After that we ignored the enemy and blew each other up with grenades.
“Truce,” I said after Dak’s grenade sent me spiraling off a walkway to my doom.
“Of course,” he said, right before he lined up a sniper rifle and picked me off at the respawn. “Oh, sorry, was that you? It’s okay, I’ll run up and heal you.” He switched to a medic class, but took out grenades instead of a medkit, lobbing them at me as I sprinted away. “Come back! These grenades are full of tenderness, I promise.”
We killed each other until the computer enemy defeated us, but I regarded the session as a success. I dropped my controller, stood and stretched. “I need some air.”
“Going to draw?” Dak asked.
“Yeah.”
“Murph’s still out there.”
“He’s probably still sorting it out with the RAs.” Besides, I reasoned, Murph was done with us. Tonight had been the work of a guy without impulse control, not a sociopath.
I packed art supplies and my tablet I used for digital art. I also hefted the old, leather-bound notebook embossed with the stencil of a red gemstone on its cover. I put on the backpack and carried the notebook gently in my hands.
I hiked campus in the deserted dark, early-autumn breeze ruffling my hair. Every scrape of a fallen leaf made me jump, but as predicted, Murph didn’t stagger out of any shadows.
My “studio” was in Old 88, a brick school building in the shape of a shoebox, constructed in the 1950s when it was considered wasteful to do something more interesting with government money than stacking cinderblocks into a big rectangle. Half its windows were tarped over and construction fences wrapped around three of its four sides.
My key opened the back stairwell. The renovations to Old 88 were floor-by-floor and I’d been assigned a summer internship with Dr. Simons, tasked with clearing out supplies from the art department on floor two and moving them up to the temporary art room on four. I would eventually move them back when construction finished, but Simons let me use the fourth floor after hours. This was probably against campus policy, but the man once threw a paint balloon at Richard Nixon. He wasn’t big on rules.
The art room was floored by scuffed linoleum, chipping paint on its cement walls, and its weak fluorescent lighting was supplemented by studio lights. I flicked them on, hung my jacket and backpack on a rolling chair, and arranged easels near the computer station. One piece at a time, I removed six paintings depicting the world of Rune from storage compartments and placed them on the easels.
I had first encountered Rune while cleaning out storage on floor two, documenting and labeling what I found. Rune was a total of forty-three interconnected fantasy paintings, featuring natural environs like coastlines, jade forests, and shadowy volcanoes belching fire and smoke. Dragons proliferated, swooping over terrified armies or bowing, dark-hooded acolytes. Those not featuring dragons depicted a primitive, stoic world of stone and iron, savage Herculean men, and a disturbing trend of shackled women.
I was more impressed by the scope of the initial work than the individual pieces, which sometimes felt rushed—an off proportion here or there suggested the sort of inattention in the early phases that had characterized my own work during high school. The colors were bold and bright, but edged too close to three-color comic book. I couldn’t tell if the artist was trying for that effect—if it was just stylized—or if he hadn’t spent enough time in realism to do well with color. The use of shadow, interesting at first, became oppressive and a crutch toward the end of the series. I’d spent hours charting the progression, watching the artist grow from one to the next, the colors getting brighter, the shadows darker, and the women naked-er.
And then, on piece thirty-four, it changed. I couldn’t make out the scribble of either artist’s signature, but they were clearly different people. It was as obvious from their paintings as their signatures, though. The medium shifted to colored pencil and the motifs were radically different. There were hardly any colors at all in the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth pieces, which were done in subtle gradations of deep earth tones, so influenced by realism and so devoid of flash that they came off the page like a dream. They seemed, really, like a subtle wag of the finger at the first artist. It was then I realized these two artists were in a kind of conversation with one another.
The second illustrator’s work touched on new content: attention to faces and expression, a level of creativity and research on the wardrobes that made the world’s culture pop. It also contained my favorite of all the pieces: an image of a handsome, silvery drake hauling an apple cart while chatting with a villager at his side.
I was impressed with the first artist’s energy and awed by the second’s technique, so I dove in. The world started to feel like a real place, and I wanted to paint my own version of it. Dr. Simons agreed to let me work up my own illustrations over the course of my college career and present it all together as a capstone project alongside some of the college’s former talent.
So I created Rune, assembling it from ideas inspired by the original works—the Isle of Ipsus, the ancient lands of the north, and the great cities of Korvia surrounding the central sea called Osra’s Eye. I’d planned to do at least five illustrations a year, but over the course of just my sophomore year, I ended up doing twenty-seven. I’d never been so productive, and it felt good to watch my technique sharpen. I felt like that second artist in particular had pushed me to hone my skill.
Under my stylus, Rune became more technologically advanced. I spent more time on cityscapes and traded the swords and the orcs during the battle scenes for sky ships and magitech lightning cannons. I tried to reference the other artists’ styles—bright magical effects lighting up a grittily real battlefield, or a fashionably attired elf wrapped in the coils of a dragon, but stroking the underside of its loyal snout: harkening back to the shackled maidens, but subverting the trope. It wasn’t so much a happy medium between two artists as my own extension of what they’d both done. I was continuing their conversation.
Tonight I assembled on the easels an eclectic mix of Rune’s art: a few paintings from both artists and from me. One advantage to my own space was that I could surround myself in images, a ritual that sometimes put me in a creative mood.
I booted the computer, plugged in my tablet, and flipped through the leather-bound notebook. I’d found it in a dusty trunk filled with Mom and Dad’s things, the remnant of a bygone age. I’d had it a long time, the pages too important to fill, but the red gemstone on its cover seemed too perfectly evocative of Rune’s magical heart. I’d finally settled on a use for the book, filling it with setting concepts and scribbles. I leafed through my ideas until the computer warmed up, setting the notebook on an end table cluttered with art supplies.
I opened Mermaid Field Trip, my latest work in progress. The painting was in its final stages, featuring a tropical lagoon scene. Rising from the lagoon was a plump and matronly mermaid with silver streaks in her hair, arms folded as she sternly observed a half-dozen adorable mermaid schoolchildren flopping around on land, poking at the surface-world wonders.
I zoomed on the expression of a freckled mermaid tot, her nose ten inches from a colorful island bird. It was supposed to be the centerpiece of the painting—the moment a fish-person met her first bird—but I was worried I hadn’t sufficiently dragged that moment off the canvas. I had tried capturing awe on her chubby face, but something was missing. I tweaked shades and attempted to imbue her with a glow. Maybe her eyes should reflect more light, I decided. I stretched for one of the art room’s reference books on facial expression.
My hand knocked over a bottle of red paint atop the cluttered end table. The cap hadn’t been screwed on tight and bounced across the floor. The bottle drizzled a slash of fire-engine red over my open notebook.
“Crap!” I snatched the notebook and groped for a towel, wiping it clean. Then I blew on the page to dry it. Turning it end over end, I confirmed the leather cover had a red stain. At least it’s not rui
ned. I suppose now it just has some… character. Most of my things acquired “character.”
I turned back to my painting and blinked. It had gone blurry. Mermaids were shifting slowly across the page, like watching old animation frame by frame. Just how tired was I?
The freckled girl smiled at me, eyes glittering with that wonder I’d been trying so hard to capture, except trained on me instead of the bird.
My heavy eyelids shut. I slumped and had the sensation of falling.
Instead of jerking awake, my next sensation was of landing hard on wet sand.
Chapter Two: 2d8 Orcs
When I woke, I could smell moss and feel wet sand against my cheek. The whole lagoon was tented in palm trees and dappled with green sunlight. I had a sense something was missing—I had seen this place a hundred times before, summoned it into being with my stylus, but now I could see things beyond the narrow frames of my canvas.
I was disoriented. Confused.
Not least because of what woke me. It hadn’t been mermaids—I had a vague memory of their stifled giggles, the splashes as they’d fled from this place the moment I entered.
No, I’d been woken by the looming shadows of ten porcine orcs. The one at the front tromped over and clutched me by the arm. “Found some breakfast, boys!” he cheered.
I wanted to believe it was a dream, but no amount of shaking my head dispelled it. I was in emotional freefall, trying to process my sudden relocation on the food chain; trying to find a way back to the fortress of protective clutter in my shadowy dorm room. Instead, the orcs tied me to a tree in a jungle by light of day.
An hour ago I had problems, but I didn’t have getting-eaten problems. I was inexplicably outdoors, watching ten of those greenish, muscular Tolkien rejects building their cooking fire higher and hotter. I couldn’t even reason it away as some elaborate prank. The orcs weren’t just monstrous in their faces or the warts speckling their bodies—their arms were too long, their legs too stocky, their backs hunched at angles a human cosplayer couldn’t mimic.
The humid air pasted my Hawaiian shirt to my chest, my jacket and backpack atop an office rolling chair that looked incongruous lying nearby on a patch of wild grass. The orcs sniffed my backpack and stuffed it into a sack. One cut slivers off the rolling chair’s faux-leather seat, tried to eat it, and upon discovering it was inedible, dashed the chair to pieces in a rage.
The tree they bound me to had clusters of red, wedge-shaped fruits that didn’t belong in my world. The green lagoon beside us was fed by a waterfall that shimmered in rainbow hues. I was more concerned with the oversized meat cleaver they were sharpening.
“I hungry,” complained a tiny orc-nugget whose helm drooped down to the bulb of his warty nose. “Build fire faster.”
The steroid-drenched captain swatted the little guy and went back to sharpening his cleaver. “We roast first. Loosens tongue.”
“Roast?” moaned the orc-nugget. “Blech. Ruins meat.”
“Got to roast. Otherwise, he no answer questions!” The captain paused from the whetstone to tick off each stage of his plans on his fingers. “First we roast him. Then questions.” He seemed to lose count and gave up on the fingers. “Then we eat.” He went back to sharpening.
I gaped, unable to wrap my head around the horror; so instead, I blubbered. “Consider my tongue limbered up. I’m Isaac Myers. I’m twenty years old. My interests include reading, illustration, and surviving breakfast. You want answers? I’ve got all the answers you want.”
The first blow I’d suffered had come from Murph; it was nothing compared to the second. The captain’s backhand hit me so hard I didn’t feel it. My ears buzzed and bright pinpricks assaulted my vision. I gradually became aware of my numb fingertips and toes, the rest of my nerves switching back on in clusters, like breakers in a house flipped one at a time. Wet agony filled me and I regretted my big mouth.
“Silence!” the captain bellowed. “Torture first, then questions. It tradition.”
Their fire blackened a tree limb until its paper bark flaked off in black crisps. It wasn’t hard to imagine my skin doing the same. Swallowing, I tried to work the cotton balls out of my mouth. I’m a talker by nature; it’s just how I handle terror. “Hey, you know this violates the, uh, Geneva Conventions. I’m an American. And a wizard! With, like, freaking spells.” A talker, certainly, but no wordsmith.
The captain stooped close, until I smelled how he liked his meat: aged and putrid. “Oh, you crafty. You answer questions without us even ask. You wizard, eh? American?”
He knew America? Hell yes, I was saved! I vowed to buy a gun for each hand and fly Old Glory off a pickup truck built in Detroit, forever. “I am. I’m a powerful, seventh-level American wizard. I know cantrips and democracy.”
His face scrunched up. He no more knew democracy than he’d have understood basic decency or the purpose of soap. It was like dealing with a YouTube commenter. But he snapped his fat fingers in recognition. “You a wizard, like we was told to bring back.”
“Aww! No fair!” whined the tiny orc in the helmet. “What we eat now?”
The captain, still nose to nose with me, grinned without looking back at the shrimpy orc. Something in his eyes suggested that was the wrong question at the wrong moment. The captain whirled and swung his cleaver. The shrimpy orc’s head bounced twice and went plop as it hit the lagoon. The pack of orcs turned, realized what had happened, and then pounced on the body. They clumped around it, ripping and stuffing gore into their throats, slurping at the bones of their former comrade.
I tried to look away, but the captain pulled my jaw in line. He made me watch. “This you if you run,” he growled. Then he joined in.
I lost the Quarter Pounder I’d eaten for dinner.
***
After “breakfast,” I swore off meat. Forever. I would sustain myself on optimistic thoughts and kale. But they marched me through lunch on a few swallows of water, so by dinner I missed that Quarter Pounder I’d heaved up. Near evening I whittled my prohibitions down to raw orc flesh, but had they presented me sushi or a medium-rare steak, all bets were off.
The march took us across rocky goat paths, and the air was a muggy soup thick with mosquitoes. Each insect was big as a quarter, burrowing its needle into me and leaving itchy, swollen lumps on my sweaty flesh. The air smelled of salt water and the palm-leafed trees were filled with exotic birdcalls. Sometimes the narrow path wrapped around a cliff-side and opened to a vista of the sea, a shimmering expanse of green-glass waves that seared my retinas.
This wasn’t Ohio anymore, and a day of marching convinced me I wasn’t dreaming or insane. Insane would have been way better—three square meals a day and pills to make the bad green men go away. No, I was just hopelessly screwed.
As best I could figure, I was on the Isle of Ipsus: a volcanic paradise filled with colorful birds and mermaids, a short skip from the temperate mainland, Korvia. Distressing facts, as these places were fictional.
Late that night the orcs forced me from dense jungle onto a strip of white beach that stretched off into the distance until the darkness erased every detail. Glossy black waves tumbled over one another, hissing up the bright sand toward my feet. I gazed into the expanse of the sky, which contained in volume twice the usual number of stars. Oh, and the glow of three moons: one the traditional silver, another looming large and red with bands of orange like Jupiter, and a tiny blue one bright as a cat’s eye half hid behind Big Red. I swallowed at the scope of it. It was all so much larger than when I’d painted it last summer.
The orcs shoved me to my knees near a crooked, timber dock and lit a driftwood fire in front of me. The captain sprinkled peppery sand from a pouch, and the fire burst into high green flames.
A face appeared—human, with a heavy brow and probing eyes outlined in what, honest to God, looked like eyeliner. His wild, ’80s-style hair was feathered to an improper volume and adorned in a diamond-encrusted circlet. He reminded me of an ageing rock star from the er
a of Big Hair who had yet to give up the lifestyle.
“Lord Dracon,” groveled the captain as he bowed face-first into the sand three times. “We find you American wizard.”
My internal threat-meter dropped off precipitously at his name.
“Bring him closer,” said Dracon. He stroked one of those feathered locks with an index finger, his hand displaying six opulent rings.
The orcs tossed me forward. I wondered if Dracon would break into a David Bowie song.
He didn’t.
Instead, his green-glowing face scoped me out through the fire, down and up and down again until it felt wrong. Like he was dissecting me. I smiled, then stopped, then cleared my throat, unsure of the proper etiquette for greeting an evil overlord. Should I kowtow? Should I have brought a gift basket? I didn’t even know what kind of tribute overlords liked. I knew for sure you couldn’t give an evil overlord money; that was just thoughtless.
“He the one?” the captain asked.
“Yes, he is,” Dracon said. “Magnificent. Bring him to Sky Keep. Be sure to search him. If he has anything in his pockets, take it from him. Do not let him have any writing utensils. If he tries to draw something, even with a stick in the sand, break his hands.” Dracon the Fascist looked at me. “What is your name?”
“Isaac.”
“You’ve taken something from me that you can never give back, Isaac.”
“While no doubt true, have you given any thought to what I can give you?” I asked. I was loath to surrender one of the last things I had left from my parents, but it was the only real technology on me: I flicked the clasp off my father’s wristwatch and presented it. “I see that you’re a wizard. I happen to wizard a little myself. This is my most powerful creation: a chronometer capable of withstanding fifty atmospheres of water pressure. It grants long life and sex appeal and the power to speak with dolphins. It’s yours for the low, low cost of not murdering me. Do you want to control time? Just send me home. Think of the dolphins.”
The Accidental God (A Pygmalion Fail Book 1) Page 2