Xandar raised his eyes from the scroll he had been slouching over, straightened his shoulders, and yawned.

It was getting cold in the cellar, though he appeared to be the only one to notice.

They were sitting in a large hall. Four dusty, heavy writing desks stood along the bare stone walls, beside each one, shelves towered up to the ceiling, bending under the weight of the heavy tomes resting on them.

Three of those desks were occupied. One was his - cluttered with open books and ink-stained scrolls where words were written, scribbled over, and marked through. Behind another desk, further to the left of Xandar’s, Blombardon - whom they called Blombo for short - was writing in his slow and methodical manner, lightly wheezing and mumbling to himself from time to time. A single light orb floated in front of him, reflecting on his thick glasses.

Casior’s desk was at the far end of the room, hidden behind a wall of shelves. He was the newest addition to their team, young and eager, having just graduated from the magic university. They hoped that the seating arrangement would deter the young wizard from running to Blombo with questions every couple of hours and instead would encourage him to search for the answers in the books, but it was a lost cause.

Behind Xandar, at the opposite end of the room, was a desk where scrolls laid spread out like maps and neatly arranged leather-bound books stood guard like sentinels. That desk was reserved for Mauriel, though she spent most of her time away from it, in travel and meetings.

“I’m making tea, does anyone want tea?” Xandar called into the room and looked to his right.

The hall seemed still until Xandar had spoken, shrouded in silence, but the question seemed to stir his colleagues back to life.

“I would not mind having some fresh tea,” Blombo grumbled slowly, and while he did not look up from his writing, he raised the large clay mug that had been sitting on the edge of his table and held it up in the air, as if waiting for it to be magically filled.

Xandar walked over to him and picked it up.

He heard a chair move from behind the row of shelves to his right and saw Casior emerge, always ready to pick up a conversation. From behind a door to a little room on the left, a voice called:

“Yes please!” in a polite, yet flat and pleasureless tone.

The area which they used as a kitchen was one hundred sixty-four and a half feet from their working area, which meant twelve seconds to listen to Casior's chatter on the way (Xandar counted), and the young wizard started talking before they even took the first step.

“I’ve been looking for alteration spells today for that last part we need to adjust, and it’s just unbelievable how many there are out there!” He told Xandar, raising his eyebrows and waving his arms. “I mean, you can’t just cast a spell to - I don’t know - make someone’s hair grow longer. You’d have to first attach it to every single hair, reach to its cells, find the right way to communicate with the cell or it will not understand your request at all, alter it, then cast a spell to locate each strand of hair and cast the inner spell on it, and that’s not even mentioning preparing the skin and the head for it, and do you borrow the energy from the body or reach to an external source?”

“It’s from the body if it has enough excess energy to spend, and a different source if it doesn’t and there is an available one. You don’t want to create the source because it’s easy to miscalculate its limits and then you might accidentally create an eternal cycle.” Xandar explained.

“But how do you determine if the body has enough excess energy? Can you tell just by looking at the person? I mean, if they are-”

“Another spell,” Xandar interrupted, and at least for a moment, it seemed to shut Casior up.

They had reached the kitchen. It was nothing more than an old storage room - Dust-laden shelves clinging to the walls and empty boxes - but they had used a few crates to create a makeshift table and brought in a large kettle, a few mugs, and an abundant supply of tea. Sometimes Mauriel would bring a box of biscuits from the nearby bakery to help them through the tiresome afternoon hours.

A single candle burned inside a glass lamp, shedding little light through layers of black soot.

There were no biscuits that day but they still had water and soon the large kettle was floating in the air, carried by a net of dim orange light.

Casior studied the floating structure.

“What spell is that?” he asked.

“Basic fireball,” Xandar shrugged.

“But it’s not a ball,” Casior observed.

“The spell is about summoning a small amount of fire, it’s a floating sphere by default, but no one said you can’t rearrange its form,” Xandar explained, and a little smile stretched across his face. It was hard not to feel pleased with yourself when you managed to get the argumentative wizard to stare in awe.

They stood in silence for a while, waiting for the water to boil, and Xandar could see that Casior was preparing for another advance.

“Wouldn’t it be more efficient to use the evaporate water spell, with an alarm spell to stop it when the water reached the right heat?” He said, starting slowly, ponderously, then gathering up speed and confidence as he went.

Xandar inhaled deeply.

“That way you could -” the younger wizard began to say but the sound of creaking hinges made him stop and look up.

They listened as the heavy door above them opened, then squeaked and groaned as the hinges pulled it back to be closed with a muted thud.

Heels clicked as someone was coming down the stairs.

“Mauriel’s back,” Xandar answered Casior’s questioning look. He could recognize her hasty pace from miles.

“Oh, perfect, I really need some tea right now,” Mauriel’s voice chimed in the empty hallway as she walked. She appeared in the doorway a moment later.

Her long hair was tied behind her head - neat enough to give her an elegant, yet somewhat strict appearance, and at the same time loose enough to hide her pointy ears. It was a feature that, even in their day and age, could still spark up suspicion, but Mauriel did not seem to mind and would flaunt or hide them according to what the situation called for.

She was a half-elf - wielding the grace of the fey folk combined with the blunt will of her human side - and was used to adjusting her manner to all different sorts.

“You look tired,” Xandar observed.

Mauriel reached into the leather bag she wore over her shoulder and produced a scroll of paper, “I just had a meeting at the palace,” she said, waving the scroll like a king’s scepter, “They want a mind enhancement now.”

“What? But we already agreed on the health protection and all the physical enhancements, adding the mind part now would mean restructuring the entire spell,” Xandar protested.

Steam was beginning to rise out of the kettle's spout.

Mauriel sighed, “That is what the king wants.”

“But the spell's due tomorrow,” Casior said.

Mauriel shook her head. She reached for the kettle which still floated in the air and pulled it down.

Xandar spoke a word and the floating net of fire disappeared with a hiss.

They trailed behind her as she walked out of the kitchen, cup of steaming tea in hand and the scroll in the other. At the end of the corridor, she turned left, away from the common area, and went straight towards the closed door. Xandar noticed that the red circle which had been hanging on the door earlier had been replaced with a red circle crossed by a line, Erdrik’s way of signaling to them that he was not to be disturbed.

Casior tried to protest but Mauriel ignored him.

Xandar had just reached Blombo’s desk - placing one cup full of extra strong tea in front of the old wizard - when the shouting started.

He returned to his desk and tried to sink back into work. Meetings between Mauriel and Erdrik often ended on high notes and he did his best to pay them no mind.

The yelling and shouting subsided after a while and were replaced with quiet tension, like the air before a thunderstorm.

After what felt like over an hour later, the door of the office down the hall had finally opened and Erdrik walked out, rubbing his flat, square face.

“Looks like we’ve got a long night ahead of us,” he announced.

* * *

It was still dark outside when Xandar awoke in the little room he was renting above the shoemaker's shop, and his gray cat meowed in protest as he pulled up the blankets to get up.

His usual robes were laying in a pile on a chair by the bed but that day Xandar turned to a narrow little wardrobe on the opposite side of the wall and took out his ceremonial robes, the ones he had worn to his graduation from the magic university.

They were deep blue with a string of gold running through the hems of the sleeves and around the collar. He also wore the matching hat – tall and pointy with stars embroidered on it. He thought it looked silly but Mauriel insisted it made him look more professional.

He was not sure why all three wizards had to attend the meeting in the first place – it had always been Mauriel’s, and at times Erdrik's, role to attend meetings and discussions with their clients, and only one of the wizards would have been enough to cast the spell. True, they were the ones crafting the spell and doing the actual work, but he was not in it for glory, only the pay, and the deep satisfaction of a well-crafted spell. Erdrik thought otherwise.

They had been lucky – after much high-pitched arguing and insisting on Erdrik’s side, Mauriel was forced to go back to the palace and appeal to the king’s committee in hope of getting a few more days to complete their work and accommodate the king’s new requests.

“It is humanly – and even elfly – impossible!” Erdrik announced that afternoon, “There is absolutely no way in hell that this can be done in one night!”

“So you're telling me I need to go back to the palace, mere hours after I came back, and tell the king – the King, Erdrik – that what he asks for is impossible?” Mauriel said. She was not yelling, but her usually melodic voice – a trait she had most likely inherited from her elvish side – reached a particularly high pitch. It no longer had the quality of chiming silver bells but of rusty metal being hit with a stick.

“How in holy hell did you hear me say it was impossible?” Erdrik exclaimed, at this point grabbing his head as if trying to prevent it from exploding, “I said, Mauriel, that this is not possible to achieve in one night!”

And with that, the explosion was over. Mauriel rode back to the palace, and despite his insisting on it being impossible to do on such short notice, Erdrik and the rest of them worked late that night, conducting a plan to turn the impossible into possible. Erdrik still was in his office when they left, gods know until what hour, and on the next morning, they heard the news that the king had approved of their request. They had seven more days.

It was an intense week, despite the additional time they were granted. Erdrik came up with a plan for how to alter the spell while not altering it as much as possible, and they worked on it tirelessly. It was almost impossible to find test subjects on such short notice, and aside from one drunk traveler Mauriel had somehow managed to recruit, they had to rely mainly on theory and luck.

Xandar usually preferred the solid certainty of logic, but as he walked down the narrow steps of the house, past the shoemaker’s workshop, and out the street, Xandar had, for the first time in his life, prayed for luck.

He was the first to arrive at the back gate of the university where they were renting part of the cellar as their work area, only that day he did not go in but remained to wait outside.

Mauriel was the next to arrive, wearing a tight-fitting, elegant dress instead of her usual leggings and tunic. A necklace with a leaf-shaped pendant hung from her neck and her hands were decorated with delicate silver rings, twisting like tiny vines around her fingers. She made her hair into a series of braids that intertwined to create a complex structure behind her head. It must have taken her hours.

She brought her travel mug - an elvish invention that consisted of a tall cup closed by a sealed lid with a small opening that one could drink from - and was sipping black tea. That did not stop her from yawning every few seconds.

“Good morning, Xandar,” she greeted him with a smile, “Did you manage to get some sleep?”

“Wouldn’t mind dozing off for a few more hours, but it’s not too bad,” Xandar said.

“Well, if all goes well, perhaps we can finish early today, take the day off,” Maurial said, her smile growing.

“We sure could use that,” Xandar said, eying her from foot to toe. Mauriel nodded but her attention was already elsewhere and Xandar watched her smile instantly fade.

He followed her eyes and saw Erdrik approaching them.

“Morning,” he greeted them. His cheerfulness stood in stark contrast to his mood just the night before.

“Morning,” Mauriel mumbled, looking away.

Blombardon and Casior were already visible at the beginning of the street that curved and led to the back gates.

A chariot soon arrived and they all got in. It was crammed inside and a tense silence had settled.

Mauriel took out her leather-bound book and started going through her notes to Xandar’s right, and to his left, Blombo’s heavy, wheezing breath, was growing louder.

“Everyone has their escape plans in case we’ll have to flee the city today?” Erdrik said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. He laughed once, nervously.

“I have a little cabin in the woods outside town, sure no one will find me there,” Blombo said slowly, smiling.

“I wish we had another week,” Mauriel said without looking up from her book, and at once Erdrik's tone changed.

“I said that we should ask for more time, but you insisted not to go back to the palace and just hope for good,” He said.

“I did not just hope for good. The king was getting impatient, which, I believe, does not look very good for us.” Mauriel replied, glaring at him from under lowered eyebrows.

“Well, we’ve done the best we could, there’s no point worrying about it now,” Blombo said and it seemed that, at least for a while, his calm, deep voice, and stoic patience managed to quiet them down.

They arrived at the palace ahead of time and were escorted to a small waiting hall where golden vines twisted around marble pillars and lavish sofas with red velvet cushions stood on legs carved to look like the paws of some predatory beast.

They waited in silence. Casior studied the room with awe, but even the royal decorations could not hold his attention for long.

“I still don’t understand why we couldn't use a simple healing spell for the mind part,” he said to the room in general.

“Because what a healing spell does-” Xandar began to say.

“A healing spell reverts a condition back to normal, and we cannot assume that the normal condition answers the new desired state,” Erdrik broke in.

“But if you can make a healed arm stronger than it was before the injury, surely you could make a mind-”

“You’re relying too much on assumptions here,” Erdrik said, his tone getting impatient, “what if there wasn’t any injury or damage? And even if you managed to improve the current state, would it be enough to answer the specific requests we received?”

“You could use detect. We did something similar in university - we used a detect spell to analyze the current situation and then a healing spell to-”

“Perhaps it would be nice if we had the opportunity to take a few months and engage in research and look for alternative ways, but that was not an option, now was it?” Erdrik broke in again, raising his voice “I have extensive experience with body and mind-enhancing spells, and this is a proven method, so that is what we did.”

Beside him, Xandar heard Mauriel mumble: “And we wouldn’t want to argue with Erdrik’s vast experience…” but it was too quiet for anyone else to hear.

After a long while, Squarb, the head of the king’s committee, entered the room, looking down at them from behind his glasses. He did not seem pleased, but from what they’d been hearing from Mauriel, that was his natural state.

The head of the king’s committee had his hands folded in front of him and there was not a trace of a smile on his long face.

“The king will see you now.” He said, not bothering to greet them, and started walking.

They rushed to follow.

“You think your work is hard? Imagine having to deal with four of these every day.” Mauriel mumbled, throwing a sideway glance towards the wizards, who trailed behind.

They walked through empty halls where their footsteps echoed like an approaching avalanche until they stopped before large doors that were guarded by two men in metal suits. They held long spears in their hands and looked directly through the party.

Squarb turned back and, looking at Mauriel, said: “It’s time to really impress the king now.”

The doors opened slowly and they entered a wide hall. In front of them, on a raised dais, stood two heavy thrones, marble stairs leading up to them.

Xandar’s heart started pounding. He was not nervous before, but in an instant, cold fingers grabbed his insides and his head was filled with echoes, hardly forming coherent sentences.

He heard Erdrik speaking, ‘putting his charming mask on’ as Mauriel liked to say behind his back.

“We started this assignment with two goals in mind,” he was saying, “One being enhancing his majesty’s health and physical vitality, the other, enhancing his majesty’s mind, leading to a better health, better memory and sharper wits - traits that would improve his majesty’s performance and allow him to carry his royal duties with ease.”

He went on to describe - in very simplified terms - the mechanics of the spell and the different components used, though it did not seem to impress the king, his round-cheeked wife, or the committee who were all staring at him with severe expressions on their faces.

Then it was Mauriel’s turn to talk about the spell and describe what was about to happen. To the unsuspecting listener, she would have sounded calm, but Xandar could hear the subtle shake in her breath.

“The spell we have for you today consists of three components; a potion his majesty will be ingesting, a complex spell that our senior wizard, Blombardon Krhabgaard will be casting, and a special word his majesty will repeat to release the conjured energy.” Mauriel was saying.

The potion was nothing more than water colored with beets and mixed with sugar, salt, milk, and vinegar. They found that people expected a potion to taste bad.

“People like a show,” Erdrik liked to say, and while the spell required no drinkable components, their experience showed that indeed, a simple invocation read by a wizard was less satisfying to most people than a more complex, interactive spell consisting of multiple components.

The same was true for the word the receiver of the spell had to repeat. It was gibberish and held no meaning, but it made the target feel empowered.

There was some whispering and a quiet, urgent-sounding conversation as the king’s committee stirred. Squarb rushed to the king's side, spoke some words in his ear, then listened, nodding violently.

He walked down the stairs to where the rest of the committee was gathered.

“How can we ensure his majesty pronounces the word correctly and does not alter the spell?” he asked.

Mauriel was about to answer but Erdrik stepped forward, “It is a simple word that will be both shown in writing and spoken to the king to ensure he pronounces it correctly,” he said, “What’s more, it is only meant for the release of magic and therefore cannot alter the spell itself and endanger the king.”

They waited in tense silence as the king pondered Erdrik’s words and motioned to Squarb again, making the tall, skinny man rush to his side in his erratic, jerky manner.

They had to wait until Squarb walked back to his place at the front of the committee, put his pale hands one atop the other, and with an air of self-importance, say:

“His majesty approves.”

They had Casior - who eagerly volunteered for the task and had no other competition - bring the potion to the king, holding the little bottle with the utmost care and dedication. He was of course stopped on his way by Squarb who scrutinized the bottle as if he could read its content with his eyes, and only after his nod of approval was allowed to walk up the stairs to the throne.

The word that the king was to repeat they had written on a tiny scroll and clapped with approval at the king’s first attempt to pronounce it.

When it was time for the casting of the spell, Blombo walked forward, being the oldest and most reliable looking of them all, and in his deep, calm voice, he began reading the ancient words.

Xandar could feel the slight, almost unnoticeable, shifts and sparks buzzing in the air as if it was full of electricity.

The entire hall held its breath.

When it was time for the king to seal the invocation, Xandar watched Blombo’s mouth move slightly as he whispered the real word that would release the spell, and held his breath.

The king’s features began to shift.

His mouth, eyes, nose, and ears moved and came in and out of focus - looking smeared for a moment and then became clear again. The arms and legs extended and shortened, and even the head’s shape switched and moved, causing the crown to slide sideways.

The movement intensified and became a blur until it was completely unclear if the creature before them was even human. Talons and other strange features came and went and for the slightest of moments, it looked like a gigantic fish had been sitting on the throne, opening and closing its mouth erratically.

Xandar looked aside and caught Mauriel staring at him and the other wizards, her eyes huge and horrified.

But then it suddenly stopped. The fuzziness ceased and a new form solidified before them - it was still the same king, but he was taller and stronger, with greater presence and a fierce look in his eyes.

Xandar realized he had been clutching his fists tight and finally allowed himself to relax, when another surge of energy ran through the room, buzzing around the king’s head.

The man’s fierce glare was gone and he suddenly seemed confused and disoriented. He looked up, unaware of the people around him, and started opening and closing his mouth repeatedly.

At the foot of the stairs leading to the throne, the members of the king’s committee were slowly turning their heads from the king to Blombardon and the rest of the party.

“What happened to his majesty,” Squarb said, hardly moving his mouth. The sentence should have been a question but was not pronounced as one.

Mauriel was the first one to make a motion, she took a step forward, and, nervously playing with her hands, began to say: “It might be that-”

But before she had a chance to finish the sentence, Erdrik took over:

“The king must have mispronounced the word,” he stated, not a shade of apology in his tone, “It happens all the time. Spells are delicate things, right? The slightest shift in tone or punctuation and you might get an entirely different result.”

It was the kind of self-assuredness that made people doubt themselves, and in the face of it, even Squarb began to trip on his tongue.

“So can you, I mean, can’t it be..” he was struggling.

They looked up in surprise as a voice came from the top of the dais. The queen cleared her throat and raised a hand, silencing Squarb with one motion. She was pale and her voice thin and shaky as she said:

“Can you fix it?”

* * *

Xandar was in the kitchen, heating a pot of tea on a floating net of fire when he heard the door leading to the first floor open and close with a thud. Footsteps were approaching.

Erdrik passed by the doorway, not bothering to stop. Mauriel was behind him, and she headed straight for the kitchen.

“Good,” she said when she saw Xandar, “I could use some tea right now.”

“Did you manage to calm things down?” Xandar asked.

“Prepare for a long night,” she said with a deep exhale, “we need to fix this as soon as possible. And Erdrik even managed to sell them another contract.”

“Really?”

“Yes, a continuous improvement agreement, where they can get help from us if anything goes wrong, and they can ask for changes and additions to a certain limit and we add small spell components every month,” she told him, seeming surprised by her own words. “You must hand it to him, Erdrik knows how to talk to clients. If only he would use this ability here.”

As they walked back, Xandar noticed that the sign on Erdrik’s door changed from yellow to red, meaning that he was busy.

“Listen up,” he said when he finally emerged, “Here’s what we’re going to do,”

Xandar could hear Blombo’s deep sigh coming from behind him.

It was going to be a long day.