by J. C. Staudt
My minikin dragon came to watch over me at a time in my childhood when I was questioning the world around me and doubting everything I had previously thought was true. The first time I saw him was the day after my eighth birthday, which was a month or two after my father, who was working as a janitor at a small hospital in the suburbs at the time, went to the corner store to buy orange juice and a toothbrush and never came back. I was playing with molded plastic army men in a pile of mulch beneath a tree in my backyard when Ersatz emerged from a nearby shrub and said, “Are you going to waste your day playing with toys, or will you allow me to occupy your time with something more important?”
At first I thought he was a talking lizard. Years later, after I convinced my mother he was more than my imaginary friend, she referred to Ersatz as my ‘iguana.’ Through all those years, until her death when I was seventeen, she never opened her eyes. She never allowed herself to see. Not that I blame her for it; after all, she’s no different than most people.
Startled, I dropped my toy soldiers and asked the talking lizard who he was. Ersatz told me his name; he told me he’d been a close friend of my father’s, and that my father had sent him to guide me and watch over me as I grew. He told me of a world beyond our own; a world slowly melding with ours due to a catastrophic glitch in the fabric which separates them.
Most startlingly, Ersatz told me that both he and my father were from that distant world. The world on the otherside. When he told me the vast majority of human beings on Earth have no idea they’re sharing the planet with a hodgepodge of creatures found only in myth and legend, I was skeptical.
It isn’t that people don’t see signs of othersiders in their daily lives. It’s that they refuse to believe them when they do. They’re too set in their ways to acknowledge the unknown. So these creatures who show up at random times and locations through rifts along the border between our world and theirs, retaining only shreds of memory from their former lives, have learned to blend in.
They all cross over with partial amnesia, and so it’s easier to piece together the broad strokes of their history than the minor events which constituted the lives of individuals. Yet along with a small piece of that grand puzzle, each othersider brings with them something which, to me, is far more important. Something that doesn’t belong in this world, and which, to the best of my knowledge, had never existed here before the first othersiders came over.
Magic.
That’s the blue glowing stuff I can see radiating from their bodies and from objects they’ve recently touched whenever I cast my detection spell. Even tiny parts of them which have fallen off, like flakes of dry skin on a bus seat, or hair down a shower drain, hold their magic for a time. Magic is fuel, and fuel is good.
That was the first thing Ersatz ever taught me. The second was that all magic is about change. Change in appearance, temperature, location, chemistry, or even knowledge. It’s about laying the laws of nature over your knee and breaking them in half.
What does it take to break something? Put simply, two elements—force and leverage. In the case of magic, the fuel provides the force, and the caster provides the leverage. Every spell boils down to which law you’re trying to break and how easily it can be broken. Your chances of success are determined by the fuel you use and how efficiently you’re able to channel that fuel through your mind and body. If you’re tired or unfocused, you’ll leak magical energy like a sieve, whereas sharp clean emotions process it like a funnel.
When a man claims he’s in touch with his feminine side, certain people might say he’s overly emotional. I say those people are dickholes. Emotion is strength. Emotion is masculinity. Emotion lets me cast stunning, shart-inspiring spells to dazzle and amaze and give people chills. Mostly me.
Casting is incredible. It’s an emotional high worthy of orgasmic levels of praise. Spells are borne by emotion. Magical fuel—which I call residue—carries with it the life experiences of the creature it came from. I’ll bet you never knew there were slivers of grief, betrayal, passion, rivalry, and the memory of your first kiss in every hair on your head. There are. They’re all captured there, and in your skin and your bones and your blood, preserved like the age rings on a tree.
Channeling all that emotion is exhilarating while it lasts, but afterward it leaves me feeling drained, a numbness akin to mourning the loss of a loved one or going through a tough breakup. That doesn’t leave much emotional energy leftover for the other people in my life. Which is why there aren’t many.
If you’ve ever wondered why the old wizards in the stories become hermits and lock themselves away in lonely towers, that’s the reason. It’s also why going through puberty as an apprentice wizard was hella confusing. Like ‘having your crotch set on fire while watching Mufasa’s death scene from the Lion King on repeat’ confusing.
The pages of my spellbook are curled and heavy with ink, a lifetime of handwritten notes from Ersatz’s teachings over the last fifteen years scrawled across the lined pages and creeping down the margins in print so small it’s difficult to read without magnification. I’ve spent more time and effort making this spellbook into what it is today than anything else I’ve ever done, and I’m immensely proud of it. The depth and breadth of my magical knowledge is thanks to two things, and one of those things is Ersatz. He’s been the single biggest influence on my progression in the arcane arts, and I credit him with making me the wizard I am today. Whether I’m good or bad at it, he’s the one to blame.
The second of the two things responsible for my skill in magic is sitting on a bookshelf across the apartment from the Tetris-shaped hole beside the fireplace. I keep this item on my bookshelf because, well, it’s a book. An invisible book, thanks to the enchantment I’ve placed on it. Anyone looking for this particular book isn’t going to be the least bit interested in a thick volume called An Inquiry of Early Modernist Ideologies, which is why I’ve placed a second enchantment over it to make it look like that’s the title in case anyone breaks through the invisibility.
The book’s actual title is Codex Arcanum—the Book of Mysteries, for those of us without a pretentious Latin degree. As far as I know, there are only a few copies of the book in existence. More importantly, it’s one in a set of six legendary grimoires which, when gathered together, are supposed to unlock some sort of mystical puzzle box. I only know that because it says so in the epigraph at the front of the book, though it doesn’t specify the names of the other books:
Codex Arcanum
The Book of Mysteries
Fourth of the Six Grimoires of Magic
Where All Are Gathered, All Shall Be Revealed
Earlier I mentioned that my handwritten spellbook is the second-most valuable thing I own. The Book of Mysteries is the first-most valuable, and when I say one is worth more than the other, the difference is not unlike the difference between a skyscraper and a tin hut. Not only is the grimoire’s monetary value unimaginable; for me, it has sentimental value as well. It’s the only thing of my father’s I own.
Ersatz has used the Book of Mysteries time and again over the years to teach me the ways. He and the grimoire are a tag team of magical awesome-itude, and thus it’s no accident that I’ve become a relatively formidable wizard. Of course, I tend to question the validity of the word wizard to begin with. If you can be a regular kid one day and a wizard the next, then I guess somewhere along the line I underwent a transformation. If not, well, then I’m not a playa, I just cast spells a lot.
As I fabricate a spell of suppression to temporarily disable the first enchantment, the grimoire fades into view on the dining room table, disguised as a textbook with a glossy cardboard cover. The hairs on my bracelet burn away; it’s wire-thin now and almost spent. It disintegrates to dust as I use the last of its energy to remove the second enchantment. The book shifts into its true form, an ancient tome smelling of calfskin and parchment with ornate pewter cornice pieces and a matching clasp.
I undo the clasp and flip the book open t
o the back, where several pieces of the last page have been torn off. I tear off a new piece and hold it in my palm. It’ll do.
As magic books go, the Book of Mysteries is primarily concerned with the sort of magic used to uncover hidden truths and bring enlightenment. Spells I learned from this book helped me overcome the disbelief every mortal encounters when choosing to accept the existence of the otherworldly creatures around them. It didn’t take me long to achieve enlightenment. What took me a while was learning to shut up about it so my teachers and classmates didn’t have me committed to an asylum. I went through a few rough patches during my teen years, but who doesn’t? Luckily I had Ersatz, and eventually Quim, to help me through them. More on Quim later.
I flip toward the center of the book and locate the guidelines for a complex scrying spell. All the magic words and hand-waving involved in spellcasting are optional; they’re there to get you into the right mindset. Once you know a spell well enough, you can cast it in the silence of your mind without so much as a word. My handwoven bracelets are fine for small everyday spells like that; spells I’m in the habit of casting. The spell I’m about to attempt is no simple cantrip, and will burn far more energy than a bracelet can provide.
I enter my bedroom through a door in the left-hand wall of my apartment. They say the bedroom is where all the magic happens, and in my case it’s true in more ways than one. Actually, just the one. I haven’t had a date in longer than I can remember. And since I can remember the day I met Ersatz when I was eight years old, you get the idea. The tools of my trade are arranged on a narrow worktable along the wall beside my meager twin bed. My laboratory, as I like to call it, is where I turn my collected samples into usable residue.
I’ve spent countless hours obsessing over ways to touch the forces of magic at a moment’s notice. Over the years I’ve tried every delivery method I could think of, often devising elaborate contraptions by which to discharge magical payloads. I researched how hair samples are processed in drug testing labs and bought my own homogenizer, which is like a space-age mortar and pestle that uses grinding beads to pulverize samples to dust in seconds. I’ve bought empty gelatin capsules and made my own pills, though the idea of swallowing a pill made of hair-dust still makes me sick. The bracelets are one of my inventions, but those take a long time to make, and they don’t last long.
Taking a seat in the rickety antique chair at my worktable, I set my books aside and place the scrap of parchment I tore out of the Book of Mysteries on top of them. Most of the time when I’m casting at home, I do things the old-fashioned way. On a low shelf above the worktable, an assortment of stoppered vials hold processed samples arranged in alphabetical order from Archon to Zombie. Most of the vials are empty; I’ve used more than I’ve been able to collect lately, and supplies are dwindling.
I select a vial labeled Dryad and pull the cork. Like a gymnast before the parallel bars, I pour out a small pile of dryad dust. I add a pinch of sphinx, a dash of basilisk, and a smidgen of cockatrice—pinches and dashes and smidgens are all very precise units of measure—before rubbing the mixture into my palms.
It’s important to choose the right material for the job. A compound which might serve admirably for one spell might be complete garbage for another, so learning the subtleties requires lots of experimentation. There’s variance even within a single creature; a werewolf’s hair, for example, performs differently than its blood, skin, bone, claws, and fingernails. The alchemical combinations are vast and nuanced, altering the levels of stability, potency, versatility, and resilience in various spells. For someone like me, who produces no innate magical fuel, studying magic is as much about brewing the right concoction as it is about learning how to cast.
With the Book of Mysteries open to the correct page and my spellbook open to a section of tips I’ve written for casting this particular spell, I focus on the scrap of torn paper and think about my dad. It’s been a long time since he left the book behind, so its connection to him as an owned object has weakened significantly. And since it’s the only thing of his I own, the spell costs me a shred of priceless paper each time I cast it. Soon I’ll run out of blank pages, and I’ll have to start using the inked ones.
Here’s where the rule-breaking comes in. Certain laws like heat and light and appearance are on the simpler end of the breakability spectrum, while immutable laws like death and time and dimension are notoriously ironclad. You don’t mess with those unless you know what you’re doing. Or if you’re me, and you’ve got a damned good reason for it.
This spell hurts more than any I’ve ever cast. It forces me to dredge up some of my most intimate and painful memories surrounding my father and his disappearance. I try to remember him; what he looked like, how it sounded when he spoke. As the years go by I find it harder and harder to remind myself of those little things; things that come so easily with the people closest to us, and melt away as those people fade into our pasts.
I’m reaching toward my father with disembodied arms. I can see him as though he’s standing in front of me. The spell’s power builds. The dust on my hands burns off as the parchment scrap browns at the edges. My heart pounds; my palms are clammy.
There’s an audible whoosh as the tiny scrap of parchment bursts into flame and drifts into one of the apartment’s many inexplicable drafts. When the fire goes out, the parchment disintegrates in a swirl of ash.
I know I should stop, but I don’t. I’m close. Although thousands of creatures have crossed over to our world from the otherside, I’ve never heard of anyone going back. Maybe that’s why my dad has been so hard to find all this time; maybe he figured out how.
I can feel his memory crystallizing. I push forward, swimming with those immaterial arms toward a dark uncertainty. If he’s there, I’ll find him—in this world or the other. The force of the spell pulls at my body, lifting me from the old creaky chair in my bedroom to send me hurtling along a spiraling ethereal rollercoaster. Objects sharpen and blur, far and near, until everything throbs with life and color.
A shockwave throws me back against my chair, pulsing from my body in a ghostly ring as sharp and flat as Saturn’s. I open my eyes, only now realizing they were closed. Everywhere the dust touched my hands, the skin is clean and smooth. The sensation of my father’s nearness is tangible, a dream all too real.
The spell has failed. Again. It keeps happening this way, a raw turmoil which threatens to tear my heart out by the roots. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve cast this spell, honing the mixture and giving myself the proper emotional recovery time between castings. This is as far as I’ve ever gotten.
Ersatz scuttles across the floor and climbs the brick to perch on the windowsill. He studies the open pages of the two books and frowns. “The scrying spell again?”
“I don’t understand why it keeps failing. As soon as I feel like I’m about to take control, I lose it.”
“It isn’t the sort of spell that’s easy to control,” he says. “It’s more likely to control you.”
I tap the page with a finger. “There are only two reasons a spell like this could fail, assuming I’m casting it right. Either my dad is resisting being found, or he’s… not around to resist.”
“What did you see?”
“Shapes. Bright forms in a field of darkness, like the beginnings of a vision. A place.”
Ersatz ponders. “That’s a good sign, though it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. You could be conjuring the images in your head based on something you’ve seen, or dredging up a long-forgotten memory.”
I prop my elbows on the worktable and bury my face in my hands. “I just want to find him.”
Ersatz doesn’t comfort me. He’s not that kind of dragon. “You certainly won’t find him by sulking.”
“I’m not sulking. I’m wallowing in the abyss of my own despair.”
He softens. “Cade. It’s been fifteen years. Sooner or later, we must all let go of what we’ve lost.”
I slap the Dryad
vial so hard it hits the brick wall and shatters in a storm of glass and dust. “I know how long it’s been. Fifteen years of wondering who I am and where I came from. How can I know one if I lose the other?”
“Control,” Ersatz cautions. “Control. You mustn’t tax your emotions after a spell like that.”
“Control this,” I say, flipping him the bird.
He droops his eyelids, unamused. “Your tawdry gestures mean nothing to me.”
“Then teach me how to flick you off in dragonese so I can make you understand.”
“Wherever did you learn such unrefined behavior?”
“On TV.”
“You don’t own a television.”
“I watch it at the gym. Which reminds me—did you know the mayor’s dead?”
“Which mayor?”
“The Mayor of New Detroit. What other mayor would I be talking about?”
“How should I know? Do I look like a member of the voting population?”
“You look like a hairbrush with legs.”
Ersatz starts to say something, then breaks into a wheeze. Smoke billows from his snout. He’s laughing, and I can’t help but laugh with him. It feels good; a release in the tension after a punishing few minutes.
Next thing I know we’ve both lost it. I breathe a loud sigh and catch my breath, anger abated. “You were about to get salty there for a second.”
“It’s late,” he says. “I’m not in my right mind.”
“Oh yeah, I’m sure you must be exhausted after a long day of napping.”
He grins. “Napping is food for the soul.”
“Your soul must weigh five hundred pounds and have diabetes.”
“You ought to feed yours once in a while. It might make you less grumpy.”
“I spent half the evening on my hands and knees, and the other half on my back. And that’s not the first line of a dirty joke. Point is, I’ve got a legitimate reason to be tired. I’m going to hit the hay and get an early start at the range tomorrow.”