Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-Adventurers — Wizard who only had time to prepare one spell. But it's a good one
"She's scaring me again," the berserker says.
"Aye?" The archer leans very carefully, just enough to peer around the edge of one of the roofless and abandoned keep's windows. "Not the five hundred demons outside, contract-bound to wait until the hour the moon reaches its peak before they burst in, slaughter us, eat our corpses, and take our souls to the Hell of Burning Hammers?"
"She's closer," the berserker says.
The archer turns her head and takes an equally careful look at the wizard. It's almost an hour since Malia, businesslike, tapped out a line of powder that glowed in the dark onto a borrowed metal vambrace, ("It had better be metal. And you'd better wash it thoroughly afterwards,") snorted it, screamed, and coiled into a dangerous yogic pretzel to repeatedly fold and unfold a small square of paper into series of shapes, swearing continuously and with shocking novelty.
"That's how she opened the Vault of Lions," the archer says. "That worked out."
"I didn't like it," the berserker says.
The piece of paper in Malia's hands, as her rapid fingers return it to a flat square, is now twice the size along each edge as when she began.
"You can't bring two wizards," the archer says. "They fight like little bitches, and it was her or Tunnock. You'd rather have Tunnock, against a demon army?"
"No," the berserker says, and looks at his boots, abashed, for just a second. "We never got into this kind of trouble when we had Tunnock, though," he adds, in a lower voice.
Good wizards, true, are a blessing and a curse. They watch her for a few seconds.
"You know where you are, with a fireball," the berserker mutters, eventual and reluctant.
"On fire," the archer agrees.
"I never even heard of her spells."
"I think nobody ever heard of hers."
There are wizards and wizards. The kind that adventurers come into contact with, generally, they have a handful of tricks from the well-known repertoire. At the high end, they've managed to craft a single original spell, a treacherous horror of unknowable capability.
Malia knows dozens, and none of them are familiar: Reynold's Homocarbonosis. Spacecrux. Liminal Hour. Three Through Four. Claustrophagy. Logophoresis. Malia is, quite possibly, a lunatic. Malia is going to explode one day, you just know it, and maybe it'll be literal and maybe it'll be metaphorical, and neither will be pretty at all.
The wizard starts to laugh, a thin, dry-mouthed cackle. "I need a piece of wood," she says, still folding. "Big. A log. Or a bundle of smaller wood? And somebody's spare shirt."
"This sounds creative," the berserker whispers, with a hard-earned dread of the word.
"Five hundred demons," the archer sighs. "Come on, there were some staved-in doors back there."