Magium: The Mage Tournament: Book 1

by Chris Michael Wilson

It doesn’t take long for the animals’ leader to make her appearance. Her shape is that of a normal fox, but her fur is so bright that it looks like it’s made of actual gold. The magical aura that she emanates is rather intimidating, and it also gives off an outworldly vibe. A similar vibe in fact to that of a banshee. Could she originate from the magical plane as well?

  The fox is being accompanied by a leopard and a bull, one on her left side and one on her right, just like two bodyguards walking alongside some rich noble kid. When they all stop in front of our cell, the fox starts speaking to us, in the common tongue.

  “Greetings, outsiders,” she says. “I am Eleya, the golden fox, and these are my two trusted lieutenants, Leo the leopard and Taurus the bull.”

  “Leo and Taurus!” Daren says, in a low voice. “Name creativity at its best!”

  “Shouldn’t Leo be a lion’s name, though?” Hadrik asks him.

  “Shhhh!” Rose tells them, while looking frantically at the three animals to see if any of them heard their banter.

  The bull seems to have both heard and understood Daren’s jest, as he is now looking straight at him, with a furious look in his eyes. The leopard either didn’t hear his remark, or didn’t deem it worthy of a reaction on his part. The fox simply ignores them altogether, and continues her speech, as if nothing had happened.

  “My loyal subjects informed me that you were caught trespassing on our sacred grounds,” the fox says. “What do you have to say in your defense?”

  “We didn’t mean any offense,” I say. “We’re from outside this continent, and we didn’t know that we were on sacred grounds.”

  “That is your defense?” the fox asks me, baffled. “In what way does ignorance absolve you of your transgression? Do you deny having trespassed on our sacred grounds?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then I hereby find you guilty,” the fox says, “and sentence you to a lifetime of hard labor in our animal kingdom. May your years spent here make you reflect upon what you’ve done, and repent for your crimes.”

  “Now, wait just one second!” Daren says. “What kind of a nonsensical sentence is this? Who sentences someone to a life of labor like that just because they happened to walk into a forbidden area by accident? Do you also execute your fawns and cubs if they don’t keep off the grass in a park?”

  “You would be wise to not address me in such a casual manner, mage in armor,” Eleya says. “But to answer your question, the animal kingdom has neither parks, nor a rule to keep off the grass in any region of the continent. However, if there were such a rule, and a cub or a fawn were to break it, then I assure you I would not hesitate in ordering their execution. Rules are meant to be upheld, both by humans and by animals. The fact that you humans are so lenient with your rules is one of the main reasons why your society is decaying to such a degree. I will hear no more of this. You will begin your work tomorrow, at the break of dawn. You have until then to prepare yourselves for what is to come.”

  With these last words, the golden fox leaves, and her bull companion hurries to follow her. The leopard stays behind for a bit and magically conjures a yellow envelope on the floor in front of him, out of thin air. He then uses one of his front paws to push the envelope under the metal bar door, and into our cell. Once he makes sure that he got our attention, he also goes to follow the fox and the bull, without uttering a single word to us.

  Rose picks up the envelope from the ground and opens it. Inside, there’s a small note that appears to be written in the common language.

  “What does it say?” Kate asks her.

  “It says: ‘If you reach a corridor that splits into three paths, each marked with the symbol of an insect, choose the one marked with a beetle.’ ”

  “Hold on,” Kate says. “Does this mean that the leopard expects us to escape and is giving us directions?”

  “So, Barry,” Daren says in a particularly loud voice, even though we’re all very close to each other, “what do you figure we should do next? Do you think we should wait until tomorrow and see if the golden fox has a change of heart? Maybe we should hold another vote to decide our best course of action! What do you say, Barry? Should we hold another vote?”

  The smug grin he has on his face is getting a little irritating.

  “That’s enough, Daren,” Kate says. “None of us could have known what the fox’s intentions were beforehand. They still left no guards to watch over us, so no harm was done. In fact, we may even be in a better position than we were before, judging by the contents of the note that Rose is holding in her hands.”

  “Aye!” Hadrik says, “We all agreed to hear the fox out before trying to escape. It was a good idea while it lasted!”

  Having been left with no other alternative than to break out of our cell, we wait for a few minutes to make sure that the fox and her lieutenants are out of hearing range, and then Hadrik shatters the wall of our prison with his fist.

  As we step over the rubble and take a good look outside of our cell, we see that the corridor we’ve just entered is completely deserted. If it weren’t for a few lit torches here and there, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to assume that this building had been abandoned a long time ago. Our cell seems to have been placed at the far end of the corridor, which means that the only way for us to go is left.

  While we walk, I pull out the stat device from my pocket, and I start to think about what I should be investing my four new points in. These ruins are looking rather old. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the floor were to crumble beneath us, while we moved around the corridors. Maybe it would be better to max out my premonition stat. I haven’t had a single vision since that time when the teleporting mage attacked me with a dagger, which I’m guessing is due to the low level of my stat, but in a place like this, I can’t think of any other stat that would be more helpful. I decide to spend three of my points on the premonition stat, in order to bring it to its maximum level of four, and then I spend my last remaining point on reflexes, which should also help me in case my premonitions don’t trigger in time.

  “I don’t like this,” Kate says, as I put my stat device back into my pocket. “This is the same direction in which the fox and her followers went. The last thing we want is to run into them while we’re escaping.”

  “Well, it’s not like we were given much of a choice,” Hadrik says. “There was only one way to go after we walked out of our cell, and there haven’t been any forks in the road since then. What intrigues me most is that we haven’t passed by a single cell since we got out. Isn’t this supposed to be a dungeon of some sort? Where are all the other prisoners?”

  “Maybe they only have one cell per corridor?” Rose suggests.

  “Forget the prisoners,” I say. “I’m more worried about the complete lack of guards in this place. Did they seriously think that we couldn’t bring down these frail old walls without magic?”

  “Hey, Rose,” Daren calls out, as he’s studying the writing on a wall. “Can you come over here for a second?”

  “Certainly!” Rose says, and she heads over to his side.

  “You can read ancient languages, right?” Daren says. “Can you tell me what this says?”

  “Hmm…” Rose says, as she looks at the text and furrows her eyebrows. “I’m afraid that this is a bit too advanced for me. I can tell that it’s written in the language used by the lessathi of old, but I cannot understand any of the words.”

  “Barry,” Daren says, “didn’t that trinket of yours have a stat named ‘ancient languages’? Come over here and see if you can translate this!”

  As I start to decipher the glyphs on the wall, I realize that the writing says: “If you like discovering secrets, tap each of these glyphs in rapid succession.”

  I tap all of the glyphs in order, one by one, just as the instructions said.

  Suddenly, the stone with the markings on it slides itself to the side, and two small objects get thrown out of the hole it left in the wall. The stone then slides b
ack into its original position. Upon closer inspection, I see that the two objects that came out of the wall are a small parchment and what appears to be a piece of a puzzle. I take them both from the ground, and read the piece of parchment. The text on it is written in the common language this time, and it says: “Find all of the pieces of the puzzle, and I will share with you my greatest secret. I’ve left one of these in each of the buildings I’ve designed.”

  The parchment is then signed as simply: “This building’s architect.”

  “Okay,” Daren says, as I put the small parchment and the puzzle piece in my left pocket. “First of all, what did the glyphs say, and secondly, what are those?”

  “The glyphs said that if I press them all in rapid succession I’ll discover a secret. The parchment said that if I find all of the pieces of the puzzle, I’ll find out this building’s architect’s greatest secret.”

  “Useless,” Daren says, disappointed, as he steps away from the wall and starts to walk down the corridor again. “I don’t know what I was expecting, really. I mean, it’s not like we’re—”

  Daren stops mid-sentence when he realizes that there is someone blocking his path. There’s a little girl standing in front of him, with her hands behind her back and a cheerful smile on her face. She is wearing a golden amulet around her neck, a gray tank top shirt, large pants commonly worn by clowns and no shoes. She is about four feet tall, and her long red hair is almost reaching her waist. Given her height and general appearance, I’d say that she is no older than ten. And yet, I’m not getting any sort of warning to not hurt her. Isn’t she one of the locals?

  “Hello!” she tells Daren, still smiling.

  “What the…” Daren says. “Where did you come from?”

  “There!” the girl says, while pointing towards a hole in the ceiling.

  “Oh, uh, okay…” Daren says. “And what are you doing here?”

  “We were just doing some training in the room above, when we heard you talking below us,” the girl says. “My name is Flower. Pleased to meet you!”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa…” Daren says. “Hold on, there! Who’s ‘we’?”

  Flower seems to have been caught off guard by Daren’s question.

  “Did I say ‘we’?” she asks. “I’m sorry, I meant to say ‘I’. I was doing some training in the room above. No ‘we’. Just ‘I’.”

  “What do you mean by training?” Kate asks her.

  “Oh, lots of stuff!” the girl says. “But mostly, I come here to practice my acrobatic skills. There are all sorts of traps around here, and I try to dodge them while doing fancy backflips or while I’m running on walls. It’s really fun!”

  “There are traps in these ruins?” Kate asks.

  “Yeah, the place is filled with them!” Flower says. “You need to watch your step if you’re not from around here. Did you all come here for sightseeing?”

  “Uh, no…” Kate says. “We were captured by the animals and locked up in a cell. We’re currently looking for the control room so we can turn off the collars around our necks. You wouldn’t happen to know where that is, would you?”

  “Control room?” Flower asks, and she pauses a little to think. “Oh, you mean the room full of levers and buttons! Sure, I know where that is. Follow me, I’ll show you the way!”

  As she starts walking down the corridor, Daren says to me in a low voice:

  “Something’s not right, here. The spell that the organizers cast on us isn’t reacting to her in any way. What do you think is causing this?”

  “Maybe she’s a prisoner here too, and the organizers don’t know about her,” I say.

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too,” Daren says. “But if that’s true, why do you think she’d be hiding that fact from us?”

  “It doesn’t matter who she is,” Kate interrupts us. “She clearly knows this place better than us, and if she were working with the animals, she would have already alerted them of our presence. Either way, there’s only one path for us to take at this point, so we don’t really have much choice than to go after her. We’ll decide later if we should trust her or not.”

  When we catch up with Flower, we hear her start talking with a much colder tone than before. While she speaks, she is still walking down the corridor, and her back is turned to us.

  “What’s wrong with you, Flower?” she says in her cold voice. “We came to these desolate ruins to train, not to play the tour guide! We don’t even know who these people are!”

  “Relax, Petal!” the girl says, this time in her previous cheerful tone. “They seem like nice people. We can get back to training once we’re done showing them around! This shouldn’t take long.”

  “I’m sorry, who are you talking to?” Kate asks her.

  Flower gets startled by Kate’s question, and quickly turns around to face her.

  “D-did we say that out loud?” she asks. “I mean ‘me’! ‘Me’, not ‘we’! Because there’s only one of me!”

  “Wait, are you implying that there’s more than one of you in there?” Daren asks.

  “What?” Flower says. “No, that’s crazy! You’re crazy!”

  She then starts laughing very nervously and unnaturally.

  “Did she just call me crazy?” Daren asks us.

  Suddenly, there’s a muffled laughter coming from within the golden amulet that Flower is wearing around her neck. The girl opens up the amulet and starts talking to it.

  “Shut up, Arraka!” she says.

  Now that I can hear the laughter clearer, I realize that the voice inside the amulet is made up of three different voices, all women, laughing simultaneously. Once the being inside the amulet realizes that we can now hear her clearly, she starts speaking to us.

  “Hey, you there!” the voice says. “This girl’s a banshee! Quick, check her magical aura! Check her magical au—”

  Flower panics and she closes the amulet, shutting the voice up, but the harm had already been done. As I analyze her magical aura in detail, I realize that it’s in fact a lot more powerful than it seems, and that she’s willfully suppressing it in order to make it seem like that of a normal human. But is she an actual banshee, or another artificial mage like Kate? There’s something off about her aura… I can’t tell exactly what. It feels almost as if she has two distinct magical auras around her, one that gives off an outworldly vibe, and one that doesn’t. It’s as if both the girl and the banshee that possessed her are somehow coexisting in the same body, as two separate entities. But that’s impossible… Isn’t it?

  “So, that’s what she’s been hiding from us all this time!” Daren says.

  He then turns to the girl.

  “Kid, you’re in luck!” he says. “You don’t need to live in fear any longer. Despite my looks, I just so happen to be an established white mage! I’ll rid you of your banshee problem in no time.”

  “What?” the girl says, shocked. “No, you can’t!”

  “Of course I can!” Daren says. “Don’t worry about the collar. This sword has more than enough enchantments on it to be able to carry out a purification ritual even without me casting any spells. That banshee will be dead before you know it, and you’ll be able to live your life as a normal girl again!”

  “No!” Flower shouts. “She’s my friend! I won’t let you hurt her!”

  “Friend?…” Daren asks the girl, as he approaches her. “This is even more serious than I thought! I need to get you purified, quick. You’re not thinking straight anymore!”

  When he gets closer to Flower, one of the stones that he stepped on starts sinking into the floor, and we can hear some other stones moving above our heads.

  “Look out!” Flower says, pointing upwards, as a large rock detaches itself from the ceiling and descends upon our heads.

  The girl raises her hand, with her palm facing the big boulder, and she shoots a fireball at it, which pulverizes the rock in an instant. As we are getting showered with rubble from the destroyed boulder, the walls a
re now slowly starting to close in on us, with a loud and menacing sound echoing all throughout the corridor.

  “Oh, no!” Flower says. “I remember this trap. This isn’t good! The walls aren’t going to stop until they turn us all into red gooey paste.”

  She starts looking all around her for a way out, and then her eyes find the hole in the ceiling that she used to get into our corridor.

  “Okay, I’ve got an idea!” she says. “I think I may be able to create an enclosed space here by blowing up the roof on both sides of the corridor. I can then flood the room with water so that we can all swim up to that hole in the ceiling! Can you guys swim?”

  “Well, I’m dressed from head to toe in heavy armor, so what do you think?!” Daren asks her.

  “Okay, okay! New plan!” Flower says. “I think there was a secret mechanism in the room above to stop the walls from moving! Petal, can you give me a boost?”

  The girl puts both arms alongside her, with her palms facing downwards. Two powerful jets of water start erupting out of her hands, which lift her into the air, and right through the hole in the ceiling.

  “What the hell?” Daren says. “Didn’t she use fire magic just a moment ago? Don’t tell me that she’s already mastered two elements by the age of nine?”

  “Actually, I think that water is the banshee’s element,” I tell Daren.

  “What did you just say?” he asks me.

  “Guys, can you hear me?” Flower asks us from the room above, but she then continues to talk without waiting for an answer. “Just wanted to let you know that I’ve found the secret mechanism. But, uh… You see, the thing is there’s more than just one mechanism. And I don’t really know which one of these is the right one. But… I’m sure I’ll figure this out in good time. Probably.”

  “Okay, that’s it!” Hadrik says. “I’m going to punch right through this wall until we get to the other side.”

  “What?” Kate shouts. “No, don’t do that! Are you insane? What if that wall is the only thing holding up the ceiling above us and it will all come crashing down upon us once you destroy it?”

  “So you’d rather sit here and get squashed between two walls, then?” Hadrik says. “You’re not seriously thinking that the little goofball up there is going to figure out the complex mechanisms that run this place before the walls reach us, do you?”