Where Wizards Are At War

  The jade light rebounded off glass, missing a bundle of dark purple silk. 

  “Whoa, that was brutal,” muttered Psyche Silver, straightening up.

  “We’re meant to be fighting,” said Adainne, her twin. Her wand was tilted towards Psyche’s chest. 

    Adainne yelped - she looked down. Sticky vines were weaving round her legs, pulling her down to the floor.

  “Yeah we are. Look who’s doing a much better job of it.”

  Adainne sighed and waved her wand over her head. Fire spun out in a passion hot cylinder round her body, cremating the plant. 

  “Guess I should have seen that one coming. Oh well!” Psyche pelted a torrent of water at her twin. 

  Adainne broke her fire cylinder. Her wand shook as it stopped the water. 

  It began to solidify until it turned into a mound of hard ice. She launched it at Psyche with a fierce throw of her wand. 

  Psyche laughed and set the block alight. The resulting water collapsed and filled the room, licking the walls. 

  “We’re not really on our A game today, are we?”

  “Your distractions aren’t working Psyche,” said Adainne, and suddenly she was breathing down her twin’s next, wand pointed at her throat. “I could turn this into a knife right now…”

  “Alright, alright, I get your point,” said Psyche. “Get that wand out of my throat, please. I hate people touching my neck.”

  “Freak,” Adainne commented, sliding her wand into it’s holder. “Just as well you’re not in much of a mood to fight today. I have to go get ready for my recruitment mission.”

  Psyche gasped. “Recruitment mission? Dad never lets me do recruitment missions! How did you do that?”

  “That’s what Dad lets you do when you don’t go around looking for guys after hours,” said Adainne, smirking. 

  Psyche’s expression dropped. “At least it’s not Earth guys I’m sleeping with.”

  Adainne laughed. “Yeah, but, Earth guys or not, you’re the one breaking rules, so I get to do recruitment missions. At least you don’t run the risk of dying today.”

  “True. And what a good day not to die. Seth’s taking me in out in his shuttle later. We’re going to the Sky Park to watch all the lights come on on Earth.”

   “That’s sweet,” said Adainne, wrinkling her nose. “The good thing about not being on Earth any more is that we get to see it better.”

   “Hey, it is sweet. But I agree. I hope we’ll be on Cloudline for a while. I can hardly believe it’s been a year already.”

   Adainne pulled her fingers through her periwinkle hair. “I know. Did you watch the news this morning? Apparently Wizard Eron’s executed a couple of undercover Sky Agents.”

  Psyche shook her head. “Not again. I don’t know why Dad even bothers, Wizard Eron always finds out about them. No one’s ever got close enough to him to find out any real information about his movements. When’s your mission, anyway?”

  “About an hour or something. I have to be on the field fifteen minutes early to get briefed.” Adainne and Psyche began to walk together. 

  “Hey, think if I stop being a s**t I’ll get to go on a recruitment mission too?”

  “It’s not about you being a s**t, it’s the after hours stuff. Why don’t you go rant to Dad while I get changed and see if you can get a place in today’s mission?”

   Psyche closed the training room door behind them. “Think he’d let me? Worth a shot, I think.”

  “Yeah, and a word of advice? Don’t mention the word s**t.”

  “What’s that supposed to- Hey Seth,” Psyche cooed, clutching the arm of the well-built Seth. 

   “Hey babe,” he said, pecking Psyche on the cheek. “Are you coming on the recruitment mission today?”

   “Uh.” Psyche glanced at a repulsed Adainne. “Yeah, yeah? Yeah. Well no. You know, my dad begged me, but I just couldn’t, what with all my other obligations to Cloudline.”

  “I am,” said Adainne, moving between them with a hand raised. Psyche snorted quietly. 

  Seth raised his brows. “Oh right. When are we to be at the grounds again?”

  “An hour I think.”

  “I thought we weren’t leaving until quarter past?”

  “Briefing,” explained Adainne. “Anyway, I need to go get changed. Have her home by midnight, Seth.”

   Psyche and Seth both gave a small laugh. 

   Adainne swiftly left the training area and headed up to the apartment blocks. Most of the complex was composed of glass, protected by charms to make it unbreakable. 

  At night, black shutters would rain down and conceal the complex from Earth wizard patrollers. 

  The complex sat on a large nimbus cloud, made oversized by magic. The cloud’s ability to hold such a weight was also due to magic, a spell that required topping up every month. 

 At the front of the complex, a fair few miles from where Adainne was, the shuttles and aircraft were kept. 

  It was in this air park that Adainne found herself forty five minutes later, standing amongst a group of sixteen other young soldiers. 

  “Afternoon, boys and girls,” said the Sergeant. “As the more experienced of you know, this is a dangerous but routine recruitment mission. We don’t tend to have many wizards dying, but there is every chance if you don’t conduct yourself properly. An important thing to remember is that these rogue wizards aren’t necessarily aggressive. 

  Most of these wizards will relocate at the sight of us and won’t put up a fight. However, should one be an aggressive little tripe and decide to open fire, well, you know the drill. Send an alert to the other shuttles for back up and surround them. Attacking recruitment missioners is an offence against Cloudline law. So, any questions?” 

  A hand rose into the air behind Adainne’s head. 

 “Excellent, I’d hate to think I hadn’t explained anything properly.” The hand fell back into the crowd. “Right, get in your shuttles. Remember, if we get a candidate, communicate with them and request for them to teleport into the nearest shuttle. If we get a Time Wizard, on the off-chance we do, call the nearest shuttles and surround them. We have strict orders to capture them by all means necessary.” 

   With that, the Sergeant slid into his own steel shuttle, the oval glass curving several metres above his head. 

   Adainne found her own shuttle parked close to the edge of the Cloudline complex. 

  She jumped in, squashing a helmet onto her pastel hair, and powered up the engine. 

  “Alright, lift up.” Sergeant‘s voice was heard on her tannoy. She pulled back the lever and felt the weightlessness of lifting the shuttle. 

   She hovered for a second, then turned sharply and shot off into the cotton atmosphere. She tunnelled her way through clouds, spinning rapidly, dipping down and rocketing up through the air, heart punching with power. 

 “Remember, cadets, these guys like hanging out in the nimbus clouds. Look out for them,” said the Sergeant.

  “Copy that,” Adainne said with duty. She was tearing her way through a cold-white cloud. 

  When she appeared at the other side, she noticed a shape below. 

   That was a nimbus cloud if she ever saw one. It was enormous, perhaps too obvious a hide out for a rogue wizard. Still, maybe this wizard liked a bit of grandeur. 

  She pulled back the lever and floated down to get a better look. 

  The cloud started to spark. Hot yellow jolted around the sullen grey mist.

  Adainne had seen the evidence she needed. In the same moment Adainne’s finger landed on the responding tannoy button, a crazed scorch of electric white tore up at her. 

  She didn’t have time to scream. The lightning crackled its way through the shuttle in less than a second. Adainne was suspended in thick, shrouded air- so little air, so hot, such sticky sticky wet.

  She felt herself be sucked fast to her death, falling through whistling air.

Reviews

[TOF_Matt]

You have a great, clearly thought out world you are portraying here. Your mythology is intriguing and you've clearly thought a long time about the details of this society. I like the idea of the fight being "routine" for these two, to establish just how close they are and the monotony of what the audience would at first find an exciting life.

That being said, I think you're in too much of a rush to give us the details. You give us a short action sequence, yes, but really look at the structure of the writing. Anything that's important is told directly to the reader by the narrator, or given through dialogue. As the reader, I've found you've spoon fed me and so I become lazy and disinterested. There's nothing to think about because everything is absolute. Psyche is a tramp because she sleeps around. I didn't get to make up my mind about that, because you made it up for me. Similarly we aren't left to discover the wizarding world, but rather you've simply delivered the details to us like a textbook.

Your description says you want to imagine this like anime, but think back to a lot of animes. Most of them tease you slowly with the intricacies of their worlds, and then slowly divulge more and more to you. I noticed you like Death Note, so I'll use it as an example. In the first episode, all the viewers are given of the main concept is a book with 5 instructions in it. That's it. There's no explanation where it came from, no explanation why it's on Earth, no explanation who it belongs to. It creates mystery and intrigue and that's what draws the reader in. I think right now, you're missing a lot of that intrigue.

I think you should pull this way back. Forget about including all the backstory about the war, what happens to kids when they turn 15, all of it. Start with the fight and their quips. Don't even mention they're sisters until the end. Try to make it obvious through their actions and conversation that they're related. Likewise, cut down the long conversation. What's really important here? Basically that Adainne is the "good kid" and gets to go on a mission, and that Psyche is jealous but is probably a troublemaker. Establish the characters firmly without spoon-feeding the reader, then move forward with your plot. I feel like the climax here isn't really the mission or the lightning cloud (which I honestly think happens a little too abruptly, there's not much dramatic build up to it), but rather the fact that the sisters are suddenly heading in two different directions.

Anyway, I don't want to seem overly critical. I think it's a great, deep, layered idea. I just feel you don't need to be in such a rush to tell it. Take your time, let us ease into and warm up to the characters before you take us on their wild ride. And most importantly, let the reader do some thinking. Don't throw all the facts in our face, but pepper them like breadcrumbs throughout the story through what the characters say and do, not what the narrator tells us. You don't want to walk over to the X, dig up the treasure and then hand it to us, but really you want to just point us in the right direction so we can dig it up ourselves. Then the characters become truly endearing because we feel that much closer to them.

[Daydreamer54]

You have a beautiful way with description and I like the world you created. can't wait to see what happens!
Seth’s taking me in out in his shuttle later.-Seth's taking me out in. U ahd an extra "in"
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[Aarontastic]

Tbh I didn't care for this story too much, or at least this chapter of it. This is the first time I've read your prose, I think, so I was surprised and a little disappointed that so little of your talent with words translated into this format. There were a few bright spots here and there though.

Firstly, I think you opened your story rather flatly. It's a good idea to catch the reader's attention right from the start with something striking, but I thought your introductory paragraphs were cold and sterile though, not to mention laden with phrases which I found awkward like this one:

"Being the daughters of the President left them more open to attacks and so, if they were to lead any sort of unrestricted life, they needed to learn to defend themselves absolutely."

Like I get what you mean by 'unrestricted', but there was probably a better way of phrasing that; also, ending the sentence with 'absolutely' just sounded off to me. There were many instances throughout the story like that. which by themselves amount to nothing, but combined can make reading it clumsy.

The next paragraph was better though and had an instance of the lyrical phrasing you do so well:

"Psyche was the most carefree of the two. With her long, electric plum hair and thickly coloured turquoise eyes, she was very much an energetic spark in the fighting ranks. Adainne could be often described as the opposite. While possessing the sharpened, pixie jaw..."

Love those descriptions!

The action scene that passage preceded was weighed down too much by your dialogue, I feel, and the conversation between the two sisters was not the best dialogue. It did flesh out their characters a bit, and clearly revealed Adainne as the more serious one and Psyche as the, er, not so serious one.

But really, did we need to know this?

“It’s always my business, you dumbo. Who did you run to when you lost your virginity at fifteen? Hm?”

That was kind of weird XD It felt like an unnatural, contrived thing to say in conversation lol. I know girls are different and they are 15, but do they really talk like that? Since the sisters are the daughters of the President, they seem to speak kind of formally, but then the conversation gets very crude and they say 'shag' about 5x...the two elements of their personality clashed, methinks.

Then there was this:

"As for a Time Wizard, they are a unique brand of wizard. Where the average wizard’s magic is restricted by not being able to time travel, these wizards are somewhat free to..."

There's a lot of 'wizard' in there. I think that would read better if you used some synonyms like 'mage' or 'sorcerer', or something like that, just to break it up.

Reading this chapter, I was wondering how glass buildings, or structures of any kind, could sit on a cloud? You mention the planet as being Earth in the distant future, so if the laws of physics have changed or are being manipulated, maybe hint at that for the audience instead of just taking it for a given.

I really picked on the text and tried to break it down some because I feel there are so many ways that you could improve this. Besides what I pointed out, I didn't feel like there was too much wrong here, except (like TOF said) you can tend to flood the reader with details at times to the point where it can feel didactic. This seems like a long-ish story, so there's no rush to get in all the background stuff at once.

I know you are a good writer so I'm sure you'll improve your stories as you practice (if you haven't already). Your poems are amazing so maybe try and emphasize your strengths a little more by adding more descriptions and communicating things indirectly.

[Caradoc]

Interesting, and I could picture it as an anime since I like to watch them. With the descriptions, I would picture more as a modern day anime than anything from the past. I prefer the older anime but sometimes the new ones get it right. Most everything that comes out in this day and age, whether it be music, books or movies seems overdone; a desperate attempt to regurgitate what came before and capture what made it great, before failing horribly.

This however, could be great.

I agree with TOF_Matt. Tone down the delivery of information to the reader in the beginning. Start off with the sparring session and allude to the connection between the two. Weave the descriptions of their looks and personalities into the fight and make the reader get invested in one or the other before you reveal who they are. Then after the fight is over, cut the scene and go into the narration you first began with, preferably the first paragraph. From there you can jump to Adainne's first mission, maybe throwing in some dialogue from the Sergeant telling everyone training is over. Then you could add the previous narration about the 15 year old mark.

That's it as far as storyline and delivery of information goes. Next up is formatting and presentation.

Without the use of indentation to form nicer looking paragraphs I suggest separating all paragraphs by at least one space. It looks better and makes it easier to find your spot if you lose it. Keeping them separate also helps identify dialogue so the reader doesn't get confused as to who is talking. For scene transitions you can either double or triple space to show the break, or take the more time consuming method which I sometimes use. Make a line of asterisks across the page. This is a clear definition of where one scene ends and another begins.

Finally look over it and see if you can spot any SPaG mistakes. Even the greatest writers and masters of the English language sometimes have typos, which is why they have editors.

My final word is that this is an intriguing story, one that has great potential, especially as the plot of a manga or even an anime. With some cleaning up it'll be there. Just remember everything I say here are merely suggestions. As the author of this piece you have every right to ignore me.

I wish you well in acquiring what it is you seek.

[Shep]

This caught. My intrest nicely done

[Stella]

This is such an intriguing story and I'm thoroughly amazed by our creativity and your writing. I look forward to reading the next chapter.

[PrincessZeldaWannabe]

Good introduction so far. I really like Adainne so far!

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[Allen Smuckler]

You sure you and your sister didn't have this conversation...Hmmmm? I'm not one to read books or chapters because I have an attention span of a green head fly...that being said, I started to read your first chapter and really did become hooked on the characters and the story...which isn't an easy thing to do to me...You have a terrific way of relating a story and though there are grammatical, spelling and syntax errors on occasion ..overall it was an admirable job and I shall continue to read chapter two... (you missed many indentations...unlike poetry..it does make a different...should be spell and grammar checking to show a finished product...in my humble opinion)
Very creative and imaginative thus far, Harlequinade
allen

[Arianna]

this is a very imaginative and enthralling book,
it really pulls you right into the world where you almost don't want to leave... even long enough to give a review :)
at the point where it said "breathing down her sisters next", i think you meant neck. but that's all i found grammatically.
its an interesting topic and it pulls together the world you have fabricated and the world we live in seamlessly. well done
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