by Dante King
Creation Mage 2
War Mage Academy 2
Dante King
Copyright © 2020 by Dante King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Want More Stories?
About the Author
Chapter One
I fell up and out of the velvety clutches of the sleep that I’d been enjoying, with a sharp intake of breath.
“Get-off-me-with-your-stinky-troll-fingers!” I might have muttered as I sat bolt upright in my enormous bed, scattering pillows everywhere.
I rubbed my eyes and looked blearily around me. Yep, I was in my bed all right. My big, comfortable bed, in my large room, in my Mazirian Academy fraternity house—a fraternity house that, only recently, I’d learned was my family home transported to the top of this hill by the enigmatic Headmaster of the Academy, Reginald Chaosbane.
I slumped back against the ornate headboard, looked at the clock on the wall and then glanced out of the window. Going by the date and time, and the way that the sun was sitting low on the horizon like a fat copper coin, I must have been asleep for almost an entire day. It was early evening, and I was starving.
I hauled my battered ass out of bed and groaned. I kicked my robes, which were spattered and smeared with blue troll blood, over into a corner. Stretched my aching muscles. There could be no denying it, I had put myself through the ringer over the past few days and no mistake. At this rate I was going to have to start getting on board with Nigel’s morning yoga routine.
“Yeah, or maybe not,” I said to my reflection in the mirror.
I walked toward my en-suite bathroom at the insistence of my bladder, but pulled up short when I caught sight of the two staffs leaning against the foot of my bed. They were my two vectors—the occult conduits through which my magic flowed. Each mage usually only had one, but alongside the modest wooden staff that I had acquired from Barry Chillgrave’s Magical Emporium on the day that I’d found out that I was a mage, I now also had a rather dope-looking black crystal staff. This had belonged to my father, Zenidor, one of the most powerful mages to ever pull a rabbit out of a hat.
How can I keep the both of you? I wondered. I didn’t want to be running about dual-wielding staffs. Having at least one hand free was key—you never knew when you might want to use it to extricate some fair maiden from a spot of bother, or hit some bad person upside the head.
But the thought of leaving one of the staffs behind did not sit well with me. I picked them up.
In one hand, I held the staff that had chosen me. The vector that, despite having only owned it for a few days, I had passed through some seriously hectic times with.
In the other hand, I held the black crystal staff that had belonged to my dad and been given to me by the Prophet King, the monarch of the Gemstone Elementals.
“I want both of you,” I said to the vectors. “So, if you could just combine together magically or...something, that would be ideal.”
I experienced the strange sensation of having my words absorbed into the fabric of the very world somehow. Then, the two staffs in my hands went very hot and very cold. They shimmered, as if they’d been engulfed by a very localized heat-haze. Then, with a pop of strobing light that left a black circle imprinted across my vision for a few seconds, the plain wooden staff was absorbed into the black crystal one.
“That,” I said, running my fingers over the cool crystal and patting my two-in-one vector, “was very cool.”
After a much-needed shower and a change of clothes, I traipsed downstairs in search of my fraternity brothers. I had my newly acquired vector over my shoulder, the black crystal staff that had once belonged to my father. I met Nigel at the head of the sweeping staircase that corkscrewed down five floors to the atrium below. Nigel was a halfling; four and a half feet tall with hair that fell all over his face and a pair of spectacles that he never left his room without. He was a Wind Mage and, amongst other things, was learning how to fly and levitate while battling a crippling fear of heights. He was also, perhaps, the most intelligent person I had ever met.
I was six-foot-two myself, so in true frat style Nigel’s height was my go-to when it came to teasing him. “Shit, Nigel,” I said, “how’s the weather down there? I’m going to have to get you a bell or something, aren’t I? So that I know when you’re cruising about down there.”
Nigel made a sarcastic sound and then went to flick me in the nuts, but I blocked it. I clapped him on the shoulder, and he sued for peace.
“How are you feeling?” I asked him, as we made our way downstairs.
“Tolerably well rested, Justin,” Nigel replied. “Though not as well rested as you. I was thinking that we might have to come in there and have you declared legally dead if you slept any longer.”
“Yeah, well, the scrap with that troll shaman really took it out of me, what can I say?”
“From the little you told us, and that we heard from Chaosbane when we all got back from that little excursion, it sounds like it wasn’t just the fighting that took it out of you…” Nigel left the sentence hanging invitingly open.
“Nigel,” I said, “are you trying to get me to divulge what exactly went down between me and Enwyn?”
“You and Enwyn?” Nigel said enviously. “Again?”
“Or me and Janet?”
“Janet Thunderstone as well?” Nigel exclaimed.
“Or me and Enwyn and Janet?”
Nigel actually came to a halt on the stairs at this pronouncement.
“You and Enwyn and Janet?” my little fraternity brother asked.
I mouthed the word ‘threesome’ and motioned for him to keep walking.
“Because, as a gentleman, I would never go into those sorts of details—” I said.
Nigel booed me.
“Sober,” I finished.
We found Rick Hammersmith in the slightly dilapidated atrium when we got to the bottom of the stairs.
“Friends,” he greeted us in his subterranean bass voice. He flashed us a broad, genuine smile. That grin was juxtaposed a little with his intimidating, hulking physique. I might have been six-two and able to give Nigel a bit of good-natured shit but, if he had wanted to, Rick could have quite happily called me a short-ass. He was what might have been spawned had Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson gotten drunk one night and had sex with a water buffalo. He was, in a word, big.
“Hey Rick,” I said. I winced as he patted me on the shoulder gently—or what passed for
gently with the giant, dreadlocked Earth Elemental. The action almost knocked me through the nearest wall. “How’re you feeling after our little fight to the death the other day?”
The enormous Samoan-looking mage shrugged his brawny bared shoulders, the carved tattoos set into his skin writhing as the slabs of muscle moved like tectonic plates.
“As fine as frog fur, as we say on my island,” Rick said.
I shook my head. Rick was always coming out with these little nuggets of nonsensical, yet oddly comforting island wisdom. I reckoned his home must be a nice place, where no one had a fucking clue what anyone else was talking about, but just traded these sayings and idioms back and forth.
“I understand the basic gist of what you’re trying to say, Rick,” Nigel piped up, as we made our way toward the kitchen, “but still, I must point out that frogs do not actually have fur—not even extremely fine fur.”
“But you understand what I’m saying, yes?” Rick said.
“Yes,” Nigel said.
“That, if there was to be any creature that had very fine fur—very fine, like the way I feel right now—it would be the humble frog?”
“We get you, we get you,” I said, heading off what might potentially be a painfully long explanation.
I pushed open the heavy oak door that led into the cavernous kitchen and was greeted by the extremely welcome smell of some sort of curry simmering on the industrial cast iron stove top.
“Bradley,” I said, “if it ain’t my favorite low-man.”
Bradley Flamewalker turned from the stove, where he had just sprinkled a handful of chopped herbs into the delectable-smelling curry, and gave me a grin. He wiped his fingers on the apron he wore around his waist and then ran a hand through his immaculately styled dark hair.
“Justin, you’re finally up,” he said. “And just in time for dinner too.”
He spoke with the sort of aristocratic accent that went hand-in-hand with wealth and an upbringing amongst the upper-crust. Despite occasionally coming across as if he had a stick lodged deep up his ass, which I guessed was all part and parcel of coming from one of Avalonia’s most prestigious families, I liked Bradley. Some people might have been surprised at this, because we’d had a rocky start to our friendship, what with him trying to kill me and all.
“What are we having?” I asked the Fire Mage, as my belly gave a growl that probably could have been heard upstairs.
Bradley snapped his fingers next to one of the dormant hobs. There were a couple of sparks and then it came to life in a whoosh of flame. Bradley placed a pot of rice in water over it.
“Just a little xenebil fish curry,” he said.
I hadn’t the foggiest what the hell a xenebil fish was, but it smelled delish.
“So,” Damien Davis’s voice hailed me from where he sat at the breakfast island watching Bradley cook, “this frat house of ours turned out to be your parents’ old digs, huh?”
Damien was the only one of my fraternity brothers who had ever spent any time back in my world. He’d run with a rather unsavoury gang back in Los Angeles, and had garnered quite a reputation among his fellow gang members and the local five-o as an arsonist. Not surprising perhaps, in someone who had a magical affinity for fire.
“That’s right,” I said, returning his smoldering gaze. “I suddenly find myself a respectable property owner. You reckon we should chuck the attic on AirBnB for some extra beer money?”
Damien smirked.
“Who the hell were your parents again?” he asked. “And what did they do to leave you such a sweet pad?”
I sighed. I felt as if I had gone over who my parents were and the sort of legendary mages that they’d been more times in the past seventy-two hours than I could count. What made the whole business more tedious was the fact that, had it not been for a bit of serious jiggery-pokery by a bunch of leading mages known as the Arcane Council, everyone would damn well know who they were.
However, thanks to the world-changing bit of magic that they had performed, almost no one in this magical world recalled the names of Zenidor, my father, and Istrea, my mother.
Any artwork that had ever been crafted of them changed in the eyes of the observer so that the faces were unidentifiable. Any line of script in the chronicles of Avalonia’s history that included their names blurred when most people attempted to run their eyes over it. They were, essentially, expunged from the pages of history, despite the fact that the Void Wars—in which the future of the magical world had hung in the balance—had only taken place seventeen years previously.
I looked down at my black crystal staff, wondering where to start. Then it occurred to me, the staff held the tale of my parents within it. It had revealed to me where I came from through a vision. More than that though, it had also conferred this vision onto my friends Cecilia, Enwyn and Janet.
“Rather than tell you about them, how about I show you?” I said.
Damien raised an eyebrow at me. “What, man, are you going to dazzle us with a bit of amateur dramatics and act their story out?” he said.
I shook my head and tossed him the staff.
Damien caught it and at once went as rigid as if he’d just been hit with a fifty-thousand volt police tase—which, I reminded myself, the little rascal probably had been in his time running with that Los Angeles street gang. I was expecting him to snap out of it and then regale us with what he had seen, like the girls who I’d passed the black crystal staff to had. However, this time the staff seemed to realize that it was surrounded by people who could probably all benefit from the knowledge it was about to impart.
A beam of green light speared out from the tip of the staff and a projection suddenly came to life right in the centre of the breakfast bar.
A young boy, of no more than five or so, was shoved through a door, on the front of which was a clockwork number panel.
“Hey that-that’s me…” Damien said, his eyes glued to the moving, silent 3D image. “And my parents. That’s the safe room that we had in our old house in Avalonia.”
“Before you went to my world?” I asked.
Damien nodded.
A spectral form with a sinuous moustache and rather impressive Turkish fez, made more ghostly by the green hue of the projection, appeared then.
“That’s our old poltergeist!” Damien said. “Goddamn, I haven’t thought about that guy in a long time.”
The man in the silent movie taking place in front of us—Damien’s suppressed memory, I reminded myself—looked down at the child and said, “No matter what, son, remember the names of Zenidor and Istrea, and their quest.”
The woman shook her head, ruffled the child Damien’s hair and said to the man, “it’s no use, dear. The Glamour created by the Arcane Council already has him in its hold. He’ll not recall the names, nor the reason we are having to leave him.”
The poltergeist leaned forward then and said, in a smooth and obsequious voice, “I shall care for him as you instructed. If something should befall both of you, I shall open a portal and transport him across to Earth.”
“Where on Earth have you selected?” the man, Damien’s father, asked.
“A pleasant-sounding human habitation called the City of Angels.”
Damien’s mother smiled sadly. “Just the place,” she said.
The door to the safe room shut.
The projection faded.
For a while Damien just stood there. Then he blinked and said,”Just like that, I remember everything. About the Void Wars, about why my parents disappeared. About your mom and your dad. Everything.”
I nodded. “That’s the enchantment of the Arcane Council breaking, as far as you’re concerned,” I said.
“Damn it,” Nigel said, shaking his head. “Even though I know that I just heard the names I can’t for the life of me remember what they are now.”
“Pass the staff to Nige,” I said.
Damien tossed the black crystal staff across to the halfling. Nigel grabbed at it, fum
bled it and caught it. He went momentarily rigid, as the staff accessed his memories maybe, and then a new projection appeared, this time against the far wall.
“Shit, Nigel,” Damien said with a wry grin, “here’s me thinking that you couldn’t get any smaller.”
A younger, even smaller, Nigel had indeed appeared on the projection, accompanied by a venerable old man with a huge nose and eyebrows so long that they would have entered rooms about a minute ahead of him.
It was with his customary rapt concentration that Nigel was watching the scene in front of us unfold, so it was no surprise that he didn’t even reply to Damien’s barb.
“There’s Manfred,” I heard Nigel mutter.
“Who’s Manfred?” I asked.
“My-my family’s servant,” Nigel replied. “He looked after me, after-after my parents d-died.”
Nigel always stuttered when he was excited, stressed or rattled in any way.
The projection of manfred led the young Nigel down a corridor and then unlocked a door. The two of them stepped through into an ornate, high-ceilinged chamber. There was a roaring fireplace at one end of the room, big enough to roast an ox in, and in front of it was—
“Is that a fucking gryphon?” I asked.
It was a rhetorical question. Of course, it was a gryphon. I mean, the creature was the size of a grizzly bear that had got into the steroids, but had the body of a lion and the scaly, taloned rear legs, wings and head of an eagle. If it wasn’t a gryphon, someone had been properly going for it as far as hybridization went.
“Why have you brought me here, Manfred?” young Nigel squeaked in a voice that sounded like he’d been breakfasting on helium.