Vegenrage: The Magic User
Read Vegenrage: The Magic User Online
Authors: Robert Spina
VEGENRAGE
______________________________________
The Magic User
ROBERT SPINA
Copyright
© 2015 by Robert Spina.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015900850
ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-5035-3563-3
Softcover 978-1-5035-3564-0
eBook 978-1-5035-3565-7
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.
Rev. date: 01/15/2015
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Contents
Chapter 1 Robert Meets Logantrance
Chapter 6 Robert Becomes Vegenrage
Chapter 7 Vegenrage Faces Blethstole
Chapter 8 Cloakenstrike, Erkensharie, And The Treestriders
Chapter 9 The Fate Of Elven Magic
Chapter 10 The Search For Alluradaloni
Chapter 11 Cloakenstrike Holds The Octagemerwell
Chapter 12 Alluradaloni’s Curse
Chapter 13 Glaborster Dwarves To The Rescue
Chapter 14 Alluradaloni Becomes Farrah
Chapter 15 Lushantor, Rowgen, And Gripzon Charge Ugoria
Chapter 16 Ugoria Proves Formidable
Chapter 17 Behaggen Enlightens
Chapter 18 Shenlylith’s Prison
Chapter 19 Wherlerria And Magic Revealed
Chapter 21 Ugoria Strikes Back
Chapter 23 The Fight For Gwithen
Chapter 24 The Dragon Feast Has Begun
Chapter 25 More Than A Feast For The Dragons
Chapter 26 The Glaborian Disaster
Chapter 27 Farrah, Vergraughtu, And Parnapp
Chapter 28 The Dwarves Go To Erkensharie
Chapter 29 The Coming Of Vlianth
Chapter 30 Vegenrage’s Destiny
CHAPTER 1
Robert Meets Logantrance
Robert gets up at 5:00 a.m. to get ready for work. He takes a shower, brushes his teeth, combs his hair, and puts on his gray button-up shirt jeans and then his steel-toe boots. He heads out to his two-door Chevy Beretta, starts it up, and is off on a forty-five-minute drive to his first store. He sips the cup of coffee he prepared on the way to work and finishes it as he gets to his first store. He walks in the Big M store, saying hi to all the familiar people, and heads to the back of the store. Once in the back of the store, he starts the backbreaking work of moving skids of soda pop around, rotating the stock in front out to the service area of the store. He arranges the shelves, filling the soda product on the shelves, which takes an hour. Then at the back, he rotates the new stock that came in this morning to the back and the older stock to the front. He spends two hours in this store then heads off to another bigger grocery store to do the same.
Once in the main grocery store, he heads to the back, where there are sixteen skids, all weighing at least two thousand pounds each, that he has to rotate by hand. He works on this for hours, stocking the shelves in the front of the store then heading to the back to rotate and organize the stock in the back of the store. He stands and stretches his back a lot as this is a backbreaking, physically demanding work. Hour after hour he bends over, picking up all the different-size bottles, cans, assorted packs, and assorted combinations of drinks; and there are lots of them. He moves the skids around with power hand jacks or manual hand jacks, whatever is available, saying hi to and chatting with the other vendors as he works. He works until about 11:30 a.m. then heads to the front of the store to get a ham-and-cheese sub for lunch.
He orders a ham-and-cheese sub with onions, lettuce, tomatoes, and mayo like he always does and gets a small cup of soda to drink with it. He sits all alone in one of the booths off the side and eats his lunch. He looks around to see only one other person sitting at a table while all the other tables are empty. He watches as people walk around with their shopping carts and do their shopping. He finishes half of his sub, wishing he had a better, more exciting life instead of this backbreaking, very boring life, having to accept the pittance he is paid to break his back.
As he eats and watches all the people, he wonders if everyone else is just doing what they have to do just to survive financially as he does. He rubs his forehead, thinking,
Oh I don’t want to go back there
. Every day his back is sore from the constant bending over and picking up of loads of product as heavy as he can manage. His feet are always sore, and his mind is worn out thinking about and doing a job that he couldn’t care less about.
He just about finishes his sub, when a very odd man walks into the dining area. This man is a demanding presence standing over six feet tall. He has very long white hair and a white cape that is tied with a gold twine at his neck. His cape extends over his shoulders, down to his elbows, and bevels around to his back and down to the back of his knees. He is holding a magnificent golden staff that is etched with very neat markings from the bottom all the way to the top, which is a foot higher than this man’s head when resting on the ground. The staff has a beautiful round crest at the top, with a very large amber-colored jewel resting in the middle, shaped like a diamond that is large enough to be held by two hands.
The man walks up to the booth Robert is eating at and stands in front of him. He motions his left hand to the empty seat in front of Robert at the same booth. “May I join you?”
Robert, chewing his sub, looks at all the empty seats in the dining area, looks the man up, and swallows his food. “Well, with all these empty seats in here, why don’t you sit right here?” He motions to the seat in front of him. Robert sits upright and leans back, looking curiously at the odd-looking man.
The man looks at the relatively small seat compared to his stature and sighs, “Ah!” He holds up his left index finger. He then raises the staff up high enough so he can put the bottom of it in his left palm. Now he pushes down on the staff, and it seems to collapse as he pushes the staff all the way down until it is only about three inches in height.
Robert looks on with a smile. “Very cool trick.”
The man smiles and nods back. He takes the now-tiny staff and puts it in a small leather pouch that is tied around his waist with a golden rope. The pouch is no bigger than his left hand, and yet he puts his entire right hand in the pouch, moves it around a bit, and pulls his hand out without the staff, which is apparently now in the pouch.
Robert laughs with a smile. “That’s really neat.”
The man says “Oh!” raising the index finger of his right hand and then giving the gold twine at his neck a pull. The twine unties all by itself, and the man twirls the cape from left to right of his body, and it shrinks to about three or four inches in size. Just as he did with the staff, he puts it in the pouch at his waist. He is wearing a white silver shirt that looks like a very light chain mail. It extends down his arms, to his elbows, and down to his waist. The shirt looks very comfortable, tied to his waist by the thin gold rope holding the pouch. He has leather pants with soft-sole boots that rise up his calves. He sits down and cups his hands together on the table, looking at Robert.
Robert looks around the dining area and notices that no one is taking any interest in this man, nor is anyone even looking at him. Robert laughs. “You know, when I was in junior high, my friends and I played Dungeons and Dragons, and that pouch at your waist, we used to call a Bag of Holding.”
“Indeed it is a Bag of Holding, Mr. Spina.”
“Wow, you know my name. What is your name?”
“I am Logantrance.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Logantrance. That’s a pretty cool name. Did it come with your Bag of Holding?” Robert says, laughing.
“No, the Bag of Holding came long after the name. Actually, my name came to me in my first quest long ago, as will yours.”
“What do you mean? My name is Robert Charles Spina.”
“That is your earth name, but that is not the name you dream for yourself.”
Robert takes one of the last bites of his sub, looking at the odd man, chuckling.
“Mr. Spina.”
“Please call me Robert.”
“Robert, I am not here by chance. I have chosen you to be a magic user. Let me explain. I am Logantrance—illusionist, spell creator, spell crafter, master mage, time walker, and fighter of realm, dimension, and plane. The time has come for me to teach a new magic user, and I have waited hundreds of years for someone such as yourself to come along. There are very few of us magic users in all realms of time and space, and no one is born with the magic in them. Rather they live to capture the magic around them. You are one of these very few people.”
“What people? Whom are you talking about? How do you even know who I am?”
“All people dream, Robert, and in people’s dreams, they have a presence about themselves, and your presence is unmistakable. Your presence is very strong, very positive, and always good in nature. You have a supreme constitution and survive just fine on your own. This makes you my choice for learning the art of magic.”
“This conversation is very interesting, Logantrance, so I’ll share my dreams with you a little bit. I dream of using magic, but I also dream of fighting with swords and other weapons, kind of like a barbarian magic user. I dream of fantasy worlds with dragons, incredibly dangerous monsters, and beautiful women, but these are dreams unfortunately, nothing that is real.”
“Oh! But, Robert, it is real, and you are the man that will spend thousands of years learning the art of magic, training your body to use weapons, and seeking out danger. You are the man to rejoice in the solitude and lonely being alone, kept excited by the knowledge and wisdom of learning and mastering the art of magic. Very few people possess this unique trait, and fewer yet would use this ability for good.”
Robert finishes his sub and smiles, sipping from his soda. “Well, Logantrance, thank you for a most interesting conversation and the cool tricks, but I should be getting back to work now.”
“Robert, I am here to take you to your new home, your new work.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let me show what I am talking about.” Logantrance snaps his fingers, and Robert’s stomach falls out. He gasps, putting his hands to his sides, realizing that he and Logantrance are sitting on a cloud, looking down at earth.
“Whoa!” Robert trembles a little. “You know, I am really afraid of heights,” he says, looking at Logantrance.
“No problem.” Logantrance snaps his fingers, and the two are back in the dining area.
“Well, I must say that’s pretty impressive, and I would leave all this in a heartbeat,” Robert says, extending out his hands and arms, looking around. “So how am I supposed to live and where? How am I going to get the bills paid?”
Logantrance stands up. “There are no bills to pay where you are going.”
“Where am I going?”
“You are going to a different realm of reality.”
Robert stands up, laughing. “All right, let’s go.”
“I don’t think I need to tell you this, but you realize there will be great danger to your life in this new reality.”
“Who cares? If you can get me out of this waste-of-my-time, waste-of-my-life job, I’m there.”
Logantrance smiles and turns his back to Robert. He puts his index fingers together above his head and extends his hands outward then down to the floor, which makes a visible chalk line that Robert can see. Logantrance turns to Robert. “Once you walk through this door, you will be at your new home.”
Robert shrugs his shoulders with a grin on his face and walks through the Dimension Door and disappears. Logantrance smiles and walks through behind him.
Robert is now standing in a humungous round room. The ceiling is about ten feet high in the middle, sloping down to about eight feet high at the sides. There is a big round cement fireplace in the middle of the room, with a big fire burning. The room is about fifteen yards across, and the entire width of the room is shelved and completely full of books. There is one entrance that leads outside, and on the other side of the room is a sitting area with a golden table low to the ground, with pillows in front of it for sitting on.
Logantrance walks into view right next to Robert. He appears right out of nowhere.
Robert looks at him. “This is very cool. Come on. This can’t be real. Is this real?”
“This is very real, Robert. This is your new home.”
There is a golden hue to the room, giving it a very warm, wealthy, comforting allure that Robert is very attracted to. He walks around the fireplace, looking at all the books. The books are all very neatly stacked on the shelves, with gold, black, yellow, red, orange, and green bindings. Some bindings are solid in color, and some are multicolored.
“These books are very beautiful, and are they the books that will teach me magic?”
“They are, and I have designed this room specifically for you, with all the schools of magic for you to learn from. Over here, we have healing magic. Over here, offensive spells, and here, defensive spells.” Logantrance walks to and points out areas of books as he talks. “Here we have illusion, and over here, the use of language. All languages are used in the art of spell casting. Once you have mastered these books, then here we have the learning of spell creation. These spells do not come cheap by way of time, Robert. You will spend many centuries learning all the schools of magic in order to master them all. Of course, the more you learn, the quicker later magic will come, but it will still be way over a thousand years before you are even ready to attempt real magic in the outer realms.”
“A thousand years! What are you talking about? People don’t live that long.”
“Magic users do. They easily live for ten thousand years.”
“You know, this is crazy. It can’t be real, but I so would love to believe that I can use magic. I mean, to be able to shoot magic missiles out of my fingers or throw fireballs and lightning strikes—these thoughts are so alluring. To be able to have the power of telekinesis or put someone to sleep with the wave of my hand would be so attractive to anyone, not just me. How can this be real? Come on. This is all one big illusion, just like you making me think I was sitting on a cloud a little while ago. I bet, if I walk out that door, I’ll be right back in my store and have to go stock shelves.”
“Go ahead. You have to see it sometime.”
Robert walks out the door and sees a beautiful blue sky with fluffy clouds. The ground is carpeted with a beautiful, plush green grass, and he turns to see the entrance to his new home enters into a mound of earth that rises up over the entrance. He jogs up the side, which slopes gently to the top of the entrance, to see nothing but sky and a flat, plush green grass with the exception of the mound entering his secluded home. One odd thing is that the grassland extends about one mile then just ends. He jogs to the end and looks off this plateau to see it fall off to empty space. Rubbing his forehead with a curious look, he walks back into his new home to see Logantrance waiting there, sitting up on a chair near what is to be his study area. The chair previously was not there, and now Logantrance sits there, smoking a long pipe.
“Robert, come sit. I need to explain some things for you.”
Robert walks toward Logantrance, who waves his left hand, and a chair appears in front of him. He sits, and the two men face each other.
“You are not in the earth realm anymore. You are now in a mystical, magical place that only you and I know about, and only I know how to enter and leave. Just by breathing the air here, you gain magic power that will strengthen and grow in you. I had a strong sense that you would not hesitate to accept this challenge. I must tell you this is a dangerous undertaking on your part. Becoming a magic user makes you a valuable prize throughout the realms. Magic users are the most sought out individuals in all the realms for their magical abilities and their knowledge. There is good and evil all around, and evil will seek you out at all cost. As you learn and your magic grows, so will your presence. I can protect you as long as you do not leave this plane. Once you leave and use magic, your presence will become known. How powerful you will become is yet to be seen, but you have the potential to become a great and powerful magic user. I see this in you and know greatness is in store for you.”