CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories by J. Posthumus (read after txt) 📕

was hardly a thaumaturgy-grade gem, such as normally topped a wand, but it was a type of crystal. This meant that it could hold a few spells. He played two paralysis hexes with his harmonica—the regular, full-body kind, not the special variety he had been practicing—and then cast the Word of Ending twice, the Word of Opening once, and a fog-removing charm for good measure. Each of these spells, he placed into the quartz, which he then put in the pocket of his peacoat.

In an emergency, he would have something ready.

Then, tossing the bag of feed over his shoulder, he set out for the moors.

He found the place that he had been standing when he first saw the giant rooster. With the stone Hurlers at his back, he walked slowly westward. The dusting of snow was melting, so the monster’s huge talons left deep marks in the muddy ground.

Gaius followed them.

Lying on his stomach atop a rocky ridge, Gaius focused the binoculars on a seemingly-uninteresting hill surrounded by a low outcropping of crumbling rock. The area was about half an acre in size. Even in the summer, when Bodmin was crawling with hiking and picnicking emmets, as the locals called the tourists, Gaius had never seen a single person climb over that hill.

To him, that said: obscuration—i.e. magic that deceived the senses, to keep the Unwary away from places of the Wise.

Could there be something hidden there?

“Other men get to investigate spies or quest for mythical animals,” he murmured aloud. “While I am stuck following the most stupid of animals, the chicken.”

Something moved to the north! Gaius swung his binoculars that way.

The six-foot rooster!

The gigantic fowl ran across the snowy moors. Gaius tried to keep his binoculars trained on it, shifting this way and that to find a comfortable spot atop the uneven rock. It was hard to concentrate on the black bird with something digging painfully into his stomach. With a hiss of annoyance, he pulled all the bumpy things out of his coat pockets—the harmonica, the quartz, his pocketknife—and thrust them into the seed bag. Then he inched forward, following the big bird, first through the binoculars and then with his naked eye.

After about five minutes, it approached the wall of crumbling rocks that encircled the area Gaius had noted as suspicious.

For a micro-second, the rooster walked into solid rock.

Then, with something like a snap, the knob of the hill was gone, and where it had seemed to be stood a small farm.

The rooster trotted down an incline to a rusty gate in a high chain link fence that surrounded an open area filled with barnyard fowl. The big black bird pecked a lever on a post, and the gate swung open. It strutted inside, and the gate swung closed behind it. Then, it crossed the entire enclosure, walking near the front fence so that Gaius could only see its upper body as the bottom of the enclosure was lower than the surrounding rocky hillside.

In the far-right corner stood what looked like a feed dispenser with a green lever to one side and a red one to the other side. The gigantic bird pushed a red lever and lowered its head, as if pecking at newly-dispensed grain. Out of the corner of his eye, Gaius caught a glitter. He moved the binoculars and adjusted the distance.

Was that a crystal set into the post? A strange thing to put in a run-down chicken coop. Could it hold a spell of some kind? Maybe something to help keep the chickens healthy? No way to tell from where he was. Gaius turned his gaze back to the food dispensers.

The giant rooster was gone.

Gaius cautiously closed the rusty wire gate behind him and walked into the enclosure where the black rooster had vanished. A ridge of rock ran all the way around the enclosure, outside the chain link fence. Over this rocky wall, to the west, he could see the tall, slanted roof of a weather-beaten stone cottage. There was no sign of a human owner, though a bit of smoke trailed up from a chimney.

He wondered who might live in that house. A witch, he wagered. Cornwall was famous for witches. Even the Unwary knew about Tamsin Blight, the “White Witch of Helston” and Betsy, who could kill a horse with a look or keep a pig from dying with a word, even if its throat had been cut. There was even a Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, up on the north coast.

As a child, he had assumed these witches were just myths, like the Hurlers. It had never occurred to him before that these witches might be real, as real as the other young sorcerers with whom he went to school.

Moving into the enclosure, he surveyed the situation, blinking at what he saw. Slowly, his jaw fell open. Chickens were everywhere, but almost no two were the same.

When Gaius was six, his mother had died. During her last days—to occupy her little grandson and keep him from being underfoot—his maternal grandmother had given him a large picture book depicting chickens by breed, both mundane breeds and exotic ones. He had spent some of the last hours of his mother’s life giggling at the funnier-looking chickens with her. In the months and early years after she was gone, the book had been his favorite.

Now, standing here, it was as if the pages of that book had come to life. Gaius had never seen so many breeds of chicken in one place in his life.

Some were ordinary, such as the two pure white Ixworths—or maybe those were Bresses. He had trouble telling those two breeds apart. Well, at least, without eating them. The Bresse was said to be the best-tasting bird in the world. Others were extraordinary fowl Gaius had never seen before in the flesh, such as the Yokohama, which resembled a black and white phoenix. With its exotic tail feathers, the