by Gustavo Bondoni
in Issue 157, February 2025
Blasted trees, the remains of what had once been a lush forest, lined the path. The few stumps that still stood were charred, blackened by some unimaginable wrath. I wrapped my shawl tighter around my shoulders; the autumn breeze was cool, but the surroundings sent a chill through me that went much deeper than mere temperature.
Ahead lay the tower. A collection of spires of utter joy, light and shining, only magic could have created such a gossamer structure of beauty and illumination. It was the architectural expression of undiluted happiness.
The contrast with my surroundings couldn’t have been more stark.
An arch in the central trunk of the tower admitted me into a place of grand stairways and framed pictures, all illuminated by light that entered through the translucent walls. A small man, gnarled and bent by the weight of his years, greeted me.
“It is late in the season for supplicants,” he said.
“I know the rules,” I replied.
“And still you came?”
“There was no other choice.”
He nodded once. “Then go up. It is the first door at the end of the stair.”
The stair was interminable, twisting upon itself, entering and exiting the walls. Had I not known better, I’d have guessed the architect was a man with a particular eye for beauty and a complete disregard for convention. But the tragedy went deeper than that.
I knocked on a door of ice and dreams that, though nearly transparent, managed to obscure what lay behind. It opened of its own accord.
The man seated at the desk was greying and sported the stubble of a beard and brown eyes. My heart beat harder as he looked at me. Everyone across Junaria had heard tell of Ameno, but I expected something different. The stories told of a wild black mane and a beard the color of midnight. Evidently, the stories were older than I was.
He showed little interest, so I pulled back my traveling hood and let my long brown hair spill out. He immediately straightened and took notice.
“Hello,” he said. “You’ve come at a difficult time.”
“I’ve come from a difficult place,” I replied. “Difficult enough to make the risk unavoidable.”
He nodded, satisfied that I understood my situation. “You must be desperate.”
“My name is Charlotte. I come from Krane,” I said. It was a small town nestled at the end of a chasm between two cliffs, a position chosen for its eminently defensible nature. Not everyone had the benefit of magical fire. “We’re under siege.”
“Krane’s walls can withstand any siege, why risk a young woman for that?”
“This isn’t an attack by other people. The attackers are fog demons.”
That got his attention: a subtle narrowing of the eyes told me that I had an opening.
“They’re creatures that live in the mists that come off the mountain. Those who’ve survived an attack claim that they feel completely solid, but when the concealing fog burns away, there is no sign of them whatsoever. But they’re back with the next fog.
“They’ve been taking us, one at a time, night after night. Sometimes they fail, sometimes a strong man can fight them off and lives to show us his scars, but women and children have no chance.”
“And what do they look like?”
“No one knows. Even the survivors only speak of hard edges in the fog.”
Silence stretched an eternal moment. Finally, he nodded. “All right. I’ll go. But I recommend that you either go along a different path or stay here and wait. It isn’t safe to travel with me.”
“Is it the time of your rage?” I asked, holding his gaze.
“The time when I must do what I can to survive,” he replied, not flinching.
“I’ll come with you all the same.”
He revealed no surprise. “Suit yourself.”
***
The road to Krane wasn’t difficult, not at first. The plains were pleasant stretches of rolling farmland and gentle hills. Even the forests were tame.
And yet, each step came with a sense of foreboding, of descending into a pit of doom. As the grey skies of late early winter darkened and closed, my companion became ever more morose and silent. His two footmen and single serving woman quaked every time he turned their way, as if expecting to be dismissed from his service—or worse—at any moment. I held my tongue.
It came to a head on the fifth day, just when I was beginning to believe that we’d actually reach our destination without incident.
We’d made camp on a cold, drizzly day, just four hours after noon, when the light was already too low to continue. I was relieved when Ameno called the halt. The sun had been notably absent all day, and I felt drained, even though I took the herbs my mother had given me all day.
The magician sat morosely by the fire and stared into its depths.
“You should have stayed behind,” he said. “These are the worst days.”
“These? I would have thought it the hardest days would be deep in winter, covered in snow.”
“Those are the hard days, too. But if there is sunlight, I can live with the winter and the early nights… just barely.”
I suddenly realized his attendants were nowhere to be seen. Wherever they’d gone, they’d taken the packs and the magician’s horse with them. I swallowed nervously, but Ameno seemed to be paying no attention to me.
He looked into the fire and, to my absolute amazement, his hard expression broke down. It was a gradual process, first losing the flinty determination around the eyes, then taking on an expression of hopeless despair. Moments later, he was crying silently to himself.
I wanted to walk over, to put my arm around him and try to comfort him but I couldn’t move. It was like watching a mountain cry—too much to take in.
As I watched, the sadness turned suddenly to determination as he warred with the grief. He roared suddenly and sat straight. I tried to disappear into myself, to go unnoticed.
The anger won and the man stood straight and, with a snarl and a curse, threw back the sleeves of his robe. Suddenly, fire sprang from his hands.
He howled and screamed and threw a fireball, a white-hot blaze, into the nearest tree. The frozen moisture inside exploded into a ball of steam and splinters.
Then he screamed and moved to the next tree, and then a rock, which shattered as if it was made of glass. He roared and screamed, and destroyed another tree. Another. A second rock. The fire shot out once and again until, with a ragged shout of pure rage, he sent out one last jet of flame before collapsing.
That one hit me. Before I could move, I was enveloped in fire.
***
He woke hours later. Night had fallen long ago, and I’d kept him close to the fire, and kept him well-wrapped in blankets. Spending a night on cold ground would have done him no good.
His eyes opened wide. When he saw me, he sat up with a jerk and scurried away. Then he stopped as suddenly as he’d started and peered suspiciously. “Why aren’t my hands tied?”
“Because you aren’t a prisoner.”
“I tried to kill you.”
“You failed.”
“You have magic.” It wasn’t a question. He knew it was the only explanation for my having survived his onslaught.
“Yes.”
He gave it some thought and I watched. Both the grief and the fury appeared to have disappeared now that he had something a mystery to unravel.
“You know my secret.”
“That your rage isn’t rage at all, but sadness?”
“That I turn my grief into anger in order to be able to survive it. If I didn’t, I’d turn my fire upon myself instead of outward.”
“Wouldn’t that be more noble?”
He shrugged. “I force my presence upon no one. I live far from anyone else and I always give fair warning. Most of my victims are trees. But few who know my secret have lived to tell about it.”
I knew that, too, but I wasn’t about to say so. We’d established that he couldn’t just wave an arm and do away with me. “I knew your secret before I ever met you.”
“How…” his eyes widened with understanding. “You have magic, too. And it does the same to you as it does to me.”
“I don’t know if it’s the magic but yes, I have the sadness.”
“And it doesn’t affect you?”
“It does. But I take a potion for it. I know a sorceress who creates potions that can cure anything.”
“Cure?” he asked. His eyes twinkled. He knew what he was asking.
“Perhaps a better description would have been that the potion makes it bearable.”
“And what price do you pay?”
I held his gaze. “None whatever. The rest of my life in unaffected.”
“Do you still have the joy, the feeling that, come spring, anything is possible, that you can take the world by storm and that all of creation is your friend?”
“It is lessened.”
“And you can bear to part with it?”
“To get rid of the sadness? Of course.”
“Hmm.”
I realized there was more he was thinking, more he wasn’t telling me.
But if I was right, he didn’t open up that night. He simply went back to sleep, glowing wards around me telling me that he was prepared for any kind of assault, magical or physical. When we woke, he sent up a beacon, a tall tower of green light and sat down to wait. Presently, the wizard’s retainers appeared, leading his horse.
When we resumed our travels, I brooded, wondering if he’d given them advanced warning about his condition or if they knew how to read the signs that a rough patch was approaching. One thing was certain: he hadn’t given me any warning whatsoever.
Well, technically, he had, but only back at the castle. He hadn’t warned me that he was about to enter one of his violent cycles.
I had plenty to consider while we walked.
***
The town of Krane loomed above us. All we could see was the wall and the portcullis in its center. On either side, cliffs appeared to be squeezing the town together, but the opposite was true: the sheer rock had defended the population for hundreds of years.
But walls couldn’t help against the scourge that was tearing its soul.
I spotted a shock of red hair on the wall. “Hammel, let us in!” I shouted.
The portcullis lifted slowly. It was a nuisance to have it down all the time, but who would come trade with a town beset with fog demons?
From within, shouts relayed the news that I was back, that I was alive, that I had someone with me.
Ameno raised an eyebrow. “So they really did send you to get me, and the town really has an infestation?”
“Of course. I don’t lie.”
He nodded wordlessly but, again, kept his thoughts to himself. He’d been in a quiet mood after the incident in the clearing, but appeared to be managing his emotions well enough.
There was no pomp, no ceremony; we were just ushered into the mayor’s audience chamber at the far end of the city and asked to wait for a moment. The mayor entered soon afterwards, still tucking the front of his shirt into his breeches. “Welcome to Krane,” he said in his deep voice. He bowed at the waist and held out a hand for the wizard to shake. “I take it you are the great sorcerer Ameno?”
“I’m only the great sorcerer when someone needs a favor,” Ameno replied with a bitter smile. “The rest of the time, I’m apparently a brute and a tyrant.”
The mayor was a jovial man, rotund and bearded and used to saying pleasant things. My companion’s abrupt proclamation caught him off guard.
I jumped in. “Talking like that, don’t you think you deserve everything they say about you?”
Everyone in the audience chamber, the mayor, his three secretaries and a pair of townsfolk who happened to be present when we walked in and had simply sat down to watch, gasped.
Tension hung in the air. Had I crossed some invisible line and condemned everyone inside this room to a horrible, fiery death? Well, everyone but the wizard and myself?
And then Ameno laughed. “I suppose I do at that.”
Everyone relaxed, but I received a number of looks that promised that people would want to talk to me once the current crisis blew over. I shrugged. This wouldn’t be the first time I’d been in trouble with the city elders.
“Tell me about these fog demons,” the sorcerer said.
The mayor shrugged. “It started during the first chills of Autumn. We always get some foggy days before the harvest. But this year… this year, the fog seemed thicker and more frequent. When you walk inside the fog, it’s colder.
“After a few days, we started getting reports of missing people, always someone who’d been outside the walls early. A child milking cows in the fields, an old man returning from the quarry. It always happened in situations where other explanations presented themselves. Falls and accidents are common on the rocky paths.
“But then we had a night in which you could hardly see your hand in front of your face. A young woman was going from her parents’ house to her uncle’s, two doors down. She never arrived and her parents swear that they heard animal noises in the fog, and the girl’s screams. Everyone who lived along the street ran out to see, but they found nothing. No body, no blood, no sign that anything had happened. When the fog lifted the next morning, we knew we were dealing with something very different.”
Ameno listened gravely and nodded. “How many people have been taken?”
“Almost two dozen. Eventually, we just began to stay inside every night, and to go out later in the morning.”
“And the livestock?”
The mayor shook his head. “It hasn’t been touched.”
“I will walk out tonight, if there is fog. Charlotte will come with me.”
I swallowed, hoping someone would speak up and tell him that I was too young for that duty.
But, just like when I’d volunteered to fetch the mage, no one came forward to say that it wasn’t a job for a young woman, that a squad of trained soldiers would do a better job. They appeared to think that, just because I had some magic, I could defend myself against whatever the world threw at me. Even my mother seemed to agree, and my father died when I was a baby, so he probably never even knew.
At Ameno’s request, they led us to a room just off the audience chamber. He looked around at it and pronounced himself satisfied. Then, with orders that food be brought to us, he asked everyone to leave.
“How long until the mist falls in the afternoon,” he said once the food had been served and the townsfolk had closed the door behind them.
“At least three more hours, maybe more. It’s just an hour past midday, after all.”
“Fair enough.”
Then his face crumbled and he slumped onto a chair.
“How do you do it?” he asked me. The sorrow was back in his features and I feared for the town. But the room had been well-chosen: it was of rock and had no windows. Only the door appeared truly vulnerable to flame.
Then I remembered how the rocks in the clearing had shattered and I swallowed. If he had an attack now, the roof could come down around our heads… and my magic would not protect me, and neither would it protect the townsfolk from the fire which might escape from the room.
But the expected rage never came. He was just looking at her expectantly.
“Do what?”
“Survive.”
“I… I already told you about the potion.”
“You also said it wasn’t quite enough.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then how?” his voice had lost all pretense of command, every grain of confidence. He pleaded, desperate to learn.
“I…”. I stopped to think about it. “I’m not entirely sure. My friends help. My family, too. And then there’s a trick I use, but you’ll think it’s silly.”
“Tell me.”
“I just tell myself that tomorrow might be a good day. You have good days, I know it. I’ve seen them. Even when the blackness hits you, you have some days where you can function normally.”
“That’s true.”
“I’m the same way. I just tell myself that tomorrow will be one of those days, and then I can go on living.”
“And that’s enough?” He was almost hopeful.
“Well, that and the potion.”
His face darkened.
***
“Is the fog here always this thick?”
All traces of morose, unapproachable misery had vanished. Ameno seemed like a man with a strong sense of purpose, driven not by a desire to help the town, but by his interest in the problem at hand.
“No. It used to be much more… normal. It might have gotten like this one or two times in a bad winter. Now it’s every day. And this fog is colder than a dragon’s heart.”
I wrapped myself tighter against the chill. Ameno wanted me to show him the places where the fog lay thickest, the spots where the currents along the narrow streets caused it to pool.
So I took him to the Pit of the Fallen.
This was nothing more than a circular plaza at the point most distant from the city wall and the gate through which we’d entered. It was located at the end of a street that descended from better parts of town. The colorful name was a relic of the time when thieves and prostitutes and murderers for hire had made this their abode, along with assorted others welcome nowhere else in the city. Most of the city’s wastewater had also accumulated here before the sewer was built.
Now, the only thing that accumulated was fog. From above, we could see it pooled there, lapping in waves against the second stories of many of the houses.
I swallowed. “Are you sure you want to go in there?”
Ameno gave me a ghastly grin in response. “Those depths hold no fear for me. Nothing inside could compare to the demons I live with every day.”
He didn’t convince me. Those swirling mists looked like they could hold some extremely nasty things, but he just strode down the path without a care in the world, casting a long shadow in the light of my lantern.
“Besides,” he continued, “all the attacks have been against people walking alone. We should be safe tonight, but I wanted to get the feeling of the town, of the night. Especially of the fog.”
I pressed close to him. The mist around us was thicker than anything I’d ever seen before. I could have sworn that I felt it grazing against me as we walked.
But Ameno appeared not to notice anything strange. He, I realized, wasn’t shivering. Perhaps the fire bottled up inside of him was enough to keep him warm. Perhaps he was just putting on a show for me.
“You’re a water mage, aren’t you?” he asked me while we explored the milky square.
I started. “I’m not sure. My mother says I have the way of water, but I never knew what she meant.”
He walked a few paces and I scurried after him. I definitely didn’t want to lose him in this gloom. His voice came out of the mist. “Yes. A water mage. And a powerful one, judging by the ease with which you withstood my flame.” He paused as he peered into the thickest of the fog, apparently trying to see through it by force of will alone. “What I don’t understand is why you need my help with this. Fog is mainly made of drops of water… they should have dissipated at your command.”
I felt my cheeks burning with shame. He’d discovered my most shameful failing. “I’d tried…”
“And it didn’t work?”
“It was like I couldn’t even connect to the water, as if it was covered with something. I could sense the water in there, but I couldn’t connect with it.”
“Interesting.” He stayed silent for some moments, probably wondering how I could be so incompetent. “I knew a water mage, once. A powerful sorceress. In fact, you remind me of her.”
“My—”
The attack came from everywhere at once, or so it seemed. Claws raked against my back and something immensely strong grasped my right calf. I felt myself being dragged backwards as my lamp fell from my nerveless hand. It extinguished itself against the floor and I was pitched into a darkness somehow made worse by the fact that it wasn’t complete: the fog seemed to emanate some grey light.
I screamed in helpless terror.
Then light reappeared. Real light, wonderful light. Yellow light. It engulfed me and warmed me and… and the iron grip on my leg disappeared. The plaza was engulfed in flame, roaring with combustion.
When it finally died out, the darkness was complete. There was no grey light, and the caress of the mist was gone.
A new flame, tiny, no larger than a candle, appeared before me. “Are you all right?” Ameno asked. He applied the flame to the lamp.
I pulled back in horror. His face, illuminated in the flickering glow, was covered in blood. “Yes.” I realized that the blood came from a gash in his forehead that though bleeding copiously didn’t seem too serious. “We should get you inside. There’s a healer just up the lane.”
“I…”
“Don’t even think of it. You can keep working on this tomorrow.”
“All right,” he said. There was mutiny in his acquiescence, but something else as well. Amusement? Speculation? It was hard to read his expression in the night.
***
“Have you thought about what they are?” Ameno asked me the next morning, almost as soon as I arrived. His hair was wild and his eyes red. I wondered if he’d slept at all. Several books were open on the table in his room. I recognized several from the tiny shelf of knowledge that the mayor always said was the town’s prized possession, but there were others, too, probably borrowed from the houses of the richest townsfolk.
“What are you reading?”
“History.”
“History?”
“Yes. Often the key to an attack like this one is buried deep in a city’s past.” He gave me a suspicious glance. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
I shrugged. “They’re demons. I supposed they’ve escaped from one of the hells.”
“You call them demons. That doesn’t mean that’s what they are.”
“All right. What are they, then?”
He gestured at the books. “That’s what I stayed up all night trying to decipher. I have some ideas, but I need to talk about them with someone who knows the history of this place.”
“The elders…”
“Are just old. Do any of them still remember how to read?”
“I don’t know.”
He sighed. “All right. I need to ask you a question. Is your mother’s name Vivienne?”
“What?”
“Is it?”
“Yes, but… how did you know?”
“You look just like her. Like she did when she was young.”
“You knew my mother?”
He just smiled. “Will she come? I already know she doesn’t want to see me.”
Now he was just being difficult. I decided to call his bluff. Mother hadn’t said anything of the sort. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Because that’s the only reason she would send you halfway across Junaria alone.”
That hadn’t even occurred to me, and I was conscious of standing there slack-jawed. I shut my mouth.
He smiled. “And besides, I assume she knows I’m here.”
I just nodded.
“Then she could have come along to say hello, as professional courtesy is nothing else. The fact that she didn’t only lends itself to one explanation. Do you think she’d come?”
“I… I’ll ask her.”
“Thank you.”
***
“Is it true? Do you know him?”
My mother had been waiting for me. She was already dressed.
“I knew him. I don’t think I know him anymore,” my mother replied, her smile filled with infinite sadness. “Perhaps I was just fooling myself into thinking I ever did.”
My insides froze. “Mother… were you and Ameno… I mean…” I couldn’t go on.
She laughed at me.
“Come on, let’s get this over with.”
I stayed a step behind her on the short walk to the town hall. She abandoned her usual ambling stride for long, sweeping paces. Her hair, streaked with grey but still mostly dark flowed behind in a style I’d never seen her wear before. Mother usually knotted her hair when she woke up each morning in the severest of buns.
Could it be? Everything pointed to it, but I just couldn’t imagine my old, boring mother being rebellious enough to fall in love… with anyone really. From all she’d said of my father, the man was a solid match, a farmer who could support his young family—the kind of man one married to be safe.
The wizard on the other hand, was dangerous, unstable, powerful. ‘Safe’ was the last word to describe him.
I tried to think of other things. The demons the night before had almost caught me. I’d been unable to sleep, unable to stop remembering the cold feel of their chitinous grasp. For some reason, it wasn’t the inability to escape that haunted me: it was the frozen quality of their grip.
Though their memory had disturbed me to the point where I couldn’t shut my eyes, and had had to sleep with a candle beside my bed—wasteful but necessary—I now found that I couldn’t force myself to think of them. All I could think of was my mother’s loose hair.
Ameno greeted us with a frigid: “Hello, Vivienne, you’re looking well. I was glad to learn that you are still alive and among us.”
My mother nodded back. “Word of you reaches us even here. I knew most of your activities from travelers.” Then she softened. “You don’t seem sad today, even though winter is well upon us. Have you found your cure?”
The sorcerer shook his head, a curt, brutal gesture. “No. But I’m intrigued by this problem of yours. Intrigued enough that I can lay aside my troubles.” He gave her a significant look. “For a time, at least.”
“What do you think is happening here?”
“Your demons are not demons. Charlotte told me about their cold hands.”
“You nearly got my daughter killed.”
“Had you come yourself, there would have been no need. And besides, I did save her, didn’t I?”
She ignored that. “What do you think they are?”
“From your histories, I’d guess either the spirits of dead miners or that of executed thieves. Evidently they have fed on the magic that seeps from the town’s mages. Two magicians in such a confined place… over time, it can cause certain side effects.”
“So you’re saying we should move away, and that would solve the problem?”
“It’s too late for that. We need to find their resting place and purify it.”
“And how will we do that?”
He smiled for the first time since we’d returned. “Leave that part to me.”
My mother nodded. “Will you be alright?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Won’t you try the remedy?”
“It will dull my powers.”
“It won’t. It’s never dulled mine.”
“You never had the joy again, did you?”
“No. But I pay that price willingly.”
“I don’t.” Impatience came over his features. I always thought that people learned patience with age… but Ameno apparently wasn’t one of those. “We need to find the graves.”
“I can save you some trouble. Criminals are thrown in the river since the town was first founded. We need to open the mine.”
They walked downhill towards the place where the cliffs came together in a sharp angle. The town had originally been a mining colony.
***
“You weren’t fooling around when you closed this off,” Ameno remarked, looking at the boulders that sealed off the shaft. “It’s going to take a while.” He pulled back his sleeves.
“That won’t be necessary,” Mother said. She closed her eyes and I sensed the magic coursing through her, more than I’d ever felt her use before. A cracking sound began to emanate from the stones and they began to move. No, I realized. They weren’t moving, they were cracking, each one breaking into smaller rocks until the whole thing collapsed into a pile of gravel.
Through the choking dust, I heard Ameno’s voice. “Impressive.”
“There’s water in the rock. Water might not be as impressive as fire… but it can be just as strong.”
“So you’ve said,” Ameno replied, and walked into the gloom of the mine.
He made a light from fire and I gasped. The mine looked like it had been attacked: half-rotted wooden carts lay smashed together or fallen on their sides. Abandoned tools were scattered among piles of discarded clothing. A pile of ore, waiting to be transported was forgotten in a corner.
“Someone left in a hurry,” Ameno said.
“There was a cave-in.”
“Are you sure?”
We walked deeper, following the rail for the carts. Soon, tendrils of mist began to appear in the corners, and then around our feet. Soon, the fog threatened to envelop our heads.
“Stand aside,” Ameno said.
The flame we’d been using to see by suddenly became a sheet of searing fire that, when it receded, left no signs of fog.
“I think we’re on the right track,” the mage said. He set off again, more confident now, always heading for the places where the fog seemed to be thickest and stopping every few hundred paces to burn the mist away.
Finally, we arrived at a large cavern with what must have been a huge pile of rocks in the middle of it, but only the top of the pile could be seen poking through the mist around it. Ameno looked at the roof. “Those rocks didn’t fall, did they?”
“Let’s find out,” mother replied. I felt that surge of power again and wondered. My mother had always been more focused on the subtleties of magic than on using brute force. I’d always thought she had no choice in the matter, that guile had replaced absent strength. Now I knew better.
The rocks crumbled and then, with exaggerated care, Ameno burned away the mist around the place where they’d been. Once the pile of gravel could be seen, he picked up a shovel from the floor and carefully set to work moving the gravel out of the way. An hour later he’d exposed a human skull.
He kept working and soon had a number of skeletons, some with flesh still attached, many wearing the rotting remains of leather and woolen jerkins. Miner’s clothing.
Ameno gently prodded one of the skeletons with his foot. Something rattled within and he bent to retrieve it. Then, with a hard look in his eyes, he straightened, a metal spearpoint in his hand. “Like I said… It’s a strange rockfall that stabs a man in the back with a spear. Perhaps someone should rewrite those history books with a more honest story of why the mine closed. But for now, I need to cleanse this place. The spirits of men stabbed in the back are not peaceful spirits. I need to cleanse this place… you might want to move back a bit.”
We took fifty steps up the hall and I finally found my voice. “Mother… how could you?”
She smiled warmly but, again, sadly. “You’ve only seen him in the winter of his life, his season of sorrow. You should see him in spring, when the first sap hits the trees and the birds begin to sing again. That’s when his cycle comes to its joyful side.”
She sighed. “And you wouldn’t believe his joyful side if you haven’t seen it. It’s utterly amazing and incredible. It’s like a ray of sun shining through raincloud or…”
She paused and looked at me. “Did you see his castle?”
“Yeah,” I replied, remembering the ecstatic crystal spires.
“Well, only a man going through one of Ameno’s joyful days could ever have imagined that and built it.”
“Ameno built that?”
Suddenly the cavern, only dimly lit by the distant flame, became bright as day. Searing heat, almost as bad as the heat beside a hearth tore over us.
My mother’s smile in the sudden light was one of pure bliss. “Yes. I don’t regret anything. After all, Ameno gave me the most important thing in my life.”
As the realization of what my mother meant began to dawn, the light went out and I heard footsteps. Suddenly, the mage himself was with us.
“Run!” he shouted.
A colossal roar came from behind us. When I turned to look, a wall of water was roaring through the mine… coming up the slope for some reason.
We ran.
“Get a little carried away with the fire?” Mother said.
“You wanted me to fix the problem, didn’t you? I should have known that if you were involved, all I’d get is one complaint after another.”
“Typical of you to blow everything up and then wonder why everyone is mad at you. At least this time, you’re not locked up in your room moping.”
And with that, the wall of water hit them.
***
“That… was brilliant,” Ameno said.
My mother shrugged. “Don’t look at me, I had nothing to do with it.”
We were sitting inside a giant bubble, rushing along with the torrent. We were no longer heading up towards the top of the mine, but the river had fallen into a deep tunnel. I know where it was going, though: this was the river that reappeared at the base of the mountain and meandered lazily through the green fields of the lower plains. It would be a long hike back, but anyone who decided to annoy us would likely regret their choice.
Ameno looked at me admiringly. “Not only was it brilliant, but it takes both strength and control to do something like this. I can’t feel water magic the way I’d sense it if you were using fire magic but… this isn’t something you can just fake.”
He paused. “Tell me the truth. Are you actually drinking your mother’s potion, or is that something she told you to tell me?”
“It’s true.”
“And tell me, how do you really feel? No, Vivienne, I didn’t ask you. I already know what you’re going to say. I’m asking this young sorceress over here.”
I swallowed. “I feel better than you do. This would normally be my sad time as well.”
He nodded. “And would you sacrifice your desire and ability to create something like my castle, to feel that the world was at your feet all during spring and fall to feel the way you do?”
“I… I don’t know. I think so. At the very least, I’d try it. You know the potion won’t affect your magic, so if you don’t like the way you feel, you can always stop taking it.”
Ameno nodded to my mother. “This one talks sense,” he said with a wry smile. “Are you sure she isn’t mine?”
The awkward silence stretched for a few moments, and then a few minutes, until Ameno finally broke it.
He laughed, the first genuine sound of joy I’d seen from my father.
Maybe her mother hadn’t been crazy after all.
© February 2025, Gustavo Bondoni
Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer who writes primarily in English. He has published several novels and two short story collections. He has over two hundred short stories published in fourteen countries. They have been translated into seven languages. His writing has appeared in Pearson’s Texas STAAR English Test cycle, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Perihelion SF, The Best of Every Day Fiction and many others. He placed second in the 2019 Been Memorial Contest and received a Judges Commendation in The James White Award. His work has appeared previously in Swords & Sorcery. His website is www.gustavobondoni.com.
Leave a Reply