The Last Weaver

Part 1: Only the Beginning

I was sixteen, and still had done nothing with my life. I had an extraordinary talent, one that nobody in my family ever had. I could cast magic.

Literally all my life I spent growing plants on the family farm. I found it boring after a while, and I heard of the great deeds of wizards and sorcerers in far away lands. I wanted desperatly to be like them, but unfortuneltly money seemed to be a problem. It was the cool spring of my sixteenth year when I decided I would finally do something with myself. A man in our village had agreed to help me improve and control my talent.

I walked into the kitchen and said goodbye to my parents. "Be safe!" they both said. The trip would be five days long, after all.. After they handed me some money, I picked up my bow and quiver. I also had a sword that I clipped to my side. I walked to the door, waved goodbye one more time, then left.

When I reached the town, I was surprised at how busy it was. Merchants were running back and forth, trying to sell this or that. Luckily for me, I was mostly ignored. The merchants were generally quite annoying, and I had made that clear on my previous visits to town.

When I reached my mentor's house, I could two people yelling, but I couldn't make out any of the words. Then the air trembled, and seemed to slowly flow into the house. Before it could get very far, and electric explosion destroyed half the small house. It knocked me back about ten feet, and my ears rang painfully.

A man, wearing a dark cloak and a hood to hide his face, ran out of the destruction, and saw me. I seemed to have distracted him enough to make him forget what he was doing. He stared at me from under his hood, but I couldn't see his face. Just his glowing eyes. He stepped towards me, and I quickly got to my feet. As the distance between us began to shrink, the wind picked up and whipped his cloak around in the air. Under it, I could see all types of swords and daggers, but he didn't reach for them.

I drew my sword, and the man stopped. "You are the one." He said, half in a question and half a statement. When he spoke, it sounded as if three people were talking, each voice deeper and eviler than the other. He stared at me for a few more seconds, then vanished.

I stuck my sword where he had been not even a second before, but he was gone. From that point, instincts took over and I rran towards the house.

Inside, I saw small trinkets and objects; but when I walked to where the explosion had happened, almost nothing was left. Only a bookcase seemed to have completely escaped destruction. There were still small flames here and there, and under some rubble was a charred, blackened body.

As I approached it, I realized with horror that it was the body of my mentor. I stood there, dumbfounded, and then ran back outside. Nobody was there. Had I imagined it? That cloaked man had killed my mentor, and then disappeared into thin air.

I decided to search through the carnage of the house. All that was to be found were little trinkets and books about magic. I paged through some of them and decided to take them, just in case. I had a very bad feeling about the events of the day.

I heard shouts of soldiers and townspeople, and decided to leave. I didn't want anyone to think I'd done this. I searched for a back door that I could slip out of, and found one down a partially intact hallway. I slipped out of the door, slunk past some houses in the backstreet, and waltzed onto the main road like nothing had happened.

I started thinking about the day's events as I walked back to the town square, because if I had no mentor then I would have to train myself. I also needed to explain to my parents that my mentor had just been blown to smithereens by a disappearing man in a black cloak.

I decided to stop at a tavern for the night and get some food and rest. It would be a day's journey later on the rough road home. I spotted a tavern to the left, and made my way there. I entered and asked for a room to stay in, and the keeper gave me the last open room, Room 13. I thanked him and asked for some steak.