30 Day Writing Challenge

Day 2: Write a fan-fic

The story I chose to fan-fic about is The Dreamer’s Thread by Starla Hutchton. Go check her out on itunes and facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Dreamers-Thread/293564928741?ref=ts&fref=ts. This story is amazing and the full audio drama podcast is better.  I have borrowed her character “Cedric” a grouchy magician, a secondary antagonist in the original story. I won’t ruin it for you, but seriously go check it out. What are you waiting for?!

I paused outside the castle gates, staring up at the impressive stone walls before me. Slits of golden light beamed from the archer’s windows signalling that there were guards about. I cast my eyes up higher still to gaze upon the castle tower, a small pebble atop a vertical stone tunnel.

He was up there, Cedric, the man who haunted my dreams at night. Just seeing his laboratory sent shivers down my sides. I had tried to catch his eye more than once, but he was so oblivious to the world caught up in his own mind.

After the Dreamer had left this world by being injured while fighting the Darkness, the kingdom had been torn between happiness and longing. The king disappeared from the public eye and holed himself up inside the castle going missing for hours at a time into his secret worlds. Cedric and Ina spent their time in the aftermath of battle getting to know each other intimately. The counsellors of the land collected the inhabitants and proceeded to rebuild the towns and villages. People rejoiced that the Darkness had been defeated, but none knew of the terrible disease the Darkness had sent into the land before being driven off the kingdom’s soil.

The sickness spread through the kingdom with slow determination. The victims suffered so much pain they begged to have their lives taken mercifully. Misery and fear swept along faster than the plague, causing riots in towns and cities.  Counsel called meetings with the king to decide on a plan of action, but the king, so deeply lost in his grief, refused to participate and locked himself in his room, declining food and drink. Cedric stepped up in place of the king and visited the counsellors who themselves had contracted the sickness, ministering to them with potions and spells. His trials served to only prolong their pain and dull the symptoms for a small amount of time. In the end however, each one infected died a terrible and frightening death.

It wasn’t long until the sickness tore through the castle infecting almost the entire staff. Cedric spent days in his lab without letup trying to magic a cure into existence. Ina helped Cedric as much as she could, but eventually supplied her talents to making the sick comfortable in their last days.

Ina became infected; her selfless spirit was her downfall. When Cedric heard she was ill, he stopped his research to see to her. He carried her up the one thousand stairs to his laboratory and set her in the cot in the sleeping room. There he cared for her night and day, re-doubling his efforts to find a cure for the disease. Ina let him experiment on her, her love for him growing stronger each day as her body faded. Cedric’s own body became weak as he forwent food and rest in his tireless search to remove his love’s pain and disease. In the end though, he was unable save the woman who held his heart.

When she died she took Cedric’s heart with her to the underworld. The spark of his existence was extinguished. He still worked on finding the cure to the plague but without vigor.

The day the king took sick Cedric moved into the king’s chambers with his alchemy tools. He sent for rare herbs from the lands the Darkness once inhabited, beyond the reaches of the light. Demented beings lived there, torn from their tasks of destruction and left to wander aimlessly in the void. Dying and recently infected knights volunteered to quest to the darklands for Cedric’s items. The king sickly and in deep sorrow did not answer the knights. They looked to Cedric, who in his own grief wallowed, and set out with no specific instructions to the dead lands of the Darkness.

Many knights succumbed to their illness on the way, and more set out from the castle each morn. None returned for many days. The king fell into a deep coma, fading with every breath he took. Frantically, Cedric started out on the quest himself. He found outside the city gates a dying knight clutching a sack tightly in his grasp. With his last breath he told Cedric in the sack were the herbs. Cedric returned to the castle and magicked the herbs into a potion and dribbled it between the king’s parched lips.  

The king’s pulse grew stronger, his colour brightened, and his breathing steadied.

Cedric began to distribute the potion to all in the kingdom, many who were cured offered to quest for more of the herbs to help heal others. The king’s recovery was slow and steady, but the illness had taken its toll. The king was now crippled and had a cane made from mahogany to aid him in walking.

Once the last subject in the kingdom had been cured of the plague, Cedric rested. He slipped into the Wizard’s Sleep, deepened by his grief of losing his one true love. For one hundred years Cedric slept as the world went on around him. His hair greyed and his beard grew long. The king married a maiden and she bore him sons and daughters. He aged and his children became adults, marrying and starting their own families. When Cedric finally awoke, he dusted the cobwebs from his eyes, cut his beard and donned his signature black shaggy hair with a blue streak. Hobbling down from the tower, he drank potions which reversed the effects time had caused on his body. When he emerged from behind the petrified door of the tower, all memories of Ina had been locked away from his mind and he was back to his irritable self.

Jolting myself back into the present, I passed silently through the wrought iron gate of the castle, closed for the night. Barely a whisper of sound or movement betrayed my presence as I floated towards the front door. My senses tingled as I searched for the king’s quarters. Following the path of grandeur I found his room, a low candle burning outside the door.

I smiled and morphed into my human shape, picking up the candle and resting my ear against the door listening for any sound. I heard gentle breathing and slowly opened the door and slipped inside. The king’s grey head rested on the pillow, he was sound asleep. His wife lay beside him, smiling when I whispered words to give her a pleasant dream, the last before she died.

I opened a vial and poured the contents over the king’s head quickly. Smirking cruelly, I placed the small candle on his chest; the next move he made would cause him to burst into flames. The voice of the Dark Master rumbled in my brain informing me I had done well.

As I backed out of the king’s room and closed the door, I was suddenly aware that I was not alone. I turned and stared straight into the icy blue eyes of Cedric the Wizard.

Fin