A freezing rain had driven Tacsony from the road where he had been steadily walking away from the burnt ruins of Panya. Failue still clenching at his heart he had lost his sense of purpose and direction and now walked aimlessly toward the horizon willing the worst to happen. And now this storm had decided to dump itself all over his muddy, tattered robes.

He found slightly better shelter than the open road under the trees. It was still bitterly cold, however, and he knew he needed to find a place to build a fire to keep himself warm for the night. He sighed, a soul deep misery invading his thoughts and preventing him from seeing the small house through the woods to his right. He muttered to himself and kicked at a pile of soggy woods. 'Damn horse. Damn stupid horse.'�

Blaming the horse instead of his own selfish tendency to stop at every inn and whorehouse along the way to Panya made him feel slightly better but not much. Trying to forget about his failure he thought about his broken staff and the crystal that hid once been attached to it and he smiled. He was a magician, afterall. Why not use his magic to find him shelter and create a fire? No matter that he was abysmal at domestic magic, desperate times called for desperate measures. He had graduated from Magic School near the bottom of the class but he had graduated which meant something. He had been assigned the important task of finding and bringing back to the capital the Hero of the world. No matter that said hero was now very dead and lying somewhere beneath the rubble of his burned home. The task had been assigned to him and he was proud of that fact.

'They didn't give it to Curran, that rat faced suck up,'� He angrily said aloud as he steadied the crystal globe in his left hand. He frowned deeply and concentrated on his magic, banishing thoughts of his school age rival. A faint chartreuse aura glimmered around the globe and his hand, relief flitted across his face before he muttered the words to a common fire starting incantation. Of course, the spell sparked up the sputtered out as he had forgotten to gather a small pile of wood for the magical fire to feed on. It may have been created by magic but the fire was real and needed real fuel to survive. Tacsony was too busy cursing his school rival's obnoxious behavior during their household spell workings class to remember this important fact. He stomped around under the trees, the icy water sliding down his limp, mouse brown hair and into his brown eyes.

In his rage he stumbled over a tree root and fell to the ground. He remembered his dead hrose and his failed mission and screamed rages even louder as he sat on the wet ground in his wet and muddy clothes. He didn't notice the figure slithering among the shadows of the trees behind him.

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