Gods & Thieves

1. Shamans and Knights

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Where one is born to save, another is destined to destroy. And where one comes to win, another is meant to lose. Or so they say.

But can one person do both?

When I was a kid, my friends and I used to play a game called Aura after school. The rules were simple: one of us was a shaman and the others were knights, and knights were to catch a shaman. The trick was, a shaman had a magical power, aura, which was limited to the imagination of the player only. Melt a weapon in your enemy's hand? Easy. Create a current of wind to knock your pursuers off their feet? In the blink of an eye. Summon a snake to sting and paralyze your foe with venom? With a snap of your fingers.

A shaman had only one weakness--silver. Perhaps every evil creature is more or less scared of silver, huh? Our tokens that represented silver could make a shaman powerless. Yet, in order to deprive the villain of magic, silver had to touch the villain's skin. And how could you do that if your villain was untouchable? The only way to win was to catch a shaman off guard, to play smarter and faster and quieter than the others.

On rare occasions when I was lucky to play a shaman--everyone always wanted to play one--nobody could ever catch me. And while playing a knight, I remember winning only once. I cheated. I sneaked up on the boy who played a shaman and was hiding in the schoolyard: there was a door at the back of our history classroom, through which you could go outside unnoticed; it was normally closed, but everyone knew where our teacher kept the keys. So first, I stole the keys from her table, then I crept through that door and into the yard, toward the bushes, waiting for the boy to come to hide there. And...BOOM! The nemesis was captured, I was victorious.

My sister who'd been playing with us that day was proud of me as never before, but the teacher didn't appreciate my creativity. She lectured me, then my older brother who came to get me, then told me to write a thousand-word essay on Why stealing is wrong. I remember that game clearly because it was the first and only time in my life when I was both the hero of the day among my friends and the disappointment of the year among my teachers. The winner and the loser. Both! How could you be both?

My own greatest disappointment, though, was when I learned that no matter how many times I played shamans, I could never become a real one.

Still, I know how to steal magic.

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