Free Master Mage by D.W. Jackson

have available?”
Maria asked, looking around the table, a grave look upon her
face.
    “We have 1,845 on the most up-to-date
count. We are asking that anyone of fighting age report, and many
are heeding the call, but we are still vastly outnumbered,” General
Foreman replied with a dour face.
    “You have 230 elves at your command,
Your Majesty,” Ferula said when the queen looked in her direction.
“I know we are a small number, but at soon as the ice flows pass,
there shall be more than two thousand of our kin joining
you.”
    “That is good to know, Ferula, but it
will do little good should we fall in the first week of spring,”
Maria replied as she scratched notes onto a sheet of parchment.
“How many of the mages have agreed to fight?” Maria asked, turning
to Horus.
    “Only 118 battle mages, but we have
another 22 support mages,” Horus replied, his face between shame
and anger.
    “That gives us a force of around 2,100
against a force that is reported to be over 12,000 and growing
daily. The question I have is how do we win?” Maria asked as she
looked at them with piercing eyes.
    “Without more men, I don’t see how we
can,” General Foreman said matter-of-factly.
    “Well, we better find a way to win. I
will not have the country left to me by my mother destroyed during
my reign,” Maria replied stubbornly.
    As the meeting wore on, Thad listened,
but few had any real ideas on how they were expected to beat an
army that was more than ten times their size. Thad had accomplished
such a feat, but it was one thing to lead around a thousand
soldiers and take them out slowly, and he doubted that the same
tactics would work against ten thousand.
    As the winter snows deepened, the war
councils continued. Thad attended each meeting, but they all seemed
the same with little new developments.
    It wasn’t until midwinter that Thad
received word from Tuck, who had been eerily silent since he had
informed Thad he would be delayed in returning.
    “We are only a few leagues
from the capital,” Tuck declared
proudly.
    “We? Who have you brought with you?”
Thad asked, both surprised and happy to hear from his elfin friend.
He had started to think the elf had gotten himself lost in the deep
snows.
    “You will find out within the hour,”
Tuck replied, his voice thick with laughter. “I don’t want to ruin
the surprise.”
    Less than an hour later, a young page
burst into his chambers, his face red and creased with worry.
“Master Thad, there is a large army approaching from the
south.”
    Thad jumped to his feet. Had the
Brotherhood risked moving in the dead of winter in the hopes of
taking the capital undefended? If they had, then they would most
likely succeed. It wasn’t until he was halfway down the stone steps
that Thad remembered Tuck’s words. He hoped the approaching army
was Tuck’s “surprise.”
    It wasn’t until Thad reached the palace
gates that he started to realize how weak the Farlan capital was.
It had a fair-sized wall, but against a real army, it would be
easily scaled or torn down. The gates, while looking large and
imposing, had not been used in centuries, and Thad honestly doubted
they would withstand a single strike from a battering ram. Every
time he scanned the city, he saw more weaknesses, including no
place with easy access so that he could view the approaching
army.
    Running to the wall surrounding the
southern side of the city, Thad quickly gathered his magical energy
and started the workings of a spell. When he was only a few yards
from the wall, Thad released his spell, making a bridge out of
energy. Thad had often made illusions that had substance to them
but had only used them for entertainment or as a weapon. On Horus’s
suggestion, he started looking at other ways to use his magic. “We
won’t always be at war,” the older mage had told him.
    With experimentation, Thad had learned
that any illusion he formed could be made semisolid as long as he
let currents of energy