The Other Side

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

Tom pulled his chair up to the desk.

"Hold it."

He didn't want to. The way it glimmered, it didn't look very friendly. But the headmaster stared at him impatiently, waiting. So he mustered up his courage. And he poked it.

Nothing happened.

So he poked it again.

"I said to hold it," the headmaster snapped.

Tom reluctantly placed both his hands around it. It was warm. And it didn't shock him like he thought it might. He looked up at the headmaster, wondering what to do next. And then the room began to fill with life as colour, sounds and images burst out from the ball.

They came from the sea many thousands of years ago. The winds had blown their ships off-course, and they had wandered upon our lands. They had travelled from far and had spent many months on the waters. They were weak and of ill-health.

They looked much like we did, but there was something about them, something that said they were different, that they were foreign. At first we thought it was the effects of the long arduous journey across the oceans. But time passed, and they recovered their strength, and still an aura of unknown hung about them.

It was much later did we realise. These beings, they were slower, weaker; they had bad sight and no magic. They were not wizards.

We called them Wanderers – they had wandered onto our lands.

They were few at first, and we were curious. We let them build houses and farm the land. Wanderers lived shorter lives and had more children. As the hundreds of years passed and their numbers began to grow, their houses became villages and towns.

It did not go unnoticed, their growth. What began as grumblings from the old became something more as the Wanderers outnumbered the wizards on the smaller islands of the continent of Atlantis.

It was many hundreds of years later did the War of the Wanderers take place. Some wizards had come to see the Wanderers as an inferior race, one sent to them by the oceans to serve.

Morgan Le Fay was one of those wizards. She attacked the Wanderers, destroying their towns and villages, killing those that resisted, enslaving the rest. But not all wizards agreed with her, and so began the war and the Clash of Two Houses.

House of Le Fay, led by Morgan, and House of Zarlock, led by Merlin – the two oldest of Houses, the two most powerful of Houses, pitted in battle against each other. As was custom, the two Houses and their allies met on the Plains of Al Kanathra to settle the victor.

Battle raged and casualties mounted, but none seemed the closer to triumph. Merlin sought Morgan to end the war as only the death of one could. He found her along the edges of the battlefield, resting near the White Forest.

They began their duel and as the day wore on they moved into the White Forest, going farther and deeper as they fought. They came upon the Silver Lake and Merlin and Morgan separated to take momentary refuge on either side of the water.

As Merlin sat by the lake with his back resting against the trunk of a white tree, a woman rose from beneath the waters. It was said that she was completely white – from her eyes, to her lips, to her hair, to the scale-like cloth that clung onto her body.

Merlin spoke not as she watched him, as she moved towards him, as she came to the edge of the lake. She sank below the waters again and a moment later a white unicorn nudged Merlin's right arm. He climbed onto it and as it flew over the Silver Lake the white woman rose again from beneath the waters.

"I give you Excalibur," she said and she threw a sword into the air.

Merlin caught the sword, the unicorn swooped down to where Morgan rested, and with one strike he sliced her head off. He returned to the Plains of Al Kanathra and threw her head onto the battlefield for all to see, for the war to end.

But the war did not end.

Morgan's supporters fled the battlefield only to re-emerge ever more vengeful. They no longer wanted to rule over the Wanderers, they wanted to destroy them, to remove their species from Atlantis.

The attacks on Wanderers resumed shortly after Morgan's death. Whole villages and towns would suddenly be surrounded by prowling hordes of Le Fays and then burnt to the ground, every Wanderer inside killed.

To prevent the genocide, Merlin gave to the Wanderers the smaller islands of Atlantis and ordered all the wizards to leave, to come to the mainland. And then he cast his greatest spell.

The rain began first, heavy and tranquil, it poured down for many days. And then came the wind, fierce and howling. They raised the waters of the ocean and engulfed the mainland. As the rain stopped and the water receded, the smaller islands, the islands of the Wanderers, disappeared. The mainland was now surrounded on all sides by a sea that stretched forever.

Merlin had left only one path that led from the mainland to the world outside. He trusted the secret of that path to a chosen few and together they tracked those wizards that had defied his call to leave, those that still remained on the Other Side.

Slowly, wizards and witches were brought back from the Other Side until there were no more.

The Wanderers told stories of magic to their children, stories of the great Merlin, the evil Morgan, and the land of the Atlanteans that sank, stories that changed over the years that passed, stories that became legends, stories that became myths.

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