Chapter 14: Sanction

Anne, with the practiced grace of a seasoned actress, was well on her way to conquering the second, and arguably more crucial, half of her meticulously staged battle for public opinion. Reporters from the Merida Newsletter, their quills scratching furiously across parchment, clustered around her like bees to honey, diligently chronicling the Longueville family’s young mistress’s every gesture of approachability, every artfully crafted display of warm-hearted benevolence. They conveniently, and perhaps intentionally, omitted any mention of the sweating, grunting porters who had accompanied her grand carriage and were now, unseen and unthanked, toiling under the midday sun.

"A most joyous Saturday to you, Mademoiselle Longueville!" a particularly effusive journalist gushed, nearly tripping over her own feet in her eagerness.

It was then that the carefully orchestrated illusion shattered. An operative, dispatched by the shadowy masters of the talking turtledove and cunningly disguised as a humble local resident, made a sudden, jarring move as they ostensibly reached for the distributed supplies. They feigned to draw something from a concealed pocket, but it was the tell-tale, unnatural shimmer of magical energy, stark and cold, flowing from between their outstretched fingers that betrayed their true intent.

The plainclothes guard closest to Anne, a grim-faced woman whose every lineament bespoke a life dedicated to the deadly arts of assassination, reacted with the speed of a striking viper. One contingent of her unit, their movements a blur of deadly precision, instantly engaged the would-be attacker. Another, with equal swiftness, bundled the startled Anne into the nearest carriage.

Among the opulent convoy of carriages that House Longueville had so ostentatiously paraded into the Istapa district, one, though outwardly indistinguishable from its fellows, was a fortress on wheels – its frame specially reinforced, its panels imbued with enchantments of resilience. This, a deliberate deception designed to confound and mislead potential adversaries, now, with a chilling irony, threatened to become Anne’s gilded cage, a prelude to her own meticulously planned murder.

In Anne’s perception, the world suddenly tilted on its axis. A nearby carriage, identical to her own, inexplicably lurched skyward, as if snatched by an invisible, giant hand. An instant later, her own vision blurred, the ground falling away with a sickening lurch. A levitation spell, insidiously activated through the arcane Principle of Similarity, had seized her carriage, sending it, with her trapped inside, soaring into the unforgiving sky. The guards who had been aboard, their faces masks of terror, were flung out like discarded dolls; their personal magical shields, no match for the brutal impact, shattered upon the unforgiving earth. Then, in the fleeting, horrifying final moments of their lives, they saw it – a spinning, spectral, pale white cross, wreathed in an aura of deathly cold, descending from the heavens with an inexorable, terrifying grace.

The gruesome aftermath – the dismembered corpses, the crimson spatter of blood upon the dusty ground, the raw, untamed display of lethal magic – ignited a tidal wave of mass panic. Fortunately, the wide, open expanse of the plaza prevented a deadly, trampling stampede. People fled, their faces contorted in terror, their movements clumsy and uncoordinated, but largely, and miraculously, unharmed, from the now accursed, blood-soaked ground.

A rotating, pallid white cross, its edges razored with malevolent energy, hurtled through the air towards Anne’s still-ascending carriage. With a desperation born of mortal terror, Anne invoked a teleportation spell, the incantation a frantic whisper on her lips. In a dizzying flash of displaced air and shimmering light, she found herself back on solid ground.

Upon landing, her rigorous, lifelong training screamed at her to immediately cast a second teleportation spell, a short-range, tactical jump to buy precious, life-saving seconds – seconds she desperately needed to summon the formidable Pierre Corneille to her side. The intricate weaving of a summoning spell, she knew, demanded both time and a prodigious expenditure of mana, the cost directly proportional to the power and resilience of the individual being called. To wrench Corneille from wherever he might be, to draw him across the intervening miles to her aid, would take Anne approximately thirty agonizingly long seconds – an eternity in the brutal, unforgiving calculus of magical combat. And the effort, she knew, would utterly, and irrevocably, deplete her own mana reserves, leaving her as vulnerable and defenseless as a newborn babe, incapable of casting even the simplest, most rudimentary cantrip.

At that critical, life-or-death juncture, her gaze was drawn upwards, towards the carriage’s horrifying, projected point of impact. The small, innocent child to whom she had so theatrically, so cynically, bestowed a piece of candy, was now wailing silently, her tiny face a mask of pure, uncomprehending terror, unable to find her mother in the swirling chaos. The child stood directly, and fatally, in the path of the falling, multi-ton wreckage. The cold, inescapable shadow of death loomed ever closer, ready to claim the terrified infant.

"...This," Anne whispered, a strange, almost detached, surprise in her own voice, "is so very unlike me."

She cast another teleportation spell, the world dissolving and reforming around her in a dizzying instant. She appeared beside the little girl a mere heartbeat before the carriage, with a sound like the roar of a dying god, crashed to the earth. Scooping the child into her arms, she threw herself into a desperate, tumbling roll, a chaotic, ungraceful maneuver that ended only when they slammed, with bone-jarring force, into the unyielding stone of a nearby wall.

Despite the partial cushioning effect of her personal, magically-generated shield, a wave of sickening dizziness, of stars exploding behind her eyes, washed over Anne. This momentary, yet critical, disorientation delayed her next intended teleportation spell by a fatal fraction of a second – precisely 0.7 seconds, to be exact. And in that infinitesimal sliver of time, the intricate, delicate tapestry of events irrevocably, and disastrously, shifted.

A sword, wreathed in an aura of dark, malevolent energy, hissed through the air, shattering her already weakened shield as if it were spun glass, and buried itself, with a sickening thud, deep into the flesh of her calf. The sword’s ornate pommel then, with an unnatural, alchemical fluidity, transmuted, shifting its form, its very substance, into a heavy, unyielding lead ball. The sudden, unexpected shift in weight, the anchoring of this dense, unmagical mass to her own body, disrupted the delicate, intricate energies of her intended teleportation, causing the spell to sputter and fail.

Ignoring the searing, white-hot agony that lanced up her leg, Anne thrust out a trembling hand, unleashing a torrent of raw, unrefined fire – a desperate, primal blast of pure, untamed elemental fury – to counter the onrushing, spectral, pale white cross.

"Sanction magic!" Anne hissed, her voice a venomous rasp through gritted teeth. "A former witch of the accursed Justice domain… No," her eyes narrowed with a dawning, horrified recognition, "it should be said, the exclusive, forbidden magic of the thrice-damned terrorist organization, the 'White Order.' I never, in my darkest nightmares, imagined you would dare to crawl back to Merida!"

"Today," a voice replied, as cold and devoid of emotion as the winter wind sweeping across a forgotten grave, "is a most… auspicious day. Only you, Anne de Longueville, shall die."

A tall, imposing woman strode forward, her movements imbued with an almost regal, if undeniably sinister, grace. The mirrored mask she wore, a featureless, polished expanse that reflected the chaos around her in distorted, nightmarish patterns, was marred by a single, jagged, lightning-bolt-shaped crack that snaked across its otherwise pristine surface. The disparate figures who had previously posed as a fawning reporter, a disgruntled local woman, common laborers, and even some of Anne’s own household guards, now coalesced behind her, their forms seeming to shimmer and shift, reforming, solidifying, into the terrifying, black-robed figures of powerful, battle-hardened witches.

"Sabina Curias," Anne said, a bitter, almost hysterical, laugh escaping her bloodless lips. "To think… to think I would be personally sanctioned, judged and condemned, by a former Rex Nemorensis herself. This… this may indeed be a permanent stain upon my family’s honor, a blemish that will never be erased. Yet," a strange, almost defiant, light flickered in her eyes, "it is, perhaps, a fittingly dramatic, a suitably grand, end to my own, rather brief, existence. Far better, surely, than to perish ignominiously at the hands of some… insignificant, nameless underling."

Sabina raised a slender, gloved arm. An invisible, irresistible force, a manifestation of her immense, almost godlike, power, peeled the small, whimpering child from Anne’s protective embrace and deposited her, gently but firmly, in a designated safe area, far from the epicenter of the impending conflict. Her four formidable retainers, their faces hidden behind identical, featureless masks, raised their right hands in perfect, chilling unison. With a single, synchronized, slashing gesture, four shimmering lines of raw, incandescent power converged, forming a luminous, ethereal cross that pulsed with a menacing, otherworldly light before the imposing figure of Sabina.

Sabina’s long, elegant fingers brushed lightly across the surface of the ethereal cross. Crimson script, like words written in freshly spilled blood, blazed into existence upon its translucent surface, a damning, irrefutable litany detailing Anne de Longueville’s every alleged crime, every transgression, every perceived sin. A heavy, dark wooden gavel, seemingly materializing from the very shadows of her voluminous sleeve, fell into her outstretched hand. With a powerful, almost ritualistic, and undeniably final, blow, she struck the glowing cross before her. The cross, with a low, ominous hum, began to glide forward, flat and inexorable, an unstoppable engine of judgment and retribution.

Anne desperately, frantically, gathered her remaining fire magic, her personal shield already flickering back into a semblance of existence, though she knew, with a cold, sinking certainty that settled like a stone in the pit of her stomach, that it would be utterly, laughably, useless. She could not possibly hope to withstand a "Sanction" personally delivered by a former Rex Nemorensis, a witch of Sabina Curias’s legendary, almost mythical, power. In the hands of other, lesser witches, "Sanction" was a potent, but ultimately conventional, spell – one that could, with sufficient skill and power, be countered, deflected, perhaps even reversed. But in Sabina’s grasp, it was not merely a spell; it was a fundamental, inexorable mechanism of reality itself, its power absolute, its judgment final.

Nevertheless, Anne, her spirit unbowed even in the face of certain annihilation, resolved to fight, to meet her end not with a whimper, but with a defiant roar. She shaped her dwindling fire into a searing, incandescent spear, launching it with all her remaining strength at the advancing "Cross." But the fiery projectile, upon striking the "Cross’s" ethereal surface, shattered into a thousand dying, incandescent fragments, its power utterly negated. Undeterred, she then poured every last erg of her remaining fire magic into her shield, desperately hoping to create a concussive, explosive blast that would, at the very least, hurl both herself and the accursed "Cross" in opposite directions, buying her perhaps a few more precious, meaningless seconds of life. But as the "Cross" tore through her shield with contemptuous ease, the brilliant, desperate sparks of her defiance, like dying embers in a sudden, unseasonal snowstorm, were swiftly, and irrevocably, extinguished before her horrified eyes.

The "Sanction" was upon her, a wall of cold, white, unyielding judgment. Against its stark, pallid luminescence, the crimson script detailing her supposed sins burned with an unbearable, accusatory intensity. Anne closed her eyes, a single, defiant tear tracing a path down her dirt-stained cheek, bracing herself for the inevitable, obliterating impact. Instead of the searing pain of annihilation, however, she heard a dull, resounding, almost metallic, clang. A soft, warm, golden light, impossibly, miraculously, seeped through her closed eyelids, bathing her shattered world in a hazy, ethereal, orange-red glow.

"Saving a life, it seems, earns one a considerable number of bonus points, Mademoiselle Longueville," a familiar, gruff voice rumbled beside her. "My considered opinion of you, I must confess, has somewhat… improved."

Corneille, his face a mask of grim determination, emerged from behind the crumbling remnants of the wall where Anne had taken her desperate, last stand. His shield, the legendary Sulina, was pressed firmly, unyieldingly, against the advancing, ethereal "Cross." He pushed forward, his powerful legs driving him onward, his heavy, steel-shod boots leaving deep, crater-like impressions in the unforgiving earth, his terrifying, almost inhuman, brute strength forcing the magical construct, inch by agonizing inch, backward.

A shower of pale white energy fragments, like a rain of shattered ice, fell around them. Sabina’s form blurred, a streak of black vengeance, as she instantly, and with a predator’s lethal grace, engaged Corneille. Behind her, her four masked witches fanned out, their movements fluid and practiced, taking up strategic positions to gain a better field of observation, and, more importantly, to guard against any potential, and likely devastating, area-of-effect attacks Corneille might choose to unleash.

Anne’s eyes snapped open, her face a mask of stunned, disbelieving relief. Wincing in agony, she wrenched the embedded sword from her calf, the pain a white-hot lance that momentarily stole her breath. In the mere two seconds that had elapsed since Corneille’s impossible intervention, the very air around them had vibrated seventeen times with the sheer, concussive force of their cataclysmic blows.

She looked up, her vision still swimming, to see Sabina wielding a solidified cross of condensed, malevolent energy as a brutal, close-quarters melee weapon in her right hand, while another, identical cross, remotely controlled by a subtle flick of her left wrist, spun and whirled through the air like a deadly, ethereal buzzsaw, constantly seeking to strike Corneille from the flank or rear. Corneille’s sword and shield, Gryphon and Sulina, danced in his powerful grip, a blur of silver and gold, constantly, seamlessly, shifting between offense and defense – the shield a battering ram, a bludgeon of irresistible force, the sword a flickering, lightning-fast blade, parrying, deflecting, seeking an opening in Sabina’s relentless assault. Though their furious exchange had, as yet, yielded no decisive, crippling blow, the very ground beneath their feet and the crumbling facades of the surrounding buildings began to crack and groan, to splinter and buckle, under the sheer, unadulterated, concussive force of their colliding, otherworldly energies.

Initially, it was clear, Sabina, with her superior magical power and centuries of combat experience, held the upper hand, her attacks relentless, her defenses impenetrable. But then, as a brilliant, almost blinding, azure light began to suffuse Corneille’s blade, an ethereal luminescence that pulsed with an ancient, divine power, the delicate, deadly tide of battle began, almost imperceptibly at first, to turn.

The air thrummed, a low, guttural growl, with the thirty-seventh earth-shattering impact. In that fleeting instant, Corneille, his senses honed to a razor’s edge, seized upon the first, almost infinitesimal, flaw in Sabina’s otherwise perfect defense. The golden gryphon emblazoned upon the hilt of his sword seemed to roar, to spread its mighty, ethereal wings, and a furious, localized gale, a miniature hurricane of focused, divine fury, erupted from the enchanted blade, deflecting the spectral cross that was, at that very moment, hurtling towards his exposed back. In the same, fluid motion, the point of his azure-wreathed sword drove, straight and true as an arrow loosed from a master’s bow, directly for Sabina Curias’s vulnerable throat.

Sabina, her reflexes honed by centuries of conflict, flicked the solidified cross in her hand with lightning speed to parry the deadly thrust. But as the two weapons met, not with a clang of steel on energy, but with a sickening, grinding sound, a network of cobalt-blue fissures, like cracks in flawed ice, spiderwebbed across the surface of her magical construct. These were not mere physical cracks, Anne realized with a gasp of dawning understanding, but tangible manifestations of deep, structural flaws, of inherent, fatal weaknesses within Sabina’s own, supposedly perfect, magical creation. The cross, with a sound like shattering crystal, exploded into a thousand dissipating fragments of pale, white light. Sabina, her masked face unreadable, swiftly, almost contemptuously, reformed the magical construct in her hand. But what had once been an unbreakable, indomitable weapon now seemed as fragile, as brittle, as common glass beneath Corneille’s relentless, divinely-empowered assault. The air no longer trembled and groaned with the force of their clashes; instead, deep, angry gouges, stark, brutal marks of desperate retreat and relentless pursuit, scarred the ravaged earth around them.

Sabina, her breath coming in ragged gasps, drew a wicked-looking short sword from a concealed sheath at her belt, deflecting an oncoming, decapitating slash from Corneille’s Gryphon and using the jarring momentum of the impact to leap backward, creating a precious few feet of distance between herself and her implacable, divinely-favored adversary.

She stared, with an expression that might have been horrified disbelief, at the azure-glowing sword in Corneille’s hand, muttering, her voice a low, incredulous whisper, "So… so that is its true nature. The Minerva’s blessing upon this accursed blade… it is 'Weakness Detection.' After a certain number of contacts, a specific resonance… the inherent vulnerabilities, the fatal flaws, of the object struck are directly, and irrevocably, revealed. Physical weapons, forged of mundane steel, might still stand a sliver of a chance, might endure for a time. But energy constructs, weapons woven from pure magic… before your sword, they become utterly, laughably, fragile."

"Be advised, Mistress!" one of Sabina’s retainers, her voice amplified by a subtle enchantment, called out from her vantage point. "The gale that erupted from Corneille’s sword was a cunning feint, a calculated diversion! The wind itself, we surmise, was generated by a single-use, and likely exceedingly rare, magical artifact!"

"Be advised!" another intoned, her voice equally clear and carrying. "Our adversary, Corneille, has not, as yet, seen fit to employ any of his known Hathor divine arts in this engagement! He is, without a doubt, deliberately, and most frustratingly, holding back his most potent, and likely decisive, trump cards!"

"Be advised!" a third voice chimed in. "No discernible mana fluctuations have been detected emanating from the person of Corneille! He is, therefore, to be definitively excluded from the ranks of active magic users!"

"Be advised!" the fourth and final subordinate concluded their rapid-fire assessment. "There is a discernible, and potentially exploitable, difference in Corneille’s reaction speed and defensive capabilities between his left and right sides! His offensive and defensive strategies consistently reflect this asymmetry! It is, therefore, logically surmised that his left eye possesses a significant, and perhaps even debilitating, visual impairment!"

Sabina’s four masked subordinates, their voices a chorus of cold, analytical observation, relayed their findings regarding their formidable opponent. Corneille, seemingly unfazed by their public dissection of his strengths and weaknesses, executed a graceful, almost contemptuous, flourish with his glowing sword. "Such… tiresome, and ultimately futile, scrutiny."

"You are, without a doubt, a most… captivating… specimen of a man, Monsieur Corneille," Sabina said, her voice once more a silken, predatory purr. "Once we have… apprehended you… and brought you back to our… more secure… stronghold, they will, I assure you, most thoroughly… and perhaps even enjoyably… examine… the precise nature of the 'sin' that so clearly, and so fascinatingly, resides deep within you."

Sabina retreated a few more paces, her movements fluid and deliberate. The black-robed witches of the White Order, with a practiced, almost telepathic, coordination, reformed their deadly ranks around her. Her four primary subordinates, after each contributing a single, potent slash of their own power to their leader, moved with a terrifying, synchronized grace to intercept Corneille, to buy their mistress precious seconds. Sabina, meanwhile, first hurled her captured short sword with unerring accuracy, disrupting Anne’s furtive, desperate attempt to once more activate a teleportation spell. Then, her eyes blazing with an unholy light from behind her cracked mask, she began to invoke the dreaded Sanction magic once more.

"Be careful, Monsieur Corneille!" Anne cried out, her voice hoarse with pain and desperation. "In Sabina Curias’s hands, the Sanction magic is not merely a spell! It is a fundamental mechanism of reality itself! Its power, its scale, its devastating potential… it is directly, and terrifyingly, proportional to the perceived crimes of its designated target…!" Her voice trailed off, her words choked by a sudden, suffocating wave of pure, unadulterated terror. Her vision, already blurred by pain and exhaustion, suddenly, inexplicably, darkened, as if a vast, ominous storm cloud had blotted out the very sun. She looked up, her heart lurching in her chest, to see a colossal, spectral cross, impossibly vast, obscuring the entirety of the sky above them. Its surface was a dense, roiling tapestry of crimson, blood-red script, a million accusations, a million condemnations, all writhing and coalescing together, like a sentient, malevolent blood rain, poised to fall and obliterate everything beneath.

The witches of the White Order, their attack momentarily forgotten, paused, their masked faces turned upwards, staring in stunned, disbelieving disbelief first at the impossibly powerful Corneille, then back at their formidable leader. Sabina herself, it was clear, seemed utterly, almost comically, taken aback by the sheer, cataclysmic magnitude of the destructive construct she had apparently, and perhaps unintentionally, created. She stared at Corneille, who was now, to her further astonishment, completely suffused, almost consumed, by a raging, blood-red aura of unimaginable power.

Corneille had finally, and with devastating effect, unleashed his Hathor divine art. But Sabina, to her eternal regret, would have no opportunity to observe its full, terrifying manifestation. The sudden, cataclysmic appearance of the immense, judgment-laden cross in the sky above had acted as an undeniable, irresistible summons, compelling every witch in the Istapa district, whether they had been observing the unfolding conflict from the relative safety of the sidelines, or merely feigning a blissful, self-serving ignorance, to join the escalating battle. She could already sense, with a growing sense of dread, several incredibly powerful, and undeniably hostile, energy signatures rapidly, and purposefully, approaching their position.

The colossal "Cross" in the sky, its purpose unfulfilled, its judgment unrendered, began to waver, to shimmer, to disintegrate into a billion dissipating motes of pale, white light. The witches of the White Order, their mission clearly, and disastrously, compromised, made the only sane, strategic choice available to them: they chose to retreat. Corneille, his face an unreadable mask, did not pursue. He merely, with a visible effort of will, allowed the raging, blood-red aura of his Hathor divine art to slowly, reluctantly, recede. He then walked over to the injured, and utterly dumbfounded, Anne de Longueville, removed the sinister, eye-adorned ring from his finger, and gently, almost tenderly, placed it beside her on the bloodstained, ravaged earth.