Sylis gazed down at the wooden boards he had nailed up to cover the hole in the back of the chicken coop that the fox pup had gotten through. Sylis was missing, not one, but three chickens, but by this point there was not much to do about it, other than hammer up the hole and be done with it. The boards of wood were not even, but no fox could slip through the tiny gaps between them; not even a mouse or rat could. Sylis nodded to himself. Then he put the hammer and remaining box of nails into a leather bag and walked out.

  Outside, the sun was beginning to set, casting vivid shades of pink, red, and purple onto the horizon of the normally blue sky. Sylis smiled. What a beautiful day, he thought. What a nice life. I hope it never ends.

  Sylis made his way along the path that bisected his farm, until he arrived at a small house, its walls painted eggshell blue, its roof covered with tiles a much darker, richer, smoky shade of purple-blue. He walked up to the door, opened it, and walked inside, without knocking and without even glancing inside to see if anyone was in. As soon as he entered the house, which had grown dark with the coming twilight and was lit inside by only a handful of candles, the smile on Sylis’s mouth vanished, replaced by pursed lips. Ugh. Let’s see what Stepdad’s problem this time is.

  Sylis walked into the dining room and sat down at the table. Sylis’s stepdad Nedlerd Karth, an old man with some white hair left on his bald head and mottled wrinkled skin that seemed to hang from his bones like clothes hanging from a wire, was already seated. Nedlerd’s clothes were green and slightly dirty. His hands were folded together on the table in front of him, and his eyes were open but seemed not to be seeing anything; he just stared in front of him, at an empty white wall where there was one thin wood shelf with an empty glass vase on it. Bowls of chicken stew made with carrots, onions, and turnips, plates containing bread and butter, and tubs of boiled peas and carrots in a sauce made from salt, garlic, and melted butter, had been set out on the table. Glasses full of apple juice and mugs of hot tea had also been set out. The dishes were white ceramic porcelain with fake-gold edges, although the forks and spoons were simple iron. The tablecloth was white printed with a design of small blue and green diamonds. The tablecloth was oversized; it covered the entire table and fell into Sylis’s lap.

  “Been waiting,” Nedlerd said, in a soft, even voice.

  “I had to finish fixing the chicken house,” Sylis said. “And then I—”

  “Did you get those new horseshoes we need?” Nedlerd interrupted.

  “I told you we can’t get those until the next time the merchant from the Imperium is in town, which will be next week,” Sylis replied.

  “Did you take out the old anti-insect charms on the tomatoes and put in the new ones?”

  “Yes, and I knew that you were going to ask that, I was about to say—”

  “Is all the grain ready to be brought to town for when the merchant comes to buy?” Nedlerd said, interrupting again.

  “Yes, Stepdad, I got the goods all ready for purchase, I put out the anti-insect charms, I fixed the henhouse, I put out the food for the cows and the pigs and the sheep, I milked the cows, and I went up to the small lake near the North Field to see what was wrong with the little dam we had built and why it leaked the last time it rained, and I repaired the dam. It’s all done.” Sylis said this in a smooth and even-tempered voice, but his mouth and teeth were tight under his mask as he spoke.

  “Did you plow the North Field?”

  “I told you, Stepdad, I will do that early next week.” Sylis gave each answer calmly and quickly because he knew exactly what to say. Stepdad asked him these same questions, or very similar questions, each night when the two of them had dinner together.

  Nedlerd nodded, and, seemingly content with Sylis’s answers, Nedlerd said nothing more. The old man grabbed a piece of bread and began to spread butter on it with a long iron knife. Sylis grabbed the bowl of stew in front of him and a spoon, and started to gobble it down, taking big, fast bites and swallowing mouthfuls so big he almost choked. But he could not resist Fann’s cooking; the stew was seasoned perfectly, with pepper, garlic, and oregano, and a mix of chicken fat and some of the olive oil he had bought from the merchant made it divine. I wish Fann would let me pay her more, Sylis thought. Fann was a young dwarf girl who had run away from home after refusing to accept the life as a miner in the mountains that her father had demanded of her. Sylis had met her when she passed through Tamm, a few months after his mom had died, and he offered her a job as a farm hand and house helper, which she had eagerly taken.

  But Fann was unaccustomed to humans, there having been none in the dwarf camp where she grew up, and humans still scared her, a lot, including Sylis and Nedlerd. She cooked all the food for Sylis, but she ate by herself, separately from the Karth family, although Sylis made sure to always invite her to join them whenever he spoke to her. Sylis did not seek her out other than when they had to communicate for purposes of the farm work, but he would often see her at a distance working in the fields, her squat, thick, short body sweaty with labor, her long black hair that flowed all the way down her back done in green braids and ribbons that matched her green farmer’s overalls. Fann was a humble girl who would only accept copper coins, never silver, because she thought silver coins would attract humans to rob her. And to be honest, she’s probably right, Sylis thought.

  So it was just Sylis, and Nedlerd, at their family dinner table each night, alone. There was a third chair at the table, and space in front of it where food could have gone, but no one was there, and Sylis pointedly did not look in that direction once while eating. It hurt too much to see where his mom used to sit.

  Sylis swallowed the last of Fann’s stew in a long giant gulp. “See you tomorrow, Stepdad,” Sylis said. “I’ll be back late tonight.”

  “Oh, will you be out tonight?” Nedlerd asked, in a bland tone.

  “Yes, you know I always go to the Tavern in town for Game Night with my friends on Friday night,” Sylis said.

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Nedlerd said.

  “I tell you every Friday when I go,” Sylis said. I wonder if Stepdad has memory loss from old age, or whether he just doesn’t care about me. I can’t exactly talk to him about it, because he’ll get furiously angry at me if I do. He talks softly most of the time, but he screams loudly when he’s angry. Sylis took a swig of apple juice, which tasted tart and tangy, with only a slight hint of sweetness. He chased it with a long sip of tea, which was warm and refreshing. I don’t even care. Just focus on Game Night. Tonight is Game Night!

  Sylis mounted his horse, a young yet strong mare named Needle who loved Sylis and gazed at him with her huge dark eyes when he fed her carrots every morning, and he rode along the rode into the town of Tamm, arriving at the Tavern just as the last hint of the sun fell behind the distant hills and total night rolled in.

  The Tavern of Tamm was the largest building in Tamm, because it also contained the town’s Inn and General Store in the same building, and it dwarfed the many other buildings and houses that dotted the main street. Sylis dismounted, stabled Needle at the Tavern’s stables, and walked into the wide, long building of the Tamm Tavern and Inn. The Tavern was two stories tall, with a large staircase in the middle of its main lobby, and it was also very wide, so that Sylis could look left and right and just barely see its far walls. But its insides were constructed of cheap, simple wooden timbers that appeared to have been hastily cut and nailed together, their edges rough, their surfaces without paint, tarnish, or coat.

  Sylis walked quickly past the bar and common room, not even gazing at the bartender and the patrons at the bar, and ignored the drunken commotion he could hear of some rowdy people having a bar fight without even lifting his gaze back to see what it was. As he was walking, a man, his face bloodied and one of his eyes red and swollen, stumbled out of the bar room and ran right into Sylis, knocking both of them over.

  “Oh, sorry, sorry!” the man exclaimed.

  “No worries,” Sylis said. Sylis got to his feet and offered a hand; the man took it and pulled himself back to his feet with Sylis’s help. The man was Marvinn, a local farmer who grew carrots, turnips, and radishes, and who also owned a lot of local apple orchards. In addition to being a farmer, Marvinn also worked a double shift as both the town drunk and the town gossip.

  “Been looking for you, actually,” Marvinn said. Sylis could smell both beer and crazy-leaf smoke in the man’s breath, and he smelled a lot of it because Marvinn was standing a bit too close, his face thrust into Sylis’s face. “There’s another wizard in town. Right here, in Tamm! Sort of thought you and your mom might be the only ones in the world, Sylis, well, God rest your mom’s soul, but no, here another one is.” Sylis’s nose curled up at the smell of Marvinn’s breath, but he held his position and did not back away. “Strange fellow, too. Dressed all in blue, so, if I would wager a guess, a Blue wizard. Tried to talk to him. A bit weird. Sort of strange, even for a wizard, although I’ve never met many.”

  Another Blue wizard in Tamm!? Sylis thought, and his mind raced ahead in an effort to digest this unexpected news. Why? Another wizard has never passed through this town in all my life! Where did he come from? Why is he here?

  “Why is he here? Did he say anything about his purpose? Where did he come from?” Sylis asked Marvinn.

  “Why is who here? Who are you talking about?” Marvinn said, and then he stumbled away, and promptly fell to his knees and began to vomit, right there on the barroom floor. The random others in the room did not even bother to look at this; Marvinn puked a lot when he was drunk, and he was drunk a lot. They were used to it.

  Sylis walked right up to the bar and gestured with his hand to attract the bartender’s attention. The bartender handed a customer a beer, and then gazed around the room, and his eyes caught Sylis’s gesture. He came over.

  “Say, Montaine, is there another wizard here? I heard a rumor, but I don’t know if it’s true. Is there really one here?”

  “There is, Sylis,” Montaine, the bartender, said. “A patron gave me a nice big tip of one silver coin and bought me a shot of my own finest whiskey too, as a thank you for my service, so I’m in a very good mood tonight. I’ll give you this knowledge for free: they say this wizard, a Blue, rode in earlier today, from Imperia, the capital city of the Imperium. And he’s having a smoke and a drink in the billiards room, down by the patio. But that’s all you’ll get from me, unless you have a copper coin to spare.”

  Sylis left the bar and made his way through the crowded lounge, to the billiards room. He sensed the Blue wizard, before he even saw him: he could feel a raw, powerful energy, like a sense of heat and fire and burning or like lightning in the sky, as if the air itself had become heavy and thick, filled with magic so strong he felt himself pulled forward by it. The man was seated at a table, a mug of beer before him, a pipe resting on an ashtray next to it. He wore fancy blue robes, lined up and down with a design of stars and lightning bolts in silver thread, and a white beard protruded out from the bottom of his blue mask, which he wore below a tall, pointy blue hat which had a matching star-and-bolts design like his robe.

  Sylis took a seat next to the Blue wizard, extended his hand for a handshake, and opened his mouth to speak.

  “Hi! My name is Sylis. I’m the Blue wizard of Tamm. Nice to meet you. May I please know your name?”

  The man, however, did not shake Sylis’s hand. Instead, he slowly reached out, took hold of the pipe, brought it to the mouth-hole in his mask, and took a long drag. Then he put the pipe down, and slowly exhaled, a long puff of foul-smelling smoke, right into Sylis’s face. Sylis turned his head away from the man and coughed, and then spun his head back around, facing the wizard.

  “My name is none of your concern,” the Blue wizard said. “As I am sure you must have heard by now, even in these remote backwater scum ponds like this, I don’t even remember the name of it, this town of yours, changes are happening in the Imperium. The King is old, and his two trusted advisors, the two dark priests named Wote and Shome, are now consolidating administration of the Imperium, and replacing old and outdated practices with newer and more efficient processes. Wizards, in particular, are of some concern, because each Color runs itself quite independently of the Kingdom, and this can lead to some, shall we say, disorganization regarding how to allocate the scarce magical resources of our society. I heard rumors there was a Blue wizard out here, in this remote barren filth-lands, although I wondered why any wizard would be out here, among the pigs and their mud. Yet here you are.”

  Sylis shuddered, and rapidly withdrew the hand which he had outstretched for this man to shake.

  “Is it that strange for a Blue wizard to be out here in the farmlands?” Sylis asked. He had never known that it might be. His entire life, he had assumed he was normal. He had never left Tamm; he had no knowledge of what things were like elsewhere to compare his life to.

  “It is,” this wizard said. “Almost all of the families in which magic is inherited live within the Imperium, or the Northern Empire, or one of the minor neighboring kingdoms, such as Skagor or Kalin. I speak only of humans who inherit magic; I do not care about the Yellow magic of the faerie elves and half-elves, who matter less to me than a drop of mud upon the bottom of my shoe; and of course White magic belongs to God, and God gives it to whoever God chooses, regardless of heredity. But each of those families with Blue, Green, Red or Black magic is known. I come from the well-known Noble House of Dirkmentis, for example. Many families have wizards, and not all of those families are among the nobility, but many books exist in which the names of those families are written down, and they are known to us. It is these country bumpkin small-town farm wizards, who just happen to exist in some random town or village for no known reason, the farm wizards such as yourself, who concern Wote and Shome, because your existence is random, chaotic, and unpredictable, and they cannot properly control for your effects upon the Kingdom’s plans. Wote and Shome wonder which family produced a Blue wizard unknown to the Kingdom, and how one such as yourself might have ended up here. They were curious to know if you existed. So I was sent here to find you.”

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  “Um, so, great, you’ve found me,” Sylis said. “I do exist. Now what are you going to, well, do?”

  “Who, me?” the Blue wizard said. Sylis thought he could see a glint of a smile in the mouth-hole of the wizard’s mask, but he could not be sure. “Why, I will do nothing. My goal was information. I now have it. I will set out on horseback tomorrow, to go about these lands, looking for other stray wizards, whom local rumors have led us to believe might be out here in the rural muck and mud. Then I will report back to Wote and Shome in Imperia. I serve no other purpose.”

  Suddenly the Blue wizard leaned forward, his masked face mere inches from Sylis’s own mask. “We are no threat to you,” the wizard said into Sylis’s face. “Wote and Shome have only the best intentions of the Kingdom at heart. What the bards say about them in their songs is simply not true. They are not a dark cloud hanging over the Kingdom. They are good for the Imperium. They are wise and just. And they shall usher in a new era of order and organization, to replace the random chaos of the King. God save the King, and I am a loyal subject, but Wote and Shome will take what was good and make it great. God save the Kingdom.”

  “You know, Tamm is not a part of the Imperium… yet,” Sylis said. “Do you know if these two dark priests, Wote and Shome, intend to… change that?”

  The Blue wizard laughed and took another drag of his crazy-leaf pipe. The man wore a series of interlocking metal rings on the ring-finger of his right hand, connected by a hinge at each of the finger’s joints, so it was as though his ring-finger was wearing its own little suit of armor. The tip of the rings tapered into a long, sharp point, like a claw on his ring-finger. He smoked using his right hand, and this claw kept hitting his pipe when he used the pipe, producing a clicking sound, over and over again, click click click as he smoked. “I have no idea,” the wizard said. “You would have to ask them. Although, to be honest, I doubt you will. They are of Black, and mostly they only speak to other lords and leaders who are of Black. Even I, as a Blue, am only rarely granted an audience with them, and only when they have some specific purpose for me. The King was incredibly wise to appoint them as his ministers of state. And the White Wizard was wise to make no objections. The two dark priests Wote and Shome have been swift in their ascendency, and their appointment as ministers of state dates back only to one year ago, but their rise has been powerful and profound.”

  “I see,” Sylis said. Bits of ash were falling from the pipe as the other wizard smoked it, leaving small blackish-gray dirty soot-stains on the man’s very expensive-looking blue robes.

  “I have learned all I needed to learn, and you don’t seem to be, shall we say, fun,” the Blue wizard said. “I smell no alcohol on your breath, although I am guessing you can smell plenty in mine! A wizard is at his best high, drunk, and stoned out of his mind, because then we can turn them into anything we want, a newt, a lion, or even a butterfly, and the law blames it all on the drugs, not on us, and we can’t go to jail for it, it’s the law on the books. The law says it is their fault for not getting out of our way, since they could identify us on sight. It is the one effective use of my mask. Or at least in the Imperium that is the law. I wonder if you even have any law out here. A marshal or a sheriff or something? We wizards are above the law, really, you know. And the ladies love us for it. At least, I think they do. Have you ever done it? Gotten totally wasted and cast a magic spell, I mean? Do you know how much fun it is?”

  “Um, I have to be going, sorry sir, but I have an urgent appointment, so sorry, if you will excuse me,” Sylis said, and he stood and backed away from the table, and walked back through the bar room. He turned and looked back at the Blue wizard as he walked, and bumped into someone in front of him as he walked forward with his head turned around to glance behind.

  “Hey, you made me spill my beer! Oh, it’s you, Sylis. You’re a good kid, just like your mom. I think your friends are meeting tonight, right? Good luck against them!”

  Sylis smiled at the man, another local farmer who led the local farmer’s guild to which Sylis belonged. That’s right, tonight is Game Night! Calm yourself down. There’s nothing I can do about that Blue wizard. Focus on Game Night.

  Sylis went out of the tavern area, found an area of the lobby where no one was nearby, and leaned against a wall, and just paused for a moment, breathing, placing the full weight of his body against the wall so that he could relax his muscles, which were tense and tight. He exhaled slowly, and then stood up straight. He adjusted his robes, which had gotten slightly tangled up in his belt as he had rushed away from that wizard, and then he walked straight to the back of the Tavern and Inn building, at a fast, steady pace, into the area comprising the town general store, which occupied a large room in the back of the Tavern.

  Once inside the general store, he ignored the main room where the merchant who owned the store put her wares on display. The shelves were full of bags of flour, cans of beans, hammers and saws and other tools, jars of oil for both heating and cooking, candles, yarn and fabric, and bags of coal. One shelf held cheap iron costume jewelry adorned with fake colored-glass gemstones, and several shelves displayed various premade articles of clothing, like shirts and capes, in blue, green, red, white and black. He walked by the locked glass case containing a handful of Green wizard-enchanted objects: iron rings and necklaces, amethyst amulets, and carved wooden totems, most of which had a simple good luck charm or protection ward in them. Sylis walked directly into the small, dark, dimly lit room at the back of the store.

  It was a square room, its walls made of the same unfinished wood as the rest of the Tavern, except that in the dim candlelight the walls were cast in shadow, and therefore looked darker than they really were. The room was empty except for one large square table, its surface held low to the ground on short legs, which was surrounded by eight chairs, two on each side. Four lit candles in a candleholder sat on the table, which caused the table and what was on it to shine in bright contrast to the darkness of what lay beyond the candles’ illumination.

  Each chair was made of pale light-colored wood and had a thin, cheap fabric cushion tied to it; the cushions were made from cloth the same shade of gray as the color of polished iron. In the flickering white candlelight, Sylis could see the various card games, puzzle games, dice games and board games left haphazardly upon the table.

  The merchant who owned the general store had the idea for a Game Night seven years ago, to give the local youth something to do on a Friday night, provided that each kid paid her one copper coin per person per night for the privilege of renting the Game Room, as the local kids had come to call their gaming space. It was expensive, but a small price to pay to have fun in this otherwise boring farming town a great distance away from any hub of civilization. Game Night was the thing to do for the kids growing up in Tamm. Sylis had started coming five years ago, as a teen. Even now, as a young adult, Sylis was still gaming with his friends each Friday, and his friends, now young adults themselves, kept playing games, too. In fact, these days, it was mostly young adults, like Sylis, at Game Night; the candy store down the street was the new trendy hang-out spot for little kids in Tamm right now.

  Sylis was the first to arrive, so he took a seat, and began tapping his foot and messing with the way his mask fit his face and readjusting the folds of his wizard robes. He glanced at the door, looked at the candles to see how long he thought they would last, and then resumed tapping his foot. Soon, five other people walked into the room, as a group, each one passing through the small door one at a time after the next, until six of the eight seats were filled by local Tamm young people, Sylis and his friends, the gamers of Tamm.

  The group of friends decided to play a card game tonight, a game called Fire, Water and Stone that the merchant who owned the general store had imported from the Imperium a few months ago. While Sylis dealt out the cards, his friend sitting next to him, a young man named Jeff, engaged him in conversation.

  “I need you to send me back in time, Sylis,” Jeff the Red said. “Back to last week. I need to return to one week ago.”

  “Why, Jeff?” Sylis said, without taking his eyes off the deck of cards to look up. Jeff said crazy stuff all the time, so Sylis didn’t know if he was being serious or not.

  “I messed up when I asked Helen the Green to the Spring Dance,” Jeff said. “She said no to me, but I realized what I should have done differently five minutes after I had done it. I need another chance. She’s going to be the mother of my children. I belong with her.”

  Sylis finished dealing out the cards, and then looked up at Jeff. “I’ve explained to you how it works, and why I won’t do that. To send one person back in time, you have to send another person forward in time by an equal amount of time, and the magic spell ties the two of them together and pushes each one off against the other through time, with both needing to consent to the spell for the magic to work. And, once one person goes back in time, and the other goes forward in time, I have no way to recall them back to the present. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. It can’t be undone.”

  “I am prepared to accept the consequences of my decisions,” Jeff said in a grave and serious tone, “and my little brother Robben will be a willing sacrifice to offer a week of his life for my sake. He will go into the future by one week and lose one week of his life so that I can travel back in time. I can persuade him to do so of his own consent.”

  “Robben will not!” Sylis said, shocked. Robben hated Jeff. Robben was of White, and he hated his older brother Jeff’s Red antics. I don’t like his antics much myself, although he is my friend. Sylis took a closer look at his friend. The corners of Jeff’s lips and the muscles of Jeff’s cheeks curled up into a grin, and Jeff’s eyes were gleaming with mischief and silent laughter in the candlelight. Sylis placed the palm of his hand onto his forehead and held his hand there for a moment. “You were joking. That whole thing was a joke. That isn’t funny, Jeff. Magic is serious,” Sylis said.

  “I did ask Helen to the dance, and she did say no to me, but, yes, the rest of it was a joke. And you fell for it like a complete and total sap,” Jeff said.

  “Not a funny joke. Magic should be taken seriously,” Sylis said. You’re lucky I don’t take a week of time off of your life just out of spite for that stupid joke.

  “I thought Jeff’s joke was funny,” Sylis’s other friend, Beckie the Green, chimed in.

  “Well, it was an okay joke, a bit worn, but I found it acceptable,” another of their friends, Obrem of White, said. Obrem was one of the only people in Tamm other than Sylis who was literate and would read books, and he had a collection of old drama reviews from the Imperium that some distant cousin of his who lived there had mailed to him by horse-carried post. As a result of reading nothing but theater reviews, Obrem liked to give his opinions about everything on every topic to anyone who would listen. “The basic idea was stale, but the delivery was executed well. A bit predictable, but, so long as Sylis keeps falling for it, I think Jeff should keep making them.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate that,” Sylis said sarcastically to Obrem.

  “Can we let the game begin, please?” the final friend at the table, Ryddeck of Black, said in his scratchy, gasping whisper of a voice. “I… am in ill health, as you all know, and so I… need to defeat you and crush you all at Fire, Water and Stone and win the game as rapidly as possible, so that I may know the… joy of the agony in your eyes before I expire.”

  “Your lung infection was six years ago, Ryddeck, yet somehow you’re still with us,” Obrem said. “I think you use your illness just as a tool to manipulate us and to claw at our emotions at this point.”

  “I’ll be sure to… haunt you especially, Obrem, after I die,” Ryddeck said.

  “What a mean thing to say to Ryddeck, Obrem,” Jeff said.

  “Really?” Obrem asked. Obrem’s eyes widened slightly, and his lower lip pouted.

  “Oh yes,” Jeff replied, although he could barely suppress a laugh as he said it. “And I think that, to punish Obrem, the rest of us should gang up on him and make him lose the game first! First one to make Obrem’s cards die gets a gold coin from me!”

  “Jeff, I think in order to have a gold coin you would have to actually ever do some work or get a job like the rest of us,” Beckie said.

  Sylis did laugh at that joke, as did the others, with even Jeff giving it a chuckle despite himself. Well, she is right, although I wouldn’t have said that remark out loud, Sylis thought.

  “I could steal a gold coin,” Jeff said. “Did you hear that Szedrick Kadaz, the town butcher, was robbed by someone with a sword two years ago? And no one ever learned who did it. The thief was smart: he knew he could not wear a mask to hide his face, lest he incur the wrath of the wizards who are the only ones who wear masks, so he put on a knight helmet and covered his face with the visor. He stole three gold coins and twenty-one silver coins! I bet I can do that! I hear that the gnomes have a ton of gold, and the elves, too. Not that I have ever met a gnome or an elf, but if I did, I could trick them into trusting me, and then liberate their money from their coin pouches!”

  “That would not be a very nice thing to do,” Sylis said.

  “I bet you would make a great thief, too, Sylis,” Jeff said. “You could stop time, rob someone, walk away, and then unfreeze time. What could possibly go wrong? And you would share the stolen loot with your best friend in the entire Realm of Six Colors, by which I mean me, right? Am I right? Sylis?”

  “No, Jeff, you are not right,” Sylis said. “Blue magic does not work like that. If someone is frozen in time, then their money is frozen in time, too. It is not that simple.”

  “Sylis would make a horrible criminal, and you all know that,” Obrem said. “He is too nice. Nice guys finish last, and that is twice as true in matters of evil and mischief. Now, can we please get back to the topic at hand, and return to our game? I am really looking forward to crushing and destroying all of you, if you would just be silent and play the game!”

  Each of them looked at the hand of cards they had been dealt, and then each person drew a card and played a card, taking their turn, and they went around in a circle around the table taking their turns at Fire, Water and Stone, and Game Night had begun.

  Sylis and his friends played long into the night, laughing and having fun. They played a card game, then a dice game, and then a board game. Sylis had completely forgotten about the other Blue wizard he had met. Eventually, exhausted but happy, Sylis left for the night, remounted Needle, and rode home, with the moons’ glow radiating down upon his silhouette and making him and his horse shine in stark contrast to the surrounding darkness as he jockeyed down the road at night.

  At the door to his house, he dismounted, looked up at the building illuminated by the moonlight into a shadowy shade of blue-gray, and smiled. He led his horse into the stable next to his house, and then he walked back to the house, entered, went to his bedroom, fell facedown onto his bed, and went to sleep instantly, his head resting on his large, comfortable blue pillow, his nose snoring loudly in a deep heavy slumber. He was so tired from his day of farm work and his night of gaming that he passed out without even changing into his nightclothes or saying goodnight to his stepdad and Fann.

  It was because Sylis had fallen asleep in his day clothes that he was still wearing them when he woke up in the middle of the night later that night. He rolled over, swung his feet over the side of the bed, and sat up. He smelled smoke. He turned his head around, so that his eyes faced his window. But, as he turned his gaze, he saw something. His motion froze, instantly. His skin turned an even paler shade of white than normal. He felt his body grow cold and rigid. He began to shake.

  It was the ghost of his mother.