September 9
Date Nite
496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjdxy5OMtAq
I wound up wearing the same basic clothes I always do. It's something kind of drilled into me. It becomes important for a wizard to be able to identify themselves as a wizard, so most of us are taught to develop a distinctive style of dress, e.g. the pointy hat. Should a wizard for some reason find himself traveling by road and not magical flying cleaning implements, the hat will signify to any potential bandits that causing trouble for the person underneath it is a good way of getting your arse turned into a decorative carved gourd and then set on fire. This is also good for the wizard because honestly, we are not really that good at fighting. The average wizard would not have a chance of defending himself from anything more dangerous than three or four well-armed men, a dozen untrained peasants with torches and pitchforks or a really mean housecat. The arrangement works out well for all parties involved.
Further we tend to associate particular clothing items and magical implements to best create a particular identity for ourselves, something to distinguish us from our various arcane competitors. I was always a traditionalist, so I garb myself with the pointy hat, the carved wooden staff and the fur-lined greatcoat large enough to lose a small child in. I also have a scarf that I sometimes wear, that's made of all different colors sewn together that can wrap around my neck two or three times and still reach down to drag against the floor and… and I'm stalling.
The truth is that this is the first engagement I've had with a woman since Witney died, and… well, even back then we didn't exactly have a lot of time for dating. On top of that, I didn't know anything about this woman except that she possessed a boat, a merchant fishery enterprise and an incredibly high tolerance for uncoordinated wizardly shenanigans destroying their profit margin. I couldn't even remember her name. Did it start with a J?
No, no it couldn't have. They hadn't invented those yet.
Dina, that was it. I had actually done quite a bit of research on it but it just kept slipping in and out of my mind.
Fox had to do quite a bit of convincing to get me to go along with this. I had backed all the way out three times only for the crafty little butler to draw me right back in. He went so far as to pay for a two week stay on Capreae as his final incentive. Hell, even I wasn't awkward enough to pass up the imperial pleasure villas.
And so that brings us up to the pleasant moment. I sat in the tower's meager dining room, on the opposite side of a small wooden table from Dina. She looked much like she had the last time I saw her, but she had traded her plain green dress for a sleeveless, forest green dress that was trimmed with gold and clinched with a wide leather belt. She smiled at me over a glass of strong beer and I smiled back, for all the good that did. Neither of us had said more than fifteen words to the other.
I swallowed a large gulp of beer, hoping in vain that it would calm my nerves. I could feel sweat beading between my skin and my shroud. My tower was ancient stone, solid, thick and still. In this edifice, sound was deadened; any noise from outside this room was swallowed up by the stone like a sarcophagus consuming flesh. Fox was in the very next room, putting the finishing touches on tonight's meal, but I could hear little more than a low murmur. In this room, I could hear everything magnified tenfold. A chair scuffing against the floor was like bone grinding on bone. Dina's breath was the sound of air rushing through the entrance of a cave. The rush of popping bubbles that came after every sip of beer was… was… I don't know what that was, but they were unseasonably loud. I'm going to have to come back to that one.
I was never good with silence. For me, silence had a kind of inertia to it. Once silence is in place, it becomes harder and harder to break the longer it persists for. This endless loop of empty nothingness feeds back into itself, and if allowed to continue on could carry until the world was consumed in fire, leaving nothing but two aimless, wandering spirits each waiting for the other one to say something first. I could never get out of it on my own. Witney was always the one who spoke first.
Our scintillating nonversation was interrupted by the appearance of a covered serving platter with a Halfling valet beneath it.
"Your main course for this evening, messire and madame," Fox said, coming up on his toes to place the dish between us. "I trust things are going well between you two?"
I looked at Dina but said nothing. A tiny elbow slammed into my kneecap and I jumped.
"Fine!" I shouted. "Everything's fine here!"
"Oh… yes," said Dina, her accent adding an amused lilt to her words. "It's been a truly enjoyable night."
"Wonderful," said Fox, clasping his head together. "I'll leave you to it, then."
He walked out of the dining room, but not before flashing me a look I didn't need words to interpret. Don't disappoint me.
I sighed internally and lifted the lid off the tray, revealing a steaming pastry within that smelled of roasted fowl.
"You're… you're quite in luck," I said, taking the knife and carving into the thick crust. "Fox makes the best coffin chicken I've ever had."
"He is quite incredible," said Dina, her smile seeming a bit more genuine. "He talks about you all the time."
"And yet you still wanted to have dinner with me?" I said, cutting through the top crust, revealing the whole roasted hen within. "That's one of the most flattering things I've ever heard." I carved through the rest of the crust, pulling and tearing it away from the bird and shoved it to one side of the table.
"Hey, what are you doing?" said Dina, grabbing the crust and tearing off half. "Don't waste that!"
She offered me half the crust and against my better judgment, I accepted.
"Are you actually going to eat the crust?" I said. I rapped my half against the table, producing a noise like a heavy doorknocker. "How? And why? And also how?"
"Have you not been eating the crust?" she said, breaking off a chunk and rubbing it on the roast chicken. "The crust is where all the juices go. You soak it in, it gets nice and soft and savory… you barely need to chew." she demonstrated, popping the soft, meat-sopped piece of bread in her mouth and licking her fingers clean. She paused, eyes going wide. "By the gods…"
"I told you he was a good cook," I said, laughing. And then, amazingly, beyond all my expectations, she laughed too. "He's really a life saver, I don't know what I could do without him," I continued, thoughtfully resting my chin on my hand. "If I can be honest, he really pushed me to see you. I get the feeling he'd be more hurt than you if I said no."
"Hang on…" Dina carved herself a portion of meat, spearing some roast turnips and carrots for her plate. "He pushed you into this?"
"Well… yes," I said. "I mean you wanted to see me but I was so nervous since it had been such a long time for me, and Fox had to really try and push me to invite you over and…" I paused, noting the confused stare in her eyes. "Oh lord…"
I took a long drink.
"Alright," I said, crossing my arms. "What did Fox tell you?"
"He said something about you admiring me afar for several years but not having the courage to give it voice," she said, rubbing her temples. "Somebody's been playing silly buggers with us."
"Never trust a man who makes more money than you," I said, getting out of my seat and pulling a voicepipe from the wall. "Fox!"
"I'm afraid I'm rather busy and unable to come to the speaking tube, Mr. Wizard," said the voice on the other end.
"What is that?" asked Dina.
"It's a magic trick, don't worry about it," I said. "Fox, just how long did you think we'd be fooled?"
"I was rather hoping it wouldn’t come up in conversation, sir," said Fox.
"Of course it's going to come up!" said Dina, pulling the pipe away from me. "What else are we going to talk about? The only thing we have in common is you!"
"…I'm afraid I'm unable to speak further, ma'am," said Fox. "Please enjoy some music as you wait for me to become available."
"Fox?" The only reply was a strain of lilting, melodic harp music coming from the speaking tube. "Fox I know you're there playing your harp into the tube!"
"Oh best to ignore him," said Dina, taking her seat at the table. "You know when I first took over the business from my mother, he got me to lock you guys in at a discount in exchange for saying I sold to Metamorphos, the magical savior the world. I agreed, even though I had never heard of you. As it turned out, nobody else from Din Eidyn to Obar Phuill had heard of you either!"
I laughed in spite of myself at that.
"Well it's true, I did legitimately save the world from a big scary magical abomination," I said. "I just did it in a way that meant nobody else ever found out about it."
After that, we actually started to enjoy ourselves. Dina told me about her route up the river Forth, her encounters with trading ships from the Norselands or Ibera and her near-disastrous run-ins with selkies and orcas. I in turn told her about her full name, Murdina, how it meant that she was a warrior of the sea, and likely a prophecy that she was meant to become a great captain or an admiral in some navy. There are as many methods of distribution as there are systems for attributing meaning to a semi-randomized series of variables, and I worked with words, particularly people's names. A name has a great magical power, most wizards take great pains to hide their true names, and I was no different. I studied the thaumaturgical link between that power and the person and how a carefully examined name could be used to divine a person's nature, secrets, even their future. Onymancy is my party trick. Hypothetically.
But, good things can only last so long, and halfway through dessert and our third round of beers, the conversation meandered its way back to the topic I was hoping to avoid.
"How did you do it?" asked Murdina, leaning forward over the table, a strand of curly hair leaning forward over her eyes. "How did you save the world?"
"Oh you don't want to know about that," I said, looking at a familiar pattern in the wood grain. From the right angle and the right amount of squinting, it looked somewhat like a horned owl, and I always thought of that as being particularly wizardly of my dining room. "…it's really not much of a story. If it was, you would have heard of it."
"No come on…" she said, smiling. Her mouth was so much wider when she genuinely smiled. "You can't start out a conversation talking about how you saved the world and then not follow up."
"It's… it's not something I like to discuss," I said. "I was saving the world. When you try to save everybody in the entire world you soon realize there are some people who can't be saved. You have to let the small fish go to catch the big fish. …except the big fish is… the one that doesn't get caught and gets to keep swimming and eating worms and making little fish babies and… I don't really have a metaphor for this."
Murdina slowly stopped smiling. I sighed.
"It was a long time ago," I said. "Almost sixteen years. Or… more than sixteen years, even. Time is kind of blurring together for me."
"Johnathan I didn't mean to bring this up," said Murdina, reaching across the table, putting her hand on mine. "We don't need to talk about this… I've never met a wizard before, I just wanted to know about… doing magic and fighting demons and all the things in the stories."
"It's alright," I said, leaning forward over the table. I didn't move away from her hand, but I didn't move towards it. "The only person I have to talk to is Fox and he's heard all of this before. It's starting to sound repetitive."
"Like reading the one book you own for the two-dozenth time?"
"Exactly," I said. "The thing is, if you really want to know about magic, you've come to the perfect place. Every day, I get up just as the sun is going down, I stare at some stars, I make sure all the stars are exactly where they're supposed to be. Every night, they're in the same bloody place they're supposed to be, but I have to stare at them just to make sure that the predictions we have for the relative positions of all the stars for the next ten thousand years aren't just so much scribbling on calfskin because that would crash the astrology industry. We've already discovered two entirely new planets that drive a sharp stick right through that crystal spear, but we haven't released it to the public because you can't even see them without magic so who even needs to know?" I sighed, pouring myself another glass of beer.
"The dark secret of wizards is that almost none of us ever need to do any proper magic," I continued. "All we do is look at stuff that's so big or so small or so completely esoteric that it will never even affect anyone's life. My best friend, he's a battle mage for Ambrosius Aurelianus himself, you'd think that would be worth seeing, right? No, all he does is geomancy. He looks at the ground and tells the generals what places are the most magically sound spots to station their troops. Any decent municipal surveyor could do that. Maybe he'll throw some fireballs in battle, but that's not much when he's in the middle of hundreds of guys throwing spears. Maybe fifty wizards in one place could make a dent in the battle but one guy is just a target with some flash paper.
"We do learn spells and stuff… we learn how to summon the energies of the universe at our slightest whim," I went on. "We do that because we need to learn how to turn it off. If we never learned some discipline we'd be like… walking forest fires. You need to build a wall around that flame or it will destroy anything it touches. Pteratos was when it all went wrong. A magic-eating thing got loose and took over some poor sap's brain. Promised a to fatten a bunch of wizards to godhood if they'd join his livestock. Wizards started killing. Wizards started dying. Wizards started realizing just how far their abilities were above a normal man's. I had to stop it. I had to kill as many wizards as I could to show them that normal people would fight back."
I sighed. Murdina hadn't said a word through all of this, staring at me with wide eyes and mouth hanging slightly open. My glass had gotten rather empty during this discussion. I felt I may as well bring this sad state of affairs to a conclusion.
"My… my lover and I, we were going to stop Pteratos," I said. "Exploit its overconfidence, kill its host, and then release all our magic in a single spell. Anything magical in a 200-foot radius of that spell would be reduced to its component thaums. No way Pteratos could survive. No way we could survive. But somehow, I did. Nobody could explain it. Witney died, but through some hateful miracle, I lived. And you know what? I became the greatest wizard ever, because now I can't even do magic if I wanted to. I don't have enough left in me to do a card trick. Hell, without this shroud on me all the time, I wouldn't have enough magic to keep my heart beating."
I looked away from Murdina. I took my hand away.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't want to go on about that. It's really hard to get me to start and it's really hard to get me to stop. It's got inertia."
"…what's inertia?" she asked.
"It's… I may have to explain later," I said.
"My father died sixteen years ago, John," she said. I blinked. The conversation had suddenly shifted completely in direction and I was left watching it whip by.
"I'm… well, I'm sorry to hear that," I said. "I never knew my father. Wizards aren't generally allowed to know any of their family."
"No, John," Murdina said, shaking her head. "He died, sixteen years ago. In battle."
"Oh?" I said. "…oh. Oh my."
"No, John," she said, running a hand through her hair and smiled. "He went because he was called to it. King Loth said that the kingdom was in danger and we all needed to go off to… fight some big scary thing."
"…is that what the king told everyone?" I said.
"I was twelve at the time, that's all I really understood," said Murdina, looking down at her clasped hands. "I trust the king, he's done alright for me, if he says we need to fight then we need to fight. But I never got to see my dad again, and I never really understood why, until now. Hearing you like this, I feel like he at least died doing something good for the whole world, and that's not something a lot of people can say." She took my hand again, looking deep into me with her brown eyes. "Your… Witney… she did a great thing, and so did you."
I didn't say anything for quite a while. I probably wouldn't have said anything at all if it hadn't been for all the alcohol in me.
"At the time, I never thought we might not be doing the right thing," I said, slowly. "Deep down, despite all that happened, I still don't. I just wish I could have gone with her."
After that the evening was pretty much over.496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡlUxj7SCrOP
