Wingheart: Luminous Rock

Chapter 7: Fire, Wind, and Water

Magnus said goodbye to his brother on a lighter note and made his way to the clearing's edge. Here, a dirt slope coursed down into a much smaller glade veiled by the trees around it. Cecil could barely be spotted at the base of the slope, seated on a fallen tree. He turned and raised a hand in greeting at the sight of the boy standing high above him.

Magnus returned the gesture and skidded down the slope into the glade, shouldering branches out of his path. It was considerably darker here than in the shelter clearing. The forest domed around this place so densely that light was scarce to filter through. But in patches where trees had already cast off their leaves or where their branches parted in windows to the sky, the sun's rays cascaded down in resplendent, celestial shafts.

"Hello, Magnus," Cecil welcomed cheerily. His back was half turned to the boy. "Glad you could join me." He was toiling at a stocky branch in his lap, whittling its end to a spear-sharp tip with the blade of a small pocketknife.

"What are you doing there?" Magnus pried, coming around the fallen tree to face his former guardian.

"Just setting ourselves up." Cecil snapped shut the knife and sheathed it in his pocket. With the sharpened branch in hand, he trod into the center of the glade, where an identical branch had already been impaled upright in the earth. He speared the second branch into the ground a few feet away from the first, then returned to the fallen tree.

"To begin with," said Cecil, crouching to retrieve a gnarled staff from the ground beside the tree trunk, "why don't you tell me what you think this is?"

Magnus accepted the staff as it was handed to him. It was near five feet in height, carved of a profusely knotted wooden stalk and embellished with an impressive array of fine gems. On the head of the stalk, four finger-thin branches sprouted from the wood to enwrap a flame-red hunk of crystal, gripping it fast in place.

"Honestly," Magnus dragged his speech, reluctant to admit the undeniably fantastical appearance of the staff, "it looks a lot like something a sorcerer would use."

Cecil's dry smile broadened. "What if I told you that your guess wasn't far from the truth?"

"I probably wouldn't believe you," Magnus said candidly, "but after yesterday, I don't seem to have a very accurate idea of what I should or shouldn't believe in."

"That's quite understandable." Cecil gave a sharp nod. "You'll find that much of what you may have once considered fiction no longer seems so implausible. You must simply open your mind..." He reacquired the staff from Magnus and portentously extended its crystal headpiece. "...or allow me to open it."

When the crystal suddenly gleamed, Magnus thought it no more than the light of a sunray caught in its prism. Then a flame flickered to life on the surface of the gem and devoured the headpiece. As Cecil lanced out the burning crystal like an iron spear still lit by the fires of its forge, a ribbon of flames leapt from the staff, attacking the first of the branches impaled in the center of the glade. Torched, the branch shuddered and collapsed into the dirt. The blaze evaporated as abruptly as it had materialized, without a smolder left behind.

Magnus was rattled and silenced by disbelief. He couldn't even begin to fathom how Cecil could have propelled fire out of a crystal. "What—" he stammered. He raised a shivering hand toward the staff. "What exactly was that?"

"Would you believe me if I told you?" Cecil asked sternly.

Magnus took a long breath. "I've seen and heard enough to know that I can't stay a skeptic," he said eventually. "Tell me anything."

"In that case," Cecil replied, returning to his seat on the fallen tree, "what you have just seen is what one might refer to...as a magic spell."

Magnus bit his lip with painful reluctance, but quickly shrugged off the feeling. "Fine." He gestured to the staff's crystal headpiece. "Then how? How did that thing catch fire?"