Wild Edged Magic Vol. 1

By Simon J. Cooper

The Wild Edged Magic series is united by characters that break rules with their magic. The first five stories collected here range from traditional to contemporary fantasy, with an emphasis on alternate worlds.

First up is, The Magician's Father. Ray, a magician prone to wild experiments, becomes ill with the equivalent of Alzheimer's, and his son, the country's leading Grandmaster of Magic, is forced to confront their fractured past and the violent death all magic user's face.

In The World Within, Mira has power, but her magic is wild and untrained. Icanos is a sorcerer's apprentice, his studies incomplete. When Icanos is taken to the World Within by a force seemingly more powerful than both of them put together, can Mira hope to rescue him?
The third in the series is The Lost Diamond. Chuang Tzu, ancient deity of the Tao, is caught between a diamond and a promise, or a rock and a hard place. Whichever way he turns, someone's going to have to pay for a slice of deity magic.

In Fair Warning, Malkin survives where no one else can, in the crater, a chaotic wasteland of ever shifting magic. When they come from the Kingdom searching for crystals, the source of magic, Malkin helps some, and lets others die, but when a boy called Flint comes looking for Malkin, which way will it go for them both?

Fire Hands sees sixteen-year-old Stacey alone in a car in the desert with Drew, a guy she's known for less than one day. That might be fine, or it might not, but what's definitely not fine is the spontaneous magic force burning buildings down around her, and which will kill someone unless Stacey learns to control it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Holbrook Publishing
• Release date: Oct 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466114159

Simon J. Cooper

Simon J. Cooper grew up on a farm in rural Donegal, Ireland, and spent his time avoiding farm work, digging for dragon skulls, and daydreaming about the kind of characters and worlds he now turns into stories. When his family moved to England, Simon fell in love with County Derbyshire, (you should go there,) and ale! It was there, at age eighteen, that he embarked on a quest for the meaning of life. This led to becoming down and out in both London and Paris, and three years philosophising in Lancashire, and a lot of other unprintable stuff, great and awful. Finally, he found an answer, his own at any rate, and got lucky, and married, in Northern Ireland, which is where he lives now with his wife, two children and a dragon – sorry, dog.

Book preview

Wild Edged Magic Vol. 1

Simon J. Cooper

Copyright Simon J. Cooper 2011

Published by Holbrook Publishing at Smashwords

All Covers by ENC

Cover photo of Charles Bridge by Chosovi (unendorsed) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

Cover Image on Fire Hands by Piotr Pawel

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This ebook collection was created with support from:

Contents

The Magician's Father

The World Within

The Lost Diamond

Fair Warning

Fire Hands

The Magician’s Father

Simon J. Cooper

Raymond’s aura fizzled over his skin like twisting green lasers, the potential power mocking his sagging flesh. Even now, with my father’s tired eyes staring down at me, I felt anger rising instead of sadness, or even love. Stupid old man with a brilliant mind. He was dying in a containment pod on a cold hospital ward, and maybe this would be me some day.

Bloody mess, hey, Raymond said, his words muffled through the pod’s gel. I suppose you told me so, Grandmaster. Did I ever tell you how proud I was the day you were titled?

You told me, and then you bunked out of attending the ceremony.

Raymond shrugged. I watched it on the remote viewer, with everyone else, must have been the whole country tuned in to see my Davey, the brilliant Grandmaster, ‘Saviour of the Planet.’ Sorry, David, I know you don’t like Davey, but it’s how I think of you.

You can drop that, ‘Saviour of the Planet’ crap, I said. My jaw was tightening. I dealt everyday with the idiots in the Prime Minister’s office and slept soundly at night, but one minute with Raymond and I was fourteen again. I controlled myself. How are you feeling?

How do you think I'm feeling? Raymond’s arms flailed and wild curls of green energy flicked out and were absorbed by the gel.

What do you want me to say, Raymond? Congratulations, forty years of dabbling in magic you never learned to control, never mind understand, increased your chance of dementia by a factor of forty? Yes, I bloody told you so.

In my head I lined up another retort but Raymond’s inevitable backlash never came. He just hovered there, the pod’s gel supporting his old muscles, feeding him, cleaning him and stopping his magic from harming anyone or himself. You should never see your father naked, a junior colleague once joked. I was embarrassed and hadn’t laughed. Raymond used to say magic was best with the wind at his crack.

Won’t you ever call me Ray, or even Dad would be better than Raymond. I hate Raymond.

My throat was too tight to reply, and then the moment was gone along with a sense of missed opportunity I could almost taste. Even when Raymond and me attempted to lock horns we somehow stumbled.

How’s Maggie doing? He smiled. She still putting up with you?

She must be, she’s pregnant.

Oh that’s great news. How long, how long?

Raymond moved forward in the pod as if about to hug me. Even though thick glass separated us, I felt my muscles tense.

Six months. I tried to find where you were to tell you, but. I shrugged.

I’m sorry, I’ve been busy, I should have checked in with you. Your mother would have loved to have seen this day.

Maggie wanted to come and see you. I said next time.

I’d like that, if there is a next time.

What’s that meant to mean? Dr. Suresh said you were found visioning on a country lane and the onset was rapid, but you should still have time before, I trailed off. I didn’t want to think about where this went.

Suresh is a nice guy, but let’s face it, no one knows how long I’ve got. You might come back here tomorrow and I won’t even know you, and I might never know you again. Shit, you probably understand this disease better than I do, so think on that before you say no.

Say no to what?

I need you to take me out of this, bloody prison cell, for one last trip.

I stared at him, my father and I was angry, always angry. Here he went again, always the same Raymond. A sixty-year-old cowboy who did it his way, whether or not that way affected his family. I thought about the pods upon pods of magic users trapped on this ward, didn’t they want out. Who wouldn’t? I would want out, even for only seconds, to taste fresh air, to kiss Maggie again.

You’re too sick, Raymond, you know that. It’s too dangerous for yourself and others. If you have an attack in public again, it could be more than just visioning. I’m sure you must have taken Dr. Suresh up wrong, after all, he thought you were a Master.

So I never got any spotty little rank behind my name, I’m twice the magician of most of them and you know it.

You never became a Master because you never mastered anything. You were always too busy dreaming up your next big scheme.

Raymond thrashed in the pod. "Dammit, Davey, I haven’t time for this, just get Suresh in here. He said the only way I could be released, the only person he would consider equal to the task of containing my aura if I lose control, is you, my famous son, Grandmaster Sharpe. Now, please, get me out of here this one last time and I swear I’ll never ask again.

#

The magician’s death is dragon fire and brimstone. Demons grip him, and he holds the universe in his eye, for in his veins courses life almighty, and his flesh is power, and his mind a knife spelled with diamond edges.

Those words were carved in stone above the entrance to my college common room. Though they disturbed me when I was a trainee Master, in the twenty years since graduation, I had forgotten them, until now when they came rushing back as if I were on the eve of an examination.

They were from an anonymous author, and written down at least five hundred years earlier. They were out of date, based on superstition rather than fact, and hopelessly hyperbolic, and yet they captured what all magic users, ranked or amateur feared most — a death violent as dragon fire.

Thaumaturgic dementia, or Merlin’s Disease, as it was more commonly known, affected eighty percent of magic users over seventy years old. But that figure applied only to ranked magicians. Unranked amateurs, however brilliant, inevitably contracted Merlin’s at much younger ages. The way Raymond played fast and loose with magic, I supposed he did well to make it into his sixties.

Like vascular dementia caused by a stroke, its onset was rapid, and symptoms included personality changes, confusion,