“This is completely outrageous!” The tortoise lowered its head and shook it slowly. “A complete and unmitigated disaster!”

“I’m sorry?” Eldren said, not sure what else to say.

“You should be!” the tortoise said, looking back up at him. “You’ve put the entire realm into a terrible predicament.”

“Look,” Eldren said. He took a breath. “I’ll be honest with you. I don’t even know how I got here or why. Truthfully, I think I might be dead. I’m trying to figure out what to do and where to go. If I need to get to heaven or something by being a wizard, I’m open to it.”

“Of course, you’re not dead,” the tortoise snapped.

“How would you know?” Eldren said.

“Because if you were dead you wouldn’t be breathing,” it said.

“That seems like some pretty flawed logic,” Eldren replied.

“Have you ever been alive before but not breathing?”

“Well — er. No.”

“Are you breathing now?” the tortoise asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then you’re obviously alive.”

Eldren paused, processing the prior few minutes.

“Wait a second,” he said slowly. “Did you say that you were supposed to… get injected into my body?”

“Yes,” said the tortoise. “But as I said, you screwed up everything.”

“Kinda glad I did,” Eldren said dryly. He wasn’t afraid of the tortoise, since it was so small. He could probably smash it if he had to. But more than anything, the tortoise seemed his best hope to get answers about where and what he was.

“Take me to the table,” the tortoise said.

“No,” Eldren replied. “I’m not helping you at all without some answers first. You did just try to possess my body, you know. You admitted it. Plus, I don’t even know what you are.”

The tortoise sighed. “Fine. What can I say that would put you at ease?”

Eldren was certain that the answer to that question was ‘nothing’, but he started with the basics.

“What’s your name?” he asked the tortoise.

“Ardos,” it replied.

Silence fell between them. Ardos? Like the wizard who had retired after a botched assassination? The court wizard he was supposed to be temporarily filling in for?

“You’re Ardos?” he asked incredulously.

“Yes.”

“Nobody told me you were a turtle.”

“Tortoise,” the turtle wizard said. “And, I wasn’t one until about four minutes ago,” Ardos said grumpily. “You injected my essence into poor Nurdle.”

“You tried to kill me!” Eldren reminded him.

“Possess you,” Ardos corrected. “And for the good of humanity, at that. Now I’m powerless in this tortoise body.”

“This is all so insane,” Eldren said. “I’m going insane. Or, I already have.” Cam was showing too much patience and trust to a creature that just tried to possess him. Eldren was much more irritable and suppressed the urge to walk out of the room. He needed answers about where the hell he was badly enough to wade through this nonsense.

Plus, how much risk can a turtle pose? he thought.

“Can you please take me to my desk,” Ardos asked. “Otherwise, it will be quite a long walk for me.” He raised one of his stubby tortoise legs to underscore his point.

“If you tell me why I’m here,” Eldren said. To underscore his negotiating position, he sat down cross-legged on the floor to signal that he didn’t plan to budge. “You just tried to possess me. I should, by rights, make you into turtle soup. I fought off monsters in the swamp, you know.” The last part was a stretch of the truth but he figured the turtle wouldn’t know that.

The tortoise-wizard-man sighed again.

“Fine,” Ardos said. “Fine, fine, fine. You, my dear boy Cam, are entrusted to my stewardship in the absence of your parents, after their unfortunate and untimely accident.” The tortoise paused, letting his words hang gravely in the air. “I am your legal guardian.”

“I’m twenty-eight,” Eldren said, his eyebrow lifting skeptically.

“So?”

“So, I’ve been a legal adult for a decade. My parents’ car accident happened when I was eleven.”

“And I was your declared guardian at the time!” Ardos exclaimed. “Although you would have probably been more familiar with my pseudonym, Arthur Picasso.”

The name stirred up a deep and long-forgotten feeling and set of memories in Cam.

“You’re Arthur Picasso?” he asked incredulously. My father’s great-uncle?”He spoke slowly. He was now fully certain that this entire world was a fictitious episode inside his mind--some repressed trauma from his parents’ accident and the aftermath.

He didn’t like to think about it at all. He had been at school. His parents had driven to a city several hours away for his father’s work. They had taken a back road with just two lanes. A semi-truck and trailer had swerved, its driver delirious from a long haul trip, and smashed into their sedan head-on.

Cam’s maternal grandmother with whom he was staying during their trip, had fetched him from school. She hadn’t told him what happened right away but he knew something was wrong instantly. He didn’t like to think about the car drive or trip to the hospital where their bodies had been taken.

What had happened after the funeral was even more perplexing. His parents’ will had specified that someone named ‘Arthur Picasso’, his father’s great-uncle whom Cam had never met would take care of him. He had never understood why that was the case. He remembered being so nervous to meet his new guardian for the first time, fretting terribly about whether he would be strict or mean.

His worrying had turned out not to matter. Arthur Picasso may as well have been a figment of his parents’ imagination. No record of him existed in their state’s—or any state’s— vital statistics. He never appeared to pick Cam up. He never wrote or called. Frankly, Cam had forgotten that he had existed at all and had continued to live with his grandmother until he went to college.

“I am sorry I didn’t come sooner,” Ardos said.

“You didn’t come at all,” Eldren corrected. “Not that it would have mattered. I was happy with gran.”

This is stupid. I’m talking to a turtle.

“I figured as much,” the tortoise replied. “But, all the same, you should have been trained. Now, it will be harder.”

“Trained?”

“As a wizard,” Ardos replied.

Cam snorted. “What is this, a children’s novel? My parents die and then I find out I’m a wizard who needs training? Did you pull me here to send me off to school to make new friends and save the world?”

“Oh, no, dear boy. I’ve already told you. I summoned you here to possess your body so that I could save the world. Plus, as you said, you’re twenty-eight, not eleven, and you don’t know any magic. I’m afraid you would be quite useless doing much of anything in this realm.”

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Good plan. It worked splendidly without a hitch,” Eldren said, gesturing to the wizard’s new tortoise body. “And by the way, who picks Picasso as a fake name? That’s like, one of the most unique and ubiquitous names in the world that I’ve never heard anybody else have.”

“It sounded eccentric,” Ardos said. “And, in any event, I’ve apologized. Water under the bridge. Please take me to my desk. I’ve already told you, I don’t have any magic in this body so I’m not a threat to you, except maybe to bite.”

“How did you know my parents?” He asked quietly, trying to piece everything together.

“That, I’m afraid, is a longer story than we have time for. You have war council tomorrow and we need to prep.”

“We?”

“Well, yes. Now that this has happened, I’m afraid I’m going to have to resort to coaching you.”

“You just tried to possess me. I’m not trusting you.”

“Do you have much choice?” Ardos asked.

Eldren sighed and after a minute of mulling it over, stood. Ardos was right — what else was he going to do? The man in the turtle’s body held the answers to a lot of his questions and maybe, with any luck, the way for him to get out of this place. The more time passed, the more desperate he was to wake up in the back room of the game shop.

Eldren reached down and held out his hands cupped together. Ardos ambled into them. Eldren was careful to avoid putting any of his fingers in line with the tortoise’s mouth. He carried Ardos over to the desk and deposited him a little too roughly and the tortoise rolled onto its back. Ardos glared at Eldren as he rocked back and forth on his shell and Eldren nudged him upright.

“There’s a war going on,” Ardos said.

“I’ve gathered,” said Eldren.

“The Coven — a brigade of witches.”

“Espella mentioned them,” Eldren said.

“The witches aren’t the real problem,” Ardos said grimly, slowly plodding over to one of the stacks of books on the corner of the large desk. “They’re merely a symptom. A minor outbreak in a greater, and darker conflict. The deities move them, and us, around like chess pieces on a board. Not that the Iron Square sees that, caught up in their false religious zeal.”

“Iron Square?”

Ardos used his small, green, and bald head to nudge a particular volume from the pile and looked at Eldren expectantly. Eldren obliged and opened the tome on the desk. It contained a map.

“You’re going to need to learn a lot about the world here, my boy. Here, look.” He began crawling across the book to a portion in the northwest of a large continent. Eldren thought the rough shape looked a bit like the continent he knew as Africa. Above the map, a large title was written in beautiful blue calligraphy. Aldimea.

Boundary lines and notations dotted the continent, dividing and labeling the land into kingdoms, nations, and provinces. Ardos stopped above a large black dot labeled Nottengrad. From what Eldren could tell, this city was the capital of a kingdom called Bakavia. It did not appear to be a large kingdom. To the east, he could see the Mire Marshlands labeled. That must have been the direction he and Espella had come from. To the west, a line that presumably represented a road wound toward craggy mountains and branched out into other, smaller black dots along its way, representing various villages and towns in Bakavia.

“Here,” said Ardos, walking toward the marshlands. “This is the front of the war with the Coven, who occupy the lands to the east, closer to the Bride Water, which Eldren observed to be a massive river running north and south and bisecting the continent. “Lord Ravelo, the steward of Bakavia, is determined to stamp the witches out. The witches, in turn, hate Bakavia because of their long history of persecution in the kingdom.”

“Why are they persecuted?” Eldren asked. “Because people are scared of magic? Aren’t you the court wizard? Seems a bit sexist.”

“Wizards, sometimes called mages, can be women or men or anything else,” Ardos snapped. “And so can witch-kind. They just study different subsets of the arcane arts. Wizards in Aldimea are trained, sanctioned by the Iron Square, and honed to serve the lords of each kingdom. Most major keeps have a resident mage. Witches are an order of lost wizards who embrace— let us say, an untamed and more primal form of magick.” Eldren noticed that he pronounced the word this time with a hard ‘ick’ sound.

“Then, of course, you have necromancers, druids, tempests, and the sort. But those don’t matter for our purposes yet,” Ardos continued.

“Okay, so there’s a war with witches, who use bad magic. You’re trying to use good magic to stop them?” Eldren asked, trying to clarify.

“Bad and good are fairly relative,” the tortoise said. “But, from our point of view, that is correct. However, as I alluded, the witches are merely agents of a higher, darker, and more fearsome power.” He grew dark and distant again as if staring past Eldren. “But, you are a temp mage.” The tortoise-wizard’s voice suddenly inflected to sound cheerfully optimistic. “So, with a bit of good luck, you’ll be replaced more permanently by someone stronger by the time we have to deal with the gods.”

“The gods?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ardos said. “Let’s focus on the witches.”

“Why did you want to possess me if I’m only temporary?” Eldren interjected.

“Well, if I was inside your body, I could reveal myself to Lord Ravelo and then be granted the post permanently again. You, on the other hand, as I’ve said, are mostly useless at this point and so we’ll need a real wizard as soon as another can be graduated and certified for duty.”

“Why not get someone who already knew magic?” Eldren pressed. “Why me?”

“I needed a blank slate. A tabula rasa, so to speak,” Ardos said. It was an unsatisfying and cryptic answer.

“Why did you retire?” Eldren asked, changing his line of questioning.

“I was, unfortunately, poisoned.”

“So you died?”

“Not quite,” Ardos said. “I separated my corporeal form from my life essence to preserve it. It was quite dangerous and — er — experimental magic. I’m not sure it’s ever been done before. I’m certain it hasn’t.” From Ardos’ voice, it didn’t sound to Eldren like cheating death qualified as sanctioned magic.

“Can you reverse the spell that put you in the turtle?” Eldren asked. “And where is your body?”

“Tortoise,” Ardos said. “Where my body is is none of your business. And as for reversing the magic, now no longer have powers. And, unfortunately for me, neither do you. For now, this is how I am most regrettably stuck. And, since this is your fault, you’re going to have to help me until and if I can figure out a fix.”

“Help you how?” Eldren asked.

“Well, as old and daft as you may have become since you were eleven, I did say I was sorry that I didn’t start your training sooner. So consider this one of those ‘better late than never’ situations. However, to be sure, this will be a rush job. Did you bring your spell book?”

Eldren frowned. “My spell book?”

“Yes,” Ardos said, crawling to the center of the desk and staring up at Eldren. “The one you signed the front of?”

Eldren’s mind raced and then realization dawned on him. He had stuffed the large leather-bound book with empty pages into his backpack when he had first landed in this place. Luckily, Akronaza had fetched his belongings out of the swamp and he still had it. He pulled the book from the bag.

“Excellent,” Ardos said. “We can get started first thing in the morning. It turns out, there’s not as much energy in this small, reptilian body. I’ll need to sleep, preferably in some place warm. You should get some rest as well. We’ll have many details to discuss in the morning, especially before you go to the war council.”

“Where is warm? Your tank is broken,’ Eldren noted.

”Under the pillow should do quite nicely,” suggested Ardis.

“Under the pillow of the same bed as me? You just tried to possess me. No way am I sleeping in the same bed.” He strolled over to one of the bookshelves and began removing tomes.

“What are you doing?” Ardos snapped.

Eldren didn’t reply. He began stacking books into piles. He glanced over and eyeballed the turtle’s height, trying to mentally measure how high it could climb. Six books high should be enough, he thought. He arranged piles of books, six high each, into a rectangular pen. He walked over and picked up Ardos, careful to keep his hand out of biting range again.

“What are you doing? Put me down!” Ardos wiggled his turtle legs wildly in the air.

“Until I learn more and can trust you, I can’t just let bygones be bygones when you tried to possess me,” Eldren said. “So you’ll sleep here tonight.”

The wizard-tortoise protested for another half hour or so but stopped when Elden threatened to move him to the first floor and cover the pen with a blanket. Now, he lay in the quiet of the wizard's tower so tired he could barely move but too anxious to sleep.

He needed a better plan than Cam’s proposal to just follow along. His own plan. True, he didn’t know any magic or anything about the world. The risk of that was that if he did or said anything rash, he risked creating more unintended problems for himself.

What could he do? Should he tell General Espella about Ardos? Should he tell Lord Ravello when they meet tomorrow? He had never even met the man and nobody had explained anything about him. He had no clue what he was walking into tomorrow morning in the war council. Would they expect him to do magic? Would Ardos reveal himself and confess to his backfired plan? Could Elden make him confess?

Just do what you’re told, Cam’s thoughts surfaced. You don’t know where you are, you don’t know magic, and you have to try to lay low. Go along with the flow until you learn more.

Cam was always thinking like a scientist; be careful and perform the experiment, gather the data, and analyze it before acting. But that approach was paralyzing. So far, it had gotten them nearly stabbed by a shadow monster and close to getting possessed by a wizard. Their? He was going insane.

Most importantly, his mind lingered on the fact that Ardos had said he was not dead. This was good news, although also meant he could still die. It was the closest he could get to confirmation of his hypothesis one way or the other without actually dying. The fact that he could still die scared him now even more, given the vast amount he didn’t know about this world he had fallen into. Threats could, quite literally, be around any corner.

More than anything, as he finally started to nod off, what worried him was the connection between his parents, their accident, Ardos, and now his sudden appearance in this strange world, whether it was in his head or not. How was it all connected? And how could he get out?

In any event, it was all completely absurd. Tomorrow morning, a turtle was going to teach him how to be a wizard.