by Dante King
Creation Mage
War Mage Academy 1
Dante King
Copyright © 2020 by Dante King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
v001
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Want More Stories?
About the Author
Chapter One
“Shivoshan’s Grimoire for First Phase Elemental Mages,” I said to myself as I took the dusty old book from the shelf. It was a hearing test of sorts—I was coming off the back of an Iron Maiden concert and my ears were still ringing. I’d hooked up with a girl afterward and…well, she’d been loud too. My hearing was getting better, but it was taking time.
I placed the book on the counter and finished writing the name of the person who’d reserved the book on a yellow sticky note.
“Enwyn Emberskull,” I said, almost laughing and sticking the note on the cover of the book, “must be really into roleplaying.”
I left the book and started sorting through the shelves. The bookstore was well-known throughout my small town for carrying the kinds of books few people wanted to purchase. Most of the residents avoided the place. Some said it was haunted. For half the kids who grew up here, going through with a dare to enter the store was a rite of passage.
Sure, it smelled like mold and was covered in a thick layer of dust, but it was a second home to me.
After we’d been listed on Buzzfeed’s ‘Top 100 Haunted Locations in the Midwest’, out-of-towners and tourists often visited. They’d purchase a book or two, all the while guffawing at the subject matter. Other than the tourists, we didn’t have many face-to-face customers. Since my uncle had hired me to catalogue the books and add them to the eBay store, we’d been getting a lot more sales. From what I could gather of their purchase history, our online customers were mostly history buffs looking for rare historical texts, but there were a few who were into the darker side of weird. Those customers had purchased histories that looked like a recipe from How to Summon a Demon For Idiots.
Yeah, we had books on how to summon demons. Books on curses, necromancy, exorcisms—the whole shebang.
I had to admit, I’d been a little curious as a kid whenever I’d visited my uncle’s store. Suffice to say, I’d attempted to cast almost every spell from every book. By the time I’d been through the entire store, I’d become quite the unbeliever.
A pity. Magic was awesome, and I would have given my left nut for it to be real.
The bells outside the door chimed, and a woman brushed aside the curtains to step into the bookstore. She wore a jet-black dress. Her dark-brown hair was tied back in a high ponytail. Her heels clicked against the hardwood as she approached the counter. Unlike most ladies who were above a seven on Justin’s Scale of Feminine Allure—my own scale, one that didn’t underrate a celebrity just because she was famous—this woman didn’t turn her nose up at the smell or the dust.
When she arrived at the counter, she smiled at me, blood-red lips turning upward to reveal Colgate-white teeth. She didn’t quite look out of place—her glasses made her appear bookish—but she was definitely more beautiful than the store’s usual, more eccentric, clientele.
“Enwyn?” I asked.
“Indeed. You have my grimoire?” Crow’s feet squeezed beside her dark-brown eyes. They were the only sign that this woman might have been pushing forty. Fifteen years my senior, max. Who was it that said age is nothing but a number?
“Here it is,” I said, brandishing the book and smiling.
“Excellent.”
“Emberskull? That’s a unique name. Where’s it from?”
“Nowhere you’ve heard of,” she said, but her tone wasn’t rude.
“Old family name?” I was just trying to keep the conversation going. She was too hot for me to just let her walk out of the store. Of course, it was a stupid question. A last name was by definition an “old family name.” I kicked my own ass in my mind and tried to save it. I failed. “I mean, did your parents ever say anything about it?”
“No,” she said. She shook her head, but she stared at me without blinking. Now, I was getting creeped out. “I never knew my parents. They died.” Her fingers brushed a skull pendant necklace just below her well-defined clavicle.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but she continued as though I hadn’t said anything.
“They were afflicted with a horrible curse that turned them into black widow spiders. My mother devoured my father after lovemaking, and my mother killed herself because she couldn’t stand the guilt.”
I shook my head. “That’s…pretty fucked up.”
I figured the story was some kind of crazy coping mechanism, or maybe she was just trying to weird me out. The goths of the 90s were probably all about her age now, so maybe she was a throwback to that era. Her black dress certainly fit the picture.
“Worse things have happened.”
Tell that to your goddamn dad, I thought. Poor bastard was probably just sitting back for a relaxing post-bone cigar or beer. Next thing you know—dead.
She glanced at the grimoire and nodded her head a little. Then she looked at me and started laughing. She put the end of one finger on the tip of my nose and grinned. “Gotcha.”
“Right,” I said, remembering why this woman had stepped into the store in the first place. “Let’s get you this book so you can start casting some spells,” I said, with more gusto than I felt. I punched in the price. $2.99. “Seems like a bargain for learning a bunch of magic.” I smiled at her again.
“Most of the spells don’t work,” she said as she took the book from me.
“Oh, really?” I couldn’t help laughing a little under my breath. By “most” I assumed she meant “all.” I wasn’t going to say it aloud, though. She might have had a decent helping of crazy beneath that tanned skin, those long legs, and that busty torso, but she seemed like a nice woman.
“Like this one, for instance,” she said, thumbing through the pages and handing the book to me. “Fireball. That’s a Fire Spell. Someone with the natural affinity for Lightning wouldn’t be able to cast it. Not unless they were a dual-mage. So, technically, it works, but not for Storm Mages. I suspect this particular volume was compiled piecemeal from various other texts. The author is most likely a null who happened upon a collection of mostly inauthentic works and managed to strike true a handful of times.”
I held back a sneeze from the sheer amount of dust among the brittle pages.
“Right,” I said, trying to sound like I didn’t think every second word the woman said was crazy talk. After all, I liked the way she was leaning over the counter to point to the spell, and I couldn’t help feigning curiosity as she leaned a little further and made her neckline plunge.
Suddenly, Enwyn snapped the book shut, pulled away, and clutched it to her chest. “You don’t believe me.” She sounded almost horrified.
“Oh, so you’re a fencesitter? Nothing worse than a man who won’t commit to either belief or unbelief.”
I laughed. “I suppose you could call me that. I’m open to changing my mind. Maybe I can be convinced. Why don’t you show me something?” My eyes went to the book, but they also flicked back to Enwyn and her chest. Was that a black lace bra peeking through her neckline? I realized then that my question might be misconstrued. Enwyn didn’t seem to care that I was looking though, so I decided to let her draw her own conclusions.
She glanced purposefully down at her neckline and slowly pulled up her blouse to cover her bra. “You did mean you wanted to see magic?” Her lips tweaked into a smile as if to say, and not my bra and what it’s propping up?
“Magic, yes,” I said with a hard swallow.
“So, you’d like to know for certain—without any shadow of a doubt—that magic exists? That the world you see every day is not all there is? That there is something beneath it all; something that gives you a sense of childlike wonder? Something like that, correct?”
It was the kind of question with only one kind of answer: Hell fucking yes. I want magic to be real. I want to cast fireballs and ride dragons … maybe fuck a moon elf under the stars.
Enwyn’s smile broadened, as though she’d read my mind. Her eyes sparkled from behind the thin lenses of her glasses.
“Perhaps you might just see some magic today. I can’t make any promises, but you never know when the supernatural will show itself. Take this grimoire, for instance. It may look like an ordinary book, but I’m certain there’s authentic magic in there somewhere. Why don’t I leave this with you while I peruse the shelves?” She placed Shivoshan’s Grimoire on the counter. “In the meantime, maybe you can find a spell that’s authentic?”
She winked before she turned and headed down an aisle. I was about to call out to tell her where the books on witchcraft were located, but she was already heading in the right direction, and she seemed to have no trouble finding them.
“Authentic spells, huh?” I asked myself as I started scanning the grimoire’s pages. “Does that mean if I find one, she’s going to go on a date with me?”
The book was old, that was certain, but it held no more magic than my right thumb. Still, there was no denying the penmanship of whoever had composed the handwritten manuscript. Exactly how old was this book? It seemed much older than the language indicated—it was in modern English, after all. Most likely the creator had attempted to mimic the style of older texts.
The spells were written with step-by-step instructions on how to cast them. Each required three basic elements: will, spirit, and matter. I flicked through a few more pages until a spell caught my eye. The ink on this particular page shimmered as if the words and diagrams had been written with one of those metallic ink gel pens.
It was a Storm Bolt spell. To cast this spell, the user had to channel their mana through their will, build it to the point where it was almost overflowing, then cast it in the direction they wanted the spell to go. There was even a neat little diagram that showed the exact order of actions, with a warning dictating what would happen should the caster perform these actions incorrectly or in the wrong sequence.
Well, shit, I thought, someone sure went to a lot of effort on this book.
I recognized a bunch of the spell names from Dungeons and Dragons. As far as I knew, a lot of the spells and much of the magic system had been built from Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series, so the book must be even newer than I’d originally thought.
Or maybe the creators of D&D had taken a bunch of their spells from older texts, ones much like this grimoire. While I knew a bit of pop culture around D&D, I wasn’t exactly a big tabletop gamer. I dabbled a little in D&D, but I wouldn’t have called myself an expert roleplayer. I had a bit of an understanding of the way the mechanics worked, and I knew a half-dozen spells from various schools of magic, but my knowledge wasn’t encyclopedic.
The front doorbells chimed again, and another customer entered. Two in one day? It might not have been magic, but it could have almost passed as a miracle in this shop.
I quickly glanced up and saw a giant of a man, in a filthy leather duster, shamble into the Romance section. My uncle stocked some weird-ass porn magazines, so I figured here was another homeless dude who wanted to add a few images to the spank bank. He pulled out one magazine, and I smiled to myself.
Fairy Tales Gone Wild.
A classic for urban campers and curb jockeys from here to the 7-11.
I felt for guys like him. With all the drugs he’d taken, it probably took Snow White and all her Seven Dwarves to pitch his tent. As long as he didn’t start jerking his gherkin inside the store, I didn’t have a problem.
I looked over to Enwyn. She had removed dozens of books from the shelves and sorted them in multiple piles on the floor. Her brow furrowed, and she went on tiptoes to reach a book on the top shelf. The bottom of her dress hiked up, and I noticed the slight outline of her asscheeks. Was she wearing a thong? Or no panties at all?
“Need a hand?” I called out as the question of her underwear—or lack thereof—rattled through my mind.
Enwyn glanced over at me as she stretched higher. “I’m fine.” She strained to say the words.
I was about to leave the counter and help her retrieve it, but her fingers managed to clasp the spine and she pulled it off. Her eyes widened as she read the title, and there was a slight illumination along the back of her hand. It was green, almost like a glow-in-the-dark neon light.
Was that a tattoo?
It sure looked like one. I blinked a few times. It wasn’t glowing anymore. As quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.
That was weird. Maybe she had the tattoo done with some kind of glowing ink? Is that even a thing?
I put the thought aside and returned my attention to the grimoire. Just had to find an authentic spell, with no way to tell one from another. The Storm Bolt spell looked a little different from the others, if only because the ink hadn’t deteriorated but, for all I knew, Enwyn had some completely bonkers criteria for judging authentic spells from unauthentic ones. Still, I figured it was worth a shot. She was damn beautiful.
I’d always liked women a little older than me. She might have been a little kooky, but those ones were always the best in the bedroom. A little clingy and a whole lot of crazy, but I had a burner phone for such purposes. Was I jerk? Maybe. Was I an idiot? Hell no.
I heard a shuffle of feet and looked up. The homeless guy was making a beeline toward Enwyn, who now had books piled so high they were threatening to topple at any moment. He moved past the counter, and I caught a whiff of old-man cologne and peppermint. Those weren’t the smells of a person who’d spent months living on the street.
Enwyn tilted her head past a pile of books to glare at him as he began to crowd her.
Well, shit. It looked like I was going to have to throw this guy out after all. I hiked up my sleeves and was about to walk over there when the guy suddenly tore back his leather duster. I had a profile view of him, and I was expecting to be shocked by the sight of Rodney and his Saggy Friends. Instead, I was greeted by the strangest looking human torso I’d ever seen.
It was covered in stone-like lesions, as though he’d been the victim of some kind of scientific experiment. His skin was like paved cobblestones, almost like the Thing from Fantastic Four. Except it looked real—way too real. Was this some crazy-ass version of leprosy?
Despite my initial shock, I popped open the drawer beneath the counter and went to reach for the Beretta M9 my uncle kept there. My right arm wouldn’t move. It was stuck to the grimoire. An energy raced through me, flooding me, and filling me like I was a balloon being pumped with air.
The homeless guy took a small stick from his belt and whipped it toward Enwyn. The ground trembled, and a man-sized stone h
and burst from the hardwood and attempted to snatch Enwyn. She rolled out of the way of the grasping hand and produced her own little stick, which I’d now realized was a wand.
A wand? And what the fuck was with the hand? This was the weirdest prank I’d ever seen, and the visual effects were insanely life-like.
Enwyn shouted something in a language that sounded like Latin, and a ball of flame erupted from the end of her wand. It smothered the hand and incinerated it in a cloud of ash.
The next thing I knew they’d started dueling in the middle of the bookstore, throwing blasts of energy from their wands that obliterated bookshelves in explosions of wood and paper. It was like being trapped in a Harry Potter movie, only with fewer Butterbeers and way more shit for me to clean up afterward.
“Come on!” I said as I tried to pull my hand free from the grimoire. The ancient book was now stuck to the countertop as well, so I couldn’t tear it free with my other hand. Sure, I could have tried to squeeze a round off with the M9 at the bum-turned-wizard with my left hand, but in all the chaos, I’d just as easily hit Enwyn.
I had no time to figure out whether this was a dream or whether this was actually happening because every time the thought arose, it was quickly dispelled by the crack of wand fire or the explosion of yet another row of books being turned into confetti.
I looked down at the book and saw that the page with the Storm Bolt spell was now glowing beneath my hand. Hell, maybe this was a dream. Maybe it was the world’s weirdest hallucination. Either way, this simply wasn’t another day at the office; a day where none of the books inside the shop contained any real magic. Enwyn had said that there were certain authentic spells inside this grimoire, and the Storm Bolt spell seemed as likely a candidate as any of the others.