Chapter 8
1970 Words
8
I swallowed the lump in my throat and gathered my scattered thoughts into a few scattered words. “H-how? When? Where?”
He chuckled. “Quite a while ago, and that’s a story too long to tell at the moment.”
Caius struggled to his feet and studied Sage with narrowed eyes. “Who are you really?”
Sage shrugged. “Just your average traveler.”
Caius shook his head. “No average traveler could summon a storm that powerful that quickly. Only-” He froze and his eyes widened.
“Only what?” Sage asked him.
He narrowed his eyes and his face hardened. “What is your full name?”
Sage smiled. “My full name is Storm Sage, Bringer of Bolts, Lord of Lightning, and Keeper of the Medallion of Tempestia.”
There was silence for a moment, and then I snorted. “Seriously? That’s your name here?”
He stretched to his full height and frowned at me. “It is, and don’t tempt me to legally change yours to match it, young lady.”
I glared at him. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Wouldn’t I?”
“Wait a moment,” Caius spoke up as he pointed at Sage. “You’re telling me you’re Storm Sage, the most powerful sorcerer of the last five hundred years?”
A little bit of air left Sage as he wrinkled his nose. “Hardly only five hundred. The number should be closer to a thousand.”
“But you vanished eighty years ago!” Caius argued.
“Seventy-nine and three quarters, to be exact,” Sage corrected him.
I leaned back and scrutinized my grandfather. “You’re seriously that important here?”
“Is that so hard to believe?” he countered.
I snorted. “It’s just a little hard to swallow that an historian could be a powerful magician.”
“An historian?” Caius interrupted us. “You chose to leave the road behind to be an historian?”
Sage shrugged. “It was decent pay and kept my family safe, at least until this Gargan fellow came barging into our lives. However, that’s not quite the most important matter at hand. We have to hurry along or we may never find their trail.”
He turned away and proceeded up the road. Caius stepped up to my side and watched Sage leave with a mixture of disbelief and pensive thought. His voice was soft and low. “Even his aura is hidden. . .”
“What’s that mean?” I asked him.
He shook himself and looked down at me. “An aura is a flow of energy that comes from people and things with powerful magic.”
“So like what Sage saw around you?” I guessed.
“Do you have any magical abilities like your grandfather? I don’t sense anything around you.” He’d evaded my question, but I let it drop.
I snorted and shook my head. “No. I can’t even work the magic of an electric toaster.”
“An ‘electric toaster?’” he repeated.
I waved off his question. “It’s nothing. Anyway, Sage is right, we need to get going.”
We caught up to my swiftly-walking grandfather and I sidled up to his side. “So are we going to meet a lot of hags on the road?” I asked him.
“Not often, but there are other dangers along these routes,” he warned me.
I winced. “Like what else?”
“Dragons who kidnap beautiful damsels,” Caius spoke up as he joined us on my other side.
“I think I can handle those,” I quipped.
Sage swept his eyes over the vast, dipping plains before us. “It’s been some years since I went over these, but during our adventures we met vampires, ghosts, nymphs, naiads, and the occasional doppelganger.” His eyes took on a wistful, if slightly lecherous, look. “One of them was particularly amorous and tried to seduce me.”
“So no angels?” I joked.
He chuckled. “No, nor any gods, though there were plenty of people who thought they were.”
“Like you with your abilities?” I teased.
He puffed out his chest a little. “They’re not the work of an amateur, if I do say so myself, though I must admit meeting a hag isn’t a safe endeavor.” He furrowed his brow. “It was rather strange to meet one so boldly out in the day, though. She must have been desperate for sustenance.”
“Could that thing have really taken our souls?” I asked him.
“In a heartbeat,” he assured me.
“That hag said something about you,” I mused as I looked up at Caius. “She called you a ‘dragon cult?’”
“Dragon cull,” Sage corrected me.
“So what does that mean?” I asked my two companions.
Sage coughed into his hand. “It’s a rather-well, a rather rude-”
“It means I’m a dragon that’s been rejected by my own kind,” Caius explained.
“She could tell that?” I asked him.
“Dragons don’t usually travel without other dragons, much less with two humans,” he revealed.
I wrinkled my nose. “Isn’t that kind of racist?”
Sage smiled. “Species tend to keep to their own even in our world, pumpkin. However, as enlightening as this moral and philosophical discussion is, we should be going.” He started on his way and didn’t look back as he called to us. “Come along now, children!”
Caius and I glanced at each other. We both shrugged and hurried after his quick stride. The winding road took us across the grass-covered field and past trees that I recognized as elm and oak. Familiar is a welcome sight among the unfamiliar, but it was also perplexing.
“So, um, Sage?” I spoke up as I wracked my mind for how to phrase this question with Caius present. “The trees here are the same as home, right?”
“Yes, though there are many other varieties that aren’t native to our home,” he told me.
“So is there anything else especially different about this place? Besides old ladies trying to kill us at every turn?”
He lifted his eyes to the blue sky. “The stars are rather different.”
“The stars are different than where you’re from?” Caius asked us.
Sage glanced over his shoulder and chuckled. “We’re from a rather long way off.”
“I’ve traveled a good distance myself and never found the stars to be different,” Caius mused.
“Where have you traveled, young man?” Sage wondered as he slowed down so we walked shoulder-to-shoulder with him.
Caius smiled. “Oh, just a few places. Mostly the cities.”
“Then perhaps you visited the Trails?” Sage asked him.
“A few times.”
“Where are the Trails?” I spoke up.
“A rather depressed section of one of the major cities,” my grandfather told me.
I looked at our surroundings. “So what’s this place called?”
“The Plains of Fiora,” Sage revealed as he wistfully glanced around us. “Legend says that a goddess blessed the flowers to be ever-blooming as a gift to her mortal lover before she ascended to heaven.”
My eyes widened. “Is it true?”
Sage laughed and shook his head. “I highly doubt it, but I must admit the flowers blooming year-round, even in the winter, leaves me puzzled.”
“A magic user who doesn’t believe in a little godliness?” Caius mused.
“So long as the gods leave me to my own devices I will leave them in my books,” Sage assured him. He nodded at the road ahead of us. “But I believe we’re coming to the village of Woller where a seamstress of exceptional quality awaits us.”
We crested one of the short hills and found ourselves looking down into a small hamlet. A group of two dozen huts huddled together near a passing stream. Their roofs were made of thatched reeds taken from the water and stone mixed with wood posts were their walls. A few gardens grew behind the homes with their trees full of fruits and their vegetables riping on the vine. To the left was the start of a small range of mountains with tree-covered sides and scragged tops.
Sage hitched up his pants and sighed. “Now let us hope she hasn’t passed on.”
We walked down into the sleepy village, and I looked from left to right. Most of the adults sat just inside the open doors to their hovels. Their narrowed eyes, glistening in the strong sun, watched us with tense observation. A pair of children sat outside one of the houses.
“Children!” I heard their mother hiss at them from inside the house.
The children scurried to their bare feet and both limped painfully into the house. Their mother, also bare of foot, glared at us before she slammed the door shut.
“Friendly village,” I mused.
“Outsiders often cause more trouble than benefit,” Sage told me as we neared the end of the short main street. He stopped before a small hut with a porch roof. Beneath the roof, seated in a rocker, was an old woman. She looked worse than the hag. Sage smiled and walked up to her. “Are you not Miss Nelly?”
She narrowed her eyes at him as she continued to push herself back and forth with her bare feet. “What if I am?”
“Do you still weave your wonders, old mother?” Sage asked her.
The old woman stopped her rocking and eyed us with a careful, searching look. “Strange weather we’ve been having.”
Sage smiled and nodded. “Quite strange.”
Her gaze rested on the medallion around his neck. “Could be the work of a magician.”
“It might, Miss Nelly, but we’re not looking for magic, but for clothes,” he reminded her.
“We’re looking for a magician,” she snapped as she raised one bare foot. The old woman wiggled her toes at us. “Someone’s made off with our shoes.”
“Can’t you make more?” I suggested.
Nelly stomped her foot back to the ground and glared at me. “Don’t you think we’ve tried that? Those get stolen, too! And all the night after they’re finished!” She pounded one fist against the arm of her rocker. “Blast that thief, and his curse!”
“What curse?” Caius inquired.
She stabbed a finger at her bare feet. “That monster steals our shoes and curses the owner with these terrible pains! I feel like I’m being stabbed all over my soles!”
“It can’t be that bad,” Caius argued.
Nelly whipped her head up and narrowed her eyes. “Not ‘too bad,’ young man? Not too bad?” She gingerly rose to her feet and took a careful step toward him.
A strange movement at her feet made me look down. My eyes widened as I beheld the flesh of her feet push out like it was a bag of Lego blocks being squeezed. Her toes twisted and twitched, and she nearly twisted her ankle to escape the terrible flow of the bulges.
Nelly’s face twisted in pain and with a frustrated cry she fell back into her chair. She clutched her chest and clenched her teeth as her eyes flickered up to him. “Does that prove my point, young man? No one is spared this horror. The men are unable to thresh the fields, the women to hoe their gardens. Even the children can hardly stand to run, though the poor darlings try.”
“We would be glad to help, but we’re rather in a hurry,” Sage told her.
My jaw hit the ground. “Gr-Sage! We should help them!”
He turned and the stern look in his eyes made me shrink back. “We have other matters to attend to, remember?”
I stabbed a finger at where the children had disappeared into their house. “But children are being hurt! We have to help!”
Sage studied me with a strange, faraway look in his eyes before he hardened his face and returned his attention to Nelly. “Then that is the only way we might acquire clothes?”
Miss Nelly eyed us with her sharp wisdom. “There’s always geld, but my services don’t come cheap. That fiend’s gone and stolen some of my best cloth. And it’ll cost extra so we might hire a magician.”
“How much extra?” Sage wondered.
She leaned forward. “How much geld do you have?”
“Not an eld to our name,” Sage told her.
Nelly sneered and dropped back against her rocker. “Then off with you! Shoo! I’ll have nothing more to do with such heartless and cheap creatures!”
“Is there nothing you won’t take in lieu of geld?” Sage persisted.
She rubbed her chin. “That would depend on if you know magic, for I wager normal folk can’t catch this fiend. We’ve tried, and he has always eluded us.”
Sage pursed his lips, but bowed his head. “We do have some talent in that area.”
“Then you’ll rid us of this fiend?” she asked him.
He nodded. “We accept.”
- Writer
