The Magic Story Pdf

[Blossom Stemmer]

"Lady!" I said. I talk better when I'm telling a story. Best I could say about that line is that I accurately identified her as a lady. The flame hadn't caught, just hit some glasses hanging behind the bar and melted them. I had my thunder bow in front of me, but I'd been tinkering with it. It was in no condition to draw on anything.

But every family has drama, and this one also had rent. The owner of the squat showed up with thugs and impounded all our gear, so we couldn't make a living. He said he'd give it back if we paid the back rent, but we didn't have that kind of money. So, obviously, it would have to be crime, the main industry in New Capenna. Top import, top export. We knew how to steal, too, and the equipment for that was cheaper. If you do it right, you don't even need weapons, although I'll be honest: we did it wrong.

Elnor was amazing back then. It was cheap of me to say she just looked cute. She had charm, and if you think that's nothing, you've never been charmless. I'm charmless myself. They like me here in Thunder Junction because I introduced cocktails to the desert. They don't like me for my class.

So, while Elnor chatted up guards and croupiers and bank clerks, we blew safes and teased open vaults, we muscled our way through trains on rickety bridges. Those were the days! I remember them in lights and sights. The sawdust on our workshop floor, how the sunlight made it sparkle. The stained velvets in a maestro's darkened parlor, as my hand learned how heavy gold is. New Capenna was a ruined town. Even new things were ruined there. I know because we were new, and ruined.

Anyway, that building was the worst call Shadress ever made. We borrowed the money to buy it. You can guess what happened next. Debt comes down on you in layers. And funding your debts with theft, you make twice the enemies. I won't trouble you with the whole boring story, except that I took off eventually. Just ran off down the Omenpaths, not knowing where I was going. Everyone who stayed was going to die, go to jail, or go back to being a foot soldier in one of the gangs. Back to being the lowest iron-chewer in the Riveteers? No. I wanted a new life.

Justifying myself? Of course I'm justifying myself. But I'm right, too. I could die with my friends or live alone. What I took wouldn't have paid a month's interest, and I kept it out of the hands of our enemies, didn't I?

I had a couple of seconds. I used them to get my thunder bow back together and in my hand. It's a heavy, well-balanced crossbow with a stock polished bright, and it can channel lightning, hard, crackling bolts of it. Besides hunting, I mostly use it to kick people out of the bar, so it's bigger and more complicated looking than it needs to be.

"I don't get it, Yuma," said Elnor. She was cool for a woman with thunder pointed at her; I could smell the power, like the smell of rain coming to the desert. "Weren't we good to you? Didn't we accept you when nobody else did? Didn't we hook you up with the best body-man in the city to change your humors, to make you a fella?"

"Walked into that," I told her. "Listen. The money's gone. I spent it. There's nothing here to get back, and I don't believe you even want to. How long have you been looking for me? A year? That's plenty of time to forget why you're doing something."

Her hand flexed. The snake was looking better; as I watched, it coiled tighter around her arm, digging into the fabric, and its head reared higher. It breathed red flame, not at me, but just into the air, warming it. It's cold in the desert in the morning, and this creature was far from home.

A sturdy little cactus, a toddler in shape and size, with six stumpy arms. Not much of a face, but I somehow knew he was well disposed to me. I put my jacket around him to keep from being hurt by the spines and picked him up.

He didn't lead me to water or anything like that. He'd just awakened a few minutes before. Didn't know how to do anything. But he took this shine to me, and being looked at in a friendly way made me see myself from the outside, and asked what I needed. I figured water flowed down, so I looked for low ground. Low ground turned out to be a dry riverbed, cool water under the sand. So, I lived.

"I told you, the money's gone," I said. Kirri'd had plenty of opportunities to run during that first little fracas, but he didn't run, of course; he doesn't do what he doesn't care to do, even if it was making me sweat with nerves.

She snapped her fingers; the snake came to attention. I dove behind the bar, heard her running over to me. Cover is a trap if you're not nimble. I jumped up, hurled blurry lightning at her, and she drenched the air with flame back at me: both missed. She hit some more bottles behind the bar, though, vaporized what was inside. I was diving out of the way on a floor covered in glass and slag, hollering, "Do you have any idea what those bottles cost?"

She'd taken cover behind some of the gaming tables. My bar's got two levels, floor and mezzanine. There are some bedrooms up there, empty now. Card and dice tables in back. I introduced those to Thunder Junction, too, made a fortune on 'em. I cringed at the thought of burned holes in those acres of felt, so I stayed down, didn't shoot till I heard her move.

I had carpet on the stairs, another of my classy ideas, and now yet another one that's backfired on me because the fire fed on it like a starving beast. It was blue-hot, fast, and dangerous, surging up toward the mezzanine and cutting off my escape. I saw everything from above: the bar with the melted bottles, the hole letting in a round shaft of morning sun, Kirri in his basket, his snappy little movement as he looked up at me; Elnor, pale, standing still with the snake twining around and around her arm.

I realized then that she probably didn't really want to kill me. Her aim's not that bad. But if I were waving a stack of soft paper money at one of our craps tables, I wouldn't have bet on that number, so I darted back into one of the bedrooms. A roar of fire punched a hole right through the door, the angle sending it through the ceiling, too.

So here, again, is Yuma, certified and celebrated genius, the man on the cover of all the papers. The rooms on the second floor are all connected, right? That way you can make them into suites. Since they were all vacant, the doors were open for airing, meaning I could run soundlessly to another room and burst out the door, getting one good shot in. I ran, threw the door open, and there she was, standing on the bar in her filthy boots, aiming right at me.

I wasn't familiar with her anymore, though. She was fighting like someone else. She was fighting like Shadress. Calm, careful, waiting, and thinking. And that meant that Shadress was dead, because you don't calm down that much, that fast, unless by way of honoring someone's memory.

All this went through my head in thirty seconds, which is a long time. Elnor was just watching me figure it all out. She was giving me the time for that, because revenge isn't any good if the person doesn't know why it's happening. But she was here for revenge, and I knew she wouldn't hold the next shot back.

So, I did something she couldn't predict. I fired my thunder bow at the long mirror behind the bar. It shattered into a shower of lost money, raining down a curtain of shattered glass. Kirri was watching me through it, and I could tell that, in his quiet little way, he approved of whatever I was doing. Elnor really did turn and look at that; she couldn't believe I'd wreck my own place, even after she'd already wrecked it so thoroughly herself. Then, among the brightness and the noise, and the choking thick smoke of my investment, I leaped down and went after her hand to hand, attacking not with thunder or any kind of magic, but with my burned fist and my undamaged one.

We rolled around on the floor, grappling. With both hands I wrestled the snake demon off her and hurled it across the room; it was muscular and strong, but no more than any other animal. Same trick as with the bottle. Funny how these magical creatures sometimes only have defenses against magic. They're shocked by simple force, and Elnor was the same.

I didn't want to, that's all. And I was sure of that. It's the only way to guarantee you'll lose a fight: go into it without knowing what you want out of it. I knew what I wanted, and Elnor didn't, and that's not why I won, but it's why she lost.

The room was almost silent suddenly, no more big dramatic moves, just two people, tired, breathing heavy among the crackle of sparks. Elnor knows how to fight with her hands, too, but it was my specialty when I was a kid. When other kids were training in summoning and lockpicking and all the different kinds of magic, I was out on the street with my fists. A little rebellion against my dad. So there we were, going at it, me slowly winning but both of us about to choke on the smoke, when suddenly the rain hit.

In Thunder Junction, the desert rain is hard and sudden. It comes clap out of a blue sky; the clouds rush up on you like a train, and then you're soaked to the pores, with impossible little flowers coming out all around you. It was winter then, thunderstorm season, but still I didn't expect it. In an instant, the fires were out, and the whole place was black and acrid like a candle wick that's just been snuffed. With the water and all that char, you could have dipped a pen in the puddles on the floor and written a poem, if you had a mind to write a poem, which just then I did not. I was still coughing out the smoke from a fire that no longer existed. She was coughing, too. And then I knelt on her sternum, grabbed her wrists, and it was done.

Magic Story is a column on Magicthegathering.com. It served as the primary source for in-depth story information for several years. In that role, it replaced and was thought to have a much wider audience than the earlier print novels.[1][2] However, print novels were reintroduced in 2019, seemingly shifting the focus off of Magic Story to secondary plot lines again.[3]

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