The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex

by K. R. R. Lockhaven

  “Well I won’t be by myself. I’ve got Silvia’s sister, Ana, and Harris here to help.”

  “Good. Harris has shown me some potential already. I trust your little team much more than Bill Gulley and General Morgan. And you’ve got Xop, who I’m sure will be invaluable.”

  “I need to send Xop back to where he came from, but I haven’t been able to do it,” Harris said.

  “I’m guessing he’ll want to stay and help now.” Eddie said. “But if you ask him and he wants to go back, I’ll help you with it.”

  Before Harris could get the question out, Xop’s little voice spoke up. “I will help.”

  “Thank you, Xop.” Harris reached out to pet his shoulder, but stopped short. “Is it appropriate to pet you?”

  “I like it.” Xop leaned into Harris’s hand.

  “I’ll try to help you guys with whatever you need,” Marian said. “But I’ll be expected to stay here most of the time.”

  “Thank you,” all three said to her.

  “Ma’am?” a man in coveralls said. “We opened up the air conditioning unit, and it looks like we’ll need to add a part in there.”

  “Okay, go ahead. We’ve got a bit more pressing matters right now.”

  “Well, we went back and got our tools so we could open it up. Now we’ll need to go back to our shop and get the part. And we’ll need you to sign our part-replacement package, when it’s ready.”

  “Of course you didn’t bring any parts with you,” Eddie said. “That would make way too much sense.”

  “Yeah. Whatever. Do what you need to do.” Marian dismissed the maintenance man with the flick of her wrist.

  A small, dark-skinned man barged through the front door of the building holding an oversized, ancient tome. He was nearly out of breath. His sinewy muscles strained against the weight of the book.

  “My name is Gus Taleer,” he said between wheezing breaths. “I work in the Magical Texts Department. We found something in a grimoire from the realm of Brocéliande.” He slammed the book down on the table and flipped it open. “Just a sec. . .” He put a cell phone-sized object down on the page. It projected the words clearly into the air. Harris wasn’t sure if it was magic or technology. “This is a translator.” Gus adjusted the object until it focused on a passage. It read:

  The Ring of Brocéliande

  This Ring, forged in Dragon Fire during the creation of the Realm of Brocéliande, has the Power to Bind any Being to one’s Will. Beware the Gift of the Ring, for it is not the wearer of the Ring who holds its unparalleled Power, it is the giver. For the one who Giveth the Ring shall Control the one who Accepts the Ring as a Gift.

  Most Recent User: Feimurgan, Who used the Ring’s Power to Bind Lancelot to her Will

  Last Known Location: The Isle of Avalon, Gandore’s Vault

  Author’s Note: Do not confuse the Realm of Brocéliande or the Isle of Avalon with those places of the same names from Arthurian Legend. The Legends on Earth and other Realms are Corruptions of Places and Events from the actual Realm of Brocéliande and one need not waste one’s time studying and poring over Legends if one’s Quest requires finding the Ring in a timely manner.

  ~Xerth Ovaza, Important Grimoire Writer

  “In a different grimoire—one that was taken at great peril from the library at the Unseen University on the Discworld—we found several pages that detail, step by step, the process for facing the ‘Three Fears’ and finding Gandore’s Vault,” Gus said. He pulled folded sheets of paper from his shirt pocket. “We didn’t have time to look over the whole thing, but it looks extremely dangerous.”

  “But do-able, right?” General Morgan said.

  “Yes. I think so, anyway.”

  “So, theoretically, we could not only solve our current problem, but find a way to control the dragon for use in the military as well?”

  “Yes, sir. I think.”

  “We can have a Caster do it,” Bill Gulley said. “Site protocol states that this kind of thing is their work. I’ll call the head of their department and have them send someone right over.”

  “Where is this grimoire from?” Eddie asked. “Are we sure it’s authentic?”

  “Yes, sir. . . . Mr. Wilson, sir. We’ve had it at the Magical Texts Department since the 1940s. Someone recovered it from the Realm of Brocéliande then. I could get you her name and the exact date if you want it.”

  “No, that won’t be necessary.” Eddie rubbed his mustache and shook his head. “Holy shit.”

  Plan B

  Marian, Eddie, Ana, Jake, Xop, and Harris were convened in Eddie’s cubicle.

  “I think you guys should have a Plan B,” Eddie told them, looking distracted. “I need to go research something, but I’m sure you bright bunch of kids will figure it out. Whatever you do, don’t let the rules restrain you.”

  Bill Gulley tried to enter the cubicle, and faster than Harris thought possible, Eddie snatched a tall wooden staff, slammed it on the ground, and roared, “You shall not pass!”

  “Sorry, Eddie,” Bill said. “But could I ask you something real quick?”

  “I guess.” Eddie propped the staff against the cubicle wall and walked away with Bill, talking quietly.

  Harris thought it was odd that Eddie would leave at a time like this, but he kept his opinion to himself, like usual.

  Dan ran past the group, his head on a swivel and eyes surveying the ceiling. Harris paid him no mind, though. His focus was on a plan for getting Silvia back, not on Dan and his ever-watchful duck.

  The group was silent in Eddie’s cubicle as tiny hamsters spun tiny wheels in their heads.

  A tiny, adorable rumbling came from Xop’s direction.

  “You hungry, buddy?” Harris said.

  “Yes,” Xop said, looking bashful.

  “What would you like?” Marian said. “I have some stuff in the kitchen.”

  “Do you have ceweal?”

  “I sure do. Just a minute.”

  Marian came back with a heaping bowl of sugary cereal, which Xop began to take down with zeal.

  “How did Eddie kill the first dragon?” Harris asked as he watched Xop eat.

  “He shot it underneath its missing scale with an arrow.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. He used to be an athletic guy. The dragon fire would have killed him had he not dove out of the way. He shot the arrow with his arm still on fire, I’ve been told.”

  “Wow . . . I just figured he would have outsmarted it somehow.”

  “Well he did, really. He found its one weakness and exploited it.”

  “Oh.”

  “He got in a lot of trouble for it, too.”

  “Seriously?” This time it was Jake.

  “Yeah. He was demoted for rule-breaking for shooting the arrow into the dragon’s vulnerable spot without asking for permission first. He was both a hero and management’s example to would-be rule breakers at the same time. It completely changed his life. He went from a mid-level manager to the single biggest pain in the ass the Site has ever known. He said it opened his eyes to the reality of the Site, and he’s been a little shit ever since.”

  “Damn.”

  The cubicle fell silent again as everyone thought. The only sounds were Xop’s crunching and slurping.

  Ana was the first to speak up again. “I don’t know a lot about conjuring, just a few things I picked up from my sister. But . . . what’s to stop us from traveling to whatever realm that dragon came from and conjuring it back there?”

  “Brilliant,” Harris said. “There’s no reason that I know why that shouldn’t work.”

  “That is a great idea,” Marian said. “But what about binding the dragon once it has been conjured back? We’re talking about one of the most dangerous known creatures in the multiverse. We had a hundred binding runes in that
dome yesterday and it shrugged them off like they were fleas. That really is a brilliant idea, but I think it’s way too risky.”

  More silence in the cubicle. Harris’s hopes had soared and crashed like a kid with a Superman cape leaping from the top bunk.

  “What about Steve’s Binder Clip?” Jake said. “Wouldn’t that have enough power?”

  “Yes!” Marian shone with hope. “That could be the answer. Nice thinking!”

  “Thanks.” Jake radiated pride.

  “What the hell is Steve’s Binder Clip?” Harris said.

  “After the tragedy of 1976,” Marian said, “the Conjuring Department went to work on creating an object imbued with enough binding power to prevent another tragedy from ever happening again.”

  “Couldn’t they have just not conjured another dragon?” Ana asked.

  “They didn’t consider that one.” Marian shot her a wry expression. “So they were able to imbue this object with the power of a thousand runes, and it worked. This was back before the bureaucracy had really set in, mind you.”

  “Who was Steve?”

  “Just some fun guy at the office, I guess.”

  “Oh.”

  “He thought it would be clever to have the imbued object be a binder clip. I hear it got a big laugh at the time.” Marian shrugged.

  “So why didn’t they use it when they conjured this dragon?” Ana was obviously frustrated.

  “Steve’s Binder Clip was classified as a Magical Artifact in the early 90s and moved to the Magical Artifacts Department. They were going to hold on to it until the Conjuring Department needed it, but that was before the Site Picnic of 2013.”

  “Okay.” Ana raised an eyebrow.

  “Can I tell this story?” Jake asked Marian. “We talk about it a lot at the firehouse.”

  “Sure.”

  Jake had a gleam in his eye as he began to tell the story.

  “At the annual Site Picnic they used to always have something called the Site Olympics. It was a friendly competition between the departments, meant to boost morale. Well it didn’t take long for the friendly to disappear and the competition to take over. They would have some pretty fierce battles back in the day, I guess.

  “By the time I started at the Site, the Olympics had been pared down quite a bit, but that fierce competition was still alive. My first year on the fire department, 2013, I joined our Olympics team.

  “So, anyway, during the pie-eating contest, John Johnson, the head of the Magical Artifacts Department, stands up and loudly claims that Bill Gulley was cheating.”

  “How do you cheat at a pie-eating contest?”

  “He said he saw chunks of pie vanishing out of thin air. He told everyone that Bill had obviously conjured an invisible imp to help him eat his pie faster.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Ana’s face was scrunched up with confusion.

  “Nope. So in the final event—the three-legged race—my paramedic Dae Park and I end up winning—”

  “I don’t think her free leg ever touched the ground,” Marian chipped in.

  “So we win, but Marian and Eddie take second, securing the points they needed for the Conjuring Department to win the Site Olympics, barely squeezing by in the points against the Magical Artifacts Department.

  “John Johnson was furious. He shouted out at the awards ceremony that this was an outrage, the whole Site Olympics was a farce, and that he’d never speak to Bill Gulley again.

  “Bill didn’t help by gloating at the ice cream social, which, along with a small trophy, was the prize for winning the Olympics.”

  “You can’t be serious, can you?” Ana said. “The reason they didn’t have this powerful binding object at the dragon conjuring was a dispute over a pie-eating contest?”

  “Don’t forget the epic ice cream social.” Marian wore a vague victorious expression for a moment before shaking it off. “When John refused to let Steve’s Binder Clip go without a drawn-out fight, Bill decided that he would simply hire more people and make more runes instead. He estimated that one hundred runes would be plenty. Unfortunately, he figured wrong.”

  “If we had the binder clip now, could we bind the dragon and be done with it?” Ana asked.

  “No, it doesn’t work that way. Binding runes only work on initial conjurings. But if you were to go to the realm the dragon came from and conjure it back, you could theoretically use Steve’s Binder Clip to bind it then.”

  “That’s the plan then, right?” Harris said.

  “Yeah,” Ana said. “We get the stupid binder clip and go to Titan, or wherever.”

  “You’ll need to visit the Realm Travel Department and get a permit to travel between realms,” Marian said. “It’s usually painfully slow, but I’m sure they can make an exception in this case. And getting the binder clip won’t be easy. It’s a Class V Magical Artifact and is kept in a secured vault, heavily guarded. They might simply give it to you, but I doubt it. Nothing works that fast around here and you need it now. I wish I could try to help, but I’m going to be stuck here.”

  “We can do this, right, guys?” Jake asked, trying to pump everyone up.

  “Yeah,” Ana said, a glimmer of hope in her eyes.

  “Yeah,” Xop said in his adorable falsetto, milk dripping from his bottom lip.

  “Maybe,” Harris said, ever the optimist. “I mean, yeah, of course.”

  Patrick tentatively approached the cubicle. “Uh, excuse me.”

  The group turned as one to face him.

  “You’re probably gonna want to see this,” Patrick said. “The dragon got a hold of a news reporter somehow and he’s about to do an interview on live TV.”

  Interview with a Dragon

  “This is Kendra Nightingale from Channel Six News.” The woman on the television looked a perfect mixture of excited and terrified. “I have been given an exclusive interview with . . .” She looked down at a notebook she was holding. “With . . . the Crusher of Kingdoms, the . . . Razer of Realms, the Crimson Conquistador, the Maroon Marauder, the Vermillion Vanquisher.” The woman looked off-camera with an inquisitive expression before continuing. “Single-handedly responsible for the Massacre at Ryzok, his unquenchable gold-lust is known throughout the multiverse, El Erradicador . . . uh . . . Zoth-Avarex.”

  The camera panned out in dramatic fashion, revealing the great red dragon standing next to the reporter. She sat on a ledge near where the needle had been so that she was roughly level with the dragon’s face.

  “Thank you, Ms. Nightingale, for that wonderful introduction.”

  “Could you maybe start by telling us a little about yourself? Where you come from, why you’re here, that sort of thing?” The reporter still appeared to be reading from her notebook.

  “Well, like you said, my name is Zoth-Avarex and I’m five thousand and seventy-two of your Earth years old. I enjoy gold, well, any kind of treasure, really, and princesses. My favorite food is something called a skienox, which is similar to your Earth goats, but much bigger. When they’re scared they excrete this viscous fluid that is just to-die-for.” The dragon licked his lips. “Put that together with a side of garmonbozia: delicious!

  “Anyway, I come from a different realm, or like, a different dimension you could say. It’s kind of like . . .” The dragon scratched his chin delicately in contemplation. “Hmm, what’s hot here right now? Oh, Westeros. It’s kind of like Westeros in that there are castles and dragons and shit—sorry—and stuff. But, of course, it’s different in many, many significant ways.

  “I’m here because I was conjured by the indigestion-causing Mr. Dumed over at the Site.”

  “The Site?”

  “Oh yeah. I forgot that the Site isn’t common knowledge. Oops. I guess the rabbit’s out of the hat, now.” The dragon looked into the camera and tilted his head to the side. “There is this place no
t too far from here where your government has discovered magic . . . . Yeah, I understand your surprised expression. They’ve been keeping this knowledge from the public for damn-near a hundred years, now. That’s like a good nap for me, but to you pathet— to you humans that’s a long time.

  “Anyway, they used a conjuration spell to rip me from my homeland and bring me here. I was—understandably, I’m sure you’ll agree—not thrilled with the idea of being conjured and controlled and used as a weapon. So I busted out of there and came to your lovely city.”

  The reporter seemed to be trying to wrap her mind around all of this information. “So if magic is real, how does it work?”

  “Have you heard of midi-chlorians?”

  “Like . . . the Star Wars prequels?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?”

  “Ha! I’m just messing with you. The truth is, no one really understands magic any more than they understand gravity. It’s one of the most basic forces in the multiverse to those who have discovered it, but we don’t really know what it is, just how it behaves. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes?”

  “Cool.”

  The reporter shook off her obvious confusion and plunged on.

  “Who is the girl?” she asked.

  The camera panned to a shot of Silvia, who stood nearby, picking at one of her fingernails.

  “Her name is Silvia and she is my princess, so to speak. Her royal blood status is unknown at this time but her beauty is notorious, or should be anyway.”

  “She’s your . . . captive?”

  The dragon’s spikes stood up on his neck but he maintained an even keel. “I prefer to think of her as a guest without leaving privileges. My intent is to give her every comfort her heart could desire up here. I—Oh, would you look at that?”

  The dragon pointed his gargantuan claw at the boom mic overhead. Where the pole articulated was a spider web vibrating in the gentle breeze. “Hey, camera guy, get a close up of that web,” Zoth-Avarex said.