Cedar Sanderson is doing N'inktober, so I'm going to follow along and do what I've been trained to do by the Raconteur Press Postcard books: come up with a story to match her visual prompts. I can't guarantee that I'll have a complete story for every image, but I'm going to at least try to come up with a scene, a start, or an idea!
Glass Thixotropic
As far as evil wizards went, Ash thought, Mad Victerrix the Unrepentant wasn’t horrible.
True, he’d shrunk Salg down to the size of a small lemon tart. As a budding magical practitioner himself, he could definitely appreciate the skill that it took to work an enchantment of that magnitude.
On the other hand, as someone who was in the city at the time, he found the whole situation more than a bit annoying.
Victerrix’s spell really was well done. Nobody had actually noticed the shrinkage until the mad wizard himself had appeared in the sky above the city, smiling evilly. Then the huge gardening trowel had come down, prying them from the earth. The jostling involved had shaken apart several wooden structures, including the royal stables. Panicked horses and a flock of somewhat dismayed sheep that had wandered into the city had added to the overall confusion, meaning that nobody really grasped what was going on until Victerrix dropped the city into a pot of thick, mystical smoke and slapped a bell jar over it.
That was when the town guard had come around, looking for the itinerant wizard that had come into town the day before. There had been some rather pointed questions vis-a-vis his involvement in current events. Fortunately, he’d managed to convince the Captain of the guard that he honestly had no idea what was going on. Unfortunately, that only meant that he was hauled before the King to explain what was going on.
Given the circumstances, King Ainsley looked rather calm. He steepled his fingers as he studied Ash.
“As a wizard yourself, your opinion is that this was… what did you say?”
“Manchlans’s Third Resizing, your majesty,” Ash said confidently. There were only a handful of spells that could do this sort of thing. Even as an apprentice, he felt it was a good guess.
Everyone tensed and quieted as the room trembled. It was obvious they were being moved - immense trees blotted out the sun periodically - but nobody had any idea what was going on beyond that..
When the shaking stopped, the king relaxed, but a frown appeared on his face. “Can you cancel it? Lift the spell? Free us?”
“Sadly, no.” The king’s frown deepened. In Ash’s experience, when officials of any stripe frowned at you, that was bad news. He hurried to explain. “Not because I lack the power, mind you! It’s that such a spell would need to be lifted from outside the enchantment.”
“So you’re saying we’re stuck here, until he decides to free us.”
Ash did his best to look sorrowful. “If there was anything I could do, your majesty, I promise you, I would. But I would need to be outside.”
The Captain cleared his throat. “Your majesty, if you please. There is someone else in town who might be able to help us with that. I was preparing to speak with Rowan the Weasel on other matters before this incident.”
The king raised an eyebrow. “I know that name. She bills herself as the woman who can find her way into – or out of – any place or situation, as I recall. What ‘other matters’ were you going to speak to her about, captain?”
“Three counts of drunk and disorderly. Fencing stolen goods. Running an unlicensed gambling ring.” The Captain paused, counting off on his fingers, then perked up. “Oh, and littering.”
“Excellent!” The king clapped his hands together,. “I suggest you keep that appointment, Captain. Take the Wizard Ash along with you.” He shifted his focus to Ash, smiling broadly. “You did promise to help, after all, as I recall.”
If officials frowning at you was bad, officials smiling at you was even worse. Ash swallowed and nodded as the king gestured to dismiss them, not trusting himself to say anything more. The Captain grabbed his arm and chivvied him out of the throne room.
The Captain wasn’t interested in small talk, which suited Ash. Once they were outside, the sight of the bell jar above them started his mind spinning. He craned his neck around as they walked, examining the jar and trying to keep his calculations straight.
When they arrived at the gates to the city, one of the guardsmen was waiting for them. He saluted the Captain, and led them into the barracks. A table with rough wooden benches was off to the side of the room. A very large, muscular, and rather damp woman in a leather leggings and a dirty linen shirt was half sitting, half sprawled out over the table.
The Captain went over and thumped the table. “Rowan!”
The woman snorted and turned her head to look at them. Her eyes were blue but bloodshot, and her nose looked like it had been broken multiple times. Her close-cropped dark hair was dripping wet. Ash guessed they’d dumped some water over her to wake her up. And maybe cut down on the smell a bit.
“What’s with the scarecrow, Cap? Goin’ to give up soldierin’ and start farming?” She snickered, then winced, leaned over the side of the table, and threw up rather noisily.
The Captain sighed. “Wizard Ash, if you would, please wait outside. We’ll be with you shortly. Smith! Get me another bucket!”
Ash retreated, closing the door. From within, he could hear muttering and the sound of water being sloshed about. The Captain spoke at length in measured tones, with Rowan interrupting him repeatedly. Much sooner than Ash expected, the door slammed open and Rowan stalked out, blinking at the light. She turned to yell over her shoulder through the door.
“Right! I’ll do it! Fathoming idiots.” That last was muttered under her breath. “Don’t forget! All your men, at the main gate, like we said! Make sure they have their halberds!” She whirled and jabbed a finger at Ash. “As for you, Scarecrow - I need a drink, and we need to talk. Come on.”
Rowan turned and tramped down the street. She would have cut a rather imposing figure, except after three steps she stumbled and had to hold on to the wall to stay upright.
The Captain poked his head out of the door. “Go. Let her have one drink, no more. We need her sober. Have her at the main gate in 20 minutes.” He disappeared back into the guardhouse, hollering.
Ash looked around, threw up his hands, and hurried to catch up with Rowan.
By the time Ash found her, Rowan was already leaning on the bar of the closest tavern, a mug of ale in her hand. “So, ‘wizard’. You don’t sound like a Salger. Traveling, I would guess. Did you lose your luggage or something? Is that why you’re wearing your old apprentice robes?”
“It’s Ash, and – look, yes, I’m an apprentice. Practically speaking, as far as wizards go, I’m the best they’re going to find. If you can get us out of here, I might actually be able to do something about all this before...” He pursed his lips, unwilling to continue.
Rowan noticed his hesitation and narrowed her eyes. “What’s were you going to say? Spill it.”
“Nobody know why Victerrix did this,” he said slowly. “So there’s no telling how long he might keep us in here. It might be a day, it might be a week, it might be a month.”
Rowan grimaced. “Oy. Siege rules, then. Running out of food and water, eating the dogs. I’ve been there before. Ain’t pretty.”
“It’s worse than that. I’d have to make a complete survey to be sure, but I don’t think there’s any air holes. Rough calculation? We’ve got four days. Maybe.”
“Crap. You’re serious.” Rowan looked at her drink, then set it down and pushed it away. “The Salgers may be sticks in the mud when it comes to bar fights, but they don’t deserve that. You think you can fix things up once we’re out?”
“If it’s what I think it is, as soon as we’re out of the range of the enchantment, we’ll go back to normal size.” Ash shrugged. “At that point, even if I can’t break the spell, we can take the city and at least take the lid off. We need to get out first, though.”
“Right. Getting out of here won’t be a problem,” Rowan said. “Trust me. I’ve dealt with this kind of thing before. Let’s go see if Cap got his crew together and see about making that happen.”
Ash studied the swirling darkness outside the open city gate. It was somewhat translucent, letting him see a few feet beyond the walls of the city. He pushed his hand against it and it felt spongy and cool, almost like congealed porridge. He leaned into it and it gave slightly, letting his hand sink into it slowly. He withdrew it with a sucking POP.
He kept his eyes on the gate and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “You said you know what this is?”
“No idea.” Rowan’s voice was low as well, but cheerful. “I said I’ve dealt with this kind of thing. Watch.” She turned to face the Captain and the men with him, each holding a halberd.
“OK, Cap. Here’s the deal. You all stick your halberds in there.”
One of the guards snickered. “What, we’re going to chop it up?”
“Stir it up,” Rowan said. “Get the halberd in there as far as you can, and act like you’re churning butter. In and out, back and forth, swirl it around. Get as many men in there doing it as you can.”
The guards grumbled, but after the Captain barked some orders, they set to doing exactly that. Ash watched as they grunted and stirred.
After a few minutes, one of the guards brightened up. “Hey! This is getting easier!”
“Then keep at it!” Rowan hollered. “Mix it up good!”
As guardsmen tired, they traded off positions with their fresher fellows. After about ten minutes, it was obvious that the black fog had gone from almost solid to something more like a thin soup.
Rowan nodded. “No much longer. Come on.” She grabbed ash and hauled him over to the Captain, who pursed his lips.
“How’d you know?”
“You run into the strangest things when you’re tomb robbing,” Rowan said absent-mindedly. “The next bit is going to be kind of hard. Ash and I are going to push our way through this stuff, out to the other side.”
“We’re what?” Ash yelped.
Rowan cocked her head at him. “Four days, was it?”
“Fine! OK! Whatever you say.”
Rowan turned back to the guard. “We’re going to push our way through, like I said. Problem is, as soon as you stop stirring, that gunk will start to solidify again. So you need to keep your men stirring for at least another three or four minutes. Got it?”
Rowan didn’t wait for an answer. She grabbed Ash and dragged him away from the gate, back behind the guards.
When she let go, Ash rubbed his arm and looked up at her. “You know, you could just tell me where you need me, instead of hauling me around like a sack of potatoes.”
“It’s easier that way. No pesky questions. You ready?”
“You seriously want to just run through that stuff.”
“It’s more like swimming. Try not to breathe any of it. You wouldn’t like it.” She grinned at the expression on his face. “Oh, it’s not that bad. Trust me! You look like a runner anyways. You’ll probably beat me out. I’ll race you. Ready? Go!”
Rowan took off, arms pumping wildly as she raced for the open gate. Ash blinked, yelled, and took off after her. They hit the gate together, plunging into the darkness side by side.
He’d been expecting the cold. Whatever it was that Victerrix had set the embedded the city in, it seemed to suck the heat right out of him.
What he hadn’t been expecting was the darkness. He found himself running blind through the whatever-it-was. It felt like walking into a strong wind while sloshing through deep water.
After fifteen seconds or so his legs started to ache. He ignored them and pushed through another couple of yards with his lungs burning. He opened his mouth involuntarily, then closed it and spat to try and clear the musty, muddy taste of the fog soup from his mouth.
He was sure he wasn’t going to make it when his outstretched hand touched something cool and hard. Glass? He jumped, reaching upward, and felt his hand exit the cold of the fog. The heat of the air above him felt like sticking his hand in a fire. Shivering, lungs burning, dizzy from holding his breath, he crouched and jumped again. This time his arm exited the fog, almost to his shoulder. He flung it about blindly, and his fingers found a smooth, flat surface. He struggled to hold on, but his fingers found no purchase, and slowly slipped off.
He was sliding under the surface of the fog when something grabbed his arm and pulled. He popped up, out of the fog and into the light of day, immediately gasping and drawing fresh, hot air into his lungs. Rowan reached down from her perch on the edge of a glass wall, and using both arms, managed to pull him up and over onto her ledge, where he rolled over onto his back, wheezing and gasping.
“Thought about letting you try again, but then I thought, he probably didn’t mean it, that sack of potatoes comment.”
“Thank you,” Ash wheezed. “Where are we?”
“Edge of a big ol’ glass bowl,” Rowan said. She pointed over the far edge. “Looks like it’s maybe 50 feet down to what looks like wood.”
Ash sat up and looked around. Off in the far distance, huge structures blotted out the horizon. Something about them looked familiar. After a moment of study, he realized he was looking at immense books stuffed into a towering set of shelves that stretched up into the sky.
“Not the sky. The roof! We’re in a building. Probably Victerrix’s tower.”
“Hmm. Wizards’s study. I kind of wish I’d asked Cap for my sword back now.”
“You know, that does seem like something that might be a good idea to have handy. Why didn’t you?”
“Didn’t want it weighing me down. We’d both be back there trying to breathe soup if I had thought to bring it, so someone’s looking out for us. So. Wizardly speaking. What’s out next step? I can’t help but notice we still seem to be on the small side.”
Ash peered over the edge. It did indeed look like wood below them. “We need to get down, and get away from the area of the spell effect.”
“And me without my handy rope and grappling hook. Any ideas?”
Ash grinned. “This part’s simple. We jump.” He stood up and stepped over the side.
Rowan’s yell behind him made him laugh. He landed, rolled, and looked up at her as she gawked over the edge of the glass bowl at him. He cupped his hands and hollered up at her.
“One of the advantages of being the size of an ant! You cal fall a long way safely. Come on down!”
Rowan whooped and leapt from the edge. She fell quickly, but not as rapidly as she would have as a full-sized human. When she hit the wooden ground she bounced, rolled, and came up laughing. “Now, that was fun!”
Ash held out his hand and helped her to her feet. “Alright. Come on. We need to get away from the spell. When we do, we’ll start growing to our normal heights. It won’t happen immediately, so we’ll have to keep moving to let it happen.”
The two of them started walking. It wasn’t hard going, but they moved slowly. It was a bit like walking over rocky ground; the unfinished wood was relatively smooth, but had dips and ridges and even a splinter here and there that they had to detour around. After a few minutes, they passed the edge of the bowl that had been their prison. Rowan looked over her shoulder, then back to Ash.
“Anytime now. We probably need to get a little further away.” Ahead of them was what looked like a small mountain under a glass canopy. “Let’s head for that.”
They trudged on for a while longer, the mountain getting larger quickly as they approached it. As they came to the edge of the glass covering the mountain, Rowan slowed and stopped, brow furrowed.
“Shouldn’t we be growing by now?”
Ash turned to peer back at Salg, judging distance, and sighed.
“If the spell was what I thought it was, yes.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking. “It’s obviously something else. With Victerrix, it could be just about anything. We’d need a full wizard to untangle exactly what it is, and how to break it.”
“You can’t even try?”
Ash hook his head. “First rule of magic. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re probably going to end up making your head explode. I’d rather avoid that.”
“Reasonable. So what do we do?”
Ash leaned against the glass case surrounding the mountain. “If we could get to my master, he could help. But he’s on the Green Coast. It took me two weeks to get to Salg from there, and that was when I was normal sized. There’s no way we could pull that off.”
Rowan took a step backward. “What if we flew?”
“What? Do you mean on a bird or something? How would we steer it?”
“Or something.” Rowan pointed past Ash at the mountain behind him. “As for steering, we could ask nicely. It looks like we’re not the only prisoners Victerrix has taken recently.”
Ash turned around. Circling around the peak of the mountain was a small, winged figure. As it grew closer to them, he could make out the bat-like wings, scaled head, and huge yellow eyes burning with inhuman intelligence.
“Oh, no. You can’t be serious.”
Rowan cracked her knuckles. “You said it yourself. Four days. You don’t strike me as the type to let the folks in Salg die. And, practically speaking, I would really rather not be the size of an ant for the rest of my life.”
Ash stared at her, then threw up his hands. “You are insane, do you know that? Certifiably insane!”
“Maybe.” She grinned. “But I am right, and you know it. Yes?”
Ash looked back up at the dragon. Even miniaturized, it was 20 times larger than either of them. He hated to admit it, but she was right.
“Fine. Let’s at least see if we can get in there first.” He crouched down and examined the wooden ground. “It looks like the glass covering the mountain is lying right on top of the wood. If we can find a gouge or a gap, we might be able to wiggle under it and into the dragon’s enclosure.”
“Yes!” Rowan pumped her arm. “I always wanted to ride a dragon!” She started walking around the edge of the glass enclosure for the mountain, whistling.
Ash shook his head and followed. Based on his limited experience with Rowan, he was pretty sure that if she was happy, things were going to get interesting.
Now that makes me curious about that graverobbing adventure where she first ran into a magic thixotropic barrier...
I can't believe it. You wrote a woman adventurer I actually like! It's very rare that an author does that for me.