Carrot and Stick: How to Practice Responsible Witchcraft in a High-Crime Neighborhood - Chapter I

Carrot and Stick: How to Practice Responsible Witchcraft in a High-Crime Neighborhood - Chapter I

idk... lemme know what you think?

Chapter I

Sometimes one knew, in an instant, that they had made a tremendous, life-altering mistake. For Silas Switchbranch, Wizard-at-Arms of the Ordo Venator, his mistake was rising to the bait and allowing his mouth to write a check that his magic couldn’t cash.

It wasn’t entirely his fault, but it was definitely mostly his fault. And now he was very much worried that everything he’d worked on for the past decade was wasted. He wouldn’t rise in the ranks, he wouldn’t gain access to better spells, and Summer... Summer would mourn him, and if he was dead, she’d never get the help she needed.

So he ran, one hand pressing down on his hat to keep it in place even as his boots slipped on slush-covered ground. 

His breath was coming in quick gasps, and he couldn’t help but be reminded of what one of the instructors for prospects to the Ordo used to say ‘It doesn’t matter how many spells you can cast, if you don’t have the endurance to run the hell away when things go wrong.’ That same instructor revelled in making entire classes pass out from exhaustion and was generally regarded as a terrible teacher.

Silas was kind of seeing what he meant, now, as his legs burned, his lungs felt like they couldn't pull enough air in, and he was pretty sure he was covered in a sheen of slick sweat that was going to freeze on him the moment he stopped.

He rounded a corner, a space between two old warehouses, with a dumpster to one side. His boots crunched on hard-packed snow as he finally slowed to a stop. There was a large set of double doors, wide, the kind for loading trucks. It was at least partially covered by the dumpsters, which was more cover than none.

Of course, the doors were locked. 

“Damnit,” he cursed under his breath. 

A locked door wasn’t an impediment to a mage, of course. He was from an ordo famed for their knowledge of evocation magic, and he was pretty sure that given a few minutes, he could blow this door off its rusty hinges.

He didn’t have a few minutes. Fumbling around in his pocket he pulled out his phone, then flipped it open. He was still trying to catch his breath as he pressed through a few menus and found his notes. 

The instructions for a spell that unlocked doors. 

Licking his lips, he raised a hand, fingers brushing against the door. It was damned cold. Metal at this time of year, with an ungloved hand, wasn’t the best time, but he pushed the discomfort aside and focused as best he could. 

It was hard to grasp his magic when he could barely feel it over the thumping of his heart, but he managed it. He found himself constantly glancing between the instructions and the door, then back at the mouth of the alley. He expected the daemon to come around the corner at any moment.

Swallowing thickly, he took a deep breath, then spoke the incantation on his phone’s screen while moving his magic through the prescribed forms. It wasn’t a complex spell, but at the moment it might as well have been something from his finals. 

The door clunked and opened just an inch.

He let out a relieved breath and grabbed it, ready to run in.

Then something large and dark rushed around the corner and rammed into the dumpster with the force of a semi-trailer. The metal crumpled in the middle and trash and snow was flung off the top.

He didn’t stick around to stare and instead flew into the warehouse, heart rate picking right back up to thunder in his ears, even as he tasted the familiar tang of adrenaline on his tongue.

The warehouse was dark. Nothing but shelves of boxes illuminated by a few dull-red emergency lights. He cursed as he saw the exit at the far, far end of the room. There was nothing for it, though. He ran, boots squeaking with every step.

As he ran, he muttered his way through an incantation. It wasn’t perfect, and his magic felt a little sluggish, but he managed to muddle his way through the casting anyway. A small ball of light appeared in his hands. It wasn’t much stronger than a flashlight, but it was free, and it was just enough to illuminate the metal tongs of a forklift parked behind a row of shelves seconds before he ran into then. 

He ran through a litany of fresh, new curses as he foot caught on the forks and he was crashing down. He even managed to bash his other leg on the second tine on the way down. 

His phone was skittering away across the concrete floor, but he was more concerned with the blossoming pain across his everything at the moment. 

“God... dammit,” he groaned as he turned. He picked his hat back on out of reflex and pushed it back onto his head. 

The door at the entrance to the warehouse was opened. It cast a long beam of light across the room. Dust and a fresh drift of snow was caught in the light, sparkling as it shifted over the form of a large monster.

The daemon approached. 

It was grey-furred and bulky, large around the middle, with four disproportionately long legs and beady all-black eyes. 

It may, once, have been a racoon. But racoons didn’t grow to be as big as a fridge. 

Silas raised a hand, fingers splayed. “By... by spark and the will of the wolf, Loose the flame,” he enchanted, his magic weaving through the forms of a spell he’d cast a thousand times.

A ball of roaring fire appeared just before his hand then shot across the room, splashing orange-reds across dusty old boxes and catching the light in the daemon’s eyes before it rammed into the beast.

The flame guttered out within a moment of striking and the daemon growled low and shook his head. There was a mark there, darker than its grey fur, where it had been burned, but the little trail of smoke and stench of burning hair wasn’t going to stop it.

“Ah, crap,” Silas said.

This all started three days ago.

He was new to the ordo, only ten years past the gifting of his hat, and was itching for advancement. Being a Wizard-at-arms for the Order of the Wolf wasn’t anything to scoff at, he was proud of his accomplishment, but he wanted more, and knew that the long months and years of study into the thaumaturgical arts and the processes and methods of his order meant that he was ready for advancement. 

He was no knight, but he could at least advance from Wizard-at-arms to squire! Maybe even grab an apprenticeship with a Knight-Mage of the ordo?

His pride wrote the check. Summer always told him, with a little shake of her head, that he was too proud for his own good.

When he went to the Department of External Affairs to grab a new mission and encountered some young punks from the Ordo Arcana. Gryphons. They saw him in his relatively small hat, with his order-standard garb, and started to mock him. Just there, in public! Right next to the square. Of course, the Ordo Arcana were the enforcers, so no one was going to come over and tell them to stop being asses.

He rose to the bait, and when he stomped into the mission request desk inside, he asked for something that would be more of a challenge. 

The desk was more than happy to provide. There were always more daemons than there were exterminators.

A day later the bus he had ridden on pulled to a stop with a hiss of old brakes. He rubbed a hand under his nose, then pulled at one of the bars to get to his feet. His hand came away sticky, and he couldn’t help but grimace at the sensation. 

The mundane world was always so gross. 

He shuffled out, squeezing past an older woman with a little steel basket on wheels that had a few bags of groceries shoved within and onto a cracked sidewalk. Music was blaring from a newspaper kiosk just down the road, though it was drowned out by the rumble of cars and the constant hum of heating units.

Silas tugged his coat on tighter and eyed the street. It was a cold mid-afternoon in Julberwood, a tiny city a few hours north of New York and more hours from the North American enclave. This was going to be his beat. A city with a population just a hair past thirty-thousand, where most of the industry had been shipped overseas and where the average income was a few thousand below the national average. 

He hated it already, but this is what he deserved. 

Silas Switchbranch was a wizard, but he wasn’t some old man who had his nose stuck in a book in some decrepit tower. He was a proud member of the Ordo Venator. The Extermination Order. 

His job was simple: find out why there had been an unusually low number of daemons sighted in this area despite the ambient magical energy being higher than last reported. The Department of External Affairs hadn’t given him any reasons why they thought the discrepancy might exist, but the reason was quite obvious.

A larger, more powerful daemon was probably chewing up all the weaker local ones. 

That could be a problem if no one stepped in, and he’d just volunteered to do just that.

The next two days weren’t great.

The Ordo Logistica had given him the address of a little rental home on the edge of the city. It was small, cramped, and not all that warm, but it had a bed and bathroom and a small kitchen. He had a stipend and a card to use it. 

From there, Silas has started his investigation into Julberwood’s little daemon problem and had immediately gotten nowhere.

The best he managed to do was track down some unusually high levels of magical energy near the centre of the city, next to a poorly maintained park. That could be a stray daemon, or it could be a passing wizard, or it could even be a magic-user outside of the order trying a few things. He hoped it wasn’t the latter, because the paperwork for that would be a nightmare.

He didn’t find any evidence of anything, though. Not until this morning, when one of the alarm spells he had placed around the edge of the city went off.

He’d rushed over--which was to say, he took the bus again--and then wandered the industrial sector of the city for a solid two hours, fingertips and ears freezing and stomach growling for lunch.

Casting low-level divination spells all day through a tiny crystal globe he’d borrowed from a friend that was in the Ordo Imperium Draco was draining his magic, but when the globe went off and detected a daemon nearby, he was glad he’d brought it.

And then he found the monster, hidden in the back of some small factory, nose in the middle of a trashcan and negative energy wafting off of it. 

He’d thought himself very clever when he launched a first level spell at the monster’s back. Thadeus’ Frosty Fang, a spell he had spent weeks practicing. 

It lanced out and stabbed into the daemon’s back... and didn’t do much more than enrage the beast.

That’s about when the running had started, which led back to the present moment.

The daemon racoon rushed across the room, mouth unhinging open to reveal rows of crooked teeth.

He reached for his bracelet and touched a bead on it. “Shield!” he barked just before the monster reached him.

The daemon’s face rammed into the wall of force like a bird discovering a window. He might have laughed if the daemon didn’t immediately get back up and started to scramble at the shield.

He had, in his well-educated estimating, about nine seconds before the spell cast through the focus burned all of his reserves, at which point he’d be out of energy, pinned under an angry daemon, and very much dead.

By the time he finished calculating that, it was more like seven seconds, then six, then five.

Silas had a lot of regrets, and unfortunately few seconds to feel them all.

Four became three, which somehow led to two, then one, then very much none, and yet his shield held. He grunted as he felt his reserves bottom out, then continue to pour. The bend felt like it was made of near-molten metal. 

He coughed, his entire chest wracked with impossible pain, but his shield held. It was just delaying the inevitable, but if he didn’t hold, then who would care for Summer? What worth was some pain compared to that? He just had to hold, to keep the shield up, to keep--

“Worry not, kind stranger! Dark magical girl Carrot Cuddleworth is here!” someone shouted. 

The strangest thing was, as Silas registered the voice, he also registered that the speaker sounded... very uncertain of herself, and young.

“By the power of the moon and stars and... uh... dark things everywhere! I cast purging hearts!” 

The room filled with purple lights as a half-dozen bolts flew across the warehouse and rammed into the daemon, punching through fur and flesh from its left and right.

Silas let go of his shield spell and quite promptly fainted.

***

Dark magical girl (self-stylized) Carrot Cuddlesworth, stood in the doorway to the warehouse and reached up to scratch at the tip of her nose.

That had gone well! Probably! The man she’d saved looked like he had fainted, but he wasn’t chewed up, so that was an irrevocable victory!

She skipped into the room, then paused as the big monster she’d blasted aside started to climb back to its feet.

“Aww! Poor baby,” she said as she came over. “Are you okay? I’m sorry I had to hurt you, but I think you were trying to eat that man over there, and that’s just kind of rude, don’t you think?”

The monster spun around and hissed. It was pretty badly injured though. She couldn’t help but try not to focus on the wounds she’d poked into him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Here, I’ll make it all better.”

She raised a hand towards the monster, even as it started to stomp across the warehouse towards her. Licking her lips, she focused, then grabbed all of the magic in her chest. It swelled in her, power and love and strength that rushed through her limbs.

“Chains of Darkness!” she shouted, and from the shadows, long clinking chains grew and wrapped themselves around the monster, looping around it before pulling taut and locking it in place.

It squirmed against the restraints, but she was confident in her magic. She walked closer, a smaller set of chains whipping up and around to grab the monster’s face to keep it from nibbling at her. 

Then she pressed a hand against the coarse fur on its head. “Rite of Dark Purification!” she intoned.

She’d been working on that name for weeks now, and this was the coolest version she’d come up with!

Her magic speared into the monster, then grabbed onto its magic before yoinking it back.

It was like opening a can of soda after giving it a good shake. The monster’s magical energy exploded outward, following the line of her magic, and plunging into her.

She could feel it rushing in, dark, putrid magic. Instantly, she felt herself grow stronger, but it was a sickly kind of strength, like waking up in the middle of a fever feeling fine despite knowing that she was still burning hot.

Then the magic stabbed into her mind and filled her with mean, not-good, evil thoughts. Eat dessert before dinner, briefly considering not saying thank you when someone holds a door. She felt the evil rise, even stronger than before! She found herself thinking “maybe I don’t need to pet every dog I see,” which was obviously untrue and concerning.

It made her sick! 

The poor little racoon didn’t deserve such bad stuff in him, so she took it all for herself.

And then, when she blinked, she found herself kneeling next to a rather ordinary, if grimey, little raccoon who stared about in confusion before hissing at her and bumbling off.

She stayed there for a moment. Her skin was shedding evil purple light, and her magic felt like it was on fire.

So she gathered all of the evil, no-good, impure thoughts, put them in a little box, and metaphorically kicked them out of one ear.

“All done!” she cheered before bouncing to her feet with aplomb. Helping little creatures like that always made her feel good. Like remembering to brush her teeth twice a day. “Now... what do I do with you, mister?” she wondered. 

***