The Wizard's Soul

 Hello Friends, I thought of the idea for how magic works for this world and I really just wanted to write a story just about kind of that idea. I ended up really liking where the story started to go by the end so I was thinking about making some other stories in this same universe. I don't think I'm going to do a sequel per se unless people want one just because I didn't intend for multiple stories with these characters I kinda wanna just make a bunch of one off stories with random people just all low key in the same world, maybe I'll share some side characters or have people react to blowback from other short stories, idk just think it'd be cool to like populate a world like that. Anyway here's the first one.

-Arbitrary

The Wizard’s Soul

It took the boy’s family a while to realize that he was special. For all intents and purposes he was a normal boy. It was only when he started to describe what other people look like that his parents realized the abilities he had. The boy was born with a magical ability that allows him to see other people’s spirits. Depending on the strength of the person’s soul he may not even be able to tell what they really look like.

The boy’s parents were desperate to keep him safe; they kept him on the family farm and out of the major city so that he would never be found out by the Mage’s council. The Mage’s council was the greatest power in the nearby city. They had been given a castle and the surrounding lands by the crown in exchange for protection in the form of a personal wizard for each lord in the kingdom. Now they scour the land for anyone with an ounce of magical potential so they can bring them to the citadel to learn magic. 

His parents weren’t necessarily opposed to him learning with the wizards, but they didn’t want to give up their son, they wanted to raise him themselves first. Once he was old enough they intended to bring him to the citadel in person. However, the boy’s abilities started to get harder to hide, as a baby they could pass off his strange abilities as just the shameless actions of a child, but once he aged his visible fear at the sight of the mayor or other various members of society was far more difficult to explain away. Normally souls are a beautiful glow of light blue like a cloudless sky, but people often sacrifice parts of their soul for money or power, and what takes the place of the beautiful blue aura is a deep fog so dark that no light can pass through it; it terrified the boy. In some cases the ability was helpful to his family. For instance, when they were meeting strangers. If someone knocked on the door with a pure soul they could open without fear of being swindled, but he could always spot a con man. 

One morning he woke up with a shudder, an ominous fog was pouring out of the forest. From it emerged two monsters with deep black eyes and a dense black fog covering their physical bodies. The other townspeople hurried out of their houses and dropped to their knees. His parents rushed to his side telling him that the wizards of the citadel had come in person to take him back to the city so he could learn how to control his magic. He tried to explain what he was seeing but his parents could only see the wizard’s physical forms, radiant and glowing with beautiful magic energy. The sight alone was enough to enchant non-magical people into obedience.

Reluctantly, the boy went with the Wizards, if he ran away his parents would likely suffer the consequences in his stead. He was silent the whole way back to the city taking the time to study his captors. In person they were beautiful, perhaps the most perfect human being’s that he had ever seen. It seemed that they had no imperfections at all, but within, he could see that they had given up nearly all of their soul. They were infected with a deep evil that was poisoning their hearts and minds. The only thing that could push this energy away was the positive force of his own soul, allowing him to see just a few feet in front of him as he was enveloped in the wizards’ darkness.

As they approached the city he was overwhelmed by the different auras and souls he could see. It was a huge mixture of bright sky blue and a deep black that swirled together, so dense he couldn’t make out which energy was coming from which place. The one thing that he knew for certain was that the primary source of the darkness was coming from the citadel. The headquarters for the mage’s council and said to be the pinnacle of magic in the whole world. All he could see was a menacing black smoke completely covering the tower, all of its beauty shrouded by the lack of souls. 

Soon he was being led into the building itself, he shared a room with 11 other students, all with varying amounts of their souls still intact. They introduced themselves to him and the boy could tell that they were just normal kids around his age, blissfully unaware of the damage being done to their souls. The next day he started his classes, at first it was just about the history of the Citadel. They learned how wizards were prosecuted, hunted, and murdered by the crown for a hundred years, before the wizards unified together and fought back, eventually winning themselves the castle they now call home. Since then, they have raised generations of wizards to send out across the world to protect the people and help rulers lead. The boy shuddered at the idea of one of these monsters in every throne room in the kingdom, there was no telling how far this poison had spread. His instructor also warned of the dark mages, who had corrupted the citadel from the inside, and were cast away now living in isolation. The boy didn’t even want to begin to imagine the evil that black magic users must emanate if they were feared by even the wizards.

His next class was his introduction to magic, to start he was just lectured about the rules and specificity of magic. Every spell or incantation has certain prerequisite elixirs and symbols that have to be made and drawn before any magic can take place. They spent the majority of the day learning about these recipes and runes but at the end of the class they were allowed to attempt their first spell.

He was nervous to utilize this power that these people he feared so much were showing him. He prepared his entire set up but before he took the final steps he took a look around the room. As the students were performing their incantations he could see their souls being sucked into symbols that they had drawn, powering them until they glowed with a radiant blue energy, their bodies being left with only darkness. The boy started to panic, realizing that it wasn’t that the wizard’s were necessarily bad people, but that magic was poisoning their souls. He quietly asked to go to the bathroom and ran down the hallway. He had no intention of staying here any longer, regardless of if they were aware this magic, that they worship so dearly, was killing them.

Without bothering to stop by his room to collect his things, he slipped out of the citadel amongst the commotion of the school day. Once he was free from the dark smoke surrounding the citadel he started to run. When the teacher noticed he hadn't come back from the bathroom they would realize that he ran. He had no idea what the punishment for running away from class would be but he couldn’t risk them using magic on him or even worse forcing him to use magic.

The boy kept running until he was out of the city entirely. He ran into the forest so that he would be harder to find if anyone came looking for him. As he was running through the trees he could see a faint light deep within the forest. It looked inviting and kind and he rushed towards it hoping that he could find the source of the light. He walked for a full day and night before he rested. The light was getting closer and it was starting to surround him in a pleasant mist. On the second day his pace slowed a little; he had pushed himself too hard and hadn’t brought any food with him so he was starving. Fortunately, he happened across a small village.

The villagers were kind and welcoming. One of the women in the village gave him a bowl of stew and let him sleep in her cottage. When he asked about the mist that was surrounding the  whole village the woman got very quiet. She told him about a necromancer that lived deep in the woods that had enchanted the forest and that the black fog creeping towards their village was one of her spells to bring them bad luck. He was confused, but learned early enough to assume if he saw something differently than other people it was probably something to do with his magic.

The next morning before the woman could wake up the boy slipped out the front door and headed towards the light again. It was about midday when he arrived at a little cottage with an almost blinding light emanating from inside. The front door opened and the light started to rush towards him. Blinded by the oncoming light, he fell to his knees and held his arms up to protect himself. The light stopped about 3 feet in front of him and he could finally see through it and the source of the light.

The great blinding light was radiating from the body of an old lady with flaky skin and one eye. Deep wrinkles mixed with cuts and scrapes everywhere along her body with deep scars running across her face and up and down each of her extremities. She was missing her left leg and what was left was just a rotting stub wrapped in a cloth. The boy broke down in tears explaining that he could see people’s souls and he was running from the wizards and that he didn’t know who she was but that he knew that he could trust her.

The old lady took him into his cottage and explained to him who she was. She had the same ability as the boy, she referred to them as soul seers. She was also brought to the citadel, but instead of running she refused to practice any magic, demanding to speak with the elders to explain what they were doing. Each black spell takes a part of your physical self to power the spell and that can be painful and scary to witness, but each spell strengthens your soul and will give you strength and happiness in the next life. Dark magic only looks dark because it is powered by flesh and blood as opposed to using your soul’s purity as the fuel. The magic they teach at the citadel might make you live long and might make you look beautiful, but you will feel the cost of those actions in the next life. Turns out they knew. They were sacrificing their lives in the next life to extend theirs here and give them unnatural power and beauty. They lived far longer than normal humans, possibly forever, but when they ran out of their own souls they needed to start taking from others, so they started the school in an attempt to create eternal life. The young students going there with aspirations of becoming great wizards for noble houses were actually just fuel for the council’s selfish and short sighted gains. The old lady tried to expose the council to the rest of the citadel, but was cast out of the citadel and branded a heretic and a dark mage. A few wizards followed her and attempted to run but they had all been hunted down and murdered. Either by wizards, or by hunters buying into the idea that black magic is the ultimate evil. At the end of her explanation the old lady took the boy's hands and asked him what he wanted to do now.

“I want to stop them. I want to stop all of them from using magic ever again.”