Greed is Good Part 1: Mostly Very Dull (1st Draft)

Book Review: About Last Night by T. P... Greed is Good Part 2: Doug the Werewo...

Greed is Good Part 1: Mostly Very Dull (1st Draft)

This is post #1 of 1 in the series “Greed is Good”

Greed is Good is, or will be, the third story in the Case Files of Douglas Brodie contemporary fantasy series and takes place a short time after the events in ZombieMart, the first draft of which you can read right here.

Being a wizard is mostly very dull, at least when I'm not being chased by werewolves or attacked by zombies, and consists of lots of reading accompanied by cautious use of magic. Why so cautious? The more you learn about magic, the more you learn what can go wrong which, it turns out, is almost everything.

Look, even casting the simplest of spells you're messing with the bindings of the universe, to say it is potentially disastrous would be understatement. Fortunately that sort of business is normally self-limiting because it takes a lot of time to learn how to channel the power to cause real damage. By the time you do you're so terrified you don't want to do anything.

Which is why Saturday night saw me in my living room once again scouring the internet. Because, while I can just about get by in a couple or three languages, my knowledge of Elamite is non-existent. Strangely Google doesn't auto translate languages that have been dead for over two thousand years, I guess there has to be some sort of cut off point.

Magic has a very, very long history. In fact, it is inherent in the fabric of the universe and has existed longer than humans themselves. So it's not surprising that there are some very old magical items floating around. What no one has ever been able to explain to my satisfaction though is why older artifacts seem to accumulate magical energy.

But they do, which makes them very dangerous. Like, for example, the medallion I was studying at that moment. I'm no metallurgist so I don't know if the medallion was two thousand and some years old as the use of the Elamite language for the inscriptions implied, but it was definitely old. And I'd see how powerful it was. The biggest question on my mind though was what it was doing in Charles Town, West Virginia.

Figuring out what it said was the first step to unraveling that particular mystery. Honestly, at this point I was being stubborn. I should contact Mercedes and have an expert do the research. It would be quicker, easier, and be an admission that I couldn't do this myself.

I needed to stop messing around though because something was going on. I had moved here for a quiet life, but the last few months had been far from that. Werewolves, zombies, what was next vampires? Okay now I'm just being silly.

It would be arrogant, or is that egotistical, to assume that all this was happening because of me, but it's also true that, courtesy of a certain geas, I am something of a magic magnet. And if I didn't figure out what was going on, I was liable to end up dead.

I studied the ornate silver medallion for a moment as though merely peering at it would somehow unlock all its secrets. It was a big, chunky thing, not something you could wear discreetly, but the Elamite cuneiform had been delicately inscribed around its circumference.

A little magical examination might be able to find out more. Or it might just blow up my house. Remember what I said about how wizards use magic cautiously? I had already seen what this thing was capable of in the hands of an untrained person, imagine the damage a trained but stupid wizard might do.

And because I am just that damned stupid, I figured I'd give it a shot. Now, I'm not completely crazy so I took a few precautions first, starting with a circle. Well, more of an ellipse really because I don't have a steady hand for drawing. But the truth is that the exact shape isn't the point of a circle, it's the lines themselves that matter they conduct or contain power. Circles just look better.

Anyway, circle drawn, shields prepared, I examined the medallion again. This time I reached out with my mind and looked at the lines of energy radiating from it. It was like staring into the sun. The amount of power contained in this thing pretty much convinced me it was as old as it appeared.

There were… layers… of magic wrapped around this thing. Different spells, different energy sources, all somehow intermingling. Years of magic use and spell-crafting had left their mark on this item. Part of me really wanted to just spend the next decade unraveling the medallion's history and all the events it had been involved in.

But I needed to focus. I was looking for evidence of recent owners not historical ones, and by owners I didn't mean teenage suckers conned into using the medallion. No, the last owner of this medallion had been a skilled wizard, and with some care I ought to be able to detect the signature of their magic at work here.

Assuming I didn't blow myself up first, because the magical power in the medallion had an unstable feel. But to find out what, I needed to burrow deeper into the layers, which was asking for trouble.

I was just about to do it when the doorbell rang, which may have saved my life. Or not because when I opened the door I found myself face to chest with Doug the werewolf.

Yes, I know our names are similar, but I don't like being called Doug. My name is Douglas. Also I'm not a werewolf. Also Doug doesn't like me very much. Which made his presence outside my house not only surprising but more than a little alarming. Because the last time I'd seen him, he'd run me out of Shepherdstown.

Next: Part 2

Zombiemart is weekly serial sequel to The Wolves of West Virginia, which is available on Kindle.