King of Atlantis

I looked over at them, at the invaders. They held their heads back, as though trying to look down on us. A whole army of them, of those beasts that called themselves the descendants of humans. Just looking at them made me feel sick, with their misshapen jaws and bulky limbs, some having a spattering of blood across their face, some wearing skin and bones – human skin, human bones.

“Do you know who I am?” Adam asked.

Turning to my side, I couldn't help the hitch in my breath at the sheer swirl of magic surrounding him. I had seen him fight criminals, stood in his shadow as he battled through some of the toughest law enforcement in the galaxy, watched him take down entire armies on the news.

I had seen him kill demi-gods.

Never before had he shown such lack of control, had he let the magic roil and blaze around him. A master unlike any other, he never so much as glowed when he wielded power I could barely comprehend.

A face of calmness belied the terror that circulated around him, his voice like the eye of the storm. “I am the last king of Atlantis and you have come to my homeland to take it from those it belongs to.”

The others, they still held their haughty postures, as though they couldn't see the magic-

My eyes widened, the truth dawning on me, what with the way the magic coiled and split and tied together, like hundreds of thousands of millions of strands. No, they couldn't see it, couldn't feel it, couldn't fathom it. He had told me that only the two of us would comprehend the magic unlike all other magic, the magic that gave our universe life.

In an instant, the threads shot out, countless curving lines of light that buried themselves into the ground. Underneath, some kind of turmoil began, distant tremors.

“Arise, my people, those who have sworn themselves to the crown in life and death.”

I squatted down, barely able to keep my balance as the tremors grew and grew until the ground itself seemed to be liquid the way ripples ran across it. Then, they began to appear, looking as though pulling themselves up onto a ledge.

Humans crawled out from the earth itself, wearing clothing similar to robes, just as he had described them. Rings adorned their fingers, while some held long lengths of wood and others little more than twigs. Staves and wands, he had called those, taken from specially cultivated trees.

More and more, their numbers swelled, growing closer and closer to the opposing army's size. Those beasts, when I looked, held fear in their eyes at watching the greatest abomination to magic.

Yet, they still didn't understand the true extent of what was happening before their very eyes. They expected these humans to be mere shells, to be animated corpses that could operate above and beyond the limits of human physiology, yet be unable to think or react or do anything but tear apart whatever lay in front of it.

Those expectations would be wrong. Transcending necromancy, Adam had truly brought all of these people back to life, those people who had sworn themselves to his crown over the many millennia that Atlantis ruled the magical people of Earth. The true humans, who had waged war after war, who had grown to become one of the most ferocious species known to the universe, who had apparently killed themselves in an act of magic unable to be comprehended despite having centuries to study the remnants.

Humans skilled in the most destructive of magics, each one more capable than ten of any modern humans.

“Face the wrath of the Atlantians, the true owners of this land that is bathed in their blood. Face them and die.”