by Rain Oxford
“Are you the curse breaker?” one of them asked. They were about nine and identical in appearance with long, dirty brown hair and gray eyes. The quiet one had a scroll in his hand, no doubt one of the flyers with my face on it.
“I am. Do you need a curse broken?”
“Our mother is sick.”
“I’m afraid you need a mage for that. I can’t heal people.”
“It’s a curse, though. She’s losing her magic.”
“Oh.” I glanced at Merlin and he nodded. “I’m sorry, but she’s not the only one. A lot of people are losing magic. It’s not a curse, but I’m working on fixing it.”
“But she can’t defend herself against other sorcerers! She has a lot of enemies.”
“I sense no magic in these two,” Merlin said.
“It could be that their father doesn’t have magic and they didn’t inherit it.” As the twins started to turn away, I asked, “How did you know I was the curse breaker?” Several people had recognized me even when I was away from the castle.
The one with the scroll handed it to me. “Well, you’re on Mokora, so we had a pretty good idea, and I don’t know anyone else who has a wolf familiar.”
Merlin growled. He hated being called a familiar. Even Magnus called Fluffy, a winged, black kitten, his minion rather than his familiar. It was fairly common for people to create a strong bond with a particular creature of magic, which would become their familiar. The familiar performed tasks and protected the person in exchange for use of the person’s magic. Although Merlin was acting as my familiar in some ways, he was not just an animal. Merlin was a wizard far more powerful and wise than I would ever become. He was teaching me magic and I was using it to protect us both, but it was more than that; we were friends.
The drawing of me on the scroll was very well-done, but it could easily have been half the wizards on Caldaca. It wasn’t my face that made me so recognizable; it was Merlin. I was described as a wizard in appearance with blond hair, blue eyes, and a little…
“Scrawny? That’s rude!”
“If you would not forget to eat breakfast, maybe you would not be so scrawny,” Merlin advised.
According to the scroll, I was identifiable by my dark green robe with gold stitches and my wolf companion. I probably should have left my Dracre robe behind, but it was part of who I was— the sign of my blood. I was raised to respect it.
As for Merlin, there wasn’t much I could do about it. I could disguise him with magic, but the spell would be broken the moment he spoke to me telepathically. A magician, on the other hand, could disguise him as a man and it would not fade.
Then again, I didn’t necessarily want to be hidden. Yes, breaking curses could slow me down, but helping people usually paid off for me. More importantly, the more curses I broke, the better I became at it, and the closer I was to breaking Merlin’s curse. Of course, the same could be said for cursing people. The reason I was better at it than wizards or sorcerers was because I could do both light and dark magic.
The children took their scroll and left, somewhat disheartened. I was not responsible for the black star coming or its effects. However, I was one of the few people who knew about it and as one of fourteen people who (probably) wouldn’t lose their magic from it, I had to try to stop it.
By then, Sebsan had two plates of food on the bar for us. I paid him and took the plates to a table. Merlin had no problem hopping into a wooden seat, drawing attention from the other patrons. We ignored it and ate our roast, bread, and cheese.
* * *
Traveling at night was spooky. There were many strange caws, screeches, and howls emanating from the forest. Merlin repeatedly had to remind me to stay on the path, because it was next to the forest and I kept trying to veer away from the unnerving sounds.
I was too tired to continue practicing magic. By the time we reached Red Rock, the southernmost city of Mokora, I was a grumpy mess. I wanted to stay at the inn, but that made no sense; the plan was to sleep on the ship. Of course, in my exhausted state, I didn’t really care about the plan.
Red Rock was a good sized city where most people who wanted to buy, sell, or trade came. In fact, every time we visited it, it seemed a little larger. This time, it was packed. “There must be a tournament of some kind.” I noticed a cluster of people standing around a pot of something, trying what looked like brown soup. Curious, I joined the crowd.
“We have no time for this,” Merlin insisted.
The woman serving the brown concoction held out a mug for me. “Try our new bean juice.”
“Bean juice? That doesn’t sound very good. What kind of beans?”
“They were imported by my nephew from another world. They grow well in our soil.”
I sniffed the bean juice, cringed, and held it out for Merlin to smell. The pungent stench was kind of revolting, kind of intriguing, like I knew I would hate it, but I wanted it anyway.
“It is coffee,” Merlin said dryly.
“Is it safe to drink?”
“For you, no.”
I handed it to the person beside me and we made our way to the docks. There were some tents set up along the way, but I couldn’t figure out what kind of tournament it was, and Merlin didn’t want to take the time to ask questions.
“Detours rarely work out well for us,” he reminded me.
The bay was full of ships, which told me something was definitely going on.
“We may have to wait a few days for passage.” If I were a malicious sorcerer, I could have demanded priority. As a curse breaker, I didn’t hold that level of respect. Most people this far north of Akadema didn’t recognize my Dracre robe.
“Good evening,” I said to get the attention of three men who were arguing. “Can you point me to a captain who can take us to Akadema?”
All three men spotted Merlin and grimaced. “Do you plan to take the wolf?”
“Merlin has been on ships before.”
“We’re all captains, but it’s not a good time to be traveling.”
“Why is that?”
He frowned. “Have you been living in the mud? The inventors! They’re everywhere!”
“What kind of inventors?”
“The usual kind. A lot of people are saying there’s something wrong with magic, so they’re trying to invent ways to do things without magic.”
“Other people think we’re using magic up and they’re trying to find ways to conserve it,” one of the other men said.
The third man elbowed the second one in the arm and said, “But of course, that’s ridiculous. You can’t use up magic, because you produce it.”
I really didn’t want to get into that again. Even Merlin, who had studied magic for hundreds of years and was trained by a dragon, wasn’t sure how it worked. For me, magic was just a fact. It was like air; it was there, I needed it, and I didn’t care how it was made.
“Well, despite the inventors, Merlin and I need to get to Akadema as soon as possible.”
“I can take you, but we have to make a few stops, because there are other passengers,” the first captain offered.
“I can take you straight there, but it’ll cost more,” the second captain said.
“I can take you to Cargaf, south of here, and then you could take another ship the rest of the way to Akadema.”
“Oh, is Akadema south of here?” the first captain asked.
“Okay, I’m definitely not choosing you.” I looked at the second captain. “You know where Akadema is, right?”
“Of course.”
“How long would it take to get there?”
“Weather permitting, five days.”
We had enough seasickness potion to get there, although it wouldn’t leave much to spare. “Then we’ll hire you.”
He studied my thin, raggedy clothes and my lavish robe. “Are you sure you can afford it?”
“I’m certain, because you’re not going to cheat me.”
“Cheat you? I would never!”
“I know. I just said you wouldn’t. Besides the fact that you’re an honest man, no one is foolish enough to try to deceive the son of the most powerful sorceress of Akadema.”
“You are getting pretty good at embracing your dark side without actually being devious,” Merlin praised.
The captain offered us a fair price and when we agreed, the other two captains departed.
“I’m Ayden.”
“I’m Snagen, the captain of the Midnight Ghost.”
“Why are you snogging the captain?” Merlin asked.
“What?”
“No, ‘why’.”
“Who?”
“Closer.”
“Merlin, what are you talking about?”
“Never mind, young sorcerer, I am merely being facetious.”
We boarded the ship and I gave Merlin his first potion. Before setting sail, I met our shipmates. There were six crewmembers and four other passengers. I could see from Merlin’s expression the moment the potion kicked in.
There were two rooms below deck; one for the passengers and one for the crewmembers. In the passenger quarters, there were ten beds, so Merlin and I picked two in the corner. I leaned my staff against the wall between our beds, cradled my bag against my chest, and fell asleep almost the moment my head touched the pillow.
Chapter 3
I woke to Merlin pulling off the covers. “If you sleep any longer, you will be up all night,” Merlin explained.
I moaned. “I don’t want to get up. I need sleep.”
“Get up for a few hours and then you can sleep at night.”
I put my hood up and ignored him. A moment later, Merlin wiggled the tip of my staff under me and pushed down, lifting me up. I rolled off the bed, sighed, and climbed to my feet. “Fine, but don’t expect me to be nice to people.”
“You might have passed for a sorcerer if your mother had kept you sleep-deprived.”
I stopped. “I’m not that bad, am I?”
Merlin laughed. “No. You are one of the most polite people I know. On the rare times when you are grouchy, you avoid people. It is a refreshing change. In fact, that is why I stopped teaching royalty. You would not believe how many princes took their petty issues out on their entire kingdom.” Merlin told me about one such prince’s infamous wrath, but I wasn’t paying much attention.
Because Merlin wasn’t sick, he kept me busy with lessons. I couldn’t do magic without my wand or staff, so he came up with an idea that I wasn’t convinced would work. Since we first joined Magnus, Merlin had been teaching me meditation and extreme visualization, which were difficult lessons for me. His idea was for me to visualize my wand so strongly that I could feel it and actually use magic through it.
After he explained the idea, I tried to meditate as Merlin instructed, but I ended up falling asleep, so I had to stop and continue later. No matter how much I practiced meditation, I still had a few stray thoughts, but Merlin had explained to me that this was fine. He had told me when I first started that quieting my mind would take practice. Merlin always seemed to know what state of mind I was in.
I practiced every day on the ship, and although I wasn’t able to do magic through an imaginary wand, I could visualize it pretty strongly. When I wasn’t practicing magic, I was enjoying the benefits of being on a passenger ship rather than a pirate or merchant ship.
One of the crewmembers was a magician who put on a show for the passengers. Colorful creatures made of cold fire danced around the ship. Merlin wasn’t amused by a fire-wolf that followed him around. Fortunately, food was provided, so I didn’t need to use up our supply of edible clay.
On the second day, the captain taught me about the parts of the ship, as well as how to sail it. I didn’t think I’d ever need the knowledge, but it was interesting nonetheless.
Two of the passengers were a sorcerer couple traveling from the far north trying to escape the fading magic. As they described the chaos it caused, I decided not to tell them that the loss of magic was worldwide. If Merlin and I succeed in saving the egg, that should stop the black star and return magic to everyone.
If I failed, there probably wouldn’t be anyone left to be disappointed in me.
“I don’t see many wizards traveling,” the quietest of passengers commented during dinner. He was about twenty-five with dark brown hair and silver eyes. Merlin had warned me the moment we met him that he was a werewolf. We didn’t plan on confronting him unless he threatened us.
“Merlin says that no great quest is complete without a wizard,” I said.
“Who’s Merlin?”
I pointed to Merlin. “He is. He can talk, but only I can hear him.”
“Oh… that’s weird. I like weird. Most wizards are so boring.”
“You’re not from Mokora, are you?”
“No, I’m from Tetaryn.”
Tetaryn was north of Mokora. If he didn’t know I was the curse breaker, word of Merlin and me may not have reached his land. With my mother on my trail, it wasn’t a good thing for everyone to know who I was, because there were many who were loyal to my mother or who would capture me for ransom.
On the third day, the sun brought sweltering heat that made it difficult for the crew to navigate and nearly burned holes through the sails. The crew thought it was a curse, but the sorcerer couple said the weather had done this very thing where they lived right before people started losing magic.
On the fourth day, the sun rose on a sea of ice. It was so cold that ice had formed on the wheel and glazed the deck, making it nearly impossible to navigate through the icebergs that had either formed overnight or migrated from the north.
Fortunately, on the fifth day, the temperature was pleasant and there weren’t any icebergs in our path. I would have preferred to have been attacked by a water monster than deal with severe weather. Then Merlin assured me that it was still possible to be attacked by a monster.
* * *
We docked at Akadema and departed the ship. It was a normal winter day, about as cold as it ever got on my homeland. There weren’t any mountains or scenic canyons, only small villages, hills, forests, and grassy plains. We had no cities as large as Red Rock and while there were a few small kingdoms, they weren’t famous. If there were any wizards on Akadema, they were discreet, because the Dracre reputation was widely known in these parts.
In fact, I had to be careful in the central part of the land because some people there knew me as the misfit son of the Dracre family. Just in case my mother ordered anyone to capture me, I put my hood up over my hair. I doubted my reputation as a curse breaker had reached this far.
We reached a small village built around a castle ruins that was first destroyed by dragons… and second destroyed by me and my monkey monster. Soon after meeting Merlin, he taught me to conjure a minion. What I meant to create was a monkey, but between my lack of focus and Merlin’s excessive detail, I ended up creating a flying monkey with tentacles, which immediately escaped my control and wreaked havoc on the village. Feeling guilty, I saved them and accidentally showered the village with dragon treasure.
Merlin stopped in the very center of town. “What’s wrong?” I asked. The sun was getting low and I wasn’t opposed to stopping for the night, because the closest shelter outside the town was the Dark Forest, where we were once attacked by elves.
Instead of answering, Merlin ventured through a smaller walkway between two huts. I followed cautiously. When I caught up to him, he was sitting in front of two crying girls, grumbling. I knew he was only trying to speak, but it sounded like he was scolding them.
They both had curly black hair and black eyes. Although they looked like necromancers, I couldn’t sense any power from them. One of them was around seven and the other a year or two older. They wore elegant black robes with silver emblems, although I didn’t recognize the family’s mark. “Why are you crying?” I asked the girls.
Merlin cleared his throat and tried again, this time imitating my concerned tone instead of for
ming words.
“Our father was turned into a goat by a traveling sorcerer,” the younger girl said. “We don’t have the money to get someone to help us.”
“Where is your father?”
Before the younger girl could answer, the older girl gasped. “Be quiet, Lemar, he’s a Dracre.”
“He doesn’t look like a Dracre,” Lemar argued.
The older girl was staring a hole through the Dracre emblem on my robe. I sighed and lowered my hood. “I am a Dracre, but not a sorcerer. I’m a curse breaker.”
“I’ve never heard of your kind.”
“We’re rarer than elementalists. Where is your father?” She pointed to a black goat that was eating a bush that lined a small stream. “He doesn’t… bite, does he? I mean, he still remembers that he’s your father, right?”
“Yes, but our father has always acted… kind of like a mad goat.”
“So, he does bite?”
“Yes.”
“Lovely.” I aimed my staff at the goat. I could break the curse from a distance, as long as he was fairly still. The goat raised his head at that moment, saw me, bleated, and took off running. I groaned. “I don’t like goats.”
“You can hardly blame him,” Merlin said. “However, this particular goat is---”
When the goat crashed into a hut, I dropped my bag and staff and chased after him. Unfortunately, the hut collapsed on top of the startled animal. I pulled my wand out of my pocket and pointed it at the house. “Levitate.”
Magic shot through me, out of the wand, and into the roof of the hut, which rose into the air. The goat kicked away the door he was buried under and took off again. “Really? I don’t have time for this.”
Once again, I chased after him. Instead of running on the cleared path, he ran through the shops, bounding through windows and doors, onto rooftops, and under awnings. He destroyed everything in his path. People screamed in panic. At that point, I realized that the rooftop of the hut that I levitated was following us. I set it down… and it landed on some decorative pots.
“My pots! Those were ancient relics!”
