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.

[.quan.011.]

First, you might want put a better hook at the being. It wasn't hard to get into the story, but a hook would make it a lot easier. I like the main character, but I kind of felt you telling about their personality instead of showing. I like the plot of the story and can't wait to read more.

[Chrisnelly Hernandez]

It's a bit hard to get into in the beginning, but I can definitely see this as an anime. Going off that, to make the beginning seem more like an anime introduction (if that's really what you're going for), I would change:
"It is there that we begin the story, as the twins once again find themselves locked in combat with the other, in a charm-protected room composed entirely of glass." and just take off the last part so it ends as "... locked in combat with the other." If you did that, you could almost hear the opening theme song xD.
The simile "Psyche laughed like a bell," kind of bothers me a bit. How about something like "Psyche's tinkling laugh echoed through the room as she promptly set the block alight"? Just a suggestion...
And "At this point, it is probably useful to mention the purpose of recruitment missions and what it is to be a Time Wizard," for me that broke up the flow of the story. I liked the explanation, but I didn't like that it interrupted the story. Overall, I liked it though. I'll be sure to read the rest soon!

[w2de35657u687y4324rf]

In the very beginning I was taken aback a bit. It's a bit uncomfortable to have an unidentified narrative voice, but you quickly tore into the fantastic setting and characters. While this was a lovely experience I might have felt like it happened too quickly. You packed a ton of information into such a small space. Some elaboration would be easy to write as well as enjoyable to read. While Navyheart and Psyche were fighting I kept dipping into my own fantasies. I started getting rapid ideas for books from all of the content in that scene. To be honest, I had to reread that section because I was just having so much fun off in my own wonderland of abstract thoughts. Your abnormal descriptions of the casting and such were quite something. In particular, the sensation of the 'flash of electric yellow'. The writing was on a higher level than "L.A.F" and "By Candlelight". You seemed to have put a lot more work into imagery. I am enjoying that aspect so far. You brought the undefined narrative voice back about midway in the chapter. It bugged me less, though. Perhaps I will get used to it. I feel that Navyheart is going to take the MC role in this novel while Psyche may play a fairly large piece, but possibly die off. I can obviously see much potential in this novel just based on the first chapter. I feel that this is the effect professionals wish to leave their readers with upon witnessing the inception. My compliments go out to you.

[GrandDystopia]

Wow, just wow. A brilliantly imaginative opening to what i imagine will be a great book, it's nice when storys are able to come alive in your minds eye and thats what this did. I am gonna shelve this book in my favs, keep up the good work!:)

[Venompen]

First off, your introduction felt a tad rushed. Like eating mushy brown peas at dinner, you just wanted to get it out of the way. Other than that though, this story has an absolutely MARVELOUS beginning. It built up quickly and I'm already hooked into reading the next chapter.

[~Anita Sandlin~]

You have a wonderful imagination and I like the fact that the story line keeps going in different directions...Good Job

[Kyle]

I am humbled by your imagination....this takes so much creativity and guts to come up with these original ideas. I was surprised over and over again by the changes to the story line. I like that. Too often i can sense what will happed with ease but this is nicely crafted.

[Kyle]

Whoa....the conversational part is really terrific. I like how imaginative this is as well.

I would recommend that you space out the text a bit though. It was a challenge to read so many words and paragraphs that are so close together.