The Wizard – The Dirt and the Water

Where was the magic? From the outside, his position would have looked comical. A man clad in a very expensive and luxurious-looking blue robe, at the bottom of a hole, with his arm extended, looking terrified at nothing. He tried with all his might, a glimmer of lightning, the faint heat of fire, light, dark, even blackened fire. Nothing came out, nothing happened. With a sigh, he just dropped his arm.

What do I do now? All this time, all his life, lost for naught. Where is the magic? In a slight daze, he looked around. He was deep down in the earth, as deep as the Tower was tall. He turned; the broken and decrepit wooden door seemed sealed shut behind him. He swept his gaze over the hole. There seemed to be a depression on one side of the wall. He approached it. It was a small opening; he knelt beside it. Beyond it, he could feel air and the clear notes of water falling. Well, he needed water, though going deeper into the earth wasn’t something that he wanted to do. He looked up, toward the stars.

Beautiful, inviting. It felt as if he could reach them just by mere thought alone. There had to be water on the surface, and grass and wind, and food, not… He pushed the thought back; he couldn’t afford to panic.

He decided to try, digging his bare hands into the dirt of the walls, he tried to push himself up, to climb. He made it a few feet up, and the dirt gave way, sending him crashing down, half burying him under loose dirt. The impact made him see stars. He, who wasn’t made for pain, who had not experienced pain. In between coughs and spasms of pain, he tried to get up. Totally covered in dirt, he rose. But then he heard it, the dirt giving in.

In a panic, he first threw himself on the door, pushing and pulling with frenzied fear, but the door had become fully stuck by the dirt. The crumbling increased. Blind with desperation as more dirt fell on him by the second, he flew towards the wall that had the hole. Grabbing the wooden stick he had on his belt, he attacked the hole. As more dirt fell on him, he attacked the wall with desperation, each blow making more and more dirt become loose. Then when he felt the dirt going up to his knees, the hole became large enough that he could fit in. He threw himself through it as the dirt finally collapsed around him.

Unthinking, he crawled through the hole, no light, no guidance, nothing. Suddenly, the small tunnel ended, and he fell hard on tough soil, knocking him out cold. Dust clogging his nose and mouth

He didn’t know how long he was out cold. When he woke up, he had an ache in all his body and was extremely thirsty. With a grunt, he sat up and took stock.

He was in a cave of some kind; light was filtering from somewhere because it wasn’t totally pitch dark. He passed his tongue over his cracked lips. He was thirsty, very thirsty. Which was a good sign, but it was a warning of what was coming. With difficulty, he remembered his youth and… he had returned to where he had begun.

At that realization, he laughed, a mad hysterical sound that he felt conscious of doing but not really conscious of doing it. He lay back; the rock was not so bad, and his robe was still soft. He had lost everything, all of it, so why not just stop here, right here and now?

With a lurch, he got up, ignoring that thread of thought. It still hounded him like a predator in the dark, but he ignored it. “Move, in movement there is life,” the words of his first master echoed in his head. Using his hands more than his eyes, he sought his stick; it had to be there. After getting cut by some rocks, he found it. He picked it up; it seemed intact enough.

Using it to test the road ahead, he marched forward. In the still air of the cave, there was humidity; there had to be water somewhere. He remembered the clear and invigorating ringing noise he had heard, the clear and clean sound of water running somewhere. But now it eluded him, why?

He stopped to listen; there it was, drip, drip, drip, echoing invitingly and pleasantly. Using the stick, he followed the sound, stopping every few steps to listen again and not get lost. He had no idea how large the cave was, or what was in it. There shouldn’t have been a cave here to begin with. The stick bumped into a few things, maybe a large rock, preventing him from crashing into a wall. All he could do was follow the sound and trust his stick.

Then wood touched the water; splash, splash, he heard. Slowly, carefully, he approached the sound. Extending his arm, he touched the water. It felt cool and fresh. Now he should clean it, or find some way of making it potable. But he had no such luxury. Grateful, he knelt by the water and, like a dog, drank his fill, drank until his stomach was full to bursting. Then, he retreated a bit and collapsed from exhaustion.