Inglerook

The spluttering fireball landed amongst Hermes’s beard with a hiss, singeing the long white whiskers that he had coxed and groomed so carefully since he was a young man. He leapt to his feet and patted wildly at the hairs that still smouldered. Unable to fully put out the flames with such a clumsy technique, he finally resorted to grabbing the mug of prune juice that he had been sipping at (before the rude interruption) and doused the fledgling fire.

The various incoherent mumblings of the dining hall had gone silent during the affair. Where once their rheumy gazes had been so transfixed by the plastic trays set before them, loaded with overcooked vegetables and anonymous pastes, now all eyes were set on Hermes. He was a sorry sight; the fireball had been no more than a spark really, but his dry old beard had made fine kindling and the flame had burned an unsightly hole clean though the hairs to the robe below. Worse yet, the pith of the prunes stuck to his tattered bristles, dangling without dignity.

From the back of the hall a mischievous laughter came - its originator invisible to Hermes’s long addled sight. “Aha-ha-ha...” the mysterious voice said, before interrupting itself with a coughing fit, wheezing and taking a deep breath from the oxygen mask that hung around its owner’s neck, “... ha-HA! Looks like I got you this time Hermes, you old coot!” The voice continued as the body behind it hobbled forward.

Hermes squinted his eyes; gradually the blurred figure ahead of him began to resolve itself. It was Albertus – his nemesis. Thin wisps of smoke created by the fireball still rose from his old enemy’s Wizarframe (the walking frame that is made from a mage’s staff when the later fails to offer enough support), revealing his guilt in the matter. A mixture of indignation and rage swelled in Hermes’s heart, but he was too proud a wizard to show it.

“If you will excuse me, gentlemen” Hermes said to his stunned dinner friends, with whom he ran a mean whist drive on Tuesday and Thursday nights. He snatched up his staff and tottered out of the hall. As he passed Albertus he shot him the iciest look he could muster – when on form it was truly something to behold, the product of several millennia of practiced hate, but its power was greatly diminished by the wearer’s comical appearance. Albertus merely responded with an irritating smirk of victory.

Hermes ambled back to his room whilst plotting vengeance, his shabby slippers shuffling along the vinyl flooring. Every wizard had a nemesis; most of them were a typical sort - malicious twins, dark masters with a penchant for making orphans, old mentors turned to evil and others of such a fantastical ilk. Alas, the causes of Hermes and Albertus’s feud were much more dangerously mundane.

Regardless of the specifics, all other wizards in the great history of wizarding had vanquished or been vanquished by their nemesis by the time they reached Hermes’s grand age. It was seen as a rite of passage in the mage’s long years and the fact that Hermes had never completely destroyed Albertus, despite the fact he had reached the rank of Archmage and provost of the Rivean chronicle hall, was a source of great consternation for him.

Hermes pushed open the door of his sanctuary – the musty and dimly lit room of his own. The room contained fuming globes of glass simmering with alchemical intrigue, piles of unbound handwritten pages, orbs, wands, scaly dragon eggs and stacks of leather-bound treatises on mysticism and the arcane. Indeed, the only thing that looked out of place for the home of a wizard were the floral polyester curtains that let through far too much of the anti-dramatic sunlight outside. This was, after all, the Inglerook nursing home for wizards.

In the quietude of his en-suite bathroom, replete with accessibility grab-bars and handrails, Hermes fished out his ample grooming kit and began to repair the damage. It was complex work to disguise the hole, but beard repair is a well established practice amongst wizards, particularly amongst ones with penchant for alchemy. He was somewhat enraged when he realised he would have to remove a good seven inches of growth to fully fix the hole, but his fingers were well versed in this art and soon his beard looked as bushy and fulsome as ever.

Once presentable, Hermes doddered over to his bed and slid out an imposing looking chest from underneath; bones and screaming skulls were embossed on the hard grey metal that dominated its lid. The old wizard spoke the words of opening and the bones assembled into skeletons - he had designed them to animate and fight to the death before the box would open – a suitably impressive spectacle for one so powerful as he. Unfortunately across the centuries the skeletons seemed to have made up. Instead of fighting like they were supposed to, this time they gave each other a friendly hug and started gossiping in a strange chattering speech like old friends that hadn’t seen each other in a while.

With a sigh, Hermes crushed the idling skeletons beneath an old gouty fist and slid the box open. Inside sat his grimoire, bound in dragon-hide and etched with a host of arcane symbols. In his prime men had killed and died to catch but the most fleeting glimpse of a page, but now his magic was old and weak. Not so weak that he wouldn’t find vengeance on Albertus though. Grabbing up the book he sat in his favourite chair next to his favourite desk, and began flicking through the yellowing pages to find a suitable spell; something of just the right nature to repay his old enemy.

Hermes and Albertus had known each other for aeons; in the long, long ago they had been friends when they studied at Piggypimples College of Wizardry. They had shared a great fondness for the ancient and hallowed game of tiddlywinks and had played matches whenever they had a spare moment. So much did they play that they became near inseparable; they played winks over meals, they stole out of lessons to play and they even developed a magical version that could be played telepathically in their sleep.

Unfortunately, wizards are an extremely competitive bunch. Their friendly rivalry soon turned sour when Hermes began to suspect that Albertus was cheating with telekinesis, in response he turned Albertus’s favourite wink into a flour beetle. Things escalated rather direly from here; soon they were having out and out magical battles of fire and ice. Before they knew it they were nemeses through and through – each sworn to destroy the other.

Across the centuries, as they had both matured to a level of power beyond compare, the conflicts that punctuated their running feud only became more intense. One particularly violent encounter had scorched the very sky and birthed the auroras that are still seen today. But battles like these had failed to determine a victor and soon they turned to other means. Things got truly out of hand when they orchestrated the great wars of the Granpian continent which lasted for over twenty generations of men and in which millions of ‘normals’ had been killed – but even this had not resolved the matter. Eventually other wizards had intervened, trying to keep Hermes and Albertus apart, for fear of what state the world would be left in if they did not.

The nemeses would, of course, occasionally remember one another and maybe they would send a demonic assassin or an ill curse to try and finish their adversary, much like another person might send a Christmas card to an old acquaintance. Every so often they still had violent skirmishes that would make the foundations of civilisation rumble, but others would soon interject in such matters lest they became too wild. For the most part, they had been amply distracted by other matters and had forever postponed their long running quarrel. So it came to be that neither one of them ever succeeded in killing the other and both grew older and weaker together.

With memories of conflict rattling around his mind, Hermes flicked over another page in his grimoire and finally found the perfect spell for the occasion. Where Hermes was proud and vain of his long and sagely beard, Albertus was much more invested in his finely honed eyebrows. Magnificent things they were, bushy and well groomed; when turned upwards they gave him a look of deep, ancient wisdom and when turned downwards they gave him such a look of malice and brooding that many men had died from less sinister leers. The spell Hermes had found, scribbled in the margin of a handwritten page, would transform these impressive brows into a pair of living, furry caterpillars.

It was so perfect that Hermes couldn’t help but laugh at his own genius. At once he set about creating the necessary reagent – an ointment that he would need to rub into his old adversary’s eyebrows. Hermes decided that he would wait until the dead of night and sneak into Albertus’s room to carry out his prank. Even with the immense amusement he derived by imagining Albertus’s expression when he found his brows bald; Hermes knew that it would be no mean feat to stay awake for so long. He was, after all, a very old man.

After the simple tincture was finished, Hermes activated his largest crystal ball and tuned it in to his favourite shopping channel - a guilty pleasure of his. He hunkered down in his chair and, with the excitement of a mischievous schoolboy, began the long wait till midnight and the enactment of his plan. He sat, pondered and watched the Barbie-doll presenter tell him about a handsome set of commemorative plates; soon he found himself drifting in and out of wakefulness.

Hermes remembered the day, some months ago, that Albertus had arrived at Inglerook finally too infirm to take care of himself. The nemeses had both been shocked to discover the presence of the other, but you would be surprised to know how few nursing homes that cater for wizards actually exist. That being the case, they were left with little choice but to share this limited space.

Since that fateful day the serene calm of Inglerook’s wards had been rocked by an ever escalating sequence of pranks and stunts as the old rivals attempted to better one another. The other residents found the whole affair to be remarkably unsettling and unbefitting of such famously wise and powerful wizards, but Hermes and Albertus didn’t much care - they had regressed to the level of squabbling school children.

Eventually, they had both been called to speak to the Matron of the home who given them both a firm chastising. That was around a week ago and since then a tentative peace and avoidance had been brokered between the pair, right up until Albertus’s fireball antics earlier in the evening. Now the game was, again, firmly afoot.

Hermes jerked awake as he remembered one particularly distressing prank where Albertus had zapped away the chair from under him. It was much darker in the room now and Hermes’s ornate grandfather clock was pointing to half past midnight - the perfect time to strike. Hermes smiled at this stroke of good fortune and wrestled himself to his feet.

Stealing silently into the corridor, Hermes began his gentle hobble towards Albertus’s room. There would be a handful of night staff on duty and if he were captured he would be returned to his room, but Hermes had managed to fish out his old, moth-eaten cloak of invisibility – with the nurses being mostly non-magical they had little hope of detecting him.

Soon Hermes stood in front of his enemy’s door – number 37C. He bypassed the simple cylinder lock using an old cantrip of unlocking and the door swung open onto the darkness of Albertus’s room. Something seemed wrong, but Hermes couldn’t quite put a finger on it – regardless he proceeded. He had never been in Albertus’s room before, but in the dimness of night he could see that it was much the same as his own – stacks of books and magical artefacts littered the walls.

Hermes knew Albertus would have a host of magical traps and alarms set up – he knew this because his room was equipped with the same features. He paused just inside the doorway before he blundered into one. Reaching out psychically he quickly located their positions – only three of them were still active, the magic of the others had long since faded. Two of them were of a design he recognized and were easily disabled. The third was something completely new, as Hermes poked and prodded the device with his mind he could see its inherent cleverness – it was clearly a work of Albertus’s own devising and Hermes couldn’t help but admire his adversary’s ingenuity. Facing this new challenge Hermes experienced such a sense of adventure that he almost felt young again.

His old powers were working away at Albertus’s telepathic alarm when, with a start, Hermes realised what was wrong with the room – it was missing snoring. Albertus had always snored, from the times when they had been students together through every encounter where Hermes had managed to catch him in his most vulnerable state. Even his neighbours in the home complained incessantly of his booming snorts. Fearing the worst, Hermes flicked on the light switch.

As the halogen lights flickered into life Hermes’s suspicions were confirmed. Albertus lay breathless on the bed with plaid skin and blue lips, his pupils that had once glimmered with intellect had rolled back into his head. Hermes hobbled to his oldest enemy’s bedside – the other man’s flesh was cool to the touch. Despite the fact this was his nemesis, and that he had sought Albertus’s death for so long, Hermes was assailed by a wave of grief. He found himself hammering mindlessly at the emergency help button that hung on the wall.

As he waited for the nurses that would now be speeding towards the room, Hermes spotted something he recognised glittering on a chain that hung around the dead man’s neck – it was a small, well preserved flour beetle set in glass. Realisations flashed through Hermes’s mind at a blinding rate. So much water under the bridge, so many shared experiences – laying there was the only person that could have ever truly understood him. Hermes felt himself weeping; death had stolen the only man he had ever truly respected.

(Word Count: 2436)