by IGMS
That undid me. To be looked at like that by a stranger -- from that I could barely walk away, although I had done so by sheer force of will twice during my wanderings. To be looked at like that by my son . . . That was more than I could bear. So I bowed my head and let his tug on my arm draw me into his cottage.
Into chaos.
The transformation from day into night had done more than reveal a brief glimpse of his hidden power and bring the four chickens in to roost on the rafters. Snakes of every size and description writhed across the floor in their shadow-forms. My son walked through them, oblivious to their presence, and they slithered away from his feet. Though they were drawn here by his power, they did not dare to touch.
Not, at least, while he was awake.
On the sorcerer's bed lay a shadow-snake so large it would have made the bed sag if it had been truly present. It watched my son with such lust in its hooded eyes that I stumbled back and almost tripped over another snake that hissed as it slithered away from me.
My son frowned as I seemed to trip over nothing in the middle of his floor.
That meal was the longest I have ever eaten. I barely tasted the thin soup and hard bread, for candlelight revealed what daylight had hidden. My son's shoulders hunched as if he crouched against some chronic pain. There were dark hollows beneath his eyes. He favoured his left ankle -- the ankle where snakes always fed.
But snakes no longer fed from men. Since the end of the snake wars, when all the snakes mysteriously vanished from untrained sight, the snakes no longer slid through cracks in walls to feed on the magically gifted. No one had been able to explain why. But since the snakes had seemingly left humans to their own devices and retreated into their own lairs, why did they still congregate here?
As I ate, snakes slithered around my ankles and across my lap. One came, rested its head against my chest, and taunted my helplessness with its obsidian eyes.
If I had still had my power, I would have been able to banish the snakes from this hut, maybe even from this mountainside, as close to their ancestral lair though this was.
As I was, I could do nothing.
When my son blew out the candle and went to sleep, I stayed awake and watched in helplessness and horror as the snakes came to him. They latched onto his left ankle with their hollow fangs and drank and drank from him while he writhed in his sleep. His blankets became a tangle of knots. In the moonlight falling through the window, I saw sweat bead on his forehead. It was only his dregs they drank from him -- only the dust shed from his unawakened power -- but they could still drink until they were satiated.
Unable to lie still and watch, I toppled from my bed, fell to my knees beside his, and heaved at the snakes. My helpless hands passed straight through them. They were shadows; I could not touch them, and no knife or stave would harm them.
My son slept on, oblivious. Any normal sleeper would have startled awake at the snakes' first touch. Once awake, his skin prickling, he would have been unable to move, for fear, because he could not have told if the danger was present or just the vestige of an unremembered nightmare. Not even the snakes' touch on his bare skin woke my son.
As I struck futilely at the snakes, I cursed the sorcerer. He had stolen my boy, hidden his identity, hidden the power that was his inheritance, and then abandoned my son to torment. I imagined the sorcerer lying in his bed, watching the snakes drink but doing nothing to stop them.
I flung myself away from the cot. The snakes had to be getting in somewhere. I must block the hole. Then convince my son to come away with me, to somewhere safe. Then, maybe then, I could teach him who I was.
Hope flickered dangerously close to my heart as I searched. Out on the pale road, no snakes moved. There were none in the yard, either. Only here, within the hovel, did the floor seethe with them.
So I began to crawl across the floor. Though I had lost my power, I had not lost my sight.
On my hands and knees, I found the hole by a shaft of moonlight. The hole lay beneath the sorcerer's bed, and was hidden by weavings of illusion so it would look, in daylight, like any other part of the floor.
Snake after snake slithered up through the hole while others slithered down again, their bellies full of my son's power
As I watched, I cursed. What kind of madman would do that to a child?
I wriggled under the bed until my head was above the hole. Though I had no power, the weavings were plain to see; little grey strands of the spell, of all different thicknesses, held the hole open. Other strands held the illusion of concealment across the hole. They were simple spells, and easy for me to see each strand and where it went.
No steel or weapon can snap a magical thread. Only the force of a man's will, of his intensions, can break it. In such a way some great sorcerers found their deaths at the hands of ordinary, sighted men. If I had still had my power I could have snapped one strand and the whole spell would have unravelled. It would have been a mere matter of intention, of knowing the shape of the weavings of which all things, both real and illusion, were made.
As I was, powerless, it took me the entire night, pulling with my hands. Slowly, painstakingly, I tugged at one strand. I thought, if I could stretch this one strand far enough, the hole might sag and become too small for the snakes to pass through. Then at least they would have to find another way into the cottage. Hopefully it would slow them down long enough for me to get my son away. Who knew what they would do when I tried to take their source of sustenance from them?
As I pulled, I marvelled at my weakness, or the strength of this one small spell; I could not tell which. Maybe the spell that rendered all of my speech backwards had twisted my intent as well, without me knowing it. Maybe it had twisted who I knew myself to be as well as what I tried to say. But at last the knot slid a little and the strand, stained with my blood where I had tugged, began to pull free. It worked looser, then more, and a little more.
The earth trembled. I stopped pulling. A kind of brightness began behind my eyes, a brilliance like the shimmer of sunlight on water. My innards felt as if they were turning into molten ice. No ordinary spell should feel like this as it unravelled. No normal spell. For the first time since I lost my powers in the Snake Wars, I felt a tingling of fear that started at the base of my spine and crept slowly upwards.
I jerked the strand free to make the hole collapse and bring the unearthly sensation of melting inside me to an end. But as the strand came loose, the feeling intensified. The hole did not close. Instead it widened to reveal a vortex of strands, all intertwined, that extended down, down, into the snakes' tunnels. There was not one tunnel but thousands. Not one spell, but thousands of spells. It must have taken some sorcerer a lifetime of work.
He had bound them all: tunnels to snakes, snakes to spells, and spells to tunnels, all to hold the snakes captive.
I saw it, in that instant the hole opened. He had bound them. I had just set them free.
For long moments I could not move. They writhed below me, not a handful, not even hundreds, but generations and generations of snakes. They were not in their shadow-forms, either, as they lay within the tunnels, but present. Here. Only as they slid through the mouth of the tunnel did they fade into shadows.
Strands from the mouth of the tunnel stretched towards my son. With snakes covering the floor, I had not seen the strands before. My son must have been used as a lure to draw the snakes here. Then the sorcerer had tied him here. Tied him here for the snakes to feed upon and keep them satiated so they would not roam too far afield and find someone with awakened power they might drain -- someone from whom they could draw enough power to break the spell binding them within their lair.
So the sorcerer had given them a human sacrifice to sustain them.
He had given them my son.
The sorcerer had protected the land and its people from the snakes. The cost: my son's torment.
The snakes saw the opening in their cage and surged towards me, frantic for light, for food.
Desperately, I tried to grab the other end of the thread and pull together the two ends of the strand I had broken, but I had no magical power and the strands were too far apart, now, for my physical strength to pull them together again. Not with all the snakes that surged between them and out the hole, over me. Their cold scales, as hard as iron, pressed against me as they rippled past.
I didn't know what else to do so I grabbed for a strand in the weavings that encased the tunnel walls. This strand was almost as broad as my wrist. I thought if I could pull the broken strand to it and tie them together, maybe it would hold for a while, at least long enough for us to get away.
From the corner of my eye I saw my son. He moaned and thrashed as snakes gathered on top of him, no longer shadows but real. They wrestled each other aside to reach his ankle and feed. He could not survive all of them feeding at once.
Even as I hauled on the strongest cord with all my strength, I thought of the calamity I had released on my land. In all the villages I knew so well, each child with an ounce of magic in them would be drained and tossed aside as so much detritus. Crops would be destroyed as the snakes trammelled through them. Cattle would be eaten, and houses would be pushed over to reach those cowering inside. I remembered doing almost nothing in the Snake Wars. And here I had caused it all to start all over again.
I braced my feet and hauled on the strand with all my strength. Sparks burst before my eyes and under my skin, like tiny jolts of lightning. I did not heed the warning signs, but pulled harder, with more desperation.
And the strand pulled free.
Not out of the pit, as I expected it to. Inside me, something deep and anchored tore. I felt as I imagined those did who had young snakes crawl down their throats and rip out their bellies from the inside.
I collapsed.
The cottage rocked and fell in a tumble of earth-and-wattle walls. Turf from the roof fell on my legs. Only my head and arms, protected under the sorcerer's bed, could still move. But the physical pain was vague and unreal next to how the unravelling spells lashed me until I could do nothing but scream.
For I was the spells' starting point. I was its beginning, its creator. I was the man who had shaped these spells and fixed them into place.
I was the sorcerer. I had done this to my son.
I heard my son roar as he woke to this hovel collapsing around him.
And as the spells unravelled, I remembered.
The snakes had been too many, far too many for one sorcerer. All the others who had had any magic were drained or dead. I had seen the power in my son. He was too young to help me -- an infant. If I left him, the snakes would drain him, too, and take his power. Then there would be nothing left of us, and nothing left of the land.
The spell had taken all my strength, and more. It took all my language, it shredded my power, as I had to twist and wring my strength until I could not even stand or feed myself for days afterwards. And to bind a child -- that took extra magic. Extra thought. I had bound myself backwards in order to hold the spell into place -- in order not to remember it, not to know that my son was in torment and, unable to bear it, come here to free him. But I could not make myself forget him. Not altogether. I left myself memories of his babyhood so I could remember him, and grieve. I had taught an ordinary man, my friend, how to take my son, how to bind the boy.
My son, my son. All those years I had looked for him, pined over him, all that agony I had caused him, caused his mother, caused myself.
And now all for naught as snakes piled over me, as they dug holes through the fallen turf to reach my ankle now that my power had returned. They would drain what I could not yet control. My old abilities were too weak and too rusty with age and disuse. My reflexes were too slow.
I heard my son cursing. Would he remember his mother, now that the spells were unravelling? Would he know the father who had sent him to this fate? He would certainly know his own torment, and his own power. But with no training, he would not know how to use it.
He could certainly see the snakes. I heard the repeated whack of something wooden striking their bone-hard scales. He would soon learn that weapons were nearly powerless against them. I heard the wood thrown aside. The weight of turf left my legs. I felt him dragging snakes off me. Their teeth, deeply sunken, tore through my flesh and tendon, but pain was far away.
There is always a moment when you can turn left or right. A moment when you chose between destroying a child's life and your own, or leaving countless lives victim to the snakes' feeding.
The choice before me now was no better. It was too late to close the hole. Too many snakes had escaped already; I did not have the power to call any of them back into the shadow-forms in which they had been bound. I could try to repair the spell and leave my son bound, leave him to writhe against the now-visible restraints that held him while I went out through the countryside to try to round up the snakes, an old man on twisted legs, his power rusty, himself weak, vulnerable.
Or I could stop trying to repair the shattering spell. Loose the bonds on all of them. My son. The snakes. Set them all free.
"Old man! Are you all right?" My son grabbed my legs and began to drag me out from under the bed.
Choice comes. Decide to pull glory back into yourself, to wrest it back even against its will and go back to the fight you thought was over -- even though it means leaving your child bound and helpless. Or you let go. Let the battle go to someone younger, stronger, let him have his chance at life no matter how brutal, no matter how hard, because it is still a chance at life and a battle fought. Because sometimes the battle is where you discover yourself.
Sometimes, you find yourself in losing.
I let go of all the threads and watched the spell unravel.
I'm sure there was physical pain. I felt none. The agony deep in the core of me overrode it all. I had left this unfinished mess for him. And I could not help him.
For the spells, as they unravelled, unravelled me. A lifetime's work took with it the life that had given it birth. Power left my body; it ebbed away with the last of the spell as its strands dissipated into the fog of memory.
My son hauled me out from under the bed.
In the glimmer of dawn, when worlds touch again for the briefest of moments, he was a-glow with power. It fell from him like rain. He had no idea what to do with it, or how to handle it. Now the snakes fled from him, afraid of so much strength. But not for long. Soon they would return. He would have to battle them, for himself, for this whole land, yet he had no idea how and I could not stay to teach him. I tried to form words, to tell him all he needed to know about the battle that was coming to him. But the world about me was becoming as grey and shadow-like as the snakes had been.
My son grabbed my shoulders and shook me a little. "Old man. Old man!"
I tried to clutch his sleeve, but my hand would not obey me. I said, "When I was a young man, a sorcerer stole my son."
For Want of Chocolate
by J. F. Lewis
Artwork by Kevin Wasden
Nobody warned me about chocolate, which is why I was standing in the mall right outside Godiva, and to be honest, I thought I was going to go berserk. The luxurious bitter scent of dark chocolate mixed with other odors that I'd never noticed before: a spicy flair, a fruity bouquet . . .
When I was human, these odors never sang to me the way they did now that my olfactory senses had received a mystical boost.
Of course, no matter how good it smelled, I knew I couldn't have any. Vampires can't eat . . . and I'd known that. Hell, I'd been dating one, for over a year. But in the moment, when I got the news about mom's illness and Jason made his offer, I hadn't been thinking about food, my job . . . anything.
My boyfriend Jason laughed at me. He leaned over the fourth floor balcony rail, by the DVD store next to the escalators. His long black hair cascaded past his hard muscled shoulders, and he tossed it back as he laughed. He whispered his words, but I heard him clearly. "What? You forgot vampires
can't eat?"
An older woman brushed past me, purchase made. She didn't wait until she was out of the mall to open her chocolate. She discarded the bag, removing the multi-colored ribbon from the matte gold box. I felt like that rat in the Pixar movie, the one that can cook, because when she opened the box, the world faded away and the scent canceled out everything else. The nearby food court, the woman's own body odor, even the siren call of blood itself, were replaced by this cornucopia of rich, dark wonder.
I'd always laughed at Jason for the way he'd stared at me whenever I ate a bag of Cheetos. He'd focused on every nuance of what was such a simple action, eyes locked in on each individual Cheeto as it went into my mouth. Now I knew how he'd felt. The sensation was overwhelming, like hang-gliding . . . or really good sex.
Jason laughed again as I began to stagger, but I didn't look up at him. My eyes were on the chocolate. I recognized each piece, from the Coffee Feather to the Raspberry Caramel Duet. My fangs came out, tearing through my gums. It was only the second time they'd ripped free of their hidden sheaths; already the pain was more tolerable.
"Careful." Jason was next to me in a blink, right hand on the back of my neck. He forced me back against the glass of the shop, left hand on my abdomen. "Just watch."
I'd have gone for the Dark Ganache Heart, the Pecan Crunch, or the Dark Mint Medallion, but she didn't. She sat at an abandoned table at the edge of the deserted food court, the metal chair's creak inaudible to humans, but loud as the clatter of high heels on tile to me and to Jason. She lifted a brown square, the 72% Dark Demitasse, and unwrapped it with blasphemous abandon.
I wanted her to break it in half to savor it, but she chewed it recklessly, without thought, without care.
"She's not even tasting it," I said with a snarl of outrage.
The woman glared up at me with a scowl, her fat lips drawn up into a look of porcine self-importance. What must I have looked like to her? A skinny little bitch,dressed in black? Did she envy my hair, my pale perfect skin? Or did she look at the blue lipstick, the eyeliner, the tiny gold stud in my nostril and dismiss me as trash? Jason laughed again, a gentle laugh, a pitying laugh, and I could see it in the woman's eyes . . . she thought he was laughing at her.