by Dante King
He cocked an eyebrow at me, in an inviting way, as if challenging me to solve the question he had just asked.
“Wait–what?” I asked.
The man suddenly leaned in. His breath smelled like spices, rum, and something that I couldn’t quite place.
At that moment, a serene tinkling echoed from out of the very walls of the large and decadently appointed room. Everyone stopped talking. Then, an androgynous voice, that came from everywhere and nowhere, said, “Will all students please assemble in the Lambent Hall for the Headmaster’s opening address. Thank you.”
The older guy clucked his tongue. “Duty calls,” he said, and he smiled a smile that somehow epitomized efficiency, smoothness, and an unbridled aptitude for all things. He placed a friendly hand on my shoulder. “We’ll have to continue this later—and we will—but, for now, I have a new cohort to welcome to the Academy.”
It struck me that this strange sonofabitch was saying that he was the Headmaster of this joint.
I was about to ask him if this were the case, when he said, “I’d be obliged if you could hold this.” I looked down and found myself holding a tumbler filled with a beautifully fragrant mauve liquor. I could have sworn the guy hadn’t had anything in his hand when he accosted me. I looked up.
“Course he’s freakin’ gone,” I muttered. Abruptly, I realized what I’d been doing before the Headmaster—if that was who he really was—got a hold of me. I looked around, but Janet had disappeared in the crowd that was moving steadily back toward the door that led to the hall with the chandelier.
“Damn it,” I said. I knocked the glass of liquor back. At least that had still been in the glass when I turned back to it.
I strolled along at the back of the crowd and out into the Lambent Hall. To my amazement, the place had been completely transformed. It now resembled nothing less than the bastard-child of an Opium den—one of the cool ones from a Hollywood western—and a desert sheikh’s tent. It was full of soft pillows, low tables, and rugs. Though the chandelier remained, the ceiling was now draped with rich cloths and the walls hung with tapestries.
I beamed. “Goddamn magic,” I said, under my breath.
In the center of the room, directly under the chandelier, was a raised circular platform on which sat something that looked suspiciously like a giant bong or pipe. A line of students waited at the foot of the stage. I assumed that these were my fellow new recruits and joined the back of the queue. As I did so, Enwyn appeared at my elbow.
“Here comes the Headmaster,” she said. “I saw that you two met.” I could hear the grin in her voice.
The suave, slightly older guy walked onto the stage and raised his hands in greeting. I saw not a few women around the hall cast covetous glances in his direction and wondered how many of them this Headmaster slept with in a year.
Was that a legitimate perk of his job? Like a parking space closest to the door?
I felt a pang of awkwardness that I had called the head honcho of this place ‘buddy’, but then dismissed it. If you want to go around grabbing strangers and asking them riddles, being called ‘buddy’ should be the least of your worries.
“Good evening and well met, prospective students, treasured alumni, and old hands,” the Headmaster started. “My name is Reginald Chaosbane, and I have the distinguished honor of holding the post of Headmaster at the Mazirian Academy.”
There was some scattered applause, but Chaosbane waved it benevolently aside.
“I shall keep things short and sweet, as we have far more pressing business this evening—the Choosing Ceremony for one—than listening to me wax lyrical about how fine a body of students and teachers reside inside these walls. The Mazirian Academy, in short, is the crucible in which we take the rough ore of magic adepts from different places, races, and worlds before we meld them and forge an alloy stronger than any one person alone. Here, you fresh conscripts will be honed and sharpened into magical practitioners that, we hope, will change the world.”
I had to hand it to the guy, he knew how to captivate and hold a room. As insane a last few hours as I’d had, and as much as I wanted all the bureaucratic farting about to be over so that I could start learning some damn magic—or at least go and rendezvous with that sexy water nymph again—I found myself enthralled.
“Each new prospect will come onto the stage and imbibe from the Choosing Pipe,” Chaosbane continued. “They will then take a seat here, at my feet, and surrender to their vision. I will then be able to decipher what category of magical practitioner they are and assign them into a fraternity.”
A fraternity! Just when I thought things couldn’t get any better!
“In these fraternities, individuals will grow alongside their fellow students and learn of something wondrous, something pure, something that cannot be taught. I speak, of course, of friendship.” Chaosbane clapped his hands and smiled mischievously. “The fraternity houses will also provide bonuses that will boost their member’s progress in the arcane arts.”
Without another word, Chaosbane gestured to the first person in line—a red-haired woman with the yellow eyes of a hunting hawk—and bade her step forward.
Privately, I couldn’t think of anything more awesome than hitting Dumbledore’s bigdaddy bong to find out what sort of mage I was going to be, but I didn’t want to be the very first person. What if the herb was so strong that you just wigged out, ran off, and spent the next two days with your hand in a jar of mayo and a stupid grin on your face?
Eventually, the line shrunk. Before I knew it, I was standing in front of the Choosing Pipe, with the mouthpiece, attached to a flexible tube, in my hand.
Alright, it’s time to show your worth. Prove that you’re not the sort of jackass that could fall up a tree. Prove that what happened in the shop wasn’t just a fluke.
With that thought, I took a mammoth hit on the pipe, breathed in the acrid smoke, and exhaled a cloud of smoke that would’ve had Puff the Magic Dragon applauding.
Then, I sank onto the cushion at Chaosbane’s feet and let myself fall into a vortex of swirling color.
Chapter Five
I’d smoked my fair share of the Devil’s lettuce while growing up—I lived in a small town and options for mental stimulation were pretty limited—but I’d never toked anything like this.
For the briefest instant, as I closed my eyes, I had the sensation of standing on my toes at the edge of a cliff. Below me was a void of the purest white. It tugged at me invitingly. A wind whipped at my back. I was both pushed and pulled. What I stood on the edge of I had no fucking clue. Was it my future? Was it my destiny? Was it simply the sort of trip that Hunter S Thompson’s brain went on over breakfast? There was only one chance to find out, and by God was I going to take it!
I took the plunge, tilted forward, and allowed my consciousness to be snatched away in the velvet embrace of whatever super-herb Chaosbane had packed into that epic domerocker of his.
It was after I’d stepped into the sweet clutches of oblivion that I was enfolded in the swirl of color. A tunnel, a vortex, a kaleidoscope: they were all words that had been used to describe the sort of mind-altering trips that sent young men and women off to lands where they shit rainbows—when, in actual fact, they were just lying on a patch of grass in a park and purring like a cat.
I had started the day as a second-hand book clerk, before unintentionally exploding a man like a dropped watermelon. Then, I’d discovered that I was a mage. This three unbelievable—but intimately connected—experiences now put me in exactly the sort of accepting state of mind for potent hallucinogens.
I allowed myself to be whirled along, down this plughole of scintillating lights and garbled noises.
Scenes that I knew to be memories played on the walls of the shaft down which I fell or floated up—it was hard to tell the difference just then. I watched as one such memory loomed across my vision, as if it were being projected on a movie screen. It was from the point of view of a baby—of me, I knew with cer
tainty—and someone was waving my arm for me as my parents walked up the steps of a small airplane.
The day they died, I realized, I wasn’t even aware I remembered that. Do I? Or is this just a reconstruction of my brain from what I think I know?
I steadfastly refused to get sucked down this potentially depressing rabbit hole. I had loved my parents, obviously, but I had only been little when they’d been killed in that plane crash, and my memories of them were extremely vague.
Another memory. This time, it was the day that I’d lost my virginity to Nina Larkin. It had been right at the end of our final year in high school. She and I and a bunch of others had snuck off early from our final biology class. All of us, that morning, had pilfered whatever alcohol we could lay our hands on from our homes. We’d mixed this up to produce a concoction that we nicknamed The Hangman—because you’d have one drop and be dead.
I watched as the scene unfolded in front of me. Watched as I fumbled with that goddamn bra of Nina’s for what felt like forever. I was a quick learner though, and that was the only time that I had trouble with those tricky little clasps. Finally, like a kid that had been struggling with the wrapping of a present that had been overzealously sellotaped, I got the bra off and—
I was whisked away again, sucked down through the eye of the maelstrom. This time though, I got the impression that I diverged somewhere—like I’d slipped down an alternate trouser leg of reality, if that made any sense.
More visions flicked past, but these were things that had never happened. I watched myself picking up my college diploma for business. That had actually happened, but what hadn’t was the Masters that I could see was now stamped on my certificate. I’d only just scraped through my degree, having found girls and gaming far more enjoyable and worth my time than learning about business policy, marketing, and strategy implementation.
I blinked. The scene cut, like the snip in a film reel. I was sitting in a cubicle, bent over a desk, hammering away at a keyboard. I looked like a ghost; pale and wan.
Fuck that! my consciousness rebelled.
The very thought that my future might have turned out that way made me feel physically ill. I had thought about it often enough. To see it actually played out in front of me, now that I knew I had, made me question the sanity of my past-self. The notion that I now had a choice between spreadsheets and spells made me realize how fucking fortunate I was. I was reminded of a scene from the nineties action classic, Face/Off. Steve Buscemi, who played a lovable, cannibalistic psycho, said at one point, “What if I told you, insane was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years... at the end of which they tell you to piss off? Ending up in some retirement village... hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time. Wouldn't you consider that to be insane?”
Those words would have sounded bonkers to me, even if I hadn’t been made aware of the magical universe. Now that I knew that this world existed…
The image crumpled in front of me, as if a giant hand was screwing it up like a huge sheet of paper. It looked to me like that potential future had just been discarded. I was glad. If I was going to be this world's most powerful mage—which, when it comes to magic, why would you set out to be anything less—it was good to know that, whatever happened, I wasn't going to end up spending the rest of my life working out profit margins or something equally as tedious.
The hallucination changed.
I felt myself pulled in yet another direction, though it was less a physical sensation and more like my brain had been thrown into the undertow of some powerful river. And I was swept into blackness. Nothing. I was neither falling nor floating. I was simply hanging in infinity.
Then stars began to bloom in the darkness, like cells on a Petri dish. To my stoned delight, I watched as a universe was born. Was it ours? I didn’t fucking know, but I did know one thing; and that was that it looked astonishing. Gases expanded, planets were formed in the blink of an eye, and comets flashed through the infinite silence. I watched as mountains rose, frosts crystalized, lightning storms swept Martian landscapes, gales howled through unearthly forests, and bubbling fires burned for eons in the hearts of stars.
Holy shit, if you could grow weed like this back in my world, you’d have people queuing up around the block!
Then, it struck me that I was, once again, getting a crash course in the types of Elemental magics that were out there: fire, ice, lightning, air, and earth.
What of the other five? What of the types of Elder magic?
No sooner had the thought formed than the universe, that had been quite happily building itself around me, imploded. Darkness reigned once more. This time, though, it was only for a second.
I was assailed, suddenly, by what felt like the mother of all strobe lights. I screwed up my eyes.
A single word seemed to flash across my vision, along with the staccato lighting: CHAOS.
There was one final flash, and I stood inside of a church—though it was like no church that I had ever been in before. A single pure note hung in the air, a sound that pulled simultaneously at my chest and stomach and groin.
Another word melted into my consciousness: HOLY.
Then, my surroundings shimmered, as if I stood in the midst of a heat haze. The entire church in which I stood ran like candle wax in a hurry, melted, until it formed a simmering pool all around. This quickly cooled, cracked, and turned into a bed of ashes.
I could make out the word INFERNAL in the dust at my feet, and it filled me with a foreboding of sorts.
Nuts to that, I thought. I’m not about to allow my own brain to run this trip for me. It’s my damn brain after all.
Bending my will, I managed to crowbar a little piece of personality into the hallucination. A beer appeared in my hand.
“That’s more like it,” I said.
Everything vanished—including my beer, sadly—and I was once more hanging in an empty void. There was nothing to tell me which way was up. I was just a pair of eyeballs floating through an abyss. Then I saw a white dot—tiny, no bigger than a full-stop—in front of me. It was hard to know whether it was a zillion miles in the distance or hanging right in front of my nose—with no arms it was impossible to reach out and check.
The word DEATH brushed my mind like a falling cobweb.
Suitably baffling and unfathomable, I thought.
Abruptly, in a rush that stole the breath from my non-existent lungs, I felt something. Up until that moment, the whole psychedelic experience had been limited to what I could see and hear. My brain had been under the illusion that I had been moving about, due to visual stimulus—the twisting kaleidoscope tunnels et cetera. Now though, I felt a physical lurch in my stomach, as if I’d just driven over a speed bump too fast. The tiny pinprick of light expanded suddenly, an iris shot zooming out, and, before I knew my ass from my elbow, I was in the middle of a very, very explicit orgy.
There were things in life that could not be mistaken for anything other than what they actually were and, let me tell you, an orgy was one of them.
I was standing in a sort of thigh-deep carpet of writhing naked bodies. The sounds of people really enjoying themselves—the soft hiss of skin against skin, the slapping and grunting and moaning and gasping—smothered my ears. Everywhere I looked, there were people thrusting and bucking and squirming. Legs were flung out in utter disregard, backs were arched.
I became suddenly cognizant of something else: they were all women. Every single one of them, as far as I could make out, were of the female persuasion. I looked around to check that this was right and, in doing so, perceived that I had a body here.
Nerds ran the world—that was a fact—and so I had no qualms in letting my inner geek out to express his delighted excitement at what he thought this vision might mean.
“Revenge of the Sith! Is this the fucking future?” I exclaimed.
I swept the room. Amongst the plethora of incredible tits, parted lips, and glorious a
sses, I picked out a few faces that I recognized. There was the Thunderstone girl with her legs wrapped around the head of some other woman who had clearly learned to breathe out of her ears. There was the green-skinned Kryn...and, yep, that was Cecilia! My eyes darted about until they found the face of Enwyn.
“Fucking yes!” I said, and my voice echoed weirdly around the hazy, mystical room in which this orgy was taking place.
None of the other participants looked up from what they were doing. This was hardly a surprise. If I’d been up to my tonsils in any one of the women in this room, it would have taken something along the lines of the International Space Station falling to earth to get me to look up.
My gaze snapped upward. Enwyn had gotten to her feet. She was completely naked. If I hadn’t been aware that this was a drug-induced dream, I would have thought it was a set-up, so good did I feel looking at her standing there. She opened her crimson lips and licked them in a way that would have melted the resolve of even the most devout celibate priest like a meringue lifejacket.
“CREATION MAGE,” she said, pointing to me and smiling.
My eyes snapped open, staring up into the indecipherable eyes of Reginald Chaosbane. He was looking down at me with something that might have been satisfaction in his golden-hazel eyes.
“That,” I said to him, in a cracked voice, “is some good shit.”
Chaosbane flashed me a wink, quick as a swooping swallow. Then, he looked up at the assembly in front of him, raised his hands, and cried, “Storm Mage!”
A couple of hours later, as the last hint of dusk was leaving the western horizon, I found myself trudging along a road that, back in my world, I knew led to the old excavated quarry on the outskirts of town.
My mind was still filled with images from the Choosing Ceremony, and the words of Enwyn’s likeness calling me a Creation Mage. I was also aware that that was not what Chaosbane had called me. He had said I was a Storm Mage. The contradiction was at the forefront of my mind, but thankfully the headmaster was currently tramping along at my side, so I would have the opportunity to ask him.
