Sunday, March 8, 2020

One Day Your Time Will Come, Platform 17

Xenogregnasus, the dark wizard of Umptunshire, waited for the train. He checked his watch. 11:43.

The train was late. Again. Xenogregasnus sighed. The train was always late. He looked up at the arrivals board; there it was, the 1745 to Blombard, arriving at Platform 17 at 11:40.

Platform 17. It was always Platform 17.

Greg to his friends closed his eyes and sighed. He was a 43rd level Dark Wizard, privy to the secrets of the Tome of Answers, knower of the Knowledge of Yn-Malsoom, practitioner of the Magic of the Nine-Million Souls. And the train arriving to Platform 17 was always late.|

Time slowed around Greg, the world took on a dark, hazy hue; glowing phone screens became incredibly vibrant lights in the darkness, but faces refused to be visible in the gloom. Greg's eyes glowed with an unholy inner light, and as his back arched and his toes curled he slowly raised off the ground, hovering in place. The inner light began to leak from his eyes and ears, his mouth opened to emit the light in horrible rivulets, accompanied by the sound of the eternally wailing souls of the nine underworlds known to mankind and one only known to marmots.

With a sudden burst of energy the light exploded within him, without him, around him, everywhere was the sickly purple light. As Greg slowly lowered to the ground his eyes returned to their normal black-red tint, and he wiped the remains of the purple sludge from his lips. He looked around him, time still moving at a bare crawl; everything was tinged in the purple glow of the 53rd Cantrip of the Dread Lord Jungunmir. Junnie had taught it to him the summer previous, he used it mostly to find the remote control on movie nights.

Slowly details began to emerge from the purple, hints of other colors, each signifying a different magical influence; blues were regular human magic, the kind everyone could do and usually did without even realizing it. A woman's entire face was blue, her real face only barely visible beneath the facade she had created for herself. Another man's left foot was blue. A small child held a blue ball.

The reds were what he was looking for, the influence of negative feelings and emotions, the demonic influences. They were plentiful but most were small, bench seats that were uncomfortable, a clock that ran slow, a ticket-taker who just didn't like people. Nothing like the kind of directed malice that would be necessary to delay a train on a daily basis just to inconvenience a single person.

The colors began to fade; the spell was powerful but necessarily brief, and has time resumed its normal speed and the usual colors came back into prominence Greg sighed again. Same result every day, nothing new coming out to reveal itself, nothing to hint at the source of his misery.

He was a 43rd level Dark Wizard.

And one day he would have his revenge.

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