Epilogue The Next Great MageThirteen years later . . . For All of Us

Epilogue The Next Great Mage

Valen

Almost a year ago

Six-year-old Valen falls out of his mother’s arms and to the Valgard ground, tendrils of Shadow curling around him as panicked

Mages rush by.

“My son!” his mother cries, as she’s whisked from his sight by the press of fleeing Mages. “Help me get back to my son!” he

can just make out her screaming. “He’s our next Great Mage !”

“Mamma!” Valen screams as the booted foot of a fleeing Mage connects with his shoulder, his leg. The poisoned sky overhead

is full of low-hanging, nightmarish Shadow clouds spitting curling black lightning, Valen’s Level Five Magelines sizzling

terrified fire through his whole body. Roughly jostled on every side, Valen breaks into heaving sobs just as a Gardnerian

woman grabs rough hold of him and yanks him into her arms.

The terrifying scene surrounding them comes back into full view as Valen and the stranger-Mage are swept forward by the sea

of black-clad Gardnerians, all in desperate flight toward a series of glowing arches made from prismatic runes situated at

the plaza’s far end, the interiors rippling silver.

Valen glances around frantically, no sign of his mother anywhere. “Mamma!” he screams again and again as shrieks split the air. Valen’s eyes widen in horror as Mage soldiers with multitudes of glowing

gray eyes fly in on dragonback, their multi-eyed dragons possessing six or even eight limbs, huge gray wraith bats soaring

in beside them.

One dragon lands a few paces away from Valen with a ground-shaking thump , crushing an old woman under its huge body. The multi-eyed Mage astride it dismounts, fast as a blur, then grabs a screaming woman and latches his elongating teeth into her throat. Valen’s gut clenches with terror as tendrils of Shadow course from the Mage-thing’s body, and the woman goes limp in his Shadow-clawed hands.

“MAMMA!” Valen screams again, as the woman holding him suddenly throws him straight into one of the prismatic arches.

The scene cuts out, and a vision of a starlight bird flashes through Valen’s panicked vision as he hurtles, limbs flailing,

through the silvery mist.

Valen lands with a thud and vomits onto brushy soil. His gaze whips around, the surrounding Forest bizarrely prismatic, some

of the mostly gray-tinged leaves colored blue and purple along with the more familiar colors of fall. A cold rain batters

his skinny frame and thunder rumbles, drawing his gaze skyward. Far overhead, he can make out a translucent dome marked with

faintly visible prismatic runes.

So terrified he can barely pull a breath, Valen breaks into heaving sobs, all alone in the oddly colored forest.

“Mamma!” he chokes out.

An onyx-hued woman with horns! and wings! and dragon eyes! bursts from the woods and runs toward him, a Lupine wolf-monster woman with wild amber eyes and flaxen hair racing beside

her, a rush of terror shooting down his spine.

A Wyvern monster and Lupine monster! Just like his scariest toys!

Out to kill and eat Mage children!

Valen screams, fright turning him into a wild thing. He grabs hold of the closest branch, struggling to remember the words

to the candle-lighting spell his mamma taught him to use if Evil Ones got hold of him—the same spell he learned for his wandtesting,

when he blasted out a huge column of fire and blew a burning hole through the room’s wall. The priests’ eyes had widened,

all the surrounding adults murmuring and exclaiming as the wand was wrested from his hand and they’d grouped around the wall’s

smoking wreckage, eyeing him in a strange way that made Valen feel scared.

Calling him “the next Great Mage.”

Faced with the incoming Wyvern and Lupine monsters, Valen shrieks out the candle-lighting spell once more, screaming his vengeance

at the monsters, along with his fear over not being able to find his mamma, his wand hand trembling.

A huge bolt of fire explodes from the branch and blasts toward the Evil Ones.

The Lupine monster throws up her forearm, and the firebolt glances off it, the flames quickly pulled toward the Wyvern monster and sucked into her outstretched palm.

Before Valen can blast out another column of Magefire, the Lupine monster reaches him in a blur, wrests the branch from his

grip, and grabs him in her frightfully strong arms. Valen thrashes against her, snarling, his fire power searing through him,

his ferocious magic desperate for release.

The Wyvern monster narrows her slit-pupiled eyes at him, her nostrils flaring. “Kill him, Diana,” she urges.

The scary wolf woman keeps an iron hold on Valen’s writhing, screaming form as she growls at the Wyvern monster, low in her

throat. “No, Voor’nile. He’s a child .”

“Do you sense the level of power coming off that child ?” the Wyvern monster growls back. “That’s no normal Mage child. That child is at least a Level Five, with the potential for

Great Mage power. He should be destroyed before he can grow into it.”

Another growl cuts through the woods, low and scarily resonant.

Valen freezes as another Lupine monster, a tall male, strides out of the forest. Confusion rips through Valen. Because this

Lupine monster is a Mage , with the same green-hued skin and night-black hair as Valen’s own.

“Diana’s right,” the Lupine Mage man states, his stance powerful. “We’re placing him under the pack’s protection.”

The Wyvern monster spits out what sounds like a hissing curse as Valen devolves into wailing misery, screaming, “Mamma, Mamma, Mamma!”

And then he’s in motion, the forest around him a blur as he screams and screams and is carried through the trees by the Lupine

monster woman, the scary Lupine Mage man keeping pace at her side.

Eventually, Valen’s earsplitting wails slow then stop, exhaustion overtaking him. A tremor kicks up as he finds himself able

to manage only an exhausted, soul-destroyed whimper. The Wolf monsters reduce their tree-blurring pace, the Lupine woman gently

shushing Valen as she rubs his back.

He goes limp in her arms. There’s something so warmly kind in her tone... something that seems, as her voice catches with what feels like kindred grief, like she understands on some heart-deep level his rageful, slashing grief and terror. And so, completely spent, Valen allows the Lupine monster to hug his limp form. Allows her to talk and murmur softly to him. And later, after they reach a small dwelling in the purple woods, he allows her to tuck a blanket around him before enveloping him in her strong arms and gently murmuring him to sleep.

Valen spends the next night falling asleep beside the Wolf monster woman.

And the night after that.

But days are a different thing.

Valen screams and rages and tries to hit and bite any of the Evil Ones who come near. He finds wood in an attempt to hurt

them with fire. As he screams for his family. Screams out his terror and pain and trauma.

“He’s no good,” passing monsters say. Elf monsters and Noi monsters and Fae monsters and others.

“That Crow child has too much power,” they say.

“You’re playing with fire, there, Diana.”

“Rafe, he’s another Great Mage. Get rid of him.”

But the wolf woman and the wolf man calmly refute all of it.

Time passes, and Valen starts to remain calm around Diana, the wolf woman, only Diana able to approach him without provoking

an attack. He bites or punches anyone else who tries to come near. Finds a multitude of sticks and sets a multitude of things

on fire.

But Diana and Rafe refuse to give up on him.

More time passes, and new monsters come to visit, those who are completely immune to his fits of fire because they have so

much fire of their own. Elloren, a Dryad Mage monster who has as much fire as he does. And the Icaral monster, Yvan, who offers

to fly Valen into the sky when he’s ready.

But still, when he’s not careening into outright hostility, Valen turns increasingly despondent, lapsing into dull silence

when he’s not lashing out.

Until Ariel comes.

Valen hisses at Ariel, and she hisses back. Then she gives him a wide smile, her fire eyes full of fierce understanding. Thrust

into a whirlwind of confusion, Valen lashes out at her. Tries to set her wings on fire. But she meets it all with narrow-eyed

calm.

And comes back every day.

Soon, out of sheer confusion, Valen stops trying to set fire to her wings. Stops trying to set fire to everything in sight.

And before long, he’s going off with Ariel. Then with the Wyvern Raz’zor. Up, up, up into the sky, the three of them throwing fire out at the heavens. Great lashes of it across the sky, turning the night gold and crimson.

Good , they say, Ariel and Raz’zor both.

Be angry , they say.

Set the damned sky on fire.

And so he does. Sensing that Ariel and Raz’zor need to do this, too, from time to time.

And, as more time passes and Valen is surrounded by so many who are so kind, who understand and accept him, somehow, his fear

and rage begin to lessen.

Before long, step by step, little by little, so incrementally he almost doesn’t notice the changes happening, he’s letting

Ariel and Raz’zor fly him up so high that he touches the clouds.

Letting Trystan and his mate, Vothendrile, teach him to hone his fire into lightning bolts so he can light up the heavens

with forking electricity through the dark of night.

Then, as more time passes and he grows taller and taller, Valen lets spider-marked Wrenfir teach him to care for injured cats

and use his fire power to speed Wrenfir’s apothecary spells as they work together to fabricate medicines for both people and

Wrenfir’s rescued felines, Wrenfir gifting him with a purple kitten of his own.

Interests build and build, and before long, Valen’s love of cats branches into a love of horses, and he’s letting Andras teach

him how to treat injured equines. Letting Ariel teach him how to set a bird’s broken wing. Letting Wynter teach him how to

sculpt a small statue of the bird he and Ariel just healed and released back into the wilds.

The Great, Blessed Forest.

More time passes, and before long, twelve-year-old Valen is letting patient Or’myr teach him how to throw power through crystals

and charge them to heat a home, to power a ship. Then how to grow mushrooms and brew them into tea. How to play the violin.

And letting Elloren, Yvan, Oaklyyn, and Yulan show him the meaning of the Balance, and the Nature-balancing magic of the Zhilaan

Forest.

Year upon year passes, with so much love and attention enfolding Valen, his heart has trouble holding it all sometimes. It’s

so gradual that it’s impossible to pinpoint the day it fully and irrevocably happens—the day he fully lays down his Mage defenses.

The day the desire to draw a branch, rage out a spell, and set someone on fire truly abates.

The day he heals enough to stop fighting and lets in their collective love.