Rise of the Sciencemancer

Ch. 8 The Fae-Bloods

“What’ll it be, kid?”

George looked at the bartender. By now, the young former magic student’s eyes had fully adjusted to the dim interior lighting of Widdlebottom’s. The bartender was a middle-aged man, with not bald, but thinning, hair. His eyes, though deep set in rings of dark wrinkles, suggesting that he didn’t sleep much, roved the entire establishment alertly, even as he glanced at George to take the youth’s drink order. As George prepared to answer the man’s question, he hoped his throat had adjusted to the smokes, vapors, and smells of the establishment enough that he wouldn’t croak out his answer, or worse, cough instead of answering.

Starstorm bought his throat some time by landing on the bar and answering for him. “This is my friend, George, Sal. He’ll have a Bracer Island Ale.”

The barkeep looked down at the dragon, his eyes halting their constant surveillance of the whole establishment to focus intently on the little reptile. “Sal was my dad. He’s been dead for ten years.”

Starstorm, little social butterfly that he was, didn’t miss a beat, didn’t pause for an awkward silence or anything. “Well, you look like him. Spitting image.What’s your name?”

“Mel.”

“Well, Mel, nice to meet you. I used to come in here quite a bit back in the day. Your dad was younger then than you are now. How time flies for you humans. Your dad was quite a character. Used to keep this place packed. He had a trick he did with three barstools that…”

The barkeep smiled slightly, in spite of his gruff demeanor it seemed. “You did know my dad. He later improved that trick and did it with four. I saw him secretly practicing with five sometimes, but he never perfected it with five, so he never performed with five.”

“Well, getting up to four is definitely something. Wish I could have seen it.”

“Well, as compensation for missing it, the kid’s first ale is on the house.”

“Thanks, Mel! You’re all right.” Starstorm looked at George and winked when the barkeep moved back to his work. The little dragon set his voice at just the right volume to be heard by George but no further. “Don’t just drink the ale, George. Drink in this place. The people. The history.

“Sailors come here from all over the world with their own stories and well-traveled lives. Some with tragic pasts, lives that didn’t work out. Some who are just drifting through their lives with no plan, just drifting from thing to thing. But in their travels, they’ve all seen things that the petty commoners in Sutter’s Village wouldn’t even believe existed.

“Look at the walls, George, the decor. The nettings and other pieces of ships and objects that came off ships, ships that impossibly sailed all over the world in with their fragile, thin wooden hulls the only things keeping them from sinking to the bottom of the mighty oceans. These humans amaze me.”

George looked at the sailors. Some played card games. Some drank in small groups and talked in low voices. A group of fae-bloods sat at a table away from the other, fully human sailors. One of the fae-bloods, a female who struck George as very beautiful, looked up at him, as if she sensed him. George realized that he’d been staring at her exotic beauty, so unlike Melindra’s.

The fae-blooded woman had dark, curly hair that spilled from a tightly wound red-patterned kerchief. Another such kerchief was loosely wrapped around her neck, loosely enough that it slipped a little, revealing gills, like those of a fish, on her neck. George noticed that the other fae-bloods also had their necks covered. So, they were all of sea elf descent.

George had never met a fae-blood before, but he had learned about them in school. Elves, full-blooded elves, the ancestors of these fae-blooded sailors, had been the ones that humans had first learned magic from. The elves claimed that they had always been in the world, but had hidden themselves from humans until the Great Wars of Devastation had destroyed so much of the world that the elves could no longer hide themselves. Pitying the humans who survived the Wars, elves taught the humans magic on the condition that the humans would, side by side with the elves, use the magic to restore the world, to heal it from the Wars.

This had worked out fine for awhile. The lands were magically cleansed of horrible plagues and of a horrible substance used in the Wars called Radie Ashun. 

Then, as the numbers of humans grew enough that structured, national governments were needed, the humans with magically talented bloodlines formed the Society of Sorcerers Born which had set up the current world order.

With the rise of the Society, elves, by and large, disappeared. It seemed the elves and the humans didn’t get along so well after the formation of the Society and human nation-states. So, as it had been before, the elves returned to whatever state of hiding they had been in for the thousands of years before the Wars of Devastation.

However, rebuilding the lands of Zorethea had taken time, a lot of it, centuries. In that time, when elves and humans mixed, they mixed racially as well. Full-blooded elves were gone now, inhabitants of myth and legend, but their mixed descendants had been left behind.

George let Starstorm order him another ale, but while he was waiting for it, he excused himself from his reptilian friend and guardian to pee out the first ale. On the way back from the privy, his eyes fell on a set of darts used in a game with a target on the wall. The target reminded George of his failed magic test just a few days ago when he couldn’t move a small stone across a horizontal version of that dart board.

Angrily, George grabbed one of the darts and whipped it through the air toward the dart board. He nailed the center of the target exactly. At least I’m good at something, George thought with a sense of bitter triumph.

“Hey, my friend. You’re pretty good.” One of the fae-bloods had seen his dart throw. “You must play all the time.”

“Not really,” George said.

“Oh, but you must play us now,” said the fae-blood. “It’ll be fun to play against someone with your obvious natural talent.” He waved his hand at George’s perfect hit on the wall.

George looked back to where he’d been seated at the bar with Starstorm. He couldn’t see the little dragon. George scanned the entire room. Nothing. Then, he heard Starstorm’s voice near the ceiling. There, in the rafters, Starstorm had found another p’ckit dragon, a brown one. The two of them were chatting it up up there away from the humans and fae-bloods down below. George could tell that the brown p’ckit dragon was female because she had a head crest, a white one, that she had shaped into something like a human hair style.

George looked back at his fae-blooded challenger. “Ok. I’ll play.” George thought the game would take his mind off his own depressing life, might be a chance for him to feel good at something besides magic, and that if something bad were to happen, Starstorm would see him.

“Great.” The sea-elf descendant smiled, his teeth very white. “Let’s get started. Drinks for everyone, on me. What are you drinking, my friend?”

George remembered what Starstorm had ordered him before. “Bracer’s Island Ale.”

“Oh, you’ll want something stronger than that, my friend,” cooed his new benefactor. “Trust me. I know just what you need.”