The Wizard (Revised)(Chapter one)

If you've never been to wiltshire, well, you aren't missing much. England, like any other country, has its high and low spots. Not to say that it is ugly. In fact, quite a few people think it is beautiful, snow and all. Not me. I'd been here four miserable nights, and the only good thing was the sunrise in the morning that made it feel like negative twenty instead of negative twenty one.

Why would I, a consummate city boy with no survival skills past knowing where t get free food be out here in England? My eye strayed to a little girl, sitting in a small cloth tent at the center of the stone fixture. What was her name? Maggy, or something like that. I had no idea, and didn't ask any questions.  Grunts like us were trained to bleed and die without any question, and I’d been doing this for too long to break that rule now.

“So who do you think she is?”

I snorted, looking over at my partner as if she'd been reading my mind. Evelyn, or Evey as I called her (just to piss her off) was no more than five four, maybe a hundred pounds soaking weight and had the blackest hair I had ever seen. I teased her that if she ever decided not to wash it, no-bodied be able to tell. It had resulted in her trying to bleach it, with disastrous affects.

“Does it matter?” I asked her, even though we both knew it did. The White Council was not the most protective group in the world, especially when it came to humans. The current Merlin was trying to change that. Apparently he thought that not only should the White Council play a bigger part as the big brother to humanity, but just about any supernatural attack on humans had been met with overwhelming force. Which explained why a single girl had warranted the deployment of no less than thirteen Wardens, myself included.

“It does to me!” She squeaked, looking down at her clothing in distress. If you have never met a wizard, you wouldn't know that we tend to give techies headaches. CD players, televisions, the occasional digital watch, we break them all just by being near them. Perhaps it has something to do with bad luck, maybe it has something to do with our magic. Who knows, but every wizard is afflicted with it, and it makes Airplanes very risky.

So, we had to find other ways to travel, which brought somebody to the idea of traveling through the NeverNever, the magical realm of all things Faerie. Despite the ideas that Faerie brings to mind, it is not a nice place. Wizards are hated by just about every magical entity even more than humans are, and traveling through basically a hostile country larger then the United States is dangerous at best, fatal at worst.

If having a horde of baddies wanting to kill you wasn't bad enough, the topography was. A few hours walk may be a few thousand miles in the real world, but not every path had a, well path. For instance, the “road” that had taken us from Boston to England took a sharp turn into a very wet, swampy area of the Never Never. No clothing had been spared, to the dismay of the few woman with us.

I grinned at her again, despite myself and the situation. I wasn't one for laughing at people in distress, especially sine I myself was caked in mud that was frozen rock solid, but I'd rather laugh the tension away then cry it away. And there was tension, in bucketfuls. Whoever this little girl was, and for whatever reason the bad guys wanted her they wanted her badly. We'd seen wave after wave of what could only be described as monsters, and no matter how many we killed, they kept coming.

“It could be worse. I-” My voice dropped, a lone figure on the horizon drawing my eye. We'd sent sentries up about two hundred feet apart all over the valley. It wasn't abnormal to see them walking in for a break. This one was not walking however. He was sprinting, and quite fast. Blood covered him from head to toe, how much was his I had no idea, but did it really matter? I had placed me and Evelyn at the center of our ring of defense, a decision I regretted now. We had both been on our feet in a matter of seconds after seeing him, but it still took us a good four minutes to reach the crowd of wardens that had gathered around him.

Evelyn pushed her way through the crowd, a tiny wisp of a creature compared to the gigantic men she flicked aside with almost no effort. I stayed on the fringe of the crowd, not needing to see what condition he was in to know it was bad. A lot of the blood had apparently been his, it seemed, and his voice was little more than a whisper as he tried to get out what had happened before he passed out, or died, or both.

It seemed very apparent to me what had happened, and I turned away, content to let Evey do her job and try to save him. The worst we had imagined had indeed happened: The horde of monsters hunting the child had arrived early. Without the heavy hitters the White council had promised to send to back us up, there was no way we could hold them off. Neither could we turn and run; the council had been very specific about that.

Stonehenge had become something of sacred ground to Wizards, though I wasn't sure how, and we were not to surrender it under any circumstances. It was another one of those radical developments that had come along with the new Merlin, and that had been so unpopular with the older veterans. It was bad enough that he had become the youngest Merlin in history, let alone that he believed in crazy things like reform. No, he was not popular at all.

Personally, I had never had much of a problem with him. I was not a spring chicken myself, but I was young enough to fell that some of his policies might be headed in the right direction. Today, watching those tiny figures of bad guys that wanted to kill me line up on the horizon, today I did not agree with him.

Even at this distance, it was clear they were not bigger than a child, if children ran on all fours and spit out acid that would make any gardener cringe. A couple turned into a dozen turned into a few dozen, and they kept coming, half waddling half galloping as if their legs were made for an entirely different type of movement. They squealed like a dying pig, huffed like a fat man on a treadmill.

I ran my hand through muddy brown hair that was starting to show a few streaks of white, no thanks to days like these, shook off my thick outer cloak and tried not to grind my teeth in frustration too hard. The line of enemies grew closer and Warden Grey flickered at the corners of my eyes as the others shed their coats as well. Not enough Grey, a corner of my mind noticed. Not for this.

Power hummed in the air as magic gathered into my motley crew of wizards. A small blood stained hand gripped my shoulder. I turned, smiling down at Evelyns fear streaked face. Too many here hadn't been in a real fight, and too many wouldn't survive to see another. I gripped her hand for just a second before turning to my own weapon of choice.

Staves were always in plentiful supply, as were blasting rods. Me? I was old school, to the bone. I shook my arm loose of my robes, revealing a dirty copper colored gauntlet that wound its way up to my shoulder. Runes and sigils smoked as power began to flow through it, leaving small red welts on any exposed flesh. The pain you suffer for fashion.

I'd like to say at this point I gave some stirring speech that roused everyone into fighting harder and longer. I didn't. Didn't even try. There was nothing to say that could make this better or easier, nothing to say to bolster their moral. Just the chaos of battle erupting as magic burned the atmosphere.


A fountain of blood sprayed up into the air, arced its way down and landed square on my face. Whether it was the Warden who'd been next to me or the tiny child like monster he'd been fighting, I didn't know. I was just so glad my mouth had been closed at the time.  We’d been fighting for at least a few hours now, and I didn't have to look around to know we weren't winning.

The Grey that had surrounded me moments before was either stained red, or had disappeared altogether. I swallowed the thought back, ducked a swing that was meant to take my head off, screaming as I sent a bolt of flame through the creatures head. Some wizards were Beserkers, feeding off their anger and becoming all but invincible. I was just pissed, and it was made all the worse by the clown I’d been stuck with.

I'd long ago lost sight of Evelyn somewhere in the chaos, but had found Dennis to replace her. Not that he wasn't a capable Battle Wizard. Hell, he might be as good as me. He was just, well...His palm extended towards my head, sent a gust of wind flashing across my face and sprawling me to the ground in time to avoid yet another killing blow.

Sure, he had saved my life. But still. “Don't worry,” He grinned, winking at me. “We can't all be as good as me.”

See what I mean? I ground my teeth together to avoid saying something I'd regret and pushed myself back to my feet. Nothing was trying to kill me at the moment, and a sliver of hope snaked its way through my mind? Had we won somehow? No, no we hadn't. The tiny little monsters were still there, claws gleaming with blood and mucus, they just weren't moving.

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Do you remember your last surprise birthday party? You step into the room, everybody jumps out and for those first few seconds, your brain stops working. Something about the unexpectedness makes you sluggish, slow to react. You try to fight through the fog, but it takes some time no matter how hard you try.

When the little devils stopped fighting, it was that sort of surprise that took over my mind. The cloud descended and the only two things ran through my mind. How many of these things would I be able to cut down before they started moving again, and why had they started moving? I am not sure how long I stood there, stuck between thought and action, but it was long enough that when a firm, warm hand grabbed my shoulder, I just about jumped out of my skin.

Dennis looked up at me (I was taller and enjoyed reminding hm of it). Blood smeared his face and hands, most of it belonging to the two wardens he had flung over his shoulders. Both the men might be dead, but even in death we left no man behind. I shook my head once, clearing the last cobwebs and nodded back at him. There was time to wonder about the living later when we had dead to take care of.

The walk back to camp was short, but quiet. Neither of us was sure what to say, and to be honest that was completely fine with me. The body count had risen to a point where the two of us could not get them all in one trip. All of us still alive could not manage them in one trip, magic or no. At last county, about twenty three wizards had been killed or fatally wounded. Another thirteen were injured so bad they may not walk for a very long time.

Nine of us were left in action. Nine. Out of forty five, nine were left alive. The losses were staggering, and something we had never imagined. The only solace was that of all those dead wardens, several had gotten their death curses off. The horde that had been the enemy was still, well still a horde, but their numbers were drastically smaller.

As long as we were looking at silver linings, as soon as that many death curses was lobbed the White Council was sure to have noticed. They were a lot of things, but complete morons were not one of them. Morons, yes, but not completely. They were sure to hurry their old asses up.

The last dead body dropped from my arms into the last empty bed in our medical tent. The perfection of the body to bed ratio was surely just a coincidence. Blood soaked my body and my arm was finally beginning to feel the affects of my magic use.

The dirty secret that they never tell you about magic is that, along with looking really cool and getting all the ladies, it takes an enormously big toll on you. Mind or body, some part of you always suffers. It is why there are so many totems to help you focus.  Without them, the punishment flows freely to both, taking evenly, or unevenly.

The human mind is an amazing thing, able to recover from just about anything, even able to operate with pieces of it missing or removed. The body is not so resilient. Wounds take weeks, months to repair themselves, and something missing is always a disability. Its for this reason that most wizards choose to take of their minds, and not their bodies.

Items such as Staves, wands and Blasting Rods channel your magic through your mind and out. There is a limit to how much you can take, and if you take too much it starts taking from your body as well. It is much less devastating, but much less powerful for the effort.

When it comes to pure, un filtered destruction there is nothing like the sacrifice of your own body. Items such as Gauntlets, Amulets and rings take of your body. My arm had given until the muscles in it felt like rubber. All the skin from my wrist to my elbow was either burned or singed, red welts growing wherever there was pure skin left.

I groaned, finding a nearby bucket of water and submerging myself up to the shoulder in it. I'd overdone it, I knew, but I had no choice. Any less of an effort would have meant others would have died in my place. Not an option. Still, my body did not appreciate what my mind understood, and rebelled.

As soon as steam had stopped rising from my arm, I pulled it out. Skin had melted to metal, and it was a bitch to pull the two apart, but I did, wrapping myself in gauze before heading to the hospital tent myself.  There would be no bed for me, ad I wasn't looking for one. If Evey had survived, that's where she would be.

The tents were sickly looking things, with windows too small and flaps to wide for sanitary means. A droning sound much like that of a beehive rose into the air; the moaning of the wounded, and there wee far more than I had thought. Several were stretched out on mats in the sun, baking their wounds away. They were not as bad as the ones I found inside. My stomach had never been that strong, and I tried not to vomit.

I found Evelyn standing over a young man, no more than twenty, a bone saw in her hand and sweat dripping from her forehead. Some magic or painkiller had made the young man not care, and it was lucky for him; Evelyn had nearly her entire weight on the saw, desperately trying to get through the poor mans left arm.

Modern medicine did not do much amputation anymore, and coupled with magic we did even less to our own kind. These wounds were not normal, however. An infection spread through each and every cut deeper than a scratch; an infection that neither magic nor medicine could fight effectively. If it was not caught before it spread through the body, it was unstoppable. It spread within an hour of being in the body.

Evelyn said nothing, only motioned me over to help her. We finished with the young mans arm, hopefully saving him, then moved on to the next four patients. Only two of those we could save; for the others the infection had spread too quickly. The story was the same for too many of those in the “hospital”. There were too many to help and not enough left standing who knew how to help. I was limited to holding them down and sprinkling antibiotics where I could.

We had not brought many with us, and withing an hour we had saved who we could, and made the other comfortable as possible. Too many still would die, but there was nothing more we could do than wait, and pray.

I found myself at last alone with Evelyn, in a small corner of what served as the break room. Several healers were passed out on the cots that had been set up, but the room was big enough to give us some privacy. She was in my arms immediately, hugging me with a strength I didn't know she had. I pushed her away, grinning beside the pain she had left in my ribs.

She stepped back, brushed the hair from her face. “So... how was your day?”

I laughed, lifting my arm up for her to see. “About as good as yours.”

She frowned, taking my arm gently in her hands and looking over it. “you should have told me before,” she chastised me, grabbing some gauze from a nearby box. “The wounds are too cauterized to do anything for them now, and painkillers won't help any.” She began wrapping my arm. “I would not have let you help if I had known you were hurt.”

“I don't think you had much of a choice.”

Her frown deepened more. “No, I didn't.” She pulled back, put the gauze away and pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. “this came about forty minutes ago. Dennis said it was important but..” She flashed a half hearted grin. “I felt the bad guys could wit before they claimed any more lives.”

She left without saying another word, leaving me alone with the piece of paper. I unfolded the note, reading and re-reading it. It was, in fact, from the bad guys. They wanted to meet, to talk. I sighed, crumpled it up and stuck it into my pocket. Talking was the last thing I wanted to do with the bastards, but fighting was even less appealing.

I found Dennis not far outside the tent, and we began to discuss what to do.