Fantasy
A bunch of intro text about Magic & Wizardry
When I shook Femi's hand in the office break room on my first day, everything faded: the snot-colored linoleum, the nauseous fluorescent lighting, the wheezy hum of the refrigerator. Instead of "Nice to meet you," I heard myself say, "You are a fragment of heaven."
I pulled my hand back, feeling like a complete moron, but her tranquil expression didn't waver.
Marsius pulled his coat tight against the wind. The snow blew in flurries swirling about his face and his fur boots sank deep. The sharp, dirt-ice smell crept under his hood, edged and filthy like the season. He looked up at the sheer stone Academy walls, their tops lost in darkness. Somewhere above, the remaining college members were heading off to dinner, or the library, or bed, secure and warm. There was no point dwelling on it; the prison awaited. He pulled his coat around him more tightly and lowered his head into the icy wind.
It took him half an hour to trudge to the broad prison gates, battling through the narrow streets. The high buildings funneled the wind and whipped it around him. Twin torches sat on either side of the gate, guttering and flaring, sending the acrid scent of burning swirling about with the wind. He lifted a leather-gloved fist to bang on the iron-shod door. At his third attempt, someone heard; a small door recessed in the main portal swung inward and a head poked out. There was annoyance on the face it presented.
"It's eccentric," Alric said, "but surely it's not dangerous."
"The Council's vote was unanimous," Duke Richard said. He looked ridiculous in a bright yellow doublet. The color would make anyone look foolish, as the other old men seated around the table proved, but its gaiety was especially jarring against Richard's habitual dark expression. "You know your duty, Guardian."
"We might kill the wizard tonight," Jonlen whispered.
"Or be killed," Slip whispered back.
A penny plunked into the fountain outside the Chinese restaurant, and one of the resident goldfish swam up to investigate. He tasted metal in the water. He took the penny in his mouth--he was large, as goldfish went--and tasted something else beneath the tang of countless human hands: the coin carried a woman's wish for a new job. He couldn't discern details without swallowing it, so he did, and began to digest.
By evening a bright, shining, almost golden penny lay where he had been, until the owner's son scooped the fountain clean of wishes, and threw them in the register with the change.
Gabriel wouldn't ever have thought there would be circumstances rough enough for him to set foot in lower Manhattan Chinatown. In the old days, perhaps, but not after the integration. Too many dragons.
There were mainly humans, of course; clingy people chattering in Mandarin as he walked by in the drizzle, one offering traditional Chinese souvenirs while the next tried to sell him pornographic holograms--"real girls, real action, not Jìsuánji made!" But in the shadows beneath the awnings, he saw their willowy shapes, the odor of their dirty scales wafting against his face as he walked. They wouldn't do anything now, but ten years earlier, they would have scorched him and promptly sucked the meat off his bones. It made him pull up his collar and walk faster.
The crypt had not been locked. The graveyard was so remote and so rarely visited by anyone that vandalism had never been an issue, so getting access to the crypt was like visiting a 7-Eleven. Ras had walked right in.
The air inside was musty, and the center of the room was dominated by a large stone sarcophagus. Green moss decorated the corners of the room. Ras wondered for the hundredth time if Jerome LeVine had chosen the crypt just for the sake of easy access, knowing that someday, some other necromancer would come along and try to raise him using one of the many spells LeVine had written while alive.
"That's Erelong, child. That's where you were born."
Mayve pointed down the hillside to the valley laid out beneath them. Elian, still breathing hard from the climb, squinted against the bright sunlight, the dazzling silver of the river winding wide through the valley. Between stands of trees she saw a patchwork of ruined stone buildings and, in a round open field, the circle of standing stones. Jagged white rocks rose from the ground in an uneven circle, like the earth's crooked teeth, like impossible summer snowmen.
Arnold Gold walked in timidly, holding a cardboard sign. "This says knock and come in."
Robert Brewster was sitting behind a desk. "Sorry for the chaos. We're just relocating. Construction is not quite complete. And my secretary is on her break. But we'll get by."
In the moonlight, Magda walked through the memory room.
This was her room, even more so than the kitchen. Nate never came in here. Piles of papers and bags of old clothes turned the floor into a maze. Along the wall were broken bookshelves, chairs missing legs, old toys from her girlhood.
The shop was almost bare. A few unpromising objects lay scattered willy-nilly on its rickety shelves. As he gazed at the forlorn selection of wares Magnus was approached by the proprietor, an old and wizened man with a mild, yet sinister, grin.
"Are you looking for anything in particular, sir?"
Prince James winced as he watched the court jester stumble back into an open cabinet in a futile attempt to catch a wayward juggling ball. The jester fell amidst a shower of colorful props and knick-knacks ranging from odd to downright ludicrous.
James sighed. Pantolino was undoubtedly an awkward, bumbling fool. The only thing worse than his jokes was his bad sense of timing. For all his clumsy ways, though, he was beloved by the entire court--from the lowliest servant to the king himself. Pantolino had a heart of gold and a gentle nature to match. He had a warm smile and a ready ear for anyone in trouble. Simply put, he was everyone's friend.
The sorcerer was young, still with a downy beard, his power small and flickering. He set his mind to obtaining greater strength, and after much study he decided to lure the creature of living darkness, whose energies he could then tap. The creature would need a pit, deeper than the lowest basement of his castle, deeper than the copper mines of the Frostshadow Mountain, deeper than the Everquiet Caves. Because blood and fear would stoke the creature's life force and swell its energies, supplying it with victims would give him even greater power.
His mouth stretched in a smile as a plan struck him, and he congratulated himself on his cleverness.
Marla Mason, sorcerer in exile, looked over the railing of the balcony, down at the lavish resort hotel's pool with its swim-up bar and tanned, happy people lounging on chairs, and thought, I can't take another day of this.
"I can't take another day of this," she said aloud to her companion, Rondeau, who leaned on the rail popping macadamia nuts into his mouth from a tin. He wore the most outrageous aloha shirt Marla had ever seen--its eye-wrenching pattern included not only parrots and palm trees but also sailboats and sunsets and what appeared to be carnivorous plants--and had the self-satisfied look of someone with more money in the bank than he could spend in even a fairly dissolute lifetime.
My guardians, tall and robed in blue, whisper when they see me now and shake their heads. They're dissatisfied because I haven't orchestrated an escape attempt for at least five Champions. Well, okay, exactly five. Since the Champion known as Eric.
I'm not supposed to know the Champions' names, of course, but I see it as my job to break the rules (of which there are never-ending lists) as often as possible. Why else would they choose a girl forever sixteen to preside at the Court of the Sybil? They're looking for trouble, even hungry for it. My adolescent fire is what runs the magic they seek. Plus, anybody in my place would have to bend the rules just to provide some variety to the monotonous sameness of never reaching seventeen.
Evan didn't have much magic left.
He'd almost used it all up before he met Trevor. He never had a lot--just enough to make his invisible friend, Nave, come and play. But Evan hadn't needed Nave to come and play after Trevor moved in next door because Trevor became Evan's best friend.
Magic & Wizardry
A bunch of intro text about Magic & Wizardry
by Mishell Baker
Published on Apr 7, 2011
by Jay Caselberg
Published on Nov 11, 2011
by Donald S. Crankshaw
Published on Sep 29, 2011
by Sean Patrick Hannifin
Published on Dec 15, 2010
by Erin M. Hartshorn
It was the quality of Reina's silence that first drew Sarna to her as she sat in the gardens outside the old palace ruins. Sarna had come to the outskirts to gather the grasses that would be used for the First Meal at the convent, after the midsummer fast. Her sickle for harvesting hung at her belt, untouched; the gardens might be on her way to the gathering fields, but she would not remove plants from the palace gardens. Nor would anyone else -- too afraid of ghosts or magic or the ire of the current prince of their city-state, even if he would never have the power kings once did. She knew she had nothing to fear from magic, from essence, and ghosts could be banished to drift. Crossing the prince, however, would not be wise.
Thinking how fortunate she was to have the gardens to herself this morning -- the city was increasingly crowded as the fast and its ensuing feast days approached -- Sarna walked along a path tiled with bricks from one of the broken walls. She rounded a corner to see a girl of perhaps twelve sitting on a fallen pillar, intent on a red lily in the nearby grass. Her black hair was tied on the top of her head in an Estian artist's knot, exposing the flat planes of her face to the summer sun. The one bit of ornamentation she had was her hair clasp, of volcanic glass the same sheen as her hair; otherwise, her attire was as quiet as she herself, an unremarkable dove gray blouse with a charcoal-colored divided skirt. The girl could have been the child of anyone in the city were it not for her complete stillness of body and soul.
Published on Nov 5, 2010
by Amanda M. Hayes
Published on Oct 6, 2011
by Sylvia Hiven
Published on Feb 18, 2011
by Thomas F Jolly
Published on Nov 14, 2011
by Simon Kewin
Published on Aug 23, 2011
by Edward Gary Kratz
Published on Oct 27, 2011
by Ken Liu
Published on Aug 10, 2011
by Shamus Maxwell
Published on Feb 13, 2012
by Mari Ness
He had replaced his hands with wands, one tipped with amethyst and lined in silver, the other dotted with emeralds and lined with gold, spraying a continuous fountain of golden sparks. When the wands came together, carelessly or deliberately, the resulting clash of colors and sparks stung the eyes. People whispered that he had been a poet once. A failed poet. A _very_ failed poet, sniffed some. His work had lacked rhyme, meter, meaning, beauty, sophistication, experimentation: he'd been begged never to recite again, never to bother the learned journals with his pained and ugly words. That explained the missing hands, the glowing wands, although others protested this explanation. No poetry, however ghastly, could bring anyone to _that_. No, it must have been some other obsession playing on him: a lover, a child, a demon.
Published on Sep 28, 2010
by Maria Melissa Obedoza
Published on Jul 27, 2011
by Carma Lynn Park
Published on Oct 3, 2011
by T.A. Pratt
Published on Mar 11, 2011
by Susan A Shepherd
He went through all nine skills, and found nothing that worked. He carved wood and stone, seashells and goathorn, but the things he made had no life of their own either before or after the waker touched them
Published on Sep 21, 2010
by Amy Sundberg
Published on Jul 22, 2011
by Chuck Von Nordheim
Published on Feb 7, 2012
