Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Spoiler alert: what follows below is an additional apprentice’s report upon the story told by Stahl in The Killer and The Dead. There are seven already present at the end of the novel. Yep, I included commentaries on my story at the end of the story: I thought it would be fun, and an interesting experiment.

There are many more than seven apprentices, so more reports remain to be written. I wrote another as a speed fiction run in a blog a few years ago, which I regard as an unsubmitted first draft by an apprentice rather than their final report, and this one. More to follow.

So: if you have read the novel (and if not – you can get a free copy from BookSirens here, now!) why not write your own apprentice’s report? Feel free to submit it to me, if I like it I’ll publish it here and award the writer a prize.

But back to the spoiler alert – the report below does reflect on actions and events in the novel, so it will spoil the novel if you have not yet read it. There, you have been warned.

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The Jaded Apprentice’s Report. (Report #8)

How am I supposed to react to the meandering drivel I was just subjected to?

Why does it matter? We are supposed to guess, to compete, to vie for attention and for superiority, to guess at the mind of the killer, and the mind of our master. And what would be the reward? If we somehow guessed the mind of our master too well, death would be our reward, possibly at the hands of the violent brute who took such delight in imagining our deaths – or was that our master speaking?

It is an attempt to tie us in knots, all of it. This is a moving labyrinth, entwined snakes rolling in a misshapen ball, and somewhere deep within the writhing mass are their hidden heads, fangs useless in jaws clamped shut by the pressure of so many bodies forced against each other in a shifting maze that none can follow, every snake lost in their commingled complexity, that each thought they would master, but now all are blinded.

That is my thesis here. This story reveals the pointless complexity of our lives, buried in scheming and lust for power, afraid of our peers because we are all rivals, because we know deep down that we all hunger for more power, hunger like the dead do for blood or flesh, and the best, purest, source of that power is each other.

Wizards live to devour each other. And we have all apprenticed ourselves to one. What utter fools we are.

I come to this conclusion far too late. I am already too deep-snared, surrounded by coils and blinded. Pride keeps me going: I want at the least to not die at the hand of one of my miserable rivals. I’d rather die at my master’s hand, or maybe the hand of his enemies, as they come to extinguish him. For do not doubt, they have their labyrinthine plans for him, even as he has his for them.

The conquest of Aranvail. What a joke. We know there is a plan, and that we will be powerful foot-soldiers in his struggle, shock-troops and decisive victors is what we are told. Only the most gullible fool would believe that. We are nothing but sacrificial lambs, perhaps distractions, pawn sacrifices in a game of chess we don’t understand.

So what do I think of Stahl and his story? Trapped in the Mire as he was, he had far more freedom than we. Now he is in our master’s orbit he has become our equal in slavery. Once our master has you, you will never be free. The new boy thinks he will be, the one that doesn’t speak, but shouts defiance with every movement. I envy him his angry hope.

The dead have their plans, they are another snake coiled around us and our master, even as we are wrapped around them, all of us caught in the writhing hopeless mass/mess that grows bigger and more insanely complex every time you realize there are more competitors on the field than you previously imagined. The road to power is paved with tombstones, a vast necropolis of failed ambitions. My name is carved in stone, waiting for me.

It is all futile. I know I am smart, cleverer than most. Once I thought myself quite the superior intellect, and I was, in comparison to the clods that surrounded me. Here though, I am forced to admit I am not of the best even among the apprentices. That galled me at first, after I got over the denial, and that took years.

Now I know enough to know I am a gulled child, a useful idiot, a piece and a pawn in a game I do not comprehend, but will end for me in death long before the game comes to its conclusion.

I will not court my master’s favor or try to win his approval anymore. I do not care. I try not to grow careless before my rival apprentices, but I am slipping, one of them will plant a metaphorical blade in me soon enough, and I’ll be both angry at it being them who undoes me, and relieved it is over – they can have their victory, grow a little fatter in power, and continue their blind struggle. I will rest, at last.

Unless they keep my spirit trapped for some grotesque purpose. Death may not be a release.

So I contemplate suicide, to get out before my rivals or master get to me.

I have not the nerve. Not yet.

I could try to go out in a blaze of glory, initiate a confrontation against someone only just good enough to beat me, force them to kill me in their victory, rather than keeping my soul or spirit for later use. No soul stone for me.

Is that what the story taught me? That the defiant spirit, who fought to the end, is naught but a soul in a frozen gem, handed over by the killer in exchange for his vulgar family? Cyrtha was truly great, far more powerful in his time, and after it, than we, yet even he is reduced to just another acquisition of our master’s: a clever ploy played out, a stratagem revealing his wit, carried out by the witless who had no idea what they were doing or why. Bravo, I suppose I am supposed to say. But it is so inevitably clever I can only be unsurprised, and know I have sufficient wit only to see part of how brilliant it was. The achievement is wasted on me, who cannot grasp its whole. How fabulous.

So I say this: you are all fools. And my master may be the greatest fool of all, destined to discover that among his peers, he is nothing but a mediocre talent, and not half as clever as he imagined. That is a day I’d like to see, a failure I’d like to witness, if it didn’t mean my own destruction in the process.

Ah, curse it. I still want to live. I wish I had a fraction of my current power and the illusion of freedom I possessed in my old life, where I could live comfortably with mundane certainties and seem incredible in my wisdom and magical might to the yokels surrounding me. I could live my life as a merchant’s son, making money, enjoying wine, and women, wealth, and the simple power that comes with it, all backed with little flourishes of magic to keep me comfortable until my dotage.

No dotage now. I learned how to extend my life, to live in this endless hell of competition. I thought it was a blessing, that I would grow more powerful, more intelligent, more wily with extended age. If anything I’ve withered. In the Mire everyone knows everyone else’s business. So it is in our little coterie of wizards. Who here keeps secrets for more than a decade or two? None but our master. Funny, Stahl’s story really is a reflection of our world in a shit-smeared mirror. Can any of my rivals see that? And if they could, would they write it out so starkly? Or say something else they thought wittier?

I don’t care. I ask questions to seem deep, but I’ve lost interest in the answers. As anyone reading this should have lost interest in my meanderings by now, I’ll stop. I accept your judgment, master.