Gathering Storm (The Salvation of Tempestria Book 2) by Gary Stringer (howl and other poems .txt) 📕

attack, but Daelen, breathing hard, called out, “I yield!” to put an end to the battle. Cat asked the garden to release him, and Mandalee sheathed her sword. “You make a great team, you two. In all my time in your mortal realm, I’ve never met anyone who fights the way you do. You always seem to have another trick up your sleeves. I get out of one trap and fall into another, despite all my experience.”

“Thank you, Daelen,” Catriona smiled, genuinely touched. She knew what that admission must have cost him in terms of pride. “That’s almost the first time since I met you that I feel you’ve truly given us the credit we deserve.”

“Yeah,” Mandalee agreed, “maybe now you see why we insist upon you treating us as your equal partners.”

“Do you understand the lesson we’ve been trying to teach you, Daelen? Power isn’t everything. Agreed?” Cat prompted.

“Well, I see your point, but I wasn’t using my beam cannon or anything like that. No matter what tricks you think up, you can’t beat that. Not with the power I’ve gained since merging with my dark clone.”

“You think so?” Cat arched her eyebrows. “In that case, the lesson is incomplete.” She asked Mandalee to stand well back for safety, then told Daelen, “Shoot me.”

“What?”

“Use your beam cannon – shoot me.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Deadly serious, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“Cat, be reasonable. You know what will happen if I do that – a direct blast from my beam cannon – you’ll die. I’ve already killed you once by doing that, I don’t want to do it again.”

“You killed me last time because I chose not to defend myself. I had to make you snap out of your dark clone’s grip, and my death was the only thing I could think of that would be shocking enough. Therefore, I allowed you to kill me. This time I will not. If you’re still worried, I’ll cast a Mirror Image again, so you can just shoot my copy. If I fail, there’s no harm done, but if I succeed, my point will be proven.”

Daelen agreed because he could see nothing else would satisfy her. He walked a short distance away, Cat cast her Mirror Image, and the copy moved well away from the real Cat and Mandalee.

The shadow warrior fired his cannon straight at the copy and got the fright of his life. The duplicate produced a shield of polished glass in an instant – a mirror. The beam struck and reflected back, missing him by inches. The real Cat and Mandalee applauded as the copy took a theatrical bow and vanished.

“Now do you understand?” Mandalee asked. “Your cannon is basically just focused energy – harnessed, enhanced light. In a real battle, you can bet my friend wouldn’t have missed.”

“But no-one’s ever been able to defend against my cannon before!” Daelen gasped, unable to believe what he’d just seen.

Mandalee supported her friend, pointing out, “You’ve never fought a druid of Cat’s skill before.”

“That’s true,” he admitted.

“It is my experience,” the assassin continued, “that power breeds complacency.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him,” Cat agreed.

“That can be fatal, especially in my profession,” Mandalee concluded.

Cat continued the theme. “Your previous major battles have always been against other powerful beings who try to match your power with their own. I know your power is far greater than mine, so it would be futile to try to fight power with power. Therefore, I find other ways. I fight power with guile, cunning, finesse, style, and trickery. Why do you think I am taking druid magic to higher levels than ever before? Why do you think Mandalee chose Nature’s power for her cleric magic?”

Daelen didn’t know, so Mandalee told him, “Ultimately, everything comes down to nature. Even as powerful a weapon as your cannon must conform to natural laws like reflecting off shiny surfaces.”

Catriona added to the lesson. “Take our initial storm battle. I don’t create a major storm here in this spot the way you do. I can’t. Storms like that don’t just appear naturally; it’s impossible. So, I do it nature’s way: conjure a small disturbance far over the ocean and give it a push in this direction. By the time it reaches here – a process I can speed up – it’s stronger than the storm you created yourself, and I don’t need to expend much energy to do it.”

Desperate to find a way out of admitting defeat again so soon, Daelen argued, “Ah, but going back to my cannon, your copy was able to deflect it because she knew it was coming. In a real battle, you wouldn’t know.”

“Yes, I would,” Cat countered, choosing to conceal Dreya’s lesson about the Temporal element she knew her magic to possess. “You always use your cannon. It’s your most powerful weapon, and your instinct is to go for the quick kill. Therefore, you appear, fly, power up and fire. You’re not exactly subtle, as I’ve told you before, so I’d have plenty of warning before you fired. More than enough to sprinkle a bit of sand from my vial and create a good enough mirror to reflect your cannon beam.”

“Maybe I need to rethink my tactics, then, if I’m so predictable.”

“He’s learning,” Mandalee remarked to Cat.

“Finally,” she agreed, with a friendly smile.

“In that case, maybe I should open with something like this, instead,” Daelen cried. Quick as a flash, he drew his sword…or at least, he would have done, had it not been stuck in his scabbard.

Trying not to smile, Mandalee explained she’d heated it with her Burning Blade spell, anticipating a hand-to-hand strike. The metal had naturally expanded and was now stuck tight.

“It’s only temporary in this case,” she assured him, “but I could melt it if I wanted to, then you’d never get it out again. You really must learn to be a little less predictable,” she smirked. “Like this.”

Mandalee stepped forward and kissed a stunned Daelen full on the lips. When she broke the