Chapter 1
Wherein our Hero is Quite Conveniently, Though not Very Poetically, Orphaned
Noel could almost feel the vomit burning holes in the back of his teeth. His grass-stained hands and wrists ached as they, along with his equally grass-stained knees, supported his diminutive frame. He closed his mouth, sloshed some saliva about, and spat what he hoped was the remainder of his stomach acids into the puddle directly before his downcast face. The oval lump of brown offal reminded him distinctly of a mirror. Having never seen his own face, it was an understandable mistake.
He couldn’t smell the vomit, though. He only smelled smoke.
After a few more seconds to calm his breathing, Noel looked up from his weakened stance to spy the burning building. The House was all he knew to call it, home of the sorcerer Hyperio and his apprentice-slash-footling, Noel. Noel was sixteen if the sorcerer was to be believed (and there was no special reason to believe him), and had been apprenticed his entire waking life. Yet in all that time, he had never learned a spell, incantation, nor even the proper application of a magic word. Presumably, such mysteries were to come after he had mastered the deep umbra of the washing machine and properly ironing the sorcerer’s underpants.
Such mysteries would never unravel now, it seemed. The sorcerer had died in the sanctum of his laboratory, apparently overnight. It was not unusual for Hyperio to work overnight and well into the next day, nor was it odd for him to sleep as late on other days, so Noel thought little of his absence. He fed the sorcerer’s porridge to the cat Diana, knowing that the sorcerer would find out if he ate it himself, then went about his chores. It was not until late afternoon that Noel began to suspect that something was amiss.
He had announced breakfast through the basement’s trapdoor, and was met with silence. Lunch was answered the same way. After placing the goose in the oven for dinner, Noel risked announcing through the trapdoor that the bird would be ready in an hour.
Again. Silence.
He had neither seen nor heard the sorcerer in over sixteen hours. This was practically unheard of. Trembling, he knelt down and finagled his index finger through the metal loop by which the sorcerer opened the trapdoor into his laboratory. Noel had never touched this loop before. As he knelt, paralyzed by indecision, he glanced over at Diana. If ever he so much as contemplated doing something wrong, Diana was sure to be there, watching, judging, and quite possibly preparing a report for the sorcerer. Diana was allowed in the lab. Noel was not. Hyperio frequently spoke to Diana and seemed to understand her responses, but Noel was unsure if this was genuine communication or merely play-acting. The sorcerer certainly always seemed to know if he had misbehaved, but was this due to his mystical omniscience, or a symbiotic relationship with a feline familiar?
“Master,” he called, his voice breaking for the first time in longer than he could remember. “Master, I have not seen you all day. I’m worried.”
Again. Silence.
And so, Diana staring all the while, Noel tensed his bicep and lifted the trapdoor. Below was completely dark. The candles had long burned out, it seemed. Noel called again and again, and received no answer. Perhaps the sorcerer was mediating and required darkness. Perhaps he had teleported to another plane without telling him, expecting the boy to continue his work regardless. Perhaps he had merely fallen asleep after a late night and did not desire to be disturbed. Whatever the cause, Noel was too frightened to bring a fresh candle down with him. Instead, he crept down the cold stone stairs into a room he had never visited before.
“Master,” he whispered furtively, his arms extended and his eyes wider than the abyss into which he looked. Still nothing. He was taking the stairs at about one step every thirty seconds, terrified that at any moment Hyperio might appear and bellow that this was a test, and he had failed. Noel still remembered the sorcerer’s one-hundred-and-forty-seventh birthday two years past, when he had surprised his master with a breakfast tray. He had entered Hyperio’s bedroom unbidden, only twenty minutes after sunrise, to find the sorcerer already awake and sitting up in bed. The old man whirled furiously, eyes agape and aglow with otherworldly anger. Brokenly, he explained that he had been polishing his wand by the light of the risen sun, and that stupid Noel had foolishly interrupted the ritual. He was beaten black-and-blue for that one, and the sorcerer threatened (not for the first time) to turn Noel into a cat, like Diana. Diana was supposedly the sorcerer’s concubine until she displeased him by growing old, at which point he had transformed her into her present form. Considering how well she was treated, however, and that he himself was covered in sores and newborn bruises at the time, Noel saw little danger in that particular threat. He rarely did.
He certainly felt threatened now, though, as he descended the fifth step. A mild purr from behind told him Diana was still watching. Was that purr a warning? Perhaps it was not too late to turn back. Noel took another step.
“Master?” he hissed again. “It’s almost dinner time, o sorcerer. You have not eaten all day.” He heard something: a creak? Or a murmur? Or a moan? He froze, his right foot in midair above the next step, pumping his very existence into his eardrums, listening. It sounded again; some faint creaking from somewhere in the basement. “Master?” he redundantly whispered again, planting his foot on the next step.
Unfortunately, as he had been listening, Diana had been prowling, slinking halfway down the stairs before deciding to take a rest on the sixth step. Noel was in the process of setting his right foot on the cat rather than the step, when she screeched, turned, and bit into his cloth-sack shoes, scratching as she did so. Betraying the confidence of the entitled, She did not move from her place on the step as she attacked. Noel, wishing to avoid both damaging the sorcerer’s cat and his poorly-clad toes, instinctively drew his foot up and away even as his weight continued to shift forward. This concluded in a brief and painful tumble that left Noel unconscious on the basement floor for several hours.
When he at last awoke with all the concomitant head-throbs and eye-spins associated with this condition, Noel was immediately distracted by a trio of overpowering odors: two familiar, one new. The new scent was a sickeningly insistent sweetness, a putrid miasma that reminded him of a pheasant that had been left uncooked and uncured in the back of the pantry for too long. It was the scent of death, and his unfamiliarity with it was a rare blessing in his life, now ended. A more familiar scent wafting from the same direction, though never before experienced in this magnitude, was of defecation. Evidently, someone or something had died and gone to the bathroom in the basement while he had been sleeping.
The third scent was the smoke, and it was coming from above.
A faint light was now flickering in the basement, and as Noel slumped to his knees he saw the shadows of multifarious arcane objects dancing about in the peculiar light. At the room’s center, he saw what was almost certainly a robed figure, dangling and spinning very slightly in the infinitesimal glow. The figure was suspended there by a rope, creaking. Hyperio was dead.
A loud snap drew Noel’s focus up the stairs, where a overpowering orange glow threw the smoke-scent into wildly obvious relief. The sorcerer was dead, the House was burning down, and it looked very likely that Noel was soon to express his mild admiration for the Pharaohs of old by following his master into the afterlife.
He could not remember what impetus had finally convinced him to crawl up those stairs and creep out of the burning building, but here he now was, having traveled into broad daylight during his unconsciousness, almost prone upon the beautiful green grass that he had never felt before and seen only from a distance, littering it with his corrosive fluids.
“Mrowl,” came from nearby. Noel sat back on his knees and spied Diana sitting at the far border of his puddle of sick. The cat examined the filth, then eyed the boy and cocked her head to the side as if in silent condemnation. Noel was feeling more than a little vulnerable at the time, and was not up for handling the judgment of a housecat. Shortly after, she coughed a hairball into the mess, and Noel thought that perhaps he was assuming more than he aught regarding feline social mores.
He looked up. The sky was a piercing blue, almost electric. The light, glistening green grass was a far cry more impressive than that moldy old curio he was never able to satisfactorily sponge. A hundred yards away to his right, a vast pool of water sat quietly, patient and infinite and deadly. Without yet knowing why, Noel shuddered and leaned away ever so slightly.
Then he looked to his left.
Not a mile away, vast and enormous to the naked eye, stood a giant metropolis. Rectangular buildings, massive and virtually identical, cropped up at various altitudes, each one of them so cyclopean as to crush the old House with a stray thought. As if to echo this point, the third floor of the House cracked and collapsed in on itself.
Noel stood, the creak of his knees reminding him instantly of the creak of the rope. He looked at the burning House. He looked at the lake. He looked at the city.
He looked at the cat.
Diana stared at him, the snide contempt apparently vanished in the flames, replaced with a vacant and superficial curiosity. She turned away and stalked off toward the city.
Noel had never been one for making his own decisions.