The Chronicles of Brendan Earle, Apprentice Mage.

Beginning of The War

Day Three

Full Memory Accession: Sample 579

Accession justification:

Essential background. Alterations must be made to the training of the young Mages to allow them to fight a war successfully. Without deeper access to the skills of sample 579, this will not be possible. The Ferguson variant of  579 should also be allowed greater awareness of his SAS skill-set so as to better play his part of leader. It is not considered necessary for other variants to access this knowledge. All memory streams will be altered to accommodate these changes.

Patrol with a brick in the cuds near Crossmaglen. Young, all of us young, wavering between macho cockiness and near bowel-emptying panic when shadows took on menacing shapes.

Winter Selection for the SAS in Wales; humping through the Brecons in mortal fear of not getting it. The day when I got handed my sand-coloured beret with its winged dagger.

Jungle training out of Penanjong camp, Brunei, the squad feeling like pillocks when the local Hash House Harriers ran through our LUP - we hadn’t noticed the toilet roll strips.

Lugging a Minimi up a hill on the border between Iraq and Iran, sweat running down my back, despite the cold of the night. The constant mantra: shape, shine, shadow, silhouette, movement and noise.

 Death, killing and more death. A point is reached when that no longer seems a way to live a life.

It is another world, alien from the one that Ward lives in. Are their lives all so different?

Niall

Jock walked into the hall, found me at the entrance to my room and said, “You’re gunna need to sit down.” He had a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, but from the look on his face this wasn’t the prologue to a joke, so we went inside and I sat. The bottle was of our usual thick green glass, so I had no idea of what was inside it. He poured me a good double and held it out. “Drink that.” I took a cautious sniff and said, “This smells like…”

“Aye, so ye’ll ken it’s no for dabbing ahind yer ears, take a drink man.”

I did. Smoothest single malt I’ve had in a long time; mature, well-rounded, delicious. The Scots carried the knowledge of distillation with them from Ireland when they went over to the big island, but can’t equal the product of the home country, whatever the advertising might say. This, however, would keep any drinking man happy.

“Good stuff. How long have you had this maturing and why are you bringing it out now? Or is that a stupid question, given the day’s news?”

“I’ve had it for about forty-five minutes and I’ve brought it to show you what young Earle did in my class today.”

I considered that statement for half a minute, looking into the whiskey to see if it would give me any clues. It didn’t. Then I took another swallow. It still didn’t bring enlightenment, but that wasn’t why I’d drunk it, so I didn’t complain.

“This has been a day, hasn’t it? I think you need to sit down here and have a glass of this yourself and tell me the full story.”

Phoebe

After breakfast that morning, (Aki said hi, she said sorry she’d been so ‘tied-up’ recently and promised to have a sit down and a gossip soon) I went to see Niall. I had an idea some of the info I’d picked up from the book and the crystal needed more than just me acting on it and I needed to get someone else working at looking at things.