This is my working first chapter. Hormunder, while not the main character, is certainly significant, and I felt the scene strong enough to start the book on.
Hormunder, Magi of the Seventh Circle, Caretaker of the Blue Pearl, and Holder of the Vast Secret, seethed not so secretly. His frustration was marked on a face that appeared to have strenuously tried to fit a what a magus should look like but hadn’t quite succeeded. A receding hair line was demarcated by an chaotic frizz, the color of which alternated between dark red and brown attempting valiantly to become grey. His beard was what his peers called whispy, when they were being polite, and worse things - such as scraggly - behind his back. Calling a magi’s beard scraggly was one of quicker ways to make an already infamous temper arise to the surface.
Hormunder glared at the door to his tower, waiting for it to open and Elric to appear. Appear and be suitably chastised from the terrible scandal he caused at the Amaranth Court. Hormunder heard a grating sound and realised that it was his own teeth. That impertinent boy! he had no right to attempt to touch the Splinter. The amount I had to explain to the rest of the Circle, let alone the Slythan embassy! I will be humilated for years to come!
“Argh!” Hormunder clutched at his frizz. Small blue sparks crackled and circled around his head. A headache began to pound, as the sparks manifested into a Achestorm, violently spinning around. Another distraction.
“Enough. No longer can I wait, for that motherless son of a hedge warlock!” He declaimed to the empty room. It was a habit of his - making statements addressing an audience, which in this particular moment included a mouse, the cricket it was chasing, and a few semi-sentient sparks that had left the Achestorm to zig and zag their way across the room.
Hormunder threw open his apprentice’s door with a hand that was not nearly gnarled enough. He squinted with eyes that were almost requiring spectacles into the half-gloom. His disappointingly medium sized nose pointed at the pillow of Elric’s simple bed. Ahah! A hair or two should do! He snatched them and scurried up into his study, a mere two flights further away. Pearl being a city of wizards, magic, and insufferable bearded elderly types, real estate upon which one would build a tower were rather in high demand. As a result, Hormunder’s tower was actually a four floor squarish building, rather similar to another down the street, had no odd angle’s whatsoever, and his solarium (star room) was inconvienently blocked on the southern horizon by another tower rising into the sky - it happened to belong to Regulon the Incomparable. “Regulon the Incompetent, more like,” muttered Hormunder. Upon reaching the study, he hurried to his alchemical instruments. “I must distill his essence from these hairs, an elementary exercise, I must say.” This was accomplished with a few vials of this and that, a turn of a knob or three, and one or two “Blast that boy.” A flame to the bottom of a flask to boil off any waste liquids, and a scrape to get the newly formed residue, and then a careful transfer to a smaller vial. Hormunder approached his crystal ball - actually rather high quality, for saving up on real estate meant he spent his monies on something of value. A practiced scatter above the ball and a few intoned syllables of a suddenly resonant voice and the mottled crystal whirled into clouds that formed and reformed. Hormunder knotted his brow - eyebrows not quite meshing together satisfyingly. Without warning three green glyphs glowed in the ball till they were all that Hormunder could see.
“What in Yrgga’s eight pl-” The ball cracked, then shattered, the splinters falling to the floor. Hormunder’s eyes bulged. Then the splinters rose from the ground, forming a sphere, then an oval, then a face - nonhuman, sparkling, and phosporescing a sick pale green. A glass tongue snaked out, the shards began to vibrate in the air, humming till it became a pitch that made Hormunder’s eyes water and his ears sting. The face began to speak in scratchy syllables. It was casting a spell!
Hormunder grasped his chest, at the pouch hung just underneath his robe. The pouch moved of its own accord, pulling towards the snaking, sparkling tongue. It couldn’t be! Not this! Never this! Hormunder’s mind gibbered at the consequences of what his mind was starting to realise. But even if his fears were unfounded, he had to act. The sibilant voice of the sharded face was rising higher. One hand at his robes, the other scrabbled at the desk drawer, below the crystal ball. There. A bottle of redwyrm bonedust. He popped the wax seal with his thumb, and trailed the dust in a careful circle around him, as fast as he dared. He scribbled glyphs at the aspected points as the intoning voice grew fervent. Whatever he had unleashed through his ball was about to complete the spell. A trickle of dust from the bottle - Just a few grains more! The voice shouted and the shards flew at the crouched wizard. They reached the perimeter of the circle just as Hormunder looked up, finger still on the ground, scribing the last symbol. He saw as the shards angled towards his face, then slowed, then fell as they breached his protective circle. Most that is, except for the few that made up the tongue. They whipped at his face - his eyes. Red pain pierced him, then washed over in a tide of black.
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