Chapter 11

“To the people of Merith: Let us celebrate this victory. Let us sing loudly through the night songs of joy and of rejoicing. Let us dance and feast, for the monsters which have plagued our lives and our nightmares are finally dead.”

The Guardian’s Instructions, penned by Rigel Knotsworth, year 1002

Casting

Oliver felt like the next hour would never end.

Ashley made him do every type of cardio and muscle-shredding exercise she could come up with before lunch started. Pushups, sit-ups, pull-ups, chin-ups, and anything-else-ups. Once his upper body reached absolute exhaustion, she had him do a set of sprints, and then focused on another set of muscles to tear up.

Whenever he slowed or took too long of a rest, she would slap him with the butt of her staff. He quickly came to loathe Ashley and her wicked brown staff, muttering under his breath the vilest curses that came to mind. That was what pulled him through that hour of agony, focusing on what innovative, Life-forsaken words he could label Ashley with.

Fortunately, she had him train a good distance from the other pupils at the School of Magery. It was less embarrassing for him and it meant no one would question why the Guardian of Magic was a weakling.

Miraculously, her training came to an end and she sent him to one of the lodges—the cafeteria—for lunch. Once his stomach settled from the exercise, it growled with hunger. He wasn’t certain how long it had been since he’d had breakfast this morning back in 4027; the time traveling sort of made Oliver’s biological clock go haywire. It was like jet lag without the airsickness.

Everyone in the cafeteria stared at Oliver as he grabbed his food, but he was too exhausted and hungry to care. They all offered to let him skip the lines, which he accepted with a weak nod of thanks. Lunch was a salty, meat-and-vegetable stew made from a few massive cauldrons fit to feed an army.

He sat alone at a table; no one dared to sit less than four seats from him. Aimed at him were probably a hundred stares, but he never lifted his eyes from his bowl. He could feel them though, putting him on edge. Oliver was no stranger to public attention, but he didn’t know these people, and they didn’t really know him. It wasn’t the same as being a Branch Leader.

After eating, Oliver limped back to the Mages Lodge to find Ilan waiting for him… with a big grin.

“How’d your training go with Ashley?” he asked.

Oliver replied with a painful grunt as he sat on a wooden chair.

“Sounds about right. She’s great, isn’t she?”

“If you consider salt to an open wound to be great, then yeah, sure, she’s wonderful,” Oliver said.

“I know her training can be intense….”

“She almost flaming killed me! She threw me on the ground and nearly stabbed me with her staff!”

Ilan laughed. “Well, hopefully, you’ve learned your lesson not to cross her.”

“Hard to do when she’s mad at me just for wearing these green robes and for not being the Guardian of Magic.”

“But you are the Guardian.” Ilan grew serious yet managed to keep a small smile on the corners of his lips.

Oliver slapped his thigh. “Well, great. Looks like my acting has paid off. I’ve already got you fooled.”

Ilan shook his head. “No, you’re acting has nothing to do with it. I believe in the Grand Arboler’s words; you really are the Guardian… you just need some training.”

Oliver usually hated people who professed blind conviction in the divinations of old men, but in Ilan’s case… Oliver found it hard to hate him. The way he smiled. The hope in his eyes. His calm voice and jovial demeanor. It was all so… disarming.

“Which is why we’re here,” Ilan said, shifting gears. He tossed a small stick to Oliver. “Time to train. Hold the wand in front of you with the tip vertical.”

Oliver did so.

The wand looked like one of those plastic rods musicians used to bang their drums in 4027. The wand was very… plain, to say the least; barely sanded enough to keep from getting splinters and rounded just enough to spin around the fingers. Most of the wand was light brown, except for a small, yellow node at the tip.

A shiver crept up his arm. Even though he didn’t believe the same as the Arbolers, he still felt awkward holding something wooden in his hands.

Ilan quickly reached forward to readjust Oliver’s grip, saying, “Make sure the tip is perfectly vertical. This is your Casting position. You cannot Cast any magic unless you start and end in this position. Focus on the position of your wrist; engrain it into your mind. Got it?”

Oliver blinked, then nodded.

Ilan gave him another brown wand to hold in his other hand. “More often than not, you’ll use a staff in your dominant hand and a wand in your nondominant hand, but it’s important to practice handling a wand in both hands just in case. Now, get both wands in Casting position.”

Oliver did, but Ilan still corrected his wrists until the wand tips were perfectly vertical. “Okay,” Ilan said. “Now it’s time for the grueling part. Do you have any experience twirling?” To show what he meant by twirling, Ilan spun a wand of his own around his fingers.

Oliver’s jaw dropped. The wand became a brown blur in Ilan’s fingers. Ilan smirked at Oliver while twirling the wand, as if this were something he could do in his sleep, in the rain, and underwater. He switched hands and twirled it just as well with his left hand.

“I can’t… twirl,” Oliver said.

“Okay, then that is what you’re going to do for the next four hours.”

Oliver heaved an exasperated sigh.

“Can you juggle three stones?” Ilan asked.

“Stones, no. Balls, yes. Barely.”

“Good, this will be like learning that… times twenty.”

Ilan enthusiastically jumped on to teach Oliver how to twirl the wand around his fingers. He started slow, making sure Oliver knew how to move each finger correctly, and demanded a staggering amount of repetition.

Once Ilan was confident Oliver had the proper technique, he let Oliver continue practicing on his own while he picked up a staff leaning on the wall and practiced his own set of routines on the other side of the lodge.

Oliver slowly trudged through the tasks Ilan gave him. Five minutes of clockwise horizontal twirls. Five minutes of counterclockwise horizontal twirls. Five minutes of clockwise twirls away from the body—Ilan called them vertical twirls because the tip spun perfectly upward and perfectly downward. Five minutes of counterclockwise vertical twirls toward the body. Five minutes of figure eights. Five minutes of reverse figure eights.

And that was just for the right hand.

He had a five-minute rest and then he had to repeat the entire process with the left hand. Five-minute rest and then start the whole thing over again. He dropped the wands often, so he sat in a chair and leaned over to practice near the floor where it was easier to pick them up.

When he dropped the wand five times within a single minute, he huffed in frustration and didn’t bother picking it up, stretching his sore muscles. “Pick it up and keep practicing,” Ilan said from across the room. Oliver glared at him, but Ilan wasn’t looking. He was busy doing his own exercises, his shirt off, and twirling a long staff in his right hand and a wand in his left in a blurring, complex routine.

Oliver picked up the wand and started twirling it again. A few hours passed, and the sun approached the horizon. He rarely dropped the wands by this point, but he was still quite slow. Ilan came over to correct his twirling a couple of times to make sure he didn’t form any bad habits. He instructed Oliver to practice using both hands at the same time, which was strangely not as hard to do as Oliver thought it would be.

Although this practice was far from enjoyable, it was less painful than Ashley’s training. He kept at it because, deep down, he was excited to learn how to use magic, now that he knew it was real. But can I actually use magic? he thought. The Arbolers believed only special, holy people in ancient times could use magic, like the mages. If I can’t use it, then that’ll mean I’m not the Guardian and they’ll send me home. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? This could be my ticket home!

“Alright, Ilan,” he said, standing up. “I thought you were going to teach me how to cast spells. This is just finger drills. When do I get to learn the magic?”

Ilan wiped sweat off his forehead with a cloth and regarded Oliver with a raised eyebrow. He took his time to return his staff and wand to a rack on the wall labeled “ash.”

“And I’ve been thinking,” Oliver continued. “What if I can’t do magic? What if I’m not worthy of its power? How could I be the Guardian of Magic, if I can’t even do spells?”

“We don’t ‘do spells,’” Ilan said after drinking out of a cup of water. “There’s no such thing. We Cast magic.”

Oliver rolled his eyes. “Well, wasn’t that what you were supposed to be teaching me? How to Cast magic?”

Ilan took another long quaff of water. “Casting position.”

Oliver cocked his head. “What?”

“Get in Casting position with one wand.”

“Oh.” He did so, raising a wand up in front of him with the tip vertical.

“Good. Now do two figure eights, two clockwise vertical twirls, and return to Casting position.”

Feeling glum to have to do more twirling practice, he gave Ilan a flat look and began spinning the wand slowly, as instructed. Combining the two different sets of twirls was tricky, but he barely managed to do it without dropping the wand. When he returned it back to casting position, something incredible happened. A beam of light shot out of its tip, just like a flashlight. Except there was no bulb, no batteries, just… light.

A chill ran down Oliver’s spine, the same way it did the first time he saw Silas Cast magic. But this time, it was even more surreal because he Cast it himself. Out went his theory that he couldn’t be the Guardian because he couldn’t do magic.

“I… did it,” Oliver said slowly, still staring at the glowing wand. “I didn’t think I could.”

“Anyone in the world can cast magic,” Ilan said. “Not just the mages. However, not everyone gets the privilege. You see, wands and staves like these are very expensive, especially now, because of the war. In fact, the wand you’ve got there is one of the cheapest, but it’s still worth a few pretty gold coins.”

They fell silent for a moment.

“Casting light is great and all,” Ilan said. “But just wait ‘till you start casting fire, water, and lightning. That’s when things really get exciting.”

Oliver looked up from the glowing wand. “I look forward to that.” And he honestly meant it.

He couldn’t deny that something had sparked within him like a match struck in a dark room. A fascination with magic. A curiosity about how it worked. A thousand questions needing answers. A desire to practice, train, and learn more until he could eventually master it.

The light from the wand slowly faded until it was completely gone.

“What happened?” Oliver asked, tapping the wand a couple of times against his palm as if it were a broken drone. “How do I get it back on?”

“You don’t,” Ilan said with a frown.

“What? Why not?”

“Every wooden weapon is good to Cast magic only once, and then its magic is extinguished.” As he spoke, he took Oliver’s wand and threw it into a large bin labeled “extinguished.”

“Only once?” Oliver furrowed his eyebrows. “Flames, that’s inconvenient!”

Ilan shrugged. “Yes, but it’s better than no magic at all. And we’ve developed methods to make things easier. Look inside your robes.”

Oliver did and noticed three deep pockets that could hold a separate wand each. “Every mage walks around with a staff and at least three wands at all times,” Ilan explained. “Combined, it’s enough to grant them about ten minutes-worth of magic. And this is just one of the simplest things we’ve thought of to overcome the extinguished-wood obstacle. Just wait until you see a battle.”

“What’s it like?”

He wore a big grin. “Well, you’ll just have to see for yourself. Hopefully when we put an end to that ashpot Lennox Elmson.”

Oliver raised the wand in his other hand. “Can you teach me another one? Water? Or even fire?”

Ilan shook his head. “That’s an oak wand. It only casts light. You’d need another type of wood to cast water or fire. And then you’ll need to memorize their Carvings.”

“Carvings?” He recalled learning about them from his history classes. They were some sort of ancient designs or letters thought to be used to communicate. One of the first languages ever recorded. No one had managed to crack the code. “Why would I need to practice writing in an ancient language in order to do magic?”

With a laugh, Ilan raised his hands up, his palms facing Oliver. “Enough questions. I can tell I’ve piqued your interest, but it’s time for dinner. Go eat, and then come back here for my father’s training. I have a feeling he’ll answer a lot of your questions.”

Before Oliver left, Ilan gave him a small parchment that had an extensive list of twirling exercises he needed to do while eating, before sleeping, after waking up, and even while using the latrine. Oliver grabbed a wand from the “extinguished” bin and took it with him to dinner.