Aldric Starweaver's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Aldric Starweaver forgot the name of his own front door spell this morning. He stood on his stone porch and stared at the lock for a full minute. Then the word came back, and the door swung open. But the gap frightened him. He is the last wizard who knows Barkroot's spells, and he means to write every one into a single book before his memory rots away. The book sat open on his workbench, its old cover warm with quiet magic. Beside it lay a spray of white jasmine, still fragrant from last night. Barkroot held hundreds of spells, and they were scattered far across the forest. That was the trouble. The spells hid in distant places. One clung to a cliff a full day's walk east. Another slept in a cave beyond the river. Aldric could copy any spell the instant he saw it. His silver-framed mirror caught the shape of a spell in one flash and held it. Then he pressed the mirror to the book, and the words poured onto the page. The tool was perfect. His legs were not. He walked slowly now. His knees ached on stairs. He could not reach a tenth of the spells before he forgot why he was walking at all. Aldric sat down and did the math. Three hundred spells. Two years of memory left, maybe less. One old man. The numbers did not fit. He rested his hand on the journal and felt the old magic hum under his palm. "I need to be in ten places at once," he said aloud. His pet stirred at the sound. The silver serpent uncoiled from the warm hearthstone. Its scales threw cold light across the floor. It lifted its head and fixed him with pale eyes. Aldric had raised the serpent from an egg. He trusted it more than most people. "You can carry the mirror," he told it. "But there is only one of you, and one of me." The serpent slid to the jasmine and nosed the white blossoms. Aldric had planted that jasmine years ago from a friend's gift. He remembered, suddenly, what she had told him. The flowers bloomed at night, and their scent called the small folk who lived deep in the wood. He crushed a blossom between his fingers and waited. The scent spread. Within minutes, tiny lights drifted through the window. A cluster of winged fairies hovered above the workbench, no taller than his hand. Their wings shimmered like wet glass. They were fast. They knew every path in Barkroot. Aldric laughed for the first time in weeks. He could not gather the spells alone. But he did not have to. He would send the fairies to the far spells with copies of his mirror's magic. They would fly where his legs could not. His grimoire would fill after all. But the fairies asked a price. And Aldric did not yet know what it would cost him.