“Dr. Sterblich?” I ask the man standing in the shack.

Strangely, at the same time he asks the exact same question. Clearly, he’s not Dr. Sterblich. He’s far too young first off. At most he’s the same age as me. He has black hair draping to the middle of his neck, a long blue coat, a black vest with a blue shirt hanging out of it, black pants, and black shoes. He also has blue eyes, but not like Sidney’s. His eyes are deep ocean blue. He stands with his posture a bit off, but other than that, he’s a fairly good-looking guy.

“Drats. I thought that you were Dr. Sterblich. I’ve been waiting here for two hours.”

“No. My name is Souladonis. This is Katherine and Sidney. Do you know the doctor?”

“Nope. Never seen him before. But when I got here, the fireplace was still hot. I figure he’ll be back sooner or later. Have a seat. We can wait for him together.”

In Dr. Sterblich’s shack there are a row of benches on either side of its single room. I imagine that once upon a time his students sat on the benches while he lectured. But now the benches are empty and there’s no indication that they’ve seen much use lately. The young man sits on the leftmost bench and I sit on the next bench facing towards him. Katherine and Sidney retain their normal formation at my sides. I ask, “Might you tell me your name, and what brings you here?”

The young man responds, “My name is Nathan Bram. I’m a student of alchemy and I’ve read all of Dr. Sterblich’s books. There’s just this one recipe that I’ve been having trouble understanding, so I came here to ask him about it.”

I listen to Nathan attentively. “Does he mention the petrification curse in his books?”

“Not directly. Why do you ask?”

I hand Guilt over to him, so that he can inspect it.

“Wow a petrified staff! That’s weird. If you’re trying to fix it, then there might be a way.”

“What?” I accidentally shout.

“That one recipe I mentioned; the one that I can’t figure out. Unless Dr. Sterblich can help us, then we’re both out of luck.”

I take Guilt back and wait with Nathan. It turns out that Nathan is the leading student from Wyrmscale Academy in the country of Wyrmscale. There’s been a sudden outbreak of a contagious illness that’s left countless people in his country ill. The academy’s leader, Arch Lord Horror, personally asked Nathan to find a way to cure the illness. He believes that there is an alchemy recipe that is the cure to the illness as well as all other maladies. Petrification amongst them. Yet the only one who fully understands the recipe is its creator, Dr. Sterblich.

We wait another hour and a half before the door finally opens. An old man in a worn out lab coat enters the shack. He has a crossbow strapped behind his back and holds a rabbit by the ears in his left hand. His body is slanted to the right, weighed down by his petrified forearm. “Dr. Sterblich!” I say excitedly.

“Who are you people?”

Nathan answers, “Dr. Sterblich, I’m a big fan of yours. I have all of your books and I’ve completed all of your recipes except one. I was wondering if you could help me understand what I’m missing – from the immortality elixir.”

“Noooo!” Dr. Sterblich screams frantically. “It was just a fantasy! The gods don’t allow it!”

He throws down the rabbit, and then uses his left hand to pull out a bolt from his quiver. Placing the bolt in his mouth, he applies his one good arm to drawing his crossbow. Next, he uses his mouth to set the bolt on the crossbow and cocks it as well. Then finally, he points his weapon at Nathan. “Get out!”

“Unfortunately I can’t leave Doctor,” Nathan says. “Many people are sick in my country and I’m not leaving until you explain the elixir to me.”

“Noooo!” Dr. Sterblich screams again. He pulls the crossbow’s trigger and fires its bolt at Nathan. Responding with blurring speed, Nathan whips out a rapier with a golden hilt and deflects the bolt.

“Please Doctor let’s not get violent. That’s not in your best interest.”

Before things escalate any further, I interrupt. I approach Dr. Sterblich and present my staff to him. “Please Doctor. I was told that nobody understands the petrification curse like you do. Is there any way at all to reverse the curse? I’m desperate and I’ll do anything.”

He bends over to examine my staff more closely. “How did this happen?”

“It was cursed by a monster.”

A sudden look of horror overtakes the doctor. “The cockatrice?”

“No a gargoyle familiar, but what’s a cockatrice?”

“The Earth Ruling Golden Cockatrice,” Nathan explains. “It’s one of the four immortal beasts. There are the Earth Ruling Golden Cockatrice, the Seafaring Golden Megaladon, the Hell Burrowing Golden Cerberus, and the Heaven Dwelling Golden Dragon. In many cultures they’re believed to be gods, but it’s not quite clear what they are or where they came from. Others believe that they keep the balance of the world in order. I don’t know myself, but I do know that they’ve been around for as long as written history and probably longer. Is it correct to assume, Dr. Sterblich, that when your research staff was petrified you were trying to steal feathers from the Golden Cockatrice?”

Dr. Sterblich shudders. “It was just a fantasy. The gods don’t allow it.”

“Answer the question,” Nathan demands.

“Yes! Yes that’s right! I was trying to create a potion for immortality, but it required an immortal ingredient. We tried to steal a feather from the immortal beast, but it was too much for us. It petrified all of my students and half of my right arm. There! I said it!”

Nathan approaches Dr. Sterblich and holds his sword to the doctor’s throat. “But you still haven’t told us everything. It’s here in Eudaimonia isn’t it? Tell me where.”

“You’re a fool!”

Nathan presses the sword against his neck. “Alright fine,” Dr. Sterblich says. “If you want to die, then that’s your problem. Follow the laid out path through the woods to the peak of the mountain. You’ll see a trail of people petrified in lab coats. They will lead you right to the beast. And to your demise.”

Nathan releases him. “Fire up your chemistry set doctor. I’ll be back soon.”

He walks to the door and I chase after him. Katherine and Sidney try to follow me as well, but I don’t let them. I order them to stay in the cabin with the doctor. I won’t risk allowing them to become petrified like Nadine too. That would completely defeat the point of everything that I’ve done in the past six years.

Outside of the cabin, I meet up with Nathan and we start hiking the trail to the mountain’s peak together. The trail is a narrow dirt path cutting through an agglomeration of leafy green trees. I understand that he intends to steal a feather from the Earth Ruling Golden Cockatrice, but what I don’t know is whether or not he has a plan. “Say Nathan, “ I begin politely. “When Dr. Sterblich and his team tried to get a feather from the Golden Cockatrice, they were all turned to stone. Do you have a plan on how to get one safely?”

The corners of his mouth turn up into a light smile. “Of course. I’ll come at it from above, jump on its back, pull out a feather, and then get away quickly. Our best chance is to get a feather before it’s aware that we’re hunting it. If that doesn’t work, then I’ll fight it for its feathers.”

I nod in agreement with his plan. It’s decisively better to try to steal a feather and run than to fight an immortal monster: especially one that can simply turn its attackers into stone. Speaking of people turned to stone, we encounter the first one a quarter mile up the path. It’s a male in a lab coat. He looks like he was hit by the petrification spell while trying to flee in panic. We’re still only a third of the distance to the mountain peak. That means that this man ran away quite far and that the Golden Cockatrice chased him all the way here. “Looking at this guy Nathan, I’m not sure that we’ll just be able to run away.”

“Well then we had better fly.”

“Fly?”

“I’ll show you when the time comes. Don’t worry about it.”

We trek on. Like Dr. Sterblich said, we find a trail of petrified bodies guiding us to the top of the mountain. Seeing all of their terrified, frozen faces is starting to unnerve me. Nathan, however, seems perfectly calm and collected. He did say that he was the top student of Wyrmscale Academy, so I can presume that he is a powerful mage. Yet at the same time, I doubt that he’s ever faced a monster that could easily turn him into stone. I remember how I went into battle with the gargoyle haughty and overconfident. I’m still paying for that mistake to this very day. Just as I start to voice my concerns to Nathan, he shoves me screaming, “Look out!”

I fall behind a tree and cautiously peek around it expecting to see the Golden Cockatrice coming down the trail. When I see nothing, I start to wonder. “Did you see it?” I whisper.

“You almost stepped on a caterpillar,” Nathan chides.

Coming from behind the tree, I look down at the ground to where Nathan is pointing. Surely enough, there’s a little green caterpillar inching its way towards a tree. I raise my left eyebrow at Nathan, silently demanding an explanation.

He gets the message and explains, “I’m like a caterpillar. Caterpillars are forced to crawl face first through the mud while the rest of the world either steps on them or ignores them completely. Back at school people use me when they need me to write magic scripts for them, but then they turn right around and call me by the nickname, ‘Dork Genesis.’ They make fun of me saying that when I was born my mother gave birth to a whole new level of dorkiness. They don’t know how much that hurts me. My mother passed away when I was 10 years old. I always keep her rapier and her familiar with me.”

I silently sympathize with Nathan. It’s weird to compare oneself to a caterpillar, but I think I get his point. “Do you want to know what they call me at Winterspring Academy?”

“What?”

“The greatest disappointment of all time.”

“Ouch. How’d you get that esteemed title?”

I show him Guilt. “I got my staff and my girlfriend petrified. Then I dropped out of school, so that I could search the world for a cure. I was Arch Lord Aerolyso’s apprentice and everyone had high hopes for me. I crushed those hopes in outstanding fashion.”

Nathan chuckles. “That’s pretty bad.”

An understatement. We continue up the trail some more and pass by several more statues including one of a small girl. Her size suggests that she had been a teenager of maybe 13 or 14 years. Also, unlike the other statues, there are a few flowers placed at the feet of the small girl. I pat the statue on the shoulder and continue on. She must have been Dr. Sterblich’s own daughter. None of the other researchers were old enough to have a daughter of her apparent age. I don’t know why Dr. Sterblich brought her along, but I can only imagine the heavy guilt that he feels over bringing such a cruel fate upon his daughter.

After hiking for three quarters of a mile, we finally come to the summit. The trail fizzles out at the end where the line of trees stops. The peak is nothing more than a rocky table with a little bit of grass and a giant bird walking around. Except it’s not a bird. It’s more of a two-legged dragon-like creature with a snake’s body, a rooster’s head, a hawk’s wings, and rooster feet. Its entire body is covered in gold. Beyond the Golden Cockatrice, the rocky table continues for a short stretch before dropping off into a steep cliff. In the distance one can see the blue horizon, and half of the Eudaimonian island hanging below.

Hiding in the trees, Nathan and I observe the beast trying to get a feel for its movement patterns. It’s unlike any creature that I’ve ever seen. It walks around for a bit, stops, looks around, and then repeats the pattern. There are neither eggs nor a visible nest on the ground. It looks like it’s guarding something, but what I couldn’t say. One thing that I do glean from observing it, however, is that it only ever looks in the trail’s direction. In ten minutes time, it never looks behind itself even once.

“I don’t think we can surprise it from this side.”

“No and because of the cliff, we can’t go around it. I do have one idea though. Do you know Summoning Magic?”

“Yes, at the Master level.”

“Alright then. Summon anything that can run fast and I’ll summon my mother’s familiar.”

While Nathan concentrates his mana to summon his mother’s familiar, I cast the Killer Rabbit spell, thus summoning the weakest of all summoning creatures. It’s not powerful, but it’s fast and it’s small. My hope is that it will be able to outrun the Golden Cockatrice and avoid its petrification curse. Waiting until the exact moment that the cockatrice starts pacing, I tap my Killer Rabbit on the back to send it forth. It runs out wildly, immediately catching the monster’s attention.

At the same moment, Nathan summons a gigantic white phoenix with a 25 ft. wingspan. It’s so big that it can’t even stretch open its wings in the space between the trees on the left and right sides of the dirt trail. Even if we were in an open field, a bird of its size would still have a hard time taking off. I don’t mean to criticize Nathan, but I’m not quite sure that he really thought his plan through.

“Get on its back,” Nathan tells me.

The white phoenix lowers its head laying its body out flat. Nathan hops up on its back and I do the same. I’m still doubtful, but Nathan seems like he knows what he’s doing. He pulls out a carefully sorted pack of magic scripts and thumbs through to a specific one. “Large birds can’t take off from a standing position,” he says. “I’m going to cast the Grandmaster Script Magic spell Omnipotence on it. Omnipotence is an enchantment that changes the target’s magical power into physical strength. It’s going to jump up into the air and then snap out its wings. Then I’ll quickly dispel the enchantment and restore its mana.”

Out of all thirteen magic disciplines, Script Magic is the most powerful yet the most difficult to learn. It’s so difficult that generally speaking, most skilled script mages are 50 years or older. As a discipline it’s mostly for writing scripts that allow other mages to cast spells that they don’t know or to allow the script mage himself to conserve energy by converting his mana into powerful scripts that he can then use in battle without tiring himself out since casting spells from scripts requires less mana than casting spells directly. However, at the Master and Grandmaster level, there are spells entirely unique to Script Magic. The mages who can casts those spells, like Omnipotence, are so few and far apart that they’re extremely hard to find. Yet even if one does find such script mages, they tend to charge an exorbitant amount of âmes for their rare scripts. That’s why I’m curious as to how Nathan acquired an Omnipotence script. “How did you get that Omnipotence script?” I ask.

“What this?” he asks showing me the page in his hand. “This is a Dispel script.”

“Then how are you going to cast the Omnipotence enchantment?”

“I’ll show you. Just make sure that you hang on. The take off is kind of rough.”

Nathan channels his mana into his right hand. Aiming his palm at the white phoenix, he casts the Omnipotence enchantment. Next he says to his familiar, “Lift my lamentations to the heavens, Metanoia!”

His phoenix kicks its legs against the ground and we blast off like a rocket. The speed at which we ascend causes a heavy air current to push down against my shoulders. I struggle to stay standing as the sound of rushing air funnels through my head. At the top of the phoenix’s jump, we float weightless for a second and then quickly begin to sink. Using the Dispel script, Nathan removes the Omnipotence enchantment from the phoenix, restoring its magical power. It then ignites the back edges of its wings on fire and propels forward. I may be wrong, but if I didn’t know better, I’d say that my heart failed to beat even once during the entire launch.

“That was crazy!”

“You get used to it.”

“I can’t believe that you’re a grandmaster script mage at your age! You must be the most powerful mage of all time!”

“I wish. Most mages study the other disciplines first and then Script Magic last. My father made me study it first thinking that it would make me really powerful, but all that it actually did was make me great at Script Magic and wishy-washy at everything else. If something goes wrong and we have to fight the cockatrice, then I was hoping that you could handle it – being the former student of Arch Lord Aerolyso and all.”

That’s not good. I was secretly thinking the same thing. Nobody in their right mind would want to fight the Earth Ruling Golden Cockatrice head to head. But if that’s what I have to do to save Nadine, then I will. I grip my staff with resolve and prepare myself for whatever may come.

Nathan’s white phoenix swoops around closer to the Golden Cockatrice. It’s so focused on catching my Killer Rabbit that it doesn’t seem to notice our approach. Carefully, Nathan has his familiar hover over the monster’s head while lowering itself gradually. Nathan readies himself to pounce. Judging that he’s ready, I unsummon my rabbit. In response, the cockatrice stops running about and wobbles its head, frustrated and confused.

Seizing the moment, Nathan leaps from the phoenix and lands on the cockatrice’s back. Quickly, he reaches for one of its neck feathers, but before he can grab a hold of it, the cockatrice does a surprise summersault and brutally tail whips Nathan off of it. He crashes hard to the solid rock surface. From the way that he rises to his feet staggering, I can tell that he’s dazed. I watch in horror knowing what comes next. The Golden Cockatrice squawks violently at him, then from its eyes, it emits the telltale pink beam of the petrification curse at Nathan.