by Dante King
“That kitchen pots roamed the magical wilderness? No.”
“Ah,” she said, “it appears that your background was even more sheltered than mine.”
I stared into the past for a moment, thinking that my upbringing hadn’t been that sheltered. Then again, maybe being ignorant to the existence of a whole collection of magical worlds could be considered sheltered in a way?
Before I could expound on this theory, Madame Xel threw a snowball, which had appeared in her hand out of nowhere, at the far wall. A portal expanded out from where the snowball hit.
With a surprisingly strong grip, Madame Xel propelled Alura and myself through the occult doorway and called, “Once you have obtained a cauldron each, simply picture Frosthall in your minds and you will be recalled here. Keep in mind though, should you return without a cauldron, you will receive your first F-grade.”
“A fail?” I asked.
“Fucked,” Madame Xel corrected me, and the portal closed with a soft sucking sound, closing off Alura and I from the Academy.
Chapter Eight
Alura and I found ourselves in a meadow of sorts, ringed with saw-toothed mountains. Grass brushed our thighs, stirred by a crisp breeze.
“All right,” I said, “just what in the hell does a wild cauldron look like, then?”
“Like that,” Alura said as she pointed over my shoulder.
It turned out that these particular cauldrons were not your bog standard witch’s cauldron. They were the cauldron-shaped bodies of a herd of bizarre magical creatures. The creatures—the cauldrons—were round and fat with four stumpy legs, a face at the front, and an ass at the back. They were dark gray in color and, evidently, highly aggressive.
The rest of our class looked as if they had been enjoying chasing and fighting these creatures for the ten minutes or so since our lesson had started. Students were running about all over the place; confronting cauldrons, hitting them with myriad spells—with varying degrees of success—and trying their hardest not to be trampled by the things.
As I watched, one of my classmates fumbled a grimoire, which was clearly his vector. Before he could cast a spell, he was engulfed by a torrent of smoking white potion that one of the cauldrons splashed deftly over him in a sideways bucking motion. When the smoke cleared, the young man was frozen solid; a perfect mage popsicle.
“Whoa,” I said.
Another student—an elf or a nymph, judging by the ears and the graceful way in which she moved—was kicked to the floor by a bucking cauldron. Then, the ghastly pot-with-legs splashed a shimmering, sparkling golden potion all over her. She started twitching and jerking as if she’d been hit with a Taser.
Another of my fellows to my left managed to subdue a cauldron, bringing it down like a bison on the plains. He grasped the prone beast by one stumpy leg and, in a twinkling, he had dematerialized, no doubt back to Frosthall.
A bellow from behind me made me turn. A cauldron was lumbering determinedly toward where Alura and I were standing. It looked very much like it wanted to pour whatever horrible potion it carried over the two of us.
“Not today, butterball,” I said as I hit it with a Blazing Bolt.
I wasn’t sure what that sucker was carrying in its capacious cauldron body but, whatever it was, it did not enjoy being struck by that hybridized fiery storm spell of mine. The cauldron simply vaporized. The explosion knocked me back a pace or two and sent Alura falling into my arms. A ring of scorched, smoldering grass was all that was left of the cauldron. Such was the force of the blast that a nearby cauldron was flipped over onto its back. It lay there, a yellow potion leaking out of it, kicking its stumpy legs in the air in unbridled frustration. It let out a low bray of annoyance.
“You take that one,” I said to Alura, “and I’ll—” I hit another cauldron chasing a completely bald, blue-skinned young woman, with a Storm Bolt, and it staggered a few steps before melting, “take another one.”
Alura nodded briskly. Clearly, she was not one of those women who asked you whether you’re sure once you’ve hit them with a plan of action. With libido-warming viciousness, she cracked the prostrate cauldron right between the eyes with a kick from her rock-hard foot. Its legs went stiff, and it ceased to move. With a nod at me, Alura grasped one of the stumpy legs and vanished.
It had become quickly apparent that force was not going to be any good to me here, which was a shame because I was getting quite proficient at using it.
“Subtlety,” I muttered to myself. “That is what’s needed here.”
I pulled out my spellbook and had a quick glance through my spells. Subtlety was very much in the minority there. It was not the spellbook of a defensively-minded mage. But there was one spell that could be useful, one I hadn’t implemented much before.
Paralyzing Zap.
“Can it be done, though?” I asked myself. “Will it paralyze a cauldron?”
I felt a tickle in my fingers, a vibration that passed up through the black crystal staff. Somehow, it felt like encouragement.
“Well, let’s give it a whirl, then,” I said.
I didn’t have to wait long to put my plan into practice—in fact, I almost didn’t get a chance to put it into practice at all. A cauldron almost took me by surprise from the side, but I managed to avoid its charge with an army roll that I subconsciously managed to channel from my inner Steven Segal. It was a little awkward, but it got me out of trouble.
The cauldron lumbered past me, performed a wide turn, and came running back. A few yards away, just before it steamrolled me, I fired a Blazing Bolt at the turf in front of its feet. A fountain of dirt and grass burst up from the point of the detonation. The ungainly creature stumbled into the shallow crater, performed a neat forward roll, and skidded through the grass. It stopped just short of me. A look of momentary confusion was plastered across its squashed and ugly face.
I touched the cauldron creature lightly on the snout with my staff while concentrating on channeling the Paralyzing Zap spell. A pulse of blue energy burst out of my staff and engulfed the cauldron in a single staccato throb. The beast went as stiff as a board for a moment, its muddy little eyes crossed. It keeled over sideways, out cold.
I reached out to grasp one of the stumpy legs in my hand so I could get teleported back to the safety of Frosthall. Then I stopped when something remarkable caught my eye.
“What are you?” I breathed.
Another cauldron had just appeared amidst the madness. I assumed it had made its way over to see what the rest of the herd was up to and to find out why so many of its fellows were making so much noise.
Unlike any of the other cauldrons though, this specimen’s hide was not dull gray, but a pearlescent, changing rainbow. Also, instead of spewing out a brightly-colored potion from its back, it was pouring forth some sort of midnight vortex—the color of the night sky turned into some weird malleable solid.
As I gazed at this cauldron, another enterprising student attempted to bring it down and capture it. Within the blink of an eye, he was sucked into the vortex and disappeared.
I looked at my unconscious cauldron next to me. Then back at the pearlescent, vortex spewing monster. “Yeah, I want that one,” I said.
It was, on paper, a dumb move—I already had a downed cauldron that I could take back to Madame Xel—but I had never been one to curb an impulse just because it might, theoretically, send me to the emergency room.
Or into some terrifying parallel universe, my brain said.
“Hey, you!” I yelled, snaring the attention of the guy I’d seen frozen earlier. He was looking rather damp now, but had obviously managed to thaw himself out. He turned to look at me.
“You look like you’re ready for a cup of tea and a nice sit down, pal,” I said. “Take this fat bastard and get out of here.” I nudged the cauldron next to me with a foot.
“Vat about you?” he asked me in a deeply accented voice.
I turned to look at the shimmering rainbow cauldron.
“I’m going
after that guy,” I said.
The rainbow cauldron was laying about itself with indiscriminate abandon. It was bucking and rearing, spewing the vortex-like potion over any student that was unfortunate enough to stray into its path, as well its fellow cauldrons. To take this thing down, I needed a plan—a plan of such solidity that I could have moored a ferry to it. That much was obvious.
“Ah, fuck it,” I said before I started sprinting toward the deadly rainbow cauldron.
Curiously, I always found dangerous situations a lot like exams at college. If I tried too hard, if I studied too much, I never seemed to get as good a results as I did when I just fucking freestyled it. It was this theory I was putting my faith in now, as I ran toward my target.
When I was about forty strides away, the rainbow cauldron turned and saw me making a beeline for it. It brayed angrily at me, scuffing the ground up like a bull with a stick up its ass. Then it shuddered, and a forcefield suddenly popped into being around it.
Great. As if this wasn’t going to be difficult enough.
To give myself a second or two more to decide what the hell to do, I hit the ground in front of the cauldron with another Blazing Bolt, obscuring its vision for a moment with a cloud of dirt and grass.
Then, I used my Flame Barrier spell to form a set of steps leading up into the air. Each step formed in the time that it took me to step from one to the next. It was probably one of the dopest bits of magic that I had cast so far, and I was gutted that Alura had already vanished back to Frosthall.
I launched myself off the final step, just as the rain of dirt and grass cleared and the cauldron realized that I had pulled a Houdini and seemingly escaped it. It realized how wrong it was when my Blazing Bolt, fired from midair, smashed down on top of it and shattered its forcefield. The cauldron let loose a bellow of unadulterated fury, which was quickly cut off when I landed on its broad, bony head.
“No you goddamn don’t!” I yelled as the creature leant forward to douse me in the black vortex that it carried in its cauldron-shaped innards.
I jammed my staff on its bulbous forehead and produced the same Paralyzing Zap that I had used on the other beast—albeit with a little extra pizazz to make sure this big fucker went down.
The cauldron went instantly rigid, and I leapt to safety as it toppled forward and crashed to the ground. I landed heavily on my back and had the wind knocked out of me, but still had the presence of mind to roll as far from the creature as I could, just in case it got a second wind.
Luckily though, when I got unsteadily to my feet, the rainbow cauldron was down and out for the count. It gave one last defeated snort and lay still.
“Don’t be sorry!” I said breathlessly, unable to believe that I’d just pulled that move off. “Be better!”
It was a line from one of my favorite video games, God of War, but something pretty cool was needed to emphasize my victory and it was the first thing that sprung to my mind.
Speaking of video games, I’d played enough of them to know that you didn’t hang about patting yourself on the back all day and inviting something else to sneak up behind you and sandbag you while you were distracted. I grabbed the cauldron by the leg and allowed my mind to picture Frosthall.
I blinked a couple of times. My ears were suddenly filled with that same strange sucking sound with which the portal had closed before, and then—
—I was standing in the middle of Frosthall, surrounded by a bunch of disheveled people that I assumed were my classmates. Each of them stood next to the unconscious form of a cauldron.
“Mmmmm, my, my, Justin Mauler, you really don’t disappoint do you, dear?” came the strange voice of Madame Xel as she emerged from the crowd. “That was quite some show you put on out there!”
“You saw?” I asked.
“We all did.” Madame Xel motioned behind me to what appeared to be a projected screen of the battle ground, though from what it was being projected I couldn’t see. “And what a specimen this is!” Her mauve eyes lit up as she walked around the downed rainbow cauldron, her ridiculously sexy outfit squeaking and creaking in the silence left by the group of awestruck students that watched me owlishly.
She continued, “It says in my registration notes that you are a Storm Mage—yet, clearly, you possess Fire spells. Hmm, curious…”
I remembered that I was meant to keep the knowledge that I was a Creation Mage under my hat, so I shrugged casually. ““Late bloomer, I guess. Who knows, I might even discover I have other elemental affinities as my time here continues.”
After the scrap with the cauldrons, I was a little buzzed on adrenaline, and I hoped that my clumsy excuse was enough to explain any subsequent powers I might gain from sleeping with any other women.
Like Alura...or Cecilia...or Kryn...or
“My people, the succubi of the Infernal Realms, are, as you may know, Practitioners of Infernal Magic. What do you know of the Elder Magics, Mr. Mauler?”
Madame Xel’s voice turned so sultry here that I thought that, had it not been for the dozens of other students surrounding us, I might have popped an involuntary wood there and then.
“I, uh, I don’t know too much about them, I’m afraid,” I said.
“Hmm, well, if you’re interested in learning about them in depth, all you need do is make an appointment with my office. I’m happy to provide private lessons for those that want them…”
At that moment, my tongue seemed to have become caught up in my hind teeth. In answer, I nodded dumbly and ran my eyes longingly over her supernaturally hot body in its PVC wrapping.
I would private lesson the shit out of you, I thought.
Madame Xel flashed me the speediest wink in the history of winks and turned away to address the latest cauldron-wrangler coming back through the portal. A touch on my shoulder made me turn. I smiled as Alura squeezed me happily on the shoulder.
“What was that about?” she asked me, nodding toward Madame Xel.
I shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you exactly, but I’ve a feeling that she’s just looking to get information out of me,” I replied.
“No doubt coercing you with the assets she has not so stealthily hidden under that outfit of hers,” Alura said, raising one glittering eyebrow.
“One can only hope,” I said cheekily. “But, you know that people have to work with what they’ve got.”
“And women, nine times out of ten, only need one thing to get what they want out of a man,” Alura said.
“That might be so,” I conceded. “But that also means that, nine times out of ten, women are in the position of power and are dangerous. Seems to me that there is very little difference when it comes to the fundamental natures of different worlds.”
Alura took a step toward me. She ran her sparkling tongue over her crystal-like lips. “Do you think that I’m dangerous nine times out of ten, Justin?” she asked demurely.
“No,” I murmured back. “I’d say you’re a ten times out of ten girl for sure.”
Alura gave a soft snort and crooked a smile at me as the rest of the class filed toward the door—Madame Xel telling them to leave the cauldrons for her to deal with now.
“Do you have your next class straight away?” the Princess of the Gemstone Elementals asked me.
I consulted my spellbook.
“Not straight away, no,” I said.
“Would you fancy passing the time back at my sorority house?” Alura asked.
I’d never seen inside another sorority house since joining the Academy. I was struck by the excellent thought that I might get to see more than just the inside of Alura’s sorority building if I accepted the invitation.
“Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?” I countered.
“What’s a Dolly Parton?” Alura asked.
I shook my head. “Never mind. I meant yes. Hell yes.”
Chapter Nine
I’d always found that confidence in yourself would more often than not see you through a situation—I’d had frien
ds in college that called that sort of mindset ‘fake it ‘til you make it’. This might have been true for all situations save for the one I was in now. I felt like a mouse that had wandered into a cat-house when I was led through the door of Alura’s Elemental sorority.
“Holy hell,” I said as Alura pushed open the gleaming ebony door, covered in a climbing ivy dotted with white flowers. “This feels like some old-worldly gentlemen’s club somehow—and I mean that in the best possible way!”
The imposing door opened out into a wide, high corridor illuminated with chandeliers lit by tapers of dancing pink flames. This gave the corridor, despite it still only being mid-morning, a cosy, comfortable feeling. It also made me come over with a sudden hankering for a nice cold alcoholic beverage and a comfortable chair.
Everywhere I looked, I saw evidence of the five types of Elemental beings—Storm, Flame, Earth, Frost, and Wind—that were housed in this sorority. Everlasting icicles glittered in the arches of the high doorways. Occasional breezes wafted through the place, like the Elemental equivalent of air-conditioning, keeping the lightly perfumed air moving.
I passed one room that looked like a grotto carved out of living rock and was filled with stone furniture and hung with myriad potted ferns and shrubs. There was another that looked as if it housed a fog machine running nonstop and was punctuated with the ominous rumble of distant thunder and the dulled flicker of lightning.
“This place is incredible,” I said.
It was then that I started to notice the sorority members themselves, who seemed to have sensed that there was a stranger in their midst and had come out to investigate.
“Who have you brought us, Alura?” came a deep chocolatey voice from above us.
Looking up, I saw a curvaceous Earth Elemental draped over a balcony that ran along both sides of the corridor we were walking through. The woman’s heart-shaped face was set with deep green eyes like my frat brother, Rick Hammersmith, and her skin reminded me of the gleaming white, smooth bark of a paper birch. She was wrapped in a loose gown, and a pair of extremely eye-catching breasts were protruding through the gap at the collar as she leaned over the balcony.