Chapter 1

George and James had been sneaking up onto the roof of their school and hiding behind the parapet since they were in kindergarten together, even in the winter, when it was cold and sometimes icy up there. They could peek over the parapet and have a good view of Sutter’s Village since the school was one of the tallest buildings in the community.

Years had passed since kindergarten. George and James had grown much older. They were about to graduate from school. George would test at the Magic College of Praxis in Capitol City the next day, a very prestigious honor that George would have on account of his family heritage. James, born to a lesser bloodline, would be apprenticed to a local wizard right in Sutter’s Village. The two youths didn’t really expect to see each other much after they parted ways, so they were enjoying one of the last times that they thought they would ever hang out together.

That day, they were in for a real treat, a rare spectacle. Below them, in the town square that their parapet faced, a public trial was underway. A local washerwoman had been accused of committing science. Scientists were terrorists and insurrectionists against the governance of the Society of Sorcerers Born. Proponents of science claimed that anyone could do science. They claimed that one didn’t have to be born with the Gifting of Magic in their bloodline to understand the workings of the universe. The more outspoken and revolutionary scientists spoke of a day to come in which Sorcerers Born and common peasantry would be equals, sharing in the fruits of society side by side. Unthinkable!

The washerwoman who stood accused of practicing science sat in a chair with her back to the fountain that graced the middle of the town square. She was flanked by her guards, who seemed hardly necessary as the woman looked completely broken emotionally as well as physically exhausted. George didn’t doubt that Anti-Science Inquisitors had kept her up all night trying to convince her to confess.

Before her, upon a raised stage, sat a Wizard’s Tribunal, made up of three local ranking wizards from Sutter’s Village. One of them was one of George’s current teachers. One of them was the school principal. The third was an older teacher who had retired before George and James had grown old enough to attend his advanced classes.

Around the town square, about a hundred folk had gathered to see the trial. The Wizard’s Tribunal had called for witnesses. A competing washerwoman was testifying, not just looking at the faces of the Tribunal, but passionately presenting herself to the gathered crowd, trying to stir them up to her side of things.

“Mabel and I have, of course, had a friendly rivalry through the years in our respective laundry businesses…”

A heckler from the crowd interrupted. “It’s not so friendly now, is it?”

The witness, though she paused to glare wickedly at the heckler, was undeterred. “But, of late, Mabel’s business has taken all my customers, even generational customers, babies whose diapers I washed growing up and then paying me to wash their own children’s diapers. And why? Because she uses this!”

The witness pulled from her satchel a pouch. Untying the straps on the pouch, she dumped the contents, a white crystalline powder upon the ground dramatically. Though George and James, hidden behind their parapet, were behind the Tribunal’s stage, George could imagine them raising their eyebrows at this display.

“What is this?” asked the school principal, the central figure of the Tribunal.

“It’s–” began the witness.

“Let the defendant answer for herself,” instructed the principal.

The defendant, Mabel, looked up. There didn’t seem to be any hope on her face or in her voice. She looked resigned to her fate. She did, however, still possess some dignity about her. She would do her best to answer the questions presented to her with whatever honesty she could. George wondered how a nice lady like her could ever have gotten mixed up in science

“They are simple salts, m’lord. They soften the water.”

“Soften?” The principal seemed incredulous. “Why would water need softening? Water is not hard.”

“Unless it is ice.” The older, retired teacher on the Tribunal had not spoken until now. When he did, the crowd all “oooooooooed” and “aaaaaaaaaahed” as if that was the most profound thing they had ever heard.

A pause made it apparent that she wouldn’t interrupt one of the Tribunal members, the witness took the opportunity to continue to testify against her business rival. “She makes Sutter’s grime go away.”

The crowd “oooooooooed” and “aaaaaaaaaahed” again. Everyone in Sutter’s Village knew that anything or anyone who washed in the local well water would be covered in a harmless but distinct crusty layer known as Sutter’s grime.

“Is this true?” the principal asked the crowd. “Are there any witnesses that can attest that this washer woman makes their clothes clean without Sutter’s grime?”

Several villagers came forward, guiltily confessing that they had preferred that Mabel do their laundry since it made their clothes, towels, and diapers softer and grime free. They swore on the graves of their ancestors that they had no idea whatsoever that science was involved..

The principal looked at Mabel. “Whence did you learn this water softening science?”

“M’lord, I took in a traveler for the night a few weeks ago, one who was poor and could not pay. He wanted to offer me something in repayment, so he showed me how to make my laundry business prosper by softening the water. He said the water from our wells here in Sutter’s village was hard. I laughed at first. Whoever had heard of hard water, lest it be ice, as the good old master has rightly said? But the traveler bade me to do a load of laundry after he had treated the water with salts. And the results, many assembled here are wearing right now.”

The crowd got nervous and shifted uncomfortably, as if their clothes had somehow contaminated them with science.

“We’ve heard enough,” the principal proclaimed. “Washerwoman Mabel, we, this lawfully assembled Wizard’s Tribunal, hereby find you guilty of practicing science.”

Ominously, at that moment, the town bell rang the hour, signaling to George and James that they had to leave their special spot and return to their classes, both of them vowing to never, ever have anything to do with science.

Chapter 2

“Look out below!” came a cruel voice from above.

George looked up just in time to see a globe of liquid water, the size of a ripe melon, fall from the sky and strike the boy walking in front of him. Upon striking its target, the watery missile burst, drenching the boy. Chortles and guffaws came from above.

George glared at the aerial tormentors who had cast the spell that had created and launched the watery attack. Two older students from the Magic College of Praxis stood on a flying carpet some fifty feet above the line of Hopeful Candidates walking the road uphill to the magnificent Praxis Campus. The buildings of the campus, many of them made, either wholly or partially, of a magically grown crystal, glittered like diamonds in the distance.

What George and the other Hopeful Candidates were doing that morning was an annual ceremonial humiliation. Each year, on Entrance Exam Day, a procession of Hopeful Candidates would walk to school, only to be harassed by the upperclassmen. Striking back was forbidden by the victims. They were required to endure this indignity as a sign of their toughness.

Of course, officially, according to the College, the harassment was not to rise above the level of light pranking. Upperclassmen who went too far in their pranks could face censure, suspension, or even, theoretically, expulsion if a Hopeful Candidate were, in any way, permanently injured during their walk to campus on the morning of Entrance Exam Day. Another motivation for the pranksters to not go too far in their hazing was that, in order to attend the College of Praxis, all Hopeful Candidates had to come from, or be sponsored by, powerful noble families. Any upperclassmen who strayed too far from what was culturally considered normal pranking could be subject to retribution from vengeful relatives or allies of their target.

Nevertheless, whether the upperclassmen practiced restraint or recognized any kind of limits on their behavior or not, George found the whole ritual repugnant. The Society of Sorcerers Born ruled over lands steeped in honored and honorable tradition. Be that as it may, George didn’t think this annual ritual humiliation represented anything honorable.

After Hopeful Candidates were accepted into the school, they were no longer required to walk there. Starting the day after a student passed the Entrance Exam and wasn’t a Hopeful Candidate anymore, every student who possibly could, unless they woke up already there each day because they lived in campus housing, found a way to transport themselves to school without walking. Some rode flying carpets like the one floating over the line of Hopeful Candidates tossing water globes that morning. Some rode flying brooms. Some wore rings of flying. Some used one-shot, short term flying spells that would last just long enough to get them to school. Looking up and scanning the air above him, George could see a couple of students with a family resemblance that made them look like brother and sister riding a pegasus that was adorned at the base of its neck with the crest emblem of a powerful noble family.

The only form of transportation that wasn’t allowed for getting oneself to school was teleporting or plane shifting, as the school was well-warded against such intrusions for security reasons.

“What are you looking at?”

George had made the mistake of looking at the two water-tossing bullies riding the flying carpet a bit too long, and had probably allowed his disgust at the whole hazing ritual to show on his face. Now, he would be the next target. George lowered his head, bracing himself. He resolved to take what was going to come without making it any worse, though what he heard coming from above didn’t sound good.

“No, man! Don’t do that! It’s not worth it! You’ll get us both in trouble! He’s probably the kid of someone important.” Apparently, one of the two bullies wasn’t necessarily nicer than the other, but was more conservative and less hot-headed than his companion.

The more reckless of the youths wasn’t going to listen to any advice about restraint, however. “Did you see the way that little prick looked at us? Who does he think he is? Someone needs to show him his proper place.”

The globe of liquid that splashed itself on George wasn’t a globe of water. It was a globe of urine. The stench overwhelmed George. When he thought it was safe to open his eyes without getting urine in them, he saw the flying carpet flying on ahead so its occupants could bother other Hopeful Candidates. Then, George’s heart swelled with gratitude for his parents’ gift to him, for it had not been cheap, though his mother had enchanted it herself in her workshop. George’s outfit made a fluttering sound as it rustled of its own accord. Every drop and spot of filth on it flew off as the fabric magically restored itself to its pristine condition.

“Hey!” a student walking next to him exclaimed as some of the nasty substance flung from Geroge’s attire splattered on him. “Oh, great! This one’s got self-cleaning clothes. Must be nice!”

Once on campus, George could take care of his face and hair in a washroom. Then, he’d be good as new. In the meantime, he plodded on, wondering what else this day had in store for him. The hazing ritual was over, once and for all. It only happened once in a student’s life and everyone went through it. It was behind him now. If that was the worst thing that happened to him all day, he thought it would be a pretty good day. After all, his new life was just beginning. HIs attitude was optimistic. George felt that he stood at the threshold of a thousand possibilities, and all of them good.

Chapter 3

On campus, George came out of a washroom, fresher and a little less nervous about what was to come. After all, he’d already overcome one of the worst things he had ever heard could happen at the Mage College of Praxis. He wondered what James would have thought of him this morning both during the walk to school and of the consequences afterward. George hoped that James would get an adequate education from his local master there in Sutter’s Village. Of course, it would never be as broad or deep an education as George would receive here at the College of Praxis, but some things could not be changed, and one’s born station in life was one of them.

George thought about the evil scientists who had spread the corrupting scientific knowledge that had eventually ensnared a nice lady like Mabel the washerwoman. Why couldn’t these science-mongers just accept the natural order of things, that in this life, people were either born with the Gift of Magic or they weren’t. This was simply the way of things, the way of the world. Those born with the Gift of Magic should lead because they were more fit to lead. It wasn’t anybody’s fault that some were born with magic and some weren’t. Of course it was true that those with strong magic gifts sought out others who also had strong magic gifts to produce children with the greatest chance to also have strong magic gifts. But why wouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t they? By producing sorcerer bloodline dynastic families, the Society of Sorcerers born had brought stability and advancement to the world.

The Society had made a better world for all. All children in Sutter’s Village had been taught in school that before the Society of Sorcerers Born had been founded, the world of Zorethea had been a chaotic place, filled with famines, wars, pestilences, and other suffering for the masses. Now, peace and harmony reigned, thanks to the Society’s wise and powerful leadership. No, George thought, these scientists were not the freedom fighters they claimed to be. Science, if followed as a philosophy and a way of life, would lead humanity back to the Dark Ages.

George took in the campus’s sights and sounds. Upperclassmen with flying steeds were landing at rooftop stables that, while their riders were in classes for the day, would house everything from pegasi to griffons, keeping predators like griffons separate from their natural prey, the pegasi. The campus was decorated with magical tree species, though none of them had in-season fruit at the moment. The colors of these trees varied from delicate mauves to stunning silvers, the silver ones sparkling in the morning sun.

All of the upperclassmen seemed to know where to go and were filtering away from the quad in the middle of the campus into the various classroom and lab study buildings. There were about five adult mage instructors herding freshmen candidates into the center of the campus around the quad. George hurried over to join them. He could hear their voices giving information and instructions, amplified by spells that projected their voices to every ear in the crowd.

“This year’s pool of candidates is the largest our college has ever had,” a tall instructor with jet black hair, beard and mustache, this year’s Entrance Exam Day Proctor proudly proclaimed. “By our calculations, it will take two and half days to sort out who will attending the college this year, who will not, and at what ranking those who are attending will start. At the end of the school day today, if you have not been informed that there’s been a final decision that you won’t be attending the college this year, then you are free to return tomorrow. For those who return tomorrow, there will be no hazing. None. The Testing of the Hopeful Candidates is to happen once a year only, no more. All upperclassmen will be informed of this. Any upperclassmen who attempt any Testing of the Hopeful Candidates tomorrow will be dealt with harshly.

“The Entrance Exam will now begin. Each of you, unless your turn doesn’t come up today, will be paired off with an opponent. You are to defeat your opponent by any nonlethal means necessary that doesn’t leave permanent harm. Our judge’s panel is observing to settle any potential disputes that may arise today.” The Entrance Exam Day Proctor gestured to the tops of nearby campus buildings where instructors in dark robes and masks could see the entirety of the quad below. Students were to never know exactly who the judges were.

Next, the Proctor bade the students to all sit in a giant ring around the quad. Because of the voice amplification magic he used, everyone could hear him perfectly. “Let the testing begin. We have many candidates who must prove themselves. Ligas of Sutter’s Village step forth. Mylerna of Renalja, step forth.”

George knew Ligas as another boy from Sutter’s Village about his age. George and Ligas had never been close friends, but they’d never hated each other either. George and Ligas had always invited each other to birthday parties when they had been younger.

George knew that Renalja was a region on the far side of the Kh’shon Hills. He’d seen it on maps in his studies, but never been there. Renalja was known in history for holding out against takeover by the Society of Sorcerers Born for a long time since their population had a much higher than normal percentage of people born with the Gift of Magic than other lands. Renaljans had been able to resist and keep their independence well into recent history. A series of politically advantageous marriages, however, had eventually enmeshed the Renaljans with the Society of Sorcerers Born enough that the Renaljans had finally joined the Society.

Mylerna was a tiny, petite girl, yet she looked dangerous. There was something in her eyes that looked wrong. The expression on her face reminded George of a much older woman, though she was clearly a teenager. The way the Renaljan walked and moved with an air of pure confidence also seemed too adult for a teenager. She reminded George of a predator stalking prey.

A boy George didn’t know whispered next to him, “She looks small and weak, but my old teachers from elementary school always taught that magic is the great equalizer. When one can summon fire and lightning from one’s hands, muscles and size and bulk don’t matter.”

George whispered back. “Not everyone has magic though. The science terrorists call science the real great equalizer. Science works for everyone, they say.”

The other boy scoffed. “Well, I don’t see any of them here today, do you? Magic rules the world no matter what the science freaks say.”

Their conversation was cut off as the Entrance Exam Day Proctor shouted to the two candidates who were to duel first, “Begin!” 

Chapter 4

Mylerna of Renalja didn’t waste any time dispatching Ligas. With a wave of her hand, the earth underneath the tall boy who was her opponent liquified into quicksand, swallowing him in an instant. A mere moment after the duel had started, it was as if Ligas had never been standing there at all.

The Entrance Exam Proctor’s voice boomed through his amplification spell. “May I remind the candidates that lethality and permanent harm are forbidden in today’s duels?”

In response, Mylerna held up one hand with a flourish. She pulled in her fingers on that hand, one by one, counting down from five. When all her fingers were closed and the hand was a fist because she had reached zero, she made a magical power gesture with her closed fist and the earth where Ligas had been standing suddenly released him, prone and gasping for air. Ligas was covered in dust and looked horrified by what he had just gone through. As soon as he could speak, he screamed “I yield!”

Mylerna’s face looked cold and passionless, as if Ligas were nothing more than an insect studied in a magnifying glass. The Proctor declared her the winner. “Mylerna will advance through the duels. Ligas will consult with a guidance counselor in Building A.”

Being defeated in the Entrance Exam Duels didn’t necessarily mean rejection as a Hopeful Candidate. The judges were to evaluate a candidate’s overall performance, but it didn’t look good for Ligas, since he hadn’t had a chance to demonstrate that he could do anything, worthy of entrance to the college or not. George watched Ligas make his way through the crowd of his peers toward Building A, still shaking and trembling from the trauma of being buried alive and not being able to breathe for a good fraction of a minute. He had probably thought the he was going to die, rules against it notwithstanding.

According to the rules of the Entrance Exam, Mylerna, as the winner of a duel, had the option of continuing to duel as long as she felt up to it, or to sit back down and wait to be called on again. Mylerna opted to continue to duel. George watched as she continued to take out five more candidates, one after another. Having seen how quickly she had created Sucking Quicksand underneath Ligas, her new opponents attacked her as quickly as they could and kept their feet moving, never staying in one spot long. Her first opponent after Ligas dodged to the side as soon as the Proctor had started the duel and flung a bolt of lightning at the Renaljan girl. A column of earth and stone rose up instantly in the lightning bolt’s path, blocking and grounding out what would have been a shocking jolt.

George knew that the Renaljans were famous earth elementalists. Apparently, Mylerna was skilled in her people’s specialty. It was as if the element of earth was her friend and her partner in battle. After defeating her fifth opponent after Ligas, for a total of six, she opted to sit down until called again. She didn’t seem the least bit winded or fatigued after six duels in a row. If anything, she seemed bored.

“George Fothergill? Come with me please.” George looked up to see an instructor picking his way through the crowd of students seated on the quad, coming in his direction, beckoning.

George complied, picking his way back through the crowd toward the instructor. He seemed like one of the younger instructors. Although powerful mages could use magic to keep their bodies unnaturally young as they aged, the mages of the Mage College of Praxis tended to not do that. In the occasional conversation in which people ever wondered why, it was generally concluded that the instructors, teachers, and professors wanted to maintain the appearance of their age as a constant reminder of how much more time they had been studying, practicing, and mastering magic. So, George was pretty sure this guy not only looked like one of the younger instructors, but was one.

Once George had emerged from the bulk of the students watching the Entrance Exam duels, the young instructor repeated, “Come with me, please,” offering no more information or explanation.

George obediently followed the man into Building C, taking his cue from the man’s silence to not ask any questions nor to try to make any conversation. Building C was a three-story building with administrative offices on the first floor and a set of large lab rooms on floors two and three. The two of them climbed the nearest staircase to reach one of the lab rooms on the second floor. The teacher leading George opened the door to the lab room and gestured for George to go inside.

Stepping inside, George was shocked to see his father, George Fothergill, Sr. (George was a junior) sitting at a teacher desk at the end of the lab room. Seated around the desk were three of the school’s professors who seemed to be doing their best to keep up faces for playing card games involving wagering. The instructor who had brought George closed the door and left.

“Hello, George,” said his father. His father smiled at him, cordially, formally, with neither warmth nor malice. George recognized that his father was in business mode, his manner of presenting himself at formal events and official meetings. “How has your day been so far?”

“Educational, sir.” George wasn’t sure how to respond, but he thought that would be a good answer.

“Excellent, George.” His father looked to the teachers on either side of him before meeting George’s eyes again. “The masters here at the College of Praxis believe that I should be the one to administer your Entrance Exam myself.”

George was confused. “Do you mean I’m supposed to duel you, Father?”

His father’s smile softened and became more real for a moment, reaching his eyes. For a second George could see his father’s great love for him, but also something else…was it sadness?

“No, my son. There are other acceptable forms of Entrance Exam than dueling, though dueling is by far the most common and popular. Today, you and I are going to be using some of the equipment in this room to assess your Gifting of Magic. Are you ready to begin?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then let us proceed.”

Chapter 5

George Fothergill Sr. rose from the desk, his long formal test proctor robes flowing around him. He indicated a pedestal in the room with some of the magical equipment on it and beckoned his son, Geroge Jr., to follow him to it. A moment later, they stood facing each other across the pedestal gazing down at a small wooden circle with multicolored patterns on it, about the size of a large serving platter. The wood comprising it was three inches thick. George Jr. thought the designs on it looked such that if it weren’t laid horizontally upon the top of the pedestal, it could have been a dart board if hung vertically on a wall. In the center of the circular wooden board was a pretty, red, translucent stone, about the size of a human heart. Concentric circles with measurements in inches were marked in the board to show how far the red stone might be pushed off center.

“Move it with your magic, George,” his father said.

“Yes, Father.”

George had done things like this before in his classes lots of times. This would be easy. George gazed intently upon the stone and mentally grasped it with his mind, imagining its hardness, smoothness, and mass. Then, he mentally pushed. Inexplicably, the stone didn’t budge. This confused George. He grimaced, the skin between his forehead and nose wrinkling  and his eyes squinting with the effort showing on his face. George uttered words in the language of magic related to telekinetic manipulation and to movement in general to strengthen his efforts, though he normally in the past had only needed to do that with much heavier objects than this red stone on the testing board.

Finally, the red stone lurched forward about half an inch, but then stopped, going no further. George didn’t give up, though. Finally, as he began to grunt with effort, his father gently said, “That’s enough, son. Let’s try something else.”

For the next test, George led him over to a wall where his father pulled aside a curtain. The curtain covered a window into the small room next door. Through the window, George could see a small boy, about seven years old. The boy wasn’t dressed in mage school robes. He was dressed like a commoner.

“What is the boy thinking, George? Read his mind,” instructed his father.

“Yes, Father.”

George had never been the best at telepathy, but he should have been able to read at least the surface thoughts of the young child easily. Nothing came to him, though. Finally, George had to guess.

“He’s hungry. He’s wondering when he’s going to eat.”

George’s father sighed. “That’s a common guess, so we make sure that the subjects are fed before they are brought into the testing chamber so that can’t be the case. We also make sure they’ve recently relieved their bladders and bowels for the same reason, because it’s a common guess.”

“What is he thinking, Father?”

“Don’t worry about it, son. It doesn’t matter now. This way.”

They went back to the main teacher’s desk in the room. George’s father picked up a human skull from the desk.

“Can you tell me anything about this person? Anything at all? How old were they when they died? Male or female? Their name? Their profession?”

George murmured the magical words of a spell that should have briefly conjured the dead spirit of the skull’s owner for a brief conversation. Nothing happened. It seemed to George as if the skull’s empty eye sockets mocked him with their gaze. George was self-conscious of how long he had struggled at each of the previous tests, so this time he gave up quickly and sadly shook his head, facing downward. too ashamed to meet his father’s eyes.

They tried a few more tests involving a deck of cards before this father thanked him for doing his best.

Hearing his father thank him for doing his best after such abject failure finally broke George to the point where he broke protocol and spoke freely even though in this situation he shouldn’t speak unless spoken to.

“Father, I don’t know what’s happening today. I can do better than this! I know I can! I have many times!”

In spite of the fact that he was 15 years old, a graduate of Sutter’s Village Basic Magick School, and a Hopeful Candidate at the Magic School of Praxis, George was on the verge of crying like a small boy the age of the telepathy subject in the next room.

George’s father stepped forward and put his hand on his son’s shoulder, steadying him. “It’s all right, George. I will explain. Sit down.”

They sat at the teacher’s desk, his father in the main chair, and George on a student stool.

“George,” his father began gently, “none of this is your fault.”

“It’s not?”

“No. You have been the victim of a conspiracy, it seems. All these years, your teachers have been covering up the fact that you have little to no talent for magic.”

“What? But I’ve been using magic at school for years.”

HIs father raised his eyebrows for emphasis and smiled knowingly. “At school, yes, at school, where your teachers were able to convince you that you were using magic that was, in fact, theirs.”

“No! No! Why would they do such a thing?”

His father sighed heavily. “Because no one wanted to be the one to tell George Fothergill Sr. that his son had no magic.”

George was in shock. “But I moved the red stone a little.”

“Yes, you did,” his father conceded. “But you don’t have enough magic to ever be a true wizard.”

“Father, what will happen now?”

“There will be firings at your school, of course. Several firings.”

“But what will happen to me?”

“That, my son, will be a little harder.”

Chapter 6

“I don’t understand! You’re breaking up with me?” Melindra sobbed, her eyes gushing forth such a deluge of tears that George knew that his now ex-girlfriend must have magically smudge-proof make-up, which made sense, since her family was just as affluent as his.

The scene that George had chosen to break the bad news to Melindra was her family’s private garden. While he had known that breaking up with the only girl he’d ever kissed in his young life would be devastating for her, he loved her, so he didn’t want it to be extra devastating for her in any way. By choosing her parents’ garden, Melindra didn’t have to receive the news in public in front of any of their peers, nor did she have to receive it in front of any of her family members. It was just the two of them. She would have a chance to compose herself, to decide when to tell who in her life, her parents, her friends, everyone, and how to tell them.

George Fothergill and Melindra Will-O-Wisp had been sweethearts since they had been little. Since the Fothergills and the Will-O-Wisps were each among the social elite of Sutter’s Village (each family had ancestors among the town founders), the pairing had been encouraged by their elders. Indeed, such a pairing would have been the kind that class conscious members of the Society of Sorcerers Born sought out for their children anyway. Both families were wealthy, with strong political connections, and consistently produced offspring with the Gifting of Magic. The fact that these two young people sincerely liked each other from a young age meant that it would save the adults around them the trouble of matchmaking for a generation.

“I’ll be gone for several years,” George explained again. He had already told Mel the version of his story that he had agreed with his father to tell everyone so that no one ever found out that George had very little of the Gifting of Magic, barely any at all. Mel kept weeping and begging and persisting however, forcing the devastated young man to repeat the details over and over, sounding to himself as if he were trying to convince himself. George shoved his own feelings down far inside his heart. He knew that he would have his own private time to cry later. Right at that moment, he knew that what Mel needed was for him to be strong. If both of them broke down, instead of just her, then there would be a real mess. If George allowed himself to get emotional and cry, he might tell her the truth, the truth that he had no magic, that he was not worthy of her, that if they ever had children, those children might be born without the Gifting of Magic.

“My uncle needs help running his herbalist shop in Taalvora. I’ll continue my mage studies there.”

Melindra snuffled back some of her sobbing to control herself enough to speak. “Taalvora isn’t that far. We could afford for you to come have teleportation visits with me sometimes. And, eventually, you’d be able to use teleportation magic on your own, and so could I. Couples have long-distance relationships all the time. Well, maybe not all the time, but enough. We don’t have to break up.”

Mel’s hands were wet with her tears. She pushed back her unruly blonde hair, streaking it wet with her tears. She gazed at him with her moist blue eyes. George wanted very much to touch her hair. To put it back in place for her, but he knew that if he did, he was only making this harder for both of them.

What she said about teleportation visits was true, of course. It was also true that sometimes long-distance couples did indeed make it through times of separation and go on to get married. But how could he tell her that he, George Fothergill, jr., descended from a long line of powerful Fothergills, would never use teleportation magic because he didn’t possess even enough of the Gifting of Magic to be accepted into any mage college at all, even a lesser one than Praxis.

He knew what teleportation felt like, of course, because he had traveled that way many times on family trips. But those teleportations had been powered by his father’s magic or his mother’s magic, not his. He would never know what it felt like to wield such magic himself. Never.

He and Mel were seated at a beautifully ornately designed metal bench, painted white, in a secluded alcove in the garden. This was the exact spot where the couple had shared their first kiss, the first kiss for either of them as individuals. In desperation, Mel grabbed onto his hands. George couldn’t look her in the face. He looked away. 

His gaze found the colorful fluttering of a beautiful blue and yellow butterfly as it alighted upon one of the magical carnivorous flowers the Will-O-Wisp family kept in their garden. George knew what would happen, but he couldn’t turn his gaze away. For one, eternally frozen second of time, a fleeting moment of beauty, the butterfly majestically rested on the orangish-pink flower. That moment would have made a beautiful painting. As a painting, that moment could be made to last forever, the beauty of the butterfly could live forever. But…

Vrusssh! Faster than George could blink, the carnivorous Bug Muncher flower had taken its meal. It remained closed for about three seconds, then opened. The scene in the garden looked as before, except that the butterfly, the beauty of the moment, was gone. George disengaged his hands from Melindra’s, huskily said, “I’m sorry”, rose from the bench, and walked away as her small frame behind him was wracked with sobs.

It’s begun, George thought. I’ve begun to lose everything.

Chapter 7

Three days later, George stood on the docks of Leeward, a small port town on the coast, miles and miles away from Sutter’s Village. The main road through Leeward ran right down to the docks, the same road that ran three days journey back inland to Sutter’s Village. George looked at the road, a little muddy from a recent rain and rutted from countless wagons carrying cargoes to and from the docks at all hours of the day and night.

George’s mother’s tea from far away lands came up that road to Sutter’s Village. George’s mother had cried during George’s final farewell with his parents. George’s father hadn’t cried aloud, but George had seen one single tear fall down his father’s cheek. George honored his father’s stoicism by ignoring it as his father ignored it.

The only one who seemed upbeat at the parting was Starstorm, his father’s bonded p’ckit dragon. P’ckit dragons were normally monochrome, but Starstorm was a deep midnight blue with white speckles all over him. A mere five inches long plus his tail length, Starstorm had been with the elder Fothergill since before the lord of the manor had been George’s current age.

“Starstorm being with you will help your mother to worry a little less about you. His eyes are keen and his mind is sharp. As an assistant wizard, he knows more than many full-fledged wizards, and often has more sense, too.”

“Awwwww…..shucks!” the little reptile had said.

Starstorm had done his best to keep the mood light, to make people laugh and smile. Even George’s mother chuckled a few times. Finally, it was time for George to leave the Fothergill house and join up with a merchant caravan taking crops and vegetables to the ships in Leeward. For three days, George traveled down the road from Sutter’s Village to Leeward. He made no friends among the caravan, kept to himself, and only really talked to Starstorm. The caravaners were farmer folk. They saw George as a nobleman from a mage family, not someone of their class or station. George wouldn’t have been unfriendly, conceited, or rude to them, but he wasn’t sure how to relate to their gruff talk and he didn’t understand much of their agricultural jargon. He was only going to be with them three days, so he didn’t bother trying to bridge the gaps created by social class.

Now, he stood on the docks looking at the road, thinking of it like an umbilical cord running back to Sutter’s Village, his last connection to all he had ever known as home. Soon, he would set foot for the first time in his life aboard a seagoing vessel. The road would follow him no more, cut away by the shoreline like an umbilical cord being cut, separating a newly born human being from a placenta. Sutter’s Village had incubated him, taken care of him, nurtured him. It had been all he’d ever known. Suddenly, he was being thrust into an unfamiliar and, if he was honest with himself, slightly scary world.

“Hey! There’s a tavern! It looks a lot more lively than the little one in Sutter’s Village.” Starstorm stuck his head out of George’s rucksack. The p’ckit dragon, as he often did, pulled George out of his reverie, which was good, since it was a depressing reverie.

“Let’s go inside!” the little dragon urged.

“Why?”

“Aren’t you tired of standing out here? Aren’t you hungry or thirsty?”

“Well, yes.”

“Then, let’s go!”

“All right.”

George looked at The Fairweather, a merchant ship that was to depart that night, at sunset, which was still several hours away. Starstorm was right. There was no point in standing around the docks for hours. George had enough money that it wouldn’t be extravagant to go hang out a little more comfortably in the tavern for a few hours.

Inside, George saw that Starstorm had been right. Widdlebottom’s, as the establishment was named, was filled with sailors and travelers from all over Zorethea, not all of them human. George could see more than a couple fae-bloods in the crowd. As George cautiously took in the sights of the place, with its rough looking clientele, Starstorm suddenly surprised George by leaping out of George’s rucksack, flapping his little wings and making his way to the bar, calling loudly for the barkeep’s attention. This seemed out of character to George.

Then, George remembered that Starstorm was over five hundred years old, and had lived for centuries before befriending George’s father. George had only seen Starstorm in the context of Sutter’s Village. The young failed mage realized that the small dragon must be far more worldly and experienced than he had ever imagined.

After talking to the barkeep, which George couldn’t overhear because of the general level of background noise, the dragon flew back to George, excitedly.

“C’mon! C’mon! I got you a seat at the bar. This place has flavors and tastes I haven’t experienced in over a century, at least.”

“Are you sure we should be imbibing alcohol? Alcohol…”

“Clouds the mind, I know,” the little dragon finished. “You sound like one of those teachers at the school in Sutter’s Village. Now, there’s a whole world to explore, my young friend.” Starstorm smiled at him mischievously as his eyes sparkled with amusement.

George walked up to the bar and sat down. There were already two tankards there, since Starstorm had already ordered. The barkeep had moved on down the bar to serve others.

The p’ckit dragon stood on the bar, eye level with George seated on a barstool. “Look, kid, I’m over 500 years old. I haven’t been out of Sutter’s Village much for at least a century. I need to live a little, and since you’re my charge, I’m going to help you have a little fun, too. Ok? Just trust me.”

“Alright,” George said reluctantly. His life, the only life he’d ever wanted, with Melindra and magic, was already gone forever. What could really come from taking advice from a frolicking p’ckit dragon in a rough tavern that could be worse than that?

Chapter 8

“What’ll it be, kid?”

George looked at the bartender. By now, the young former magic student’s eyes had fully adjusted to the dim interior lighting of Widdlebottom’s. The bartender was a middle-aged man, with not bald, but thinning, hair. His eyes, though deep set in rings of dark wrinkles, suggesting that he didn’t sleep much, roved the entire establishment alertly, even as he glanced at George to take the youth’s drink order. As George prepared to answer the man’s question, he hoped his throat had adjusted to the smokes, vapors, and smells of the establishment enough that he wouldn’t croak out his answer, or worse, cough instead of answering.

Starstorm bought his throat some time by landing on the bar and answering for him. “This is my friend, George, Sal. He’ll have a Bracer Island Ale.”

The barkeep looked down at the dragon, his eyes halting their constant surveillance of the whole establishment to focus intently on the little reptile. “Sal was my dad. He’s been dead for ten years.”

Starstorm, little social butterfly that he was, didn’t miss a beat, didn’t pause for an awkward silence or anything. “Well, you look like him. Spitting image.What’s your name?”

“Mel.”

“Well, Mel, nice to meet you. I used to come in here quite a bit back in the day. Your dad was younger then than you are now. How time flies for you humans. Your dad was quite a character. Used to keep this place packed. He had a trick he did with three barstools that…”

The barkeep smiled slightly, in spite of his gruff demeanor it seemed. “You did know my dad. He later improved that trick and did it with four. I saw him secretly practicing with five sometimes, but he never perfected it with five, so he never performed with five.”

“Well, getting up to four is definitely something. Wish I could have seen it.”

“Well, as compensation for missing it, the kid’s first ale is on the house.”

“Thanks, Mel! You’re all right.” Starstorm looked at George and winked when the barkeep moved back to his work. The little dragon set his voice at just the right volume to be heard by George but no further. “Don’t just drink the ale, George. Drink in this place. The people. The history.

“Sailors come here from all over the world with their own stories and well-traveled lives. Some with tragic pasts, lives that didn’t work out. Some who are just drifting through their lives with no plan, just drifting from thing to thing. But in their travels, they’ve all seen things that the petty commoners in Sutter’s Village wouldn’t even believe existed.

“Look at the walls, George, the decor. The nettings and other pieces of ships and objects that came off ships, ships that impossibly sailed all over the world in with their fragile, thin wooden hulls the only things keeping them from sinking to the bottom of the mighty oceans. These humans amaze me.”

George looked at the sailors. Some played card games. Some drank in small groups and talked in low voices. A group of fae-bloods sat at a table away from the other, fully human sailors. One of the fae-bloods, a female who struck George as very beautiful, looked up at him, as if she sensed him. George realized that he’d been staring at her exotic beauty, so unlike Melindra’s.

The fae-blooded woman had dark, curly hair that spilled from a tightly wound red-patterned kerchief. Another such kerchief was loosely wrapped around her neck, loosely enough that it slipped a little, revealing gills, like those of a fish, on her neck. George noticed that the other fae-bloods also had their necks covered. So, they were all of sea elf descent.

George had never met a fae-blood before, but he had learned about them in school. Elves, full-blooded elves, the ancestors of these fae-blooded sailors, had been the ones that humans had first learned magic from. The elves claimed that they had always been in the world, but had hidden themselves from humans until the Great Wars of Devastation had destroyed so much of the world that the elves could no longer hide themselves. Pitying the humans who survived the Wars, elves taught the humans magic on the condition that the humans would, side by side with the elves, use the magic to restore the world, to heal it from the Wars.

This had worked out fine for awhile. The lands were magically cleansed of horrible plagues and of a horrible substance used in the Wars called Radie Ashun. 

Then, as the numbers of humans grew enough that structured, national governments were needed, the humans with magically talented bloodlines formed the Society of Sorcerers Born which had set up the current world order.

With the rise of the Society, elves, by and large, disappeared. It seemed the elves and the humans didn’t get along so well after the formation of the Society and human nation-states. So, as it had been before, the elves returned to whatever state of hiding they had been in for the thousands of years before the Wars of Devastation.

However, rebuilding the lands of Zorethea had taken time, a lot of it, centuries. In that time, when elves and humans mixed, they mixed racially as well. Full-blooded elves were gone now, inhabitants of myth and legend, but their mixed descendants had been left behind.

George let Starstorm order him another ale, but while he was waiting for it, he excused himself from his reptilian friend and guardian to pee out the first ale. On the way back from the privy, his eyes fell on a set of darts used in a game with a target on the wall. The target reminded George of his failed magic test just a few days ago when he couldn’t move a small stone across a horizontal version of that dart board.

Angrily, George grabbed one of the darts and whipped it through the air toward the dart board. He nailed the center of the target exactly. At least I’m good at something, George thought with a sense of bitter triumph.

“Hey, my friend. You’re pretty good.” One of the fae-bloods had seen his dart throw. “You must play all the time.”

“Not really,” George said.

“Oh, but you must play us now,” said the fae-blood. “It’ll be fun to play against someone with your obvious natural talent.” He waved his hand at George’s perfect hit on the wall.

George looked back to where he’d been seated at the bar with Starstorm. He couldn’t see the little dragon. George scanned the entire room. Nothing. Then, he heard Starstorm’s voice near the ceiling. There, in the rafters, Starstorm had found another p’ckit dragon, a brown one. The two of them were chatting it up up there away from the humans and fae-bloods down below. George could tell that the brown p’ckit dragon was female because she had a head crest, a white one, that she had shaped into something like a human hair style.

George looked back at his fae-blooded challenger. “Ok. I’ll play.” George thought the game would take his mind off his own depressing life, might be a chance for him to feel good at something besides magic, and that if something bad were to happen, Starstorm would see him.

“Great.” The sea-elf descendant smiled, his teeth very white. “Let’s get started. Drinks for everyone, on me. What are you drinking, my friend?”

George remembered what Starstorm had ordered him before. “Bracer’s Island Ale.”

“Oh, you’ll want something stronger than that, my friend,” cooed his new benefactor. “Trust me. I know just what you need.”

Chapter 9

I am good at something! I wonder if there’s some way to turn throwing accuracy into a profession, George thought as he beamed proudly at the third bullseye in a row (and there had been many others as well) that he had thrown in the dart game with the Fae-bloods.

“You’re really good, my friend,” said Jetsam, the fae-blood who had originally approached him about playing darts. With a warm smile, the elf-blooded sailor tried to hand George another drink. George waved his hand at the mug to politely decline.

“Are you sure, my friend? It steadies the nerves.”

“My nerves are already steady, thanks.”

George was beginning to wonder if Jetsam and his friends were trying to get him drunk. And Jetsam’s smile, which at first had seemed friendly and warm, was starting to get a little creepy. George thought he needed some air. Thinking of the outside made him think of…The Fairweather, his ship. He couldn’t miss his ship!

“What time is it?” he asked Jetsam.

“What does it matter? We’ve got all night, my friend.” Jetsam tried once again to hand George a new mug of whatever stuff he had recommended George start drinking. 

“No.” George shook his head for emphasis, but suddenly shaking his head made him dizzy. He had to get out of here. He had to find out what time it was and find out if he had missed The Fairweather. Was it even still daylight outside? Why did this place have no windows?

“Starstorm!” he called. Why was everything suddenly so noisy? Had this place gotten so noisy while he’d been playing darts? The place did look fuller than before, with more patrons. How long it been since he had lost track of time?

“Starstorm!” he called again.

Jetsam and his crew (minus the beautiful fae-blooded woman who had been there before. She had left sometime during the dart game.) looked at each other nervously as George called for help.

“Oh, Boss! I’m so sorry.” Suddenly, Starstorm was there. He perched on George’s shoulder. He felt so heavy. Why did Starstorm suddenly feel so heavy?

Jetsam looked at Starstorm with a predatory calculating gaze. The warm smile and cheery-eyed expression was gone, replaced with a look of cold assessment, taking stock of the p’ckit dragon and how the small creature might affect the nefarious plans that George was starting to suspect them of having for him.

“Go away, little pest.”

“Pest?” Starstorm flashed bared teeth at the fae-blood, then said, “I’ll show you what a pest can do.”

Starstorm dived into one of George’s pockets. Jetsam laughed. “Run away, mighty dragon. Ha ha ha!”

Suddenly, Jetsam’s face and the face of his compatriots blanched. A couple of them went slack-jawed. Starstorm had emerged from another of George’s pockets wielding a wand. Not a small, p’ckit dragon sized wand, but a full, human-sized wand, longer than Starstorm himself. Starstorm could have used it as a staff or a pole. “Here ya go, Boss,” the dragon said as he leaped to George’s wrist. He opened the fingers of George’s hand (which George discovered were strangely numb, making him extra-thankful for Startstorm’s help). Working quickly, the dragon placed the wand in his ward’s hand and helped him hold it somewhat steady.

Starstorm barked orders at the hooligans. “Now, losers, get out of here! Use that back door behind you right now if you don’t wanna see what happens when a drunk mage tries to use a Wand of Lightning.”

George thought, But I’m not really a mage. Oh! But the fae-bloods don’t know that, and I do have a p’ckit dragon, and I’m dressed well. They’ll believe it. Is this really a Wand of Lightning?

Going along with Starstorm’s plan, George met Jetsam’s gaze with feigned, but hopefully convincing, confidence. He jerked the wand toward his former benefactor menacingly twice, while saying, “Zap, zap! Go on!”

To his crew, Jetsam said, “Let’s go fellas.” To George, he said, “We let you win, idiot.”

Starstorm jerked his head at the dart board and back quickly. “I don’t think so. I saw the whole thing. All those bullseyes were his. Now get on with yourself.”

“Fine.”

*********

Soon, George was walking along the dock toward where The  Fairweather had been moored. It was just now sunset, but not past sunset. The ship would hopefully come into view, George and the tiny dragon would board, apologize for being late, and George would retire to wherever his cabin was. He was feeling sick, even a bit dizzy. What had that drink been that Jetsam had been buying him? He wanted to know so that he could avoid it by name for the rest of his life.

“Is that really a Wand of Lightning?” George asked.

“No, Boss, it’s a Wand of Illusion.”

“Oh, so everything was a bluff then.”

“Yeah, it was….uh oh!”

George didn’t like the sound of Starstorm’s uh oh!

“What?”

“The Fairweather has already sailed. I see it though. It’s not far. I can fly out to it and tell them to come back for you.”

“It looks pretty far. Are you sure? And would they really come back?”

“I’m sure. This mess is all my fault. I should have kept a better eye on you. I’ll get you on that ship. I’ll offer them a dragon’s hoard to turn back if I have to, and you know I have one.”

“Ok.” George stopped and leaned against a barrel for support. He had started to sway.

“Hang tight, Boss. I’ll be back with a ship.”

Starstorm left George leaning on the barrel and fluttered away madly. “Wings, don’t fail me now.”

“Be careful,” George said, but his tiny friend was already gone. George felt bad that the dragon thought it had to babysit him, and apparently that was true.

Suddenly George heaved with nausea. He leaned over the edge of the dock to make sure his vomit went in the water instead of onto the dock where people would walk. As he leaned over, he couldn’t stop leaning. He just kept going down, his legs having lost all feeling beneath him, offering no support to stop his downward motion. George fell headfirst into the water. He tried calling for Starstorm, but just got a lungful of water for his effort.

Am I going to drown because of the first time I ever got drunk? he thought. I really am a loser.

Chapter 10

     George had hit the water headfirst. He knew he should right himself and get his head pointed upward, toward the surface, but his body wouldn’t move. It was numb, numb with whatever the fae-bloods had had him drink and numb with the unexpected frigid coldness of the water, which only got colder as he sank into depths that received less sunlight. He wondered if the fae-bloods had spiked his drink with something or if he really just hadn’t been able to handle the alcohol in its normal form. He wondered if it would hurt to die.

Just then, he saw a darker shadow against the water and heard the turbulence of some kind of movement. What felt like a pair of hands grabbed him roughly, not gently at all. The hands were small, but with long, bony fingers, stabbing bruisingly into his flesh to secure their grip. George was elated for a moment because if he wasn’t hallucinating, then this could be a rescue. However, instead of pulling him upward, the hands dragged him down further and faster.

Once he realized this person or thing was pulling him down, not up, George’s survival instinct overcame his paralysis and he began to struggle. A moment ago, in his depression, George had been willing to die in the cold, numb water, but the thought of being devoured by some undersea creature re-awakened his desire to live. He thrashed madly. He could feel the grip of the hands on him start to slip.

Then, his captor came in close enough to see better, a dark silhouette, small and shapely like that of a woman, with flowing hair and seaweed around its head. What would have taken George’s breath away if he’d been breathing was the thing’s glowing eyes, the only feature of it not in silhouette. Bubbles suddenly burst from where it’s mouth should be and the thing actually said something, a single syllable, incoherently babbled into the water. George’s eyes felt as heavy as lead as he suddenly knew what the creature had said.

 A sleep spell was a minor spell of the First Column, one any apprentice mage could cast within a few months of beginning to learn magic. George had been supposedly casting it in school for years, though he had not known that his teachers had been cheating for him. In his school lessons, students had been both the casters and the recipients of the spell. It had been cast on them for learning purposes and to provide subjects for their classmates to practice on. George knew how it felt to be overcome by a sleep spell. So, the creature was using magic on George since he had begun to struggle.

That was George’s last conscious thought for awhile.

*********

When George awoke, he found that he was surprisingly dry, laid out in pitch darkness on an uncomfortable floor, a rough rock floor like the floor of a cave. Was this an underwater cave with air in it? If it was, was the air supply limited? How long would it last? A light spell instantly came to mind, but George caught himself, realizing that was a reflexive thought of his old life, back when he had been tricked into thinking that he had the Gift of Magic, back when he had a whole life laid out in front of him that looked good and included marrying Melindra and making his parents proud, continuing the family’s magical dynasty. No, he could no more summon magic to light his surroundings than he could have moved the stone or read the child subject’s mind when tested for the Gift of Magic by his father. He would have to cope with the darkness, the darkness his life had become, the darkness of not having magic.

George used his time in the dark to feel around cautiously. He found wooden crates, stacks of them. This dry cave might be where the sea creature kept treasures and other belongings that needed to stay dry. Most of the crates were sealed and would have needed a tool to open, but some had already been opened and the lids were loose. George wondered if he should open some of the unsealed ones, but didn’t relish the thought of rummaging around blindly with his hands into who knows what kind of contents. The contents could be sharp or poisonous. It was another reflexive thought from his old life: A mage must protect his hands, for they are his craft. No hands, no spellcasting. George decided that his hands needed protecting whether he was a mage or not.

Suddenly, there were wet sounds that seemed about ten feet away in the total darkness, a large splash followed by drippings and smaller, pattering splashes as the drippings landed on the cave floor. Then came the voice, like gravel being tossed about in a whirlpool.

“What has she brought in here and won’t show me? Me, her own mother! Ffaghh! Impudent child! She forgets her place, yes she does.”

The voice stopped. There was a sniffling sound.

The voice resumed, exuberant. “Man flesh! Live man flesh! Young man flesh! Yummy! Let’s see it! Yes, let’s see it shall we now!”

The voice murmured the exact light spell incantation that George would have liked to have used if he had truly had the Gift of Magic. The cave illuminated fully, brightly enough to read by, but not too brightly as to hurt one’s eyes. George was horrified to see that he was alone, in an underwater cave, with no magic, no weapons, and no help, face to face with a sea hag.

Chapter 11

The sea hag’s skin was a bluish-gray, sickeningly more gray than blue. It hung off of her bones in great saggy bags, as if her skin’s elasticity had been too stretched out by past obesity to ever contract again around her now smaller form. Her face suffered for it the most grotesquely. Flesh dangled from the end of her chin and jiggled there when she moved. Not only were there bags beneath her eyes, but excess flesh from her forehead drooped over them from above. This forced her to tilt her head back to see properly, looking down her misshapen nose as if she were some snooty aristocrat wondering how the security at a cotillion had let in a mere peasant who wasn’t a member of waitstaff or kitchen help. George, a former member of high society, knew that look well. The part of his mind that noticed irony realized that some of those snooty aristocrat ladies had looked about as ugly.

As the sea hag shuffled forward, she reached out graspingly at him. Her fingers were so long and bony. They could have been the hands that grabbed him and rescued him before, but they seemed too long. George was sure those fingers would have punctured him, not merely bruised him. Besides, the hag was speaking as if she were seeing him for the first time. Apparently, George had been rescued by her daughter. Had he been rescued so he could be eaten as food? Taken as a mate and then eaten as food? Taken in the hopes of extracting ransom from relatives on the surface world? None of that sounded good.

There was a splashing sound across the cave, which, now that it was lit, George could see was bigger than he had thought when he had been in the dark. Another figure hurried up behind the hag.

“Mother! Stop! He’s not for you!” The voice of the newcomer didn’t sound like gravel in a whirlpool. It sounded like a normal, pleasant, even melodic female voice, though obviously urgently yelling.

The hag looked over her shoulder, scowling. “Just a taste, dear. I’ll leave the important parts for mating alone.”

“He’s not for food nor for mating mother. He’s ugly anyway.” As the hag turned to face her offspring, George could see that the daughter was none other than the beautiful female fae-blood who had caught his eye at Widdlebottom’s. Her loose-fitting clothing had been replaced with a more form-fitting ensemble that looked more suitable for swimming. “He’s apparently a mage who got a little too drunk at Widdlebottom’s and got into trouble. He fell into the sea, too drunk to swim.”

The mother hag looked hopeful at this news. “Then no one will miss him. They’ll assume he drowned. We can do with him as we wish.”

“He has a p’ckit dragon familiar looking for him on the surface. The little creature is willing to pay a reward for his master.”

The mother hag looked even more hopeful. “Reward….” Her eyes (what George could see of them through the folds of her face), became dreamy as her voice drew out the word “reward” as if uttering the word itself was a sensual pleasure. “What kind of reward?”

“I’m still negotiating that, Mother. At this stage, I need to prove that I, that we, actually have him. A lock of his hair should do, along with some small trinket the dragon would recognize.”

George felt terrible. Now, Starstorm was saving his butt yet again. And even if the ransom exchanged worked, George knew what it meant for any dragon, even a small p’ckit dragon, to have to part with even a small portion of its treasure. In his magical education at school, George had learned that one of the most important reasons that dragons hoarded treasure and guarded it so fiercely was that as they accumulated more and more treasure, they also accumulated more and more power.

Dragons and their treasure hoards were metaphysically linked. A dragon that lost a substantial part of its hoard would actually become physically weaker, easier to kill. This explained why even good dragons, dragons who were kind, merciful, and just, still hoarded immeasurably vast treasure hoards and would refuse to part with any of it. In a very real way, dragons and their hoards were one.

George didn’t like to think of Starstorm parting with even a single copper coin of his treasure, especially to save him from his own foolishness. Even if they did get through this whole underwater sea hag experience, they had missed their arranged passage aboard The Fairweather. He couldn’t go back to Sutter’s Village and ask his parents for more money to pay for another ship’s passage.

“Go back to the living room, Mother,” the daughter said chidingly, as if she were the mother coaxing a child back to her bedroom. “I’ll get what we need from him to prove to the p’ckit dragon that we really do have him. Then, we can get down to negotiating a price.”

The sea hag disappointedly, with a few lingering, hungry looks at George, walked back to a corner of the room further than Geroge had yet explored,hidden by stacks of crates. There was another large splash, and she was gone.

“Now, then,” said the daughter, producing a pair of scissors, “let’s get down to business. You have a very loyal familiar, I must say.”

“Yeah, he’s great,” George said, his voice probably reflecting the disappointment he felt in himself that Starstorm was saving him yet again. “Thank you for saving me, by the way. That was you out there in the water grabbing me, wasn’t it?”

She snorted. “Save your gratitude for your dragon friend. He’s the one making a sacrifice for you.” She reached out to him with the hand that wasn’t holding the scissors and searched his head for a good place from which to cut a lock of hair.

“And don’t think about trying any funny business. You’re obviously not that much of a mage or you wouldn’t have succumbed so easily to my sleep spell, drunk or not. You’re also several hundred feet underwater even if you did manage to get out of here. I would say you’re just an apprentice.”

“Uh, yeah,” George said to prevent awkward silence.

“I’m an opportunist,” she continued. “There was obviously more opportunity in saving you than in letting you drown.”

She snipped a lock of his hair and then gestured slowly and menacingly at him with the scissors afterwards. “But if there had been more opportunity for me in you drowning, you would have drowned, got it?”

“Got it.”

“Good. Now, what can we show this little dragon friend of yours that will prove you’re really here with us besides this lock of hair?” 

Chapter 12

Even though it was dark, George had managed to rearrange the crates into something like a chair, albeit a very hard one. Using one of the cave walls for back support, he could even lean back a bit. He sat there, alone in the dark, thinking of what the rest of his life could be like, assuming that everything went well with Starstorm negotiating him out of there.

He wrung his hands a lot, not because that was a normal habit of his, but because he just couldn’t stop feeling the empty place on his ring finger that had once worn his Fothergill family crest ring. He knew that Starstorm would be convinced by that, if nothing else, that Esmerelda (apparently the name of the fae-blooded girl who had rescued him) had actually encountered George.

He had assumed that Esmerelda was of sea elf ancestry like most fae-bloods in Leeward.

but her mother was a sea hag. George, although he would never be a mage now, had indelibly imprinted in his mind years of magical education from being a top student in Sutter’s Village. He reviewed in his mind what he knew. Like elves, hags were also fey, although fey of the Unseelie Court rather than the Seelie Court. Hags, like harpies, dryads, medusa, and other female-only magical species needed human men to reproduce with. If the child was male, it would be human. The child would be given up, perhaps given to the father (if he hadn’t been devoured or turned to stone), perhaps given to the father’s family or some other human family. Hags might even use the male child for dark ritual magic. Daughters, on the other hand, took after their mothers, being a nascent medusa, hag, harpy, dryad, or what have you.

That meant that one day, no matter how beautiful Esmerelda was now, she would eventually look like her mother. Eeeew!

George sat there in the dark, still thinking. He went back to rubbing a fur pelt on a glass rod. He had a little surprise planned for Esmerelda’s mother if she should once again come in to see him. He had found these things and more in the shipping crates the hag and her daughter kept here. Desperation had overcome his hesitancy to reach into the crates blindly in the total darkness. By opening one of the already unsealed crates, George had been able to makeshift a tool to open others.

The fur he had found in a crate of pelts. The glass rod he found in a crate that, when he opened it, he recognized its contents even in the dark. Carefully, lovingly packed amongst soft, cushiony material was an alchemy set containing the glass rod and other labware. He wondered if this lab set had been destined for the labs at the school in Sutter’s Village.

In one crate, he had even found a lantern and the means to fill it with a flask of oil and light it, but he knew that burning fire consumed breathable air, making the air stale and unfit. He didn’t want to use any more air in the cave than he already was by breathing. He resisted the urge to try to remember exactly what the air had smelled and tasted like before, to compare it to now, to decide if the quality was actually getting worse or not. Thinking like that wouldn’t help. Esmerelda thought she would get a small dragon’s hoard out of this affair, and that would only happen if he were alive. So, she wouldn’t kill him…on purpose.

The fur and glass rod, when rubbed together, made tiny sparks in the darkness. George wondered if this is what he had been reduced to, a stage magician relying on tricks rather than a real magician born with the Gift of Magic. George remembered his father saying once that stage magicians is all scientists were, for all their mad ravings about understanding the fundamentals of the universe without magic, they were all just glorified stage magicians, like the one that had tricked washerwoman Mabel into her crimes against magic. What was George supposed to do with his life now? Become a scientist? He scoffed at the thought.

His musings were interrupted by the splash of someone entering the cave.

“Esmerelda?” he called out hopefully.

George was disheartened to hear the voice of Esmerelda’s mother instead.

“Esmerelda,” the hag had a mocking tone in her voice. “Esmerelda, my darling kissy poo. I see the way you look at her boy. You want her? I can make that happen. But you have to give Mother something first, eh?”

The hag didn’t utter a light spell. She could see just fine in the total darkness. George could hear her coming closer. It was time to put his plan into action.

“I’ve sobered up. I’m ready to use my magic now, hag. Begone or I’ll make you regret that your daughter ever found me.” George put all the menacing tone in his voice that he could remember from seeing powerful mages lose their temper when he was growing up in mage society, all the ego, all the contempt for perceived lessers, all the malice and even a little sadism.

The hag stopped her approach for just a moment, then chuckled. “You’ve got moxie, young one. But you’re no mage. I don’t think you’re even an apprentice. Why had you gotten drunk and jumped off the pier? I think you’re a failure.”

George was struck by the hag’s perception of him. The only detail she had gotten wrong was that he hadn’t fallen from the pier on purpose, but the rest was essentially correct. But, his life was at stake here. He suspected that she was going to get up in his face, then create magical light when he was unavoidably looking right into his eyes. Once their gazes locked, she could attempt to place a magical charm on him, and then he’d be doomed. He had to act, now. She had started moving forward again.

“You doubt my power? Have a taste, foolish fey!”

George heaved a bag of flour that he had found in another crate up over his head. He had opened the top of the bag earlier. He held the bottom of the bag firmly and let a cloud of the fine powder drift in front of him in the direction of the hag’s voice.

“Ack!” He received satisfied gasps and exclamations for his effort. Quickly, he grabbed the fur and glass rod, which had been as charged up with sparks as he could get them while waiting alone in the dark for something like this to happen.

George knew from alchemy classes that fine, flammable powders could catch flame when dispersed in the air, and even, under the right circumstances, cause explosions. He held the rod and fur in the cloud of flour. He still couldn’t see but he knew he’d found the cloud of flour in the dark because he could feel the powder coating his hands. He rubbed the fur and rod together as fast and as hard as he could. There was a flash and a small boom. The flash lasted only an instant, but in that time he saw the hag’s face, her eyes covered by her hands, her mouth distorted (even further than it naturally was) by a snarl.

Even though the flash was over and he saw no more, he could hear Esmerelda’s mother retreating.

George put on his pompous mage airs again, projecting mightiness into his voice. “Don’t disturb me again until your daughter has brought news that my ransom is paid, hag.”

Before the characteristic splash that indicated that she’d exited the chamber, George actually heard the had say, “Yes, Master Mage.”

George, with absolutely no magical talent, had just been recognized as a Master Mage by an obviously ancient fey, all because he had used science. Oh, the irony!

 

Chapter 13

 

“Take my hand, human.” Esmerelda reached for George as they stood by the pool in the storage room through which the beautiful fae-blood and her mother had been coming and going. George complied. As they were about to step into the pool, Esmerelda looked over the room, currently lit by a light spell. Her eyes roved over the crates that had been left with a white dusting of flour from earlier.

“You really don’t have much magic do you?” she asked him. She seemed genuinely curious. Her voice and face didn’t convey the contempt from their last interaction.

For some reason George answered completely honestly. He wasn’t sure why. “None at all,” he said.

“Well, you must have something about you. P’ckit dragons are known for their loyalty, but yours is an extreme little critter.”

“He’s been with our family for generations.”

“I knew it! You’re a mage kid, but somehow you were born without the Gift of Magic. How does that happen?

“I don’t know. I wish I did know and the answer was that it was something that I could fix.”

“Huh. I would have thought all your vaunted professors at the schools would have had some theory to explain it.”

“Nope.”

“Well, their theories are pretty bupkiss anyway.”

George almost spoke up at that point, ready to defend his culture, his people, his way of life, but then realized it wouldn’t matter. They weren’t really his people anymore. It wasn’t really his way of life anymore. And once he was exchanged for his ransom, he’d never see this hag’s daughter again anyway. Who cared what she thought?

SInce he was silent and didn’t continue the conversation, Esmerelda squeezed his hand, as if to draw him back from daydreaming, and said, “Hold your breath.” George did so and they jumped together into the pool.

The pool opened straight down into what looked like an underwater cave living room. George’s eyes couldn’t focus very well under the water, but from what he could make out, it looked like the hag and he daughter had furniture and other accouterments from the surface world arranged like an apartment or small house. It was lit by a magical glow globe affixed somehow to the ceiling. George hadn’t seen a glow globe since he’d left Sutter’s Village.

There was a stone table in the center with stone chairs. Esmerelda’s mother sat on one of the chairs, eating what looked like a large piece of a shark’s body, holding it with her hands and burying her face in the fishy flesh. It reminded George of how children ate pieces of watermelons at festivals in Sutter’s Village. The shark must have been dead for awhile because it didn’t create a cloud of blood in the water, seeming all bled out already.

Ignoring the gorging hag, Esmerelda and George left through the little apartment’s front doorway, which revealed itself when the beautiful fae-blood waved her other hand, the one not holding onto George, at a large bushy growth of sea-weed on one wall. The green strands parted, allowing the two swimmers through.

George didn’t know how much longer he could hold his breath. He became very concerned once they were outside Esmerelda’s apartment and he saw just how far below the surface they were down here. Obviously, he couldn’t talk to voice his concerns. He remembered his musing before that Esmerelda wouldn’t kill him on purpose. This could be her killing him unintentionally, though.

He looked over at her in the darkness of the depths. She once again appeared as she had when she had rescued him, a lithe, dark silhouette with wildly waving hair. Then, as before, her eyes glowed. Bubbles left the part of her silhouetted face where her mouth would be. She cast another spell. Was she putting him to sleep again?

But, no. George felt some kind of enchantment around them as the two of them shot to the surface at high speed. Yes, at this speed, they’d be on the surface in no time and he was sure his held breath would last.

They broke the surface near a beach with no town or settlement in sight.

“Aha! Boss! Boss! You’re ok!” Starstorm winged in from the shoreline and whizzed around his head, looking at him intently as if to do an inspection to make sure he was alright.

“Starstorm, I’m trying to swim to shore here,” said a little annoyed.

“Oh, yeah, Sure. Yeah, Get on the shore. For sure.”

George smiled, remembering what the dragon had sacrificed for him. “Thanks, buddy.”

“Oh, so I’m your buddy now? Nice.”

Once George, Esmerelda, and Starstorm were all on shore, the beautiful fae-blood took charge in a business-like manner. “Ok, dragon. I’ve held up my end of the deal. You hold up yours.”

“Fine.” Starstorm dived into one of George’s pockets and deep into his pocket dimension. George and Esmerelda just looked at each other for a few moments, him with a sheepish grin on his face, and her with a frown, which somehow didn’t make her any less beautiful.

Starstorm resurfaced with an impossibly large pearl, the size of a croquet ball. He flew it over to Esmerelda’s grasping hand, avarice apparent in her eyes, which were green anyway, whether she was feeling envious or not.

“Thank you, dragon. Take care of your charge here,” she said nodding to me. “We won’t meet again.”

As the hag’s daughter headed out from the beach into the water and disappeared, I wondered what would happen next. We’d missed our passage on The Fairweather. Startstorm would no doubt be weakened by the loss of such a valuable part of his treasure. But first I should apologize for being such a fool and so much trouble.

“Starstorm, I–”

“Save it, Boss. We gotta get moving.”

“What?”

“Remember when I told you we had a Wand of Illusion?”

I looked at the water where Esmerelda had just disappeared beneath the waves.

“Starstorm, you didn’t.”

“I did.”

 Chapter 14

 

     As the sun rose over the horizon, casting a warm golden glow across the deck, George stumbled bleary-eyed from his hammock, still adjusting to the gentle rocking of the ship beneath his feet. The air was filled with the salty tang of the sea and the creaking of timbers as the old vessel, The Singsong, cut through the waves. He had never felt so out of his element, surrounded by the foreign language of nautical terms and the bustling activity of the crew. A gruff voice barked at him to get moving, and he quickly joined the line of sailors hauling on ropes and winches to raise the sails. The coarse fibers bit into his soft hands, but he gritted his teeth and pulled with all his might, determined to prove his worth. Throughout the day, George was put to work on various tasks, from swabbing the deck to coiling ropes to climbing the rigging to unfurl the topsails.

The crew members, though initially gruff and impatient, gradually warmed to his earnest efforts and began to teach him the ways of the ship. They showed him how to tie off a line, how to read the wind in the sails, and how to navigate by the stars at night. By the time the sun set, painting the sky in brilliant hues of orange and pink, the protagonist was utterly exhausted, his body aching from the unaccustomed exertion. But as he collapsed into his hammock, listening to the gentle creaking of the ship and the distant calls of seabirds, he felt a deep sense of satisfaction and belonging. He was a part of this crew now, learning the language of the sea and the rhythms of life aboard a sailing ship. And though the road ahead was long and uncertain, he knew that he had taken the first step on a journey that would change him forever.

Unwilling to accept Starstorm’s offer of sacrificing some of his dragon treasure to purchase passage on another ship since they had missed their passage on The Fairweather, George had bartered his physical labor as a crew member on The Singsong for himself and for Starstorm in order to reach Taalvora where his uncle lived.

     As George settled into his hammock, his hands freshly salved and bandaged by the ship’s physician to treat blisters and rope burn, several other crew members of The Singsong’s crew also came in to bed down at the end of their shift. George was not the only new crew member, though he was the only one without previous maritime experience.

     The new crew members had heard some interesting things about the captain, Capitan Ferdinand Hernendez. George had enjoyed working to the music of his singing and his lute, for Capitan Hernandez was a bard. In fact, several of the crew were his apprentices, both as bards and as seamen. After some cajoling and some bribery in the form of an extra ration portion at dinner, an old sailor named Barnabas was convinced to share what he knew about the captain.

     “Well, laddies! So ya want to know about Cap’n Hernandez do ya? Well, I’ve been wit’ ‘im longer’n most. And I’ll tell ya that the story o’ this voyage is a story of revenge. Our last stop in civilized seas is Taalvora. After that, we’re headed into the Untamed Sea to Siren Island.”

Barnabas smiled in satisfaction at the gasps his storytelling drew when he mentioned Siren Island. “Oh, yes, laddies! The Cap’n is gonna get his revenge on the Siren Queen herself. Ya see she took his best friend and the Cap’n ‘as sworn that evil bitch is gonna pay. Ya see the Cap’n was’na a Cap’n in those days. He was a member of an adventuring party, the Merry Myrmidons they were called. The Merry Myrmidons were going on an adventure by sea that took ‘em past Siren Island. Our future Cap’n didna go on that adventure wit’ ‘em that time, the time that his best friend an’ ‘alf the Myrmidons were lost ta the Siren Queen an’ ‘er brood.

“Hernandez blamed himself, ya see. As the party bard, he figured he shoulda been there ta countersing the blasted sirens’ enchanted singin’. Bards, as ye know, can counter song and music related magics. Our Cap’n believes that if ‘e’d been there that day, all the Merry Myrmidons would still be alive.

“There’ll be a great battle when we get to Siren Island, laddies, believe you me! But those of ya who survive will earn a share o’ the Siren Queen’s treasure, and should set you up for life, I’d say. The Cap’n is a skilled enough bard and he’s got enough other bards aboard, that we should be quite safe from the sirens witchery, though I strongly advise stuffing your ears as an additional precaution.”

There was a long quiet after Barnabas wound down his story. The men who had listened looked somber. After hearing the tale, George was even considering staying on the with the crew after his original agreement to work until they reached Taalvora was fulfilled. His uncle didn’t really need an assistant in his herbalist shop. That was just the solution his family had come up with so that it would never be known back in Sutter’s Village that George had been born without the Gifting of Magic. And, if a share of the Siren Queen’s treasure could “set on up for life” as Barnabas had said, then George could maybe get himself some kind of financially good life, even if he wasn’t a mage. Maybe he could invest his share of the treasure into starting some kind of merchant business himself or something.

George looked down at Starstorm, the little dragon was snuggled up sleeping next to him. George wondered what his diminutive companion would say about an adventure to vanquish the Siren Queen. Soon, sleep found George, too. He had strange dreams though, that he was on Siren Island and that the Siren Queen was Melindra.

     Chapter 15

Two days later, George was in the galley eating, enjoying the camaraderie he’d found with the sailors, who’d taken to believing he was a runaway rich kid. There was no way he would have been able to hide the way he spoke, his vocabulary and diction, no way he’d be able to hide his ingrained table manners, or a thousand other little things about his upbringing that just didn’t fit in with the other sailors, however, they had come to respect him once he’d proven his work ethic and that he could take the crap they’d dealt him as they had socially tested him in the way that males often do with teasing and practical jokes. George wasn’t sure how they would have treated him or if they’d accepted him if they knew his whole story, that he wasn’t really a runaway rich kid, but a mage school washout, a disappointment to a mage-blooded family, an outcast and a disgrace.

Suddenly, the galley doors burst open. Barnabas was there, looking frightened. “All hands on deck!” the old sea dog bellowed. “We’re being attacked by a kraken! Fight fer yer lives, fer that’s surely what’s at stake, laddies!” Those sailors who carried weapons drew them as they made their way onto the deck.

George didn’t carry wear a dagger or a long knife around like some of the other sailors did. Mages in his society didn’t carry weapons because according to their maxim magic was their weapon. Well, George didn’t have any magic, and he wasn’t some “late bloomer” going to get any, either, so this experience made him resolve that, should he survive what was about to happen, he was going to have to learn some form of weaponry.

A strong smell assaulted his nostrils as George emerged onto the deck from the galley. Several large tentacles, each as thick as a tree trunk, probed the deck. When they found something fleshy the squirmed, like a sailor, they wrapped around him and pulled him overboard. The air was filled with a fine mist, though the sky above was quite sunny and cloudless. The beast must be stirring up the water underneath and next to the ship so violently that it was like being in the vicinity of a waterfall.

On the main deck, a group of sailors were hacked at a tentacle with axes. The thing bled blue, not red. That seemed the most unnatural, fantastical thing of all to George. It seemed that if this thing were any kind of natural creature, not a demon or a fiend from Hades, Hell, or any other Infernal Realm, then it should bleed a proper red color.

George heard the twangs of the strings of musical instruments above and behind him on the quarterdeck. Turning, George saw Capitan Hernandez trying to arrange his bards in position to play. George would have thought this insane if he wasn’t aware just what bardic musical magic could do.

Bards were eclectic magic-users, just as quick to offer a prayer to some forgotten deity as they were to use a proper spell. Some bards had the Gifting of Magic and used proper spells such as the Society of Sorcerers Born used. Other bards weren’t able to use proper spells but could work magic anyway through their music. It irked the Society of Sorcerer’s Born that they lacked a proven and satisfying explanation of bardic magical music. Some said that true bards must be able to somehow tune into the echoes of the Songs of Creation. Other mages called that a theory for simpletons who even believed in the Songs of Creation. One thing was sure, there were no two bards the same. Being a bard meant a commitment to walk a path of individuality that was at once lonely, and yet filled with company.

George’s eyes widened in shock as he saw that neither the captain not the other bards had yet noticed a sneaky tentacle coming up behind the rear of the ship. The other tentacles were coming in either port or starboard, as if the beast were trying to give the ship a hug, but this one sneaky tentacle coming over the quarterdeck was about to strike someone unawares.

“Captain, look out!” George yelled as loudly as he could. Somehow, over the din and cacophony, the captain heard him. He took in the danger, cast a quick, combat spell that blasted magical energy right through the tentacle (that thankfully was one of the relatively smaller ones). The severed part fell on the deck and the stumpy part, still attached to the main body of the kraken, withdrew back into the sea.

“Good man!” yelled the Captain back at George, saluting the neophyte sailor, smiling at the youth encouragingly. Suddenly the captain’s expression changed to shock and fear, however, not fear for himself but fear for George. “No!” Capitan Hernendez cried.

George felt a tentacle from behind him, unfortunately one of the bigger, tree trunk thick ones, crushing out his breath so that he couldn’t ever yell or scream. He saw the deck fall away below him, but knew that it was really him who was being lifted up. He wasn’t just being lifted up, either, but to also horizontally, so that instead of ship’s deck under him, there was now water and the thrashing monstrous bulk of the beast. It’s head, eyes, and mouth were not in view, but George really didn’t want to see those. What he already saw was horrific enough.

His next thoughts were of Starstorm. Would the p’ckit dragon blame himself for George’s death? George thought of his parents and Melindra, James and everyone in Sutter’s Village. He felt very disappointed that he wasn’t going to get a chance to try for a share of the Siren Queen’s treasure, enough money to start a new life and maybe, just maybe, be happy again.

  

Chapter 16

“Boss! Boss! I’m coming, Boss!” George heard from behind him and to the left Starstorm’s desperate voice and the mad, frantic flapping of his tiny wings as he skimmed over the thrashing water in George’s direction. Trapped in the grip of the kraken tentacle, George couldn’t get his head turned around to see his tiny ally. George was also being repeatedly dunked under the surface by the tentacle’s general thrashing. There was no rhythm, no timing, to the dunking, so sometimes when he went under, George had his breath held, sometimes he didn’t. He had still not yet seen the beast’s head. Somehow Geroge had the impression that the creature was occupied with something else, wherever it’s head was, that it wasn’t trying to kill him or drown him on purpose…yet.

In moments here and there, when George’s ears weren’t too waterlogged to hear anything but water filling his ears, he thought he heard nearby voices. He thought the beast must have pulled more of The Singsong’s crew into the water, but then some dim part of his brain that was still thinking realized the voices weren’t yelling in the common tongue of the humans that part of the world, they were using Elvish.

The Elvish voices must not have been audial hallucinations, unless Starstorm was also a hallucination, because the little p’ckit dragon, whom George still hadn’t managed to see with his eyes since the kraken attack started, seemed to hear them, too. Between dunkings, George heard, “Boss…over there…be right back…hold on.”

I’m not really going anywhere, George thought sarcastically.

George had been managing to breathe shallowly in the grip of the beast’s tentacle. It hadn’t cut off his lung capacity completely, but nearly so. Though he was getting some little bit of air, in spite of the squeezing and the dunking, it wasn’t enough air, George knew. Just when he thought he was going to pass out, to the failed young magic student’s great surprise, the tentacle mysteriously loosened, then let him go completely. George, who could normally swim quite well, found it hard with his limbs numb from having had their circulation cut off for awhile in the tentacle’s grip. Survival was a powerful motivator, though, so George’s arms and legs had ample opportunity to circulate blood again as George thrashed them around himself in an attempt to establish a sustainable rhythm for treading water.

Once George had stabilized himself in the water, and though exhausted, had managed to be breathing fully into his lungs again, he noticed that the nearest great tentacle to him, which he assumed was the one that had snatched him from the deck of the The Singsong, wasn’t actually moving anymore. In fact, it was slowly sinking under the waves. Had the beast died? If so, how?

George’s heart jumped in sudden shock and fear as something huge and dark nudged him. What now? he wondered in exasperation. I hate the ocean! I hate it! I hate it! I’m never traveling by water again! If I live, that is.

Free of the kraken tentacle, George was able to pivot around while treading water to see what this new threat was. To his horror, a very large dark shape was near him with a large black fin sticking above the water. George may not have been born a seafaring man, but his education at the magic school in Sutter’s Village before he had failed to make it into the magic college had shown him quite a bit of the world, sometimes live and in person when his teachers had taken his class on teleportation field trips, but more often in the most wonderfully illustrated books, some of them enchanted so that the pictures would animate into moving scenes for the reader to watch. It was in such a book that George had seen these creatures, the wolves of the deep, orcas, killer whales.

The cetacean’s head surfaced, its mouth opening as George both panicked and marveled at the sight of its teeth and throat. The whale didn’t swallow him or even come any closer to touch him. Its mouth opened and closed several times. It bizarrely reminded George of a trained dog wanting an expected edible reward to be given to it.

“Thara, Langa! Veni sara! Veni sara!” an elvish voice called out. George knew Elvish pretty well. What he translated in his head was “Stop, my love! Come here! Come here!” Elves often referred to animals as “my love”, especially beloved pets, steeds, hunting companions, or other animals they were in close relationship with. This orca was with a group of sea elves?

Then it all made sense. Sea elves would have been hunting the kraken. The orcas were the perfect hunting companions to assist them in either killing the behemoth or driving it away. The intimidating, predatory cetacean turned away from George, giving him a good view right into one of its eyes. George felt overwhelmed by the mind, the intelligence he felt by looking into that eye.

The whale went over by the male sea elf who had called it. Next to the elf was a floating wooden crate, probably pulled off The Singsong by the kraken during the attack. Seated on the crate, as it bobbed up and down in the water, was Starstorm. George realized the tiny dragon was giving his wings a rest. P’ckit dragons, though they could fly, were not great flyers, certainly not built for great distance or endurance. That’s why George had worried so much back on the pier in Leeward when Starstorm had tried to reach The Fairweather when it was leaving him to convince it to come back before George fell into the water and encountered Esmerelda.

Starstorm and the sea elf were arguing in Elvish. Like George, the p’ckit dragon was something of a polyglot, speaking many languages fluently. George knew enough elvish to follow along easily. Though the sea elves had a distinct accent compared to the Elvish George had heard spoken by his teachers in school in Sutter’s Village, the accent didn’t make the sea elf unintelligible. In fact, his speech seemed slowed by a drawl that actually made him easier to understand.

“Sea elves were not there at the Grand Council when the Pact was agreed to,” the elf said.

“But they always honored it as if they had been, ever since,” Starstorm shot back.

“Ever since? No one has invoked the Pact in over a millennia.”

“Has it ever been revoked? Have the elves ever withdrawn from it?”

“No. But there are all kinds of historical customs that people nowadays don’t practice. The Pact is ancient history. Nothing more. It doesn’t exist today.”

“Oh? So, the Sacred Word of the Elves is just a historical custom,” said Starstorm. “I see.”

The elf’s face looked like Startorm’s impugning of elven honor exasperated him. “No! Of course not! Fine! I’ll go talk to him.” The sea elf began swimming toward George.

“His name is George,” Starstorm called from his perch on his crate. “He’s not too arrogant for a human.”

The elf cursed in his language, probably unaware that George could understand him quite well, calling ALL humans ambergris, whale vomit.

When the elf was halfway over to George, George was exhausted, and possibly injured from his time being squeezed by the kraken tentacle. He began slipping under the surface and fighting to get back up to breathe. He heard the elf calling for the whale to come over again, “Veni sara! Veni sara, Langa! Nykra terakva va sylna ara lysa voryn.”

George was too grateful for the help and focused on immediate survival to be offended when he heard “Come here! Come here, my love! The stupid dirt-walker can’t breathe and needs help.”

Soon, the orca was supporting him while he clung to its dorsal fin. He was catching his breath when Starstorm flew up to him, the little dragon also breathing somewhat raggedly. It had been an exhausting day for everyone, George supposed.

“Don’t worry, Boss, I got ya covered. Just let me into one of your pockets. I know they’re wet. Oof!” The little dragon grunted with effort and used his claws as he tried to pry open one of George’s shirt pockets. The wet pocket and the wet shirt were stuck tightly together in one wet mess. He finally managed it. Before he disappeared into his pocket dimension, he looked back at the approaching sea elf, then up at George.

“I’m going to get you into a little stronger bargaining position, Boss. Right now, you’re dependent on this whale, controlled by the elf, to simply not drown. You look like a helpless wet rat. I’m going to fix that.”

“Bargaining? What do you mean?”

“We have to convince them to honor the Pact of the Elves. You remember that from school, right?”

“Yeah. Of course. It’s kind of a big deal.”

“Well, ya never know with some of you young kids these days. Some of your generation doesn’t seem to take school seriously.”

“Well, I did. And even if I didn’t my dad would have made sure I did anyway.”

“That’s true. You have the Invocation of the Pact memorized?”

George paused. “I think so.”

“You’d better.” With that the tiny dragon disappeared into George’s pocket. George felt him there for just a moment, and then nothing, as the dragon had crossed over into his pocket dimension.

The sea elf was alongside the orca now.

“Where’s your dragon, now, terakva?”

Before George could answer, the sea elf whistled piercingly, turning his head about this way and that to project the sound in all directions. In response, many whistles called back. Then, the hunting party of elves combined with the pod of orcas were all headed in George’s direction from all directions. The elves looked to be in good spirits, as they had been victorious over the kraken. George was soon surrounded by them.

The rest of the sea elves didn’t look as if they were any more friendly toward humans than the one who had been arguing with Starstorm. George heard the word terakva, or dirt-walker, mentioned a lot in their low murmurings. The elves all stared at him while the orcas socialized with one another, rubbing up against each other and making throaty whale sounds while they sprayed each other and the elves using their blowholes.

George was about to break the uncomfortable silence when he felt his pocket suddenly rip from his shirt with a loud tearing sound. Starstorm had pushed something out of his pocket that didn’t actually fit through the pocket opening. The seams holding the pocket to his shirt burst from the strain. The dragon and a yellow, rubbery package the length of George’s forearm appeared. Starstorm, averse to water, flapped his wings and took off into the air before he could tumble into the water. The yellow package tumbled down the hide of the orca on which George was perched and floated nearby in the water.

Starstorm zoomed down to grab the package as if it was the most valuable thing in the universe and musn’t be lost at any cost. He fumbled around its surface, even flipping it over to find a string sticking out of it with a small white ring at the end of the string to help one pull it. The dragon pulled the string and yelled, “TA-DAAAAAH!”

The small, rubbery package began to expand with a whooshing sound as it somehow filled itself with air, taking on the shape of a very small boat, a raft, a rubbery raft. George had never seen anything like it. It must be a very valuable and magical piece of Starstorm’s dragon treasure hoard.

The diminutive dragon looked over the faces of the sea elves, satisfied with their looks of surprise and wonder. He looked up a George, a cocky expression on his own little dragonish face. Starstorm used a small bit of his own magic to amplify his voice so that all present could hear, even to the back of the hunting party. “C’mon down, Boss!,” his suddenly loud voice boomed. “Let that overgrown guppie get back to his pod. You don’t need him to support you. You’re a descendent of the Society of Sorcerers Born. Your forefathers made the Pact of the Elves.”

Then, leaning in Starstorm whispered to George, or rather tried to whisper (he had forgotten to end his voice amplification magic, so everyone, all the way to the back of the hunting party, heard the whisper also, just as well as they had heard the first part), “Now. Say it now.”

The lead elf swam closer, his drawl heavy with disdain. “Vaelis paktara seryn va lyna,” he said, dismissing the star-oath as dead. “Terakva, why should we honor a pact for ambergris like you?”

Murmurs rippled through the elves. “Sylketh va kryn voryn,” one hissed, scorning the shore-scum’s plea. Orcas thrummed, their blowholes spraying as an elf soothed, “Langa, sara vyn!”

Starstorm’s amplified whisper boomed, “Now, Boss. Say it now!”

George gripped the raft, salt stinging his eyes. His father’s lessons surged—words drilled into him at Sutter’s Village. He straightened, voice ragged but rising. “By vaelis and flame, we swear, elves and wizards, to aid one another. In peril, we rise, guarding seryn and seas. Bound by this oath, our kin shield the world’s heart, forever!”

Silence fell. The sea elves’ eyes widened, their murmurs stilled. The lead elf’s jaw tightened, caught by the ancient words. “Paktara…” he muttered, as if tasting a bitter truth. The orcas circled closer, their intelligence mirroring the elves’ conflict—honor versus hatred for a terakva.

Chapter 18

George, Starstorm, and Stingray, the young warrior who had begun the argument sat in the yellow raft, waiting. The sea was blessedly serene and calm. The Singsong had survived the attack of the kraken and had gone on its way. It was unlikely Capitan Hernendez and his crew even knew that their attempts on the deck of the ship to repel the behemoth’s attack had been assisted by another attack, an attack from below coordinated between a sea elf hunting party and an orca pod. George had no doubt been written off by the ship’s crew as lost at sea in the attack.

By this time the Sun was on its way down, which was also a blessing since the raft had no tarp or other covering to protect its occupants from the solar orb’s blazing rays. This was no cold Northern sea. Not far to the South, past Taalvora where George’s uncle ran an herbalist shop, was the tropics, where one could enter the Untamed Seas and, eventually, find Siren Island, the ultimate destination of The Singsong’s quest for revenge.

“It’s the fault of you terakva that the Pact of the Elves isn’t a common thing anymore, you know,” Stingray said. It was the first time any of them had spoken, though they’d been sitting for hours. It felt as if Stingray, in spite of his reluctance to have anything to do with George or his dragon, was starting a conversation out of boredom or perhaps just wanting to have the silence filled.

Stingray’s skin was a bluish-green, more green than blue. His eyes were wide and solidly black, all pupil and no sclera. Geroge supposed that helped his eyes take in as much light as possible in the sunless depths. Stingray sat facing away from the Sun, had shifted when the Sun moved to keep his back to it as the afternoon advanced, and kept his eyes closed a lot, as if the brightness up here at the surface hurt him.

George wasn’t sure how to respond to Stingray’s accusation in a way that wouldn’t aggravate his already precarious situation considering Stingray’s people’s attitude toward terakva, dirt-walkers. He had to say something, though.

“I learned in school that there were disagreements between our peoples.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Stingray replied. “Your people hoard the Gifting of Magic in family bloodlines. Those families use it perversely. They use it to lord power over those without the Gifting. We elves could not be a part of that. There’s blood on the hands of my ancestors now because it’s my ancestors that taught your ancestors how to tap into the Gifting in the first place. What your kind has done with it is sick and depraved, terakva.”

Stingray turned slightly toward George, shielding his eyes with his hand from the Sun’s rays. “The Gifting isn’t a gift for the individual to hoard for himself or herself. The Gifting is a gift for the whole community. We elves don’t live as you do, terakva. Not at all.”

George tried to be positive. “The histories say that before the Society of Sorcerers born came to power, my people and yours cleaned and healed many lands and seas. By working together, much Radie Ashun was cleansed and ecosystems restored.”

“Yes, we elves remember that, but we also remember that the War of Devastation that tainted the world and brought the Radie Ashun was your people’s war, not ours. And what you did to the dragons was unforgivable. For thousands of years, we elves had been watching you, humans you call yourselves. War was the one constant among all your countries, societies, and races.

“None of you could ever have enough just seeking balance with Nature. You were always looking at your neighbor countries, societies, and races with envy, wanting what they had. If neighbors were rich, their wealth was lusted after. If neighbors were poor, the very land they lived on was lusted after, or perhaps their very bodies were wanted to use as slave labor. So, your neighbors they ceased to be, and they became enemies in war.”

George couldn’t argue against Stingray’s facts. They were the same facts George himself had learned in school. When George had been learning it from books and from professors lecturing in classrooms in Sutter’s Village, history seemed so far away in time. After all, these were things that had happened to people centuries ago, or in some cases, millennia ago. Other people who’d had other lives, who’d left behind facts and dates for students to memorize in school for exams.

To Stingray, however, history seemed visceral and personal. The sea elves must have a more oral tradition of passing down history. George tried to imagine what it would have been like if his professors had been entertaining storytellers instead of lecturers. What if instead of a classroom of bored students gathering at school, whole families had come together around a community symbol like a fire to hear the storytellers tell history in compelling ways that made ancestors seem connected to the people living today, as Stingray felt connected to his ancestors.

Suddenly, what appeared to be a great beast, but not one George recognized from any book, emerged about a hundred yards away from the yellow raft. What new nightmarish creature is this? George thought at first. Then, he realized the thing was made of metal, that it had round windows in its sides.

“What’s that?”

“That,” said Stingray with a cocky smile, as if pleased to be showing off, “is our ride, terakva.”

Chapter 19

Stingray slipped over the side of the raft and pushed it toward the metal vehicle, for that is what it was, a vehicle that somehow swam underwater. George, raised in the Society of Sorcerers Born, even though in one of its smaller, nondescript villages, had nevertheless seen some magical marvels in his young life. Once, he had seen a carriage that was animated by magic so that it didn’t need horses to pull it. That had belonged to a very prestigious High Wizard of the Society who had come once to Sutter’s Village to preside over the ceremony of presenting an award to George’s school there for producing the most students who went on to be accepted into the Magic College of Praxis.

George had been eight years old at the time. He remembered thinking the horseless carriage was the most magnificent work of magic he’d ever seen. That paled in comparison to the thought of a vehicle that actually swam beneath the waters of the ocean. Whereas the High Wizard’s carriage had gleamed in the sunlight with gold and silver accents, this submersible vehicle that had come to take George beneath the waves to the sea elves’ realm had a coating of barnacles and slime. It looked no less magnificent to George.

In shape, it was a very elongated ovoid, with a sleek narrow front, obviously to reduce water resistance. It was thicker in the middle and tapered off at its rear end, where a large propeller was positioned to provide the machine with thrust. Since the propeller was a vulnerable spot on the craft, for if it were damaged, the craft would be immobilized, a strong-looking metal crossguard was positioned over it. A sensible precaution, George thought. In a few of the round windows that ran along the craft’s sides, George could see sea elf faces looking out at him with a mixture of curiosity and disgust.

A hatch opened on the top of the submersible. Four elves emerged to help the new passengers aboard. Starstorm did not want to give up his large yellow treasure. At first George didn’t see how it would ever fit into his pockets again. Even if the raft were returned to its original size, the pocket on his shirt had been torn off. The resourceful dragon, however, opened a valve on the raft, letting the air escape. Still, the process of deflating the raft wasn’t nearly as instant as its inflation had been. The elves were not very patient about waiting for George and the dragon to squeeze and push all of the air out of the valve so that the raft, once airless and flattened, could be folded up into something like the size and shaped it had been before.

“What is this substance it’s made of?” George asked as the two of them (mostly George since he had a body much larger and heavier than the tiny dragon) squeezed and pushed air out of the raft on the tiny space available on the top of the submersible, while the impatient elves muttered insults, not realizing that both the human and the p’ckit dragon could understand every invective the elves used.

“It’s called rubber. There’s not a lot of it on Zorethea. This raft came from another world.”

“You’ve been to another world?”

“Several actually. I do have a life, you know.” Starstorm seemed a little indignant.

“You used some kind of portal or spell?”

“I’ve done both actually. And once, I even flew on a ship between stars.”

George desperately wanted to ask Starstorm more about what other worlds were like, and about ships flying between stars, but he didn’t think the already impatient elves would appreciate their work in deflating the raft slowing down for such an involved side conversation. From what George could hear and translate of their speech, they wanted to return to someplace called Wonderdome as quickly as possible. They hadn’t realized that a tiny dragon would delay their return by insisting on carrying out some sort of project on their upper hull folding up a weird, floppy, yellow boat. George knew their presence among the elves wasn’t totally liked or appreciated anyway.

Once the rubber raft was completely deflated and folded up, George simply carried it since the only pockets he had left were his pants pockets, and there was no way it could fit in those, folded or not. A p’ckit dragons pocket dimension is a very large place, but the entrances are at the very bottom of the host’s pockets, so if an object couldn’t fit through the opening to a pocket, forcing it could rip the pocket open and ruin the whole point.

In school, George’s teachers had assured him that though they were super-rare and legendary, to the extent that commoners didn’t believe they even existed anymore, giants still existed in Zorethea in far remote places. George wondered if a p’ckit dragon had ever taken a giant as a host. Their pocket openings would be enormous. A p’ckit dragon fortunate enough to have a giant for a partner would be able to bring a cow or a horse into its pocket world if it so desired. This would be something to discuss with Starstorm later.

The elves put George and Starstorm next to an observation window. George supposed that it kept them out of the way and also would allow them to be impressed by the sea elves’ underwater civilization once they reached it. George settled into the rather comfy chair, covered in some kind of unrecognizable leather. Probably from some marine creature, he mused.

As they descended into the depths, it didn’t take long to leave the sunlit waters behind. Just as George thought a long, boring trip through total darkness lay ahead of him, George started to see the splendorous, glowing, bioluminescent life forms of the sunless deep. He’d never learned about any such thing in school. He wondered if his professors, erudite as they were, even knew that such creatures even existed. George lost track of time next to the dark window, agape at the wonders swimming or wriggling through the waters around him. They weren’t just fish. There were all kinds of creatures of shapes and types George couldn’t even begin to name. Starstorm, too, was silent, as if the moment were spiritual and reverent.

Eventually, George noticed that the total darkness outside the window wasn’t so total anymore. A glow was coming up from beneath the submersible. It was like getting up early on the surface world to watch the sunrise, except instead of a creeping light coming from the horizon, gradually getting brighter and brighter, the light was coming from beneath the deck under George’s very feet. He could hear voices now, the elves, speaking in their Elvish tongue Aelvaris. The captain of the submersible was issuing the orders for the docking procedure for the place called Wonderdome. 

Chapter 20

When it finally came into view, George’s breath was taken away by the splendor and magnificence that was Wonderdome. There were so many lights, and the lights were of so many different colors. Many of them were moving or blinking or both. It was hard at first for his eyes to focus, but George forced them to. He desperately wanted to take in the full scope of the sprawling city, the hugeness of it all. He believed that once he was down there among those lights himself, that he would not be able to grasp the wholeness of it anymore than an ant on a piece of bark on a tree trunk, or crawling across one single leaf, could grasp the wholeness of the entire tree.

So, young George, magic school washout, found himself having an experience that he knew many wizards would kill to have. He was about to be the guest of the sea elves in a domed, undersea city. He would see wonders unknown that were not recorded in any books at the primary school in Sutter’s Village for mage children or even at the Magic College of Praxis. 

As they got closer to the Wonderdome, George could start to get a sense of scale. He saw submersibles that looked like the one he was in and assumed they were the same size. There were much bigger ones, not much wider but a lot longer. It seemed that the design of the submersibles was such that, when made larger, they lost their ovoid shape and become more tubular. Using the submersibles to judge scale and distance, George realized that the Wonderdome was truly gigantic.

The Wonderdome kept out the sea. It was like a giant bubble, though not jiggly or flimsy, obviously able to hold back the pressure of the entire ocean. Inside the dome was an air-filled environment, dominated by buildings so tall that George thought their heights must be dizzying to the occupants. The buildings were also tubular in shape, and covered in windows and lights. It was as if some undersea giant had planted some of the larger submersible tubes in the sea floor, tended them like a garden, and they had grown into the giant buildings. Many of the buildings had bridges to other buildings such that George was sure that a pedestrian could walk around the entire city without ever going down to street level.

Just as human cities George had studied in school had areas inside their walls and areas outside their walls, the Wonderdome was surrounded roundabout by settlements bigger in area than the area under the dome. There were no super-tall buildings outside the dome. That made sense. Ocean currents or large undersea leviathans or behemoths would wreak havoc with them. (Starstorm, who had apparently had experience on other worlds, said that the super-tall buildings would be called skyscrapers if they were on the surface and not underwater.)

The submersible transporting them came on low over these settlements outside the dome. George couldn’t see directly below him since his window was in the side of the craft, but he could see enough of the area of the sea floor further away to see that entire sea elf families lived in one or two story structures constructed from a wide variety of building materials, from stone to coral to giant shells and more things George couldn’t immediately identify. He saw children playing with octopi and stingrays as children on the surface might play with dogs and cats. He saw a team of sea elf men working with ropes made of woven seaweed to hoist large stones in place for one of their houses.

There were no cooking fires of course, for obvious reasons. George assumed the sea elves could eat a lot of their diet raw, but wondered what they did when they did need heat for warmth. Lights were everywhere. There was something like the magical glow globes from the surface lands of the Society of Sorcerers Born mounted on a pole in every neighborhood, but they weren’t exactly like the Society’s glow globes. Their light was softer and pulsed sometimes. The shape of these strange light emitters wasn’t constant, either. They shifted slightly as is they were bioluminescent jellyfish sans tentacles. They came in all colors. Children carried them as they played games with them. Adults lit their way with them as they swam about their business.

At last, George’s submersible neared the Wonderdome itself. Whatever it was made of looked like glass, but it couldn’t be glass. It was here, near the dome that the submersible settled onto the bottom of the sea floor, in a wide area free from buildings where a few other submersible craft of similar size were parked. Stingray and an officer of the crew came to fetch George and Starstorm, to see them through something that George’s understanding of the Elvish Aelvaris tongue translated as “air-locks”.

The officer was the ship’s mage. He said he would help get George through the “air-locks” by casting a water breathing spell on him. George wasn’t as freaked out by this as he might have been. There had been field trips to a pond when he’d been in school on which students had learned how it felt to magically breathe water by means of that particular spell. The mage offered the same spell to Starstorm, who declined, saying that his pocket dimension could be quite waterproof if he wanted it to be. With that, the p’ckit dragon disappeared in George’s pocket.

“Well, terakva,” Stingray said as the ship’s mage began preparing to cast the water breathing spell. “It appears I’ve been made your official guide and host for your stay at Wonderdome, so we’ll be seeing a lot of each other. I’m also responsible for any trouble you cause, so don’t cause any.”

Chapter 21

One of those “air-locks” was involved in exiting the submersible so that George and the elves could make their way to the base of the Wonderdome. Another “air-lock” was built into the Wonderdome at that point. These “air-locking” systems exchanged a water-filled environment for an air-filled one, or vice versa. That way, people and things could be moved into or out of the submersibles or the Wonderdome itself. Genius! thought George.

Moving from the submersible to the Wonderdome was more than a little awkward. The elves swam gracefully and with ease, but George, though he could swim, was not nearly as proficient. Also, George couldn’t really see. The wide entirely-pupil looking eyes of the sea elves were perfectly adapted to this environment, but George’s eyes not so much. After a few moments of floundering about blindly, George felt a strong hand take his. He figured it was Stingray’s since the young elf had been given charge of him. Sure enough, when George was inside the Wonderdome, after its airlock cycle had run, and George’s eyes could focus through air again instead of water, there was Stingray.

As he wiped his eyes, George wanted to take in the magnificent sights inside the ‘Dome up close. He looked up at the nearest of the “skyscrapers”, as Starstorm had called them. It almost gave him vertigo. When he brought his gaze back down he nervously noticed that he and Stingray, who hadn’t left his side, had drawn a crowd of sea elves. They were gawking at him, most of them in astonishment and wonder, but a few with revulsion or contempt.

There was nothing but an awkward silence for many moments, until a strong, but elderly-sounding female voice came from the back of the crowd.

 “Let me through. I will see him now. I mean, not really “see” him, but you know what I mean. Anyway, he needs to see me.”

“Yes, Vaeloryn,” came a deep, male voice. George strained his memory to remember the term vaeloryn. What was it?

There were several murmurs of “vaeloryn”, many of them reverential. The crowd moved aside as if the sea itself had parted as an elderly woman, wearing a beautifully iridescently colored blindfold, was guided by a large male bodyguard to where Stingray and George stood dumbfounded.

Stingray immediately knelt. “Vaeloryn,” he said.

George didn’t want to cause any kind of offense by breaking an important custom, considering how controversial his presence was, so he started to kneel, too. The Oracle (THAT’S the word vaeloryn, oracle, Geroge remembered) reached out, somehow knowing right where George’s shoulder was in spite of her blindness. “Get up, boys. Both of you. You are my guests now. Stingray, you have been gone with your hunting party many days. You should check in with your family. They worry about you. They know that you are brave and strong and fierce, but they worry about you, especially your mother. I will take care of George until you come to my house for dinner tonight.”

Stingray got up but he didn’t raise his gaze to where it would have met the Oracle’s if she had not been blind. “Yes, Vaeloryn.”

“Good,” she responded. “You do know where my house is, don’t you?”

Stingray seemed taken a bit aback. “Yes, Vaeloryn. I do.”

“Good.”

George saw the tension leave the gathered crowd as many tittered at the Oracle’s joke. Of course, the residence of such a person as this would be known to everyone in the city. By pretending otherwise, that her invitation to dinner was just a normal dinner invitation, and not an invitation to such an esteemed person’s house (Perhaps the Oracle was even the ruler here. George had no idea what sea elf government was like.)

“Come, George, walk with me.” The Oracle switched herself from leaning on her bodyguard’s arm for support to leaning on George’s arm for support. She smelled like a strange mixture of fish (but not rancid fish) and flowers. Her skin was more gray in tone than that of younger sea elves, and the tips of her pointed ears drooped slightly. She was still very beautiful in an elegant sort of way, stately and regal.

The crowd that had gathered to see the terakva who had invoked the ancient Pact of the Elves dispersed, no doubt concocting rumors for the local gossip mill about just what the Vaeloryn wanted with him. The bodyguard walked a few paces back, his lean muscular form (swimmer’s type of muscular physique, of course), moved almost silently behind them. George noticed a wicked looking dagger with a bone hilt on his belt.

“Are you hungry, George? Thirsty? Do you need anything? My house is a long walk from here. Tell Starstorm, if he wishes to come out that my offer extends to him, too.”

Starstorm’s head popped out of George’s left pants pocket. “You really are an oracle! Yes, I’d love something. I’m not picky. Seafood is just fine.”

The Oracle smiled. “Good.”

Soon, they were seated resting on a park bench, the bodyguard walking the park, never too far away. The Oracle introduced herself as Nereia. She said they were about halfway to her house, but at her age, she needed rest breaks when walking so far. George knew that elves typically lived a thousand years on average. He thought it might be impolite, but he took a chance and asked, “How old are you?”

“I am one thousand and twenty-nine, young man.” She smiled. “Yes, I made it over a thousand. I owe that to clean living, I think.” Then, she laughed. “I am one thousand and twenty-nine, but if you think it’s due to clean living then I have some dragon eggs to sell you. Ha ha!”

George loved her immediately. Immensely old, but filled still with the full fire of life.

Her smile faded and she looked serious for a moment. “You will be my last student, George. I have seen it.”

“Student?”

“Tactically, George, what is the difference between a bow and a sword?”

“A sword is a melee weapon, but a bow shoots a target at range.”

“Very good, at range, beyond where the warrior can reach with his own hands. A teacher’s students are her arrows, George. I have shot many into the future past where my own lifespan will reach. I will take one more shot with you, and you will change this world.”

“But, what are you going to teach me? I don’t have the Gifting of Magic.”

“I know that, George, but you don’t need that for your destiny. You are to become sylkryn.”

“Sylkryn?” George didn’t know that word, and it wasn’t just that he had forgotten it like he had forgotten vaeloryn before. He was sure he had never known this word at all.

“Sciencemancer.” Nereia said.

Chapter 22

“This is so good!” Starstorm said. The small dragon let out a resounding belch that George thought should be physiologically impossible for such a tiny creature. The elf children seated at the table laughed, the gills on their necks fluttering as they did so.

Starstorm sat directly on the long, koralys table as Nereia entertained her guests at dinner. A child’s doll furniture had been arranged so the diminutive guest could have his own designated dining area within the larger dining area. George couldn’t believe Starstorm’s manners. The dragon, though direct, even blunt, in his speech most of the time, was usually the epitome of manners when it came to formal etiquette in situations of high society.

When no request to be pardoned for his offense seemed forthcoming from the dragon, George did it for him. “Please excuse my companion. Apparently being lost overboard at sea and facing a kraken has made him forget his manners.” 

The table was huge in size. It could easily have seated thirty people. The koralys material that it was made from was a form of polished coral. Polished to a glassy sheen, it shimmered with iridescent reds, blues, and greens, rivaling marble’s elegance. Embedded bioluminescent flecks and enchanted runes made it glow, reflecting Nereia’s Vaeloryn status and Wonderdome’s splendor.

In addition to Nereia, George, and Stingray, there were several other guests at the dinner that evening. George couldn’t help but think of it as evening, being a terakva, because that’s the time he naturally associated with having a formal dinner like this, and also because he was so tired he felt it MUST be evening. Surely, sleeping time would come soon.

With no natural cycling between hours of daylight and hours of daylight’s absence, however, the sea elves didn’t experience day and night in their culture. They needed about as much sleep as humans did, however. Their society’s system of time and scheduling was based on a twenty-four hour clock with three eight-hour periods: the Period of Work, the Period of Family, and the Period of Sleep. What George was thinking of as evening and dinner time was about a third of the way through the Period of Family.

Prime Minister Moray, one of the other dinner guests George and Starstorm had been introduced to earlier, opened his mouth to speak, but Starstorm beat him to it. “George, you’re very educated, but you must understand that it’s all book learning. There are things that you’re only going to know through life experience, and not everything that should be included in textbooks makes it into textbooks. You’re thinking of surface elf etiquette. Of course I’d never burp at a surface elf table, but here among sea elf culture, it’s expected. It means that you’re so pleased by the meal that you’re willing to show your joy by allowing some of your body’s precious gasses to escape.”

Precious gasses? George thought. This culture will definitely require some adaptation on my part for as long as I’m here.

“Starstorm is correct,” the Prime Minister said, “I would never burp at a surface elf diplomatic function.” Throughout the dinner, the Prime Minister had politely yet firmly grilled George, asking a lot of questions about the Fothergill family. George, a scion of the aristocratic Society of Sorcerer’s Born, knew that the Prime Minister was trying to figure out how important George might be in the surface world society, assessing if George represented a threat, a mere curiosity, or an opportunity that the Prime Minister could politically leverage somehow. How George hated politics! He always had. Even down here, in the sea elf society that was so different from the surface world, there was politics.

He supposed that if there weren’t politics, then a bodyguard wouldn’t be needed for such a revered figure as the Oracle. But then, why would someone who could see the future need a bodyguard? George resolved to ask millenarian just that in a more private moment.

As the conversation progressed, much ado was made by some of the guests that George’s last name included the word “gill”.

“If his human last name contains the word “gill” then perhaps there is something to this prophetic vision of Vaeloryn Nereia’s,” said Riptide, one the Prime Minister’s assistants, “or perhaps not.”

One of the children became indignant on Nereia’s behalf. “My Nana’s visions are never wrong.”

Everyone looked at Nereia. The child had spoken out of turn for a child. Children, at such an event, should not speak unless spoken to. In that regard the sea elven culture and the Society of Sorcerers Born were the same.

“Mina,” Nereia, gently addressed the child. “While it is true that none of Nana’s visions have ever failed…” there was a harrumph from Riptide, as if he needed a moment because he had slightly choked. The Prime Minister’s assistant grabbed a glass of water, and pretended to address his situation while gesturing with his free hand for the Vaeloryn to continue and not mind him as he recovered.

“While they have never failed,” Nereia continued, “there are many of my visions that have not had their time come yet. Some of them have been waiting centuries to come true. It’s normal for people to have doubts.” She smiled graciously at Riptide in conciliation.

Riptide was enough of a diplomat to return the gesture of conciliation with one of his own. “Let us toast George Fothergill, junior, of the humans, our guest here in Wonderdome.”

“To George Fothergill, junior, of the humans,” they all said as they toasted, even Starstorm, who caught his eye and winked at him.

One voice stood out in particular amongst all the others, a young female voice that sounded like the essence of music itself. George wanted to hear that voice more, saying his name over and over with her elven trill as she pronounced “Fothergill.”

The voice’s owner sat several seats down from George on the same side of the long table, so it made sense why he hadn’t seen her yet. Her dark green hair spilled down her blue shoulders. Her lips were green that matched her hair exactly.

George had risen to give a short speech as custom would dictate in his society (and he supposed the elven society, too) when he was the subject of a toast. Upon noticing the green-haired girl, though, all thoughts of what he’d been quickly composing in his head to say were suddenly gone.

He stood up alone, as the whole room stared at him expectantly.

Chapter 23

To prevent the silent pause from dragging on awkwardly, George just opened his mouth and started rambling. Whatever he had been planning to say, he just couldn’t remember and there wasn’t time to organize his thoughts all over again now. As George Fothergill, Sr.’s son, he had been to enough of these kinds of functions in the Society of Sorcerers Born to wing it, or so he hoped. He remembered one of the techniques one of his father’s friends had taught him. Tell a story. The audience won’t mind if they hear information they already know, so long as it’s told entertainingly. So, that’s what he did.

“When I was snatched from the deck of The Singsong by the kraken, I thought I was going to die, painfully. But, thanks to you, dear friends, whose ancestors were friends of my ancestors, I didn’t. I shall be eternally grateful.”

There was applause. George sat down relieved that was over. That should have been a long enough remark to accept a toast.

“Mommy,” Mina, apparently Nereia’s granddaughter, asked her mother, Nereia’s daughter, next to her, “was George grabbed by the one of the baby krakens or one of the parent krakens?”

Baby krakens? George thought. There are bigger ones?

Mina’s mother deferred the question to Stingray. “Stingray was in the kraken hunting party. Why don’t you ask him?”

Mina looked at Stingray in wide-eyed admiration. “You hunted the kraken that grabbed George?”

Stingray wiped his mouth with a napkin before answering. “Yes, little one.” He smiled. It was hard not to smile at Mina. She was adorable.

“All by yourself?”

Stingray laughed. “Oh, no! I’m not that mighty. My hunting mates and I partnered with a pod of orcas. Orcas hate the krakens, too.”

“Everybody hates the krakens.”

“They do.”

“But the one that grabbed George was just one of the babies, right? It wasn’t the Mother Kraken or the Great Kraken?”

“No, it wasn’t the Mother or the Great Kraken. Those two stay in the Dark Trench and don’t come out.”

“What if they did?” Mina asked dramatically.

Stingray looked over at Prime Minister Moray. “Then the Prime Minister would sound the alarm and all Wonderdome would fight.”

The Prime Minister didn’t seem to appreciate being drawn into the conversation with the child, but, astute politician that he was, he rose to the occasion and spoke hearteningly to Mina. “Wonderdome has the bravest warriors in the world. Perhaps, if one of the Greater Krakens were to attack here, we’d end it once and for all.”

Mina’s younger brother suddenly got a mischievous glint in his eye. He lunged at his sister to give her a jump scare. “Rarr! I’m the Great Kraken! I’m gonna eat you!” he yelled as he grabbed her. Her response, a scream, was no doubt very satisfying to the rapscallion, who laughed jovially at the result of his prank.

“I don’t need to be Vaeloryn to see that the children have had all the time at a formal dinner they can take for one night,” Nereia said. Koralyn, why don’t you take them to their chambers for story time?”

Koralyn, Nereia’s daughter and Mina’s mother, took her own two children as well as several others from the table and left the dining room, leaving only adults.

“I guess the children will miss dessert,” Riptide said. “More for us.”

George wondered what could possibly be for dessert down there in Wonderdome. Humans used so much sugar and dairy, but sugar cane grew up there on the surface, and the sea elves obviously didn’t have any cattle.

When dessert was brought out, it was delicious–whale milk cheesecake. Whales were mammals, of course. The sea elves harvested whale milk just as humans on the surface milked cows. In place of sugar, certain deep-sea kelp species produced a sweet, syrupy sap, similar to maple sap. This sap could be harvested and concentrated into a thick, amber syrup which was the main sweetener of the sea elves’ cuisine.

“The krakens have been growing in numbers lately. The Mother and Great Kraken have been busy. They are planning something,” Nereia said.

“It’s an especially prodigious breeding season for them. That’s all. Even ancient beasts can get horny now and then, right?” Riptide opined.

“Both the Mother and the Great Kraken will die soon,” Nereia intoned portentously. “George will have something to do with their deaths.”

All eyes started at George. Before anyone could say anything, Nereia continued. “After both the Mother and Great Kraken die, then I will die. No one is to tell the children, or anyone outside this room right now.”

The guests couldn’t hold themselves in any longer, the table erupted with whispers, gasps, and side conversations.

George didn’t like being suddenly thrust into the spotlight yet again. First, he was to become a Sciencemancer student, now he was expected to kill krakens that were the much greater-sized parents of the one he’d been almost killed by before? Why had Nereia chosen to make these public pronouncements now, in front of so many people?

Prime Minister Moray’s eyes met George’s for just a moment, as if appraising George all over again. Stingray looked shocked. Starstorm smiled brightly and gave George a thumb’s up gesture. But, the most captivating gaze of all that met George’s eyes, was that of the green-haired, melodically-voiced girl. She looked, in all her alien beauty, green hair, all-pupil eyes, even the delicate gills on her neck, like the most beautiful female George had seen since he’d fallen in love with Melindra back in Sutter’s Village.

She even spoke to him, her voice somehow carrying over the cacophony of the confused gathering. “You do have great things ahead of you, George Fothergill, jr. I know it.”

Chapter 24

Nereia came to fetch George from his chambers before the Period of Sleep was officially over, accompanied, as always, by her bodyguard. It was the sea elf equivalent of waking someone up before sunrise. The whole palatial estate of the Oracle was quiet. They didn’t wake Stingray, but left him snoring away in his bed, which, like George’s, consisted of the shell of a giant clam filled with soft, mattress-like material that conformed very comfortably to the body of the sleeper. George rose and dressed. Soon, they were gone.

Nereia gave George a tour of Wonderdome in the last couple of hours of the Period of Sleep. Unlike the surface world, with its cycles of day and night, the ambient light in Wonderdome never changed. People in their homes would turn out lights for sleeping, but outside in the streets, the light was the same as the busiest marketplace hour. This made it seem like a ghost town to George since shops were closed and there were few, if any, pedestrians about. The most common other beings they saw were constables, who wore brightly colored sashes to identify them as law enforcement over theri mostly naked forms. None of the sea elves wore much clothing, though none practiced full nudity.

They started their tour by entering the tallest of all the city’s skyscrapers. They entered a small, moving room that Nereia called an “elevator” that took them to an observation deck at the very top of the building.

“We’ll start with what you’d call on the surface, the bird’s eye view,” the millenarian said as she began pointing and acquainting George with the layout of the city. There were no designated residential districts. Houses were sprinkled everywhere, with people usually living as close to their work as possible. People whose occupations took them outside the ‘Dome lived near one of its airlocks. Those who labored as craftsmen lived in or near the Crafting Quarter. Those who worked with submersible ships lived near the ship yards. Each of the skyscrapers was like a small city unto itself.

Nereia pointed down the side of the building they were viewing the city from. “We’re taking that bridge next. There’s something in the next building you need to see.”

In spite of his weariness from not quite getting enough sleep, George followed eagerly. They took the elevator down to the level of the bridge and followed the bridge over to the neighbor building.

In the neighbor building, they were greeted by metal, humanoid automatons that could speak with apparently full sentience. They didn’t look like any form of golem George had ever seen in the books at school.

“Greetings, Vaeloryn and associate. How can I assist you?”

“This is George Fothergill, jr. He is in training to become sylkryn. Learn him well. He is tylufu.”

The automaton seemed most impressed by this introduction and inclined his head to study George from a variety of angles.

“I would like to take George to the Room of Histories.”

“Of course, right this way.”

As they walked through the buildings, at various places inset into the walls, there were sections of glass, but they were neither transparent nor mirrors. They displayed scenes of other times and places, some underwater and some on the surface. Scrying, George thought.

They rode in another elevator to a room clearly marked in elven as the Room of Histories.

“May I assist you in finding the exact history files you want?” asked the automaton.

“No, thank you. We’ll be fine.”

“Excellent. Please do not hesitate to summon me or one of my colleague units if you require anything further.” With that, the mechanical marvel left.

“What kind of golem is that?” George asked.

“Oh, he’s not a golem. He’s a robot.”

“Robot?”

“I’m going to show you what science can really do, George. Are you ready for that?”

“But science is just stage magic, parlor tricks performed by charlatans.” George looked dubiously in the direction that the “robot” had walked off.

“No, George. That’s what the Society wants people to think. Those who know history know better. We’ve preserved history here in this room. The Society says science is nothing of significance, just stage tricks. But don’t they also teach that science was responsible for the Great War of Devastation? How can both of those things be true? How can science be both nothing significant and something that enabled the Great War of Devastation? Does that make any sense?”

“No, it doesn’t. It can’t be both.”

“If you realize that, then you’re ready. Sit down, George, this will take awhile.”

As George sat in a comfy chair, he thought the room reminded him of a study, except that there were no shelves of books. Nereia was standing next to one of the walls, moving one of her hands along one of the glass scrying devices. Just as George was about to ask another question, she let out a satisfied “a-ha” and the lights in the room flickered.

In the middle of the room, a three dimensional lightshow appeared accompanied by sound that came from all around. A narrator’s voice started speaking Aelvaris elvish, which George could have followed with some effort, but Nereia tapped the glass in front of her again and the language changed to the surface world common tongue. Clearly, she didn’t want her student to miss anything.

“…history of our world, known in most cultures and languages as Zorethea, is a history of great changes, of cycles of war and destruction, as well as exploration, achievement, and prosperity. Here, we present you with an overview of the history of Zorethea.”

George sat for over an hour, absorbing much more than he imagined history ever was, much more than he had ever learned in school in Sutter’s Village.