The Magical Book of Wands

by Raven M. Williams

  It was the last of those memories of me as a Dark Fae Princess and you as my handsome magician that hurt the most to take from you...

  I had opened my eyes, hearing nothing but your heartbeat and the sounds of the Crystalline Forest. My hands roamed over your chest, barely able to believe you were flesh and blood and that there was no penalty for being able to touch you.

  You laughed at me and you grabbed the back of my head to plant a small kiss on my forehead.

  You laughed again when you saw me frown, offended by my own hesitation when every cell of my body was screaming for you.

  “It’s not enough,” I told you, already tearing at the laces on his horrible shirt.

  You leaned forward and nibbled at the flesh of my neck and my intent had dissolved on a current of laughter.

  “You’re ticklish,” you mused and I could feel a grin spreading on your face before you wiggled your tongue and nipped my ear.

  “We don’t have time for this,” I murmured, my hands returning to the frantic task of undressing you. I hadn’t meant all of it, just the extra bits. Foreplay be damned, I would have you, even if we had to run and screw at the same time. It wasn’t some mere reckless urge. When fae resonated with their mate, anything short of instant coupling was physically painful and I was eager to be rid of it to focus again.

  I was frustrated and feverish under the torrent of your insubordinate kisses while I tore away your clothes first and took you in my own hand. I tried to lift my own skirts to mount you but you stopped me.

  “I want to see you too,” you scolded, nibbling at my chin as you did.

  Still, you didn’t help me, but any attempt to take you resulted in failure. I was left with little recourse but to go back to the frustrating task of disrobing while you licked and nipped and pinched every bit of me I struggled to expose.

  It was exquisite torture when my breasts were freed, your mouth claiming one and your hand claiming the other, glad for your other hand being freed to catch me when my legs went weak. You seemed content to spend every moment mapping my skin with every part of your mouth, memorizing all of the spots that made me laugh and moan until you composed a symphony of the sounds I made.

  Ah, but I was still so frustrated and didn’t touch you, just sought to free the barriers between us. I thought I would finally have you when my skirts fell away, but it was uncharted territory and your sweet torment continued there, even from the top of my tail to the tip, your hand dragging over it with the same reverence I had shown to your cock. You spent way too much time assaulting me with waves of pleasure and still I was greedy to have you inside me. I had grabbed your hair and yanked you to line up where I wanted you, drawing blood from your bottom lip when I bit you in a feral kiss. I could taste myself, the heat of my arousal that would prepare your entry mingling with the copper flavor of blood. My hips began a rhythm of need even as I struggled to coax you to stop denying me.

  You laughed one last time as you slid into me, filling me so fully that I arched and cried out in victory. It was then that I locked my legs behind you, feeling your back muscles work as you pumped into me with languid torture. I wanted to be angry, but the rhythm was perfect and a new need overrode the selfish objective I had thought I wanted. I began to touch you, reveling in the broad expanse of muscle jumping beneath my curious fingers.

  Our eyes had locked and your rhythm intensified. I watched my glow on your human skin and ran my fingers everywhere just to see you wear the source of my love.

  My generous lover, you never found your climax until you had sent me over the peak more times than I could count.

  You might have gone longer but, reckless respite of passion aside, we had company and there was no time to dress before we had to flee. They had not seen me yet, had no idea their princess was the culprit. Maybe if I had known that or trusted you more, I wouldn’t have been so quick to erase so much...

  We were young, stupid, and while I was stupider, you were definitely far younger and I had made a hard decision for the both of us.

  As long as I was Dark Fae, I would always need to return to Asphodel or wither away. It would mean I would always be putting us in danger to retain my immortality. As long as we were who we were, there would be no peace. They did not know yet that I was gone, but the moment I came back, there would be no doubt.

  It wasn’t even a question to me. I couldn’t imagine life without you. What was immortality without my reason to live? I was already pushing my luck with how fortunate I had been to get out of my marriage without causing a war, to find my matched aura, and I couldn’t ruin that either.

  I would erase everything we were. You would never have the guilt of the memory; it would be my burden alone. We would be human together and we would be safe, living as very different people. I would be Gretel and you would be Vincent and we would live and die as humans.

  Where did I screw up?

  The homunculus worked, which is still a blow to my ego. The fact that in 45 human years, no one in Asphodel or Saranel had ever guessed that the sad sack homunculus wasn’t me. Never mind that I should rejoice that my programming was adequate enough a lover to fool my wretched prince (and possibly Orphes), but my own father? Was I always so uninteresting to him?

  Then again, perhaps he knew from the first. Perhaps it was how he atoned for the misery he had caused. He is Dark Fae, after all, and alliance or not, he owed them nothing. I like to think he is even proud that I found my loophole after all.

  I couldn’t have known that the homunculus would work so well and that they would never look for me. Then again, maybe my former lover and former husband did know by now and it never mattered that I was there at all, only that there be a symbol of unity for the pathetic masses. Elandris’s own massive ego wouldn’t bare the scandal and he’d be free to bugger his lover rather than attend to a restless wife.

  I guess all that remains is why we aren’t dead now... What turn of fate brings us to this moment of reckoning? But I am selfish, my love, and the truth is only yours if you are mine still. So, like the humans say:

  Are you my ride or die?

  ‘VINCENT’ FROWNED AT ‘Gretel’, once more pulling out the wand from the tacky 70s style pocket. The ‘70s’ melted away and the world around them was not too much different from Earth, yet it wasn’t ‘Earth’ at all or at least any he had known as Vincent.

  “Vincent isn’t my real name at all. It’s Aseron,” he said, his memory trickling back. “But you never told me yours.”

  ‘Gretel’ smiled sadly, still searching his face for rejection and betrayal.

  “It’s Adair,” she told him, blushing.

  “45 fucking years of marriage and I’m meeting you for the first time. In the place we supposedly met for the first time,” he grumbled, the strange words of a grizzled old man coming from a man the very picture of youth.

  Adair screwed up her face with guilt, nearly jumping when his hand kindly grazed her cheek.

  “45 years of bearing it all alone. And you never got sick of me,” Aseron told her now, catching her tears with his fingers. “But you died in an accident.”

  Adair shook her head, once again moved that he would think of her first.

  “No, I learned that we weren’t doomed to die as humans,” Adair admitted, her human glamor falling away to reveal her true form: the pointed ears, the tail, those odd colors he thought his old or dead eyes had simply imagined. “I didn’t dare subject our children to some dreaded homunculi just to stand in for us. I had to count on how well I knew you to find your wand after I ‘died’.”

  “You were nearly wrong,” he chastised. “I had the gun to my head.”

  Adair winced. There was always some important detail she overlooked.

  Aseron fell silent, thinking of the children he would never see again in the face of the woman he loved more than all the worlds.

  “What happened to me?” he asked.

  “They’ll find you peacefully on the bed,” Adair assured him, her fa
ce still edged with fear. Already, she was saying too much...

  Aseron laughed and swiped at her tears once more.

  “God, woman, you’re going to drown me if you keep it up. I’m not going anywhere. Wherever you are is where I want to be. I was about to eat a bullet to prove it,” Aseron reminded her, feeling her arms circle him in relief.

  “Enough to live with me in Asphodel forever? With ordinary Dark Fae peasant, Aoibheal?” Adair/Gretel asked hopefully. She couldn’t help but be fond of never being ‘Adair’ again. ‘Gretel’ needed to retire as well...

  It had taken a human lifetime to figure this one out. How to make her aura unrecognizable. The answer had lain with the immortality awarded to humans kept by the Fae. She had found the source of their power, the intricacies of aura, came from a source called the Fount. It was why proximity to their homeland was so crucial. Learning to manipulate it had not been easy, but since no one in Fae ever remembered its existence, she had free rein to test it undiscovered.

  “I’m prepared to lie with you forever,” Aseron conspired, leaving no doubt of the double entendré.

  “Aseron, is that your wand—?” Adair started to tease back, a play on the old human pick-up line.

  “It’s one of them anyway,” he finished, more than happy to fill her with his magic once more.

  About the Author

  Krista Gossett, a graduate of IADT with two degrees in graphic design, has self-published two books in an epic fantasy series, The Truth about Heroes, and is working to publish more in a variety of genres. Raises her two nephews and loves her African cichlids, even the big pink jerk.

  www.Kristagossett.blogspot.com

  http://www.facebook.com/kristalynngossett

  The Dragonbone Wand

  By E.P. Clark

  IT WAS JUST A PIECE of bone.

  Dull white, the width of my finger and twice as long as my hand, it lay on a faded piece of velvet. Young men and the occasional young woman gathered around it, laughing nervously and pushing each other with their elbows to be the first to touch it.

  “Are you finally going to try this year, Laela?” one of them called out to me.

  “No,” I said. But I walked over and joined the crowd anyway.

  I was the oldest amongst them by a good ten years. Back in the foolish first flush of youth, when young men run off to war and young women run after young men, I had stayed at home and apprenticed to the village healer, and then to the village scribe. Now I was both. While my age-mates chased after their growing families, shouting at their children and nagging their husbands in order to feel loved and needed, I sat in my quiet cottage, copying out wills and tending to those whom others could not help. Loved I was not, but needed I certainly was. It would be wrong to walk away from that. No one else in our village could so much as set a broken bone, let alone write a letter. I couldn’t leave them to go chasing after adventure, and, I’d always told myself, I’d never really wanted to anyway. The mountains on the edge of the horizon that pulled at others so strongly had never provoked any feeling in me other than a vague but nauseating fear.

  Red-haired Arne, whose right arm was still in a sling of my fashioning after yet another ill-advised climb up a tree, stepped forward and stretched out his left hand towards the piece of bone. The others laughed when he stopped, his hand hovering a foot away from the wand, and then cheered when he suddenly made to snatch it off the velvet. The cheers turned to laughter again when he yelped and jumped back, sucking on his fingers.

  One by one, the other young men tried to touch the piece of dragonbone. Some got closer than others, but none were able to get within a hand’s breadth of it.

  “Come on, girls,” said the man who was running the show. He was puffy-faced and unshaven, in robes that might have once been rich but were now mainly dirty, and he was obviously bored. If I had to imagine a dragon-sorcerer, he would be the opposite of the picture my mind would form. But he had been coming through our village every year ever since I could remember, growing shabbier and shabbier and more and more bored as he exhorted us to test ourselves for the talent and maybe, just maybe, prove ourselves to be the possessors of that most precious prize: dragon magic.

  “Come on, girls,” he said again, staring off at the sky as he spoke, as if too bored to even bother looking at his potential future acolytes. “Don’t you want to try? Wealth and health, knowledge and power beyond your wildest dreams, could all be yours. And for you it would come easy. You know we need more women.”

  He told us that every year. Dragon magic was more common in men, he told us, and most women who had the talent couldn’t learn to do much with it, but they still needed them.

  “Why do you need us?” I had asked, the first time he had told me to test myself. “Why do you need women, if we can’t use the magic?”

  “In women the talent always breeds true,” he had told me, and then quickly cut his eyes away, embarrassed. I hadn’t had to ask any more, and I hadn’t tested myself either. I hadn’t wanted to become an ordinary broodmare of ordinary children here at home, and my desire to be dragged off to the mountains and turned into a broodmare for dragon-children was no greater. At least let them court me properly if that was what they wanted from me. But instead I was expected to prove myself to them as worthy of exploitation, and thank them for the privilege. I was glad that most of the other girls seemed to feel the same way, and didn’t even bother to present themselves for testing.

  A couple of raindrops fell down from the gray sky, spotting the faded velvet but not touching the bone itself. Giggling, the girls who had come all quickly tried to put their hands on the wand. Two could not get within a foot of it and retreated with sulky faces. The third brought her hand down to hover no more than an inch from the wand, but when she tried to close her fingers around it, she shrieked and jumped back as if burned.

  “Hard luck,” said the man, not sounding as if he cared one way or another. “You must have half a drop of the blood, though. When the time comes, be sure to send your children to us for testing.”

  The third girl retreated to join the others, who were all shaking their hands and saying in loud voices that they were glad not to be chosen, glad not to have their lives overturned and turned over to others.

  “And what about you, Laela?” asked the man. “Is this finally to be the year? Will you finally see if you can come join us at our forge in the mountains?” He waved his hand in the air, vaguely in the direction of the mountains that could be seen on clearer days. There was a rumble, whether of thunder or a fresh eruption of fire, I couldn’t say.

  “Why do you know my name?” I asked him. “You don’t remember anyone else’s name.”

  He smiled a tired smile. At one point, probably before I was born, he must have been handsome. I imagined him as he would have been when he was the same age as the boys he had just turned away, fresh and eager, catching the eye of every girl who saw him with his good looks and the air of power and good fortune that must have suffused him as soon as he was chosen. Now the air that hovered around him was mainly suffused with disappointment and too much drink. A good advertisement for dragon magic he was not. But maybe he was the best they had. Maybe the bad things they said about the mountain and the forge and the order and the training were all true.

  “Every year you come here and stare at the wand, and every year you refuse the test,” he told me. He looked me up and down. “And you’re easy to remember,” he added. “A head taller than everyone else, and hair like a curtain of midnight.” His lips twitched. “You didn’t think I was a poet, did you? Come on, Laela. Let this year be the year. What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m not afraid,” I told him.

  He looked me up and down again, but this time, for the first time, with the shrewd eyes of someone who did know things that other, ordinary, mortals did not. “Yes, you are,” he said. “You want to be chosen, and you’re afraid you won’t be, isn’t that right?”

  “I don’t want to be chosen,”
I said.

  “Everyone wants to be chosen, Laela. Wealth and health, knowledge and power, remember? Who doesn’t want that?”

  “I don’t.”

  “So prove it.”

  “I already have. By not taking the test.”

  “You can’t prove yourself by not taking a test.” I thought he might be trying to hide a smile. Perhaps he was cleverer than I had always thought. “You can only prove yourself by taking it, and seeing whether you pass or fail. Take the test, Laela. And then you can tell me which of the riches we offer don’t appeal to you.”

  Somehow I had ended up standing right in front of the rickety folding table he always set up on the edge of the market square, which held the faded square of velvet and the unassuming little piece of bone.

  “I don’t need to take the test to know the result,” I told him. “I’ll fail, just like everyone else.”

  “And since you don’t want to be chosen, you have nothing to fear,” he said. “Take the test, Laela. Get it over with and stop hovering on the edge of the crowd whenever I come through, looking like a raw recruit at a whorehouse.”

  “How charming,” I told him. “You make me want to join you even more.” But my hand reached out of its own accord anyway. He was right: I needed to put an end to this. And maybe, just maybe...

  My hand seemed to separate from my body and float downwards on its own. Surely this couldn’t be happening, surely it couldn’t be me who was doing this. I had always said I would never take the test. I had always broken out in a cold sweat of fear at the thought.

  My hand continued to float down towards the wand of bone. I had heard from many others what it felt like when the bone rejected you, and sometimes treated their wounds. A slap, a bee sting, a scorching burn...for some it was more painful than for others, but for everyone it was more pain than they cared to withstand. Failing the test was its own rite of passage.