�Master, I did a spell last night, not a healing one! Look at this.� With that Leimar concentrated heavily, his brow forming an almost exact replica of the sculpture of a millipede in the city�s museum. The master�s left eyebrow lifted a little, his right one staying motionless. A rose slowly formed in Leimar�s right hand, and he looked up, eyes bright like a child presenting a crayoned scrawl to a cooing aunt.
Hand�s mouth lifted slightly at the corners, not quite a smile, and he wove a magic of his own, forming the most plush and impressive bunch of multicoloured roses Leimar had ever seen. Leimar�s proud face slipped slightly, but he was still happy with his by now fading rose, for it was his first �on demand� magic.
�Maybe,� said Hand, �you will be great one day, boy. Maybe. But enough of this triviality, I want to show you something today, something important to me, and, I hope, to you.�
He then walked off down a corridor, and Leimar hurried quickly after, not daring to ask what off Earth his master was talking about. They left the house by the back exit, Hand silencing the stable boy with a wave of his non-capitalised hand and motioning to Leimar that they were to walk to their destination.
For not more than two miles they walked, in silence except for the occasional hastily muffled noise repeating itself from the hurried breakfast. Through grass and yet more grass they walked, until they came to a cave. Here Hand halted and Leimar stopped with him. The master wove a quick weave of light and from his hand came a shining beam to light the way. They walked into the cave, which was everything an exciting cave should be, with scary bats, dripping walls and the odd bone of unidentifiable, yet strangely human-esque, origin. They threaded through side passage after side passage until Leimar nearly longed for Hand to take him up the back passage, just for a bit of variety. Then they arrived at their obvious goal.
Hand sighed a deep sigh. He always felt more secure when he was here, with his master. He bowed his head slightly, a very high reverential sign from a Mage, possibly because they tended to be old and have neck problems. It�s the high magic you see, to get that elevated you have to keep looking up. Leimar did none of this head bowing; in fact the most he mustered was a small, incredulous frown. Noticing this, Hand spoke to the boy:
�Boy! Bow your head! You are in the presence of Bereus!�
Leimar was stunned by this and not quite sure how to respond. He tried staggering around for a bit, but this didn�t really help, so he instead closed his eyes, wiped them and opened them again a few time. This helped nothing either. After a few more episodes of this kind of palaver, discouraged by Hand�s small frown, Leimar spoke his confusion:
�But, master, this is a small pot plant of the petunia descent.�
Hand replied with gravity and weight behind his words (he�d become accustomed to too many biscuits before bed of late):
�That pot plant, boy, is more than you�ll ever become.�
As if in attempt to prove this, the petunia-born plant feebly raised a leaf menacingly, before collapsing back again in fatigue.
�Well, he is in full bloom, looking very, uh, blossomy.� Said Leimar, attempting to salvage some respect at the loss of a little sanity.
Hand shook his head and picked up the plant before heading back off, muttering of �false hopes� and �the end of the world and he can�t even see past the foliage�. Leimar followed, resigned to not knowing what was going on.
*
�Boy, let me tell you a tale.
�In older times, well, a couple of years ago, there was a man called Dave who, it was said, could thread a camel through the eye of a needle. So powerful were these threadings that it is rumoured that a light he threaded in his study when he left as a teenager still burned brightly when he returned there a hundred years later. Dave could bend a man�s will to his own, and so on and so forth, point is he was a very good Mage. Probably the best.
�Like all such types in fiction though, he eventually went a bit loopy and got the wrong end of the stick. Rather than chewing off his own foot or creating an exact replica of a ship and putting it in a bottle, as �normal� mad people do, Dave decided he should take over the world. He had some noble pretence, of course, but I doubt it held muster. Great magic coursed over the land, changing it, making mountains where there had been fields, fields where there had been seas and seas where there had been small men named Brian with cheese in their teeth.
�The other mages of the world didn�t hold much truck with this sort of thing though, so we decided to stop him. We elected our six strongest, including Bereus and me here. Between us we could move most mountains, drain most seas and make really good bunches of flowers out of our threadings. We only hoped we were strong enough....