1) Fireball
Zagran muttered a single word of power. It was a word that conveyed millennia of careful refinement of the science –nay, the art – of anger. A word so secret that it remained unknown to everyone but a select group of people. A word so hideous that it made glass to shatter, animals to run away and fear to be instilled even into the bravest hearts.
It was a mild dwarven curse.
The cause for his anger looked at him with an innocent face and merrily meowed back, while it continued pawing and chewing on the last arcane diagram on which he had been working that night.
- Go to the bloody nine hells and get eaten already, you goddamned ball of fur! – He threw a boot at his familiar cat, which dodged it with no effort. It jumped down to the floor, its tail quivering with happiness, and started purring and rubbing against his leg. Zagran sighed.
A wizardÂ’s familiar was supposed to be a loyal servant and an useful companion. A familiar would do all the menial tasks his master couldnÂ’t take care of while he was busy trying to unravel the mysteries of the multiverse. Familiars from the legends could talk, or cast spells of their own, yet the only talents Fireball, his cat partner, had shown in the twenty years they had been together were an uncanny ability to get people to pet him and a knack for causing all kinds of property damage.
The dwarf arcanist took a glance at the diagrams. For a long time now, he had been trying to rewrite all his spells so they could be casted without any hand movements. To a wizard like him, also trained in the traditional dwarven way of fighting, that could prove an invaluable asset in battle. He had known for several decades that there existed additional clauses and formulae that could be added during preparation to provide that effect, but the increased complexity of the resulting spells significantly impaired his casting potential.
No, there should be a different solution. Not patching the spells, but rewriting them from scratch in an improved way. Unfortunately, such a way still remained hidden from him, as all his experiments until now had ended in disappointing failures.
The formula that Fireball had used as its personal playground was totally messed up. The parchment was now scratched, and a lot of new ink lines were connecting random parts of the diagram together. Some runes had been crossed out completely, while some others were now joined by scratch marks in a strange fashion.
Zagran arched a brow. He probably had spent too much time without sleep, because the spell was making more sense every time he looked at it. Of course there were a lot of mistakes, but the subjacent structure was now much simpler, and yet the main clauses of the spell were still connected somehow. He looked down at Fireball, who was trying to hunt an imaginary mouse, oblivious at the fact that it might have been the first cat to achieve a groundbreaking advance in magical theory. The wizard shook his head and sighed for a second time.
It took him no time to write a corrected version of the spell. He still was not totally sure of the theoretical principles involved, but his intuition told him that this time he had found the answer for good. A greedy smile formed in his lips as he prepared to cast the new spell. It was a light cantrip, a simple and harmless trick. He was a wizard at the peak of his might, and he truly was on the road to absolute success. Nothing could go wrong now.
He muttered a single word of power.
A strong explosion came out of ZagranÂ’s room in the Foul Olde SpiritÂ’s Inn. The windows shattered. A flock of birds flew away. Even the bravest men in the bar stopped drinking and looked upstairs in fear and reverence.
After a moment an unharmed cat emerged from the smoke, its tail pointing up with unwavering bliss while he looked for the next person who would pet him today.
Zagran Belgyr
