Submission #1

From the Journals of a Wizard's Apprentice: Golems

I stepped back and looked at my work.  Making a golem is not hard work; it is merely a matter of making sure the soul array is properly engraved into the material.  In this case, the material in question being a mixture of river rocks, mud, and clay.  Once I was satisfied with what I had, I muttered the activation incantation and immediately, the material began to move and shift.  The mud and clay pulsed with the life granted to it by the soul array and the rocks sank and rose from inside of it.  What was once a mound of stone and soil eventually shaped into a more humanoid form.  All the while, the array remained intact, proving the strength of the spell.
--Journals of Athanasios the Old

I’ve discovered that every time I try to weasel out of the life of a wizard’s apprentice, good fortune seems to always be in short supply for me.  At first, I thought it was just from a lack of magical knowledge; but later on, I realized that fate wasn’t going to let me out of this.  Such was the case when I was tasked with making a golem of my own.

I chose to go with the traditional clay golem for my assignment.  But if I ever had any hope of leaving this life behind, I was going to need to go bigger.  I managed to work up a mound of clay that was as wide as I was tall and I prepared the soul array.  After saying the phrase to give it life, everything went smoothly: it formed into a large man-shaped golem.  What I didn’t account for was the consequences of making a golem so big at my skill level at the time.  It didn’t listen to a single word I said and it then proceeded to stomp through the castle (did I not mention my master lives in a castle?).  My master managed to erase its soul array, essentially killing it, but I was still in a heap of trouble.

Once again, we come to a beast that my master somehow talked me into fending off.  This time, however, he came along, which was nice because I would be dead if he didn’t.  The basilisk in question was terrorizing livestock on a farm and we were called upon to deal with it.  Its lair was an abandoned mine shaft about a few kilometers away and for the occasion, my master had brought special goggles with mirrors on them.  Since we couldn’t look at the thing directly, we had to opt for its reflection.

We went quite deep into the mine before we came upon the beast.  It didn’t notice us at first, since it was tending to what looked like a nest of eggs the size of watermelons.  Of course, this made the situation more urgent, so we prepared to strike at the beast before it had a chance to notice us.  My master blinded it by searing its eyes shut with a couple fireballs—an impressive feat, considering he didn’t have to look at it—and as the beast was distracted by the pain, he handed me an axe so I could take it down.  It was certainly easier killing the basilisk than it was with that hydra; I was eaten by it before I killed it.  Once the basilisk had fallen, we turned our attention to the nest.  We had to smash the eggs to keep them from laying waste to the farm and the surrounding areas.  For most of it, it was easy work, until I came across an egg with a half-developed basilisk in it.  Its still-forming head plopped onto the ground when I flattened the rest of the egg.  The eyes in the head were small and underdeveloped, but the instant I saw them, I froze.  For that moment, I could neither move nor breathe, and my legs buckled from the loss of control.  The last thing I remember before waking up outside the mine was my master’s voice shouting out to me as I was engulfed by the silent darkness.

It was a curious little one, the little drake hatchling.  It liked to nuzzle against my leg and nip at my ankles with its small, nubby teeth.  Any wiser hatchling would stay as far away for humans as possible and call out to their mother.  But this one treated me as if I was one of its clutch mates.  It was so young, blissfully unaware of the atrocities that man was capable of.
—Journals of Athanasios the Old

To aid in my education in magic, my master proposed that it was time that I had a familiar.  So one day, he dragged me to the menagerie in the nearest town to find a suitable companion for me.  There were a lot of different creatures there, ranging from the mundane to the downright odd.  One of the animals there looked like a large tiger, only with a longer snout and a bulkier tail.  It just laid in its pen, curled up like a kitten and snoozing in the sun like one, too.  I must have stood there for longer than I thought, because the beast opened one of its eyes and looked at me.  It opened its mouth wide with a yawn, showing off a set of razor-like teeth and a long, forked tongue.  Obviously, this wasn’t any tiger I had ever seen at the zoo.  It slowly stood up on all four of its legs, stretching them while branding the blades that were its claws.

After standing there for a few seconds, with the beast just staring back at me, I decided to check out the rest of the menagerie.  I should have known that my luck wasn’t going to swing that way because the next thing I knew, a giant tail wrapped around me and pulled me into the beast’s pen.  The beast purred as it looked me over in the coils of its tail, sniffing and nuzzling through my hair.  Needless to say, I wasn’t very comfortable with its sudden admiration of me.  I called out to my master for help, but when he came over, he just laughed.  Then, he said that the beast, which he called a tiger drake, liked him and wanted to go with him, even going so far as suggesting that it was my new familiar.