A Bitter Brew

by Greg Curtis

  So too did the animals of the world. The mystical ones the bards sang of. He was shocked as a flight of griffins suddenly arrived from out of nowhere and flew through the portal. They had been magnificent creatures he thought. A herd of unicorns followed them through a few days later, and they were even more beautiful than he had imagined. The bards did not have the words to describe them truly.

  Other creatures arrived and stepped through the portal. Ones the bards had never written of or sung about. Winged horses and birds that blazed with fire. Big black hounds with three heads and lizards with two. Tiny little snakes that could fly and birds as large as mammoths that couldn't. Obviously a lot of things had been left out of the tales.

  Hendrick sat there watching the ancient past, fascinated by a world he had never even imagined possible, and wanting nothing more than to visit. But eventually he had to stop. Partly because it simply wasn't possible to keep going. He couldn’t follow them through the portal with his spell. But mostly because the people and the creatures had also stopped going through the portal. After a certain point as he ran through day after day at the oasis, no more people and no more creatures came. Not even when he started sprinting through the days so fast that the seasons began to come and go. It didn't take the wisdom of the sages to know that that was because there were no more left to come. Maybe there were other oases, other portals. And maybe more ancient peoples and creatures were still heading for them. But this one had seen its last visitors.

  This then had been the end of the ancient Kingdom of Malthas. And while he knew he could simply stay and go back further in time to watch it all over again, he knew he shouldn't. Though it was fascinating and he could have stared at those images of the past forever, this wasn't what he had set out to learn. He had started this search looking for a woman.

  So he sent his window away from the oasis and racing back to what remained of the ruined city after the great beast had rolled over it. And when he arrived back there for the most part not even rubble had been left behind. However, here and there he could see the remains of a few odd pieces of buildings, sticking out of the emptiness like bleached bones in a desert where there had once been a corpse.

  It was a sad sight, but as he reminded himself, it was a tragedy that had happened over fifteen hundred years ago. It also wasn't what he had come to see. That was clearly further back. Hendrick started turning back the pages of time once more, and soon he found himself looking at happier times when the city had still stood. And he gaped at what he saw.

  It had been magnificent! The streets were paved with an orange and brown veined marble that together somehow formed straight lines. They needed lines because everywhere he looked carriages travelled along them. But not carriages such as he was familiar with. These ones had no horses pulling them and no wheels. Instead they simply floated along a couple of feet above the streets, with no sign of what made them move.

  The buildings along both sides of the streets were made of stone and volcanic glass, crystal and concrete. They towered above the street, often ten or twenty stories high. These buildings were as tall as the highest towers and there were hundreds of them. Thousands. And if he'd had any worries that people might have had difficulty climbing the stairs, he needn't have. The people seemed to either float up to wherever they needed to be, or to fly if they were equipped with wings.

  Every city street where it crossed others met in a circular section of road, where the streets became a giant circle surrounding common land. Gardens, wooden benches, fountains, grassed areas and even small copses of trees, abounded throughout the city. He wondered why they were there. It made an already huge city even larger. Was it simply for the purposes of beauty? Or was it practical? He didn't know, although the one thing he did notice was that none of them had vegetable gardens. On the other hand, many of the buildings had huge roof gardens in which vegetables were planted.

  Strangest of all, many of the buildings were topped with great sculptures of steel and crystal. Huge round orbs of glass, windmills of burnished copper and lattice work towers of steel. There was a huge variety of them and he could think of no reason for them save to look beautiful and perhaps impress through the skill of the builders.

  This was a city of magic. A city of wizards. But not he thought, Altanis. Because from what he had read, that city was of a place of warring wizards. This, if he was to judge it based solely on the way that people wandered the streets happy and carefree, was a place of peace.

  Where were the broken and downtrodden people he had read of? The people one short step away from slavery? Where was the suffering? The fear? He couldn't find them. Instead as he skipped ahead through the days, all he saw were seemingly peaceful happy people going about their normal lives. Walking along the streets or floating above them. Mothers escorting their children to what could only be schools. Store keepers selling their wares. Save for the magic and the materials and the different peoples of the world, this could be a typical day in Burbage.

  And then as he'd known it must, the end came. It came without any warning.

  It began with a fireball, but one such as he had never imagined possible. This one was as large as one of those twenty story high buildings and built of flaming rock, and when it hit it destroyed an entire quarter of the city. Hundreds of thousands of people must have been killed in a heartbeat. There had been no warning. No chance for people to flee. Just this immense ball of flaming rock streaking down out of the sky followed by fire. It was an inferno larger than a mountain. After that thick black clouds of smoke and dust blanketed everything.

  People ran and screamed. They panicked. But strangely none of them reached for their magic to drive the burning, choking clouds of smoke away. None called water down to quench the flames. And he had to wonder; if this truly was a city of wizards, why weren't they defending themselves?

  But even as he asked himself that he saw someone strike back with a swarm of spinning, shining blades. They streaked out from the city, heading back toward wherever the fireball had come from. The battle had been called and met.

  Hendrick back tracked the silver shears through the city until he finally found the caster, though at first he didn't realise he'd found him. He'd expected a man. A wizard. But what he was looking at wasn't that. He was built and shaped like a man, and may once have been one, but he certainly wasn’t any longer. Instead what he was looking at was a dull grey statue that moved. A gigantic statue made of magnetite.

  It took Hendrick a few moments to understand what he was seeing. Finally though, he realised that this colossus of magnetite was in fact one of the seven ancient wizards. He wasn't marked with the magic metal though. He was the magic metal. Somehow he had been transformed. Fifty, sixty, seventy feet high and weighing surely tens of thousands of pounds, he was the ancient wizard of earth and force magic – and he wasn't really a wizard at all!

  Sensing a pattern forming even then, Hendrick followed the fireball back to its point of origin and found another colossus – this time a living statue made of Infernium. It was incredible to see a man that huge made entirely of the fiery bronze metal, seeming to radiate heat and light. But having seen the last colossus he had expected it. Just as he'd also expected to find another ruined city. This one though had been drowned. Hit with a deluge of water that had flooded the entire city to the height of the tallest buildings. And the city hadn't been built in a valley either. The water that had engulfed it was actually just one gigantic water droplet; one large enough to engulf an entire city. Crystallite.

  Naturally he followed that vast bubble of water back as it had flown through the air, and almost through the black of the space between stars, until he found the next ruined city and the next Colossus. This one was made of the living blue, shimmering metal.

  Unlike the others this one's city didn't seem to be damaged in any way. Instead it was the wizard himself who was under attack by the looks of things. He seemed to be holding his head and screaming as if he was in agony. Hendrick suspec
ted a mental attack – Luminite. Unfortunately it was an attack of that sort he couldn't follow back to its caster.

  But what he could do he realised, was follow the victim’s own attacks, as lost in his madness, he sent one vast droplet of water flying after another. And Hendrick dutifully tracked each one until he finally found his target. The Mithril wizard.

  Hendrick didn't know the wizard's name even though he had some of his memories. Like most people he never thought of himself by his name. And he didn't recognise his face. It looked familiar, but no more than that of a casual acquaintance. He realised in time that it was because the wizard only saw his own face when he looked in a mirror. Like most people the wizard would probably recognise many other faces before his own. Yet something in the giant wizard called to him.

  The Mithril wizard was perhaps not quite as large as the others, standing only fifty or sixty feet tall. But Hendrick wasn't sure what that meant, if anything. He suspected after looking at his city which had been completely destroyed that it represented the fact that he was losing the war. But whether he was losing it because he wasn't as powerful as the others, or had simply lost power because he was losing, Hendrick couldn't tell. What he could tell was that his city was gone. It had been smashed by fireballs and tornadoes, and another of the huge grey monsters that ate cities was busy making a meal of what remained. The huge bubble of sea water that was heading its way was largely a waste of time.

  The strange thing was that as he stared at the Mithril giant, thoughts and feelings were stirring in his mind. Memories of pain, feelings of shock and betrayal. And he knew that they were the memories of the ancient wizard being prodded into life by the sight. It was disturbing. Like awakening memories of a past life you had never known existed. But more than that, the memories were horrible.

  Still, it was useful having those memories awaken. Because it helped him to track down his target – Erohilm. He knew, even as he experienced the pain of having been betrayed by her in the most terrible way, that she had ripped his heart apart only hours before. It was why the wizard was dying. It was also why the wizard had attacked the others.

  Pain, blood, vengeance. That was all the wizard had known at the end. And it was an unpleasant last meal. Hendrick didn't want to eat it.

  So he stopped the history lesson at that point and headed a few hours back into the past. Just far enough to find her in the Mithril wizard's home.

  Seeing her was like opening a door into a world he had never known existed. A world of love and hate, heartbreak and joy. A world of transcendent highs and abysmal depths. And none of those emotions were his. Hendrick could feel the ancient wizard’s emotions. He was utterly in love with her and had built his entire world around her wishes. Hendrick though, standing back from the emotions, wondered who she was or why she mattered. It was decidedly strange.

  It took him some time to take control of his thoughts. To let the most intense of the emotions wash away, so he could stand back and try to watch dispassionately. But eventually he managed it and watched on as the story continued on to its terrible end.

  Hendrick looked on as he saw the woman tell the ancient wizard that she was leaving him for one of the other wizards, and then took her leave. It was that that started the war that had ended an entire civilization. It seemed like such a small thing to have such consequences. And yet to the wizard, it had been everything.

  Hendrick only had fragments of the actual memories of what she'd said and how the ancient wizard had launched the first attack against his rival. He didn't know the names of the wizards; only the woman’s name. But he still felt the wizard’s pain as if it had been his own. It was like a wave crashing over him.

  Unlike the gigantic Mithril wizard though, he noticed some other details of the encounter once he'd let that first terrible wave of pain wash away. And the first thing he noticed was the way she was dressed. Gowned from head to foot in a sparkling, shimmering dress that covered everything and yet seemed quite immodest as it hugged the contours of her body scandalously. Any man would have wanted her. She was seduction itself.

  The other thing he noticed, once he'd managed to draw his eyes away from her shockingly indecent dress, was the smile on Erohilm's face as she left his home. A knowing, triumphant smile as if she had just won some epic battle, instead of having ripped a man's heart out. And he saw the way she never looked back as she left. Not even when the wizard fell to his knees and called out to her, begging for her to stay.

  All around her people noticed. The door to his gigantic home was open and it was hard not to notice a fifty-foot-tall man made of Mithril, pleading for a beautiful woman to stay at the top of his lungs. But she just walked away, smiling, her hips swaying mesmerizingly, telling him of everything he'd just lost.

  It was cold, calculating and cruel. But he also wondered to himself as he watched her walk down the street, was it more than that? Was it a plan? Did she know what her betrayal would ultimately lead to?

  It seemed unlikely. How could she know? And if she had known, why would she ever do what she had done? It would lead to her own death along with so many others.

  Or would it? Did she have some plan to survive, as unlikely as it seemed? Did she perhaps know where the portals were?

  Hendrick followed her down the street, watching her every step and yet still he nearly lost her. It happened so quickly. One moment she was simply walking down the street through the crowds, and the next she was gone. How?

  It took him a surprising amount of time to answer that question, as he had to turn time back a few seconds and then watch her disappear again and again, looking at it from every angle, before he finally understood the trick. And when he did a chill ran down his spine as he realised she wasn't at all what he'd thought. She had also been a wizard.

  It was a masterful spell. So quick and clean that no one would have spotted it. Not even the people who were right there with her on that street. No one who wasn't able to watch the trick from every angle and even slow it down so his eyes could keep up, would have spotted it. She had simply entered a particularly dense group of people, side stepped in front of one man walking immediately beside her and then ducked around another coming straight at them. And in that moment she had changed into the man she was weaving her way around.

  The man she had ducked in front of had to stop hurriedly, and then for a heartbeat had grown angry. But he had no one to be angry at because the woman who had ducked in front of him was gone and instead he was staring at the back of a large bearded man. Hendrick could see the surprise in his face as he tried to make sense of that even while dodging more oncoming people. And the man who had been coming toward her probably only saw her for the briefest heartbeat before she changed her appearance. A heartbeat later it was all over and she now wore the body of the bearded man and continued on down the street.

  That wasn't physical magic. She hadn't actually shifted form as some with the magic of Illuminium were able to do. Because her clothes had changed with her. If she had been using such a spell she would have still been wearing her shimmering dress. And it couldn't be magic of the mind either, because even if she had had Luminite magic it couldn't have affected him since he wasn't actually there. Which only left an illusion of light bending – Infernium magic. But Hendrick had never seen one of their spells done so flawlessly. There had not even been a ripple in the air as her illusion took hold. It was too perfect. But more than that as she – he – jostled against other pedestrians, the material of the suit moved as if it was solid. What sort of spell was that?

  But she wasn't finished. Even when he'd finally worked out what she'd done and begun following her new image she changed again, repeating the trick twice more. And each time, despite knowing what she was doing, he found himself losing her and having to go through the same detailed search to see who she'd become again.

  Did she think she was being followed? Think she was being spied on? By whom? The giant Mithril wizard was in his home, his heart breaking as his world
crashed down all around him? He wasn't spying on her. And none of the other ancient wizards were there either.

  But even as he wondered that, she pulled her next vanishing trick, and turned into a darkened doorway leading to a warehouse. She stepped into it and yet somehow did not step through. All he could think was that the doorway was a portal of some sort.

  That meant she had Mithril magic as well as Infernium!

  Like the other wizards, she too had had no markings. And she was from a time before the seven ancient wizards had gone to war. Evidently possessing more than one form of magic wasn't the impossibility it was today. But still it gave him pause. It made him wonder – just what other magic did she have? Did she also have the magic of the mind? Luminite? Because as he sat there, remembering the sheer pain that the ancient wizard had known at her betrayal, and having seen her complete lack of caring, it occurred to him that if she had used a spell on him, it would explain a lot. And since the wizard was in fact a fifty foot tall living Mithril statue, it would also explain how he could have believed she cared for him instead of being frightened of him as everyone else surely was.

  Love, lust, seduction and a few spells to cloud the thoughts and make a man stop thinking of the impossibility of a woman like her entering his life. This woman was a warrior and those were her weapons. Devastating weapons that would leave her chosen prey completely at her mercy. Hendrick knew that. But he also knew that that would mean that she had set out to deliberately destroy the wizard and perhaps even start the war. And he could think of no reason why anyone – even if they could survive the war – would want that.