Hidden Magic

Prologue

50 Years Ago

The frantic pounding at the upstairs door startled the young wizard into dropping the vial he was preparing. It shattered on the workroom's dirt floor and the liquid soaked into the ground with a slight hiss and a poof of odorous smoke. Wendell cursed under his breath.

"What do they want now?" He ran a hand through his dark hair in frustration at the interruption. Unbeknownst to him, the powder still on his fingers tinted it slightly white, although this did little to make him look any older than his twenty-five years.

He glared up at the ceiling in the general direction of the knock then nudged the pile of broken glass with his boot, surveying the newest damage. Just some more mess to an already littered room. He could almost hear his former master complaining about a wasted concoction and such a disorganized work area. The old wizard had passed six months ago, but still his once-apprentice continuously felt the need to look over his shoulder lest his magic- or lack there of- was being watched by the keen eyes of his teacher. Besides, I work better with a mess, he tried to reassure himself to get that voice to leave. It was no use. He knew this was out of laziness, not purpose.

He climbed the narrow, rickety staircase and once on the ground floor, closed the trapdoor. With a grunt, he managed to drag the small bookshelf over the entrance. It was a pointless try at camouflage when anyone who really wanted to get into the workshop could find it, but Wendell was far from good enough at protective magic to try to seal it the way his master had done. Wendell's only result had been melting the padlock into a jumble of metal, which he now used as a paperweight, thus summing up his magical prowess in one simple lump.

Taking a moment to beat some of the residual soot from his plain brown robe, Wendell opened the door just as the youth on the other side had his arm raised to pound at the door again. Momentarily thrown off balance, the boy grabbed the door frame.

"Yes? I had an important spell going." Wendell crossed his arms over his chest. No need to tell the boy- Dav, one of the helpers at the inn, as the wizard knew- that the spell had been simply a kind of cantrip for a bit of continuous light in a room without windows.

Dav seemed decidedly unimpressed as he shifted from foot to foot. "You gotta hurry. A band of orcs was spotted inside the treeline to the southwest. They told me to tell you you're needed at that gate."

"Am I?" Wendell frowned. Surely this was more a job for some archers or the town guard. "Aren't guards ready on the wall? Shouldn't you be alerting the sheriff instead?"

"Aye, already have, but you're our wizard." He said this in a way that seemed to come across to Wendell as 'You're our wizard so you better well go do some wizarding'. "The old one. I mean, the one before you, always said he had some kinda magic to keep the village safe."

Wendell sighed. In his opinion the villagers had become far too dependent on magic and had a bad habit of asking for something he couldn't supply. It wasn't so much that he was loath to help, but for every little spell he cast for them, he had to spend a great deal of time resting to recover from the energy drain. 'Wendell the Wondrous', he cynically snorted to himself; his master had given him that title once after one of his experiments had actually come to fruition and it had stuck with him ever since, much to the apprentice's annoyance and the amusement of the villagers. For all that the old wizard had been brilliant, he just couldn't seem to grasp that his student would never be a particularly powerful spellcaster.

But his master had been perceptive enough to leave something behind for his less adept apprentice. Now where is it... he'd promised to keep it on his person, but a wizard's pockets were never a secure location. Digging through a multitude of pockets, flaps and pouches and dislodging an assortment of baubles and a small beetle, Wendell's hand brushed the chain. He tugged this out and dropped it into the slightly more convenient satchel hanging at his hip. The beetle, now sensing impending freedom and possibly a chance not to be poofed out of existence as a spell component, scurried away.