The World's Second Best Wizard Ch. 01

On an early autumn day in the South of the world, a long road wound its lazy way between two great cities. At times the road was wide, beaten smooth by the tracks of carts and the falling of feet; at others it passed through woods and hills and became narrow and winding, or disappeared altogether on one side of a coursing river only to reappear on the other.

Down this road on this day, where the path emerged from a thicket of pines and became a dusty trail through open fields, a wizard was walking. The crows and sparrows that flitted above would see a broad-brimmed mustard yellow hat winding along its way; the squirrels and rabbits scurrying on the ground saw baggy robes of the same colour, within which a short figure was striding purposefully. The wizard held no staff and carried no bag, simply made wizardly tracks with hands folded up in loose sleeves.

The wizard's name was Finduir, and she was pissed.

'Fuck's sake,' she was muttering to herself, walking as quickly as she could away from the trees behind her. 'Goddamn - fucking - hat -'

Once she judged she was far enough from the wood, she sat herself ungracefully down right in the middle of the road and plucked the hat off her head, throwing it aside. It landed in a sad heap in the dust.

'You've gotta wear the hat, Finduir,' she said to the hat mockingly. 'Nobody will think you're a real wizard if you don't wear the hat, Finduir. You'll get rained on if you haven't got a hat, Finduir.' She shook her head and gave the hat the finger. 'Fuckin' spider trap in the woods, though, ain't ya?' With a snap of her fingers, she set the thing ablaze, starting a tiny sad bonfire in the road. Then she shook her hair out, swatting cobwebs and spiders free, and groaned.

'I hate the hat,' she said to a passing dormouse, who nodded understandingly. 'Problem is, you start in the woods with a hat, you keep shit out of your hair - the hat collects all the creepy stuff, except the absolute masses of stuff that somehow manage to get in your hair anyway - so you gotta keep it on until you're out of the woods, and then you set it on fire. That's a rule, or something.' The dormouse decided it was out of its depth and buggered off.

Finduir was perhaps the second most famous wizard in the world. Three years ago, she had been part of a group of nine heroes sent to defeat Ornodrin the Unmaker, and at this task the Company of Reclaimers (as they had become known, which pleased some of them and perturbed others who thought it wasn't the coolest of names) had succeeded. They had, without hyperbole, saved the entire world, and things seemed to be going much better since the great evil had been destroyed (funny, that). It had taken some time for nations to restore themselves, to recover and to adjust to the new world, but everything seemed to be on the right track, and all nine of the heroes were revered, almost worshipped, and loved by all.

So everything should have been pretty great, really, and if Finduir had been the only wizard in the Company they probably would have been. Everybody loves wizards. She'd have been the wizard who overthrew the Unmaker, the valiant and wise pinion of goodness in the world.

Unfortunately, Caenephas Worldweaver had also been on the quest, and he was generally considered much cooler. Nobody really gives a shit about the second wizard. One wizard, awesome. Two wizards... eh.

That was how Finduir came to be making the extremely dull journey along the road on this day: as the most forgettable member of the Company, she was the only one obscure enough to walk unrecognised and expendable enough to continue doing vaguely dangerous things and going on quests of a sort, even though the original quest had been way more dangerous than anything in the world these days - and consequently so thoroughly non-boring - that any and all subsequent adventures felt totally lame in comparison. There was no true evil left in the world with the dissolution of the Unmaker's terrible hold on the darkness, just a few people who were still kind of being low-key dicks; as someone who had been on the Greatest of Quests, even if nobody really knew what she had contributed, Finduir had just about enough authority to have been volunteered as a sort of de facto sheriff, and against her better judgement she was now spending most of her time wandering to places where people were doing some sort of low-level shenaniganry and telling them as sternly as she could to stop it.

In the road, Finduir was still muttering grumpy grumbles to herself. 'These freakin' robes as well - so damn hot -' and she pulled the yellow robes over her head and threw them on the flames. Beneath, she wore flapping trousers and a loose tunic in the same mustard shade: a wizard's under-robe clothes were almost as baggy and shapeless as the outer robes themselves, which may as well have been dyed potato sacks. 'Don't even like yellow,' she said petulantly to the burning fabric.

Top layer of stuffy robes discarded, Finduir sat in the road huffing. A short sword, previously concealed, was now visible at her side: the once-renowned blade Conflagration, which had broken in a climactic battle during which Caenephas had brought forth a great spirit of the earth and of the forests to fight as a force for goodness and justice, so naturally nobody remembered what Finduir had been contributing while that was all going on. She'd later had the splintered shard of Conflagration made into a ring, which she wore on the middle finger of her right hand, and the rest reforged into a shorter blade that frankly she liked better than the overlong old one anyway. There was some elf or fey blood in her ancestry, or so her family claimed, and indeed she did have wide, pale eyes, a thick length of richly dark hair, smooth skin that almost seemed radiant in certain lights, delicate ears that tapered to narrow points, and an excruciatingly misanthropic disposition.

After a few minutes of gentle complaining about everything in sight, Finduir felt much better and more relaxed; she stood up, groaning at the prospect of more walking, and set off down the road again. She didn't know how far she had to go for today's journey: there had been reports of a troublesome trickster selling dangerous and dubious potions and magical items somewhere between the forest and the next city, which could mean a few more hours of travel or another week. No horse or carriage for her, though: everyone assumed the wizard was more than capable of... teleportation, or flying, or just walking a really long way without assistance. It was kind of BS, really, that nobody had enough esteem for Finduir to treat her particularly well, and yet everyone had a high enough opinion of her abilities to assume that she could do all sorts of superhuman things, and indeed that she would be willing to do them.

So she trudged on down the road, spouting a stream of mumbled negativity to keep her spirits up. She passed babbling brooks, which she told to shut up; rolling hills, at which she sighed loudly before striding past without giving them the satisfaction of a further glance; vibrant wild flowers, on which she sat.

*

As the evening drew in, Finduir began to wish she hadn't burned her robes - they'd have made a decent blanket, at least - and started scanning the sides of the road for shelter where she could start making camp for the night. A gently burning flame caught her attention: by a waymarker stone a few hundred yards off to the side of the path, somebody had set a lantern.

The wizard wandered up to the burning light and put her hands on her hips. The little lantern hung off a spoke at the side of a tall stone, twice Finduir's height, which told her that the city at the end of the road was still a few days' travel off. Finduir considered the fire before her: a light could mean civilisation: a village, with an inn, or perhaps at least a farm or something. Then again, a light might just as easily be a lure set by nefarious bandits, drawing helpless victims off the safety of the main road. Finduir huffed. If it was bandits, which she doubted - nothing that exciting ever happened to her lately - they'd pretty quickly regret trying to banditerise a wizard, even a second-best wizard.

'Welcome!' trilled an enthusiastic voice from above. Finduir glanced up and saw, sitting atop the stone and framed by the light of the setting sun behind her, a witch she recognised.

'Aurigan?'

'Oh, cock,' said the witch. 'Fina?' She hopped down, landing lightly on the balls of her feet in front of the wizard.

'What are you doing?' Finduir asked warily.

'Oh, y'know,' said Aurigan, pulling at a strand of her raven-black hair. 'Just doin' business.'

There are three kinds of magic-users in the world: wizards, witches, and mages. The primary difference between wizards and witches is the tightness of their clothes; the identifying factor of mages is that they are lame try-hards. (And forget warlocks. Piggybacking on a supernatural patron's magicks instead of getting your own is cheating and generally accepted as not cool by all except the warlocks themselves, who are weirdly oblivious to their own blatant poserishness.) This particular witch wore an outfit all in shades of midnight blue: shining boots up to the middle of her calves, skintight shorts barely covering any of her thighs with a sort of tasselled half-skirt that stuck out behind as if she were wearing only the back half of a complete garment that had been mildly shredded, and what amounted to a strip of cloth on her upper half - it ran from the waist of her shorts, up one side of her torso and around her neck, before coming back down the other side. Her nipples were covered, albeit visible through the fabric at more than a passing glance, but the smooth and youthful skin at her midriff, shoulders, back, and the sides of her breasts were completely exposed. She also had a tiny hat, a parody of Finduir's own (now, of course, sadly but a small pile of ashes).

'Business,' said Finduir suspiciously. 'Like, sex business?'

Aurigan laughed. 'Not that sort of business. I sell potions, trinkets, that sort of thing.'

'Ah,' said Finduir. 'Would they happen to be dodgy, by any chance?'

'Absolutely,' admitted Aurigan immediately. 'Not, like, entirely deliberately, but y'know how it is. Anyway,' she said, quickly putting a hand on Finduir's shoulder as if greeting an old friend, 'it's been so long! How've you been - what've you been up to?'

Finduir and Aurigan did know each other, albeit not well. The witch had perturbed the Company during a brief interlude on their long quest: she was a minor character in their history, but one of the most popular with artists depicting scenes from the epic tale.

'Wizarding,' said Finduir shortly, jolting Aurigan's fingers with a slight shock of magical energy so that the witch let go, looking stung. 'They send me to stop people doing dumb shit now. Like you, apparently.'

'Am I a criminal?' Aurigan asked, gasping in mock horror with a hand to her chest.

'I'unno,' said Finduir. 'What are you actually selling?'

'Well,' said Aurigan, putting a finger under her chin with a thoughtful glance up into the heavens, 'I've been trying to make an honest living since the whole... thing. I travelled for a bit - oh, Fina, I went to Alledhorn; did you know there's a whole library they've built there just to contain stories people have written about the Company's quest? - and they organise it by which characters appear and, if you can believe it, apparently I get shipped with almost every single member of the Company!' She beamed. 'I'm very shippable, the fan fiction writers seem to think.'

'Great,' Finduir grunted. 'You were saying about now?'

'Oh!' blurted Aurigan, 'that.' She folded her hands behind her back and leaned against the waystone, one foot extended with pointed toes in front of her. 'So I was trying to make an honest living, as much as anyone can, and I thought, well, there might not be much evil any more but people are still going to stub their toes and whatnot, so I started brewing healing potions and selling them - farmers, travellers, you know. Then I branched out a bit - diversified, I think is the business word for it - did all kinds of brews for all ailments or for causing all kinds of bespoke effects, and little enchanted things for protection or luck too.'

'All sounds legit until the point that they don't do what you said they were supposed to,' said Finduir.

'They totally did!' Aurigan protested. 'For, like, ages everything was totally fine and everyone was having a great time and I actually thought I could make, you know, a whole actual not-even-mischief-causing business and stuff - and then one day things... stopped doing what they used to do.'

'What d'you mean?'

'Look,' said Aurigan, 'I know what each ingredient of a potion does, and I know what they do when you mix 'em together. I've been doing this for decades.' (Like all witches, Aurigan aged slowly: she looked only twenty, but was probably three times as old. Finduir was still young enough to be aging at a normal rate, as wizards did until they reached their mid-twenties - at which point they seemed to either stop aging entirely or immediately become incredibly old-looking and stay just as old until they died centuries later. Caenephas Worldweaver was four thousand years old, and had supposedly been a wiry old man with an enormous grey beard for all but about ten of them.) 'My potions did exactly what they were supposed to until one day I made them exactly the same and they just didn't do what they were supposed to.'

Finduir was unconvinced. It sounded like an excuse for causing shenanigans, or a cover for a more malicious intent.

'It's not just that, though,' Aurigan continued, pouting. 'My magic doesn't even work the same way.'

At this, Finduir's ears perked up. 'Your magic doesn't work the same way?'

'That's what I said,' Aurigan mumbled, and she stood up tall and raised her arms, touching her thumbs and index fingers together at chest height. 'You can detect what sort of spell I'm casting, right?'

'Of course.'

Aurigan nodded. 'Do it now,' she instructed; Finduir sighed, but focused her senses on the witch in front of her. Aurigan furrowed her brow, and a purple spark fizzed between her fingers: Finduir sensed a warm buzzing, recognisable by its tone and timbre to her as a simple charm intended to conjure a small apparition. It was a popular trick at children's parties: the magicmaker in attendance could simply conjure a menagerie of little glowing purple creatures, at which point they could simply sit back and allow the children to chase the magical swarm for an hour or two. It was practically passive income.

Instead of a floating horse or swan, though, a heavy purple gas began to leak from Aurigan's hands. Finduir inhaled sharply, confused; but there was no mistaking the spell being cast, and this was not the effect it ought to have. The wizard turned her senses then to the billowing gas, and feeling a noxious danger within it she quickly waved her hand and dispersed it. Aurigan spread her hands, staring at Finduir with an expression that very clearly said See?!

'That shouldn't happen,' said Finduir.

'That's all you got?'

'I don't know,' the wizard mused. Aurigan sighed heavily, sitting herself down cross-legged at the base of the stone. 'You were conjuring an image.'

'Yup.'

'But something else happened.'

'Bingo.'

Finduir sat down next to the witch, thinking hard. 'Could it be my detection that went wrong?'

'It's my magic,' said Aurigan. 'I mean, maybe yours is going to stop working right too, but it's mine that's awry right now.'

'We need to test this,' said Finduir, half to herself. The witch beside her groaned loudly.

'Really? You wanna do science?'

'I need to understand this so we can fix it,' said Finduir. 'Magic shouldn't be able to go wrong like that.' She turned to Aurigan. 'Can you show me everything?'

'Erm,' said the witch. 'I mean, sure -'

'The... the potions and the enchantments. I need to see what's gone wrong.'

'Well, then,' said Aurigan, standing up and stretching; Finduir could see the muscles of her exposed back tightening and loosening. 'I don't usually invite people back to my place after meeting them on the road, but - oh, wait, nope, I do actually do that so I can sell them stuff.'

Finduir clambered to her feet. 'I take it we're not far, then?'

'Nah,' said the witch, pointing away from the road towards the sunset. 'Hour or so over that hill and we're there.'

Finduir nodded. 'Were you... expecting me to come for you?' she asked, as Aurigan began walking with swift, poised steps towards her home.

'Well, I was hoping they'd send Caenephas,' said Aurigan. 'He's so stupidly muscly, you know? That whole ripped grandpa thing going on.'

'How do you know that?' Finduir exclaimed.

'You remember when you lot all camped by the lake under Greymount, the day before you ran into me and I gave you all a bit of trouble?'

'You nearly killed us!'

'Anyway,' Aurigan continued, unfazed, 'I'd been following you for a couple of days by then, and you wizards wear such baggy robes - super unflattering, by the way, so very happy to see you seem to have updated your look a bit - that it was really easy to sneak up to him in the night while you were all asleep and just... lift 'em up a bit, have a peek.'

Finduir shook her head in confusion and disbelief. 'We had someone on guard,' she said. 'And - he's the wizard, no way he wouldn't have noticed, and - and, and he wasn't wearing anything underneath?!'

Aurigan shrugged casually. 'I'm a good sneak, and I reckon he probably did know and just let me do it 'cos he liked it, dirty old coot. And yup, totally commando. Old school wizards are all about the robes and nothin' else, apparently.'

Finduir opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, then snorted. 'That's so weird.'

*

Aurigan led the wizard across the hill, through a path among thick trees, and back to her home: a two-storey wooden shack with a tall chimney and a low porch, tucked at the back of a glade of trees and grasses. Frogs croaked in a shallow, humid pond; latchbirds, small flapping things with long tongues, swooped around the little swarms of flying insects dancing through the trees. Finduir couldn't help a low laugh when she saw it.

'Could you live in any more stereotypical of a witch's house?'

'Hey,' protested Aurigan, 'that's my home. Also, it used to be owned by this crazy witch with, like, full-on nose warts and roads and all sorts. Besides, it builds a vibe for the customers.'

'Pff.'

The witch led Finduir inside, hopping up a short series of wooden steps and through a rickety door ('I don't need a more secure door; I can blow any fucker's head off in five seconds flat,' said Aurigan in a way that made Finduir think she not only could but had) into a cosy living room with a pillowy sofa and a lot of dark-coloured soft furnishings.

'Nice,' said Finduir, and meant it: the witch's home looked spectacularly comfortable after her long, dirty trip along the winding road.

'It's home,' said Aurigan, striding across the room to a firm-set wooden door towards the back. She flung it open, revealing a flight of stairs descending into a darkness beneath. 'C'mon.'

Finduir shook her head. 'Uh-uh. This looks weird as shit.'

'It's fine,' Aurigan drawled, beckoning down into the blackness below. 'It's my alchemical lab, nothing creepy.'

'Alchemical labs are dodgy as fuck,' bemoaned Finduir, folding her arms with a huff. 'You know, like, ninety-five percent of all things being done in alchemical labs are weird sex things.'

'Firstly, you just made that up, and secondly that describes all sentient beings' behaviour in all locations and situations all of the time,' Aurigan chided.