Community of Magic Pens

by Community of Magic Pens (epub)

  Since this might take a while.

  They’re tapping out black ink into little plastic cans, like the ones you used to paint from when you were a child.

  Their asymmetrical hair flops over as they lean across the stand. You can’t help but think how cute they are, harmonizing the big, bold colors and fierce images tacked across their wall. Music with a smooth, rhythmic beat plays behind them. You wonder if they chose it for you.

  They ask if you’re ready.

  That’s a deeper answer, so you just blurp a little yep.

  Again, they run a wipe across your arm. Cool, cleansing. Soft.

  Soon, no one will wash this away.

  They side-eye you, trying to verify that you really understand. With a shrug and a let’s go, the buzzing needle makes contact with your aging skin.

  You sink into the feeling. This is not pain. You’ve felt pain.

  This is business. This is the hum of traffic, the flashing of a tunnel. This is life.

  Quite a list, they say. Never like to pry, but if you want to tell me what it’s for, we’ve got a few.

  You close your eyes. You open them. There’s a bright light, and deep beats, and someone outside is telling a sex joke.

  These are all the things I was told not to say, you state. Things that are right. Things that are true. Things that I am.

  Bit of an overreaction, they quip, then stop, like maybe they’d gone too far. Like maybe they were talking about themself. You feel that.

  So you don’t answer. You hold still, knowing each stroke will last a lifetime. What’s left, anyway.

  The pulsing beats are pleasant. They definitely picked this for you.

  Try and relax, they say. This is going to take a while.

  E.D.E. Bell (she/e) writes unique fantasy fiction that blends traditional and modern elements. A passionate vegan and enthusiastic denier of gender rules, she feels strongly about issues related to equality and compassion. After nearly two decades in technical intelligence, she now applies her magic to the creation of genre-bending fantasy fiction in Ferndale, Michigan, where she is proud to be part of the Detroit arts community. She loves cats and trees. She revels in garlic. You can follow her adventures at edebell.com.

  The Drawing of a Sword

  K. Alysee Simon

  I slid my hand across the blank paper, pushing out any creases and brushing away any crumbs. The large parchment thinned in spots across the center. Soon, I’d need to replace it. Already this piece had served up six swords, two shields, and thirty-four arrows. It wouldn’t survive much else before the cream surface tore under my pen’s nib.

  One more sword then, and hopefully I could retire for the day—if the commander allowed it. I stood from my stool and lifted my ink bottle, giving the contents a swirl. The red-brown ink swished against the glass. I breathed out slowly, preparing myself. It took months to learn how to work amidst the war camp’s noise, to figure out how to ignore the clack of soldiers walking in armor, of orders shouted, of the roar of the nearby blacksmith’s forge. War was never quiet.

  Calm, I picked up my pen and dipped the tip into the ink before facing the parchment. One breath of anxiety rose in my chest as the blank expanse stared back at me. I didn’t let it linger, forcing myself to start at the far edge, drawing a single curve from the left side, across the desk, to the right. I dipped for more ink, back to the parchment, drawing another line, completing the curve of the blade. Ink again, to etch out the fine lines of a hilt. Back and forth I went, to the ink, to the parchment, to the ink. I gave it depth, adding hatching across the blade before drawing a small jewel at the base of the hilt. The pen’s nib scratched and scritched with each movement.

  The motions pulsed through me like the beat of drum, and as I made the last mark, the tempo of my work ceased. I stepped back. The sword was more elegant than what I usually drew. War meant fast production, necessity only—a sharp blade, a strong grip, a balanced hilt. This piece was more.

  “That’s a bit much, don’t you think?” Detta asked as she came up behind me.

  “It will cut,” I said simply. I ran my fingers over the coarse wood of my pen’s barrel, my fingers catching in the notches where I’d bitten it, and one mark from when it got smashed between some rocks after I took a tumble. I needed to be more careful, because if another pen could be created in all the world like it, I knew not how.

  “Is there any particular reason you’re here?” I asked as I set aside my pen and turned to the parchment. Detta commanded over the army’s archers, and strangely, also over me. We’d formed something close to friendship over the past two months—an understanding of where each of us stood.

  She stood quietly waiting as I wiggled my fingers above the drawing’s hilt and reached down. My hand slipped into the parchment and I gripped the sword, carefully pulling it from the sheet hilt first. The fine lines my pen made shook, vibrating with magic as slowly, inch by inch, the sword took solid form, slipping free until I held the entire blade out at my side.

  This was the magic of my pen—the magic I was known across the kingdom for. It was the reason the Queen had me dragged from my home and stationed here, with orders to create until the war ended, or until I died.

  Detta shook her head, and held out her hand to take the sword from me. I handed it over. “No particular reason,” she said as she lifted it left and right before giving a casual swing. “Other than needing my daily dose of your bitterness.” She flashed me a grin.

  “No battles today?” I looked to the south, where somewhere beyond the rolling hills stood the army from the Southern Isles of Elotch. I had yet to lay eyes on them myself, and preferred to keep it that way. I’d heard enough stories about their soldiers riding into battle on the back of giant gear and clockwork wolves, they already filled my nightmares—and to think, their invasion could have been avoided if the Queen had simply apologized for the slight she’d shown the Elotch King at court last fall.

  “No,” she said, putting aside the sword, suddenly sober. She wore the leather armor she always kept on, even on battle-free days, as though she couldn’t imagine the weight of breathing without it. “There are rumors that more ships have arrived on the coast, carrying more soldiers, and more of their mechanical wolves.” She swept closer, a foot away, and slid her hand across the parchment which had indeed torn from the last sketch. “Most of the other commanders won’t say it, but whispers have started spreading that this will be it. Our last stand.” Her voice fell like the whispered scratch of my pen when I drew.

  I took a step back, lost for words. I was no soldier of war. Years ago, I’d suffered an accident involving a horse and more ale than a youth of seventeen years should ever drink. It left me with a twisted leg, and the determination to become better with my hands than most were on their feet. Ten years of wood carving and blacksmithing and somehow, I created the pen—a creation I was never able to repeat again, no matter how I tried. My place was with it in my hand, and paper before me, drawing creations faster than a blacksmith could smith them.

  If we were to lose, and the Elotchians to push into camp, I would run. There would be no last stand for me.

  Detta must have seen the terror flash in my eyes, for she lifted her hand from the parchment and placed it on my shoulder. She left it there for a long moment before she pulled it away and moved back to her spot. “Have you ever thought of drawing something else?” she asked, her eyes falling on my pen where it rested beside my bottle of ink. “Maybe a magic staff that could kill a horde?”

  I shook my head and rolled up the torn parchment, dumping it in a vase in the corner. “You know it’s not so simple,” I said, unrolling a fresh piece, weighting its corners with glass stones. “It only works when I draw something I could make without the pen’s magic.”

  She rolled her shoulders before lifting a hand to push back her bangs. “And all you know is swords and shields.”

  “And horseshoes and helmets,” I added.

  “Is there nothing else you
know how to make?” she muttered, but she was already headed out of the tent, to wherever it was commanders went to prepare for war.

  “Maps,” I called, unsure if she’d even hear me. “My father was a cartographer.”

  They came just before the sun rose in the sky, before the soldiers could break their fast with a meal, before most had even rolled from their sleeping mats and emptied their bladders. The warning came as a shrill wail of a horn, followed by the rumble of shouted orders. I woke with them. At first, I stood watching them prepare. Detta hurried by and I couldn’t even get up the words to wish her health and strength.

  The mechanical wolves came over the hilltops an hour later. They stood at the top, staring down at us, watching as our soldiers fell into ranks. A courtesy that they didn’t come crashing down like a hammer on glass, smashing us to smithereens. I stood beside a few of the other blacksmiths, studying the indistinct black blob that was the far-off silhouette of their creations.

  “This is it,” the eldest of us said. “This is where it ends.”

  Anger flared in me at his words. I turned my gaze on him, my lip curling.

  “Cay!” Detta called, catching me before the fire of my anger could catch hold of my tongue. “Get your pen. I want you on the front lines, drawing arrows.”

  “What?” I gasped. I’d never been called to do such work. After I’d been brought in, I’d been left to draw and create, alone in my tent. Never had I been forced to the front lines. But never had the front lines been a mere hundred feet from my tent.

  “Hurry,” she said, breathless with adrenaline and fear.

  I hurried back to my tent, gathering a new piece of parchment, my ink, and my pen. I came back to find an archer I’d never met before waiting for me. He waved me along, hurrying me as fast as my limp could go. We stopped at the back of the front lines, the rows of our army’s soldiers stretched out in the clearing before the camp. The horde stood hundreds of meters away, waiting as we organized—a respect their people showed in war.

  Detta stood at the back, lines of her archers before her. She pointed to a spot at her side where a box had been set, a pile of stones atop it. I quickly sat and rolled the parchment out on the crate, uncorking my bottle of ink.

  “This isn’t what I signed up for,” I said, my heart pounding with more force than I’d felt it exert before. I couldn’t breathe, and yet I was breathing so fast I could barely do much else.

  “You didn’t sign up at all,” Detta said, before she pulled on her helmet and picked up her bow. “Now start drawing.”

  I took in my blank parchment, my head spinning, ugly gasps of air catching in my throat. The horde on the hill began to move. First slowly, as though they too weren’t sure of what they were about to do, and then suddenly like a dam breaking, they flew down the hill.

  “Fire!” Detta called to her archers. They released their arrows, quickly reaching for more. She ordered them to fire again. I followed the arc of the arrows as they fell toward the advancing mass, their figures still too far out to yet feel like troops.

  I always knew the war was real, and yet, until it stood right before me, I hadn’t truly known its reality.

  “Arrows! Cay, draw us arrows!” Detta hovered at my side, her face white with terror, her voice ragged from shouting. The archers around her reached for their quivers, pulling again from their stores, half their stash already depleted—not enough. There was no amount I could draw that would be enough.

  The horns of warning sounded, their blare reaching deep within me and breaking through the ice holding me tight. I gave off one shiver before inking my pen. And then I drew.

  I drew curved lines and broken ones. I hatched details and stippled shadows. I moved as fast as I could, my hand cramping as I held it over the paper, careful not to smudge the wet markings. The pen hummed in my fingers.

  “Cay, what are you doing?” Detta shouted. The heat from her body burned at my back, her terror mixing in the air with that of all the other soldiers around us. My Kingdom’s people. Many of whom were pulled from their homes unwillingly, just like me. All because our Queen wouldn’t give a proper apology for a simple slight the Elotch King wouldn’t let go.

  I drew without looking up. I drew even as blood splattered across the parchment and Detta shouted at me for arrows, more arrows. I drew for what felt like hours, but couldn’t have been more than a handful of minutes.

  One more mark. I looked up before making it. The clockwork wolves descended toward us like an avalanche of moving metal, their gears clicking, the soldiers on their backs hollering war cries. Arrows flew from both sides, some finding their marks, others sinking into the ground or bouncing off shields. The distance between the two armies was closing.

  I squeezed my pen tight. I’d first discovered its magic on accident, a sketch of a dagger coming off the parchment and into my hand. The week after was spent experimenting, learning the limits of what the pen could do—and what it could not.

  I had always assumed the magic was tied to my own ability. That if I could make it at a forge, I could use the pen to draw it into creation.

  I prayed I was wrong. I prayed it wasn’t tied to my ability to create, but to my knowledge, to what I knew of blacksmithing—and map making.

  Dipping the pen one last time into my ink, I drew the last line.

  The pen snapped. It broke in two in my hand, the nib half tumbling to the ground, the other half falling to the parchment. It laid there, unmoving. I held my breath, my heart frozen in my chest as the ground trembled from the horde stampeding toward us.

  It hadn’t worked. Of course it hadn’t. Detta screamed again for her archers to fire. Arrows sang through the air.

  I studied the sketch, my hands numb. A coarse drawing of the battleground stared back at me, the lines rushed and rough, but solid. Until one disappeared, and then another, and another. The sketch faded away.

  I looked up. All around us the ground continued to shake, but not from the stampede of mechanical wolves. The horde slowed. Wolves clanked and clacked as they skidded to stops. Our line of soldiers stumbled on their feet.

  “What’s going on?” Detta asked, looking to me.

  “Magic,” I muttered as the ground ripped open at the base of the hill, the chasm splitting too fast for anyone to react, metal wolves falling into it, filling the air with the scent of spilt oil as the earth continued to crumble beneath the enemy’s army.

  I had done it—saved our army, saved these soldiers, yet at the cost of others. So many others. They tumbled into the abyss I’d drawn, gone from our land, but also gone from theirs.

  “I’m done,” I said, bending to pick up the other half of my pen. The two halves fit together perfectly, but they felt wrong. Hollow and cold.

  The ground finally stopped rumbling. The remainder of the horde stared across the chasm at us, so little of them left.

  “Send a message to the Queen,” I said, shoving my broken pen in my pocket. “Tell her I’m done making weapons. Tell her she needs to end this before we lose. Before we all lose.”

  K. Alysee Simon (she/her) is a librarian with a background in the arts, specifically ceramics. She came to librarian work and writing after graduation, and loves helping people, whether with words or finding information. When she’s not reading, writing, or working, she enjoys playing video games, walking her dogs, or spending time with her significant other. For her, storytelling is about building worlds with endless possibilities, especially ones that have never existed before. She can be visited at ksimonfiction.wordpress.com.

  Nothing to Write Home About

  M. R. DeLuca

  “Yes, Mom, I’ll be finished sorting through Gram’s stuff by tonight. Tomorrow morning, the latest. I’ll let you know what was in Gram’s secret room. No, I won’t forget to pick up you and Dad at the airport. That happened only one time. I know you had to take a taxi fifty miles— Mom, I have to go. Say hi to Dad for me.” Nestor hung up before his mother could say another word.

&n
bsp; He hated to be rude, especially to his own family, but he had grown weary of everyone in his life treating him like he was an irresponsible child: his parents, his former (numerous) bosses, his ex- (also numerous) girlfriends. That is, everyone except Gram. She took him seriously. So seriously, in fact, that she’d entrusted him as the sole living keeper of her secrets.

  And now she was gone.

  Gram lived in a beautiful split-level in a desirable neighborhood. His family members were itching to put it on the market and split the proceeds, but—the will stipulated that Nestor, only Nestor, had to empty the contents first.

  Which is how he found himself alone in the big, dusty old house.

  He had no reason to say no. He was between jobs again, could really use the money from the house sale, and had promised Gram years prior that he, and nobody else, would empty the secret room. As flighty as people thought he was, he kept whatever promises he made.

  So the executor handed him a pen-shaped skeleton key with a heart-shaped bow and explained that, per Gram’s written instructions, the locked room should be entered last and alone.

  After working almost non-stop for the better part of two days, Nestor was almost finished cleaning. Most of the things he had gone through so far were knickknacks or appliances, things he could discard without being slowed by sentimentality. But the smallest second-floor bedroom would surely take time.

  He had never been in Gram’s secret room.

  Nobody had, in fact, except for her and Gramps. As family lore had it, as a young mother Gram one day said she had an important project to tackle and claimed the glorified closet. She never mentioned what she was doing all those hours, all those years, locked in that cramped little room, and all Gramps would say when their kids asked was, “Chasing immortality, how should I know? Go do your homework or something.” But they told each other everything. Gramps knew what his wife was doing, and kept mum his whole life.