The Wizard

Moment

The Necromancer reveled in his moment of triumph and laughed at the wizard, who spoke three little polite words. They shook loose a terrifying memory for Mazlo and sent his twisted mind reeling back to his childhood. 

"A moment, please." 

It was a few days after Nicholas Redwing's thirteenth birthday that he began to realize he had a deep connection with the darker side of magic. He was off alone in the woods killing things and had just in a single motion ended the lives of 37 animals and one tree. Its leaves fell to the forest floor covering the small piles of dead birds and chipmunks. 

When he counted the insects as well, his single death spell had ended well over a thousand lives. Nicholas snickered to himself and walking a few yards deeper into the forest, took note of a large elm with 28 sparrows, 2 red-bellied woodpeckers, 11 finches, 9 starlings, 5 squirrels, and an owl. Not to mention 2,789 insects. 

He rattled off these statistics and waved his hands preparing to send them all into oblivion. He found his concentration interrupted and his body unmoveable. Every life form in the forest had stopped moving. The sounds of wind, bird, and insect all fell into silence. Out from behind the tree stepped his father.

"A moment, please." Melock coughed and cleared his throat. "Just a moment of your time, my dear boy." 

Melock patted the bark of the tree. 

"A fine specimen don't you think? Ulmus Rosales, I believe. And the species abounding in it; Passeridae, Melanerpes Carolinus, Fringillidae the lesser golden finch, Sturnidae, Sciuridae Mammalia, and the noble Strigiformes Chordata. Owls to you and me. And, as you mentioned, the staggering abundance of Hexapoda Insectas.

"It would be such a shame for them to fall out of the ecosystem. Let me show you a world where these lovely creatures no longer exist." 

Melock reached forward and touched the immobilized boy on the forehead. Nicholas was sent to a barren wasteland of a world in the throes of a nuclear winter. He had days to explore it, to indulge in its simplicity, to become alone in it, and to see himself as its ruler and master. Melock meant to show him an environmental disaster caused by the absence of just a handful of animals in an ecosystem's food chain, but Nicholas saw it as a raw world he could mold to his liking. A place he could conquer nature and the elements, where he alone could rewrite the laws of physics. 

Melock brought him back and left him to consider his actions in the forest but failed to turn him away from the path of destruction. Redwing never respected his father again after that day. The old fool wielded the power of the universe at his fingertips yet did nothing with it. 

Nicholas saw during that moment his true enemy in life. He would learn his father's methods, add them to his own, and count the days until he became the master of all reality. 

And then, on that wintery deserted beach, time again came to a standstill. The waves no longer broke, the wind no longer howled, the clouds overhead sat in the sky like a painting. Mazlo was again frozen. 

He used every ounce of power he had left to force himself to speak the revolting rhetorical question.  

"He taught you the Moment?" 

He would have vomited in disgust if any part of his digestive system was working. Redwing was frozen there, hand forward, claw reaching up to let a hundred magical swords drop, horns jutting out of his head, gargantuan dragon wings spread out behind him three times his size. 

His latest undead assassin about to rid him of Ozgold once and for all, also stood frozen at the instant before plunging a dagger into his heart.