Of Spells and Spelling

Flash fiction for the 30 DAYS OF FANTASY WRITING CHALLENGE

Prompt 12 of the 30 DAYS OF FANTASY WRITING CHALLENGE:

The Wizard Duel Has Been Going on for Three Weeks

They're both exhausted.

Half the town is gone.

The spells are getting weird.

This is a continuation of the simultaneously-occurring stories Dragon-born (Prompt 6) and Unstable Magick (Prompt 7).

Photo credit: Nadin Sh on pexels.com

When Esti crashed into Daryn inside an enchanted caldera, she was in the form of a dragon, and he was a hydra. The impact stunned them both, and tumbling backward through a rift in the space-time continuum tore their spells from their bodies. By the time they hit the floor of Daryn’s tower workroom, they were both human again, and stark naked.

Esti wasted no time in throwing up a protective shield, but really it would have been better for everyone—and specifically the citizens of the Karstlec Mountains—if she hadn’t.

Even in the fantasy genre, it’s extremely rare for one magic system to meet another. Generally, in stories, authors adhere to one. Even when there are multiple worlds, the magic generally works in one and not so well in another. There’s a good reason for this: multiple magic systems cause confusion for the reader and the characters. Not only spells, but also spelling, becomes a problem. What is magic in the Four Kingdoms is magick in Daryn’s world, and that ‘k’ makes quite a difference.

Esti’s protection spell was meant to cocoon her inside a safety net, impenetrable to all but the strongest curses. What actually happened was that her magic (which, unbeknownst to her, was now magick) exploded outwards and blasted a hole in the wall of Daryn’s tower. Back in her own world, a section of Innesgharst Peak calved off, starting a landslide which dammed the River Karst, consequently flooding the Deisgaard Plain and destroying half the town of Ung.

Daryn responded by shooting a binding spell at Esti. Silver tendrils wrapped themselves around her wrists and ankles, and she strained against them. Daryn was a 450-year old sorcerer, and Esti was a 26-year-old enchantress. The potency of her power should have been far inferior to his, but her adrenaline, combined with the unfamiliarity of the magick she was harnessing, lent her enough strength to break the enchanted bonds. The resulting shockwave rippled through the tower, smashing every window and glass vial, and completely collapsing the portal behind her. It also caused every window in the queen's palace in Svelgard to shatter.

All Daryn’s possessions, which had been pulled through the portal into the Four Kingdoms, reappeared in an instant. The sorcerer flung himself aside as his standard lamp popped into existence an inch from his right elbow, and Esti was knocked to her knees when Magicks of the Occult and several other heavy tomes hit her in the small of the back.

From the ground, she fired a volley of defensive spells at Daryn, which turned into fruit bats—and somewhere in the Karstlec Mountains a herd of sheep grew wings.

Daryn sliced a hand through the air, bringing up a shimmering and, he hoped, impenetrable shield between himself, the insane sorceress, and the possibly rabid bats.

“Cease your spellcasting, witch!” he shouted, at the same time as Esti shrieked, “Return me to my sisters, mage, or I will destroy you!”

Unfortunately, just as their magic systems were entirely different, so were their languages.

They stared at each other in confusion, and it was then that they both realised, simultaneously, that they were wearing nothing at all. They both clapped hands to various parts of themselves.

Daryn cast around and grabbed a curtain, which had fallen to the floor when Esti blasted a hole in the wall, and wrapped it around himself. Esti sidled behind a spindle-legged table and piled books on it to cover herself. Then Daryn cast a translation spell over his lips to change his words into a language the woman could understand.

Daryn was a great sorcerer in many respects, but he'd always been more interested in pushing the boundaries than learning the basics. So, when he once again commanded Esti to “Cease your spellcasting, witch,” what she actually heard was, “Bring me treacle tart, wench!”

Esti looked rather affronted. Daryn tried again.

“Send by first-class mail, Mitch!”

Esti’s brow creased in a bemused frown.

“Open the pod bay doors, HAL!”

Daryn flinched, his cheeks turning a little pink.

“Amateur,” Esti muttered, casting her own translation spell in the air between them. For some reason, this one worked as intended in Daryn's world, although in the Karstlec Mountains, an entire village forgot how to communicate in their own language and suddenly started speaking Urdu.

“You were saying?” Esti asked dryly.

“I was saying, stop casting spells. Your magick is entirely unstable!”

“Unstable? Of course it's unstable! This isn't my magic system. It's your fault I'm here—”

“I didn't ask you to dive-bomb me inside an inter-dimensional portal!”

“Well, maybe if you hadn't tried to force your way through the veil at the summit of Innesgharst Peak, and so threaten everything I've dedicated my life to protecting—”

“It was an exploratory mission. I came in peace!”

“You came as a dirty great hydra!”

“It was for self-defence!”

“It was blatantly aggressive!”

“You overreacted!”

“Are you serious? What would you have done in my place? Actually, scratch that—you’d have saved your own skin, wouldn’t you? You mages are all the same.”

“I'm not a mage, I'm a sorcerer—”

“Semantics!” Esti shrilled. “Whatever! Just take me back to the Karstlec Mountains.”

“I can't. You destroyed the portal!”

“Then create another!”

Daryn gave her a disparaging look.

“Just create another? Another inter-dimensional portal? Do you have any idea how much research, experimentation and spellcasting went into the creation of the one you so casually destroyed? Decades! Decades! And even if I did replicate it, there's no way I could determine its destination with any accuracy.”

“You can’t—?”

“No!” Daryn snapped. “I don’t know where you came from and, in the vast expanse of the cosmos, the odds of locating that place again are—are—billions to one.”

Esti was speechless, as cold comprehension washed over her: she was stranded here. There was no way home.

Thank you for reading!