The Last Mage

Sitting at the aged and wooden desk the old man stared out his small window, smelling the incense that burned on his desk. The snow falling outside was a welcome distraction to his labor.

Taking his feathered pen and dipping it in ink he took to his work. Wood crackled in the fireplace as he wrote on the aged paper, which was light brown and rough after its years of existence. He crossed out lines of words, writing different ones above them.

He was destroying magic.

The thought of it brought his head up again, and out the window. A pine tree just outside his house was covered with white now, spots of green showing in parallel strips to the pallid ground. A fox ran into view from the right, and disappeared on the opposite side.

Work was calling to him, and he picked the pen up once again. A small inkblot remained where he had stopped last. This was the final archive, the last paper that told how humans could perform magic. A natural function of the human body. Writing away again, he remembered what the feeling had been like.

Most vivid to him was the warmth that coursed through his body. A warmth as if a raging fire was racing through his veins, and the extra heat wouldn’t go away unless he finished the "spell". Since every command of magic humans used required their eyes to be closed, they never saw the magic unfold only the results. Some took longer than others, every so often requiring the person to handle intense heat for long periods of times.

Finished. The last part of the two hundred and fifty-six-page lie was complete. He had created a new way to perform the human action. Of course, it was one that would never work.

Standing and crossing over to the fire he warmed his icy cold hands, contemplating what he had just done. As of now it was the best decision he had made in all his life, and one that he hoped years later he wouldn’t regret. Stroking his long white beard that ran just below his chest he waited for the King to visit. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice the changed book. It was most likely he wouldn’t, since he and his apprentice were the only ones who had seen it the past twenty years.

Being a mage was his life. Or, had been. He was the thirty-sixth in a long line of mages. The thirty-sixth man to learn how to perform magic and the first and only to destroy it.

Three long and heavy knocks brought him from his thoughts, and he walked to the opposite side of the room to open his chamber door. There stood the King, tall, stout, broad shoulders, and a heavy fir coat on his person.

"I got your memorandum. Why didn’t you just send a mind message to me? You can still do that, can’t you?" The mage smiled, and looked out at the two silent guards standing outside.

"Come in."

"Whatever you summoned me for it better be important," the King entered and brushed flakes of snow off his shoulders and onto the wooden floor. By the time he had closed the door the Mage was standing in front of his fireplace. The sound of the wood crackling filled the room as he joined the old man at the fire.