Genuine Magic

By Silence Leaflin

Tannor Fitzgerald is a young scholar and supernatural investigator consumed by crushing skepticism and apathy. Employed by a prestigious university in the medieval country of Falloris, he searches his homeland for evidence of the impossible… real magic. After countless disappointments and the loss of his beloved brother to a war he wants nothing to do with, his hope of finding the extraordinary is waning. But when darkness, rain and a weary soul forces Tannor to seek refuge in a small village inn, something stirs him for the first time in years. An enigmatic stranger with surreal, piercing blue eyes and his beautiful companion have taken shelter there, and Tannor cannot help but stare. His scholar’s curiosity and tenacious persistence will not allow him to walk away. Tannor’s life is about to change forever. He is about to embark on one final journey in his quest to discover genuine magic, and he may get more than he bargained for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304637512

Book preview

Genuine Magic

Genuine Magic

Copyright © 2013 Silence Leaflin

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-304-63751-2

Chapter 1

I am Tannor Fitzgerald, the third and most unremarkable son of a wealthy businessman and a fragile, self-serving young woman who married well before they were worldly enough to know what marriage truly entailed. I was rather tall, one might say, and pathetically thin, giving away the fact that I had never wielded a sword a single day in my life. My hair was as black as the robes I preferred to wear, falling down around my ears and about my eyes in unruly waves and curls. Perhaps my eyes were not quite as dark, for I was told that in the sun they could appear very nearly hazel. My pale skin, slight frame, and unmarred hands gave away my chief occupation as a struggling scholar, as did my decidedly neat handwriting and impeccable spelling.

My father, Francis Fitzgerald, was a tall man of nearly six feet whose austere countenance unfortunately bore the leathery skin and brittle hair of the laborers’ fields he thought his deftly acquired wealth would adequately hide. Nevertheless, after making his silent fortune involving himself in the illegal dealings of a far more able friend of his, he had managed to snare the wealthiest piece in his entire treasury, my mother.

Her name was Isabelle, a name that was as poised and refined as she was not, and she loved my father despite his wholly common blood and upbringing. What she loved about him I, to this day, cannot say. I see nothing of value in the man except perhaps the one or two wise comments he could manage before dinner and before the wine he always had with it had skewed his reason. My mother was, for lack of a better word, dull. She had her needlework, her flowers, her flowing silk and satin dresses, her seven cats, her two dogs, her circle of tea-drinking and drivel-spouting friends, and of course, her wonderful wit, as my father always said. What he called wit, I called obvious references to things which did not and would never matter to anyone but herself.

My oldest brother Anton was killed in the war between my homeland and Girros, our sister country to the north that had once been united with us under one flag. The ancient, powerful and justly ruled land of Rimorea had been split very near in half two decades prior by the king’s sons, each of them claiming to be the true king. The conflict sent the two princes to opposite sides of the country, dividing her and birthing two transitional entities known as Girros and of course my home, Falloris. The older prince and now king of Girros, cited his age and therefore his clear legal right to the throne. The younger prince and self-proclaimed king of Falloris chose to call to light his brother’s misgivings, faults, failures, insecurities, and any other number of reasons why he was not fit to rule. In my opinion, the war that resulted from their selfish argument had killed enough sons of both Girros and Falloris for me to say that neither of them was fit to rule in any real capacity. And yet, our king treated his citizens well enough in a day-to-day sense. I could not comment on the ruler of Girros. I had never been there myself.

Anton was a good man, but like all good men who reside in my now soured and cynical mind, he died well before his time. I remember still all the stories he would tell to my brother and me each time he returned home from some sweeping battle, some overwhelming victory. His charismatic and passionate words inspired our brother Jerome to fight as he did once he was old enough to enlist. I still wonder whether or not that was his intention, to stir him to such action. The stories around the dimming light of our cooking fire in the den of a meager cabin where we retreated from out parents to share such tales were always the stuff from which heroes were born and legends crafted. But his tone would change once Jerome retired to bed.

I wondered why he took such a different tone with me, questioning the validity of the pride and victory he always described to Jerome. But no, he had not lied, either to Jerome or to himself. He had merely held back the whole of the truth. War was sometimes exhilarating, yes… sometimes grand and inviting… so long as you were the victor. But there was another side of war, and that was the side Anton chose to impart to me. Perhaps he knew that I was not one to swallow fairy tales without spitting them back and refuting them in some sort of academic, intellectual capacity. All I know is that the world grew dark in his eyes whenever he spoke to me of the things he had seen. For that – for stealing the light from my brother’s eyes – I will never forgive either of Rimorea’s righteous and self-serving kings. I blame them even more harshly for the robbery of that than for the taking of his life. One day, Tannor, he said to me one night as our fire faded out. One day I’m just not going to come home. One day… my luck will run out. With that, he set out once again to rejoin his regiment, and that was the last time we spoke. He came home to us in a box. An ornately decorated box, due to his noble heritage, but a box, nonetheless. Anton would have hated that box. It was not at all his style.

Jerome, who sits closest to me in age, still fights on Fallorian lands for king and country, undaunted by many who say the war has naught to do with us and everything to do with the political blunders of two spoiled royal princelings. I respected my brothers, however, for while I had not the stomach for war and agreed with my peers when they said it was a hopeless power play, my brothers truly believed in the older prince’s claim to the throne and supported many of his political views. At least, I thought, they are not charging blindly ahead on patriotism alone, but rather have thought it over with some seriousness. Once Anton was dead, however, I was once again quick to denounce the war and our king.

Perhaps it is the commonness and lack of ambition my parents constantly displayed that pushed me, willing or not, towards my true calling. Strange and insignificant as it might seem to most, my current employment found me at a Fallorean university not one hour from the mansion my parents were content to let their minds rot in. I, you see, was a documenter of supernatural sights and circumstances. I engaged in this pointless pursuit in the hopes of one day finding something real, something beautifully real, to bring back to my alma mater and say definitively that magic exists in this world.

I was habitually a solitary person, allowing my scholarly studies to consume most of my free time. There were a few acquaintances at the university with whom I often spoke, but none that I would have called true friends. I usually kept to myself, door closed and uninviting, reading and studying, writing and recording, only emerging from my cluttered room to eat and bathe. I even fell asleep sometimes on my writing desk, awakening the following morning to the smell of a thick taper that had long since burned out and the scratchy feel of the parchment that was stuck to my face.

Then there was Marguerite. She was around my age and a budding scholar herself. I dare say that I shared her fervor regarding most things… most things. Her interest in me, however, was wholly unrequited. I simply did not have time for such distractions. Always she was bothering me with this and that, trying to find any excuse to speak to me or to protest that there was some earth-shattering reason why we should study together on any given day. If I heard one more time that daisies were her favorite flowers, I would scream. She was a bother. Perhaps she was a beautiful bother, with her long blonde hair that had the slightest wave to it and her large green eyes, but a bother nonetheless. Never mind that she looked good enough in her slender blue, green, or brown dresses and never mind that the billowing cloak she wore made her look as mysterious and enigmatic as a queen from another realm. Never mind all that. I had work to do.

Though my first few years were spent poring over books of creatures, spells, legends, superstitions and any other knowledge the university had archived about magic and its various incarnations, I was soon out on the dusty roads of Falloris, hoping to see something amazing. In less than two years, I was already hardened and altogether soured by my experiences. Near as I could tell, there was about as much magic in Falloris as there was support to end the war, and of that there was precious little.

Oh, there had been calls, alerts, promises and intrigues enough to last a lifetime, but none of them had ever produced anything but misunderstood peasants and decent actors pulling a prank or managing a ruse. Last year, I had journeyed to see the werewolves in the southern Hills of Shev, only to find that they were, in fact, very real, very ordinary, and very hungry wolves. I then traveled to the Salkai Flats of the west to find that the grass trolls that had been stealing everyone’s food were, in actuality, nothing more than well-fed, oversized