Alan Foster - Exceptions to Reality

His fingers creeping across the strings of the duar, Jon-Tom mentally considered and discarded a dozen different songs. Which would be the most effective against a powerful, malign personality like Wolfram? Knowing little about the man, it was hard to conjure something specific. Then he recalled the sorcerer’s words, and knew what he needed to do.

Whirling, he made a dive for the bed.

“Hassone!” Raising his staff, Wolfram thrust it in the spellsinger’s direction. Gray vapor shot from the globe at its terminus to coalesce directly between the diving Jon-Tom and the bed. Slamming into the abruptly materialized wall of solid rock, Jon-Tom stumbled once, staggered slightly, and then crumpled to the floor.

Gathering anxiously around their fallen comrade, Mudge and Stromagg exchanged a look, then turned their rising ire on the serene figure of Wolfram. Raising their weapons, they rushed the sorcerer, each screaming his own battle cry.

“BEEER!” The grizzly’s bellow echoed off the walls and rattled the stained-glass windows.

“No refunds!” the otter howled in tandem.

“Parimazzo!” Wolfram countered, bringing his glowing staff around in a sweeping arc parallel to the floor.

Rising from the stone underfoot, all manner of fetid, armed horrors confronted the onrushing duo, swinging weapons made of the same stone as that from which they had been called forth. Mildly amused, Wolfram leaned on his staff and coolly observed the battle that ensued.

Behind the fracas, a groggy Jon-Tom slowly came around. Seeing what was taking place, he reached cautiously for his duar. Still lying on the floor, trying to avoid Wolfram’s notice, he began to play, and started to sing.

“Once there was an—urrrp!”

The unexpected belch did more than put a crimp in the chosen spellsong. The visible, tangible result was a solid, softly glowing jet-black musical quarter note that hovered in the air a foot or so in front of the astonished Jon-Tom’s face.

“Well what do you know,” he murmured to himself. “Music really does look like that.”

Reaching up he grabbed the note, rose, whirled it over his head, and flung it in Wolfram’s direction. Seeing it coming, the startled sorcerer raised his staff to defend himself. The note passed right through the protective glow to smack the startled mage on the forehead and send him staggering backward.

Emboldened, avoiding the nearby swordplay, Jon-Tom strode determinedly toward the stunned sorcerer, playing, singing, and belching as never before.

“And ever the drink— urp —shall flow freely— breep —to the sea— burk …”

Each belch produced a fresh glowing note, which he heaved one after another in the direction of the now panicking Wolfram. Desperate, the wizard executed a small motion in the air with his staff.

“Immunitago!” A pair of large earmuffs appeared before him, drifted backward to settle themselves against his ears. Slowly his confident smile returned. Staff up-raised, he started toward Jon-Tom. Now the notes thrown by the spellsinger burst harmlessly in the air before reaching their target.

It was a newly anxious Jon-Tom’s turn to retreat. Changing tactics as he backpedaled, he also changed music. The roar of Rammstein thundered through the chaotic chamber. The duar glowed angrily, fiery with bist mist.

Shaken by the heavy-metal chords, Wolfram halted and clutched at his stricken ears. Trying to keep the earmuffs from vibrating off his head, he flung a wild blast from his staff. Ducking, Jon-Tom watched as the flare of malevolent energy shot over his head.

To strike the grizzly, who was busy turning his stony, stone-faced assailants into gravel.

“Stromagg!” a pained Jon-Tom yelled.

The force of the blast blew the bear backward into, and through, the stone wall that Wolfram had conjured earlier to encircle the sleeping princess. Rock went flying as the barely conscious bear landed on the bed. Groaning, he rolled to his right. His arm rose, arced, and fell feebly—to land on the waist of the slumbering princess.

Aghast, a horrified Wolfram let out a shriek of despair. “Nooo!” Jon-Tom remembered the sorcerer’s words.

Whoever touches the princess in such a way as to rouse her from her sleep shall make of her a perfect match to the one who does the touching, and shall have her to wife.

A delicate, swirling haze now rose about and enveloped the Princess Larinda. Her outline shimmered, shifted, flowed. She was changing, metamorphosing, into…

When the mist finally cleared, not one but two grizzlies lay recumbent on the bed. One was clad in armor, the other in attire most elegant and comely. Rubbing at her eyes, the princess sat up and turned to gaze at her savior. Blinking, holding one hand to his bleeding head, Stromagg looked back. Instantly the pain of the sorcerer’s perfidious blow was forgotten.

“Duhh— wow !”

“No, no, no!” Shrouded in tantrum sorceral, a despairing Wolfram was jumping up and down, swinging his deadly staff indiscriminately.

Sitting up on the bed, which now creaked alarmingly beneath the unexpected weight, Stromagg took both of the princess’s hands—or rather, paws—in his own and gazed deeply into dark brown eyes that mirrored his.

“Duh, hiya.”

Long lashes fluttered as she met his unflinching, if somewhat overwhelmed, gaze. “I always did like the strong, silent type.”

“This shall not last! By my oath, I swear it!” Numinous cape swirling about him, Wolfram whirled and fled through the open doorway. “I shall find a way to renew the sleeping spell. Then it will most assuredly be I who awakens her the second time!”

Lightning flickering from his staff of theurgic power, he raced unimpeded down the stairway and back through the foyer. Outside the smashed main doorway, the bridge back to the rest of reality beckoned.

From the shadows there emerged a foot. A furry foot, sandal-clad. It interposed itself neatly between the sorcerer’s feet.

Looking very surprised, Wolfram tripped down and forward, his momentum carrying him right over the side of the bridge. As he fell, he looked back up at a rapidly shrinking fuzzy face, astonished that he could have been defeated by something so common, so ordinary. As he plunged downward, he flailed madly for the staff he had dropped while stumbling. Though he never succeeded in recovering it, at least staff and owner hit the bottom of the canyon in concert.

Peering over the side of the bridge, Mudge let out a derisive whistle. “Bleedin’ wizards never look where they’re goin’.”

By the time the otter rejoined his companions, Jon-Tom was facing a revitalized Stromagg and his new-found paramour. The paws of each grizzly were locked in the other’s grasp.

“Sorry, guys,” Stromagg was murmuring. “I think I’d kinda like to stay here.”

Jon-Tom was grinning. “I can’t imagine why.”

A familiar hand tapped him on the arm. “You’d best lose that sappy grin now, guv, or they’ll likely ’ang you for it back in Lynchbany. You look bloody thick.”

“Be at peace, my good friends and saviors.” Though rather deeper than was traditional, the voice of the restored princess was still sweet and feminine. “I have some small powers. I promise that upon your return home, you will receive a reward in the form of whatever golden coins you have most recently handled and that these shall completely fill your place of dwelling. As Mistress of the Namur, this I vow.”

“Well, now, luv,” declared a delighted Mudge. “That’s more like it!”

It took some time, and not a small adventure or two, before they found themselves once more back in their beloved Bellwoods. Espying his riverbank home, a tired and dusty Mudge broke into a run.