The Wizard And The Dragon

by Joseph Anderson

  When the fire stopped he slumped forward and braced himself on the table. The roaring sound of the fire was gone and I could now hear him panting as if he had just run all the way to the top of the tower.

  “I may have tried too hard to show off there,” he said and laughed between deep breaths. “The wizard from your village. A frail man? Not interested in maintaining his body?”

  I was taken aback by the change in subject but I thought back to my meetings with him. He had been old but also thinner than other elderly men. He had been all skin and bone with hardly any muscle to speak of. I nodded, impressed by his guess.

  “That is not me and it shall not be you. A wizard must be strong physically as well as mentally. The fire I just created would have likely killed him,” he said flatly. “From now on you will exercise your body every day. The stronger your flesh is, the more energy that it can withstand and conduct.”

  I kept my eyes on him as he spoke. I couldn’t believe how exhausted he suddenly looked. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

  “Ah,” he smiled. “From the look on your face I think you understand why you should mainly use gems for magic. Go down to the cellar in the morning and get yourself a pouch. You’ll keep a small stash on you for emergencies like I do. Only draw on the energy of your body if your life depends on it.”

  He tried to get up and groaned. He fell back onto the chair and winced.

  “Or if you want to foolishly impress your apprentice,” he muttered.

  He reached down for the bag of gems and placed them back on the table. Even though we just had dinner he created another meal from one of the gems. He immediately started eating like it was the first time he had eaten in days. I went down to the cellar to get him some water and he was still eating when I got back.

  “Thank you,” he said before gulping down a cup of water.

  When he was finally finished, and he had eaten twice as much as he usually did, he placed the empty cup in front of me. He suspended what was left of the meal and moved it to the opposite end of the table. He gestured toward the cup.

  “Before bed, I want you to try to move that with your magic,” he said. “You might not be able to lift it tonight, but try to give it a nudge. Don’t be afraid to get it wrong.”

  I sat up straight and looked at the cup like it was the most complicated thing I had ever seen. I gathered my focus and surrounded the cup with it, just like I had when witnessing all of Tower’s spells and channeling before. I thought about making the cup move by imagining it. I pictured it floating in my head and nothing happened.

  After a few minutes I switched to a different tactic. I visualized a building force in my head and then pushed out with it against the cup. Still, nothing happened except my head started to hurt. I released my focus and turned to Tower.

  “I can’t do it,” I said.

  “You can’t do it, yet,” he said, with a strong emphasis on the final word. “You’re trying to move it with your mind. That is impossible. Remember, you must be connected to the object with your magic. Move it with that.”

  I turned back to the cup and tried again. After a few more minutes of nothing happening I began to get frustrated. It felt like I was trying to write a word without knowing what it looked like. I was about to give up again when I thought back to what I had seen Tower do.

  I remembered the flow of energy that had protruded out of his hand and onto the table. It wasn’t enough to move my focus to the cup, I had to reach out through that as well. I put my right hand on the table and I felt my forearm begin to ache as if I was straining to lift something heavy. It didn’t hurt but it was close.

  Through that I grasped the cup but it still didn’t move. I remembered how Tower had nudged me with his presence when I honed in on him. I tried to recreate that with the cup and it shifted in front of me. I had lifted one side of it up slightly and I was so shocked that it worked that I panicked. I lost my concentration and the cup fell back onto the table, spinning around with the force I had pushed into it.

  “I did it!” I yelled, not caring that I only created a small tap. It was the first tangible thing I had done with my magic. Until that moment I hadn’t really believed that I was a wizard like Tower. All of the work of the previous months had been validated all at once.

  The next few weeks brought a flurry of progress. Each day I practiced moving things along with reading, writing, and drawing in my book. Each day I could move something a little more and I was already feeling the effects of drawing power from my own body.

  I exercised regularly by running up and down the stairs, from the floor up to the roof. Falling from the stairs was still a fear of mine so I kept close to the wall each time I ran. After feeling drained from using magic I understood the importance of keeping my body strong. I also had a new found respect for Tower’s abilities now that I understood how strong he must be to channel so much fire.

  During those weeks Tower made smaller meals each night. He showed me that gems could be split as well as merged together. He had me focus on the smaller gems as he transformed them into food so I could learn their patterns.

  After a dozen examples he started halting the process half-way through. The pattern would be visible to me but the gem was caught, shining brightly, just before it would turn into the meal. He would have me guess what the food would be based on the pattern. It was in this way that I first started learning how to manipulate the energy found in gems.

  Patterns were hard to remember and I was wrong more often than not. Still, Tower was patient with me and we created more food than we needed. I was happy to eat more since I was burning so much energy while I practiced moving objects.

  “Here,” Tower said one day. “I think you should, ah, ‘cook’ for us tonight.”

  He placed a red gem in the middle of the table.

  “What should I make?” I asked as I took my seat.

  “An apple. It’s a fitting start, I think. You’ve been able to identify that one the most. You want to move your focus inside the gem instead of around it. You want to move and change what’s inside the gem, not the gem itself. Imprint the pattern onto the energy while drawing it out.”

  I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled through my teeth.

  I reached out and touched the gemstone with my focus. I had gotten better at handling it since I started moving things. My other senses could work in tandem with my magical one. I could feel the weight and texture of the gemstone as if I was holding it my hand. I could see the vibrations of the potential energy trapped in the stone.

  Slipping into the gem was easier than I thought it would be. It was more a matter of letting go of the preconception that barriers were physical obstacles. I had to remind myself that the rules that applied to my physical body weren’t always imposed on my magical sense and, if I kept that in the forefront of my thoughts, I could move into the heart of the gem.

  From then on the evening was full of mistakes. The first time I tried to effect a change on the magic of the gem I ended up reshaping its mass instead of imprinting the pattern of the apple. I drew back, thinking I was successful, and saw that the gem was now rough and misshapen. It looked like a bumpy rock instead of a smooth stone.

  My second attempt was at least successful in manipulating the energy. The pattern I used was wrong and resulted in a burst of white light that consumed the entire gem. It was blindingly bright and hovered in the air above the table as if I summoned a star into the room. It refused to fade and continued shining until Tower condensed the energy back into a gem. It was much smaller after that, having been used to create the light.

  We burned, sometimes literally, through eight gemstones before I succeeded. I was able to remember the pattern correctly and properly change the energy. From then I had to visualize and stretch out the energy into the desired shape of the apple.

  I was reminded by how Tower created barriers out of the gems as I worked the magic. Suddenly I also saw the wisdom in using red gems to make the
apple. It was much easier to imagine the red apple forming around a gem of the same color.

  As the energy spread into the form of the fruit it felt easy and natural. It was like trying to read a word that I had never seen before and, as I sounded it out, I realized that it was a word I already knew, a word that I had said aloud my entire life but never seen on paper. I had been eating apples for so long that its shape was so familiar and simple for me.

  Unfortunately that burst of confidence made me complacent in the final moment of the spell. I was excited and proud and tore my focus away too quickly. It morphed the shape of the apple into a distorted mess. It was lumpy in places, and had corners in others. I looked at it and my triumphant expression faded. I felt like I wanted to cry.

  “Wow,” Tower said and then started laughing. “It’s okay, that’s not the important part. Look.”

  He moved quickly and carved into the apple. He trimmed away the protruding pieces until it looked closer to a real apple. He sliced the remaining piece in half and handed it to me. He took the other half himself and bit into it.

  “See?” he said with his mouth full. “The shape is easy to fix. Just don’t rush the end next time. The important part is if the energy was changed correctly. Try it.”

  I took a bite. The apple was juicy and firm. It crunched as I chewed it and tasted just like every other apple I had eaten. I felt a surge of pride build up inside of me and took another bite. At that moment it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted.

  “I really did it?”

  Tower nodded and I grinned back at him. I straightened in the chair and looked at the other gems on the table.

  “What else can I make?”

  Over the following weeks I provided almost all the food that we consumed. At first we ate fruit and bread, but as I grew more confident Tower taught me more complex meals. If I had trouble remembering a pattern, he would create something for me and then guide me as we reverted it back into the form of a gem. The gem was always much smaller than it was originally and much of the energy was lost in the process, but in doing so I learned the pattern of the food and could recreate it.

  I created roast beef and ham, potatoes and turnips, carrots and cauliflower. I made onions, tomatoes, lettuce, and sweet corn. Chicken was my favorite and I made that more often than anything else.

  The more that I worked with the gemstones the faster the process became, and I discovered that the quicker I was at filling out the energy into the pattern, the larger the end result of the food was. Less energy was wasted when I could manipulate it faster. Tower explained that when I was good enough to transmute a gemstone in under a second, I could create a week’s worth of meals out of the same gem I used to make my first apple.

  “Could I create a live chicken?” I blurted out one day, the same way all the sudden questions came crashing out of my mouth.

  “No,” Tower said and then hesitated. “Well, yes. Maybe. It would be difficult. When you make food you can make mistakes and it’s okay, like your first apple. We likely get some things wrong all the time, but it doesn’t matter because the food is made to be eaten, not to live and breathe. Most likely you would end up with a very horrific result at worst, or the chicken would die part way through the process at best.”

  I nodded but it seemed to have sparked something in Tower. He stared off into space for a few moments and then shook his head.

  “No, no. You might be able to learn by breaking down the life energy of a chicken into a solid form, like when you learn a new food by turning it back to a gem. But it would be far more complex. You’d need many chickens. No, it wouldn’t be worth it. Possible, but too costly.”

  The weeks continued and I started reading from the library myself. Tower had kept his promise and given me access to a book of words and their definitions. I referred to it often and tried my best to commit the new words to memory, although it usually took finding it a few times before it really stuck.

  My proficiency at writing and drawing was increasing at a much faster rate and I spent my evenings copying Tower’s drawings and sentences for practice, emulating the way he created his curves as best as I could. I became hungry for more knowledge and became enthralled with reading as much as I could.

  Toward the end of winter I was taught how to make the gems release heat and light on the roof. That was a different kind of manipulation that required a steady change of energy instead of one sudden change, like transforming a gem into food.

  I made many mistakes. I could imprint the pattern well enough but I failed at the rate of which energy was released. The water was filled with too much light and was blindingly bright for hours as it ran down the tower walls.

  Another failed attempt shattered a gem I had been using for heat and half of the water boiled away in the channel. We spent a miserable evening in the doorway on the roof, finding it unbearably hot to be inside. We had to melt the ice in the frozen water barrel to replenish the supply for the gems. That gave me ample opportunity to experiment and understand what I did wrong.

  I grasped those basic lessons as winter turned to spring. The foundations of my education were nearly complete and, as the weather began to warm, Tower decided it was time to test me.

  Chapter Twelve

  We sat in the cellar with my copy of the giant spider’s beastiary entry on the work table in front of us. We had cleared it of rubble, dust, and tools. I sat staring at the page that I had written in my own hand, copying as much of Tower’s handwriting style as I could along with each of the words. I had copied it again and again until my letters had been small enough to fit all of the words on one page as he had.

  “Read it out to me, Bryce. If you don’t remember what a word means then don’t worry, just sound out the letters and move on. You don’t need to understand every word to understand a sentence. Sometimes you can work it out if you know the rest,” Tower said encouragingly from the other side of the table.

  “Okay,” I said in a low voice. I took one last sweeping glance over the page and then began:

  “The Giant Spider.

  “Although usually found solely in underground areas of high magic resonance, reports from other books have rare sightings above ground and in the caves of creatures of high magic potential. A prominent example is that of a hibernating dragon. It would seem that certain insect species are highly susceptible to absorbing residual magic. The giant spider is one of them.

  “Size and strength vary widely but most sources agree that any spider greater than double the standard size may be considered a giant. They retain most of the agility of their smaller siblings but lose a significant portion of their strength. The most popular theory is that the build and inner workings of most insects do not translate well to increased size, which would explain the lack of scaling strength and the perplexingly light weight of the giant spider. Further studies would have to be made in order to confirm this.

  “Other drawbacks include the loss of the ability to administer venom. It would seem that the method in which spiders inject toxins through their chelicerae—did I say that right?—is rendered useless with increased size; however, it would seem that a side effect of this disability is a high toxicity of their blood. Unless an antitoxin is also provided, it is advised that no giant spider blood or body parts be used in any alchemical experiments.

  “The exception to this rule is found in the giant spider’s silk. Although the silk’s properties are largely unchanged from its transformation, the quantity that can be produced lends itself to a vast number of practical uses. Spider silk has great tensile strength, is extremely light weight, and is capable of withstanding blows from blades and blunt weapons alike.

  “Spider silk should be harvested from webs produced naturally by the giant spider although, if necessary, the spider’s silk gland can be expressed for forcible extraction of additional silk. The process would require a great amount of restraint, knowledge, and nerve, and is not recommended.”

  I lifted my head
from the page. My eyes burned from the concentration expended on each of the lines. Usually I found that reading relaxed me, but I had tried my hardest to impress Tower and the efforts had temporarily drained me.

  “Mostly good. A few stumbles on the larger words but that’s to be expected. Chelicerae. Kuh-lis-er-ree,” Tower pronounced the word slowly.

  “Chu-lis-er-ree,” I repeated back. “Chelicerae. That one’s hard.”

  “It is,” Tower smiled. “Did you understand what you read?”

  “Not the big words. Some sentences I didn’t understand,” I said. I often felt like I was reading to learn new words rather than the message of each sentence.

  “Come and look at the spider now,” he said as he turned to face the cage.

  “Do we need more silk?” I asked. The thought of having to go inside and manually extract it from the spider was at the forefront of my thoughts. I never wanted to touch the thing, never mind force it to do something with my hands.

  “No. This will be your final lesson in the basics of magic. We discussed yesterday about the different forms of energy and how a wizard is able to control them. Do you remember how I restrain the spider before we go into the cage?” he asked without taking his eyes from the jail.

  “You shackle it with a form of energy. It’s different than when you make a barrier with a gemstone. It’s physical but not a solid object. It’s still energy. I don’t know the word.”

  “Kinetic energy. Go on,” he said.

  “You focus energy in a form of pressure at a point on the spider. I can feel it when you work the energy. It doesn’t take a lot, does it? A lot less than making fire.”

  “Correct,” he smiled. “You’d be surprised how little force is required if it is put in the right place. Well done. There are other forms of energy that I can show you but those are more advanced lessons. There’s one last thing about this spider, however. Do you remember the first time that it was stunned? In the tunnel?”