by Alston Sleet
It was my spell for a luxury transport construct. It was supposed to be my ticket to leading a team. The spell required an expensive platinum and rubies base for the ring, nothing less would be capable of holding the complex rune form, but just wearing the ring for a few hours would be enough to recharge the device for a day’s worth of travel.
I had spent weeks just working on the shape of the constructs illusion as it formed. It was my greatest work.
“I wasn’t working on that for anyone else! I was going to…,” I began before Calmick cut me off.
“You were going to sell it to the highest bidder and take FMI proprietary spell forms with you when you did.”
I could feel the walls around me press in and I was working to keep from throwing up on his desk as I muttered, “No.”
“Yes! but I caught you before you could do it. Since you created this on work resources, your company assigned rune tablet, this spell is the property of FMI. Your things should be gathered in the box outside. Good day.”
I walked out of the room in a daze. Thug number three pushed a cardboard box with some scrap paper and a picture of my Aunt in a little silver frame, into my arms. All that work, gone. Just, gone.
I could see it now, the little weasel presenting my work on Monday to upper management and the raise that would come with it. He would present it as his work and since I did everything in the hours before anyone else arrived, I had no proof that I created it. He would have all weekend to figure out how my spell worked and he would claim all the credit.
Legal wrangling would probably take years if the court would even be willing to hear me out. I wouldn’t be able to afford the legal bills to fight even if I had a chance and a lawyer willing to try.
No one would take a chance on hiring me since I was fired for a violation of my contract with FMI. I had a few articles and press releases to my name, but I mostly worked behind the scenes. While I was a master of transformation and transportation spells and my rune design work was top tier, I hadn’t done any direct enchanting in years. I mostly designed spells, I didn’t do the work of actually enchanting things. If I ended up blacklisted I might have to go back to charging mana stones or direct casting of cosmetic spells in the mall.
Maybe I could move to the East coast and try for a design shop there or try and find a job in one of the quick fab design shops. One of those companies which pop out thousands of designs a year for custom requests. I couldn’t imagine spending day after day designing yet another animated sex doll, though.
My Aunt’s face just stared up at me with her quirky smile among the remnants of my career. She always told me that with a bit more effort, if I kept trying, I would succeed, I couldn’t help but succeed. I stared at her smile the entire train ride back home to my empty apartment. I knew what I was planning to do. I knew it was a violation of everything she had taught me, an acceptance that what my parents had done to me was right, that power was what made things right, but I just couldn’t take it anymore. The most I could hope for was to be a small cog in a big world, one where all the possibilities, all the power, was spoken for.
I wanted that power.
Slowly I turned over the frame and hid the smile of the woman who had raised me and prepared to do something she would have been horrified by.
I was going to bargain with a demon.
Copyright Alston Sleet 2017
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ISBN: 978-0-9988283-0-5