A Magic Font

Mutualities | Fantasy Short Story #2

They’d told me the feeling was like drinking fizzy soda but in all your fingers and toes. Naturally, when the splithorns had lifted their heads perturbedly at the horrifying cracking noises my body was making, jutting and tossing itself into the air as power surged through me in ways I’d never even dreamed, I realized I perhaps had more sensitivity to this font than normal.

“You alright, Flaherty? You’re kinda’ flailin’ around like you’re a pack of scalefish finding a surprise corpse in their waters.” Felton rang out. Yes, reliable Felton. Uncomplicated Felton. A half-dwarf who I grew up, his Mother’s Orcish blood giving him his uncharacteristic tusks, while his Father’s dwarvishness keeping him stout and hairy. He’d been picked on quite frequently in our Khoyverian schooling, which is what drew us together. Somehow, decades after our first meeting, we’d ended up exploring the foothills acting as a threshold between the Trembling Wilds south, and the Dishook mountains where we made our home.

We’d heard from a recent Slican merchant that there was a magic font that’d spawned out here, tucked like a spider’s web between two unassuming hemlock trees, but that because it was relatively new it wasn’t causing much disturbance. ‘Those things take centuries to really turn into anything worrying, we’ll all be long dead before it forces us to care about it,’ I remember the merchant clearly saying over the second ale we’d bought them in the Stonewhistle tavern.

Nevertheless, they were wrong. I felt it surging through every inch of my stark gray flesh, my half-orc upbringing often ridiculed for being diminutive and like yer Ma’ went and got pregnant from a boulder. She, of course, never let the town’s disparagements get to her. She was an animalsitter and took care of the creatures who’d wander into Khoyver looking to settle into a more amicable life, looking for a home in collaboration with some other neighbor. It was an honorable job that, for any who took her up on her services, earned her immense gratitudes. No, but the power. Something about the power had my brain flummoxed in overtime, like the massive boulder-cutters we’d swing to clear out new paths after landslide. It had all manner of memories unburied, moments that I’d revisited in those quiet times when I was already feeling down and looking for more excuses to feel sorry for myself, moments that revealed the bruised flesh of the city and the thumb pressing into it rigidly.

I wasn’t a powersborn. I knew this about myself. I had come to terms with it. A few of my classmates were, and that was interesting enough, and I wasn’t and that was okay. Yet here, now, I saw something like a miasma of powers effects circulating around me: flames and current, water and ice, levitatious effects and confidence which was perhaps most surprising. I opened my mouth to respond to Felton but the only thing that came out was something like a Hollowcall’s booming basso profundo. The birds hadn’t been seen around Khoyver in years, but I missed them. They were terribly dangerous, beautiful siren’s call of their voice only appealing to humanoid ears, and every creature around knowing that this call was their hunting signal, a warning.

My head snapped toward one of the Splithorns least on alert and I felt myself calling to it. This was a youngling, its skull hadn’t grown into the helmetous ridges and arches that it would come to be known by. The short-haired creature, usually grazing and ambling on its four legs, was walking toward me and I knew that should it reach me, it was going to be devoured.

“Right, darlin’, you know I trust ya’ most of the time but ya’ opened your mouth and wadn’t any words that came out, so thinkin’ I ought try and jostle you free now, huh?” Felton, reliable Felton, was approaching now and I wish I could stop him. The memories unburdened themselves from my mind’s prisons yet again and I felt the fear of lonesomeness, pasts without him, futures without him, imaginary unravelings where friendship no longer held any meaning. And then, as my eyes blinked back to the present, to reality, I watched as Felton, maybe three feet away from my body with a hatchet in one hand, was swatting something away from his face with his free hand while swinging slowly, gently, the hatchet through the air around me.

Somehow, this seemed to work.

There was a disgruntled screech as I felt myself fall back to the ground, the residual powers draining into the dirt just as unremarkably as I’d felt them arrive. My legs had grown unused to carrying weight in the short minutes I was kept aloft, and I stumbled into Felton roughly. I was a few feet taller than he, yet his wide chest supported my frame with ease. “Ehem, well, nice ta’ have you back, and uh, guess nice ta’ meet you s’well.”

There was, for once, a tint of fear in his voice as I swung my head back around and saw something like a figure manifesting where I’d previously resided. It was hard to describe: not a creature but not like a cloud either. It was as though someone had outlined a body and filled it in with webbing, only to sunder it jaggedly in three places.

It didn’t have a mouth, yet we heard a new voice fill the air around us. Or perhaps new voices? It was oddly layered, as though there were multiple beings trying to occupy the same mouth. “We are so hungry. We have not been fed properly since our arrival.”

“Were you trying to eat me?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“What do you eat?” Felton asked at the same time.

“No, we eat what is available. You are unavailable.” The voice swirled this time, growing louder and softer with each syllable.

“You’re a spirit, aren’t you?” I said pointedly, “But you don’t have a name yet.”

“We have names but we are… uncomfortable.” Then as though the light of day was being forced to become multifaceted, time moving beyond comprehension, they continued, “We are the gap between the trees, the scar on the land. We are vacuous, promising space, ripped anew.”

I hadn’t read of this particular spirit before. Most were quite literal in their name: the spirit of lost trinkets, for instance, resided among trinkets that were, well, left behind or lost. The less literal the name, the more ancient it tended to be. Yet this was a new font and therefore this spirit must be new, right?

Felton tugged at my hips, forcing me to realize I’d been puzzling for too long, and the spirit had drawn closer to us. “Why did you visit us?” The spirit echoed once more.

Unassuming Felton, bold and declarative, “Honestly, we didn’t know you were a spirit, thought you were just a new l’il font, and we’d never seen one before, so we thought it’d be fun to pl-”

“Fun? What is fun?” The spirit responded.

“S’like when you’re feeling lighter and you’re giggling because you’re doing something nonsensical. Things that give you energy.” He continued, answering as though it were the simplest thing in the world to describe fun to an ethereal being of raw, ancient power.

“Oh.” The spirit said, and though they had no face I watched as they turned away from us before, raising something of arms, or perhaps just appendages, some dozen or more spindlefoxes seemed to raise up from behind the foothills around us, stepping out from brush. We weren’t in a particularly dense landscape, yet the creatures, long-nosed and buzzing with their odd purr-like vibrations, were stalking up toward us as though they’d been lying in wait for ages. A few of them bore their fangs at us and the spirit’s voice careened out, “Fun, run.” Before the small horde of spindlefoxes began to sprint at us as though we were their prey.

On their own, or even in small groups, one semi-capable person would be able to wrestle away from three or four of the beasties easily enough, this was why they typically left people alone. I shoved Felton’s back to start our fleeing while saying to him, “I don’t think it can hurt us, but I don’t exactly want to stay to find out.”

The closest spindlefox was maybe forty feet away, with the largest pack of them sitting maybe twenty feet behind. They were significantly faster than Felton’s small legs and my unathletic frailty would carry us. But what was worse was the laughter. At first it was the spirit’s laughter all around us, and then it seemed to resonate into the spindlefoxes themselves as they made this most hideous coughing sound while sprinting at us.

In front of us, anywhere there was space between trees or an especially dug-up path in the ground, more spindlefoxes seemed to appear. We found ourselves running for minutes until, out of breath and exhausted, somewhat lost from the otherwise clear return path home, the group of spindlefoxes caught up to and encircled us. They menaced, now looking twenty or thirty odd creatures, until they were close enough to reach out and kick. Then the choking laughter of the foxes quieted and the air was still as we watched, like someone tossing sand into the wind, the foxes disappeared.

“Good fun, we will let you pass. If you return, bring a feast.” We couldn’t see the figure anymore, but the voice echoed into a softness that beguiled me.

Felton, for his part, had plucked his hatchet out and had been brandishing it before squatting down onto his ankles, he looked at me and said, “Being real with you Flahr, not too keen on comin’ back feast in hand or otherwise. You have enough of your magic fun?”

It was like that that Felton and I returned to Khoyver, taking significantly longer than the trip out here to the alleged font because we’d discovered our harrowing escape led us toward the Trembling Wilds, near completely opposite of the direction we’d needed to go in.

Time seemed to return to its usual ambling pace and we arrived back just before sundown. It was odd and peaceful to return to our usual chatter, usual business as though there hadn’t just been an otherworldly power chasing us as we introduced it to the concept of fun. Returning to Khoyver was harrowing of its own accord, a city tucked in the Dishook mountains, assembled via bridges and support structures between peaks, the founders originally had dared to make their home as close to the clouds as they could imagine, having been inspired by the many wyverns, drakes, and dragons that once dotted the skies of the peaks. Though we’ve been here since before written history and the roads have become slightly more paved on their ways in, the invention of elevators certainly helping to ease folks into the city limits, one still had to climb most of the way up barren and treacherous mountainsides in order to get to one of the access points.

Twilight through the Dishook was gorgeous as all number of minerals and gems glinted with the subdued light, inaccessible or undesired by the humanity that settled here mostly due to the warnings that should you take from these peaks too much they will come down and we to with them.

Felton and I parted ways in the midst of the Hexagonal market, he walking in the familiar curve toward the fighting platforms where he served as a fight-organizer and judge, and I walking through the residential quarters toward the apartment above my mother’s animalia business. Passing the Stonewhistle tavern, I couldn’t help but peak inside and see, yet again, the Slican merchant sitting in the familiar corner, a stone table in front of him with three near-empty tankards, and a new flock of individuals listening starry-eyed to their stories of the outer worlds.

A flush rose to my cheeks, though I remembered the spark that flung its way across my digits and limbs, I remembered the utmost clarity in my mind as memory after memory after memory were uncovered and relinquished, and I remembered that, ultimately, Felton had arrived back home without much of a scratch. Then I continued my walk home, picking up a gooseberry tart from Mr. Wichem’s bakery as he was closing up.