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Four primary streams split from magic’s ancient wellspring: wizardry, necromancy, alchemy, and hexegy.
The ring was in every way unremarkable. It was not a cherished heirloom, nor uncommonly arrayed, nor expensive to replace, and yet War had been devastated by the loss because what distinguished the modest band was its history of contact with his wife: The ring was suffused with tender caresses, clasped hands, and stroked hair. As such, he believed it the rarest metal in existence.
The daily mechanism of their marriage was powered by reflexive faith rather than constant reassurance.
I’ve read one or two shelves of your formative myths. Dreadful, dreamy, self-important twaddle!” The dragon laughed, the sound as sonorous as a collapsing bridge. “And far-fetched! So many ambivalent parables about clumsy gods and little men knocking titans on their ears.”
Before he had met Isolde, Warren had been possessed by a rash tendency to rush out and embrace the agenda and habits of the first stranger who’d speak kindly to him, often to disastrous effect. His deep-seated need for comradery had, among other youthful calamities, driven him into the criminal arms of bootleggers, seen him hired on by a traveling circus as a strongman, and had signed him on for a six-month stint at sea on the occasion of his twentieth birthday. War’s mother liked to say he would gladly befriend a hungry cannibal if it saved him from that most dire of all fates: solitude.
In recent years, the study of magic had been recast by the culture as a singularly dreary endeavor. The wizards that flowed from the cartoonist’s pen were uniformly aged, disheveled, and huddled in musty libraries. They had birds in their beards and rats in their heads.
After a speechless mile, Warren at last stopped, turned, and embraced his wife as entirely and snuggly as a wet robe. He kissed her neck, her ear, her mouth and said with a tear-brightened gaze: “Never, never again. I can’t believe I put you in a sack with a dragon! When I saw all that blood, I wished it was mine. It felt like mine! I thought I was dead, and then you climbed out, and…” He repeated his kisses and she returned them. Had they been home, and not posted in the road, she might’ve invited him to greater expressions of his love and relief.
The proprietor of the Spillway Public House, Mr. Pyle, wore the raddled look of a man who’d been disappointed to discover he’d survived another night’s sleep.
Pretend that you are worth the trouble until you convince yourself that you are.”
It took another step or two for Iz to recover her voice. “What was that book about… puddings?” Warren blustered at the affront. “Puddings? It was Chef Benoit’s Anatomy of a Sponge Cake. It’s been out of print for nearly thirty years. It’s a lost treasure!” “Cake is cake, darling. It’s just a delivery system for frosting.” Warren gasped. “Heretic!”
“Luck is the universe’s thumb placed upon the unequal scales of history. Luck is the primordial sea from which all magic—coherent and entire—once sprang. It is not upon providence but the pivot of misfortune that all existence turns.”
The Hexologists—hunters of wraiths, slayers of bugbears, champions of the common pleb, determined sleuths in search of the truth—at least, when the truth pays the fare.”
The Wilbies kept few secrets from each other as a matter of preference, habit, and convenience. Secrets were burdensome and demanding of regular attention; a secret had to be nursed at odd hours and dandled in the night. Still, Isolde had always been forthright with her mate that there were things she was obliged to keep to herself—secrets that were not hers to share. Warren knew that his beloved carried around a mystery or two.
He decided to introduce a distraction. “Did I mention we received a copy of Mr. Magnussen’s new book in the post this morning? The publisher sent it over for comment or endorsement, should you feel so inspired.” Isolde’s cheeks brightened with amused umbrage. “Oh, did he? Did he really? Well then, I simply must write Mr. Magnussen an approbation, one that will make the angels sing! His editor will weep tears of gratitude! The Publisher’s Guild will declare a moratorium on publication to give his magnum opus room to breathe! Now, what rhymes with piss pot?”
Does it really matter who sits on the throne in a nation of ashes? Why even fight over such a distinction? Who wants to be the lord of soot? The world is burning. How long can we indulge our neutrality? How long until we have to choose a side?”
“So what? Life is short and lively, and death is long and deathly boring. If I have to spend eighty-six years staring at the rumps of a few pigeons to get the answers I want, it seems a reasonable trade.”
Felivox seemed not to hear him. “And somewhere along the way, one of you lot decided that our fire bladders cured impotency and our scales reversed hair loss. Within a generation, your merchant class hunted us nearly to extinction just so you could grind us up and sell us at market. And when it turned out that our guts gave you cancer and our hide carried leprosy, the cities sent their armies to eradicate our dwindling population for being harbingers of disease!
