprecedented event that would set the course of the world for centuries, or longer, to come. Why did the Lord of Magic get to dictate what everyone did with the new mana first?

The real question though, was why he accepted this contract to begin with. Again, his stomach churned. This wasn’t what he wished to be doing with his power. Brokering deals between Lords? Why couldn’t they just talk to each other?

The Lord spoke up after a few moments. “What my Legacies do is not my concern.”

“Even if they harm people just like them?”

“Again, it is not my concern.”

“Then you shouldn’t be a Lord.”

The words slipped his lips before he could think about them. But as he watched both of the Lord of the Zephyr’s eyebrows raise, her stoic face hardened into a brick, Leland straightened his back and sealed his own emotions.

He was right, in this regard, that, for a fact, he knew. It was a question he’d had since way back in the port city of Shoutwell. Back then, the Sightless Cult had invaded, and innocent people were being wrapped into their ranks as pawns to be sacrificed. He especially thought of the Moonless Lord, the Lord who had no idea his Legacy was harming people in such a way, the Lord who gave him the tools to dismantle the cult’s clutch on the city.

But also the same Lord just said, “kill my murderous Legacy and be done with it.” It wasn’t verbatim, but he still had a contract to kill other Moonless Legacies who he found to be in similar situations.

Lords just didn’t care. To not know one of your followers was the scum of the earth? Witches? Murderers? Cult leaders?

He was glad he knew Gelo and was there for her ascension. She had asked him what a Lord was like, and he had told her. But he had also said not every Lord was like his perfect example.

Only a breath had passed from when he spoke out of turn. Leland felt he needed to patch things up or double down. He chose the latter.

“What’s the point of being a Lord if you can’t properly be a Lord? Your Legacies are your legacies. They are you. They are supposed to represent what you hold near and dear. And yet, you turn your back to them even when they are hurting people? They are raiding other people. But you have the gall to express that’s not your concern.”

Leland spun on his heel. “I’d like to leave now. If that is going to be your attitude to an actual problem, then I see no realm in which I could ever get you to stop.”

And yet, he didn’t appear in the Void. He turned back around.

“Childish, aren’t you?” the Lord of the Zephyr asked. “Answer me this question, Leland Silver. What does the Lord of Magic want with all of this new mana? Why should he get all of it?”

Leland didn’t know the answer. He didn’t need to. “I don’t know. But I do know that more Tears are opening every day. Tears that lead into the same, mana filled world. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why, when there is plenty of gold to go around, people would be fighting over one vein.”

He put his hand on his chest and teetered between the balls of his feet and his heels, “To me, raiding someone in this situation doesn’t seem like a grab for a scarce resource. To me, it seems like sabotage. And to me, I believe that the Lords of our world, in this troubling time, should be setting an example and showing their people that fighting over something so abundant is the wrong thing to do.”

She let him finish his little rant. Then lifted her hand from where it rested on her cane. Before Leland could figure out what was about to happen, he was cast away, back into the Void.

And in those few minutes between the Void and the real world, all Leland could do was stew in annoyance and anger. And when he arrived back to his friends, he realized he had two more Lords to contact over this matter.

“Woah,” Jude said, studying his friend.

To everyone else, only a fraction of a second had passed since he announced he’d “be right back.” Though, to everyone, it was very easy to tell he had just been elsewhere. He was red in the face, glued into a scowl, and was almost stomping around. Not to mention the dried blood on his shirt where the wind had punched him.

“You okay there Leals?”

He spun, finding Jude. With an exhale, he muttered, “If you ever meet a Legacy of the Zephyr, don’t trust them to be noble or nice.”

But little did he know, across the world, those same Legacies were packing up and leaving for greener pastures on the advice from their Champion. A Champion who had not spoken with their Lord for some years, until today.