Wizard of Jatte by Rowan Erlking (librera reader txt) 📕

Fog, thicker than anything anyone in those parts had ever seen, rose the day after the long rain. It was cold, sign that the snow should be falling soon, though the fog was whiter than any snow they had ever seen. Flying from tree to tree was impossible. Everyone relied on Theissen’s bridges to get from one place to another, the younger ones staying indoors with sheer terror of the thick clouds inside their forest. The elders gathered up in their tree top tower discussing issues as puffs floated in and out of all the open windows. Most started closing down and covering for the winter anyway, moving the rest of their belongings to their shelters and taking down the rest of the hanging curtains. Some wanted to hire the wizard for help in clearing out the thick water vapor, but Theissen was somehow nowhere to be found.

“Well, where did you see him last?” Mensin demanded of Theobold just outside the covered nursing station.

Theobold just shrugged. “Last? Breakfast. He had just eaten a seed wafer and said he was going out for a bit.

“He could have gotten the shakes and fallen through the planks in this fog, you idiot!” Mensin flew off, dodging tree branches in his haste though he nearly got his wings bent before resting on a flet and then running across a bridge.

“Jeeze. All this fuss over nothing,” Theobold murmured. But he walked into the nursery with a slight skip to his step, bowing low to his favorite nurse with a magically molded rose made from wood shavings.

Fog, the thickest fog he had ever made, even since that one winter when they were playing hide-and-seek in the farmer’s groves, surrounded the entire forest floor. If it weren’t for the flow towards the east, Theissen was sure to get lost in it.

Getting down from the trees turned out to be easier than he thought. With all the commotion in the fog, all he had to do was walk down to the lowest flet in the village and then take to the nearest tree branch, urging it to lower him down to the next one, and then to the next one and so on. He reached the forest floor before he even heard people calling for him for help. Of course, he didn’t want anyone to see him on the ground running off, so with a little touch up of his once flaming red cloak, he was covered in brown and yellow leaf speckles that matched the forest floor.

The birdmen village bordered on the far edge of the forest near outside human villages. Theissen figured he’d be able to find a place in an inn and negotiate passage on a caravan to the nearest town to get to safety. Theobold had provided a rough sketch of the area for help, tucking it into Theissen’s satchel. It was the least he could do, he said. The most he did was pack his bag for him with food and apologize for destroying his clothes. All Theissen had left of his old wardrobe were his pants and his old cloak. The shirt, vest, and coat had been torn up when birdmen wore them, allowing for wings under large cloaks. Seron probably had them now.

The shakes came in the afternoon. Theissen now knew they came on as side effects of the poison, which had also been addictive. His legs ached. His arms ached. But he would just have to endure them until they subsided, even if it made it hard to run. There was no other option, especially if he didn’t want to go back to the birdman’s village.

The fog started to burn off as the sun got high. Without Theissen to maintain it in the trees, the moisture either rained down or floated higher, gathering with the other clouds overhead. And as the air got clearer and clearer, Theissen noticed that he was not alone in the forest at all.

“See! I thought it was him!”

He barely turned for a look, quickening his speed in leaps and bounds over tree roots, fallen trunks, and brambles though the muscles in his legs protested. Behind him were about eight hunched looking creatures dressed in brown and blue woolen clothes just coated in dirt. All wore dark shields of glass over their eyes, framed like hats on their heads. Under that he could barely see their pale gray faces, though their snout like noses and buckteeth were recognizable.

“Oh, would you leave me alone!” Theissen ran faster. He knew he could outrun a moleman even in the fog.

They continued after him, shouting. “Stop you! We have issues!”

“No kidding!” Theissen hoofed it farther, but his legs felt ready to collapse right from under him. He was only glad he no longer wanted to vomit. Without taking the poison the night before, his stomach was happier than anything.

But Theissen tripped. Jumping over one root, he hit the other. Groaning, he tried to get up, sure he would not want to have a repeat experience underground with these folk if he could help it, though his side and back throbbed from a bruise now forming.

One mole man ran over with a pickaxe in hand, panting furiously with his bucktoothed mouth hanging open. Reaching out, Theissen made the metal fall out into a puddle before the demon could lift it up to implant it into his chest. Right away the moleman dropped the handle.

“Now what did you do a thing like that for?”

Theissen scooted back onto his feet with his back to a tree, glaring up at the moleman as the other demons started to encircle him once more. “I have no intention of going back underground with you.”

“Well, we ain’t taking you there, squirt.”

Staggering for balance, Theissen was sure he had not heard him right. “What?”

One of those women mole demons walked up to him. She smiled, almost looking pleasant. “I told them what you told me.”

He blinked at her, looking for a likely way to escape. There was always up again. “And that was?”

“That you could turn us human.”

Theissen swallowed, lowering his gaze. “Then why are you all acting like bandits, surrounding me like that and wearing masks?”

One of them snorted to another. “Not entirely bright, that one.”

Stomping his foot so that the earth shook underneath him, Theissen shouted. “Stop saying things like that! You chased after me and frightened me to death! Last time you dragged me down underground and then had the gall to lock me up in a slimy cell! And now you call me names and expect me to help you?”

The woman raised her plump little hands, her yellowish thick claw like fingernails raised in surrender. “We are sorry! We are sorry! But it really wasn’t us that did all that.”

“You chased me!”

“You were running,” another mole man said.

Theissen paused, recalling that he had been. Blushing, he still glared. “Fine. So I was running. You could have just called out.”

“You would have still kept running.”

He frowned. They were probably right.

The mole woman took off her hat, exposing her twiggy hair, and squinting her black eyes, so tiny and yet so dilated that she had to cover them to block out the sunlight. “These masks are our day goggles. It helps us see when the sun is out.”

Theissen stared at her.

“So you see, they aren’t bandit masks,” one of the mole men said with a snort as if he were still mocking him.

Theissen turned to give him a look to shut up. However, all of them had taken off their hats. Some even bowed to him.

“Please, all powerful wizard. Please take this curse from us.”

Though his bones ached and his hands shook, Theissen felt a swelling inside of him that drew him close to these smelly moldy dirt covered demons. He almost did it, almost untied their knots with a gesture. However, he paused.

“Are you sure about this? Living as a human won’t be easier than being a demon mole. It will just be a different kind of difficult.”

They all bowed lower.

“We know,” the woman said. “But we prefer working and living somewhere—”

“Where we don’t have to just eat dirt,” a mole man cut in.

“Yeah,” Theissen said to him with an agreeing nod. “But at least dirt is everywhere. Regular food is hard to come by. You might end up starving to death.”

“But you helped the birdmen,” one said.

Theissen glanced over. “How did you know about that?”

The molemen looked from one another. One said, grinning sheepishly, “We aren’t all enemies. Some of us actually talk.”

That was the clincher. Theissen just shook his head and waved them closer. “Alright. I’ll undo the knots. But what you plan to do after that is all your own business. Keep me out of it.”

They nodded, bowing lower.

Theissen reached in to each demon, and one by one untied the knots within them. They were easy actually. Simple in comparison to that tangled up gole anyway. And turning from the last demon face, he unraveled the last knot. Looking up at him were Jatten folk, still covered in dirt, still hunched, but straightening up slowly as they looked around with normal eyes and normal faces, though Theissen thought they still looked a little bucktoothed.

“Look at the sky,” one murmured.

Most of them did, though one of the women walked over to Theissen, thanking him over and over with bows. Then she handed him the rose bush.

“It won’t grow underground.”

Theissen stared at it. The bush was still in hibernation stage. Thankfully, it had not died. He could still see life in it.

Raising his eyes to her as he cradled the bush in his hands, Theissen asked, “Where will you go to now?”

She smiled and was about to say, but the wind stirred up in that familiar fashion that Theissen almost regretted staying around to help those mole folk.

“There you are!”

Theissen eyes closed. He just shook his head slowly, wondering if he ought to figure out how to conjure fire.

“Daanee!”

“Ronen!”

Popping his eyes wide, Theissen saw a birdman embrace the woman who once had been a mole demon. The birdman swung her around, flying in circles. When they stopped, landing about a few feet away, both ran straight up to Theissen looking about as dopey as a newlywed couple.

“I take it you want wings?” Theissen said to her with a smirk.

Daanee shook her head, grinning at Ronen, a birdman who happened to also be one of Theissen’s apprentices once not long ago before the project quit with the rains. “No. We want for us to both be human!”

Ronen nodded vigorously, grinning just as stupidly.

With a shrug, Theissen glanced over at the other birdmen. “Then I can safely guess you are all of the same mind?”

The birdmen and women nodded, approaching him much like the molemen had.

Giving another shrug, Theissen thought, what they hey. It certainly would clear up the stink in the air.

“Just do it before the elders get here,” one of them said.

Theissen cringed then nodded. Yes, it was best to be done before that.

Again he pulled at the flow, though this spell was harder to undo. Perhaps it had to do with the creation of something so unnatural to human beings that made it so difficult. But eventually, he figure that if he pulled at the wings, taking them off like scattered feathers and ending up in fact with only three kinds from the same bird, he could untangle the knot in three seconds. Theissen tossed them aside and then went on to the next person. He had one more birdman to go when he heard and felt the approach of others. Theissen tried to hurry, but it was harder to grab hold since his shakes had gotten steadily worse.

“Stop what you are doing!” Mensin landed between Theissen and the last birdman. The doctor and several others, including a handful of the younger elders were with him.

Already irked with Theobold’s friend, Theissen looked likely to shove him aside. However, he didn’t. “Get