La Maga

When a lady mage returns to her hometown in her magical world from long years of exile in the Himalayas and thereabouts, her epiphany radically transforms the lives of an imposing, elitist, and bacchanalian dignitary and his troubled teenaged son. The binding quality of love and conspiratorial influences propel the dignitary and his son to avatar-like roles in the up-ending of the political power structure of the land.

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Chapter I

The Conus Magus Maneuver

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Pass and photo ID. You can’t get into the class without an admission pass and photo ID: student ID, license to practice magic, magical association card. Did you not receive the notice?” croaked the hall guard. And she was frog-like—small and bloated with a thick, jowly face and bloody, popping eyes; matronly, like all school hall guards, and gobbling up whatever little power over others she could muster.

“No one ever gave me a hard time about being a walk-in,” the man protested. “I promised my son that I’d take the class with him.”

“This is a closed class,” the hall guard snapped, firmly affirming in her gravelly voice: “You cannot be admitted without an admission pass and a photo ID.”

“Where do I get a pass?” the man asked.

“You don’t. The class is filled,” the froggy character said.

The man stormed away. The hall guard continued barking at students and adults alike about the entrance requirements as they congregated at the threshold of a small lecture hall. There on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at the H. Trismegistus Mystical Arts Academy, a controversial celebrity lady mage—a one Professor Sofia La Maga—would be, for the first time, presenting a class called Lost and Found: Mystical Codes and Keys.

Leonard and his buddies, Anil and Bertrand, presented the appropriate documents and were admitted. Leonard’s father, Leo de Lux, a sorcerer and one of the highest ranking magistrates of the North Atlantic Sovereignty, Terra Nova, Inner Planes Regions, followed them.

“Pass and ID. No one is admitted without an admission pass and photo ID,” the hall guard rattled. Upon realizing who she was addressing, she froze. “You can go in,” she rasped to the glowering Lord Consul Leo de Lux. He sauntered in, his attaché, Victor, in tow. <o:p> </o:p>

The lecture hall was a dimly lit semi-rotunda with 10 rows of bucket seats. The ceiling was tin-molding speckled with whirling fans that gave a person vertigo if he stared up that way too long. The leaded windows were heavy plated, stained or ornately mottled to block out the sky or the trees or passing birds so the mind couldn’t fly outside to daydream. At the sunken hub of the semi-rotunda were a podium, a desk, and a chalk board illuminated by a bare bulb hanging from a wire.

Leonard de Lux Junior made quick work of setting up a prank while his father chatted with some people who were members of the Royal Conservationist Party. He figured he’d get away with it, and his dad would get a mean laugh from the escapade. Leonard would feel strangely proud of secretly giving twisted mirth to his father, who had been on the rag about this new celebrity teacher. With sleight of hand, he dropped a stink-bomb on the teacher’s chair. When she sat at the desk to study the seating chart and call the roll, she would, you know, make a smell. Leonard twitched his eyebrows and sneered to appear daring and shameless to his buddies, who sniggered and sputtered so that their pimply, adolescent faces turned reddish and even gawkier.

Leonard’s father, Leo de Lux, held the esteemed and very powerful position of Consul within the Senate of the North Atlantic Sovereignty. He was a mere 43 years of age when he assumed the role 2 years previously. His position, assumed at an unprecedented young age, was a testament to his family’s status and influence and also to his own prowess. He was held the academic degrees of Sortiar Excelsus and Magus Adeptus, and of course, he was a fellow in the Royal Order of Sorcerers and Magi.

The Consul was vehemently against Sofia La Maga’s teaching appointment. He fought it in league with several other parents who were members of the Royal Conservationist Party. As consul, he should have had the final say—and would have in times past —but the current popularist democratic sprawl and the rather bureaucratic checks and balances system had eroded de Lux’s influence.

Leonard (Junior) and his best buddies, Anil and Bertrand, had gotten a glimpse of Sofia La Maga the day before. They gloated like the spoiled-brat junior elitist patricians that they were that the hype about the professor was nonsense. It was just as Leonard’s father had insisted. Professor La Maga was nothing but a bedraggled kitchen witch.

She didn’t seem at all like the stories told about her. In fact, she roamed through the secondary school’s second-floor corridor as if she were roller-skating with three left feet and had a mental disposition of a hedgehog.

She was a tall, slender but robust woman with the rough-and-tumble appearance of someone who had weathered hard climbs in exotic lands. Her clothes were rustic, quaintly worn, and embellished with savage jewelry: jangling bells and sashes of bone and fur, claws, shells, and spike-studded pods. Her Medusa-like mane was haphazardly plaited here and there and cluttered her face, blinding her as she toddled along. She was gripping a mass of overstuffed folders, and from her arms dangled plastic bags filled with undisclosed items that were nevertheless heavy. They swung like pendulums in the wake of her clumsy pace. The heels of her worn leather lace-up boots alternately caught on the frayed hem of an ankle-length skirt. It caused her to wobble pathetically as the heavy bags alternately beat against her ribs.

No one offered assistance. They were busy gawking at her and probably thinking the same as Leonard and his pals were. This was the prodigy who had been gallivanting across exotic lands and speed-reading through mentorships with wild wizards, shamans, and anchorites?

Leonard reported the observation to his father who smirked and lectured him about how the whole wide expanse of the Inner Planes Region was going to the dogs. He blamed immigration and student exchange laws and especially the prohibition of the caste system—even though it had been nearly a century since the prohibition had been in effect.

As far as de Lux senior was concerned, it was the discontinuation of the system that had led to the irrelevancy of heredity. It made for circumstances in which the child of the lowliest peasant spellcaster (that is, Sofia La Maga) could become a prestigious mage—all because she had spent 12 years spelunking through some caves on the Inner Plane of Katmandu or Machu Picchu or . . . some place.

Leonard’s father repeated that Sofia La Maga was a fake. He said that the heroic tales about her were hoaxes. He stressed that she had been ingloriously kicked out of the H. Trismegistus Mystical Arts Academy School of Graduate Studies in her junior collegiate year. She was a troublemaker who almost took the school down because of her political extremism. A terrorist, he insisted. Furthermore, rather than applying herself to unusual scholarship in the Terra Mysticus as claimed, she had been running some kind of inane “New Age” cult among the Commons in the Outer Planes for the past 15 years . . . .

Click here to read the entire abridged version of Chapter I

Click here to read Chapter III Celestus Magus

Click here to read Chapter V The Son

La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi