The Wizard-King

A One Shot

A Road Winding Between Trees Towards a Distant Cottage by Jacob van Ruisdael

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'You never were satisfied with your lot,' Sara said. She had grown old in the years Hesh had been away yet he had not and to him it felt like his sister had aged thirty years over night.

'And you were always content with too little,' Hesh said. The stool was hard and splintered, the table stained with old blood from butchery and surgery. He considered asking whose it was but that was mere conversation, an excuse to keep talking and that was not why he was here.

'You were miserable and you're still miserable even as you sit there looking no different than the day you left, how is that possible?' Sara grimaced, she could smell something foul about Hesh but stopped short of uttering her suspicions. Instead, she reached for the kettle and poured out another cup of nettle tea. She added a lick of honey to the clay cup.

'Yes, well. Better die rich and miserable than poor and miserable,' he clapped once and his own cup filled itself with wine from his cellar, four hundred miles away.

Sara hissed at his display, 'Vile.'

'You won't think it vile when I shower you and your family with gold.'

'I don't want your gold, and besides what am I meant to do with gold? All a bit of coin does is make someone a target on the roads,' Sara sank into the rocking chair, nursing her nettle tea.

'Suit yourself, I'm sure your man won't refuse my offer.'

'He will,' she said after a pause.

Hesh smiled tightly and sipped his wine, a Talavar 208, a cup of which cost more than the cottage Sara lived in. 'Where is your man, and the children?'

'Out hunting and don't think you'll be here to see them. Not a chance I'm allowing a damned magician anywhere near my children, even if you are my brother,' Sara cast daggers across the room, though they were far less effective than Hesh's own.

Hesh sat on the old stool he remembered their father constructing back before Sara was born and considered the stones of the cottage cut and placed by a distant ancestor. He rose, 'If that is your wish,' and headed out like he had thirty years ago.

Hesh leaned on his staff, the brilliant white crystal shimmering with gold like stars in the sky. The remnants of his family cottage lay before him, the old stones laden with moss, the roof timbers long since rotten and collapsed. The grave stones to the side had all split and cracked in the many, many winters left untouched. He strolled over to find his sister's but none of the words had survived the centuries. He pinched his nose trying to count the years since his last conversation with Sara but it was like trying to catch the morning mist. The gravestones were rough and damp, the ivy thick over the stones. He wondered who had carved them and if the last of his family to die had ever had one erected, if they'd even been buried themselves.

It had taken a day of argument with his Crownsguard to be there alone, foolish warnings about bandits or assassins or wild beasts. He was Hesh the Undying Conqueror, Commander of the Elements, Wizard-King, no two-bit rogue would have a chance against him. He stepped over the threshold into his childhood home, his sister's home, his grandparent's home, but all there was were weeds and animal dens. Any trinkets had long been pilfered or rotten away.

He had not intended to visit the cottage, not again, but his feet had taken him there of their own accord, and away from his intended destination. Perhaps it was for the best.

There was a crunch of dry sticks to his right. A rustle of leaves sounded behind him. Hesh backed out of the ruined cottage to see three men surrounding him. Two were dressed in little more than rags and wielding hatchets, the third wore a clean tunic and a castle forged sword.

'Surrender the staff, old man,' the swordsman gnashed.

'Old?' Hesh frowned.

The two in rags sniggered. The larger of the two took a step closer.

'You look like you have a bit of money on you too, leave that,' the swordsmen pointed to the ground with his sword.

'I think not,' Hesh said.

'You don't have a weapon.'

'I don't need one.'

The swordsman laughed, 'Kill him.'

The larger of the two ragmen charged and within three steps burst into flames, the crystal on Hesh's staff glowed orange. With a swish of his staff the other ragman crumpled into ash and cinders leaving only the swordsman.

'Damn vagrants,' Hesh hissed and sent a crackle of lightning coursing towards the last of his assailants. The swordsman fell, a blackened husk of a man, his molten sword starting a small fire on the forest floor. It had been many years since Hesh had had to use such crude manners. A part of him had missed it, but another felt the gnawing exhaustion of sameness. Such power had built his kingdom, yet still he yearned for more. Ever since he was a boy he'd wanted more, more food, more strength, more day, more coin, more power, all that and more he'd acquired yet still it was as his sister had said all those centuries ago. Hesh was never satisfied with his lot.

There was nothing for him amongst the crumbling stone and crawling ivy. That life, his prior life was dead along with his sister, his nieces and nephews and who ever they beget, and them and them and them for however long it had been. He wondered why the cottage had been abandoned but then he remembered a nighttime tale his father would tell of how one of his ancestors built the cottage after fleeing some disaster. Perhaps a disaster, a fire, brigands, a blight, had washed through and driven his sister's progeny away. Either way, there was nothing for him amidst the old stones.

Hesh headed into the woods behind his old home. He did not think of where he was going, though his feet took him there anyway. Those woods that he'd played in as a boy, lain traps for squirrels, and later hunted deer refused change. New trees sprouted from acorns and spinning seeds, old trees withered or fell in storms, but the wood remained, wild and calm, chaotic and serene. Hesh had changed, and he had not. The Wizard-King, once a nameless boy from nowhere of note, ruled the world with unrivalled strength and unparalleled knowledge. A timeless king for a timeless empire. Yet still the thirst for more gnawed him. Every sage from the archipelagoes of the east to the deserts of the west, to the mountain tops of the north and the unending frosts of the south, had told him the same. “You are the carrier of a curse, Wizard-King. The Curse of the Gods.” Only in his three hundredth and fiftieth year did he understand yet it took him many more centuries to act.

Soon he found himself on the path he had trodden all those years ago, the path had not changed, no new trees grew upon it, the roots that criss-crossed then did so now and the same blackberry bushes lined the path flowering evermore. Such a simple thing, a blackberry bush, Hesh had always expected something grander, something more delicate. Moth orchids or rose bushes. A demonstration of skill, but then such plants deep in the trees would only attract attention. He walked on.

Hesh had gone beyond the point of return. His destination had been elsewhere, another mage shutting themselves off from the world like so many others since Hesh's rise. If the sages knew he was cursed perhaps the mages could remove it for it was no curse of flesh, no curse of mind, no disease to be expunged or rot to be cut out, it was deeper. He understand that much. Yet he trod a path he had not trod since before, when he just a nameless boy with too much ambition. Hesh commanded the elements, fire, earth, air, water and all they beget. He could scry the firmament, beckon the winds to blow, the droughts to cease, the sun to dim. A thousand legions awaited his command, and a legion of wives served his whims. And yet still he wanted more, that was his curse. Hesh walked on and when he lifted his head he knew he had arrived.

Before him stood a cottage, the same that had stood so long ago, with pale grey stone and freshly yellowed thatch. Steam rose from the chimney in regular black gouts and a woman's humming echoed through the shuttered windows. Garlic and thyme grew against the walls while chickens pecked the earth.

Hesh strode to the door and knocked twice.

'Come in,' a cheery young woman called.

Hesh twisted the wrought iron knob and the door open in a silent arc.

'You know the rules, fetch me something,' the woman smiled, her plush lips painted black.

Hesh stepped away and search for the chicken hut. There he found three eggs and brought them back to the cottage.

'Set them in the bowl above the poultices,' the woman poked at the fire in her stove. Sparks flared as she added a new log. The iron door slammed shut and she set a kettle on the stove. 'I take it you want for meat? And something more?' a coy smile crossed her lips. Her eyes were as he remembered, one bluish grey, the other red speckled with yellow. Thick curls of shimmering black still tumbled over her shoulders.

'You haven't aged,' Hesh said.

'Nor have you, from a certain time that is,' she sat in a rocking chair. Balls of undyed wool sat in a basket to her left while to her right were sacks of feathers and down. She gestured for Hesh to sit.

Hesh perched himself on the stool before the stove, the heat making his skin prickle. 'I have a curse and would like you to remove it.' The Wizard-King stared at the stone slab floor.

'What is the curse?' She leaned back, forming a triangle with her hands. She viewed him through that triangle with her red eye speckled yellow.

'The curse of always wanting more,' Hesh said.

'That is not your curse, that is not a curse at all. That is merely your nature. I ask again, what is your curse?'

Hesh hesitated and for the first time in an age he had no idea what to say. Had the sages been wrong, did he not carry the Curse of the Gods. Cursed to always want more, more power, more sacrifice, more worshippers, more world. 'It is the curse of the gods –'

'But you are no god, you are a man. A very powerful man but still a man.'

'I am undying.'

'That does not make one a god. Do you remember when you first sat there?'

Hesh did but he failed to see why that mattered now. 'What has that got to do with this?'

The woman cocked her head to one side and regarded him as one would a babe trying to grab a doll. 'All that knowledge yet no wisdom.'

'I will not be mocked!' Hesh rose, the stool crashed to the stone behind him. Lightning crackled in his palm.

The woman rose a finger and the lightning dissipated, 'The kettle's boiled. Be a dear and pour me a cup.'

Hesh clenched and unclenched his jaw but try as he might he could not summon the elements, he could not even channel a drop of unaspected magic. The kettle screeched, like his rage, and he poured it out into her cup and then into his. The kettle quietened and Hesh set the stool upright and sat down after passing her the cup.

'Thank you,' she set the cup on the low table at her side. She leaned forward, her strange eyes alluring him as they had long ago, 'I granted you that power, boy, I did not gift it to you.'

'Damn your subtlety of words.' Such things had not mattered to Hesh for longer than he could remember. Did such things matter to sages, he had to conclude that they did. 'What is the curse of the gods?'

'Immortality.'

Hesh did not understand.

'Such things are not a curse to the gods, immortality is their nature but it is not your nature.'

'But you are immortal.'

She smiled but said nothing on that subject.

'I never asked to be immortal,' Hesh remembered. It had been so long he had forgotten the first and only other time he'd visited this... woman.

'No, you didn't,' she smiled lustfully. The woman crossed her long thin legs and began to rock.

The day, that fateful day, flooded back in Hesh's mind. The steps he took, the words he said, the three eggs he had collected for her that time too. All of it. His father had been killed on the road for a scant amount of coin he'd made at market selling furs. Sara was too young to understand and Hesh too young to do anything about it yet stupid enough to think otherwise. He'd been beaten up by the same men but even brigands knew not to kill children and so Hesh limped home, beaten and embarrassed. The worst things a boy could be. But he did not return home and instead headed into the woods, leaving his mother to worry, not that he thought of her then selfish as he was. He found the cottage in the woods and sat with the beautiful woman who lived there and he asked for power, the power to control fire, to summon the winds, to quell the oceans, to raise mountains, and she had given it to him.

'You named a price,' Hesh said.

'I did.'

'I paid it. Why am I now cursed?'

'You are not cursed, not truly. You are hollow.'

Hesh did not understand.

'I asked for your nature and you gave it willingly.'

'Then why do I still yearn for more? You said that was my nature.'

'Yes, I did, but I did not want that part of your nature.'

Hesh did not understand.

The woman laughed at his silence, 'Tell me, what is it you desire?'

Hesh held his tongue from spitting the obvious answer circling his mind. For the first time in a long time he truly thought about what he wanted and after enough time that his tea had cooled he said, 'Control.'

The woman nodded, 'And how do you get control?'

'With power, domination.'

The woman shook her head. 'You came to me as a boy, wounded in flesh and pride, and asked for power. Any boy in your position would, it is understandable. To set the wrongs right requires strength of arm and a will of iron. Power, over the elements no less, provides both amply. Your greed is your nature and that fault is mastered another way. Tell me, in that moment as a boy when you sat before me what did you want to control?'

'I wanted to bring my father back and failing that destroy the brigands who'd killed him.'

'Did you?'

'I did neither. Death cannot be undone and the brigands evaded me in my youth and by the time I could find them they were long dead.'

'Not even I can grant you the power over life and death, not truly.'

'But...'

The woman shook her head, 'Your immortality is an echo of something else. A sign of your misplacement, you are not what you are meant to be.'

'I am what I made myself.'

'With a power I granted you, over a world that has yet to figure out how to cast you aside.'

'I control the world, it is mine,' Hesh was shouting again, reaching for the flames that evaded his grasped.

'You understand nothing,' the woman hissed. She leaned forward, her red eye speckled yellow flaring for a moment. 'You lack all the qualities of the ancients. A child with a match thinking he can burn down the forests. A fool. You spoke to the sages of the world and learned nothing, you spoke to mages and learned nothing, you have lived for nigh on a thousand years and have learned nothing. A thousand more will do you no good.'

Hesh felt some essence of himself drain out of him. He faltered and fell backwards off the stool and arched his back in pain as he landed. An ache plagued his body. His hands were not his own. His vision blurred and when he stood his clothing hung loose and was covered in grey hairs. 'What have you done?'

'I have taken back what I granted and have returned what you paid.'

Hesh summoned the lightning, but nothing came. He struggled to his feet and advanced on the woman but his legs did not move as they should. Hesh stumbled to land at her feet. 'I don't want it back, I want POWER!' his voice was hoarse.

'And what has power given you? Happiness? Belonging? Acceptance? Virtue? Discipline? It has given you none of those things.'

'I didn't need them with control over the elements,' Hesh peered up at the beautiful woman with his rheumy eyes, clouded and blurred with age.

'And that is what you lost.'

'I don't understand.' Hesh's vision darkened as his skin began to flake, there was nothing beneath it, a void. He caught a mote of his flaking skin and it smudged like ash in his fingers. He groaned one last time and collapsed into dust.

'Your kind never do.'

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