Shifting Stars by Gary Stringer (simple e reader .TXT) 📕

stuck in his Deepest Slumber. It wasn’t as if she could roll up to the front door of his tomb and knock very loudly until he woke up. For one thing, Daelen StormTiger had set up defences that, given the shadow warrior’s power, she could not hope to counter. Besides, regardless of anything she might do, Michael would Sleep until the Time of Greatest Need and clearly, helping Catriona Redfletching did not count. Which once again left her with her staff.

She began to research both its security and its history – something that took her time away from what her college tutors kept telling her she ought to be studying. She often wondered how they could possibly believe they knew better than her what she ‘ought’ to be studying.

*****

One day, her class had a visitor in the form of the head of the Black robe mages, Laethyn. He was there to talk about the history of wizard magic. In days gone by, Cat conceded she would have been interested. Now all she felt was irritation. Where was the talk on the history of druid magic? Even when Laethyn waved the famous Nameless Book in the air, Catriona barely raised an eyebrow.

The Nameless Book, gentle reader, was neither nameless nor a book.

OK, in the most basic sense, it was a book, but in another way – given the layers upon layers of magical protection that prevented it from being opened – it was the most heavily fortified installation of magic ever constructed. As for the title, it was only Nameless in the sense that nobody knew what it was called, because it was written in a completely unknown language. According to legend, the book had been the work of Magias, the first wizard, based on the evidence of dating techniques applied to the book itself. It was the closest thing that secular wizard society had to a sacred religious artefact. According to tradition, Laethyn would keep possession of the Nameless Book until he retired, at which time he would pass it on to either the Red or White leader, depending on which of them had seniority.

Catriona was sitting too far away to make any significant observations beyond a mild surprise that a book that was supposedly almost a thousand years old should be in such good condition. Still, modern magic had developed remarkable preservation techniques, so it was no great mystery. The students, in general, were not allowed to touch the precious object or even get close. As if breathing on it might somehow cause damage to something that was unmarked by the passage of centuries.

Despite her general disinterest, though, the college did have resources that my mother thought might be useful to her, so she continued to attend and do just enough to keep from being removed from classes entirely.

Information on her staff was extremely hard to come by. Cat chased many a wild goose down many a dead end, but little by little she found references to help her. Through a combination of obscure books, tenacious research and experimentation, her druid magic began to grow, and she unlocked the first layer of her staff’s protection.

One of her favourite things she learned, gentle reader, was shapeshifting magic. It involved the careful manipulation of her body and what we would these days call her genetic structure, although that knowledge was unknown at that time in my mother’s life, and I’m sure she never thought about it in those terms. Mostly, druid magic works on knowledge, instinct and a strong belief that you can do what you are trying to do. Almost as if one is talking to Blessed Alycia herself and explaining what you’re trying to achieve, and no matter how clumsy one’s explanation might be, if you have the right attitude, she seems to smile upon the druid, and it happens. As knowledge and understanding grow, however, the magic becomes easier and more controlled.

Catriona’s favourite form quickly became that of a red-banded falcon, so named for the pair of red stripes that encircled its legs. Now, there is no such thing as a red-banded falcon, but the red bands helped to serve as an anchor to her true self, linking in her mind with her name and of course her mother’s: Redfletching. Flying was undeniably a fast and convenient way to travel, but the problem she had was how to carry her staff around with her. There was no way she would leave it anywhere – it never left her side. Here, her decision to keep her foot in the door at wizarding college paid dividends as she became interested in a course on Advanced Dimensional Harmonics.

These days, gentle reader, what she learned would be considered Basic Misconceptions in Dimensional Harmonics, but that’s progress for you! Still, through creative combinations of this course material with her own independent study and druid magic, she found a way to put her staff, her clothes and anything else her half-Faery self might need in a kind of pocket dimension, such that it was always effectively right next to her, within reach, no matter where she was. It was crude, it was tiring, and it was unstable, causing her belongings to fall out of her pocket dimension at inconvenient times…or even fall in, sometimes leading to her find herself suddenly naked with her backpack on her head.

OK, I’m being flippant again, but I certainly don’t mean to mock. All the techniques we take for granted today had to start somewhere, and my mother was a pioneer in this field…just sometimes a naked pioneer. But I digress.

By now, gentle reader, you must be wondering what all this has to do with Catriona’s conversation with that old White wizard recluse. Well, as I have said, my mother was obsessed with researching her Crystal Mage Staff. She would pursue tenaciously any strand of a clue, and one such strand led her to believe that the wizard Renjaf had in his possession, a particular book that other references