Ultimate Mage

by Simon Archer

  “I believe that is enough for now,” Nida said, fluffing up her husband’s pillow and rising to exit the room. We moved to follow her back downstairs to the little round table and what was left of our meal.

  “Wait,” I said just as we reached the door. “I just thought of something.” I turned to face the old man again. I leaned down next to him, took his hand, and began to hum a spell, a healing spell I had learned before the combat spells to ease pain. It wouldn’t turn him into the man he was before Viktor hurt him, but it would make what was left of his life better than what otherwise would have been.

  As I hummed the spell, a complicated variation on a C minor scale, golden light appeared in the air above him on the bed. It covered him like a blanket, obscuring him from view. I heard my companions and the man’s wife step back behind me. Marinka gave a sharp intake of breath. When the golden light dissipated, the man’s moaning subsided, and he looked refreshed and more lucid than he had been before.

  “Wha--,” he started, and then turned on his side to face me, propping himself up on his arms. His wife gasped at this movement, and I figured it must have been a long time since he had been able to do so much for himself. Then, he took one of my hands in both of his and looked me straight in the eyes. “Thank you, young man, thank you. I feel so much better now. Better than I have in quite some time.”

  “No problem,” I murmured, and pulled up his normal blanket to cover him some more since it had fallen off to the side of the bed during the spell. “We’ll let you get some rest now. I hope you feel even better soon.”

  “Thank you,” he said again, leaning back against the headboard of his bed and breathing deeply. “Thank you very much.” He yawned widely and drifted off, drained from the aftereffects of the spell.

  “Thank you,” Nida said when we had shut the door behind us. Tears were welling in her eyes. “Thank you for helping my husband.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, running a hand through my hair awkwardly. “It was the least I could do.”

  “That was a very impressive piece of magic, Leo,” Marinka whispered in my ear as we walked back down the stairs to the kitchen table where we had eaten dinner what felt like hours before, but I knew it had only been a half an hour at most.

  “Thanks,” I whispered back, and I couldn’t keep from smiling just a little despite the solemn story we had just heard. I had just completed my first major piece of magic out in the field as opposed to just in training.

  “Why have you only now come forward?” Nadeine asked Nida when we were seated. “Why not inform the council of this when it first happened?” The old woman nodded as if she had anticipated the question.

  “My husband was ashamed,” she said, sighing and crossing her hands on the tabletop. “This was a dark secret for our family. He did not wish anyone to know. And when we all lost our magic, we figured that it mattered not. But then, my son was staying in the kingdom’s outer edge this past week, bartering for goods.” Her eyes lit up now, and she looked straight at me. “And we learned of you, Mage. We learned that you seek to restore what we have lost. To find this man who caused my husband such great pain. And we knew we had to share our story.”

  “Thank you,” Marinka said, reaching out and taking one of Nida’s hands. “We are in your debt for your bravery.” Nida looked like she may cry, but she shook her head as if tossing the tears away.

  “Thank you, Child,” she said. “And thank your dear father for listening to our plea.”

  “Was there anyone else?” Nadeine asked, her voice softened. “Was your husband Viktor’s only victim?” Nida shook her head.

  “I knew of a few others,” she said. “Children who stayed in the inn, or traveled the pathway through the prairielands. But they are long dead now.”

  “Their symptoms were all the same?” Nadeine asked. Bernsten sat silently beside her, staring down at the tabletop.

  “As far as I am aware, yes,” Nida said. “They also saw no need to share their experience. These families are poor, you must understand. We are disconnected from the kingdom out here. And the war in the forest caused us much strain.”

  “We blame you not,” Marinka said, squeezing Nida’s hand. “We are merely grateful that you have chosen to speak out now.”

  “Do you know anything else about Viktor?” Nadeine asked. “Where did he go after he left here?”

  “Not much.” Nida shook her head. “We only knew he was bound for the forest. He seemed… pleased with his progress here,” Nida’s lips curled back in disgust. Bernsten was looking a bit green himself. “A few weeks later, our magic disappeared for good.”

  After that, we helped Nida clean up the table and kitchen, and then she went to bed. We sat back down around the table, sipping beers her son had served us from the bar.

  “So, what does all this mean?” I asked, looking around the table at my friends. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Well,” Nadeine said slowly. “We now know how Viktor did it, or we sort of do, at least.”

  “We are certain now that it was him,” Bernsten offered. “That is something, at least.”

  “Indeed,” Marinka said, but she looked nervous.

  “But, like, what do we do?” I asked. “How do we defeat him?” Nadeine looked lost for an answer.

  “Let us focus on finding him first,” she said, taking a sip of her beer. “We know he is in the forest. Or at least he was. We will track his movements from here.”

  “Track his movements from centuries ago?” I asked, skeptical. A grunt echoed through the tavern, and we all jumped and turned to face the bartender, Nida, and Damir’s son.

  “Does not sound like a very feasible plan, does it?” he asked, not looking at us as he continued to wipe down the bar. His voice was low and gravelly as if rusted from lack of use.

  “And what exactly would you suggest, Bartender?” Nadeine asked, her voice hard.

  “Go to the center, then to the edge,” he grunted, still not looking at us. He was the first elf I’d seen who had a beard, his black whiskers cropped close to his face and speckled with dashes of gray. I’d figured before that they just couldn’t grow them.

  “How do you mean?” Nadeine asked sharply.

  “Go to the center, and then to the edge,” the bartender repeated.

  “Do you know something that you would like to share with us?” Nadeine snapped, changing tactics from angry to annoyed.

  “He hoped to mobilize the forest elves,” the bartender said, finishing wiping down the bar, tossing his rag over his shoulder, and turning to face us for the first time. Nadeine raised an eyebrow.

  “An impossible task,” she scoffed, waving a hand in dismissal. The bartender shrugged.

  “I am merely informing you of his plans, not advocating for their efficacy,” he said, turning his back to us again and beginning to stack glasses on the wooden shelves behind him.

  “Who told you of this?” Nadeine asked.

  “One of his other victims was my uncle,” the bartender said, continuing to stack the glasses. “Before he died, he told me of a conversation he overheard between the mad elf and the stableboy. Viktor hoped to mobilize the forest elves, use them to his advantage. He sought the center and then planned to travel to the edge nearest to the mountains. I know not why.” At this, he finished with the last of the glassware and turned to face us once again, leaning against the bar with one leg crossed over the other. His arms were hairy like his face.

  “What did he wish to use the forest elves to accomplish?” Nadeine asked, a sense of urgency and excitement in her tone now.

  “I just told you, I know not why,” the bartender said, and his words were more of a series of grunts than intelligible sentences now, and I strained my ears to understand. “I only know that if you are to find this mad elf, you must find the forest elves. They will know what he did when he entered the forest.” With that, the bartender threw his rag down on the bar, grabbed a bottle of beer, took a swig, and went upstairs wit
hout another word.

  “Well, uh, he was weird,” I said when the guy was gone, turning back to my friends.

  “Indeed,” Bernsten said, raising and lowering his eyebrows.

  “It is concerning that Viktor may have allied himself with some of the forest elves,” Marinka said softly.

  “The forest elves are an uncivilized people, incapable of forming such bonds,” Nadeine said, but she looked less certain this time.

  “I mean, this is good news, though, right?” I asked. I was met with blank stares from my companions. “I mean, we have a plan now. We know where to go.”

  “I suppose this is true, Leo Hayden,” Bernsten said carefully.

  “What did he mean by the center?” I asked, remembering the bartender’s descriptions of the forest.

  “The center is the area at the center of the forest, as the term suggests,” Marinka explained. “While the forest elves have no centralized authority that we are aware of, they were known to cohabitate there in large numbers.” She looked around at us as if asking a question. “But of course, no kingdom elf had ventured into the forest since the war, so that may have changed.”

  “Please tell me we’re not going in completely blind, here,” I said, meeting each of my companion’s eyes in turn.

  “We are never completely blind when we have you, Leo,” Marinka said, reaching out and taking my hand. “Your magic will guide us. It is a more powerful tool than anything the forest elves possess.” That made me feel a little bit better.

  “So, tomorrow we go into the forest then?” I asked.

  “Indeed,” Bernsten said again, taking a large swig from his glass. “Tomorrow.” His voice rang out through the tavern, and he raised his glass to meet each of ours. We drank to that.

  14

  The inn only had two rooms for us, one for Bernsten and me and the other for Nadeine and Marinka, and the beds were rough and uncomfortable. But I slept well anyway, the warmth of the previous night’s drinks filling my belly.

  I awoke from the sound of Bernsten’s snoring and the light creeping in the crack between the window and its shade. I crawled out of bed, which was more complicated than it seemed due to the deep indentation in the center of the mattress, and pulled on my robes. I walked over to Bernsten and shook him awake. He grunted and tried to bat my hand away at first, but he woke up eventually and crawled out of bed himself, stretching his arms out and yawning.

  “Well, Leo Hayden,” he said through his yawn. “Are you ready to journey into the forest?”

  “As I’ll ever be, I suppose,” I said, yawning myself.

  Nadeine and Marinka were already waiting for us downstairs with Nida. She served us a quick breakfast of fried eggs, toast, and leftover smoked fish. I followed the others’ leads and piled the fish and eggs together on top of the toast. This was a new combination for me, but I enjoyed it and resolved to try it again sometime when we got back.

  Nida’s grandson led us outside to the stables to get our miniature horses. The stables were small, and Bill seemed pleased to be rid of them, stretching out his legs and huffing at me.

  “Alright, alright, no more stables for a while,” I said, petting his long nose and laughing. He pushed his muzzle up and rubbed my neck, tickling me.

  We mounted our horses and rode off towards the forest, waving goodbye to Nida as we left. Pretty soon, the beaten path through the grass we’d been following since we left the kingdom disappeared, and we trudged on through the grass towards the trees. The grass itself grew longer and wilder the further out we traveled, reaching up past Bill’s knees.

  The forest began rather abruptly. One second we were in prairieland, and the next, I couldn’t even see the sky through all the trees. For some reason, I had expected the forest to be some kind of dark, foreboding place full of scary sounds and weird smells. But it wasn’t really like that at all. The forest was, in its own way, just as bright and fantastical as the rest of Eviorah had proven itself to be, albeit very different.

  The trees were tall, way taller than I could ever have imagined, and they were colored a deep forest green color that was just as bright as the trees in the kingdom, just darker. The trees themselves were a healthy dark brown color, and the branches shot out in all directions at all heights, making for an interesting maneuvering experience as we traveled. I could hear birds singing and chirping off in the distance, and the forest was bustling with life. Rabbits darted out in front of us, foxes peeped out from beside the path, and owls looked down on us from holes in the trees.

  The ground itself was also a healthy deep brown color. It wasn’t muddy, per se, but it wasn’t a bunch of dust either. There wasn’t exactly a clear path for us to follow, but there were areas that were more well worn than others, and we stuck to those for simplicity’s sake.

  “How do we know how to get to the center?” I asked shortly after we entered the forest.

  “I have a general idea of where we should be going,” Nadeine said. “If we get lost, we can use your navigation spell, Leo. In fact, we ought to use that each evening before we set up camp and each morning before we start traveling again in order to ensure that we are headed in the right direction.”

  I nodded in agreement and pulled out the scroll with that spell on it to refresh my memory. It was a complicated variation on a C major scale, but I was pretty sure I could remember it well enough.

  We decided to set up camp that evening off away from the side of the beaten path in a small clearing between four shorter trees.

  “This should shield us from view,” Nadeine reasoned, walking over to look at the spot from the pathway. “Leo, could you help us set up the site?”

  I nodded and began to hum the spell for shelter once she and Bernsten had laid all the supplies on the ground before me. Following Siara’s instructions from the training grounds, I outlined a circle in the grass on the surrounding ground before casting the spell.

  Shortly after I began humming, my new cello appeared, and I switched to that from singing. Long tentacles of golden light wriggled out of the f-holes in the front of my cello and snaked over to the supplies. The tentacles and the supplies disappeared in a blur of movement, and when the tune ended, we were left with an idyllic little campsite. Everyone clapped, and I grinned as I stood from my seat made of air. The cello disappeared off into the distance along with the tentacles of light.

  The campsite consisted of two large tarps held up in a tent shape by thick logs of finished amber wood. The spell also created a fire pit from a collection of stones and coals Bernsten had been carrying, and our packs were now hanging up on branches in the trees to protect them from scavenging forest elves and large animals.

  We settled around the firepit, though we decided not to light it since we had no food to cook and didn’t want to attract attention unnecessarily. Instead, we ate leftover smoked fish with cheese and crackers from the inn. We’d have to start hunting and foraging for our food soon, as our supplies would spoil within a couple of days. But Nida had provided us with enough food and drink to last until then.

  “How long do you think it will take for us to get to the center of the forest?” I asked after swallowing a particularly large and salty chunk of the smoked fish.

  “I believe it will take several days,” Marinka said, pausing between bites of leftover bread. “The forest is dense and narrow, but also long, stretching all the way from the kingdom to the mountain regions. Our journey will probably take multiple weeks.”

  I nodded. I had expected as much. It had taken us nearly two weeks to cross just half of the kingdom on our horses, and the forest was one of Eviorah’s three major regions. I glanced over at Bill and the other horses resting between the two tent structures.

  “The horses will be able to traverse the terrain, alright?” I asked. Bernsten nodded, taking a swig of water from a leather canteen.

  “These horses have, of course, never made such a journey, but their ancestors spent much of their time traveling in the forest during
the war. It may be an adjustment for them, but they should be alright.”

  After dinner, we took turns standing watch throughout the night while the rest of the group slept. We drew straws to determine the schedule, and I was stuck going third, which was not fun. During my turn, I struggled to stay awake. While I had been used to keeping an odd schedule while working at the piano bar, I wasn’t used to having to go to sleep, wake up for an extended period, and then go back to sleep again. Plus, I’d become accustomed to a more regular sleep schedule since arriving in Eviorah, sleeping in large, soft beds, and eating bountiful meals. This was going to take some getting used to. Fortunately, we would rotate the schedule now, and I was to go last the following night and first the one after that, meaning I would get all of my sleep in one chunk for two nights in a row.

  Even though I was sleepy, I wasn’t bored. The forest was teeming with life, even more so at night than it had been during the day. A ringing sound I took to be caused by cicadas blared out through the forest, and the bird songs from the day were replaced by the nocturnal hooting of the forest’s owl population. Yellow eyes from the forest’s many animals peeked out at me from behind bushes and branches, and I could hear them moving around in the surrounding fauna.

  I leaned back on my hands and yawned, staring up at the high ceiling of leaves and listening to the forest’s natural music until I checked the pocket watch Marinka had given me and realized it was time to wake Bernsten for his watch. I did so, walking into the tent I shared with him, shaking my friend’s shoulder and coaxing him awake until he took the pocket watch from me and crawled out of the tent to stand his own watch.

  Surprisingly, I fell back asleep fairly quickly, though it was a lighter sleep than I had had previously, drifting in and out of consciousness as the forest grew slowly lighter and the birds began to chirp. Then, I was lurched awake by the sound of Bernsten crying out for help, and of metal clashing against metal. I clambered up, my head still groggy and sleep still in my eyes, and fumbled with the front of the tent, finally pulling it open. I was greeted by the sight of several strange-looking animals that appeared to be walking on two legs scratching at Bernsten’s face with their claws and pulling the other tent open.