This story is pure wish fulfillment for me. I could write a whole book about this and not get enough, except it bums me out that this isn’t real so much that I don’t think I’d want to think about it for that long. Enjoy! And if you enjoy, please like, comment, and subscribe.
The Olympics of Magic
He stepped up to the podium, and felt the amplification incantation slip itself through his throat and onto his vocal chords. He looked around, taking it in before he started talking. Three hundred rapt faces looked back at him, all young, so young, and bright-eyed and ravenous for his story and their own glory. The risers went back farther than his old eyes could see, into a swirl of young and eager magical talent. He thought of where he had started, and it brought a tear to his eye.
“It all started in incantations lab, year 11. We started working on unstable magicks, and the first time I smelled that spirit smoke, jetting out from the deepest recesses, the spell’s guts and gears, I knew I’d never be the same. Three hundred years later, I’m still not. I don’t have the hand-speed or the spirit strength anymore to take all comers like I used to, but I still smell that smell, and I still get that feeling.”
“I won’t be around much longer now to say it, so I figured I best heave my old bones down to these hallowed grounds one more time and spin up the story of how this all began for your young ears to take forward after I’m gone. So here goes.”
And then he was in it. A thousand talks like this, and this was the last. Soon he would die, as proud of his life and his work as a wizard ever was, and surprised to find himself feeling that after a lifetime of doing what he was told he mustn’t.
“So Incantations Lab. I went to Flitwell and we had Mr. Tandy then. Tough old guy who’d been behind the Great Anti-Magic Wall, spoke Chinese and everything. And he’d always yell at us about these weird theories about how civilization only existed because of beer, and powdered dragon scale would turn lead into turds. But then one day he started talking about unstable magicks, and some of the things he’d seen wizards working on in China, and it just seemed different than his other stories. He kept saying how dangerous they were, which I guess he took for a warning, but it hit me a little different. The hook was in me deep, right away.”
“I’ll never forget, he started casting a simple light spell, but instead of the usual full circle with the wand, he barely flicked it, and I saw the spell half-appear, like a ghost, and he held it there, but he was already starting the second lumos, and he cut that one off too, and then started the thing. And I started to smell the smoke and saw all three spells hanging there, and then he tied them all off with one big gesture, and suddenly, all three light balls were just *there*, hanging right in front of him, not two seconds to cast all three of them. I’d never seen anything like it.”
"He kept them there, and of course you could smell how unstable they were even if you couldn’t see it. And finally he let them wink out and turned it into a big lecture about how dangerous it was to do magic too fast, and how unstable magicks could explode. He seemed to think that would put us off, and I guess it worked on lots of people in the class. Okay, all of them but one.”
They all laughed at that, and he reveled in it, grinning and softening his eyes, so the moment drew out and the laughter rolled back and forth across the auditorium. As much as he loved to rush magic, he knew there was no rushing a crowd. That alchemy moved in its own time.
“That night I went home and tried it. Seems crazy now.” He smirked and stroked his long, white beard, and about half of them laughed again. “The first time I didn’t know how to hold the first spell, I just tried starting the second one, and it blew up and scorched my eyebrows clean off! I went to class the next day and Mr. Tandy knew exactly what I’d done, of course. He tried to make an example of me, pulled me up in front of the class to embarrass me and make me feel dumb, but he didn’t know how dumb I was. I had tried it twenty more times *after* I burned off my eyebrows, and I figured it out! So right there in class, I did it, three lights in even less time than it had taken him. My first world record, probably. And you should’ve seen the look on his face. I might as well have cast a silencing spell on him.”
She had been in that class. That was the day she noticed him. They’d been peripheral friends for years, but had hardly talked. She had too many other friends and too much other interest from too many other boys who weren’t weird and didn’t spend all their time in their room dreaming up scenarios where they got famous for inventing new magic. But he remembered that day, as he held those balls of light there, all that danger kept safe in his capable hands, and she really *saw* him for the first time. That was the real magic.
“I became obsessed. The next day I chained five together, and a week later I was doing twenty. It was dumb and dangerous, it really was, but at the time— Ah hell, I’ll be dead soon, who cares, it was the best! Everyone should be dumb and get away with it, highly recommended.”
A great cheer came back at him. He’d made the joke a hundred times before but the memory was so vivid, so wholly a part of his emotional infrastructure, that it never lost its impact. The recognition and acceptance of it were his bread and manna.
“I started branching out. Light spells got boring and my classmates needed new tricks to keep giving me their attention, and so new tricks I provided. I learned to summon two hundred lesser spirits in under ten seconds, and I’d fill the bathrooms when my friends went into the crapper. Didn’t last much longer at school, of course, but I’d stopped doing any work anyway so it seemed a profitable parting.”
His parents were furious he’d left school, but their fury was hopeless and they knew it. They’d known he was wild since he was a little boy, and he’d never disabused them of the notion. They let him stay six months, and he left after four. He didn’t remember saying goodbye to them, or really having said much of anything to them ever, but it seemed like he must have.
“Then I really got to work. They didn’t know what they were setting loose, they should’ve kept me chained to my desk as long as they could!”
She had come with him when he’d left school. There didn’t seem to be any discussion of it, she just came. He had wanted it so bad, wanted her to come, wanted to ask her, that he later wondered if he had done so and simply forgotten it, like a half-said spell vanishing into ether and leaving no trace save for the power it passed onto another spell. Yet whenever he fixed his mind on it, it seemed like she just understood his desire and reciprocated it silently.
“I started clicking off records, inventing the categories and establishing the benchmark records. Most of them have long been surpassed of course, but they were hard at the time, I promise! Chaining other spells was first. I remember the day I first chained a hundred bodymorphs in under a minute. The spirit smoke smell when I closed them off as one was so powerful I almost passed out from it. Glorious feeling, that. Then I realized I could chain different spell types, and suddenly I felt like a rank beginner again. I did the first Devil’s Triangle, and in six months of work got my time down from ten minutes to forty-seven seconds, which I do believe is the benchmark to this very day.”
They had an aesthetic relationship more than a sexual one, or at least that was what he had thought at the time. They had sex occasionally, but it was slow and dispassionate. What she really liked was watching him work. She’d sit for hours and try spells with him and suggest combinations and approaches. She taught him to control his heart rate to minimize energy use per spell and thus maximize endurance, and this inspired him to create an endurance category of benchmarks, multi-day speed runs involving tens of thousands of spells in a single incantation.
“Then I met Glen-Willis, and he was full of ideas. He’d heard of me, which I loved, and he wanted to play. Couldn’t sit still for five minutes, that boy, but he never forgot anything. He could read a thousand-step incantation once and do it from memory while drunk. Literally, I saw him do that once. He’s gone now, taken too soon. Unlucky. Never forget the place of luck in this, I’ve got eight fingers left and there could have been far less of me, quite easily.”
He held up his hands. Two fingers were indeed missing, and hardly a part of the hand was not touched by some scar or burn. He could remember every one of them in intimate detail, when and how and why, what mistake had exacted that cost. A jagged white line across his left palm brought her back to him with full force.
She had watched him call the lightning. They were standing in a field, beneath dark clouds. She was enraptured by his daring, in his memory. Once and twice and then thrice he called it, tying each spell to the next, waiting and feeling the electricity build above his head. He looked over and saw her hair lifting as she squealed in delight.
He woke up beside the field, with a scar white as ash forming on his hand, her worried face above him, looking down as she shook his shoulder and said his name. She was no longer delighted, and he did wonder for a moment if he had perhaps imagined that delight. It was so hard to be sure of anything but the spells.
“We did the first World Teleport-a-Thon the weekend I should have graduated from school. It was illegal then, of course. First fifty or so were, and the numbskulls from Wizard Concealment would run us a merry chase through the time zones. It certainly made things slower when you had to figure on literally running away through the streets of whatever city just to get time and space to do your next teleporting without them blanketing you and arresting you! Glen-Willis won most of those first years, naturally, though I prided myself on holding the record for most arrests.”
She left suddenly, although he realized one day as a very old man, many years later, that to her it did not seem at all sudden. But at the time, she was there, helping him to prepare for the next set of games, the next events, the next spells and smells and adventure. And then she wasn’t, and he did not know how it had happened, but he could not muster the incantation of asking or even finding her. Such magic left him helpless, and even two hundred and fifty years alone could not change that.
“We started the official games in my sixty-seventh year. I was something in my prime, don’t let this stooped old man fool you. You may have seen memory strands of it but that’s not enough to capture my true magnificence. Twenty-five events that first time, all in an undisclosed location to avoid the aforementioned numbskulls, three hundred of the best wizards in the world at that time, and I managed eight golds, eight silvers, and a bronze. Still the most medals ever in a single games, and you’ll never break that record now, as many of you as there are out there. Too much competition!”
He pointed with both hands out at them as he said that, and a great cheer went up. This was it. This was his last time. The chain of held spells that comprised his life was about to disappear into the vastness of the past, just like her, just like everything else. But it felt real and vital and important to him, just as it always had, and for that he was grateful.
“We, who share this wizard-hood gather to test ourselves against the outer reaches of our arts. There is danger, and we withstand it. There is pain, and we endure it. There is risk, and we run it. Life is short. Go out and play. Welcome, to the two-hundred forty-third Olympiad of Magic!”
The cheer multiplied itself ten-fold. He could already smell the spirit smoke wafting in from spells pushed to their limit. This was the last nose-full he would ever have, and it was a specimen worthy of the honor. Her going had been painful, but he had deserved it. His life had been a chain of spells, all half-cast and half-remembered, that came together only in one, singular point of power, his legacy, the games. With that and no more to show, the old man felt he’d lived well.
END
Thanks for reading, and have a great week!
Magic is universally appealing, I think. Great story, OWEN.
Great fun to see, getting old, be bold!