The Water Witch

By Ron Foster

An orphaned sea witch named Lorelei and her seagull familiar have grown up living far inland at a magic reclaimer mage's castle never having seen the beach or ocean. Gavin the apprentice sorcery recycler and supernatural estate liquidator takes over their master's trading wagon caravan after his mysterious death and sets out on a journey of discovery. A Hydromancer may work with any liquid and a chance encounter with a Squonk and its tears creates unusual magical possibilities for a water witch.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ron Foster
• Release date: Sep 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393727491

Ron Foster

Southern author, Ron Foster has shared his vast knowledge in a large library of books about survival and preparedness, both fiction and nonfiction. He is best known for his "prepper fiction"- Even his fiction books are loaded with survival and self sufficiency techniques that one can learn from. Ron Foster's knowledge in his field is extensive and has well prepared him for writing about survival in a post-apocalyptic world, where society has broken down. He has had many competencies in his background including, being a Gemologist (diamond and colored stone appraiser), an Investment Banker, an Army Soldier and an Air Force Airman. Other skills landed him as a Corporate Administrator and Entrepreneur in many different capacities. Ron has also received a Bachelor of Science Degree from Empire State College in Human Services, with a specialty in Emergency Management Administration and Planning, at the age of 50. He has a Masters of Administrative Science (MAS) Degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University with seven graduate certificates. Certifications include: Alabama Emergency Managers Association (Certified Emergency Manager), National Association Of Safety Professionals (Certified Emergency Management Specialist), FEMA Professional Development Certificate Series awarded. Graduate Certificates in: Administrative Science, Emergency Management Administration, Global Security and Terrorism Studies Certificate, Displaced Persons Certificate, School Security & Safety Administration Certificate, Law and Public Safety Administration, and Non Profit Organization and Management. He also holds a Masters of Science Degree from Capella University in Human Services. Read one book written by Ron Foster, and you'll want to read more. You'll be sure to enjoy, and you'll have a few tricks up your sleeve when your done! Tricks that could save your life.

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Ron Foster

Alabama, USA

© 2017 by Ron Foster

All rights reserved.

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Printed in the United States of America.

Acknowledgements

Pat Lambert

Cheryl Chamlies

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All My Loyal Readers And Subscribers That Support My Efforts

1

Who Lives At Number 7 Ipswich Way?

Lorelei had been taken on by the caravan as part servant/part apprentice by the old hedge wizard Stromboli when she was very young. A displaced orphan of the great coastal wars and the magical plagues that followed had left her alone in the world. Her mother Anneen had once been a respected and powerful Sea Witch who had died on Admiral Clausis’s flagship while fighting a futile last ditch final battle to try to hold back the invading hordes so that both humans and fey could try to escape what had become known as the Withering.

A malevolent invading force on the march and a people who were so evil that even nature magic couldn’t reclaim the wasted lands where their King Voxnar’s ships landed to plunder and steal even the soul of the lands they occupied.

The invaders were Goblin like in appearance and demeanor with many the size of Barrow Orcs. King Voxnar marched his armies relentlessly towards the mountains with dark Warlocks and wizards in the frontlines wielding the black arts of necromancer sorcery blighting and poisoning the land.

The Withering had come as a relentless blood thirsty conqueror from the far south it was said and with them came new plaques and pestilences that the citizens of the five kingdoms were not prepared for. Humans and magical beings alike were sorely ill equipped both in sickened spirit and body to physically ward off the new illnesses they encountered and the thinned ranks of the various kingdoms armies and navies were too weak to defend what once they called home and civilization.

Those refugees that could somehow find a way to avoid disease or violent death eventually managed to flee in a mass of panicked humanity and magical fey creature alike carrying only a few hastily gathered possessions.

They migrated in mindless miserable disorder it seemed, unaware and unprepared towards the distant safety of the Outland Mountains.  The allied native aquatic supernatural beings of all sorts fled to northerly windswept tundra beaches above the snowline as the Orcas and Narwhales fought a rearguard action with the pursuing Withering Navy.

Too late for most, the peoples of the once mighty lands had found out that the only thing that could defeat the Withering and keep them from advancing further were the seasonal onsets of the bone biting winter cold and the blanketing fall of a blizzards cleansing snow.

The ice capped mountains became the destitute traveler's magical refuge as well as a great impassable physical barrier to the Withering and its malignant death spells but new wars broke out with local hostile warlords, trolls and other night lurking creatures who had previously claimed the high mountains and valleys for their ancestral homes. Even more chaos and discord erupted as new swarms of refugees fought on to survive and carve out new homes.

Stromboli had never been much into the arcane arts of wizardry you might say, he was more of an Alchemist in mind and practices would be closer to the fact, although that wasn’t quite right either. He was a self described Flectomancer or what folks called a Tinker Mage. This particular magical discipline involves the manipulation of artifacts and machines created by both human hands and conjured in magical forges.

Stromboli's kind was also known as Steel Mages because of their usefulness at the hearth in reforming metals from damaged or cast off amulets. They also applied their knowledge and magical capabilities to beating the cursed swords of enemies into more useful magical apparatus that retained some of their enchanted selves or properties.

Flectomancers are indeed good tinkers in the sense that they will fiddle with something mechanical by adding bits of this and that to it and then puzzle over it until they create artifacts that do just about anything.

Mostly, this art involves a lot of scrounging, digging around in forgotten places and trading on the road all the while trying to build a rather complex machine artifact and using mage magic to make it function.

Some Flectomancers have wealthy benefactors like Kings and nobility that will sponsor and pay for their research, while others have side jobs to raise money by providing some other form of magic services to finance their day to day existence and incessant need for animal, vegetable, mineral and steel parts of oftentimes very odd and rare properties for their experiments.

They can create a wide variety of things with their unique skills, anything from sun reflectors for ship defense to small mechanical animals for entertainment or specific tasks.

If given enough of their artifacts and proper materials, Flectomancers can indeed be a force to be reckoned with as the sky and their imagination is the limit to invent new magical machines or access forgotten sorcery. Mages like Stromboli who have a specialized knack in enchanting mechanical/clockwork constructions to make them function can create clockwork/mechanical items that literally function against the human world’s concept of physics!

This fact is because the fuel or power source is usually the magic of the mage himself. There is a problem with this however, clockwork/mechanical items require a kind of passive power from the Flectomancer to function: this means that any Clockwork items created by this form of wizardry will not work unless in the presence of the Flectomancer or if he leaves a piece of himself behind. This will drain a portion of his magical capabilities permanently and it is a feat that is rarely undertaken

A Flectomancer career study can follow many paths and he or she can pursue building a vast variety of different devices based on his or her interests or wealth. However, most mages do it just to find out if they can make something new and useful that they can somehow show a profit from.

Clockwork pets are a unique example of Flectomancy feats of unusual inspired magic. These require enchanting the item with a kind of primal based autonomy much like Necromancers must impart to manipulate the undead. However, there is a problem with such a fanciful device. The clockwork pet still requires some power from the Flectomancer to function, as with all clockwork items they create.

This means the Flectomancer can't make these pet-like items for other people as gifts or a guard dog to leave at home. They won't work without the mages presence or by draining irreplaceable bits of his power stored in a battery like device.

That’s partially why Stromboli wasn’t considered a particularly powerful wizard in any way. The truth be told, it was his own fault he had squandered a lot of his powers in his youth powering things he shouldn’t have with bits of himself sealed in self-made batteries for human or witch amusement running his devices. See, when you’re young and a Flectomancer, the desire to test your limits of using technology causes lots of foolish financial decisions with the pocketbook or in his case his magical soul.

Stromboli wasn’t entirely to blame for his less than brilliant wizard astral light or fuel for magical Thaumaturgy. He had a couple rather unscrupulous past sponsors misuse his young enthusiasm for invention and empty pockets for their own selfishness to profit from. His own bad judgments and their devious manipulations coaxing him to do ever more had drained his powers substantially but Stromboli wasn’t bitter about this. He had learned a lot about creating autonomous devices and the harnessing of powers, more so than any other wizard of his ilk.

He mostly made his living these days as a Reclaimer. This was someone recycled magical implements.  Once a year he gathered his caravan wagons and set off on an arduous and dangerous tour of the boulder filled snaky mountain roads seeking out relics and materials to work on in his shop during the long winter to sell for a few pittances here and there on his next spring trading trip.

Occasionally, his traveling band of ne’er do wells would luck up on a wizards or witches estate sale, salvage job or a town reclamation project and then for a bit the money flowed well. When a magical entity died, they left both the objects they handled in life as well as their premises charged with magical traces of power. That didn’t even take into account the items they made while living and practicing the arts that were permanently infused with power like magical daggers, scrying bowls and mirrors, inscribed chalices and talismans, etc.

When it became known that a magical being had died an alarm of sorts went out across the ley lines of the land by announcing its absence. A loss of power you might say. The nearest magical caste system related to that form of magic or entity would then assemble and see about the disposition of the deceased’s arcane tools of the art, lands creatures, servants, pets, etc.

When the world was whole, as the survivors called the pastimes before the Withering drove them from their homes, there was always plenty of supernatural family or magical experts to handle the dead’s belongings and final absolutions. There were also great Wizard and Sorceress governing schools and political offices to sort out the legal and practical matters of great mages and wizard’s books of banned or unbanned lore. The passing of a great witch or any powerful Fey (those of the magical cryptids or supernatural kind) was just a passage in life and a Reclaimer in the role of an Estate handler insured that a great curse or conundrum was not left behind to haunt the living.

Many a desolate witches' cottage deep in the woods or single wizard’s tower precariously clinging to a rocky crag dotted the landscape of Stromboli's yearly travels. He and his crew of assistants usually started out the trail in early March living hand to mouth due to their poverty until a trade was made or an estate liquidation contract came around and supplies could be paid for and replaced.

That Stromboli’s traveling reclamation and repair service had gone through what supplies they had brought home with them from the last trading season to last them the whole winter was well known by the first homes they visited. These witches and wizards who had decided to live away from others of any kind, had their own agendas and personalities for doing so, but they were also particularly apt to being stingy with what little bit of funds they had. Some places Stromboli wouldn’t even stop at or go by anymore from fear of magical retribution for trespassing on their property or old arguments over bad trades they had forced on him colored the atmosphere of congenial relations even if they popped up at a crossroad with a request to trade.

These were the type of people who also regretfully became the majority of his clients in death when a town’s Burgermeister would send a runner to inform Stromboli they needed his services to close out an estate. Those landed nobles with money that still retained hearth witches in the kitchens would be the first to hear a bit of magic had died up the road and would want to help dispose of the problem for profit or to acquire some other healthy benefit.

Not having a standing magical counsel for villagers to go to handle such problems in most Burgs, they were stuck with whatever magical entity they had around to deal with what was referred to as the Presence  that was now dead but not gone in the real sense of the word.

Everyone knows that when an animal or plants cells die they start to emit an odor and stink. When something magical dies, it does the same thing but it also releases magic...

Most non magically minded folks don’t think about this and if they do a lot of times they get it wrong and blame all bad luck they have in their lives to a mystical presence that probably didn’t have anything to do with the mishap in the first place but such is how people come to regard living and dead witches and wizards.

When any kind of wizard or witch dies you can bet there more than a few unfinished experiments going on that can get out of control if not contained or controlled possibly. If say, a wizard dies in a stone castle somewhere that has been magically sealed for his protection to the best of his abilities then you must first find out what protection wards were disabled and died with him and which did not in order to gain entrance.

You also would kind of like to know what he or she most likely would be magically playing or experimenting with, but this was often unknown unless the wizard has a particular notoriety or public reputation. Thaumaturgy, like Stromboli practiced, kind of takes into account all magic and attempts to bend it to a general will, but like all things generalized, a specific higher form of magic can overtake and control it.

Enter Stromboli's Reclamation Service because nobody wanted to try breaking in a curse protected door only to find that the tower contained essence of dead rotting wizard which had some kind of bizarre and dangerous effect on whatever it was they were growing in their experimental labs.

Some of the little towns and a few of the bigger Bergs had made the mistake of trying to help themselves and physically destroy the home of dead wizards or witches to their great dismay by fire or dismantling. Huge mistake, particularly when a young prince had burned a pyromancer (fire) witch’s house that only made even more fuel for the fire that broke out of control and consumed the countryside. Or take for instance when a Lady Magistrate had once decreed an earth wizards home condemned and had it torn down only to find it reproduced itself threefold in depth and dimension by self repairing overnight by magically drawing building materials off of the houses and buildings of the town!

Those with magical wisdom knew to leave things well enough alone that they didn’t understand and they would charge townships yearly fees to put up so called magical barriers they could barely understand between themselves and the unknown powers threatening the general population, but this was costly as well as not necessarily effective.

For a magical artifact scrounger, the idea of being a Reclaimer was exciting but usually short lived work. Hedge wizards like Stromboli who toyed with such a dangerous profession usually tended to hire what might be considered expendable humans and employed lesser magical creatures for the dangerous sometimes suicidal work of breaking wards and recovering bodies and magical implements from an estate.

Humans were said to be grounded and immune these days against many booby trapped spells left for the Fey to be caught by. A human without recognition of magic could handle charged objects without harm where as a person or creature of magical lineage would be drawn into feeding or focusing unknown powers or energies generally for the worse and their undoing.

Gavin was Stromboli’s boy for that particular burglars or recyclers function after he had first carefully sent one of his robotic like devices to knock on a door or try a lock. Since Stromboli himself had mastered the art of both mechanical as well as physical shop made steel or brass locks, his Door Knockers as he liked to call his various mechanical magic powered crawlers were widely acclaimed as state of the art for the jobs he undertook no matter how many times they got killed on first try and were reduced to smoking and melting metal that might take more than a year for him to reproduce.

Since Gavin had no magical blood of his own to produce power or cast spells with, his training was different from any other sorcerers or wizards apprentice in that he could not create magic himself in the practical sense, only reproduce it by using other peoples magically charged objects. He learned like a child learned in infancy to use wooden blocks to form words. Just forming the words with all their ancient symbols or spelling of words was magic enough for him and something that took great difficulty on his part to study and attempt to understand, but finally one day it hit him. Once you understood the symbols for something in different configurations, it could be put inside those little wooden blocks!  A symbol for iron or water could be matched to its proper order and contained with others of like. Once he got used to like = like he learned what doesn’t ever go together with like and so on. A smattering of Alchemy was thrown in his education to deal with what chemicals in the physical world can transmute in the magical world and he was ready for what Stromboli said was his great beginning.

Although mastering such symbolism and combinations was indeed itself a great art, a magical one of sorts at that, he wasn’t expected to be a mindless drone just repeating a well-learned repetition of actions. He was human and therefore he was allowed to use his imagination to stretch the realms of possibility and create his own boxes of mixtures without personal magic inventions that were only dependant on their association and latent powers to create an effect.

A final lightning bolt left in a wand could be repackaged by Gavin and made into a sailors lifeboat flare, etc. A water component combined with a knot of wind could be combined to make a fire extinguisher. A werewolf charm could be converted to keep dogs out of the garden, etc. That was the wisdom Stromboli had tried to instill in his recalcitrant brain and Gavin tried to come up with new original uses for discarded magic to sell to human villagers and fey alike.

When his boss and grumpy old teacher wasn’t taking a half hearted swipe at him in anger or caution  to stay away from something dangerous with his hickory walking stick before he found himself really screwing something up, he was busy telling him what he expected him to master other than just identifying magical properties in found and salvaged