The Magic Book
Atlantic Island: Divided Book 1
Fredric Shernoff
Contents
I. The Enclave
II. The Wasteland
III. The Book
IV. The Portal
V. The Exploration
VI. The Return
VII. Epilogue
Thank You!
The Atlantic Island Universe
Acknowledgments
About Fredric
I
The Enclave
1
The man called Nathaniel watched the creature and waited. The animal, what the elders called a “deerkin,” moved slowly through the heavy overgrowth. It rubbed its nose on the ground and one of its tusks dragged a line through the soft earth. The other protrusion had broken at some point, and it couldn’t make contact with the soil.
Nathaniel observed this with calm indifference. His breathing was methodical and deep. He steadied the bow and prepared an arrow. He drew the string of the bow taut, feeling one small drop of sweat carve through the dust on his skin like the deerkin’s tusk had moved through the dirt.
He heard the slightest buzzing above his right ear. He kept his focus on the deerkin, which had begun nibbling the yellow grass that grew in ugly blotches all along the forest floor. Nathaniel began to count backward in his mind. Three. Two. A skeeter, most assuredly the source of the buzzing sound, landed on Nathaniel’s cheek and bit him. The wound was small but violent, as the skeeter’s microteeth tore a tiny chunk of flesh away.
Nathaniel jolted, and his arrow flew weak and awkward into the tangle of vines ten feet from the deerkin. The animal snapped to attention and bolted. Nathaniel kept his eyes on the big creature even as his eye watered over from the sting of the bite, but the deerkin merged into the forest and was gone.
Stupid. He smacked his forehead in frustration. A significant amount of the afternoon had been lost on this hunt, and for what? He picked up his bow and stretched his legs. Suddenly, he was knocked sideways by a clobbering blow that fogged what was left of his vision. Nathaniel bounced off a nearby tree. He landed in a squat, old reflexes kicking in, and scanned for his attacker.
In seconds it was on him. Nathaniel had just enough time to register the mutant coming at him before he was knocked to his back. The snarling thing above him must have been doing its own hunting—perhaps it had been targeting the same deerkin. That Khedis had willed such a coincidence occurred to him in some deep recess of his mind, but Nathaniel didn’t buy into the notion of Khedis, God of the Hunt, any more than he believed in the story of the old man Klaus, the baby Jesus, and the prophet Weber that the Creed of the Messiah always pushed. Some people had their religions to believe in. Nathaniel just had himself, and usually that was more than enough.
The mutant, a large, bipedal variant, was unusually strong. Most mutants Nathaniel had encountered were far weaker than their appearance would suggest. He’d fought one whose muscular arm had torn off when given a serious resistance. This one was nothing like that. Its blue skin was covered in sores and black hair as patchy as the grass on the ground all around them. Its three eyes were yellow and sickly, but alert and filled with violent anger.
The mutant tried to punch Nathaniel’s head into the ground, but he rolled in time and the powerful fist slammed into the earth with an echoing thud. Nathaniel flipped back to his feet and felt something in his back pull. He ignored the pain and kicked the beast in the head. It stumbled but recovered its bearings and came for him again. Nathaniel side-stepped, this time moving without any corresponding tweak of pain to remind him that his body wasn’t what it once had been. The mutant tripped but somehow stayed upright.
It pounced and this time Nathaniel didn’t get completely out of its way. They fell to the ground and he wrapped his legs around the thing’s thick neck. He squeezed as hard as he could. The mutant’s eyes bulged, and it raised one giant fist and flexed the fingers. Razor-sharp nails extended from its human-like appendages.
Nathaniel let go and tried to avoid the incoming attack, but the mutant slammed its claws into his stomach. He felt the puncture wounds as his insides tore. The mutant howled in triumph, and Nathaniel locked his legs back around it and twisted. There was a crack as if one of the great trees around them had been felled. The mutant went limp, its black tongue lobbing from its mouth. Its eyes blinked once, all three in unison, then stared emptily into space.
Nathaniel pushed with his legs and the beast fell to the ground. He looked down at his wounded stomach. Blood covered his tunic and belt and stained the dirt around him. He tore at the fabric and saw the massive holes in his abdomen. He coughed and felt blood in his mouth. Black shapes swirled across his vision. Damn it! he thought. Push through! He tried to move but his body wouldn’t respond. The darkness blossomed and he slipped into unconsciousness.
When Nathaniel awoke, red twilight had filled the sky. He tried to sit up and winced. He looked at his stomach and saw thick scabs where the holes had been. He got back to his feet and spat on the ground in disgust. Once upon a time, he would have healed from such an attack with nary a sign or a scratch after so many hours. Of course, back in those days he wouldn’t have been caught unawares or been so unable to put up a fight. Still…he looked at the mutant, its bulging eyes continuing to stare into nothingness.
“Still got the better of you, beast,” he said in a dry voice. “Though neither of us gets to have dinner.” He considered taking the thing’s head as a trophy. Mutants were poisonous to eat, but there was something fulfilling about wandering back into the enclave with the hideous thing swinging from his bloodstained belt. He looked at the darkening sky. Time to go home.
He spared one more glance at the mutant who had cost him so many hours and caused him so much pain. He sighed. Pain was all this world knew. It was certainly most of what he had known in his long life, and he didn’t see that situation getting any better.
Nathaniel walked back through the woods the way he had come that morning. His tracking skills remained as sharp as ever, even as his reflexes and capacity for healing diminished. Bertram had always warned him that his special skills wouldn’t last forever. There were the stories, of course, of the other Great Ones who had come and gone, and Bertram could recite them by heart. But of course, Bertram himself hadn’t lasted forever. None of the others in Nathaniel’s circle, be they family by blood or by circumstance, had survived the long years.
Even Great Ones could be killed, though it was an arduous task. Nathaniel thought perhaps his ancestors had been truly immortal in the time that came before, but the world was no longer a safe place for either the normals like his few companions or the Great Ones like his parents and cousins. In the long run, it all came out to the same end as the one the mutant had met earlier that day.
All that remained were the younger generations in the enclave, and most of them didn’t know what to make of Nathaniel. He didn’t seem as old as the wrinkled greys that made up an ever-dwindling part of the population, though he was significantly older than all of those, but he was different than the others who looked the same as him. On top of that, it was common knowledge in the enclave that he was one of the Great Ones, the only one anybody there had ever seen, and most people treated him with reverence and fear, a mix that didn’t breed strong friendships.
It took less than an hour to leave the forest, judging by the progression of the sun. Nathaniel picked up the white dusty path back to the enclave and ambled along, his strides becoming more pronounced as the pain in his guts diminished.
By the time Nathaniel reached the enclave, the sky was black and stars painted the dark canvas with constellations. Nathaniel regarded the most important of these, the hunter, with mild amusement. Surely t
he great hunter had never been so grievously wounded during one of his infamous sky hunts.
Nathaniel didn’t believe the star groupings meant anything. To him, they were just like the animals that children in the enclave claimed to see in the clouds. Even adults were a foolish and superstitious lot in these tortured times. Just one more thing that set him apart from everyone else.
Nathaniel approached the gate to the enclave. The iron bars cast wild shadows in the flickering light of the torches from inside the stone walls.
“Evening, Nathaniel.” The guard smiled and raised a hand in greeting. The other he kept firmly on the contraption in his belt. Even in a world where men lived and died by the sword on a daily basis, it was the technology of the forgotten that kept those who would step out of line firmly in place.
“Myles.” Nathaniel raised his hand in return.
“You were out late,” Myles said. “And you’ve brought nothing with you. The hunt didn’t go well, I take it.”
Nathaniel didn’t respond. He walked past the grinning guard and took hold of the door.
“Seems you’re getting slow, old man,” Myles said. “Maybe proves the Great Ones weren’t so special after all.”
Nathaniel felt an old fire rise up in his chest. He thought about taking the guard to task, but what would it accomplish? “Think what you will,” he said, and continued into the enclave.
Nathaniel sat at the table in the chief hall and stared at the food before him. He felt a disgusting sense of guilt to have not contributed to the enclave’s rations, and to eat from what other hunters had acquired seemed less than noble. The fact that no other hunter in the enclave shared Nathaniel’s skills just made the matter worse.
He knew the other enclaves also lacked Great Ones. The enclaves, with their clusters of people, spread out a good distance before the walls, but word traveled well when it accompanied trade, and better still when it accompanied those simply looking for camaraderie or fun. Wine had a way of loosening the tightest lips and the tightest knees, in his experience.
It had been a long time since Nathaniel had even bothered with members of the opposite sex. There was a powerful allure to being a Great One, a charm that worked across the land, and he had used it to his advantage more than a few times over his many years. But those years had caught up to him, and being the only Great One made him more odd than desirable. Besides, he knew the grandfathers of the young women in town, and had known their great-grandfathers and the generations before that. It made for odd conversation and Nathaniel didn’t have the patience for such things.
“This seat taken?”
Nathaniel looked up. Achmis stood across from him, his tray of food resting on the stomach that protruded beneath it. Nathaniel sighed and motioned for Achmis to sit.
“I heard the hunt didn’t go well for you,” Achmis said as he lowered himself onto the bench.
“Seems everyone’s heard that,” Nathaniel said.
“Nate, we’ve been friends how many years?”
“I’ve lived with you and your wife for seven, if that’s what you mean.”
Achmis seemed to nearly register the meaning of the message, then shook his head and smiled. “It’s been a long time. And in all that time I’ve never seen you fail at a hunt. Struggle, yes, run into delays, of course. Why, I told Esther that if I had a cent marker for every time you’ve been late I’d have—”
“I assume there’s a point?” Nathaniel said.
Achmis spooned a heaping portion of stew into his mouth. “‘Course there is,” he mumbled through the food. “I’m worried about you, Nate. We are worried about you. Esther says she hears you groaning when you move around the house. You never used to groan.”
Nathaniel waved his hand. “You groan. It’s what people do. And I didn’t know Esther was keeping such a close watch on my wellbeing.”
“She loves you, Nate. I love you. You’re the only Great One left in the world, and that matters, but you’re more than that to this enclave. You’re a hero and a legend and a hell of a good guy. And you know what I’m saying. Something’s going on with you. What happened on the hunt?”
“A mutie got the jump on me and scared away my quarry. It’s really not any more complex than that.”
“A mutie,” Achmis repeated through a mouth filled with deerkin meat. “Hadn’t heard much about them in a while. I thought the motherfuckers were staying put in their caves.”
Nathaniel shrugged. “Not this motherfucker. He was a big one.” He smiled. “He’s dead now.”
“And he didn’t hurt you?” Achmis asked with a raised eyebrow.
Nathaniel’s smile faded. “What did you hear?”
“That you came limping into the enclave. Limping! By the grace of Weber, when I heard that I damn near choked on my own tongue.”
“I’m really fine,” Nathaniel said, “so you can stop looking at me like I might keel over in front of you.”
“Your Great One powers are fading,” Achmis stated.
“So what if they are?”
“So you need to start living like the rest of us mere mortals. I don’t want to have to remind you that all the other Great Ones are gone.”
“And yet you did remind me.”
Achmis frowned. His flabby chin contributed to a look of absolute sorrow. “Nate, your family and the others…it couldn’t be helped. You know what the doctors said. Whatever it is that makes you special, be it a blessing from the prophet or a miracle of man, it’s not forever. You’re not forever, and that means you need to start seeking out something that resembles a meaningful life.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning find a wife. Spend time with your friends. I don’t know, take up fucking painting with the nuns of the Klaus. Whatever you want. It’s not for me to dictate your life for you, but I want to see you happy. And more important, I don’t want to see you torn apart by one of the mutie hellspawn.”
“He was strong,” Nathaniel said, shifting the conversation as much as possible.
“Yeah, that’s what they say,” Achmis mumbled. “Having never had to face one myself, I can’t vouch personally but—”
“But I can,” Nathaniel replied. “I’ve fought many and they’re strong, but they’re sick and that levels things to a degree.”
Achmis leaned forward. “This one was different?”
Nathaniel nodded. “I think so.”
“And we can’t attribute that to your…changing condition?”
Nathaniel slammed his fist on the table. “Enough about me!”
“Okay! Okay! No more about the Great One and his troubles. This mutant, did he look like the others you’ve fought?”
“Close enough, yes. But the coloring was a little different.”
“What does it mean?” Achmis asked. “A new breed of mutant?”
“I don’t know,” Nathaniel admitted. “But I’d like to go out there come daylight and investigate. Perhaps I can still play the role of hero to this enclave a while longer.”
Achmis stared at him with curiosity. “Was that…a joke?”
“I suppose it was,” Nathaniel said.
Achmis chuckled. “Well, I’ll be damned. It wasn’t a good joke, but still…I’ll be damned.”
Nathaniel returned to his quarters in the building he shared with Achmis, Esther, and eight other residents. For longer than he could say, he had lived in a palace in the central enclave. It would have been unnatural for a Great One to live anywhere else. His people had ruled over all the land forever, even above and beyond the Authority that made day-to-day governing decisions. But that was in the time before, and with no other of his kind left now, Nathaniel felt uncomfortable putting himself in such lavish accommodations. The people of his new home, for their part, insisted he live rent-free, so he took the smallest room possible and did what he could to contribute to the survival of the enclave.
He climbed the stairs to his room and pushed the door open with a hand that felt wearier than he’d ever kno
wn it to be. He sat on the bed and stared at the artwork on the wall across from him. A golden spiral that seemed to both emerge from nowhere and return to the same, it felt familiar to him. He’d thought more than once that it reminded him of his own life, though it wasn’t as if he had emerged from nowhere. He certainly remembered his childhood and the palace, and what it was like to grow up among the Great Ones.
He stared at the spiral for a long time, then he blew out the candle next to him, fell back on the bed and closed his eyes. In the darkness he replayed the fight with the mutant. It was hard not to be just like Achmis and get caught up in the details of what was happening to him, but he knew that wasn’t the big picture. There was something about the mutant that nagged at him.
Mutants had once been commonplace in the world. They were a civilization nearly as old as the Great Ones, or so people said. They were a horrifying and disconcerting breed that grew quickly and died out quickly, but reproduced so rapidly that they continued to exist within their caves.
The legends naturally said that the mutants came from beyond the wall, but of course there was nothing beyond the wall. And maybe that was what was bothering him. In a world where even the Great Ones were finite after all, the arrival of a new type of mutant didn’t fit.
Nathaniel continued to ponder this contradiction as sleep finally carried him away from the visions of the yellow eyes.
2
“By the prophet, he’s an ugly fucker, isn’t he?”
Achmis bent with his hands on his large legs, panting for breath and taking in the reality of the dead mutant in front of him.
The Magic Book Page 1
