Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-wizard — wizard who you feel like is on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t actually say anything about them for some reason
“Lots of people can cast a spell or two,” the wizard said, or…something like it. Their — her? — hair was long, or maybe not that long. Pale. Blonde, or — white? Actually, it might not have been pale at all, was it the opposite? Black?
Anyway, the important part is — damn, you wish you could recall the actual words! You know you’re losing some of the insight, by paraphrasing.
“Lots of people can cast a spell or two, but that doesn’t make a wizard. Wizards have learned to look at the world, and there are two kinds: terrified, and terrifying. The world is — well, so much of the world isn’t, it’s just human habit or human prescription that things must be so, regardless whether they are.”
The wizard sipped at their drink, which you’re sure was — well, you remember ordering it for them, it was — well, the bartender would remember, probably.
“I mean, take water. You get clerics with a couple of good water spells and not much else. Conjuring it if you have none, and purifying it if it’s not clean.” Their eyes, whatever colour they were, looked briefly haunted. “The sheer havoc and death you can cause with those,” they said. “All it takes is the wit to see past oh, those are good spells! and think only about what they do.”
You objected, you think.
“Well, simplest, you can drown people with water from nowhere,” they said. You remember that clearly enough. “Conjure it into the lungs. But so many things decay if you get them wet — one quiet afternoon in a library, and six months later, whole shelves of little-used books are consumed by mould and rot. The kind kept under lock and key because they’d be of interest to a fellow wizard, say. Spoil provisions! Make paths treacherous! Weaken foundations!”
But surely purifying water, you said — or maybe it was someone else overhearing; the bartender?
“Blood,” said the wizard, “is mostly water. It’s the things in it that aren’t that make it work as blood; what do you think happens to a man whose veins suddenly run clear as a mountain spring?”
…You surely can’t do that, the objector said, or some doubting equivalent.
“Oh, well,” said the wizard, “if human prescription says a wizard can’t simply do that, it must be impossibility that prevents it,” and they — laughed? Drank? Cursed beneath their breath?
“And that’s water,” they said. “Two entire spells. You imagine that the dark and shattering secrets of the cosmos take lifetimes of study, that only the eldest and wisest, the most experience-scarred and trustworthy, hold the doom of the world in their fingers. Shit, the things you could do with a fireball—”
They drank, then, you’re almost certain they drank. Did you buy them another?
“Not me, said I,” the wizard said. “O gods, not me, the fragile skin-thin facade of matter and motion over utmost infinite oblivion can be left to those less terrified. I will work with people. Surely that’s....”
You lose track, a little, of what they had to say.
”…Take liars. The honest man’s idea of a liar is usually someone who knows the truth just as much as the honest man, cares what it is just as much as the honest man; but is wicked and says the untruth on purpose. Do you understand, do you truly understand, how termite-rotten society can be made by even one person who is truly indifferent to what’s true or not? Whose every word is dictated not at all by truth but only by what will convince those in front of them, this second, to give them what they want, this second? The fabric of society, which human prescription insists exists, dissolves in an instant. The liar, the true liar, is terror. They are chaos. They are anathema and doom. Woe to the world, when a wizard works peoplecraft; for they are like the liar, but with eyes open, seeing beyond small human selfish things to the possibilities inherent in the world entire.”
Someone said something. Something about the wizard’s ideas having shocked them awake; that they’d remember it always, live their life differently because of it. Seeing the illusion of society.
“Oh, no,” the wizard said. “You really won’t.”
Something like that. Then they — left? Or, well, you don’t recall what they looked like. They could be any of these other weary tavern-sitters, really.
Maybe you dozed off in the fire’s warmth and dreamed them.
That would explain the way the details jumble and slip from you. You bought several drinks, and — well, you must have bought them for yourself, got fuddled. Wizard?
You know, you have the strongest feeling, strange like déjà vu, as if you were talking to someone just now.
