The Wizard of Quintz: A coming of age LitRPG

by Ember Lane

  “What changed when you nearly died?” Desmelda asked, resting on the counter.

  “I saw a vision. I think I saw him.”

  “Who?” Desmelda asked. “And speak plainly, not in riddles.”

  “I think I saw Arthur14579 looking down from the sky.”

  “What did he look like?” Billy asked.

  “A strange, strange man. He had a head like a ball, all pale and shiny, and a beard of orange and gray that sprayed out of his jaw like a hedgehog’s spines. His eyes were deep set, gray or blue. Serious, he was serious, and his skin was speckled like a chicken’s egg.”

  “What did he do?” Merl ventured. This Arthur14579 didn’t sound like much of a God at all. It sounded like he resembled Amos the Applepicker from Morgan Mount.

  Frank cleared his throat. “He stared down at me like a God, like he was from beyond the clouds. His face filled my entire vision, like it stretched from one end of the horizon to the other. He looked full of sorrow, and then, with a small nod, the flat of his hand spread in front of his face, its palm toward me. His spread fingers drew together like they were pinching a teat, and as he did it, I receded and receded until I was no bigger than an ant, and then his voice boomed out.”

  “What did he say?” Merl whispered, beginning to doubt it was Amos. It certainly didn’t sound anything like the applepicker would do. Amos did have a fair-sized noggin, but not as big as the whole world, and besides, he always wore a hat, and Frank hadn’t mentioned a hat. “You ever see Amos Applepicker without a hat, Billy?”

  Billy shook his head. “Not once, not even when he went swimmin’ in the stream.”

  Frank drew back. He looked curiously disappointed. “Don’t you want to know what he had to say?”

  “Who?” Billy asked. “Amos, or this Arthur bloke? Coz if its Amos, not really. He only went on about apples, and really, if I’m ‘onest, apples just ain’t that interestin’”

  Merl thought Frank looked fit to burst. He wondered if him and Amos had a bit of history. “Did you know Amos, Frank?”

  “No, I bloody well didn’t,” Frank snapped.

  It was Merl’s turn to draw back. “No need to get yer tunic in a twist.” Merl held up the dune dog. “Give it a stroke, should see you right. Supposed to be calming to stroke a dog.”

  Merl’s calming words seemed lost on Frank, who’d gone bright red and snapped, “Do you want to know what Arthur14579 said or not?”

  Billy yawned. “Suppose.”

  If Merl was honest with himself, he’d kind of lost the thread a bit. He wanted to ask Frank to start again, but Frank didn’t look like he had his patient head on. Merl decided he’d ask the giants about stuff, because they seemed much more measured in their telling.

  “Yes,” Merl said, being as decisive as he could, but feeling fairly sure the correct answer was no.

  “Fine,” Frank snapped and answered, through firmly clenched teeth. “He said: ‘Goodbye, Quintz, no one will find you now. Someday I will return, but you are hidden and so you will endure. I have woven my wards into the world, that you may find peace from the war that has blighted this land,’ and then,” Frank choked up, as if it was too much for him. He slumped onto the counter; the will to continue had clearly fled him, leaving him a mere empty shell. “Then,” he said, “then, my God faded away.”

  “So you think you saw…” Desmelda’s words petered out.

  Frank looked up. His eyes misted with dewy tears. His lips trembled. “The tinyfication of Quintz,” he whispered.

  Somber silence followed.

  “Strike that,” Billy mused. “I did see him without a hat once.”

  Merl sat on the mermaid’s back within the embrace of her flowing locks. He watched the bowsprit plow through the waves. It was exhilarating, breathtaking, and more. It needed words Merl didn’t even know, couldn’t know as he’d never had need of them before, not in his wildest imagination. He’d snuck out onto the balcony to think. Frank was still musing threads that he couldn’t possibly weave into sense, and Billy was still jibing him as he did it. Merl wasn’t sure why Frank was so worried about the head in the sky. He was more worried about a head in a chamber in a mountain temple. His conundrum, on the surface, was a simple one.

  Why was his face carved into the rock?

  If he was honest, it hadn’t been bugging him a lot, mostly because it had been a bit rush, rush, rush since he’d seen it. But now things had settled. The adventurers’ cabin was all clean. Its bar was stocked with ale and wine. The scullery had food, and Desmelda’s cauldron was in place. Her bed was tucked in the corner of one of the cabins, and Merl’s hammock had his blankets draped over it. So, Merl had begun to ponder if there was any way that the semblance his face carved into a mountain’s rock could be explained.

  The issue he had with pondering the problem, was that its pondering was like the alley that ran up one side of Walinda Alepuller’s tavern. Well, not her tavern, the one she used to work at until she’d been zombified and had her bonce caved in. The alley in question had one entrance and no exits. No doors opened out into it, and there were no gates in the fence that hemmed it in. If you went down it, you had to turn around and walk back out. It was a completely pointless alley.

  Merl’s bust was at the end of Melinda Alepuller’s alley, and there was no explaining it. There was no gate that he could open that might lead to an explanation. There was no doorway to an answer. There was only a dead end with his likeness staring back at him.

  But then he supposed it wasn’t really the only confusing thing about it. It might resemble him, but that was where the likeness ended. Merl’s bonce, for instance, didn’t glow gold and catch fire, nor did his lips speak in long, convoluted riddles about things he knew nothing about. So, there was that. He narrowed his eyes and stared at the steps leading up to the mermaid’s head and decided to think on something else. Impossible problems, by their very nature, we hard to solve. As such, they weren’t worth worrying about, though they did tend to niggle you. He had other pressing problems. One of them was in his lap.

  The dune dog needed a name.

  He’d named a few of his sheep before, when he was much younger, but gave up when his dad kept killing them. Pets, for folk like Merl, were unheard of. If you had a dog, it was a hunter. If you had a cat, it was a ratter. Merl didn’t have a job for the dune dog, and besides, it looked completely useless. Its head was definitely oversized for its body and seemed too heavy for its neck. Its ears were still mismatched, one up one down, and its droopy jowls dripped saliva a little too much for everyone. Desmelda had given it a brush and now its wiry, sandy hair wasn’t so matted, so it did look slightly better, but it was, Merl had to conclude, the dog equivalent of Gloomy Joe.

  Gloomy Joe had been a strange old soul. Merl’s dad had said that Gloomy just plain didn’t fit anywhere. Gloomy had tried apprenticing at everything. He’d tried quarrying, mining, woodcutting, hunting, smithing, crafting, witching— if you name it, Gloomy had tried it and had usually failed in staggering amounts. The dune dog looked like it would fail at anything you’d expect a dog to do. For instance, when it tried to scratch its head, it missed by a good two inches. If it barked, it didn’t come close to the woof of a dog and sounded like a yelp a five-year-old kid might make after stamping on his own foot. When it walked, it was like each of its limbs was controlled by a different puppeteer who’d all been drinking Dodgy John’s hooch since the early hours.

  Merl had liked Gloomy Joe. Gloomy Joe had never fit in, a little like Merl himself. In fact, the only time Gloomy Joe had looked like he’d been truly accepted was when he was part of a zombay gang. Which hadn’t worked out too well for him, or any of the gang, for that matter.

  Merl made up his mind.

  “Gonna call you Gloomy Joe. But either Gloomy or Joe fer short, ain’t worked out which yet.”

  Gloomy just looked up at him. He yawned, clearly ready for more sleep, which seemed to consume most of his day. His tongue lolled out of the side of its
mouth. Saliva dripped from him as he half panted, and half raspy breathed. Merl stroked his dune dog, and Gloomy rested its slobbery chin in Merl’s lap.

  “Gloomy Joe,” Merl said, to reinforce his choice.

  “Who is?” Desmelda asked, sitting down and stroking Gloomy.

  “That’s what I’m calling the dog. It solves one of my problems, an’ I can’t be doing with having more than one problem at the moment, not with everything going on like it is. It’s just too much.”

  “Gloomy, it suits him.” Desmelda pulled her hand away when Gloomy Joe shook his head and sent spittle flying everywhere. “Listen, and I know you’ve known him longer than me, but don’t mind Frank, Merl. He’s getting a bit tetchy because he’s not sure he’s going the right way. Once he realizes there’s only one way he can go, he’ll be back to his chirpy self.”

  Merl thought it highly unlikely they were all going the right way, seeing as none of them knew which way they should be going, but decided he really didn’t want that to become another problem. “Not sure he ever was chirpy. He was always like a good armchair, but not sure he was chirpy.”

  “A good armchair?”

  “Safe and comfy.”

  Desmelda sat back. “Perhaps, but there’s a lot more to Frank than that.” She shivered. “I can’t actually believe I’m sitting here. It’s a little, precarious, but I needed the fresh air. Thank goodness for all hair. This is a mermaid? Must have been carved from one great tree.”

  “Towerin’ red-trunked tree, I reckon.” Merl wondered if she had been sent out to check up on him, or whether she wanted something. Apart from Billy, folk never usually sought out his company. “Billy shredding stinkers again?”

  “More the dust. It was getting up my nose, but Billy? Wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Me either. That lad’s got some air in his guts, that’s fer sure.”

  Desmelda scoffed. “Gloomy Joe, let’s agree that. So, if it was one of your problems, what’s the other? Wanna see if we can solve that?”

  “Don’t think you can. Think it’s unsolvable.”

  “Try me.”

  Merl scratched his head. “Well, it’s the obvious one. Pretty sure you would all ‘ave been thinkin’ on it.”

  “The obvious one?”

  “How in hell did me bonce get carved into the mountain, and how in hell did it speak?”

  “Ahh,” said the witch from Falling Glen. “You’re right, I have been thinking about that. Do you know what a prophecy is?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “In its simplest terms, it’s a message from the Gods. If the Gods say, ‘One day Merl will visit The Isle of One and wrestle the amulet of the four-eyed knight free,’ then that’s a prophecy. Now, say there is a prophecy that a man will come, and that man with open the wards of Arthur-what-not and unravel them and a great civilization will be born, and say you were that man, it wouldn’t be strange for there to be clues littered about the land, would it?”

  Merl thought her words were fine. He didn’t have a clue what she was on about, but it sounded good. “So, I’m a message?” he ventured.

  “You might be the person in the message, and that would mean the Gods knew it would be you. Therefore they knew what you looked like, and therefore they could carve the bust in advance of you even being born, clever eh?”

  Merl took a breath. He wasn’t sure he liked the whole idea of someone knowing what he’d do in advance. He also doubted it very much. A God would have to be daft to try and predict what he would do because half the time, he didn’t have a clue himself. It was like the time he’d accidentaly burned down Frank’s hut and half of the valley. How would a God know he was going to do that? And if he hadn’t, would him and Frank have ever teamed up? It seemed farther fetched than some of Daisy Wobbler’s tales, and everyone knew she was a liar. “This prophecy, what does it say, exactly?”

  Desmelda shrugged. “We don’t know, because we haven’t found it yet.”

  Her statement muddled Merl. It was like he’d just walked into a shut door. What exactly was the witch saying, he wondered, because to him it sounded like she thought he was being shoved along by the Gods themselves, but had absolutely no proof. He couldn’t see why he would be of any interest to any God at all. He was Merl, a sheepherder from Morgan Mount. Surely there must be a better option.

  “I think the Gods must have the wrong person. I know nothing about staffs or war.”

  Desmelda patted his knee. “Of course you don’t, dear. The Power of War is the fourth ward, so you won’t know about that until you’ve mastered the third ward, whatever that is.”

  Now she put it like that, it sounded much better. The Power of War sounded daunting. It still didn’t clear up the head-thing, but perhaps once he’d mastered the third ward, it would all become clear. All he needed to do was master the Power of Construction, and then the next and one after, and then maybe more after that. He screwed his face up. “Nah, they got the wrong person.”

  “Whatever you think, dear.” Desmelda stood, though her legs were still a bit wobbly. “I’ll go heat up the cauldron and get some food ready. What I’d suggest is that you don’t worry about a thing. After all, you’ve got Gloomy Joe to look after you now.” She vanished back inside.

  “It’s alright for her,” Merl muttered to Gloomy. “She’s not the one with her noggin carved in a mountain, is she?”

  Gloomy Joe stared up at Merl. His eyes looked as blank as a field of fresh-fallen snow. He panted and began wagging his tail. Merl reached into his pocket and dug for a bacon rasher. He offered it up, and Gloomy snatched it and gobbled it down.

  “If I’m destined to unlock the wards of this Arthur bloke, what are you gonna do, Gloomy? Are you gonna sit there, starin’ up at me with them big, sad eyes? Or are you gonna help me sniff out tha’ clues?”

  The dune dog sniffed at Merl’s pocket, but he was out of bacon. Merl stood and approached the little set of steps that led up to the top of the mermaid’s head. Climbing them, Gloomy in tow, he soon reached the top. The carved headband surrounded him like a small parapet wall, and Merl leaned on its top and stared straight over the bowsprit. Wave Walker forged through the sea. Beyond the its swell there was nothing but a horizontal line where the sky met the sea.

  “How?” Merl muttered to Gloomy. “How in Andula’s name did any God find little old me?”

  15

  Merl sat opposite Frank. The Wizard of Quintz had calmed. In fact, everyone appeared a little more composed, as if a good night’s sleep in right-sized rooms had polished their moods to a lovely shine. While it wasn’t home, the adventurers’ quarters were a lot better than sleeping on Frank’s level-one hut’s muddy floor, and the giants’ ship was devoid of zombays, monsters, filthy goblins, and duplicitous elves to boot.

  Gloomy Joe was curled up by Merl’s side, his snout dribbling on Merl’s lap, which was becoming a habit. Merl stroked his head in a vain attempt at focusing his own mind.

  “A, B, C, D, E, F, G,” he said. “That’s a lot of letters, are you sure there are more?”

  “A few,” Frank encouraged, “but you know some already, and others are quite similar, so we’ll just have to keep plowing on until we get there. We’ve got a while until we get to the Isle of One.”

  “Write that,” Merl said. “Please.”

  “What?”

  “The Isle of One.”

  Frank inked it on a piece of paper that sat on the table. His letters were beautiful. The I in Isle resembled a fluted stone pillar. The S was somehow robust and sure, and the O was thin at the sides and fat on its top and bottom. Frank drew the prettiest letters Merl had ever seen. “There,” Frank said.

  Merl spun it around and studied it. “The Isle of One,” he said, and then repeated it over and over.

  “What are you doing, Merl?”

  “I’m memorizing it so that if I ever see it in my head, or anywhere else, I’ll know it.”

  Frank drummed his fingers on the table. “Let’s
try this.”

  The Staff of Morrison White suddenly appeared in his hands. Frank offered it to Merl, who reached out and took it. It was warm to the touch and vaguely familiar, like he’d held it before. Merl drew it closer, and he ran his fingers along its smooth, flat sides.

  “One, two, three, four, five, six,” Merl said. “It has six sides.”

  He heard himself speak, but his words sounded a little distant. He didn’t understand their significance, either. Merl said a lot of things, and most of the time he had a good reason to say them. He rarely wasted important words like some folk did, and that was mostly because important words came hard to him, and as such he couldn’t see the point. Billy wasted loads of words of every kind. Sometimes Merl wondered if his friend was scared to be quiet. Six sides—it was important—Merl knew it.

  “What, Merl?”

  Merl stared at Frank, but Frank had become distant too. “The staff, it has six sides.”

  “So?”

  “It’s important.”

  Merl carried on stroking its wood. The staff’s familiar feeling evoked strong emotions in him. Rage coursed through him, but not petty anger. It was the furor of battle, the harmony of berserk crescendo. It was the passion of vehemence.

  And Merl had felt it before, several times.

  He’d felt it when he’d cleaved zombay heads. He’d felt it when he’d battled the goblins and fought the elves. It was the Power of War. It was the consequence of the law, not the law itself.

  But there was also more to it than that. He sensed order within the staff. There was a strict code, a path to be adhered to, and that path would only be unlocked once the first three wards were open. He knew this already, of course. The words had come out of his flaming, stone mouth.

  “The Power of Construction, the Power of Source, the Power of Nascent, and the Power of War.” Merl started shaking. He dropped the staff on the table and recoiled from it like it was a snapncrack wasp.