by Vance Huxley
Father Curtis - Priest hosting a leech (Thirteenseed)
Celtchar - Name used by the sorcerer owning Castle House
Redwolf - Sorcerer who has a house in Stourton
Mannan - Redwolf′s senior apprentice
Terese Green - Powerful sorceress - junior (and only other) partner in Woods and Green solicitors
Celeborn, Denethor, and Galadriel - Pendragon′s senior apprentices
Gawain and Paragon - Pendragon′s newest apprentices
Guinevere - Ginny - 36 - Apprentice to Pendragon, recently promoted to senior
Verenestra aka Veren - A new sorceress (ex-apprentice whose sorcerer has been killed)
Boudicca - A new sorceress (ex-apprentice whose sorcerer has been killed) in Sheffield
Seraph Angelique Bellamy-Courts - 18 - Wealthy young woman who manipulated the rich, influential, athletic and good-looking until stopped by Ferryl Shayde - now left school
Kieran - 16 - First Taverner outside local area - in Hope Valley in the Pennines - year 12
Emst - 19 - Laurence′s German cousin
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Magical Entities:
Ferryl Shayde - Faded but powerful sorceress, species unknown, a shimmer in the air unless possessing a living creature
Zephyr - Created living magical creature - a wind spirit created, enhanced, strengthened and taught to have both awareness and a sense of right and wrong - lives in Abel′s tattoo to replace Ferryl Shayde
Fourthseed - Senior blood leech possessing an apparently young woman
Dryad Chestnut - Strong, ancient dryad living in Horse Chestnut tree on village green in Brinsford
Dryad Sycamore - A mere two hundred years old, rescued when its tree blew over in a storm - now a stone glyph allows it to be the only dryad in Dead Wood, the magically protected woodland behind Castle House gardens
Dryad Elm - Lonely old dryad, the only one living in Elmwood Park - lives in a Horse Chestnut, the only adult tree left in the park, because all the Elms were killed by Dutch Elm Disease - has befriended a human, most unusual
Churchyard dryad - Lives in a very old Yew tree that predates the church in Brinsford
Dryad Woods - Very old dryad in a large bonsai - senior partner in a solicitors firm, Woods and Green
Magical Council - A group of powerful sorcerers and sorceresses who enforce the Accord and attempt to regulate the sorcery community
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Ferryl’s World
Magic - A power that permeates the air, but cannot be utilised in its raw form. All living creatures absorb magic but plants are unable to dissipate it. Trees are the greatest natural reservoirs of magic, if old enough. Animals from insects to elephants will dissipate any surplus in an uncontrolled fashion, unless they are sentient and learn to utilise glyphs and store more.
Glyphs - Patterns drawn or etched on solid objects or in air or water, used to control magic and give it specific purpose. The strength of a scribed glyph depends on the magic put into it, and the medium it is drawn on. Glyphs inscribed in metal are the strongest, scribed in air the weakest. Effect of a glyph depends on amount of magic, skill, and intent behind it. The four basic glyphs are air, fire, water and earth. Combined with each other and shaped by intent, they create glyphs of increasing complexity, until almost anything can be accomplished. Conversely, a slight mistake can be catastrophic or fatal.
Veil - A concealment glyph that can be anchored to an object or a person. The amount of concealment depends on the intent and magic poured into it.
Spun slowly anti-clockwise, a veil obscures living beings from non-magical sight, though the magically aware can still see through it and will detect the veil itself as a shimmer in the air. Spun faster, it conceals plants, faster still, dead plants such as wood. The same speed will conceal an object such as a car if the glyph is drawn directly onto it. Spun at very high speed, the glyph uses impractically huge amounts of magic but can conceal anything, including even its own shimmer, from magic users. Beings made of almost pure magic can still detect the intense magical activity, but not the veil or what is concealed.
Another identical glyph spun clockwise at the same time extends the size of the concealment globe, faster making it larger.
Shield - A glyph that increases the natural protection covering the skin of all warded magic users. Heat or physical trauma can be felt through the shield while it is next to the skin, though the effect is reduced. The amount of magic used strengthens the shield, and it can by pushed out to cover others and nearby objects. Two shields touching causes both to drain magic from their users, with a spectacular light and heat display.
As a side effect, a shield cuts all tethers, spooky-phones, telephone or radio communications. Bindings will hold and shades can be controlled through a shield, but the protection must be dropped to allow them in or out.
A part of the shield away from a threat can be collapsed in beneath the skin, to allow communication down tethers or to free a phone.
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Gods - Possibly originally sorcerers who have learned how to draw magic from worshippers using a symbol or mark. Their power grows with the number of prayers, but old gods act quickly to crush young ones. Gods fade away as worshippers decrease but are eternal as long as one worshipper still lives. Legend claims that the glyphs were stolen from the first God.
Sorcerer or Sorceress - Advanced glyph wielder who has learned how to prolong his or her life with magic. Even after learning the secret, it takes many years to understand their body well enough to heal any injury or illness. They are usually wealthy, live in a well-guarded home and keep a wide area clear of any large or particularly dangerous entities.
Apprentice - Magically aware teenager (the usual age for awakening) who accepts a tether from a sorcerer in return for training in magic. Apprentices are used to fill protection glyphs for their mistress’s customers, using most of their naturally absorbed magic each day. The amount of magic they are allowed to keep for practicing, and the speed they learn new glyphs, varies from sorcerer to sorceress. Some apprentices may serve fifty or sixty years before being given the healing glyph, for instance, while others are never taught it.
Once established, the tether allows the sorcerer to read their apprentice’s current thoughts (but not memories), drain magic from them, and control their actions. With concentration the sorceress can treat an apprentice as a puppet, but this is hard work so most are left to carry out their orders without direct control. The tether includes imperatives that prevent any attempt to harm or betray the sorcerer, and can inflict excruciating pain.
Witch or Warlock - Minor magic practitioner unable to progress beyond wind and fire to complicated sorcerous glyphs. Sells charms and hexes, and removes or creates minor curses. They have a long but normal lifespan, usually training a replacement who will also support them in old age. The profession is dying out in the countryside and smaller towns due to the current disbelief in magic and magical creatures. There are few paying customers to provide a living so youngsters prefer to take up other jobs.
Bound Servant - A being branded with a mark allowing a glyph wielder to control it completely. Will ignore pain or injury, hard to kill because partly protected by brand.
Tethered Servant - A person or creature controlled with a less complicated version of the apprentice tether. They are not taught, nor rewarded, and are never released.
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Creatures visible to the non-magical
Dryad - Creature that lives in trees, utilising the accumulated tree-magic to protect its home tree and prolong both their lives. Gnarled, bad-tempered, rude creatures, they can manipulate magic to create a veil to hide or to change their appearance. Will sometimes give answers to questions in return for honey.
Stout woody torso, no neck, eyes large, round and are different shades depending on tree. Chestnuts are chestnut brown, of course. Torso matches bark of tree. Legs are short, stout, no knees and end in roots that often embed
in ground to help dryad stand. Arms are thin branches with long twigs as fingers, no foliage.
Can work simple glyphs using tree magic, protect tree against magic, slow rot and disease, and control tree enough to drop branches on attackers, strangle small creatures with roots or hit them with branches. Full control of the roots and branches takes many, many years of practice.
Asexual, though they can produce very realistic facsimile human features to lure humans close enough to steal a little magic. Dryads occasionally ripen young, but not often because there are few unclaimed trees. The young are given a basic knowledge of the world, the glyphs dryads can work, and how to control a tree. Blend into a young tree as seedlings and grow together, very vulnerable until the young tree matures and accumulates surplus magic.
Blood leech - Old blood magic remnant that survives by possessing a human and feeding on fresh blood and the magic therein. Spread when a single leech infects healthy humans with seeds, which grow to create a nest of leeches. The originating leech, known as the Firstseed, dominates and is protected by the others. Leeches are connected both by sensing each other’s presence and an affinity for the lair, the home of the Firstseed.
Adult leeches prefer pale skinned hosts to shed excess heat. Wear dark glasses because their eyes show red around the pupils. Most find a willing victim, usually demanding a fixed period of possession (forty years) for the curing of an otherwise fatal illness. Once vacated, the discarded host should be left young and healthy but with no memory of the intervening years. If the leech has kept the bargain they will then live out their lives normally.
Not all leeches keep the bargain, some leaving the host barely alive and often infected with a seed. These also leave the host with full memories of forty years spent hunting humans and draining blood. The host may survive but memories may drive them insane. If a seeded host finds enough fresh blood, another blood leech is created. Even if the host finds a priest or sorcerer fast enough, the seed will try to poison them as it dies.
Goblins - Visible to the non-magical because they eat large amounts of non-magical food. Goblins eat almost anything humans or animals do but prefer junk food (or fruit cake) to raw meat. Raid rubbish bins, cat and dog dishes and bird tables but also eat magical creatures and small animals and birds.
Hunted almost to extinction for two main reasons. Firstly, gastric juices and wind are very flammable, making them a severe fire hazard. Goblins sleeping near open fires could explode and set fire to the house if they passed wind. Sorcerers still believe a goblin with indigestion started the Great Fire of London. Considered vermin. Some sorcerers used captive goblins as entertainment at feasts. Guests would shoot burning arrows at tethered goblins, or heat them slowly until they exploded.
Periodic attempts to wipe them out failed because they breed fast. Goblins reach plague proportions as their melds (clan, family) keep expanding. Even goblins have no way to limit their numbers, except suicide. Periodic hunts scoured the countryside, but one survivor is enough to regrow the meld. Although goblins helped to keep rats in check, the fire hazard outweighed their benefits. A goblin infestation sweeping down from the north of England and wiping out the flea carriers might be why the Black Death petered out in the Midlands.
Goblins are dark emerald green, potbellied munchkins, vaguely humanoid. Two short skinny legs with fat feet and five fat flat grasping claws—can be used for perching. Two long skinny arms end in small palms with four long knobbly clawed fingers and a very fat, short thumb. Wide mouth, lots of tiny teeth, looong thin tongue and huge appetite. Round, dark green eyes, no apparent ears or nose.
Goblins live in melds (like a clan). Old goblins are called Olds. Skin crumbles as they get older until internal gases and juices mix with their magic, erupting in a small explosion. Olds may look for the flame (suicide) if there is a food shortage. When an Old looks close to exploding, keeps away from other goblins to avoid killing them.
Batlins - Smallest goblin, body the size of a thrush. Like other goblins except for large bat-like wings. Live in caves, barns and attics, very much like bats and usually fly at night to avoid notice.
Ratlins - Size of a large rat, not as rotund as other goblins, live in burrows and often steal flower bulbs or gnaw roots on living bushes and unprotected trees.
Stonelins - About metre tall. Disguise themselves with a seeming, looking like gargoyles or grotesque garden statues and ornaments.
Hobgoblins - Bigger, tougher and scarier and were used by some sorcerers as guards. Lived in wild places and deep caves, but are now allegedly extinct.
Troll: Several types, all allegedly destroyed by the church or sorcerers.
Cave Trolls still exist, hiding deep in the earth. An adult looks like a crusty slug with a pointed head and is the size of an articulated truck. Little magic outside of an affinity for compressing and strengthening earth and rock around tunnels. Trolls accrete rock and earth as they grow, bonding it into their skins as armour. Most glyphs bounce off an adult or only damage the crust. New-formed trolls are about a metre tall, looking like a fat half-worm on end but twisted like a swirl of cream or soft ice-cream (or a dog poop).
Swamp Trolls, Water (Bridge) Trolls and Ice Trolls are probably extinct, as they were more visible and killed on sight.
Varglin - The lesser descendants of what were called vargs, the children of the Norse wolf-god Fenris. Almost a large wolf but sickly green mossy fur with longer fangs and claws and a ruff of orange porcupine quills. Usually inhabit thick woodlands and prey on lesser magical beings or weak animals.
Amanatik - A spined, eight-legged turtle with a metre-long shell. The hunting hounds of the South American creator goddess Amana, who rode a turtle and had a mermaid′s tail. Amanatik have huge heads sporting four long spiral tusks. Allegedly came from South America on Spanish treasure ships. Prefer seashores, where they wait for their goddess to return.
Fraggon - Long, frilled, many-legged dragon with a frog-like head, looks like a stone guardian. When it moves, the creature is living stone, both more agile and more intelligent than a guardian. Possibly a creature, possibly an advanced magical creation.
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The following are invisible, unless the human is awakened to magic. Those with enhanced magical sight can see the glow of magic inside each one, the life-spark.
Free Spirit - Semi-sentient fragment of a force of nature that has absorbed a fraction of the life from a dying entity. A ripple in the water, a flame or a puff of wind can become alive though not really thinking, and will persist if it finds enough life magic to feed on. The amoeba of the magical world, hunted by a myriad of tiny creatures. Wind sprites are almost invisible, even with magical sight.
Feral Spirit - A free spirit that survives long enough to understand hunger, and seek out the stray magic leaking from non-magical beings. Any who survive long enough, the rarest of feral spirits, learn to deliberately take magic from fish eggs, tiny insects and free spirits. Feral spirits that survive for centuries learn how to drain the magic from larger animals and magical creatures. Although still very simple creatures, the strongest can kill animals the size of humans. Even those vanishingly rare examples are still ephemeral in nature, a cloud of magic with few defences, so any magic user or large predatory magical creature can drain them.
The final form, so rare it doesn′t have a name, is when a feral spirit becomes truly sentient. If it learns to possess flesh creatures it becomes harder to find and much harder to kill, and may learn enough magic to be truly dangerous. The church in particular will use all their resources to hunt down any such creature once they learn of it.
Beinsnork - Old Norse for Bonesnake - metre-long yellow snake with tiny pincered legs, covered in short, sharp triangular blades of bone. Allegedly the creations of the world-snake, if it bleeds on the bones in a graveyard.
Satan-Steed - A white lizard two metres long with red horns, and jaws like a coachman beetle, usually found in bogs or where old bogs dried up. They are allegedly inhabited by th
e spirits of those buried alive in ancient rites. Six of these allegedly pull the Devil′s coach, or in some mythologies they are the mounts of the Four Horsemen.
Ganshbaal - Glittering black nightmare scorpion rats - the survivors of the rats that bore the Indian elephant-god Ganesh in his final battle before fading from the world. During that battle, rage and magic transformed them into vicious poisonous combatants.
Wealth Toad - Sometimes called a luck toad. A fist-sized furred three-legged toadish thing with three straight, sharp horns. Not usually belligerent. Will sometimes use a simple seeming to live in homes as a small statuette where it absorbs stray magic from residents. Name originally comes from an affinity to gold.
Ruttlyte - Like a ratlin but grey and veined with virulent blue and purple. Originally a failed attempt at killing and binding ratlins. Secretive, and like ratlins, they prefer flight to fight.
Catspaw - Hand-sized beetle with cat′s paws and claws and a single sharp spine down its back. Often used by ancient sorcerers as a bound servant, sacrificed to obtain information or simply for amusement.
Skurrit - Pack hunter. Long thin low-slung metre-long body with a variable number of short legs and clawed feet, all covered with long, matted dirty brown fur. Has a light brown bald tail and a nearly bald head each about 40 cm long. Tiny red eyes in a small skull with a long thin pointed snout, containing several rows of sharp teeth. One alone will probably run from a cat, two or more might hunt it.
Globhoblin - Warty, globular creature up to the size of a football with a variable number of legs ending in clawed feet. Will eat the magic from bacteria, maggots and flies on discarded food but prefers to prey on the helpless, like kittens, hamsters, caged birds, chicks and baby animals, as well as small, slow wildlife and magical creatures. Will also prey on drunks or the ill, using a stinger to draw magic directly. Easily killed by weak glyphs or banished by hexes.
Fursomnium - Dream stealer or eater. Spreads webs through bedroom walls to feed on the emotional magic given off by dreamers. Can sometimes follow a dream back to the sleeper, inducing nightmares to increase the emotions and therefore the magic. A dream shield, often known as a dreamcatcher, can thwart it using glyphs powered by the magic in the gems. If a fursomnium eats well, for instance if someone nearby goes insane, it can sleep for many tens of years. The ambience and rumours of ghosts in old asylums is often due to the presence of a huge, well-fed fursomnium.