The crimson witch

now.
        The dragon was also victimized. It pulled its massive legs, trying to rid itself of what had at first seemed like a nuisance but now threatened to be a serious, death-filled plague. He couldn't move any more than Jake.
        Cheryn was perspiring heavily now.
        Her face was strained and weary.
        She drew the flames closer. They danced a hundred feet into the air, madly crackling and hissing.
        The man came on.
        The white worm grasses had tangled about Jake's waist now, had snared his left arm and was wrapping it right to his side. He choked off the screams that bubbled wildly in his throat and tried to concentrate on some line of action. The Talented was going to try to outlast them, to bind them here until he could come and finish them off without Thobs, choke them with his bare hands-all but the dragon, of course. He held his right arm over his head so that he might have one hand, at least, to fight back with, one hand to punch and claw with.
        The Talented came nearer.
        Flames crackled.
        The white worms slithered over his neck, his chest securely tied, laced about his upheld arm and drew it, inexorably, back to his side, lacing it where he could not use it.
        The enemy Talented was, perhaps, only fifty feet away.
        He could feel the flames of the fake fire.
        Cheryn's fire…
        Now useless…
        The worm grasses clamped shut his gaping mouth, sealed his lips with their sticky tendrils.
        They began growing up his nose.
        He tried to scream.
        His mouth was sealed.
        So this was how it was to end. The tendrils would grow up his nose, fill his sinus cavities, seek his brain, cracking bone with their pressure. They would grow through his skull, devour his gray matter and turn him into a babbling, senseless creature before he-mercifully-slipped into death…
        The Talented was only twenty-five feet away.
        The fire behind him died.
        The ground beneath his feet developed mouths.
        He created magic steel shoes.
        Boulders fell on him.
        He made a wind to toss them aside.
        But then Cheryn threw the last and most dangerous ploy into action. Suddenly, directly beside the man, she created a centipede Thob, towering above them, ready to strike all three of them and the dragon down. It was risking their own lives with their own Thob, but it put the enemy's life on the line, too.
        He made spears on the earth.
        But the centipede developed slimy metal skin that the spears could not penetrate.
        The enemy Talented opened the sky, caused boulders to fall upon it, booming and cracking, smashing together as they fell.
        But air holes opened on the metal plates, some as big as silver dollars, others as small as pencil dots, released violent puffs of wind that blew the boulders away.
        Cheryn made the metal-plated centipede start to fall on them…
        The enemy held out. He saw her plan. But at the last minute, he dropped his magics and turned all of his formidable force on the Thob centipede that was about to crush and devour them.
        The white worm grasses disappeared.
        The enemy blasted the centipede out of the sky, turned it into flickers of purple flame and clouds of green and yellow smoke.
        And when he turned…
        … Cheryn blasted him…
        Flames enveloped his body…
        White…
        White flames…
        In seconds, his eyes were charred lumps of jelly in his sockets, and his lips had been seared from his teeth so that he grinned a skeletal grin and toppled forward onto the ground-quite obviously dead, killed by a Thob, murdered by the unreal.
        Cheryn turned to Jake.
        Jake smiled, reached for her, proud of what she had done, happy that they had survived and that he could hold her again.
        She took a step toward his arms and collapsed full length upon the ground, unconscious.
        
        “It is foolishness,” Cheryn said adamantly. She crossed her fine legs and leaned against the tree trunk, scowling.
        “I won't turn back.”
        “That was an accidental encounter,” she said, pressing the point, “What do you think it will be like when Lelar is waiting for us, when he sets his best Talenteds after us, three and four at a time?”
        “Think of that!” Kaliglia said, shaking his enormous head, clucking his tongue,