by GM Gambrell
The End of Magic
(Young Adult Dystopian Fantasy)
GM Gambrell
Copyright © 2012 GM Gambrell
All rights reserved.
About The Book
When the apocalypse came it was not from the fires of nuclear war or unseen viral plagues, not from an unstoppable asteroid or even the machines rising up in defiance of their human overlords. The Last War, as later generations would come to remember it, was fought between fighter jets and dragons, between companies of sword wielding golems swarming over steel tanks in support of deadly Magicians wielding magical fireballs. It was a war of magic versus science and science lost.
A thousand years later Duncan Cade is born without magical abilities into a dystopian world dominated by the Magical. As a young adult he’s a pariah and an outcast because of his condition, an unwanted reminder of a time when their forefather’s wiped non-magical humans from the face of the planet. His life is a constant struggle not only to fit in a society based on magic he doesn’t wield, but also to survive without the simplest of magical abilities. He thinks that he is alone, the only non-magical boy in the entire world.
When the magic begins to fade from the world, Duncan is blamed and just escapes the wrath of the Magician police force into the wastelands surrounding the city of New Dallas. He sets out on a quest to find the origin of Magic and soon discovers that not only is he not alone, but the non-magical humans are finally fighting back.
The Last War was only the beginning of the apocalypse and young Duncan Cade, a boy born without Magic, is thrust into the middle of the new war against the Magicians.
One
Duncan stared out the window wishfully as the boys floated through the air on their fly-boards.
He was, of course, jealous of their ability to make the otherwise uninteresting planks of wood fly through the air, and he was even more jealous of the fun they had, dashing through the air, throwing balls of fire back and forth, and just generally cutting up. The game of Fireball could be intense, as the young boys flung basketball-sized fireballs back and forth, scoring points when they knocked someone off his flying board. It was dangerous, and quite brutal, and the boys would constantly suffer broken bones and third degree burns. That was the main reason why young Magician boys tended to excel at healing magic before anything else. He was long used to not being able to use magic by now, and the jealousy was more of a dull ache than a striking pain. He was more frustrated than anything else with how much work he actually had to do, every day, in order to get by without the use of magic. Everything, from eating to bathing to walking to school…he had to everything in his life without magic.
It hadn’t always been that way, of course, though he had always been without magic. Born to loving parents, both of them magically inclined, they’d taken care of him until he could take care of himself. He even remembered them making a game of it in those early years. What can we make Duncan for breakfast? Let’s see who can teleport Duncan to school the quickest. It had been fun until it became a chore. Then the let’s see what we can make Duncan for breakfast turned into it’s your turn to make Duncan breakfast. He’d never held it against his family, though, and as soon as he understood the situation, he began to teach himself to survive without their help and without magic.
He continued watching the boys play Fireball for a few more minutes. The boys were playing especially brutally that day. Timmy Toole, the undisputed best Fireball player in the city of New Dallas, was, once again, proving why he was the best. He balanced precariously on the fly-board, high above Duncan’s house between the houses that floated above theirs. The floating homes of New Dallas made the perfect obstacle course, allowing the boys to avoid the barrage of fireballs filling the air. That the owners of those homes constantly complained to Lord Probate, the governor of New Dallas, about the games did little to dissuade the boys from playing them. The trick to Fireball was to stay higher than your competitors so they were constantly looking up at you, blinded by the sun and blocked by the higher fly-board. There seemed no limit to the heights the boys would go. That they were low enough to the ground for Duncan to see was a little odd.
He watched as Timmy Toole swooped above another boy, his board casting a shadow on the boy below him and blocking his view. As the other boy looked up, Timmy launched two fireballs, one from each hand, over each side of the board. They caught the other boy in both sides of the face, instantly lighting his hair on fire and then sending him plummeting to the ground below. The boy shrieked all the way down, trying to cast healing and floating spells, but he was too late and hit the ground with a thud, forcing him out of the game. The only way to win at Fireball was to be the last boy floating.
Timmy whooped loudly, ducking as a volley of fireballs launched by the boys below him rocketed by. He looked right at Duncan and smiled, letting loose with a small ball in his direction and then laughing hysterically as the sphere of fiery gel splashed through the window and Duncan dashed to away to escape the flames. The ball didn’t catch anything else on fire, of course. The safety spells his father had placed on the house, like every other homeowner in New Dallas, had protected the home from every conceivable hazard. The fireball bounced harmlessly off his bed, knocked over his nightstand, and then fizzled out of existence. The nightstand immediately leapt back to its previous position, pulling the spilled contents back up with it. Even the broken glass repaired itself within seconds, the pieces scattered around his room jumping back into place like orderly soldiers.
He went back to the window and watched Timmy swoop by once more, his hands wide, taunting him to do something about the invasion. And Duncan wished he could, wished more than anything that he could stand up to the bully, but what could he, a boy born into a world of magic but without the ability to wield it, do about anything? He was at their mercy.
Timmy, however, had made a mistake drifting lower to tease Duncan at his window. The big teenager gasped as he took a fireball to the chest and, as he burst into flame, plummeted three stories to the ground below. The other boys laughed as their friend hit the ground, creating a small crater as he hit, and pointed mockingly. They wouldn’t waste their magic on the boy, and besides, his fall had been the funniest thing they’d seen all day. The great Timmy Toole, best of the Fireball players, had finally been knocked off his board. Groaning, the boy immediately cast a small rain spell, conjuring a storm to put the fire out, but it was a tiny storm and didn’t produce enough rain. There was barely a trickle from the tiny cloud, and Timmy screamed as the fire still burned. He tried again and this time the cloud that popped into existence was a bit larger, but still not enough to put the flames out. His friends circled him, laughing and taunting him, and Duncan could hear, quite clearly, their cries.
“What’s the matter, Timmy? You getting to be like little Duncan Cade? Can’t put out your own fire? Can’t cast your own magic?”
“Shut up!” Timmy screamed, his voice barely a whisper above the roar of the flames as he tried for a third time to conjure a cloud big enough to douse his flames. Duncan was sure he’d cast some anti-pain spell before playing or he would have been passed out by now.
The third cloud appeared and was, finally, big enough to put out the fires. He sat there on the ground smoldering, his skin blackened and peeling away, as he began to cast healing spells. Much like his storm clouds, the spells were slow going and he had to repeat them multiple times. Slowly but surely he got his broken body back into shape, healing the skin and mending the bones. Overall, it had been an excruciating thing for Duncan to watch, and he figured that Timmy, even with his pain-numbing spell, had to be
in great pain. Timmy didn’t return to the game, blinking himself out and teleporting away.
The boys continued to play, slowly knocking each other from the boards until there was only one left, but Duncan couldn’t watch anymore, afraid of seeing another boy fall and his magic fail him. Despite Timmy Toole being the biggest bully at school, despite the constant mocking and humiliating magic cast upon him by the bigger boy, he still felt sorry for the suffering the boy had experienced.
No one would talk about the magic fading, no one would discuss what was happening, but it was quite obvious, at least to Duncan, that something bad was happening. There were more and more events like Timmy’s struggle to put out his fires and heal himself. It was the little things that bothered Duncan, though, like his mother having to try three times the previous evening before she could conjure dinner, or his father having to try five times to teleport himself to work. No one, even his parents, would discuss the new problem, though, and that also troubled him.
Thinking of dinner reminded him, once again, that he needed to go down and check on his garden. He stood and stretched, started for the door, then promptly tripped over his own ground version of the Fireball player’s fly-board, a plank of wood with fat tires, found in the junkyard surrounding New Dallas. His wouldn’t fly, of course, but where there was a smooth surface, he could make better than ten miles an hour on it. It lay discarded like the dozens of other objects in his room that he’d built, at one time or another, to get around his lack of magic. There were the stilts, which when he managed to not fall off of them, allowed him to reach the apples at the top of his tree in the back yard. There was the lunch box that with the external water tank that, when filled with cold water, would keep his lunch cool all day. There was a telescope built of pieces of junk glass that he’d carefully assembled, a ceiling fan powered by another wind-driven fan linked with leather belts outside his window. The walls were a mess of his own drawings and posters, covering everything from a hand drawn portrait of his family to designs for gliders. His room was a mess and his mother was constantly threatening to cast a few cleaning spells, or possibly summon a tornado. She never did, though, and his room would forever remain a mess.
He made his way through the clutter and chaos of his bedroom, tripping over another unfinished project, a miniature elevator that worked on weights and pulleys, and then bounded down the three flights of stairs, getting to the first floor in a few seconds. Stairs in Magician houses were almost unheard of as most people just teleported from one story to the next, but his parents had put them in just for him. The first floor of the Cade home was a seeming jumble of random boxes attached to each other with holes cut through as passageways, all branching off from the center rectangle. The original house, that rectangular white iron box that read “Wal-Mart” on the outside wall had been used as the first Cade home, right after the Last War, and the generations of Cades that had followed had steadily added on as the need arose. He remembered going with his father when he was very young to the vast junkyards that surrounded New Dallas and picking out a box to transport back home and make into his bedroom. As they rode the box through the streets, his father told him that it was called a trailer, and that, once upon a time, it had been used to transport goods to market. When pressed, the elder Cade hadn’t known what a market was, much less what goods were—It was just something his father had told him. The box had been added to the house, joined by magic, and Duncan had used it as his bedroom ever since.
His mother’s living room, the bottom center of the Cade home, was a mess of constantly running memory stones, the little rocks that projected recorded memories of events past, pictures and paintings on the wall, and wall-to-wall plants. His mother’s plants, unlike his own, were sentient and picked at him as he passed.
“Watch out for the rug,” a particularly vile rosebush told him. He’d avoided nearing the bush as it was always lashing out at him with its thorny branches, and then tripped over the folded edge of the immense rug as he passed. The plants burst out in laughter at his plight, their sounds only slightly masking the memory stone showing the three dimensional image of his parents’ trip to New Atlantis before he was born.
Duncan tuned out the plants ridicule for a few moments, watching the dragons in the image soar above the Magician homeland. It was so peaceful looking, so clean, and so contrary to the junky city of New Dallas.
“I told you to watch out,” the rosebush said defiantly. “You never listen.”
For the hundredth time just that day, Duncan wished he’d been born with magic. The plants were sentient, but they weren’t particularly smart or brave. They wouldn’t pick on his parents because they knew what the consequences would be. All Duncan could do was cut off a branch or pull off a flower, but the same spell that prevented his bedroom from going up in flames from Timmy’s fireballs prevented any harm to the plants. They picked on him because they knew they could get away with it. He also had no doubts that the plant had rippled the carpet. Even though they were confined to their pots, they could still move their branches around.
He stood and shook off the anger, opened the front door and gulped, as he invariably did when faced with the sheer drop from the front porch of the floating house down to the ground. He then grabbed hold of the brass pole that led to the ground and jumped on, trying not to let the three-story drop to the ground below him get to him. The trip down the pole was quick and terrifying, as usual, but he’d miss the pole down when he had to climb back up the rope ladder later. He’d tried telling his father that it didn’t actually matter if the house floated or not. He couldn’t really use the land beneath it for vegetables because of the shadow of the house blocking the sun from the plants. His father didn’t understand the essential relationship between the sun and plants and would invariably end Duncan’s explanations with the comment that the house looked good up there, like the hundreds of other homes that floated above their own. It gave him the illusion of living in the clouds, among the wealthier Magicians.
Of course, Albert Cade didn’t have to climb a three-story rope ladder several times a day, hauling what he needed up with a rope and pulley, he simply teleported back and forth. Still, he knew his father thought he was helping and meant well.
His garden stretched out to the edges of their small city lot, and everywhere that the sun touched, his plants grew. There were rows of corn, beans, tomatoes, lettuce, and melons, along with dozens of varieties of bright flowers, none of which attacked him as he passed. He walked through the rows, picking out stray weeds and windblown trash from the street. He talked to the plants as he passed, thanking them for their efforts. It wasn’t like these simple vegetable plants were self aware like the ones in the City Park who spent the majority of their day taunting people passing by, or even his mother’s, who were just as mean, but he still felt a kinship with them. These plants, after all, gave him sustenance, and were, besides the occasional holiday meal conjured by his mother, all he ever got to eat. They were his life.
In the center of the lot, under the looming shadow of their house, was his chicken coop. He’d gathered the chickens and rooster up from around the city where they, like other animals, roamed freely. It had taken a bit of bargaining along with equal parts bribery. The Free Rangers, as the chickens were known, were adamant about not being locked up. They did, however, like to be fed regularly, so he’d offered, in exchange for the occasional egg, to do just that. It also didn’t hurt that the predatory animals, especially the cats, couldn’t cross the magical barrier his father had constructed for him around his garden.
“Good morning, ladies,” Duncan said, trying his best to sound as bright and cheerful as possible. The hens were not morning girls and generally blew everything way out of proportion. The slightest change in tone would throw them into fits.
“And what’s good about it?” Henrietta asked from her nest. “It’s cold outside and the cats are prowling at the barrier.”
“They can’t get in, Henrietta,” Du
ncan assured the chicken above the angry squawking and clucking of the other girls. “You’re perfectly safe inside here.”
“I tried telling them that,” Roscoe, the Free Ranger colony’s one rooster said, “but they are, as always, as dumb as the veritable box of rocks.”
The quip made the dozen females squawk even louder, and it was a full minute before Duncan could say anything else and be heard. “That’s not very nice, Roscoe. The hens are merely worried about their safety, and I don’t blame them. The cats in the city are absolutely ruthless.”
And it was true. The cats had their Revolutionary League and were locked in constant warfare with the dogs of the Round Table of Canine Interests and the rats of the Under Towners. The little battles were always closing streets and parts of town, and the cat’s leader, Sparticat, swore to eradicate the dogs and rats from the city. The chickens were, unfortunately, usually caught in the middle.
“Still, the blasted cats can’t get in here,” Roscoe said. “They know that.”
“I don’t care,” Henrietta squawked. “I can see them out there, looking in at us. It makes me so nervous I can’t lay eggs. You really should do something about them, Duncan.”
Duncan sighed. The hens were so nervous that they wouldn’t be laying eggs that day, and he’d be eating just vegetables form the garden. “It’s okay, ladies. And I’ll see if Dad can do something about making the lower part of the shield oblique or something.”
The hens squawked in agreement even though it wouldn’t change the fact that the cats were still just outside the barrier. As long as they didn’t know about it, though, they didn’t care.
“Hens still giving you problems?”
Duncan spun around quickly and smiled. Marissa Toole, his best and probably only real friend, stood there smiling at him, her arms crossed across her chest. She stood nearly a head taller than Duncan despite them being the same age. He swore her dark hair had a life of its own as it darted about her head like a tassel of snakes. He was sure it was just another enchantment, like the makeup and flowing pink evening gown, but she’d never admit to it. Her skin was a simple alabaster that usually glowed in the dark, giving her a dim aura visible to everyone. She smiled easily with him and it was never forced like the others who looked down on him with disdain for his lack of magical abilities. They’d been friends since first year magic school, she taking sympathy on him when he couldn’t even recreate the most basic of spells.
“You see?” Henrietta demanded from inside the coop. “She got in.”
“It’s only a shield against dogs, cats, and rats. It doesn’t affect humans,” Duncan reminded the chicken, once again. “And besides, Marissa teleported in.”
“I don’t care.” Henrietta insisted. “I want something done about it.”
Duncan sighed and then turned to Marissa, for some reason remembering their first day of school. He remembered that day as if it were yesterday. The other kids were all merrily making their crayons draw, mostly outside the lines, by themselves, but no matter how much he concentrated, no matter how much he stared, his crayon would not move. Marissa, taking pity on him, did his drawing as well as her own. It still hung above his bed in a frame he’d found in the rubble piles just outside town. He’d managed to make it another three months with her help before his instructors realized that he couldn’t perform magic at all. He remembered that day just as clearly as he remembered his first day in school. His mother and father had pretended not to be disappointed. They tried to hide the fact that they felt as if they, as parents, had failed in some way. He even remembered the Lord Probate, the governor of New Dallas, coming and talking with his parents and teachers. He remembered, most clearly, his mother crying. He’d never forget the sound of her crying.
“The hens are terrified of the cats,” he told her, “so I’m going to see if Dad will make the bottom part of the field where they can’t see through.”
“And that will fix it so they’ll start laying eggs again?” She asked.
He understood her befuddlement. “Yes, that’s about it. It doesn’t take much. They’re just hens, after all.”
“We heard that,” Henrietta squawked from the coop.
Marissa smiled and then nodded. The bottom portion of the magic shield around their property turned a dull gray, like painted iron. The chickens instantly began cackling ecstatically.
“Thanks, but you didn’t have to do that. Dad would have…”
“It’s no big deal,” Marissa said and he knew it were true. She was turning into quite the powerful wizard, excelling at even the most complex problems her teachers gave her. “And you don’t have to do this. I’d be happy to conjure you food. I’d conjure you anything you wanted.”
“I know you would, Marissa, and I appreciated that. But I’m not going to put you out like I’ve put my parents out. I feel like they resent me now for having to conjure for me all these years. It’s better this way, really. I can take care of myself.”
“Your parents don’t resent you, Duncan,” Marissa insisted. “It’s silly to even think that.”
“I guess,” he told her. “But I’d rather do it myself.”
“It might be a moot point,” she said, her tone turning to a concerned whisper. “You heard about Timmy, I guess?”
“I saw it. His magic failed him, at least a little.”
“It’s happening a lot now. Soon we might be turning to you to feed us.”
She’d said it so seriously that he was quite taken aback. No one talked about the misfires of magic, ignoring them like they might the war between the dogs and cats. It was just something you didn’t talk about, and the few times he had tried to ask about it with his parents, they’d only told him that it wasn’t to be discussed—especially at school or in front of anyone outside the family.
“I don’t see that as very likely,” Duncan told her. “People like Timmy would die before they’d eat something from this garden. You see how they look at me when I take my lunch to school.”
Marissa plucked a ripe red apple and bit into it, juice flowing down her pale chin. “They really don’t know what they’re missing. I guarantee you, Duncan, that one day everyone will want to eat your food.”
Duncan wasn’t sure what had occurred to Marissa to make her so down, but he wasn’t going to push it. She was obviously as uncomfortable talking about it as he was.
“Come on,” she told him, and before he could stop her and tell her he wasn’t ready, she teleported both of them away.