The Chronicles of Brendan Earle, Apprentice Mage.

Telling the Truth

Adam

I went to see Ferguson after the evening meal. There was another ceilidh going on and Luna was singing Mary Chapin Carpenter numbers, so I was reluctant to leave, but orders is orders, so…

His rooms had a carved wooden door with a huge one-eyed face on it. I was about to knock when the eye opened and focused on me. It wasn’t pleased to be disturbed. “Password?” it grunted.

“Er, I don’t know. I was asked to come here by Senior Ferguson.”

“Huh. I’ll call him. Wait there and don’t go touching anything. I don’t like getting fingerprints on my brass.”

A stroppy door. That would be one of Alistair’s.

Ferguson opened the door and let me in. The man looked uncomfortable, I might have said haunted, but there was something stronger than that about him.

“I can’t think of a diplomatic way of putting what I’m about to say,” he began, “So I’ll just say it. Starting from you coming to the Land, nothing has been normal. Nothing at all. Things have happened that have never happened before. Much of that is good, I won’t claim otherwise, but there is… there is a break in the minds of many with the way things are now and the way they were before you arrived. And you, yourself are not… there is something about you none of us feel is as it should be. At one time we thought you possibly a spy sent by Maldon. No, don’t worry, no one believes that now, but… there is nothing normal about you, Brendan Earle. Nothing bad we can see, but nothing normal either. I will apologise if this is strange, but I must ask you if you know anything we don’t.”

Well, as open an invitation as I was going to get to tell someone what was going on here. The hell with it, I needed to talk to someone openly and no longer cared if Ferguson thought I was crazy. I didn’t think he’d believe my story, but couldn’t see how that would make me worse off.

“Okay,” I said, “I’m going to tell you the story of me coming to the Land. I don’t think you’ll believe a word of it, and it’s long, but can I just tell it to you first and then you ask me questions about it afterwards?”

He nodded and I took a deep breath and started. “It began in, er, sorry, but what year do you think it is now?”

“Think? I know it’s 2007. Why might I think it was anything else?”

“I’ll get to that later. Erm, have you heard of Harry Potter?”

He snorted. “I live in the Land, but I do visit the Planet Earth from time to time Earle. There, so I believe, the fish in the sea have heard of Harry Potter. The last book in the series is due to be released soon, I understand.”

“That’s sort of the problem. Let me get back to telling it though. This story really started in 2010.” He looked hard at me, but kept his mouth closed and nodded me to go on.  “By then the last of the Potter books had been written. The film of the final book broke all box office records. The publishing industry and Hollywood had been looking for something to be the next Harry Potter for years.

 Well, in 2010 a man called Alistair Cameron finished a book he called, ‘The Chronicles of Brendan Earle, Apprentice Mage.’ It answered a lot of prayers. It was at the top of the best seller lists for most of the year and being made into a film by the start of the next. The film won an award somewhere and everyone knew there were going to be more books.

There were five, each one with the same title and just known as Book Two, Book Three, etc. Of course, they were made into computer games.

They sold big especially 'cos of  new technology. The first VL games were Brendan Earle adventures. Sorry, that won’t make sense. VL’s a system that acts directly on the optic nerve. When you wear the glasses you see the game world just like you see the real world without them. The first ones came out in… I think it was 2013, though they weren’t a patch on what we have now.