Showdown at the Sorcery Skills Center

Parodic short fiction (2 of 3)

THE STORY SO FAR

Local yokel Rykart, a pleb from the Great Soft Plains, has gained admittance to the most prestigious occult academy in the flat world of the Mighty Discus. Having snuck away from the main assembly, he now strikes out into the interior of the ancient building…

Catch up HERE

Showdown at the Sorcery Skills Center

NOW read on…

Rykart knew in advance which subclass he'd be destined for in the Sorcery Skills Center — a peasant like him would have no chance of being selected for the prestigious Sparkles, or the sinister-but-glamorous Roughcuts — so he'd determined to slip away from the huddle of students in the Main Hall.

As he was slipping out, they all crowded, in an excited chattering hubbub, towards the Artificial Incantation processing subagent, a kind of steampowered boiler-typewriter dressed up in a mage's finery, in order to give away their personal details.

---

Rykart had his own special purpose in being here, in fact, and had no intention of even enrolling in the SSC course. He himself had learnt his magic from a slovenly old hag in a forest hut, a wise soul called Delva 'Honeysuckle' Ghastley, who was rich in lore of the properties of herbs and possessed of a radiant wisdom direct from nature.

She had trained the lad in a far more powerful art than the debased wiles of sorcery taught in this rather effete institution of the Sorcery Skills Center, which today was mostly given over to motivational seminars with titles like 'Putting YOUR Magic to Work on Your Stock Portfolio', 'Divination and Future Investment Instruments', and 'Ten Lifestyle Hacks of the Millionaire Magus’.

Rykart was interested above all in laboratories and libraries, but whether in consulting them or destroying them, this was at present an undecided question. He knew there'd be warding hexes cast here and there to protect against such as him, talismans that would signal the presence of intruders, but he also had a few unexpected enchantments up his ragged burlap sleeve.

Far from the grand halls, the more tawdry spaces of the building's interior began to give off the fetid lived-in stink of reality. He made his way up a corridor that slowly became less ornate, the stonework no longer finely pointed, but rough-hewn and lumpy.

The fine candelabras became tallow candles smoking in shoddy sconces. Elaborate portraits and landscapes on the wall soon gave way to rudimentary sketches lacking perspective: witches and familiars in crude woodcuts shown committing indistinct though possibly obscene acts with nature spirits, and the torture of heretics by eager inquisitors of the Magic Standards Authority, tormentors who drooled on their red-hot irons and made them sizzle.

Finally the corridor expanded into what looked like a tunnel with only the barest masonry work done on it. The walls bore large flaming torches pegged into wooden holders. Air echoed through the space with a low howl, wafting a crazed scent of something nearly animal but not quite. The ground sloped downward, marking a definite descent towards the more primordial levels of this vast keep.

The Sorcery Skill Center’s fantasy of enchantment and control was behind Rykart and above him. Below and ahead was the blunt force of the real thing. Rykart smacked his lips, eager to discover what the depths of this enormous building contained.

A faint noise behind him. He whirled, bringing forth from the folds of his cloak his force, his only protection: a short ashen staff. He wielded his stubby weapon and squinted into the dim light. There behind him, squatting on the ground in a section that still had some windows and candles, which still could be called a corridor and not yet a cavern, was a small and grotesque being.

If he'd been a northman, Rykart would have said it was a gnome or a kobold. If he'd been from the mountains to the south, he would have called it a duende. As a plainsman known for plain speaking, he decided simply that it was a fugly fucker — but vowed at the same time to make no judgements based on superficial appearance, and instead await the event of the encounter before hazarding a judgement.

'Ahem, young lord,' said the creature. It shuffled uncomfortably, casting its mismatched eyes down to the floor. 'Beggin' your pardon an' all, master, but I been sent to discover your hereabouts.'
'And who in the Flappy Netherregions of the Harlot of Asklatoth are you, little fella?' inquired Rykart, rather directly, but not (he estimated) rudely.

'Sire, I'm your assigned thrallpixie, sent for to fetch you back to the assembly hall, an' the selection an' such. They done noticed you was missin' from the throng o’ newbs, sent us, sir, out to, er...' At this the creature's voice trailed out into a hesitant dwindling pause.
'…to fetch me back like a stray lamb,’ finished Rykart. ‘Got a name, mister thrallpixie?'
'Me name's Juk, sire.'
'Just Juk? Any more? Like a nickname, ya know: Julk the Lovely, Juk the Opportune, summin' like that?'
'No sire, beggin' your pardon, like, but I ain't attained the kind o' prestige that merits a nickname or a surname or a patronymic or a pet name or a title or even a bally slur, savin' your reverend grace, sire.'

Rykart sighed at the overwhelming sycophancy offered by this small creature, clearly afraid of physical discipline and cowed into such absement.
'Alright, Juk, you can knock off the honorifics. I ain't nuffink but a slovenly dirt-dweller and lowdown bogswimmer, no better than yourself withal.'
The thrallpixie cringed: 'But sire, you have to be better than meself, or else I wouldn't of been assigned to you. It stands to logic o' reason, dunnit? — I mean, dunnit, me lord?'
'Whatever. We'll discuss the merits of egalitarian forms of address at some other moment, Jukkie-boy, as well as the benefits of self-esteem, a modicum of which is never out of order no matter how lowly one may consider oneself.'
'Well, sire. Understood, me lord. So will you be comin' along?'

Rykart grinned. 'No matey, I will not. Things just got innerestin' down 'ere, and I aim to pursue the trail until it leads me either to death or to that big fat hairy prize that awaits the bold, accordin' to the folk wisdom o' my people. I seek great notions, Juk, great notions indeed. Overwhelmin' knowledge o' things above an' below, the kosmotic epiphany that attaches to the seizure o' objects and tomes containin' the art of aeons. You get me?'
'No, sire, Juk confesses that he don't follow the half part of your learned discourse, young master, an’ so, respectfully...'
'Give over with the sire and master, dammit, before I zap you with me bewitchments enjoinin' silence — and either come along with me, if you're comin', or go back to the main hall an' tattle on me to the higher-ups if that's yer preference. I won't impede you if that's what you decide to do.'

Juk sat there on the dirt floor, tapping chunky fingers into the dust and humming uncertainly.
'Well?' asked Rykart, after some time had passed.
The thrallpixie snivelled unhappily. 'Juk'll be comin' along, then... bein' as we was ordered to attend young master by the bigger masters.' He was unused to making decisions, it seemed, and was resentful at having to make a choice in a choiceless life.

'Splendid,' exhaled Rykart. 'Let's be toddlin' along then, shall we? Say, Juk? Wanna grab us a torch there, so we can light our way through the stinky darkness of this fungussy ol' tunnel, me ol’ matey-chum?'
'Your wish is my command, young lord,' said Juk.

Rykart bit his tongue and made a mental note to educate the little guy in the modalities of respectful but anti-elitist discourse, and so the two of them pressed ahead into the flinty dark.

---

The cavern became a cave complex, a multiplicitous rhizome structure of snaking passages wormholing their way through the bedrock of the ancient keep which housed the Sorcery Skills Center.

In times past it had been the bastion of a great and powerful dark warlock named Franxiskus Alonsio Jacobus Ui Murchú, who, after losing his ancient faith in the Righteous Way, had rechristened himself Baleful Nobodaddy. His vast fortress became known as The Irksome Keep, and was ill-famed for its labrynthine subterranean dungeon in which foul acts were rumored to be committed each day.

Safely ensconced in this network of tunnels and chambers, Baleful Nobodaddy dedicated himself to the accumulation of esoteric knowledge. Alas, he meddled too long and too intently with certain perilous dark forces, which came at length to dissolve his facial features and his already tenuous grasp on sanity.

As he became more powerful, he at the same time became more and more brainsick and less and less physiognomically distinct. That’s to say, he was soon a faceless man in sooth. His identity, his mouth and nose and eyes and individual particularity, were melted into a shapeless mass like gross ball of earwax.

Finally, or so the legend had it, he lost his mind completely at the same time as he gained immense power, a power that would permit him to exert his grip over all the world. But having no idea of what the world even was any more, no real idea of what he'd been seeking with the power that had dissolved his wits and his face, he left his stronghold and wandered away across the wilderness of the Mighty Discus.

The Irksome Keep, abandoned to the centuries, had been claimed in its ruinous state much later by the enchantrapreneur Jorkas Rolando Kindling, who built upon it the structure that first was called (somewhat unimaginatively) Mage College and later, moving with the times, the rather more brand-aware Sorcery Skills Center.

Meanwhile Madame Kindling had herself also fallen victim to the fascinations of the occult, somehow losing her grip on the lifeforce and progressively becoming a shrivelled wraith who was finally walled up in the crypt. The other staff members, under guidance from the stockholders of SSC, determined that she was negatively affecting corporate values and so had to be immured forever, for the sake of market capitalization and the bottom line. And so the raving founder of the instuttion was sealed in the crypt, to dwell eternally on whatever it is the undead fester over in their long and unforgiving undeath.

---

After an hour of winding progress through a series of rootlike passages, guided by some obscure instinct of which he was but dimly aware, Rykart found himself in front of a large iron door with grotesque ancient sigils betokening the unbalanced forces of chaos and annulment that kept it sealed. Juk stood behind him with a flickering torch.

Rykart considered for a moment and then waved his hand, speaking (through his ears and nostrils) a powerful charm of unbinding and diswitchery. Fragments like bats and beaks and razors scattered from the door all across the cavern and there was a moment of silence. Then slowly, the iron door groaned open.

Inside the chamber, a library with crumbled bookshelves and dusty tomes, lit with some eerie brilliance, was a shadowed figure. A tall man stood in that radiance, a man with no features, just a waxy mass of globulation and nightmare where a face should have been.

'Lord No-Face!' gasped Rykart. The faceless one advanced, one step, then two. Rykart knew it was too late now to attempt a resealing of the door. This encounter must be seen through to its end.

'Indeed it is I, young Rykart!’ boomed the great voice — not from the mouthless face, but from all around them. ‘Ever since I learned through my divinations that you were the Chosen One, destined to go against me in my scheme to gain power over this world, I sensed that I would some day soon have to face you in mortal contest.'

‘But you already had power over the world and look what good it did you, you deranged schmuck,’ growled Rykart. 'Besides, you murdered my parents when I was but a babe in arms! And you took my foreskin, for some odd reason…'

'Tisk-tras, 'twas but a trifle,’ sounded out the disembodied voice in guttural scorn. ‘As you suggest, I was rather unhinged throughout that period and perhaps at the time thought I was a birthpriest performing the deskinning ritual.’

The faceless man now stood before them, his waxy head shimmering in Juk’s torchlight. The voice now channeled from this glob of indistinction directly into Rykart’s mind: ‘And I regret leaving you, young Rykart, who was at that moment but a helpless infant, to live on and to grow up only to become my nemesis. Whatever was I thinking?'

‘Shit happens when you’re mental,’ replied Rykart, shrugging. He stood there and calmed his mind, awaiting the onslaught to come. Juk dropped his torch and it guttered out on the dirt floor, leaving only the eerie radiance inside the chamber to backlight the vile apparition of Lord No-Face.

---

COMING UP NEXT TIME

Showdown at the Sorcery Skills Center

In episode three, Rykart fights a duel to the maybe-death and disturbs a fearsome entity far beneath the Sorcery Skills Center. Will evil triumph? Will good prevail?

Will the Rykart-Lord No-Face line of action figures be a success? How many Happy Meals will be sold?

---

MORE LIKE THIS?

Other off-kilter tales from Fionn Flynn include…