Chris and I spent the next few minutes looking out for trucks trying to park at the loading dock. No one showed up. Since it had been clear for a while and I was getting a bit bored, I curiously tried the personnel door next to the open dock. It was locked. That was going to be a problem. I waited just out of sight from the open dock, but still within my range of hearing. I only heard a distant forklift.
I walked back around the corner of the building adjacent to the warehouse, where Chris was standing watch. I pointed at the open truck dock and said to him, "I am going to go in now. The door is locked and I bet I can unlock it from the inside."
"Why?" Chris said.
"It is going to take me a bit of time to climb up that semi-truck entrance," I said. "We're going to need to move fast if they need help."
"Makes sense. How can you walk right up to the place like it's no big deal?"
"If you act like you belong then people will ignore you. You have not seen Sarah's signal yet, right?"
"Nope."
The concrete sloped downward on the approach to the dock. It would need to climb up the four feet gap to get into the warehouse that way. Such a climb was doable, but it would be very annoying. I judged it would not be a huge expenditure of arcane energy, so I used a bit of magic to form a few narrow blocks of ice to act as stairs. To give me a bit more friction, I scooped up some loose stones and sand from the edge of the ramp then tossed it across the blocks.
"What are you doing?" Chris whispered.
"I don't want to slip on them," I replied with a shrug.
Preparing myself for a confrontation with a warehouse worker, I took a deep breath and clambered up the temporary stairs. Darting my head back and forth, I checked both sides of the entrance. Fortunately, it was clear. After waving at Chris to indicate that he should follow me, I walked over to the exit door. It had a simple deadbolt turn-piece above the push-bar. Unlocking it allowed the door to easily open with a push. Considering that this was likely some sort of crime, I quickly wiped down the spots I touched with my blouse's sleeve. The traffic areas were helpfully marked with yellow tape on the floor with text saying, "FORKLIFTS ONLY". Despite the distant hum of electric forklifts running around, I did not see another person.
Looking for the closest cover, I found a desk surrounded by cubicle walls and covered in cardboard boxes. It was along the outer wall and outside the forklift lanes. The desk did not reveal anything strange as I searched. There were lists of inventory items, work orders, and delivery orders with completed dates. The inventory lists were extremely generic; they did not even list what the items were. After I dug around a bit, I began to wonder where Chris was. He should have been right behind me. In a sudden panic, I climbed onto the desk to get my head over the top of the cubicle walls; my head darted around as I tried to spot him. I could hear forklifts moving, but the rows of filled shelving blocked my sight lines. Not a single worker was visible either. The only explanation for the place being so vacant that I could come up with was that Fridays were simply not busy days.
I stepped down from the table after my quick search and considered my options. As I was about to start looking for either Chris or Dan and Sarah, a siren started up and quickly intensified in volume. The entire back wall of the warehouse lit up for a moment, as if someone had just fired off the brightest camera flash I had ever seen. I blinked a few times before I remembered Sarah was supposed to signal us with a flash. There was going to be a fight. I was glad my magic was cooperating today because I was going to need it. The siren decreased in volume as series of loud mechanical sounds echoed across the warehouse from the ceiling. Past the rows of suspended lights, a series of domes were spraying a white powder into the air. I was certain it was not snow. I needed to find Chris and get the hell out of here. Dan and Sarah could defend themselves.
Heedless of the forklift lanes, I sprinted across the back of the warehouse, glancing down each aisle as I went. If I had to, I was going to throw an ice lance at the first forklift that confronted me. The powder falling from the ceiling started to accumulate on the ground, but thankfully it was not slippery. There were only a few rows left so when I saw a group of people at the opposite end of the warehouse, I felt immediate relief. They were all standing around a large wooden crate. The lid was removed and someone was peeking over the side. I retreated behind the end of the row and poked my head out enough to see them clearly. Dan and Sarah were there with four others, two men and two women. Three of them, including one of the women, were wearing bulky work clothes with large reflective stripes and the fourth wore office wear. The woman in office wear was talking animatedly to the man on the tips of his toes looking inside. Dan and Sarah were starting to back away from them to the rear of the warehouse, which would eventually bring them to me, but they had a long walk ahead of them. It was going to become clear they were fleeing long before they got around the corner.
Then the man stopped looking in the box, and the woman in office wear said something quite loudly and reached down to touch the floor. I felt a huge pulse of magic flow through concrete beneath me as glowing green lines spread out from her and shot across the floor. The pattern looked simple, like a series of radial lines centered on the middle of the warehouse. She must have touched one of the lines and activated some kind of latent magic circle. Was it etched into the concrete floor?
"Oh shit," I mumbled.
The dusting of powder on the ground and even the bits still in the air flashed green for a moment and vanished. Then the walls lit up with a pattern of their own, a series of interlocking shapes. That pattern was much more complex than the radial lines and I worried that the complexity of the markings was reflected in the strength of the spell itself. I noticed a faint blue light on the box nearest to me and I was confused about the source until I realized it was me. I was glowing a faint blue, or more specifically, my skin was. I nearly panicked, but then I saw that all six people around the box were also glowing blue. A few moments after the spell's activation Dan and Sarah were glowing noticeably brighter than the other four. I wondered if the spell was designed to point out people in an area by making them fluoresce. As if to disprove me, blue light began to shine out from various boxes and even a few points on the ceiling.
The group of four employees were talking to each other animatedly while Dan peeked into the crate. The conversation suddenly stopped and they split up and began looking up and down the rows of shelves. They seemed to not notice, or at least not care, that Dan and Sarah were making a break for the back of the warehouse. My friends were headed directly towards me which made getting out of here together much easier. We still needed to find Chris. I was doing my best to hide behind a storage box on the floor level. Hoping my glowing skin would not give me away, I looked around. One of the sources of blue light on the ceiling above me began to descend. Its shape resolved into that of a pointy ball before I recognized what it was: a huge spider that I was seeing from below. From this angle, it looked like it was an isle over and not directly above me.
I pulled on my arcana to try and form an ice sword, but the spell faltered as it began to crystallize in my mind. There was some force pulling at the edges of the spell and refusing to allow it to become coherent. My own energy rushed into the unfocused spell and met a wall, preventing any of it from flowing out of me. No magic meant I had a huge problem. Dan and Sarah were likely in the same boat as me.
"We need to get out of here, now!" I said to them as they approached. I moved from behind the box and pointed back the way I had come. Both of them were startled and Dan nearly collided with me.
"What the fuck, Laura?" Dan said.
"Sorry. I did not want to be spotted. Magic is being suppressed. We are not safe. We need to leave," I said. Sarah and Dan both looked like they were going to speak and I overrode them. "There is no time! We need to find Chris," I pointed insistently at the exit.
The three of us began to move, but a spider, smaller than the one we ran into at the witch's house, skittered out from the adjacent aisle. I could tell that Dan and Sarah both tried to draw on their guardians' bestowed spells and failed. Instead, we did our best to go around it and ran for the truck dock. Likely because of its size we were able to all outmaneuver it and our longer legs quickly outpaced it. Four aisles further down I spotted Chris on the floor with a skin stitcher on top of him. Luckily, his deflection ward was still holding as the spider tried and failed to bite him.
"Stop! He's there!" I shouted at Dan while pointing.
He charged towards spider after he realized the person on the ground was Chris. Dan barreled directly into the spider, leading with his shoulder. The collision sent the over-sized spider sliding across the concrete floor. Sarah and I came up just behind Dan and helped Chris to his feet. Dan chased down the stunned spider and kicked it, sending it another few feet across the warehouse.
"Time to go!" Dan said as he ran towards us and the exit.
I lead the way, making it to the exit door far faster than I would have expected. My shoulder slammed into the door, and I burst out of the warehouse. As I put some distance between me and the building, I kept my eyes on the door. I hoped my friends were right behind me. The door opened as I crossed the service road and Dan, Chris, and Sarah were all there. I stopped under a tree to catch my breath and a huge weight slammed into my back, sending me sprawling to the ground.
I pulled on my arcana for another attempt an ice blade and time seemed to slow to a crawl as the object began to form in my hand. As I completed my roll to meet my assailant, everything slowly ground to a complete stop. My weapon had not even fully coalesced and the color had drained from the world. I was locked in place, completely unable to move, and my entire vision was filled with the largest skin stitcher I had ever seen. Its fangs were a foot from my face. I could not even blink to stop looking at it.
"You appear to be in need of assistance," an unfamiliar voice rang through my mind.
"You are a guardian, I presume," I responded within my mind since speech was impossible.
Communication at the speed of thought and the associated feeling of being stuck in time reminded me of memory from Lucas. Specifically, the time when Aurora first bonded with him. It seemed that our plan to lure in a guardian had worked, but the magical entity had approached me instead of Chris.
"I am Wake. I can offer you power to defend yourself," the voice stated. "I only need your assistance with a small matter. You can, of course, refuse."
"How generous," I replied, hoping my dripping sarcasm was conveyed clearly.
"I admit that my proposal may appear coercive. I do not mean it that way. My offer is purely driven by my desire to help you," Wake said.
"What about someone else? Perhaps my friend Chris? He is near the building with two other people bonded with guardians. He does not have one himself," I asked, figuring that we might as well get what we came for. My deflection ward was likely to hold long enough for me to skewer this spider with my ice blade.
"Hmm. He is—how do I put this? He is acceptable, but your radiant aether-weave calls to me as a far superior bonding candidate," Wake said and I recoiled—mentally at least, which was about all I could do while being frozen in time.
"My… what?" my thoughts stuttered as I tried to wrap my head around Wake's phrasing which was, according to Aurora's memories, as close to flirting as a guardian could get.
"Your attunement to guardian aspected magic is exceptional as well as your … well," Wake faltered.
"I believe this moment is reaching its limit. Please spit it out," I sighed mentally.
"Your body has been magically altered. That is all. I am a wind spirit, and we wind spirits are forces of profound change. Your aptitude for a bond and this aspect of yourself make you a prime candidate. The monster above you is also likely to inflict serious harm on you without help."
"Fine," I thought. Wake was right, risking injury for no reason was a bad idea. A bond could be temporary, and I could revoke it easily. "Initiate the bond. At least until we deal with the immediate threat. Then I will introduce you to Chris. I believe he would like to talk to you. You may find that your opinion changes after a conversation with him." Aurora's memories of wind spirits seemed to imply that they could not possibly become guardians. She had thought they were incompatible with the ancient spell because they were unreliable, dangerous, and capricious. At least some of that was clearly wrong.
"Thank you. You will not be disappointed. I expect you may even enjoy it."
The magic of a bond was extremely familiar since I had memories of my previous bonds and even how the bond felt for a human. Yet, this felt a bit different than bonding with Aurora's ice arcana. The only way I could describe it was that the tendrils flowed on gusts of wind rather than along creeping lines of frost. Based on all of Aurora's previous bonds, I knew that this was only the first stage of the bond. I would not allow the bond to complete or else it would be much more difficult to hand Wake off to Chris.
"Now Laura, push!" Wake said. I had not told Wake my name. That alone proved the bond was active. Additional nonverbal context about what Wake meant flooded my brain. Wake was going to use a guardian-based spell which created a blast of wind. It could lift or push things about the weight of a person or less a significant distance.
I prepared myself to do the motions required for the spell and Wake allowed our thoughts to resume flowing with the normal passage of time. My hands moved as soon as I was able, magic flowed, and the spider was pushed upwards and away with a gust of wind. The sudden force of the spell and the subsequent impact with the ground seemed to stun the spider. As I moved to stand, my hand gripped the ice blade as it crystallized into physical matter.
"Whoa, how did you do that?" Wake asked from within my head. Wake sounded alarmed. I could suddenly feel him searching around in my head.
"Stop. Immediately," I growled internally to Wake.
I closed the distance to the to the massive spider in a few strides, stabbing into it as hard as I could with my ice blade. It thrashed, ripped the sword completely out of my hand, and bolted away towards the warehouse. I let it go. My focus was directed inwards at Wake. The guardian needed to be told to stop digging through my head. A bond usually only provided immediate access to active memory and surface thoughts. A guardian did not generally exceed those boundaries, but they could since it was not technically against their compact. Immediately, I clamped down on exactly why I wanted Wake to stop, purging it from my mind, then filling my thoughts only with the command to stop.
"Laura, why is nearly half of yourself attuned to ice? Is that why you can wield ice magic without a circle?" Wake thought at me warily.
"If you had not been so distracted by my dazzling weave perhaps you would have noticed that I was actively mid-cast," I replied along the bond.
"Laura, you have quite the font of energy within you. You are a very interesting individual," Wake added, his thoughts seemed almost giddy suddenly. I felt a tugging on my arcana. "I believe there is enough energy to complete the bond immediately. It is important we do so quickly. There are multiple mages and creatures nearby which we may need to defend against," Wake stated.
"That is not yours to take!" I let the bond thrum with my displeasure.
Dan, Chris, and Sarah had run across the road while I was dealing with the skin stitcher. The injured monster had initially headed for the open truck dock but veered away when my friends approached. It had opted instead for crawling up the side of the building and darting off across the roof.
"I found a guardian," I said with a sigh as I watched the spider retreat. Chris's worried face lit up with excitement. As I tried to refer Wake aloud, my brain was abruptly met with the fact that Wake preferred they and them. The communication was not active or directed at me. The knowledge was simply there. I had forgotten how intimate the bond was between a human and a guardian; the partial merger of consciousness it facilitated was disquieting. "They bonded with me temporarily." As soon as I finished, Chris's face fell. "We'll talk more once we get out of here."
"To the car, then?" Dan asked. I nodded and the four of us ran towards the car.
"Why are the skin stitchers not following us?" I asked as we rounded a corner and took a chance to catch our breath. I was glad that biking as much as I did had given me a reasonable level of stamina.
"Kim's friends, or at least I assume that's who they were, are fighting them I think," Dan said. "The person at the front desk had no problem with showing us the crate from Kim's receipt. Also, she could tell we had magic wards on us. At least I think so."
"She seemed all excited about Kim having protégés, too," Sarah said rolling her eyes.
"The box was empty and they freaked out. They never told us what was in it," Dan explained.
"That mage, she activated some sort of building-sized ward," Corona said through Sarah. "It had two sub-spells. The primary caused arcana to glow and the secondary suppressed non-circle casting. It is likely still active."
"And the powder was needed to activate it?" I asked, thinking aloud.
"Seems like a reasonable guess," Chris said.
"Well, they won't likely have time to set that up again if we go back in a day or two," I said.
"But they'll be all panicked and on alert," Sarah said. "I don't think that's a good idea."
"You're assuming they fight off the skin stitchers. What if the spiders win?" Chris mused.
"Doubt it. They seemed prepared even if they were a bit surprised." Dan said and he resumed walking to the car. "Let's get out of here."
"How did they not notice a skin stitcher infestation?" Sarah mumbled.
"That does seem a bit unlikely," Wake thought at me.
"I don't think a magically defended warehouse is normal no matter what they're doing," I mumbled in reply to Wake. "They could have had skin stitchers in the crate. Maybe that is why they were not setting off alarms."
"Wait, storing skin stitchers?" Chris asked. "Wouldn't they just starve if they were trapped in a box? I don't think that makes sense."
"Friend Chris is correct," Wake added.
"See, I told you that you would like him," I replied along the bond. "On that front, you should unbond. Immediately."
Wake did not reply. There was a sensation of unease and strain emanating across the bond and I became irritated. We were approaching Chris's car, and someone was leaning against the side of it. I squinted to get a better look at the person and realized it was Tommy from his stupid varsity jacket.
"This idiot is still following me around," I grumbled and I walked within speaking distance of him.
"Laura, don't," Dan said gently, "I'll take care of this." Dan walked in front of me and said to his former football teammate, "I thought I told you to leave my friends alone."
"Why would I do that when your guy-girlfriend is so entertaining. I can't believe you four are out here doing petty crimes. Breaking into a warehouse? What's next? Knocking over the bank?" Tommy mocked.
"Dude, it's not safe out here. You gotta go," Dan said, his hands clenched into fists.
"Laura, I cannot unbond now. I have aligned myself to you and I already started the process to complete the bond," Wake said tentatively across the link.
Wake's actions were completely unacceptable. Technically, he would not be violating the guardian covenant if he had started it before I told him he needed to leave. I had said that it would be only temporary, so that alone seemed to be a violation of the spirit of the rules. Fortunately, based on Lucas's terrible mistakes I had an idea of how to eject the guardian. I pulled on my arcana and empowered my thoughts themselves as Lucas had done. Crucially, I did not lower my mental defenses; I strengthened them. With my additional strength, I pulled on the bond as harshly as I could. I could feel Wake's consciousness approaching mine and my sensations blurred as our minds began to overlap even further.
"If I pass out, please punch Tommy in the head for me," I grumbled at Dan.
"Laura?" Chris asked, worried.
I turned to Chris and said, "Take my hand. I'm going to transfer the guardian to you." He eagerly grabbed my hand.
"You're gonna do that right now?" Sarah hissed at me.
"No time, sorry," I mumbled.
Wake's mind pressed against my defenses as the bond was reeled in. My theory was perhaps a bit far-fetched, but since pushing on the bond had been ineffective when Lucas tried it. Maybe it acted more like a bamboo finger trap? If I was right, the only way to loosen it was to push inwards first. Once the tension was lost, I hoped it could easily be removed without the guardian relinquishing the spell.
"Laura, I think removing me while the final bonding is occurring is very dangerous. You should stop," Wake said.
"You should have listened to me," I replied within my mind.
I poked gently at the strange windborne consciousness and felt more of their thoughts than even a few moments ago. They were resigned to their fate at this point but doubted what I was trying would work. They knew that I was the result of a human and a guardian merging, and they did not seem to be bothered by it at all. They knew that I had no intention of doing the same to them. They also were pretty sure how I was created should not have even been possible. Wake was convinced that something must have been wrong with Aurora. Wake did not really have any clear thoughts about what wrong meant. They had plucked Aurora's name from my memory at some point. Which also meant they knew Lucas's name. I readied all my magic strength at the base of the bond's hold on my mind and hesitated before acting.
"Please don't tell anyone about me. About what I am," I thought.
"Laura, they know it all already," Wake replied. "But I will not elaborate or explain further. I promise."
"Thank you. Do not worry, we will be working together soon," I said and I detached the bond from my mind. With all the power I had summoned, the action was far easier than I had expected, leaving me a bit stunned.
"Hey bitch, why are you holding hands like that? Is that a spell or some shit?" Tommy angrily mocked me as I finished my work with the bond.
I reflexively turned towards the threatening voice while internally I focused on pushing Wake away from me as hard as I could. Wake was propelled away from me with a blast of the guardian's own wind-based energy. It was almost too effective. Wake shot out of me as an incoherent streak of color; their speed too fast for them to control. My hope had been that the guardian would seek the nearest host; especially since Wake claimed Chris was a candidate. We had even been physically touching! Unfortunately, I was very wrong.
Wake shot across the parking lot and slammed directly into the person I was facing.
Tommy.