The Wizard And The Dragon

by Joseph Anderson

  I nodded.

  “Tell me about it. What was different about that time?”

  “That wasn’t energy. You froze—suspended—it that time. Like you do with our food. I don’t know what that is. That’s different,” I said quietly, unsure if there was something I had failed to notice.

  “That was an influence on time. That’s the other, more complicated, side of the magic that I can teach you. When you take energy from your body or gemstones and create fire, you are transforming energy from one form to another.

  “This other side is influencing that energy without changing it. You can accelerate the speed of the energy and make a fire burn through its fuel faster, or you can slow it down or even stop it, if you are capable enough. The more volatile and excited the energy is, the more difficulty you’ll have in slowing or stopping it. Those are the only ways you can influence it, however. It’s impossible to reverse the course of energy.”

  “You can stop fire?” I whispered.

  “In theory,” Tower responded slowly. “In my years I have only managed to slow fire, but not stop it. But I am young still. I may learn one day.”

  I gawked at his comment about him being young and he laughed at me. It was a good laugh. I found myself smiling.

  “Fire is a very active state for energy to be in,” Tower continued. “Food is easy. It’s almost entirely stationary to begin with. Creatures and people vary, depending on the amount of magical energy they have inside of them and their size. It requires a great deal of concentration and knowledge on the part of the wizard, but little to no energy is actually expended on your part. You are manipulating an already existing form as it is, not transmuting something from yourself into another form.”

  “How else can you alter time?” I perked up as I asked the question and, as if he knew the reason why I was suddenly so animated, Tower frowned at me.

  “I’m sorry Bryce, but not in the way you’re hoping. It is possible that two moments in time can be linked to each other but only under very specific circumstances. The link would also have to be created beforehand and then returned to much later. You can’t travel backwards unless you were able to create that point yourself.

  “The amount of magic involved would be immense. I’ve only come across it once in the collection of books upstairs. Even if you found a way, you wouldn’t be able to save your village from the dragon.”

  I turned my head from his view and nodded. I didn’t like to get upset in front of Tower even if there were still nights that I was terrified that the dragon may find us. I had been safe for almost a year and my nightmares still hadn’t stopped.

  I felt Tower move away and begin to shift around the room. I raised my eyes and watched as he picked up a handful of stones from the corners of the room. They were pieces of broken stone, a mess that we hadn’t bothered to clean up after extracting the gemstones.

  “Watch then, this will be the last lesson before you can truthfully call yourself an apprentice,” he grinned as he spoke and I immediately gave him my full attention. My need to impress Tower cleared away other thoughts.

  I studied his movements with both my eyes and my magic focus. He placed three stones on the table, leaving a small space between each of them. He left the first one alone, as if it was to serve as a point of reference. The second he picked up with only his forefinger and thumb so I could still see it as he lifted it above the table. He parted his fingers and the stone remained in the air. I could feel the energy drawing out of Tower to hold the stone in place. It was similar to what I felt when he held the spider in place so many months ago.

  “So far this is something you have seen me do,” he explained. “You are capable of this and you’ll be trying soon, so pay attention. First I want to show you the other way to contain things, and how it’s different.”

  He took up the third stone and held it up. His eyes locked on it for a brief moment before he looked at me.

  “This is suspended now, just like our food. Just like the spider in the tunnel. Now, what do you think will happen when I move my fingers from holding it?”

  “It’ll stay in the air,” I said, thinking it was obvious.

  He smiled and moved his hand. The stone fell and bounced off the tabletop like there was no spell at all.

  “But?” I looked between him and the stone in disbelief. “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s okay, I got that one wrong my first time too,” he said. “Suspending something only effects the object and energy of the target itself, not the forces acting around it. We could still move the spider, remember? You can still move the food on the plate. The stone will still fall.”

  I looked at the other stone still hovering in the air as Tower moved back to standing in front of it.

  “However, I’m holding this one in place with energy stronger than the gravity pulling at it. A larger amount of energy than I am using to keep this in place would be required to move it now.”

  “The other way doesn’t seem very good then,” I said with a frown. “What good is it?”

  Tower laughed, “Don’t be so quick to dismiss it. If I held our food in place with kinetic energy it will still lose heat. It will still rot and decay. Suspending something has different uses, that’s all. The spider didn’t feel any pain and wasn’t aware of us when we moved it because of that spell. In addition, well, watch.”

  He walked over to the cabinet that held dozens of our picks, chisels, and other tools. He brought a small hammer back with him and aimed it at the suspended stone on the table. The hammer slammed down onto it with a loud clang and bounced off of it. Tower had arms as large as the guards in my village and I knew the stone should have crumbled to a blow that strong.

  “It’s unbreakable!” I shouted. The spider shifted in the cell at the volume of my voice and I sheepishly squirmed in my seat.

  “Not quite. Watch now when I release it,” he said.

  He held his hand out once more and snapped his fingers. It was more of a signal for me rather than a requirement of the spell. Immediately the stone shattered to shards and dust on the tabletop as if the hammer had only just hit it.

  “These kinds of spells require a constant connection with you. It cost me some energy for that not to break at the point of impact. Not a lot, but if I wasn’t able to provide that energy it would have broken. This other stone is the same. I want you to try this now, and then I’m going to give you a real test.”

  Tower held up the first stone that he had previously left on the table. I centered myself around it and found the pattern to be quite easy to replicate. I had gotten better at learning from other spells that he showed me first rather than stumbling around trying to guess at the correct alignment for the focused energy.

  He let go of the stone and it wobbled in place. I poured more of my energy around it and it stabilized. It was one of the few times I had worked magic from my own body rather than an outside source. I felt a little faint and I was suddenly grateful for all of the climbing I had been doing each day on the stairs to strengthen my body. An image of the frail old wizard from my village flashed into my head and I vowed, once again, not to be like him.

  “This type of magic will get easier as you get older and stronger, but you should be able to do some now,” Tower explained as he pointed to the spider in the cell.

  “What?” I said, so shocked that I bolted upright and lost all of my concentration. The stone I had been keeping in the air dropped and bounced down onto the floor. Tower’s was still levitating.

  “This is your test. I want you to shackle the spider the same way you just did the stone. Then go inside and collect some webs. You can do it.”

  “Will I hurt it?” I said meekly. I had grown a little attached to the spider. I was the one who gave it food and water lately.

  “No. It’s only a little force put in the right spot. It’s like if I held part of your body down. Like this,” he said as he put the palm of his hand on my forehead. “Try to push against my han
d.”

  I did so and was met with pressure. My head felt like it was stuck and couldn’t move against his hand. There was no pain.

  “Now, imagine that I had a hand for each part of your head. You wouldn’t be able to move in any direction. You do that around the base of its legs and they’re useless. If the spider is resting it won’t even know you did it.”

  I was skeptical but only because I doubted my own ability to hone my magic, rather than not trusting what Tower said to me. I leaned forward and rested my hands on my legs, reaching out through the bars and into the jail cell.

  The spider wasn’t moving and I couldn’t tell if it was already back to sleep. Over the weeks I had gotten better at separating the imaging of my magic from the visualization I associated with my eyes. Instead of seeing the beginnings of a kinetic shackle around each leg, I felt the potential for them to be there with my magic. It was a subtle difference at first, but it was a considerable help to me, especially when I had to work quickly or manipulate something that was blocked from my view, like the hind legs of the spider.

  Each shackle took me a moment or two to secure, and I revisited each of them after a new one was formed. It was close to the mental juggling of numbers when doing mathematics, making sure to maintain each strand of magic while threading a new one around another leg.

  The process was far more tiring than the stone had been and I could feel sweat running down my back when I was finished. When I got to my feet I could feel the effects of maintaining the magical force pull at me from the cell. It felt like a faint buzzing inside my head, vibrating out into my ears. I turned to Tower.

  “Well done. Go in now and collect some of the silk,” he said and handed me a few of the wooden paddles. “I’ll watch the spider in case something goes wrong.”

  His warning set me on edge and I was extra careful to maintain each of the shackles as I worked around the room. I swabbed at the walls and wrapped several strands around the wood at once, coiling around them thickly until they became too large to handle. I set them outside one at a time, remembering to check that the spider was still subdued before I returned to the cell.

  I had trouble with the final collection. There was a particularly thick section of silk and I couldn't unravel it from the wall. I pulled on it futilely before I remembered what Tower had done each time I had watched him. I placed my hand near the silk and focused myself on my fingertips, trying to create heat through my hand to sever the web. It wasn’t something I had tried before and I wanted to get it right to impress him.

  “Bryce! No!” Tower screamed and rushed forward into the cell.

  I felt the shackles break at the same time as I heard him scream. I had focused too intently on the heat and had lost the threads around the spider. I had my back to it and the hiss it created came so close that I felt it trickle down my neck. I could do nothing but flinch.

  The spider must have reared up at me and jumped as Tower flung his spell toward it. He had gotten into the cell with me as it happened. Something smacked into my back and I fell forward into the webs. I saw Tower was next to me but there was no movement from the spider.

  He seared the webs from around me and I squirmed free of the wall. The silk still clung to me in patches and I made a face at it. I turned and saw the spider suspended as it had been the first time in the tunnel. His spell must have hit it in midair and it collided into me with the force it still carried. If Tower had been any later it could have torn me to pieces.

  “You need to be careful,” he said as he walked out of the cage. “Take this as a lesson for trying to get ahead of yourself. I’m still here to help you.”

  “I’m sorry. Thank you for not killing the spider. It wasn’t its fault,” I said softly, my head lowered in shame. It was the first time in months that I felt that I had disappointed him.

  “It’s okay, just learn from it. Any mistake you can walk away from is a lesson learned. Remember that.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  We were in the middle of summer when Tower decided it was time that I create my own familiar.

  The windows had been cleared and opened. We discarded the used paper, leaves, and silk outside at the back of the tower. A gemstone was removed from the bowl on the roof so less heat ran through the walls. The cooler, dark, windowless rooms of the tower became a refuge for us from the heat. I spent most of the days reading my way through the collection of books, while Tower busied himself with writing new additions for it.

  It was over a year since I had first stumbled my way into the tower but it was now fully my home. I had grown comfortable in the safety and shelter of its walls and Tower’s protection. I think the first weeks of that summer were the most peaceful and stable of my life, and I had no idea that the creation of my familiar was the first step in shattering that comfort.

  Tower gave me books on the subject at first, and I devoured them quickly. I had few stumblings in reading them. I was becoming adept enough at working through the meaning of words by looking at the relevance to the rest of the sentence. Each day my level of comprehension was growing.

  The books on familiars fascinated me. Tower had been correct when he said there was a large variety of forms and methods to create or imbue a life to fulfill the purpose. Some books suggested that a familiar could be found instead of made, and that an intelligent creature could easily fulfill the role. Others read more like instruction manuals to infuse stones with magical energy and the power of thought and movement, and went into great detail on maintaining such a creature.

  The idea had been in the back of my mind ever since Tower told me about his familiar and how I could be trained to be a wizard. Although I had been warned about getting ahead of myself, I had long before decided what type of familiar I would like to have. When Tower came into my room one afternoon and asked me to take a few days to consider my options, I told him I had an answer already.

  “Really?” he asked and seemed genuinely surprised, which was a rare thing.

  “Yes. I want a fire elemental, like you had,” I answered.

  He looked at me for what felt like a very long time. I thought that maybe I had offended him before he spoke again.

  “Is this because I taught you magic? This decision should be made for yourself, and fire elementals are not easy to keep,” he said.

  “No. It’s because of the dragon. I’m afraid of fire still. Even though you’re teaching me how I can control it, it still scares me. You told me that a familiar is like a friend. A companion. I’d like to not be scared of fire anymore,” I explained and then looked away from Tower’s face, afraid to see his reaction there.

  “That,” he said, after another moment of silence, “is a good reason.” I met his eyes and found him regarding me with an odd expression.

  “We’ve never spoken much about the dragon,” he continued on. “You are welcome to stay here for as long as you like, of course. But do you ever plan to go back to your village? To see if someone else survived?”

  I hadn’t given much thought to ever leaving the tower but some part of me had already decided the answer to that question. The words came out of me without any conscious thought, as if the idea had fermented inside me over the last year.

  “One day I will kill the dragon.”

  Tower once again had the odd expression on his face, as if he regretted hearing those words. He gave one solemn nod and then walked out of the room. I thought the conversation was over for the day and that we’d start work on the familiar tomorrow. It was already late in the evening. To my surprise, he was back a few minutes later and handed me another book.

  I looked down at it in my hand. The cover was blank.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “A book on fire elementals. There are some loose pages inside that I wrote as well. You can start reading it tomorrow. Tonight you must focus on the creation of your familiar.”

  “What do I do?”

  He reached over to the sollite I had been keeping on my bedroo
m table for months. He held it tightly in his hand as if to get a feel for its weight. I couldn’t properly read the expression on his face; I couldn’t tell if he was sad or deep in thought.

  “This will act as the core for the familiar. You’ve kept it for so long now that you probably already have a connection to it whether you intended to or not. It’s why I wanted you to have it. You’ll sit and focus on the sollite until you’re aware of that connection. You’ll then need to smother it with flames until it catches fire, just like starting a cooking fire,” he said, and for the briefest moment his eyes flickered to the candle on my table.

  “Should I do it now?”

  “Yes. It will take a few hours. Don’t rush it,” he said and placed the sollite back on the table. “It’s important that the fire comes from you, Bryce. That’s part of making sure the familiar will be connected with you. I know you’ve had trouble with that but you can’t use a gem or any other source of magic for this. You must create the flames from your own body.”

  I hadn’t been able to do that yet and Tower knew it. He must have been trusting me to succeed now, when it was important. It was a challenge and I gathered myself up for it. I nodded at him.

  “Good lad,” he said with a smile. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  He started walking to the door and stopped partway there. He turned back to me.

  “Bryce,” he said.

  I ripped my eyes from the sollite and turned to him.

  “Ah. Nothing, never mind. It can wait. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  I grinned at him, excited about getting my own familiar but also at the chance to prove my capabilities to my teacher. He closed the door behind him and I cleared away the books and papers so it was only the sollite and the candle, still burning as ever since my first day in the tower, on the table.

  I sat on the bed and fixated my eyes on the sollite. It felt different than a gem when I reached out for it. The amount of power contained within it was far greater than any other stone of its size, and that resonated back at me as I prodded it with my focus. I tried to visualize the energy growing around it and I felt it react, vibrating and buzzing back at me, resisting what I was trying to do to it. It felt like there was a protective layer around it that I would need to crack open to get at the energy inside.