The chickens shrieked and flapped their wings frantically, causing a cloud of white feathers to fly within their coop. Outside, Sylis could also hear the cows in their pen, and their moos sounded louder and longer than normal, an urgent deep sound to communicate fear to the other cattle, not the happy contented sounds they normally made. Something is really scaring the animals, Sylis thought. Probably a wolf or a fox. I have to go scare it away.
Sylis exited the barn and walked along the dirt path that bisected his farm. The sky was blue and cloudless, and the sun was bright overhead. He approached the gap in the small wooden fence, which he had painted blue a few years ago when he had inherited the farm from his mother, a color he had chosen because he, like his mother, was a Blue. The short blue fence marked the place where his farm ended on its western side and where the fields of tall bright green grass leading up to the dense emerald-green forest began. He often let the cows graze there, even though, technically speaking, he didn’t own that land, but no one owned it: Sylis’s farm was at the very far western edge of Tamm, and most of the lands and farms that people owned were farther east, near the one main street in the town where there were a handful of actual real stone-and-wood buildings that lined that one street.
Sylis walked along the grass, right at the edge of the forest, periodically gazing keenly into the woods to see if he could spot whatever the problem was. With his farm to his east and the forest stretching out to his west, his path was the span of long, flat, grassy fields that ran north and south between them; his farm that he had inherited from his mom was big, and his land hugged the entire eastern section of this forest. The vast size of his farm was the only reason he was able to produce enough livestock and vegetables to stay in business, although times were tough, and he was not rich.
His senses were sharp, but he heard and saw nothing unusual. Whatever you are, wolf, fox, or hawk, you’ll regret messing with the baddest, meanest Blue wizard in Tamm!, Sylis thought, but as he thought this a sly grin shaped his lips under his mask. He was making a joke to himself. He was the only wizard who lived in the small farming town of Tamm, in a region of the realm so rural and poor that no Kingdom claimed to rule over it because no Kingdom wanted it. He did not view himself as either bad or mean, although he knew that, because he was the only wizard in Tamm, he was both the baddest, and the least bad.
Sylis tripped over a branch that had fallen on the ground from a nearby tree and he clumsily and awkwardly fell to the ground. His smile instantly changed to a frown. Stupid mask. Stupid robes, he thought. Sylis had not seen the branch because his mask slightly cut his lower range of vision, and his foot had gotten caught in his wizard robes as he stumbled over the branch, causing him to lose his balance and fall completely to the ground. He lay there, for a moment, on the grass, not moving. Oh well, he thought cheerfully, and then he got to his knees, pushed down on the ground with both gloved hands, and stood back up. He took one moment to make sure he was uninjured. Then he marched ahead, still intent upon finding the source of his animals’ worries.
As he walked, he realized that his entire side where he had fallen was beginning to hurt, a low throbbing pain that did not impede his range of movement but was becoming quite painful. That’s going to hurt for a few days, if not a week. And I have to plow the North Field next week. Darn.
The Blue wizard’s clothes that Sylis wore were a heavy burden to his life as a farmer, but he had to wear them at all times, other than while bathing or sleeping. Sylis wore a navy-blue wizard’s robe lined with blue-dyed sheep’s wool, worn open in the front but tied loosely at his waist by a blue rope. Beneath it he wore a royal-blue buttoned vest, and, beneath the vest, a simple cloth shirt and pants which he himself had made of white fabric that he had dyed pale sky-blue after he bought it. His hands and feet were adorned by black leather boots and gloves which he had treated with a blue stain to give them a dark smoky blue-black color.
He wore a blue cloth mask over his face, tied behind his ears, which covered the entirety of his face except for three small holes: one for each eye, and one for his mouth. As a farmer he was expected to be able to make clothes, build furniture, construct farm buildings, and do many other things, but he had paid a local seamstress to stitch a pattern into his mask, because he wanted it done perfectly. He had chosen a design for his mask which featured suns and moons and stars and comets, with the suns and moons dancing with each other and having smiley faces inside them. It was embroidered with a thick, heavy silver thread that showed up well against the indigo-blue fabric of his mask.
No one remembered when the custom had begun that all wizards would wear masks over their faces and wear robes the same color as their magic, so that, at a single glance, everyone in any room would know who the wizards in the room were. But to Sylis it made perfect sense as a custom that evolved to protect the people who could not do magic or use magic to defend themselves: they knew, with one look, precisely which people not to annoy unless they wanted to be turned into a toad or go home with nine new legs, especially if they were having a drink at a tavern, where drunken wizards had a reputation for becoming pretty nasty and obnoxious. And they even knew which spells an angry wizard would hurl at them, because they could see the color of their magic from their clothes. Sylis did not drink alcohol and did not smoke crazy-leaf or drink high-potion, but he did enjoy walking into a room and having people take notice and be cautious, especially because he viewed himself as a friendly, soft-spoken, cheerful person who otherwise would never command things like fear, awe, or respect.
The one thing he liked about his wizard’s clothes were that they were a genuinely nice palette of a mix of shades and hues of blue, from the light blue of his shirt to the intense blue of his vest to the rich blue of his robes to the dark blue of his gloves, displaying the fact that he was a Blue. It was not unique to Sylis that his clothes were all the same color as his color of magic: everyone wore clothes the color of their magic, if they were wizards, or clothes the color of the school of magic to which they were loyal if they were not wizards.
Each of the Colors had a type of magic for its wizards to focus on and a corresponding quality that it sought to cultivate in the wizards who practiced it. The five schools of magic for human wizards were: Blue for Time magic and Intelligence, Red for Chaos magic and Fun, Green for the magic of the Elements (water, earth, fire, and air) and Life, Black for Necromancy magic and Power, and White for Divinity magic and Good. Yellow magic was fae magic that could only be cast by the elves and faeries, so humans often thought of magic as having only five colors, and those were the five colors of human clothes. Sylis had been well-educated by his mother, so he knew that magic had six colors, but he had no idea what virtue or quality Yellow represented. Each Color embodied a different philosophy of life, so you knew something about someone the instant you saw them, just from the color of their clothes, because you knew which philosophy of life they had chosen to describe themselves.
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Legends held that at first, it was only wizards who wore their color. Later, wizards made their servants wear the same color as them. Eventually, everyone wore the color of the school of magic to which they were loyal. The system was convenient, which is why the ancient tradition had stuck and lasted into modern times. No one really knew what the punishment was if you did not wear the right clothes to match your color or role as a wizard, because for a thousand years the taboo and the tradition had held, and by now it was so firmly established that everyone just did it without question.
Because of his wizard-clothes that smothered his thin lean body and the wizard-mask that hid his face, people looked at him and saw just another Blue wizard, in typical Blue wizard clothing. They did not see him. They did not see a young man, his body gangly and scrawny and hairy, his eyes hazel-green and wide, his skin pasty-white and dotted with freckles, his hair light-brown and short-cut. They did not see the mustache that he was always trying to grow out but could never get quite right. They could not see the smile of sincere joy that usually graced his rosy, pink lips.
People would never see or know any of these things. But it was a small price to pay, one which Sylis would have paid willingly had he been given the choice, in return for the magic. His magic meant everything to him. It was a gift from God. And it was a gift from his mom. His mother having taught him magic, not the farm which he had inherited from her, was his mom’s greatest gift that she had given to him, before she died. He assumed he had inherited the gift of magic from her; he did not know who his birth-father was, and the one person he could have asked, his mother, had been dead for three years. People sometimes asked him why he was not a Green wizard, because Green magic was much more useful to farmers than Blue. But he would answer them, no, he was a Blue, just like his mom had been a Blue. A Blue wizard was what he was.
Sylis walked through a small clearing between two trees, to a spot that had a vantage point from which he knew he could see some distance into the forest, because of how the gaps among the trees lined up. He stared into the forest, at the tall, thick trees, their leaves a rich and dark green now that spring had begun, their trunks brown and knotted, their branches shooting up into the sky like a network of veins visible within translucent flesh. He saw nothing.
Maybe it’s Jeff, playing a trick on me, Sylis thought. Jeff the Red was one of Sylis’s best friends, but he was a trickster who would play a practical joke on someone without hesitation and without remorse. I really should cast a spell on him one of these days. He knows I won’t. Maybe I will. No, I know I won’t.
Sylis turned around, ready to go back to his farm and forget about whatever it was. Suddenly, he heard a faint whimper, like the sound of an animal in pain. He froze, staying perfectly still, and focused on his hearing. He waited. Silence. Another moment. Silence, still. Then… he heard it again. A short whimpering moan. I should not investigate, Sylis thought, but then he grinned and thought: No, I will investigate. I am the bad mean Blue wizard of Tamm!
Sylis heard the noise a few more times and soon came upon its source. Hiding in a bush, on the ground, was a small, young fox, barely more than a baby, its coat a shiny bright red, its underbelly white, except that its fur was stained by a heavy soaking of its own blood, and it had a deep wound in its side, from which blood dripped out. The fox had some chicken feathers near its mouth and on the ground around it, except that no chicken was there to be seen. The fox pup looked up at Sylis, its young blue eyes cute, adorable, and full of pain.
It must have gotten one of my chickens! Sylis thought. I bet it dug through that hole I had nailed up at the back of the wall of the chicken house. I need to count my chickens again when I get home. Sylis peered down at the injured animal. Looks like a wolf smelled this stupid fox’s chicken and came and took it away from it. And took a bite out of this fox in the bargain, too.
Sylis bent down to look closer at the fox. The fox looked up and tried to move, instinctively attempting to flee a human, but it wailed in pain and then fell back, its body trembling and throbbing up and down as it breathed, and the fox just shivered and lay there, and it decided to submit. Sylis knew, in that moment, that the fox would let him kill it without putting up any sort of fight.
Sylis had an idea. Oh my God I should not do this. I would kill any adult fox, without regret. And, you know what? I think I’ll do this without regret, too. Sylis knelt down to one knee at the side of the baby fox. He reached out and placed one dark-blue-gloved hand upon the fox’s wound. The fox just sat there, watching Sylis and trembling, having already given up its struggle.
Sylis closed his eyes and cast a Blue magic spell. Sylis’s Blue magic, his time magic, was subtle and invisible: there were no magic words spoken, no arcane ritual with spell components, and would be no flash of bright light, no sound of rumbles, no fireworks, nothing to impress anyone. He breathed life into a spell, and it took its effect, and that was the end of it. He liked Blue magic. It was humble, and simple, and it did not brag. It just did its thing.
Sylis’s Blue spell drained time out of the fox, causing it to become a few months younger, and then he poured that time into the flesh around the wound, making it age by a few months, giving that part of the fox’s body an extra few months of time in which to heal, in just a few moments of real time. The fox’s wound rapidly closed up and healed before Sylis’s eyes, leaving behind an area of flesh without fur where it had an ugly scar caked with fresh blood, but it bled no more.
The fox instantly stood up, took one last look at Sylis, and then turned its head and frantically ran away, darting into a thick green bush and out of sight.
“Thank you, Sylis, that was very nice of you to heal me,” Sylis said, pretending to be the fox. “Why, you’re welcome, Mr. Fox, I’m glad you appreciated it,” Sylis said, pretending to be himself talking back to the fox.
Sylis grinned, amused by how silly he was. He turned and trekked back to his farm. His pace was neither fast nor slow, as he knew he had many tasks ahead of him today, but he also had a lot of the day and its sunlight left in which to do those tasks, before darkness would fall and bring his daily farm work to its end. He made sure to walk slowly enough not to stumble and fall over any fallen branches by accident again. The pain in his side was getting better, but he still felt it.
Sylis was walking along the fields of grass, his pace steady yet careful, each footstep firm and confident, when all of sudden he broke into a run, with a huge grin spread across his face under his mask. He took long steps, fast, not even looking down. His rapid motion caused the pain in his side to flare up, but he kept running. His motion caused the already loose tie of the rope belt at his waist to break loose, and his wizard’s robes flew out behind him like a cape as he ran forward, so fast that air flowed through the blue robes behind him and made them look like waves flowing through the ocean’s surface during a windstorm in his wake.
I can’t believe I forgot! Sylis thought. Today is Friday! That means tonight is Friday night! I have to finish all my farm chores so that I’ll be ready in time to get there before it starts!
