Free Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 by C. Dale Brittain Page B

door of a dragon's lair.
    No longer reading the spell closely, I started leafing ahead. Naurag might have gotten a spell he created on the spot to work for him when several large dragons poked their fire-breathing snouts from their caves to see what strange creature had invaded their valley. But no two wizards'
    magic ever works exactly the same, unless one has memorized all the steps of the other's spells, and I didn't see much point in asking the dragons to wait while I carefully recited Naurag's spell, pausing occasionally to check the book and make sure I had each word right.
    The handwriting here was sloppy. I sympathized with Naurag's despair—I felt it too. He was pushing ahead with writing down the spell, but in knowing it wouldn't work where he was, in the borderlands, he must have started doubting whether he even remembered everything he had done correctly, and whether it would ever again work at all.
    Suddenly I stopped reading to stare blankly out the window. I thought I understood at last why the Master had decided I would be a good person to succeed him, and why he had given me this book. At first I was amused, then, the more I thought about it, appalled.
    The Master, in reading this account written by the teacher of the man who had taught him his own magic, must have decided that Naurag reminded him of me.

IV
    At last I reached the place in Naurag's account that mentioned the Dragons' Scepter, the part for which the Master had given the book to me in the first place. Two wizards stood between me and Naurag: the Master and the man who had trained him. But as I read on it increasingly felt that I personally knew this man whose flesh had for centuries been dust, so that all that was left of him was a tattered ledger— and his spells.

    "In day's light," he wrote with new enthusiasm, "I ween that I may be able to improvise a solution to this difficulty which troubles me so sore."
    His improvisation, as he went on to discuss, centered on a wizard's staff he had brought with him to the land of wild magic. Apparently he had stolen it from some other wizard during his flight from those he considered his enemies. "The power already latent in this staff," he wrote, "shall make it amenable as a matrix for my spells."
    I had never stolen anything from another wizard, I thought indignantly.
    If the Master of the school was likening me to Naurag, I hoped he kept that in mind.
    Greatly daring, Naurag, still with his 'purple companion,' had ventured out from the borderlands, north nearly to the central valley where the largest dragons lived, and there worked his spell again, attaching it as he went to the staff. "I baptize this staff the Dragons' Scepter," he wrote proudly, describing it all after the fact as though it had been a much simpler process than I suspected it really was, "baptized not in religion but in spells of my own devising, and with this instrument I can make the fiercest serpent bow its scaly neck to me."
    I glanced across the room to where an old wizard's staff leaned in the corner. It had once belonged to my predecessor here in Yurt. I didn't think it had any particular powers latent within it, but it crossed my mind to wonder if I might be able to attach Naurag's spell to it myself, up in the land of dragons, even if I couldn't find the original Scepter. The nagging voice pointed out that this was sounding more and more as though I planned a trip north soon.
    This was still an intellectual exercise, I reminded myself. Just because his spell had worked for him didn't mean it would work for me. Not even the Master himself had attempted to reproduce the spells that had created the Dragons' Scepter. Naurag was a better wizard than I could ever be if I lived far longer than the Master.
    The next few pages of the ledger were sheer boasting. If I could believe him, once Naurag had perfected his Scepter he spent several weeks commanding the dragons, lining them up like soldiers, forcing them to perform