Who started the events of that fateful day? It would take a great witch skilled in divination capable of soothing into the past, or maybe even some weird creepy crippled kid molested by an old man in a tree who likes animals a bit too much, to know exactly what happened.
Only Rufus and Silas knew the truth.
Blasts of multicoloured energy shot from the wands of six of the greatest published, peer-reviewed department heads in magical academia toward their disgraced, drunken Chancellor. One did not retire from the faculty of the University of Magic; one was retired.
A blistering green-blue blast of magical energy shot back at them. Wild-eyed, maddened by delirium tremens, Silas confronted the six most formidable wizards of the age not currently employed by Magic University. (Those people were real showmen: Rabbit in the Hat 101, Coin Behind the Ear 305, and Saw A Model in Two 495 were some of the highest earning tuition fees in West of Middlemost Earth. If you wanted your young wizard or witch to really make it financially in the world with a practical magical education, Magic University was the place to be. Its graduates could count on stable, financially successful careers beyond the useless esoteric and obtuse theory taught in the Ivory Tower).
As the seven beams of light collided in the middle, a terrible rainbow doused the Great Hall. It might have made for a grand music festival -- if and only if the necessary and sufficient conditions had existed [copious mind-altering narcotics, abundant cheap alcohol, orgiastic and naked young people zombie gogo dancing to a mad electronic beat], but they did not. This was West of Middlemost Earth, after all, not some drug-fueled Shambala in the West Kootenay mountains of British Columbia.
Humphrey was the first to die. A surprised gasp rattled from his cracking lips as the flesh melted away from his cheeks. Swiftly thereafter, his arms fell out of their sockets. Both of his legs shattered into ash, and his torso collapsed to the ground. His popping eyes looked around in bewilderment for several seconds before they bulged out from their sockets. What was left of him slowly melted into a puddle of goo.
Mortimer combusted in a ball of green flame. Wailing and flailing, he started to run wildly about the Great Hall. Sumptuous tapestries which hung on the walls for centuries went alight like matchsticks, starting the Great Blaze. His horrible screams echoed throughout the Ivory Tower until the wizard crumpled into a meat ball of charred skin, broiled meat, and cracked bone.
Simon turned white; his skin, quickly blackening. Frost enveloped him. Icicles encased his beard, eyebrows and hair. In an instant, he went from warm and alive to a frozen Popsicle which teetered then tottered falling to the ground to explode into broken bits. It was the surreal site of a man shattering into ice cubes: one moment a solid mass; the next, puddles.
Chang imploded. As if a miniature black hole formed in his sternum, he started clutching at his chest in startled wonder before everything went crooked. His arms warped and bent, sucked into his chest. The legs were next. Just before his head was slurped through the vortex, he looked squarely at Silas, gasping with stoic aplomb:
“Silas, you bastard. I knew you always cheated me at Mancala. He who steals rocks will get stoned.” A wry grin swept his handsome old face before his long Confucian beard was pulled down the sink of his chest leading to the rest of him to simply cease to exist: water down the drain. A tiny, spinning black singularity hovered in the air for the fraction of a moment; in the blink of an eye, it was gone.
One solitary tear slowly dripped down Silas’ cheek. Damn, he really liked Chang. The rest of them were pompous bastards, but not Chang. He gave him his first opium pipe.
Justice, or at least crazy-eyed psychotic revenge, was swiftly dealt with dirty old Dormund. He suffered. Boils erupted across his body, bursting ooze from his skin. Black bloat-flies the size of a 1/4 Gold Dragon flew up his nostrils and into his mouth in the thousands. Rabid trash pandas swarmed him, biting off his fingers and toes. A gang of pissed off squirrels, built like dead lifters, ripped off his hairy ears. Black crows swooped down, pecking out his eyeballs and biting out his tongue. A ferocious opossum emerged from his stomach, all gnashing teeth and slashing claws, happily munching away on his innards. His end was like his life: ignominious, filthy, and inside-out. He convulsed in agony, finally ripped to pieces and devoured by evil little garbage creatures.
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Prospero was the last to die.
The battle between him and Silas was worthy of an epic written by an eccentric Anglo-Saxon scholar at Oxford. It deserved the story arc, character development and heart-warming coming-of-age tropes of a teenage magical melodrama where youngsters are confronted with evil in the world and the death of their beloved school heroes. Brilliant stanzas in iambic pentameter extolling philosophical profundity, exquisite characterization, and polish written by a bard. Unfortunately for Prospero, the author of his story was a college drop out with no writing talent more concerned with maintaining his heavy daily supply of boutique tall boy craft beers while he waited for ideal powder big mountain ski conditions to bother crafting such a dramatic episode.
His death was an act of literary derision.
A hoard of one foot tall gremlins suddenly manifested in the burning Great Hall. As a chorus, they chortled: “Caliban! Caliban! Caliban!” The raucous continued. It was incessant. Chants of “Caliban! Caliban! Caliban!” mocked the old sorcerer.
Each one was armed with a pencil, or dice, or a paperback Oxford University Press copy of -----. This little army started to stone Prospero with loner’s dice reeking of shame, slinging youthful angst at him like soggy pubescent tissues. They stabbed him with Number 2 pencils. Hundreds of them beat him to death with ironic allusion.
Only the bloody mess of literary standards and integrity, massacred by popular culture, was left of Prospero. He was obliterated by the disinterest of an apathetic drunkard, the wizard Silas: the archscholar whom abandoned civilisation for his own personal self-destruction.
* * *
The Great Blaze spread from the tapestries to the wooden support beans of the steeple, ripping through the spire. The vaulted roof of the Ivory Tower collapsed in a heap of mortar and block, smashing through the lower floors sending embers and raging flames below. It set the Great Arcane Library aflame. Some of the greatest commentaries on the use of declension, conjugation, syntax and morphology in the history of magic were consumed in the inferno. Whole treatises on the use of gender, infinitives, and the appropriate of nominative and accusative cases in the casting of spells were lost. Great arguments between assistant and adjutant professors, filling entire quarterly journal volumes; and their appendixes with critical footnotes were lost. Even the great tomes on social justice in the arcane world, the identification and analysis of magical privilege; and brow-beating admonitions to conform to occult correctness or risk being turned into an undead ghoul serving the non-magical oppressed were consumed. Pamphlets for the ethical treatment of familiars were torched. The greatest intellectual achievements of the University of Magic were destroyed; never again would the world know such intellectual advancement in the arts of witchcraft.
After the Great Arcane Library swept the blaze into a firestorm, the Great Blaze spread to the Great Laboratory of Magical Curiosities. When it engulfed that place, the entire Ivory Tower went supernova. This of course caused the Cataclysm, also known in the few pockets of educated survivors as The Great Exposition.
The Cataclysm obliterated most of the countryside, et cetera ad nauseam as one expects from the typical thematic; and structural tropes of the genre. The Golden Age had ended, wizarding folly caused it all, and somewhere the caricature of an old Norse war veteran working as a policeman complained about his great adventuring career being cut down in its prime after he took that fateful arrow to his knee. He would never be an oarsman, much less drink from a skull.
Silas managed to escape the Great Blaze, and the Cataclysm with his faithful butler, Rufus, moments before that fateful event. After he slaughtered the Deans, Silas glanced at his gnomish servant; and muttered, “I need a fucking drink, Rufus. I am hearing pixie voices telling me about some Neverland that is either some ephebophile’s petting zoo, or some pirate wonderland ruined by spoiled brats who would probably be better off baked into a stew.”
He blinked. “Did you fucking see that?” Silas gasped. “Merlin’s shriveled scrotum, we need to get the fuck out of here.” His shaking hand held his wand into the air before the old man pissed himself, shouting: “Deus ex machina!”
They were instantly transported away to safety. Silas had crafted his most difficult spell: one which touched upon the authorial, blending his world and the Other.