Short Stories 3rd Place: Wicked Things by J J Andrews

Morgana watched the distant figure wind its way up the twisty mountain path, the golden halo of its hair shining in the fading sunlight. The bright spark blinked in and out of the mists as it climbed higher. She glanced sideways at Balthazar. He lounged against a stone pillar, scaly arms folded, showing no sign of having seen anything. She leaned back against a pillar, mirroring Balthazar on the opposite side of the doors, and relaxed into the growing darkness. As the shadows spread, she sent a few of her own with them.

Finally, Balthazar straightened and pointed a dark talon towards the newcomer. She supressed a smile that it had taken him this long to notice and simply nodded. A hidden talent amongst friends was an advantage against adversaries, and at the Dark Academy, they were often one and the same. Their visitor was now close enough she recognised it as a young boy. Visitors were rare. A child? Almost unheard of. She straightened, sharpening her focus.

“Do you think he’ll make it past the arch?” she asked Balthazar.

He snorted. If it had been a horrifying many-limbed being of pure malevolence approaching instead of a small human, she suspected he would have responded the same way. Balthazar took admission to the academy very seriously.

Morgana curled one of her shadowy tendrils around her pillar as the boy approached the great stone arch further down the path. Very few applicants ever passed beneath it. Usually, they slumped to the ground as soon as they stepped foot under it, moaning and shivering as they heard its silky whispers. She remembered it as wild and freeing, intoxicating with all its dark promises. And even so, she had had to work hard to pull free of its embrace and make it all the way to the Academy doors.

Her shadows pulled tighter around her in anticipation as the boy advanced. He glanced up at the forbidding archway with shining eyes and did a little dance beneath it, arms waving and short legs spinning, apparently delighted with himself. Morgana raised her eyebrows. This was new.

Balthazar flared his wings wide and roared, the noise echoing across the valley. Morgana sent her shadows snaking along the path until they wrapped themselves around the boy’s legs, rooting him in place. The boy gasped, and for a moment she was gratified something was going as expected, until he clapped his hands together and grinned up at her. His legs squirmed beneath her swirling bonds, his whole body moving in what was clearly an ecstatic wiggle.

She had never seen a prospective Academy entrant wiggle before. The boy gave his hips a little twist and the cords of shadow dissipated into the evening air. Her mouth dropped open. Across from her, Balthazar was glaring at the boy, clearly unimpressed. She considered him more carefully. After all, he had walked beneath the archway without breaking stride and had just shrugged off her restraints as if they were nothing. Now free, the boy rushed over and turned his face upwards to address them.

“Hello! I can’t believe I made it into magic school! What’s it like? I bet it’s amazing!”

Morgana exchanged glances above the boy’s head with Balthazar, her eyes wide, taken aback by this assault of enthusiasm. Balthazar echoed her expression, his face almost comically shocked. Magic school? As if this wasn’t the most infamous academy of dark arts there ever was.

“My name is Alfred Wandsworth, but you can call me Alfie,” beamed the boy, not the slightest bit concerned by his lack of welcome. He was still bouncing on the balls of his feet, arms gesticulating as he spoke as if his tiny body could barely contain his delight.

This just kept getting worse. She wasn’t sure how she was going to present this Alfie, with his cherubic face and boundless energy, to the Academy president. But there were very few rules here, and the ones they had were set in stone. He had not only found the secret, perilous mountain path, but had also passed through the malicious archway and had not been cowed by the guardians of the gate. The boy had earned the right to present himself. Although she might need to have quick word about ‘magic school’ beforehand if she wanted to maintain any dignity at all. Before she could say anything, Balthazar spoke first.

“My name, small child, is Balthazar the Great,” said Balthazar, his voice a rumbling growl as he stood on his back legs to his full height and stretched his great red wings up to the sky. He looked down his scaly nose at Alfie. “I am the terror of the sky, death on silent wings in the night, the great and terrible… what are you doing?” He suddenly cut off with a yelp.

Alfie had reached up and started stroking the bottom of Balthazar’s wings, apparently fascinated, and paying absolutely no attention to Balthazar’s speech. “Oh wow!” he breathed as his fingers danced across the ruby scales, hands tiny against the curving spikes that jutted out from the edges of each giant wing. Then the boy seemed to see through the Academy gates behind them for the first time, and with an “oh cool!” he was dashing off, intent on the floating fountain in the central square. Morgana watched him go, struggling to process what was happening.

“Are you alright?” she finally asked Balthazar, who was standing in place as if stunned. She couldn’t help a small smirk at his horrified expression.

“He touched my wings! With his grubby little hands! What is he? He’s so…” Balthazar seemed momentarily lost for words. “Enthusiastic,” he decided, after a significant pause. “Do you think… no, surely, he knows where he is, right? He hasn’t wandered in here by accident?”

They both watched as Alfie admired the black magnetic stone of the fountain, cheerily greeting a troll that was walking by, seemingly unperturbed that the fountain flowed with blood. Morgana followed him, inexplicably drawn to the mad energy he exuded, as Alfie dashed over to the carefully curated garden bed of poisonous plants in the corner of the square. He promptly started collecting a bouquet of likely lethal blooms, humming to himself as he worked. The mountain troll passed her, wearing a dazed expression that she was quickly coming to associate with anybody that encountered the tornado of enthusiasm that was Alfie.

“I’m not sure,” Morgana admitted to Balthazar, both of them drawn along in Alfie’s wake. The idea of someone attending the Academy by accident was…unthinkable. The kind of Dark Arts that were honed here were beyond most people’s comprehension.

Balthazar raised a scaly eyebrow at her, and gestured to where Alfie was laughing, chasing a yellow petal that the evening breeze had plucked from his grasp.

“Yes, alright,” she conceded. “He is a bit more…sunshine then we usually see in a candidate.” And yet, she stared at this boy who had stumbled into a realm of nightmares and was acting instead as if all of his dreams had come true. Balthazar stayed beside her, both of them neglecting their duty. She couldn’t tell if he was still traumatised from the unexpected tactile examination of his wings or if, like her, he was simply fascinated by this creature.

Alfie befriended a group of ogres by the deadly garden, and before long, one of them was wearing a crown of flowers on its head.

“Should we do something?” Morgana asked. “He appears to be infectious.”

Balthazar grunted and flared his wings again. Uh-oh. He was definitely still angry about the touching.

“Boy!” he yelled across the square at Alfie, who left his new friends to skip back towards them, his own flower crown blood red with the last of the setting sun. Morgana decided to try again, before Balthazar lost his temper. She let her power whisper around her, shadows twisting as she wove them into extra arms ending in sets of vicious claws, fanning them out from her back. “Do you know where you are?” she asked, keeping her voice low and soft.

Alfie watched her display with his head cocked to one side, still smiling. “Of course, I do. This is magic school! Look at all the cool people everywhere! And now I’m one of them!” He hugged himself, bouncing up and down again on the balls of his feet. Was the boy ever still? Morgana looked around the square at the ‘cool people.’ Apart from herself, wrapped in shadow, there were the ogres, ten feet tall and ugly as sin, and a furious Balthazar who was practically breathing steam at this point. A pack of sharp-toothed critters skittered by, scrabbling over the still-bleeding body of a rabbit. She gave up. The boy liked monsters.

Balthazar apparently disagreed. “Magic school!” he roared, his tail thrashing. “This is the most prestigious Academy of Dark Arts in all the land! Where only the most wicked dwell so that we may hone our beautiful, sinister skills! You,” he spat at Alfie, a rush of hot air billowing from his throat, “do not belong here.”

With that, Balthazar whipped his spike-tipped tail towards the boy. Quick as an adder, Alfie side-stepped the flashing scales. He gazed intently at the enraged dragon, and Morgana froze, her shadows tasting malice in the air. The little boy furrowed his forehead, smile now nowhere to be seen. Suddenly, there was a small, wet ‘pop’ and a flood of something warm and sticky drenched the right side of her body.

She gaped at the spot where Balthazar had stood only moments ago, now nothing but a splatter of red across the grass. She spun to stare at Alfie, her shadows shying away. He beamed at her, as if he had done nothing more than swat an irritating insect. He adjusted his now blood-soaked flower crown and shrugged.

“I know where I belong.”