"Put that away! It's just going to slow us down!" Said Grablen, nervously glancing around the large room.
Green smoke to arose from the cracks in the stones below, and fall from the ceiling as well which gave a sort of eerie heat to the room, which was making Grablen uncomfortable.
"I'm not hurting anything by reading these," Said the other, a very short figure named Piddly.
"Besides, I like learning about my heritage.You could learn something about yourself reading these." Piddly was holding a rather large tome which he had flipped open to a random page.
"Wait a minute," He said, looking down at the page suddenly. "It says here 'A dwarf named Knicker married a boar one day, and that boar begot an ugly dwarf-boar which they named Grablen.' Sound familiar?" Piddly chuckled for a moment and then continued,
" 'A few years later Grablen's closest friends realized that his mother wasn't in fact, a boar, but rather a horrendously ugly dwarf woman named Margaret.'
Gee, you've had me fooled all these years! I think it must have been the hooves that threw me."
At this, Grablen picked up a nearby candlestick and hurled it at Piddly.
"My Dad's name wasn't Knicker, and shut up! I think I can hear something, be quiet for a second!" Grablen hissed.
"First off," shouted Professor Wheeler, "We shall learn the 'Blink' spell. It was named this after the creator of the spell, who had a problem with dry eyes, and thus was always blinking more than he should have."
He chuckled slightly.
"He was taught under me as well, his name was Doug Curtis...always seemed distracted." He added, surveying his students.
There were only five people in the room at that moment.
Piddly looked around at the room, noticing that there were many strange things on small tables that were against the walls, which held small, fragile-looking devices that nevertheless looked important.
"As you've all learned, or should have learned by now it that each school of magic has a corresponding hand movement." Wheeler moved his hands with a flourish. "With frost you keep your palms facing toward you, with fire you keep your palms away from you, arcane doesn't use hand motions mostly, but rather your eyes and mind. Not to say all magic doesn't take thought, it's just that arcane magic takes a little more to get it going. Some of the more advanced arcane spells do, in fact, use hand motions, but you won't be getting to that just yet. Holy magic is one of the most simple as long as your palms face the heavens. Nature magic is slightly more tricky because you have to keep your hands in front you at all times. The last of course is shadow magic, which shall not be taught here.
"What you first must do," Wheeler continued, raising his voice to Piddly, who hadn't been paying attention.
"...Is visualize where you'll be going. In this case it will be into that red box that's been drawn on the floor. This is an easy version of what you'll later be doing, but you crawl before you walk, eh?"
He chuckled again.
"Now, observe what I do." He walked across the room towards the students, and then faced the red box drawn in the floor.
He closed his eyes tightly.
"Right now, I'm picturing the red box as well as I can." He said, looking towards them,
"You'll go after this, so pay attention! You don't want to blink into a wall, now do you?"
There was no chuckle this time, just a sightly more significant expression of concentration on Wheeler's face.
He put his right hand in front of him at a full arm's length, and it looked as if he was grasping an invisible ball in the air.
The left hand was at his side, palm facing the ground, also looking as if were holding an invisible ball. His knuckles turned white, and his hands looked strained.
Then he stopped entirely, and turned and looked at the class, smiling widely.
"Surely you didn't think it was that hard did you?" He exclaimed, looking exited.
"It's one of the simplest spells known to Mankind, pure and simple."
He now looked back at the red 'X' mark on the ground, and stepped towards it.
"All you have to do is look at where you want to go, and think to yourself that you'd like to be there more than where you currently are. Though, it is still quite a challenge to blink somewhere that you can't see."
With that, he disappeared, leaving behind a small turquoise-colored orb that flashed for a moment then disappeared as well.
The four students gasped, as he had just re-appeared across the room. All of this had happened over the course of about three seconds.
Everyone, including Piddly clapped excitedly, since this was his first time seeing the blink spell in action.
His little younger sister, whom he and his friends had nicknamed Wick exclaimed excitedly, "When can we try, Professor?"
"Well, I'll get to you soon enough. Right now, I want Piddly to try it now."
Piddly jumped at his own name being spoken.
Piddly stopped talking. They could indeed hear some people arguing. He couldn't understand the language, but that might have been because the noise was quite far away.
"Chik'mani del mok! Mak seeni ce lama'del anna! Canni'si mi'tiani. SOK TUROK!"
And then there was a very loud crashing sound and then silence.
"I know what that's about. Sounds like someone's invited the in-laws."
Grablen made a throat-cutting movement with his hand.
"Sorry."
They walked slowly down the rows of bookcases which seemed to be the only occupants of the building until a moment ago. Grablen unsheathed his sword, which seemed a little large for a dwarf to carry comfortably. Piddly was still absentmindedly carrying the book he had found.
"It says here how to serve man," Piddly excitedly whispered, once again reading from his book. "Step one: Find man. Step two: Kill man. Step three: Cook man..."
He ran into Grablen abruptly, who had stopped walking suddenly.
"Shut up!" He hissed as Piddly picked himself up from off the floor, grumbling softly.
From where they were standing, they could see an enormous square of yellow light which was drifting in from the next room.
Piddly got to his feet and peered around Grablen. The next room was a kitchen, and right now there were two unconscious ogres lying on the floor.
"What are two ogres doing in a library?" Grablen muttered.
"Lets find out." Piddly said.
They quietly crept into the kitchen.
"These ogres have to be seven or eight feet tall..." Grablen whispered.
"Right now, they're seven or eight feet long, dear Grab." Piddly said as he slid a huge ring off the pinky of the shorter ogre.
"What's in these cups?" Asked Grablen, peering into one of the bucket-sized mugs.
"Can't say for sure. But if these guys wake up while we're here then we're gonna be in for one heckuva fight. Do you think we should stick around here?" Piddly asked as he happily slid the ogre's ring off it's pinky finger and cleanly onto his wrist like a bracelet. The heat and green smoke of the last room was drifting into the kitchen, and now it was making him uncomfortable.
"I would guess not." Said Grablen, climbing to the top of the table.
"So lets guarantee that they don't wake up." And he thrust his sword through the back of the short ogre's head.
"Wh-what?" Piddly stuttered.
"You want me to go? Why?" He asked accusingly.
Wheeler looked him over.
"Because of your rapt attention during my instructions." He said, meeting Piddly's gaze and smiling slyly.
Grudgingly, Piddly stepped forwards, painfully aware that every eye in the room was on him.
He came to a stop beside Wheeler, who was looking down at him. He leaned down and said softly into Piddly's ear,
"I think we're having meatloaf for dinner. If you go far, bring me back something to eat. Oh, and don't overthink the blink. It's easier than you think."
And with that he hobbled off to the other side of the room where the other students were eagerly watching.
Trying not to look nervous in front of his friends, Piddly tried (and failed) to focus on the task at hand.
"I have to focus on the X. Focus. Who drew that on the floor?" He wondered.
They did a pretty good job of it, in his opinion. He wondered if it would wash off. Well, it was probably put on with magic, and would be removed the same way. Wait. Focus. Red X. Focus, Piddly, focus.
Or was he supposed to be thinking of how his body would actually travel the distance? How did that work, he wondered? And how would hand motions help anything? Probably just a bunch of bunk, he thought. Right now his head was on fire. Oh how he would like to get away from those eyes; and hopefully before he made of fool of himself in front of his few remaining classmates.
Had the others in the class been taken out because they hadn't been paying attention?
Would he get the boot as well because he was looking at those strange devices on the even stranger-looking tables? What if he accidentally wound up with one leg inside of a wall?
Oh why didn't he pay more attention?
His stomach lurched slightly as he realized that he had spent the last twenty seconds staring in one place, and had not invested a moment actually trying to focus.
This must have been why the Professor had told him not to over-think anything. Why had the professor told him about dinner? He had never struck Piddly as particularly odd, but after that conversation he was beginning to think otherwise.
Both people have to talk in order to be a conversation. He hadn't done any talking. What was the word for a one-sided conversation?
Pushing all of those thoughts to the back of his mind, he thought of the red X on the floor, and stared hard at it. For a split second he thought of how much he disliked being openly observed, and in the other half of that split second he found his feet planted firmly on very green grass, and he heard a mockingbird chirping softly somewhere nearby.
If either Piddly or Grablen had been paying attention, they would have observed three very large ogres had just entered the room from a doorway behind them.
One of the ogres had two heads, both of which were hideous to look at. The other two ogres were cyclops.
Before Grablen or Piddly had realized it, they had both been beaten over the head with some very large trees that were essentially ogre clubs.
A few second later they found themselves standing outside of the Scholomance in a misty ghost world, near a few gravestones.
"Oy!" Grablen cried. "What just happened to us? Where are we?"
He took a few cautious steps forward, discovering that in this ghost world everything was smooth and slightly slippery. It was altogether harder to stand on than the normal world had been.
"I don't know," Said the gnome, scratching his head, which actually didn't itch at all. "But I would guess that we need to figure it out soon."
They looked around for a moment, noticing a large dirty brown lake, which was one of the pleasant features of the Plaguelands.
"I know what it is!" Said Grablen. "I'm just really sick or drunk. This is all just one big hallucination." He tried to kick a near-by pebble but failed as his foot passed cleanly through it.
"This has never happened to me before...are we dead, I wonder?" Asked Piddly, ignoring Grablen's comment.
"If we were dead then I have a feelin' that we wouldn't still be here. We'd be somewhere new. Somewhere excitin'." Grablen said, passing his left hand through his right arm and wiggling his fingers.
"Well, maybe we can find someone and ask for directions back to the real world." Piddly wondered out loud, taking a large step forward.
"This is an odd place indeed if I want to talk to other people. Hmm!"
"Piddly, you foolish mooncalf," Grablen said, walking quickly to keep up with Piddly.
"Who are we goin' to find here in this cold ghost-world?"
As if to answer his question, a very tall woman with large wings and a draped robe and hood appeared in front of them.
She was white as a sheet everywhere you looked, and sort of hung on the air like a candy wrapper caught in an updraft. What they could see of her was very beautiful, but all they could see was her hands, bare feet, and her mouth.
The rest of her head was draped with a very light blue shawl which sparkled in the ghostly sunlight. Her clothes tricked the eye, for the robe looked as if it could come apart at any moment. The robe was also light blue, but didn't sparkle as the hood did. Instead of sleeves, the robe had sort of bandages at the arm-holes that were gracefully wrapped around her arms, and hung off at the ends, looking as if it would constrict her movement.
She looked like a very artistic representation of an angel.
The sensation was like falling suddenly, then coming to a solid stop before you even realized you were falling in the first place.
Taken aback for a moment, Piddly realized that he had succeeded in his first blink spell, though not quite in the right way.
Looking upwards, he could see one of the castles' turrets. There was a large red and grey flag hanging from the battlements. And judging by the flamboyant image of an intertwined horse and Pegasus, he knew immediately that it was the servant's quarter. He looked out into the forest, immediately spotting a man fishing in a stream.
Piddly walked over to him slowly. The man was muttering something under his breath. He grasped the fishing rod so tightly that his knuckles were white. He was obviously from one of the other mage towers, Piddly noticed, for his scarlet clothes were loose-fitting and unmarked, showing that he was a mage's apprentice. He looked out of place in the woods fishing. Piddly saw the man was chewing on something.
"I, uh," Piddly said. He felt very cold all of a sudden.
The apprentice jumped at Piddly's words, obviously surprised. He pulled his line out of the water quickly, and turned to a small bundle of boxes behind him.
"You aren't supposed to be here yet." He said, his face was concealed in scarlet, but his eyes were grey.
He opened the small box and a horrendous smell rose out of it. It smelled like rotting fish and garlic. There was a charge hanging in the air, meaning this mage had been casting a lot of spells without waiting for the air to discharge. This was a terribly dangerous thing to do.
"What are you doing?" Piddly asked, confused.
"I could ask you the same thing, little one." The mage snapped back, dropping his fishing rod into the box, which disappeared in an impossible feat.
"Mage pockets." Piddly thought. He must be fairly accomplished to be able to create mage pockets.
"You don't see many mages fishing these days," Piddly laughed nervously.
"Maybe you don't," The other said, picking up the box and frowning at Piddly and closing his eye tightly.
"But then, mages in training don't see much of anything." The man sounded venomous. He kept frowning at Piddly through closed eyes, and then vanished in a puff of purple smoke. Piddly lingered for a moment at the stream.
"There are no fish in this stream anyways." And he walked back to his landing point.
When he returned, there was a green orb hoving a half an inch above the ground. As he bent down to get a better look at the orb, it swiveled on it's axis to face Piddly, and he realized it was an eyeball.
Magical eyes were not unheard of, but Piddly was pretty sure they were strictly shadow magic, and that was illegal. The eye examined Piddly for a moment, then, apparently satisfied, it turned around and drifted lazily down the lawn towards the gardens.
He started to follow it, but he was stopped suddenly by Wheeler, who had stepped in front of him. He could see the rest of his class following closely behind. Wheeler was not smiling.
"Urr..." Stammered Piddly, trying to find words to explain.
Wheeler stared at him, looking aghast.
"Students usually don't blink that far on their first try." He said slowly.
"We have another spell for long-distance travel, it's called vivus-apisci, but you won't learn that for quite some time. How did you blink that far?"
Feeling like a large rock had suddenly appeared in his throat, Piddly stammered and choked for a few more moments before uttering the word "nervous" and "leave".
Piddly was the first to speak.
"Oy, lady. Would you mind telling us where we are? We're completely lost--"
"--And he's a complete moron. Total idiot! Did I mention I've never met him before? Never ever. Hand to the gods!" Grablen interrupted, making what he had always believed to be a graceful bow to the angel.
"You're almost dead," The angel said, she had a monochromatic tone in her voice which was flat and almost completely lifeless.
"I can return you to life, but it's going to hurt for a while. I'm sure that if you could find your bodies, then you could get back to the real world, but that search might take a while, and I'm sure that you two are both too lazy for that."
A trace amount of life flickerd into her voice, along with a sarcastic edge. "Boy, is it gonna hurt."
Piddly and Grablen looked at each other for a moment, then said in unison, "Do it."
"You're sure?" She asked.
"Of course." Grablen exclaimed.
"It's really going to hurt badly. I don't speak from experience, but I know a lot of people who've done it. They all said it hurts."
"Do it."
"I'm serious. This is not for those with a low tolerance of pain. And I've heard that the pain isn't all at once. It lasts for ten minutes or so afterwards as well."
"Shut up and do it."
"Fine. This is going to hurt."
The angel vanished from sight abruptly, leaving the two alone. They blinked because of the sudden sunlight, but other than that they felt normal.
"Bah. 'This is gonna hurt,' huh? I feel fine." Grablen said, brushing a blade of grass from his sleeve.
"It seems that she exaggerated just a wee bit," Piddly said. "Lets head back to Chillwind. I'm tired of this for today."
Piddly took one step forward when suddenly every bone in his body seemed to explode. Saying that it was like being dipped into fire would be an understatement. He could no longer see, for his mind was too preoccupied to be bothered with making his eyes work. It felt as if every inch of his body had suddenly been singled out by some unseen hand and stabbed with a very sharp knife.
His brain was swimming the vague recollection of something like this during his first day at the mage academy. During that time he had accidentally teleported inside a wall and immediately set fire to it. It had been his most painful thought for his entire life until now.
Crippling, mind-numbing pain rippled through his body like electricity. He wasn't sure if he had died suddenly, because it was as if he had been removed from the world at hand, and taken to some black place where there was nothing but blind pain, from which there was no escape.
He couldn't feel anything around his, because the throbbing pain had overridden his sense of touch. A thought emerged from the fog in his brain: Hammers.
It's like being beaten with thousands of hammers. Thousands of tiny little hammers.
Then he could see green in front of his eyes. It wasn't like the color green at all, but something much more like a red thought; it was something vague, but in the back of his head he knew that he wasn't seeing it with his waking eyes. It was just his brain interpreting the pain in his head as a color.
Then something snapped and he was awake.
At first he was aware of a wall of brown on the left side and a wall of blue on the right. The right side of his face was itchy. His hands hurt. Remembering that he could move his eyes, he glanced around cautiously. Pain was still coursing up and down his back and then around his skull and down his arms and legs like a continuous whiplash.
Realizing he was on the ground, he tried to get to his feet.
His legs felt like jelly beneath him, so his sat back down. He felt nauseous.
"I hope I don't barf." He said simply, holding his stomach with his hands. His hands were shaking.
But what had become of Grablen?