The sea hag’s skin was a bluish-gray, sickeningly more gray than blue. It hung off of her bones in great saggy bags, as if her skin’s elasticity had been too stretched out by past obesity to ever contract again around her now smaller form. Her face suffered for it the most grotesquely. Flesh dangled from the end of her chin and jiggled there when she moved. Not only were there bags beneath her eyes, but excess flesh from her forehead drooped over them from above. This forced her to tilt her head back to see properly, looking down her misshapen nose as if she were some snooty aristocrat wondering how the security at a cotillion had let in a mere peasant who wasn’t a member of waitstaff or kitchen help. George, a former member of high society, knew that look well. The part of his mind that noticed irony realized that some of those snooty aristocrat ladies had looked about as ugly.As the sea hag shuffled forward, she reached out graspingly at him. Her fingers were so long and bony. They

“Take my hand, human.” Esmerelda reached for George as they stood by the pool in the storage room through which the beautiful fae-blood and her mother had been coming and going. George complied. As they were about to step into the pool, Esmerelda looked over the room, currently lit by a light spell. Her eyes roved over the crates that had been left with a white dusting of flour from earlier.“You really don’t have much magic do you?” she asked him. She seemed genuinely curious. Her voice and face didn’t convey the contempt from their last interaction.For some reason George answered completely honestly. He wasn’t sure why. “None at all,” he said.“Well, you must have something about you. P’ckit dragons are known for their loyalty, but yours is an extreme little critter.”“He’s been with our family for generations.”“I knew it! You’re a mage kid, but somehow you were born without the Gift of Magic. How does that happen?“I don’t know. I wish I did know and the answer was that it was so

Two days later, George was in the galley eating, enjoying the camaraderie he’d found with the sailors, who’d taken to believing he was a runaway rich kid. There was no way he would have been able to hide the way he spoke, his vocabulary and diction, no way he’d be able to hide his ingrained table manners, or a thousand other little things about his upbringing that just didn’t fit in with the other sailors, however, they had come to respect him once he’d proven his work ethic and that he could take the crap they’d dealt him as they had socially tested him in the way that males often do with teasing and practical jokes. George wasn’t sure how they would have treated him or if they’d accepted him if they knew his whole story, that he wasn’t really a runaway rich kid, but a mage school washout, a disappointment to a mage-blooded family, an outcast and a disgrace. Suddenly, the galley doors burst open. Barnabas was there, looking frightened. “All hands on deck!” the old sea dog bellowed. “

When the elf was halfway over to George, George was exhausted, and possibly injured from his time being squeezed by the kraken tentacle. He began slipping under the surface and fighting to get back up to breathe. He heard the elf calling for the whale to come over again, “Veni sara! Veni sara, Langa! Nykra terakva va sylna ara lysa voryn.”George was too grateful for the help and focused on immediate survival to be offended when he heard “Come here! Come here, my love! The stupid dirt-walker can’t breathe and needs help.”Soon, the orca was supporting him while he clung to its dorsal fin. He was catching his breath when Starstorm flew up to him, the little dragon also breathing somewhat raggedly. It had been an exhausting day for everyone, George supposed.“Don’t worry, Boss, I got ya covered. Just let me into one of your pockets. I know they’re wet. Oof!” The little dragon grunted with effort and used his claws as he tried to pry open one of George’s shirt pockets. The wet pocket an

Stingray slipped over the side of the raft and pushed it toward the metal vehicle, for that is what it was, a vehicle that somehow swam underwater. George, raised in the Society of Sorcerers Born, even though in one of its smaller, nondescript villages, had nevertheless seen some magical marvels in his young life. Once, he had seen a carriage that was animated by magic so that it didn’t need horses to pull it. That had belonged to a very prestigious High Wizard of the Society who had come once to Sutter’s Village to preside over the ceremony of presenting an award to George’s school there for producing the most students who went on to be accepted into the Magic College of Praxis. George had been eight years old at the time. He remembered thinking the horseless carriage was the most magnificent work of magic he’d ever seen. That paled in comparison to the thought of a vehicle that actually swam beneath the waters of the ocean. Whereas the High Wizard’s carriage had gleamed in the sun