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The Serpent Isle Irregulars in...
"Pecking Order"
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So yes, the sorcerer went by a different name these days: "Buck Buck".
A most humiliating turn of character development, like naming a dog "Woof Woof" or an anteater "Snoof Snoof", or a human after any one of the disgusting noises that they make from any one of their disgusting orifices. The bird himself found the name intolerably undignified and had already committed to memory the face of the one responsible for giving it to him. That was not a difficult task—he'd known (and hated) the man for years.
Never mind and rest assured; the rising sun of Revenge continued its steady approach towards the axis between Buck Buck's imagination and reality. In time that sun would breach the line and set the world ablaze, and those who wronged him (and there were many wrongs) would come to know the general size and shape and suggested retail value of a rooster's wrath. For now however, he contented himself with etching his initials—his real initials—into the cold dirt ringing the outskirts of their humble campfire.
Nobody else recognized the crude marks as Sosarian runic. Nobody would even think to hazard a guess; as usual, all humans present mistook the exercise for one that birds might do as a matter of instinct. To them, well, he was probably scrounging for grubs or something. After all it was supper time, and Buck Buck showed minimal interest in the generous handful of crumbled grain and seed that the one named Sethys had poured out onto the ground before him, a subtle indication that he preferred his scratch to have a little more substance (or depending on the time of day, a higher ABV).
Such sophisticated modes of communication usually failed to catch the eyes of humans. Even those belonging to the one named Shamino and he fancied himself a professional eye-catcher—a ranger, or so he claimed. He did not wear the obnoxious green livery of the Moonshadian genre. He did wear a complicated expression, contorting while his jaw, downy with a layer of blond stubble, struggled to make headway through a particularly squeaky cut of preserved pork. And why did he not sit by the fire and warm himself? No no, he kept away from the others and leaned against the hoary trunk of an oak tree, defoliated and hibernating, which it would continue to do so long as this accursed world continued lurching towards the better side of winter. Her chill pervaded everything, from wooly jumpers to fluffed up feathers to bones and to beating hearts. The sensation was not entirely bad; perhaps this Shamino cherished it. What else but a wicked winter could make spring so sweet?
Then again, Buck Buck still remembered the Glowing Man and no doubt the others did too. And no matter how they tried to ease each others' spirits today, the residue of yesterday's ill will yet tainted every gesture and befouled every platitude.
In those moments—stuffed taut with human suffering, enough to fill a body cavity from neck to rump—Buck Buck felt vaguely glad to be a chicken.
"I'm not saying that our mission doesn't feel like a trip for biscuits. Virtues know I'd've rather gone north with the Avatar," Shamino admitted freely, despite his straining jaws. "But she's depending on us to find that Serpent Staff. She's depending on us to take this seriously." He sighed, long and low. "I really don't think we needed to invite the chook."
"But I didn't invite him. He jumped into my bag and refused to leave, like last time," Sethys kindly reminded the ranger from across the blaze. The one named Sethys had no professional title. Nothing like Ranger or Bandit or Knight or even Stowaway Poultry. He was just "Sethys", a cipher, but despite his relatively vernal appearance he was practically as old as the stars, or so Buck Buck gleaned from the tireless mouths of those who typically paid little heed to eavesdropping chickens.
How old, exactly? His age was a non-zero integer with at least three, but probably four digits. Maybe five. Who could say? Certainly not Buck Buck, for he no longer had enough fingers to do the arithmetic. How long ago did the ancient Ophidian people tear themselves apart in the name of philosophy? Furthermore, how long it would have taken for the vaunted "intelligentsia" of modern Moonshade to tear one ingenuous lad apart in the name of research?
Human civilizations would ever rise and fall, but the general thrust of humanity itself never seemed to change. Better to be born a chicken.
"And you couldn't, uh, extricate the aforementioned chook from the aforementioned bag…?" The follow-up came from the one named Stefano, who now ruminated comfortably against the fallen log that he and Sethys shared for a seat.
Yes, Buck Buck knew Stefano—had known him for years, as we said. How many years, exactly? Oh no, not the arithmetic, no no, not now; it hardly mattered anyway. What mattered was that the one named Stefano had as many faults as a rooster had feathers, with the most obvious shortcoming being how much he adored hearing the sound of his own voice. Fortunately, his mouth was currently preoccupied with the better part of a bap, giving his quieter neighbor a precious opportunity to sneak in a few more words.
"I tried. He bit me," Sethys admitted, sheepishly; Buck Buck couldn't dispute the charge.
"And you didn't bite back? Tch," sneered the one named Wilfred. He sat slightly elevated from the others for he'd claimed the catbird's seat atop a flat-topped boulder near the fire. From there, everyone could easily observe him polishing off the remains of his supper—whole salted trout. He hoovered every last edible mote off the carcass before tossing it into the fire without a care. "Y'know, if it was in my pack, I'd've just grabbed the little bastard by the neck," he went on, miming suggestively. "Given it a little snap like so. Easy as."
Easy as, indeed. Failsons like Wilfred often spoke so, of perpetuating the pointless violence that bandaged their empty lives like the wrappings around a shambling mummy. Buck Buck knew better; the exhalations of the world's Wilfreds rarely produced anything more than hot air.
Their expedition—which should have been a straightforward jaunt due south from the Sleeping Bull Inn to the outskirts of a cave that contained a former Ophidian city (the name Sethys told them sounded more like a sneeze, so the modern moniker "Furnace" would suffice)—threatened to end prematurely during an ambush by a Goblin war-band occupying a Monitorian watch tower. What the Goblins lacked in finesse, they made up for in warm bodies and crude armaments. Shamino's lot found themselves evenly matched in ability, but hopelessly outnumbered.
Still, they fought for their lives. Shamino the Ranger had no opportunity to put adequate bowman's distance between himself and the swarm; he resorted to fending them off with a Magic Sword. Stefano the Bandit seemed at a loss—not like a Goblin would have anything worth nicking—but it was always a treat to witness his unconventional "fencing" "technique" first hand. And poor Sethys the Cipher, his gangling arms heaving that blasted Mallet (or Whatever) of Dedication around with so much of the aforementioned that he almost made a few "own goals" in the process. Yes, one could assign a litany of qualities to the three men and no, not all of the commentary would be flattering. However, Buck Buck had to concede that they were at least brave.
Foolhardy, but brave.
Damning with faint praise? Perhaps. But it was better than what he had to say about Wilfred, which was nothing; Buck Buck had no comment on the pikeman's martial prowess at all because he had yet to see him fight. He had so far witnessed several battles involving the Avatar and some combination of her companions, squaring off against a diverse selection of foes, from gremlins and goblins, to gazers and dragons and sundered gods made manifest. They even defeated his former—well, that's beside the point, and we don't have to reveal everything in the narrative, do we?
All different foes, all different friends, all different fields. In fact, these battles had but one constant: The peculiar absence of one Sir Wilfred Bullard.
So? Where went the warrior? And what was he doing during those knuckledusters, if not dusting his knuckles?
During their most recent encounter, Buck Buck himself put an end to the fracas with his impeccable sense of timing and his godlike magical puissance (if he did say so himself), assisted by that mysterious, miraculous Ring he'd pinched from the Avatar's kitbag and secured around his own bony shank, disappearing into the fluff of his hock. And although one could argue whether a marauding band of Goblins had enough brains between them to accomplish anything meaningful, Vas Corp Por¹ still worked on them just fine.
But back to Sir Wilfred Bullard of the Bear Command: In the unhygienic aftermath of mass cranial combustion, the others eventually discovered him quailing behind a large tree, pretending to lord over the headless corpse of a Goblin, swearing up and down that he'd been engaged in brutal single combat versus the band's leader. No, he couldn't prove it, but nobody could disprove it either; they dropped the issue for a more scandalous one.
Like someone outing themselves as a Practitioner of the Illegal Thaumaturgical Arts. A Sorcerer. Never mind that said Arts had just saved all of their worthless hides from becoming a Goblin's feast, the mere idea of having one's personal space invaded by a Sorcerer planted a kernel of discord in everyone's hearts that would soon bear the fascinating fruits of paranoia and mistrust. Shamino started by pointing the finger at Stefano and demanding that he "hand over the bloodspawn 'ere someone else gets their head exploded". Wilfred echoed the motion, and in doing so revealed his embarrassingly ill-informed belief that all residents of Moonshade must be Sorcerers². But Stefano, totally unfazed, deftly diverted the others' scrutiny to Sethys, who—once again³—found himself reporting that he heard the occupant of his bag "cluck" something "deliberate" immediately before the spell's deployment.
And—once again—he was spot on.
Alas, when it came to the question of "who just cast that illegal spell that requires all those illegal reagents", only a complete head case would accuse the nearest chicken. The vicious irony of it all put a rare smile back on the face of Buck Buck's inner sorcerer, while Sethys appeared as dejected now as he did earlier, slouching inward, glumly absorbing Wilfred's bluster.
"A bit cruel, that," he finally remarked.
"It's not, though. That's how ma did it—just a quick snap of the neck, see—and ma wasn't cruel. And I wager it's how things ought to be."
"That's not what I meant, Wilfred."
"Look, we raised those chickens for eating, not for pets. The best of them might get to lay eggs and make more chickens for a few years, but they all get cooked sooner or later. It's a fact of life."
"I meant I'm not going have a living thing, uh, executed simply because it wants to ride around in my bag." Sethys sniffed. "It's cruel."
But Wilfred wasn't listening—too invested in picking at his teeth with a leftover fishbone. "The likes of you can go through your whole life sniveling around the dirt, trying to rustle up worms, pretending to be happy with that. Those of us who want a proper supper know we need to break a few necks to get it."
Buck Buck glanced at Stefano; sure enough, the man had caught a whiff of a quarrel and was now bobbing his head around in anticipation, the way old cobs do when they espy a prospective pen. No doubt he fancied himself the the brains of the entire operation—a storied master of the moot who enjoyed a good filibuster almost as much as he enjoyed a good bap. A gob stuffed to the gullet with buttered bread would not stop him from chiming in this time: "My my, how the knight waxes philosophical! However, methinks you've misunderstood the objections of the resident Ophidian. Our Sethys speaks not of supper, my dear pignut, but of justice."
"Justice!" Wilfred spat. "What would a dandy bandit know about justice?"
"Plenty, but that is beside the point. The point is, I believe he was objecting to the severity of your theoretical punishment, not its methodology."
"Speak normally."
"Oh no. My apologies," Stefano gulped down the last of his meal. "I forgot, they don't do superfluous syllables around these parts. Too busy bashing each other's skulls in for sport."
"Like you Mooncalves do it any better. Worse, I'd say," said Wilfred (and again, Buck Buck couldn't dispute the charge). "At least we're not above dirtying our hands with a real, honest hand-to-hand brawl. Unlike you lot—casting spells behind people's backs, making yourself invisible or paralyzing the other man before he even gets a chance to strike, or just exploding his head outright. No honor in it."
"Hmm! Yes, I do suppose we really ought to be more like you, Sir. Like when those goblins came pouring out of that tumbledown guard shack earlier; I say, I've never seen someone leap so high at the prospect of having a real, honest hand-to-hand brawl."
Judging by the way the smugness of Wilfred's smile tripled in magnitude at Stefano's critique, Buck Buck couldn't help but wonder if he had even heard of sarcasm.
He gave a little chuckle. "Well! When a man sees as much combat as I have, he learns how to read his foes, to find their faults and make the most of them. He gets a sort of seventh sense about it."
"A seventh sense!" Stefano raised his eyebrows. "Sethys, our mutual friend Wilfred has seen so much combat that he now possesses seven whole entire senses at his disposal. What do you think of that?"
But Sethys evidently possessed one of the senses absent from both knight and bandit—good sense; he would keep his beak right where it belonged.
"I think… Well, all I meant to say was that I do think there is such a thing as overkill," he explained a mite too late. "Uh, like blowing up all those Goblin heads—that was overkill, I think. Besides that, I really don't mind Buck Buck tagging along." He paused. "I certainly don't think we need to wring his neck for it."
"I do. He's dead weight," said Wilfred.
"He's a chicken," said Stefano. "How much could he possibly weigh?"
"I-I'll look after him, no worries," Sethys reassured them. "And I'll try to get him to dial back the death magic. Wouldn't want to run a-fowl of the authorities here."
An abrupt sound from the shadows—feet crunching on dead leaves and dried sticks, and an irritated groan—stole the spotlight from the Ophidian's comedy stylings. The reprieve came from Shamino the Ranger, cloaked and armed, and preparing to leave.
"Where are you going? Leaving us for dead, are you, Master Shamino?" asked Stefano. "My word, the sprog's pun wasn't that bad."
"Patrol," he replied, little more than a perfunctory grunt.
"Like hell. Won't be able to see nothing out there, 's a new moon," noted Wilfred. "Besides, I told you I'd keep first watch."
Shamino shook his head as he readied a lantern. "That cave down the road there—that's how we're getting into Furnace. It's full of trolls. Or at least it was, last time I went through it."
"Bull! The Knights of Monitor cleared that place out ages ago!"
Shamino glared at Wilfred. "It was full of trolls and dead Knights of Monitor."
"You're not going in there alone, are you?" Sethys squinted in concern (or myopia; the lad had spectacles for reading but in Buck Buck's opinion he needed to wear them a lot more often than he did).
"I'm not going in there at all. I'm only going to survey the surroundings; I would like to avoid another ambush if possible. And I would really like to avoid a repeat performance from our resident Death Mage." Shamino redirected his glare somewhere towards the two men sitting on the log. He would depart with a curt nod and order: "Don't go anywhere."
The next several minutes passed in welcome stillness, with only the crackling of the campfire and the gentle rush of untroubled twilight air to prevent the world from lapsing into total silence.
To Buck Buck's surprise, it was Sethys who spoke up first.
"I don't think Shamino cares for our company very much."
"Of course he doesn't. He's a born Britannian bootlicker." Wilfred scoffed. "He's simply too virtuous for the likes of us."
"What, like you?" Stefano wagged his finger at him. "You don't like us either."
"True. But see, he dislikes us for what we stand for, what we are—that is, New Sosarians, natives to this land."
"No?" countered(?) Sethys.
"No?"
"No, I mean Shamino isn't a born Britannian. He was born here."
"No. He came on a boat from Britannia with that Wolf-wench and the rest of her simps—"
"No no no! Giselle told me all about it. Shamino was a king here once, the very same from the old legend of King Shamino and Fair Beatrix."
Stefano furrowed his brow. "Is that so? I don't believe I'm entirely familiar with that one."
"No? Perhaps it was better known back then. Uh. Back in my day, I mean. There was a ballad and everything." Sethys stopped just short of humming a few bars. "He was a simple woodsman who became a king, long ago, long before the rise of the Serpents even. Because there was another king here, the King of the White Dragon, and he had this daughter named Beatrix—"
"Who cares!" Wilfred snapped. "Probably all made-up rubbish anyway."
"Made-up! Wilfred, we went to his castle to recover the Chaos Banes! Right? We… We met his ghost! He turned into a real white dragon and tried to kill us—surely you remember that!"
Sethys's eyes goggled in disbelief (or again, the myopia), but Buck Buck harbored no such illusions regarding Wilfred's lived experiences; the rooster had been present for that spectacular battle, riding shotgun in Sethys's satchel as usual but not yet armed (or shall we say ankled). However, he saw neither hide nor hair of Wilfred until well after the end of the fight, while the others were tending to their many wounds and burns and the doughty warrior strode triumphantly into the chamber, claiming that he just dispatched an entire stand of hostile Reapers who were guarding the next room.
Buck Buck could not recall exactly what the others had to say about that, save for Mortegro's muttering to Boydon while he and Sethys were sewing the piecemeal man's half-rotten arms back onto his trunk: "If he's going to lie, he could at least try to make it believable…"
"We went to a castle that just happened to be called the Castle of the White Dragon. And I don't believe in ghosts, and neither should anyone else," lectured Wilfred. "And the dragon you fought was the same any other, just covered in dust like the rest of the place. Besides, if what you're saying is true, that'd make Shamino thousands of years old."
"True, but that's not so much of a stretch, is it?" Stefano posed. "I mean, Sethys is here, and you believe he's an Ophidian, right?"
Wilfred said nothing. He rolled his eyes upward and inhaled.
"Oh, never mind," Sethys intervened; even Buck Buck could sense the futility of arguing with a stone wall. "But Giselle told me all of this herself, so if you won't take my word for it, take hers. Or better yet, ask Shamino himself when he returns."
"This absolutely scintillating nonsequitur aside, I wouldn't be so quick to adopt the term native for us New Sosarians," added Stefano. "Lest you forget your more, er, relevant history, 'twas only a handful of generations ago when our forefathers arrived at these lands from Britannia."
"But that's my point. Why did Erstam and the others come over here, if not to get away from all those kings and fools and their blasted virtues? You know what's happened over there since?" Wilfred sneered. "Tyrants like British or silver-tongued murderers like Batlin got the whole damned run of the place, that's what."
Ugh. Most Moonshadians were more or less indifferent to the former name by now, but the latter was one that could still make a bird's feathers stand on end; evidently that flimflammer of a sage had made more of an impression than initially assumed. Buck Buck, for one, would never forget the night Angus Bullard vanished beneath a fog of suspicion, and how the old codger's disappearance coincided with another much closer to a sorcerer's heart.
Wilfred continued: "Alright, so our world's bound to end and we're all doomed to die here, or so everyone says. At least we'll die free. Or at least I will. Tch." For example, he would now take the liberty to enjoy a few after-dinner puffs off his clay cutty-pipe. Such liberties normally came at the expense of others, such as the relatively non-toxic air everyone else had been freely enjoying up to this point. "Anyway, that's why Shamino doesn't like us, see. He hates what we are," he continued continuing. "Meanwhile, I don't like you because of who you are—that is, a couple of bumbling goits. With me, it's strictly personal."
"Ah, well. I reckon that's the best we could've hoped for," Sethys concluded with a shrug.
"Honestly, I believe our Shamino braved the night simply to clear his head, all because you refuse to decouple yourself from the deranged hypothesis that your satchel-chicken there is our party's Death Mage," said Stefano. "Having an active imagination is one thing, my dear Sethys, but giving the entire mitten to one's sense of rationality is quite another."
"Rationality," Sethys repeated, automatically. "The confluence of Emotion and Logic in equilibrium, that allows one to comprehend life, the universe, and everything."
"Yes, well, does that comprehension of everything typically extend to the flummery of farm animals?"
Buck Buck bristled. He did not cotton to his dweomercraft being dismissed as mere flummery, especially from a miscreant like Stefano Pavone, who made the wrong kind of name for himself during his Seminarium days for flunking the Novitiate's exam a record thirteen times. When it came time to sit for the fourteenth, Stefano opted to exhibit an alternative understanding of legerdemain by swiping the karakul cap clean off Magister Fedabiblio's head without the old windbag noticing until well after his soon-to-be former student had bunged it into the lake.
"The monks warned us about this sort of thing, didn't they? How the worsening Imbalance may start to affect sensitive folks. Hallucinations, strange behaviors, nervous breakdowns—well, let us face the facts; you were already a fairly nervous individual if you do not mind my saying so," said miscreant went on, squeezing Sethys's shoulder in a manner meant to inspire comfort. "The moment we met, I gleaned the impression of a fellow trying to walk a tightrope without so much as one of those little umbrellas to break his fall."
"I suppose," was all he had to say for himself.
Sethys's waters ran still and not necessarily deep. Nevertheless, Buck Buck could recall several occasions where the lad appeared to be entirely disengaged from the palaver at hand, only to find out later that he'd not only overheard but retained every detail down to the most incriminating minutiae.
He could be very useful. He could be very dangerous. But mostly he was a sitting duck; nothing to worry about. What would a lowly duck know about thunderstruck sorcerers? Buck Buck pondered momentarily the roles of various birds in a rapidly collapsing society. Pecking orders, that sort of thing—ducks, swans, quails, and the unassailable confidence that the mighty rooster outpecked them all.
"Nobody would blame you, of course, given everything you have experienced over the past," Stefano hastily miscalculated, "hundred thousand years or whatever. In light of all that strife, who wouldn't start believing that a chicken can cast ninth-circle death spells? That said, it isn't…" He searched. "It isn't very helpful, Sethys. So, should the topic arise in the future, I would strongly suggest keeping your mouth buttoned like the backside of my union suit on a cold night."
"…I will. If it helps. And as I said, I'll look after him. Perhaps I can even get through to him on some level that he might understand," Sethys half-mumbled, mostly to himself.
And that was that. Buck Buck decided then and there that he absolutely did not care to find out what Sethys meant by that, and so he hopped off the log and strutted away, around the campfire, towards the party's meager pile of packs. Stefano was here and so was a wineskin filled to bursting with cream sherry, by rule. Buck Buck only had to find the right one…
He glanced behind him, making sure the others were not paying him any mind. They were not; they had embarked on a different argument. Over what? Buck Buck did not care to find out but he knew he would anyway, totally against his will. Something about Chaos Banes, according to Sethys's quiet meandering:
"…to be fair, we never believed that our abstractions of the banes as a concept would amount to anything beyond the purely rhetorical. That battle at the Castle of the White Dragon, that was the first time I'd ever seen one in person."
"Never saw a bane before that, then? Dear me, not even back in your time, during the war?" That was Stefano.
"But I did feel the banes when they, uh, popped out of the Serpent, so to speak."
"Really now?" Stefano leered. "Ghastly stuff, eh? But tell me more. What did it feel like?"
Here, the bird felt inclined to interrupt his hunt to narrate something along the lines of "It wasn't every day one got to speak with a real live Ophidian", but in reality every new day presented boundless possibilities to speak with a real live Ophidian. It was just that Sethys spoke so rarely of himself and of the extraordinary events that crystallized his past and this world's dire future.
Or was it just that nobody ever asked?
"Hmm." Sethys thought it over. "Have you ever blocked a blow with something you were holding—a staff or a shield or what have you, so intense you felt it rattle the nerves in your teeth?"
"I have!" Wilfred chimed in. "That clanging you get in your teeth when you block a blow, I know exactly what you mean. Go on."
Somehow Buck Buck doubted this. Somehow he knew the feeling was mutual among his peers.
"Well, it felt just like that, but the impact was strong enough to make my entire body ring. My teeth, my bones, my ears—the absolute noise of it all was incredible!"
"Did it hurt?" asked Wilfred.
"Not really. But it left this awful malaise in its wake."
"What's malaise?"
"It's a bad feeling. Not quite pain, but a sort of discomfort of the soul. An unpleasantness. It's like that pang you get, deep down, when you finish your morning exercises and you go to stand up, right, but the moment you set your foot on the ground something goes crunch and you feel it jab into your toes and you know, you just know instantly that you've stepped on your spectacles again and it'll be weeks before you can get another pair so now you're facing down weeks of squinting at ream upon ream of tiny gilded squiggles that you can barely decipher on a good day in the best lighting and with your spectacles that you just broke." Sethys paused to breathe. "It was like that feeling in that instant—that dreadful pang, only, uh, forever."
Oh. That's why nobody ever asked.
Sethys, at least, sounded genuinely distressed by the memory. "I still feel it, anyway," he said. "Perhaps you do too."
"I don't feel a thing, but I don't wear spectacles."
Buck Buck did not even have to look at Wilfred to know he had already shrugged off the matter wholesale. Besides, he had just located Stefano's wineskin and was now hard at work, trying to remove the cap with just his beak and feet. Being a chicken did have many surprising advantages over being a human, but the lack of opposable thumbs was not one of them. He desperately wanted—nay, needed a drink. The night was young, the company loathsome. The mood hinged perilously close to that of any given weeknight in the tavern of the Sleeping Bull Inn. All he needed to complete the tableau was a fistful of darts and some idiot's head to serve as the board.
It just so happened that he heard Wilfred's voice first, crowing contentiously about some newly laid problem that Buck Buck had managed to ignore for a few blissful minutes: "You?! You're the bloody worst one out of the lot! And you smell."
"I beg your pardon, sir!" Stefano huffed.
"You do! You reek of pomade and something my mother used to hide in the bedroom drawers to give the guests something else to complain about. Prissy little bags of some purple 'erb. She always made my brother stuff them. I refused to touch the stuff!"
"Yes, that would be lavender, Wilfred. A natural deodorant with a litany of social benefits. Methinks you should consider trying it out for yourself, if not for your own sake—Sethys?"
Buck Buck nearly tumbled tail over tit with the force of the liberated cork; he scrambled quickly to steal his sips as the upended contents of the wineskin began to moisten the dirt. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sethys on his feet, smearing some ashen substance into his fingers. With a mighty snap!, he sent a ball of sallow light soaring a foot or two over his head. There it stayed, obedient as a streetlamp.
In Lor, competently cast.
"I'm going to look for Shamino," Sethys declared. He flipped and folded a dowdy dove-colored shawl around his shoulders, and headed towards their pile of baggage.
Wilfred scoffed. "Why? The man's a vaunted hero, is he not? He can handle himself. Waste not your worries on him. That's what I would say, anyhow."
"I'm not worried. Something has just occurred to me, and I should like to ask him about it."
"What do you mean, something? What're you on about?"
"Waste not your worries on me, Wilfred," Sethys returned, and left it there.
He picked his satchel from the pile, regarded the spilled cream sherry at his feet with a knowing frown, then knelt as close to Buck Buck's level as humanly possible.
"Well, are you coming with me, Mr. Tafani?" he asked, hardly above a whisper, his satchel an open invitation.
And what else could a thunderstruck sorcerer say to that besides: "Buck Buck…?"
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Footnote 1: Vas Corp Por, or "Mass Mind Blast", was an early invention of the infamous Vasculio of Moonshade. In turn, Vasculio created the spell by applying everything he had learnt about magic from his mentor, Erstam the so-called "Mad Mage", if that is any indication. As for mechanics (and not to be too trite about it) the spell it does exactly what it says on the tin—rather, it would if spells came in tins. Anyway, when it came time for the Council of Mages to determine whether or not to include the spell in their official canon, they found its overall effect to be "a bit much" and rejected the submission as quickly and politely as possible, with none of the usual suggestions for improvements or further experimentation. Additionally, the amount of bloodspawn required to cast the spell well exceeded the limit set by the city's Death Magic regulatory board (viz. Mortegro) and so it seemed that Vasculio's debut would forever languish in the obscurity of illegal grimoires and cautionary tales. That is, until that wonderful day when the Glowing Man arrived in Moonshade.
And who can say what strangely humored stars must've been in alignment that season, to have the Glowing Man's visit to the city dovetail so neatly with the ill-advised (and liquor-fueled) return of a disgraced adept named Ensorcio Tafani… (Back)
Footnote 2: In fact, the distinction between the terms mage/magician and sorcerer is a legal one within Moonshade city limits. A sorcerer may be defined simply as an adept-level mage whose practicing repertoire includes spells that exist outside of the magical canon as approved by the Council of Mages. This definition extends to those mages who teach, sell, or otherwise utilize the so-called Death Spells without proper licensure. Typical punishments for those convicted of Sorcery range from a heavy fine to city exile (temporary or permanent). Repeat offenders are promptly imprisoned in the Mountains of Freedom.
It can be safely assumed that Sir Wilfred has none of this in mind whenever he accuses all Moonshadians of being "sissy sorcerers" or "wussy wizards" or some other alliterative insult that fails to take into account the full scope of the city's comprehensive caste system. (Back)
Footnote 3: This specific incident occurred shortly after the Avatar split her overlarge company into two manageable parties and had them depart to their respective destinations. One party would travel to the unforgiving Northlands in search of some ancient bit of tat, while the other would venture all the way south, into a veritable living hell, in hopes of finding some other ancient bit of tat. As they made their final preparations at the Sleeping Bull Inn, no doubt their eyes grazed over the sight of an ordinary rooster strutting around the barnyard. However, Sethys, tasked with collecting that morning's eggs, must've overheard Buck Buck creating a little repast of his own.
In Mani Ailem—Create Food—made for a suitable test of a rooster's magical capacity and for the little trinket he'd pilfered from the Avatar's own bag but a few hours prior. Unfortunately, it also made for a rather unhinged bit of news for Sethys to report over that morning's breakfast. (Back)
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