“Wait,” Penny worried at the last possible second. “If this doesn’t work the way you expect it to, how long will I be sickened? Do you have a backup plan ready in case of that outcome?”

  Seymour paused, lips slightly parted, caught in the moment before he could begin to read the scroll he was holding. He looked directly in her eyes, drew in a deep breath, and blew out a sigh.

  “Seymour?” She tilted her head. “Did you hear me? I asked: do you have a backup—”

  Without knowing whether or not it would work, Seymour quickly read the scroll in silence while mentally targeting Penny. The parchment disintegrated and became a green, gaseous bolt which zipped in her direction.

  But before it could strike her, Penny’s familiar swept in and intercepted the putrid-looking bolt. It swelled with green energy before absorbing and nullifying it completely. Penny was unharmed.

  The next moment, her pet book floated so that it was hovering directly in front of her. It shook loose one of its pages, which fluttered down so that Penny could catch it, only becoming corporeal as it finally came into contact with her hands.

  She read from the parchment her familiar had created, “A custom scroll of Moonshine, it says.”

  Seymour started to apologize for targeting her with a potentially harmful spell, but he stopped himself just before beginning to speak. He didn’t sense anything but awe in Penny’s voice. No resentment or anger at all – like she hadn’t even registered the fact that a moment earlier he’d gone ahead despite her concerns and cast the scroll on her. He snorted a laugh, and she didn’t react to that either, still too distracted by the scroll her familiar had produced.

  “Count to ten,” he whispered a short time later. “And then just step out and use it.”

  “I’m worried—”

  “I know,” he cut her off, “but don’t be. I’m going to get hit by it, too, but that doesn’t matter, because you know exactly what needs to be done and you’re more than capable of doing it.”

  Penny nodded.

  Seymour searched her eyes. She knew he’d see fear there, but also determination. As if confirming as much, he suddenly broke from their hiding place and made a run for it.

  One, Penny counted, still hidden. Two…. three….four….

  She listened to the sounds of Seymour crashing through the dense jungle growth.

  ….five….six….seven….eight….

  She listened to the angry buzzing of the hornet as it emerged to pursue him.

  ….nine….ten!

  Penny finally stepped out of the hiding place. Her familiar floated close to her right shoulder, its glow barely illuminating a small patch of the surrounding jungle. This moment should have terrified her, but she somehow felt more firm and powerful than she had ever at any point in her life prior.

  She heard the shift when Seymour doubled back toward the sepia light of her Teacher’s Pet. He wasn’t merely snapping branches and rustling leaves to carefully maintain the hornets' attention; he was shouting at the top of his lungs, ululating like one of the barbarian savages from the South, taunting the creature to keep up the chase. When Penny saw the leaves begin to tremble and quake right at the furthest edge of her light, she held up the scroll her familiar had given her and quickly mouthed the words to activate it:

  She had been correct before when she guessed that Seymour had stopped off in the library before they left the shop. He’d stored several schematics for neophyte-ranked scrolls in his Object Memory.

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  His first choice had been a simple Mute spell, which was typically used to interrupt and prevent enemies from casting spells of their own. Seymour had selected it for a different reason, though. He’d known before they left the shop that they were heading out to hunt flashbats, and he reasoned that if they needed to escape from the bats then muting them would be highly effective, since the creatures would presumably require echolocation in order to navigate and track prey. Hitting them with Mute and eliminating their ability to emit sounds would render them functionally blind.

  It would have been a clever application of the spell, not something a complete novice like Seymour would be expected to come up with, and she once again found herself impressed by his quick thinking.

  The other scrolls he had decided to store in his object memory were more straightforward: Mend, Fire-Starting, and Nauseate. Mend would have been useful to repair minor damage to items or to heal minor injuries. It was one of the most popular neophyte-ranked spells in existence.

  A Scroll of Fire-Starting was added because he thought it might be useful if they ended up caught outside for the rest of the night and needed warmth, or as a means of dissuading jungle beasts from coming too near – which may have worked on most creatures, but obviously not the magma-filled obsidian hornet.

  And the Nauseate spell had been the final scroll he memorized. He’d thrown it in with the thinking that if they were ambushed by something truly dangerous—a leopard or lion or the like—then the beast would be less likely to eat them if it had an upset tummy.

  None of these scrolls were going to be useful in the ways he had intended. In the end, Seymour and Penny were forced to take a risk. He’d used the Nauseate scroll on her, successfully goading her familiar into absorbing it and producing a custom scroll.

  Seymour emerged from the jungle and in that exact moment she triggered the scroll. The monstrous, black-shelled hornet came barrelling out of the darkness after him. The scroll vaporized into a wave of silver light so powerful it rustled the tree limbs in a wide area, as if a sudden cyclone had blown through. Seymour tripped and went sprawling in a bank of ferns. Penny could hear him struggling to stand and failing to find his feet again. He went down with a second thud.

  The scroll had done its job.

  Which left the hornet no better off than Seymour. It slammed hard into a tree and fell to the ground. It crawled along, clearly confused, unwilling to take once more to the wing.

  This was the opening they had been working to create. Penny rushed to attack the obsidian hornet using the wooden meat tenderizer Seymour had conjured earlier. She swung it down as hard as she could, the first blow mangling one of the creature’s wings. It scrambled in place, turning to try and stab her with its stinger – a stinger which continued steadily pushing out fist-sized globs of lava which became flaming piles on the jungle floor.

  Staying out of its range wasn't difficult. Penny matched the hornet’s rotation, remaining in its face, keeping one step ahead of its more-dangerous rear-end. She struck another blow hard on its back, right where its lone, uninjured wing connected to its torso, and then followed up with a strike to the side of its head. She was careful not to damage the two bulging, obsidian spheres located on either side of its body.

  She had once been given a lesson on obsidian hornet anatomy, and one line from the reading assignment stood out in her mind: magma is stored in the balls. Busting them would spell trouble.

  As she smashed the mallet down time-and-again, the hornet began to resist less-and-less. Its stinger was still oozing lava in spurts but the flow no longer seemed controlled; the action no longer intentional. She broke its legs and it fell prone. She beat its brains out into the dark dirt. When she was done, she stood, her breath hot as one of the small fires dotting the jungle floor around her, and let the mallet fall from her hand, where it plopped down into the brain-mud.

  As the young humans slowly made their way out of the jungle, Gorgudan the Golden floated high above in the night sky. He had been observing them the entire time, ever since he sensed Penelope Amberwine’s class evolution taking place in one of his testing chambers.

  “I think I may have been gratified by it a bit too much,” the girl admitted. “The violence felt… downright exhilarating, to tell you the truth. And much more natural than I would have ever expected – much, much more natural. Truly, you should have seen it.”

  Far above them, Gorgudan chuckled at her choice of words. Seymour had seen no part of her violent outburst, of course, having been blinded as part of their battle plan. Penelope now had the Riftborn’s arm slung over her shoulder and she was leading him out of the jungle, back toward the savannah and the safety of the magic shop.

  Gorgudan, meanwhile, remained completely invisible. It was highly unlikely either of the young humans would have noticed him winding through the air at such a great altitude, but he opted to take the additional step of turning invisible just to be extra certain. He himself, however, had still seen everything that went on down there.

  And he now felt more certain than ever that Seymour Little would one day manage his magic shop. The Riftborn had confirmed once again that he possessed guile and guts which belied his rather meek appearance. And there was something else. Gorgudan continued watching from above as they finally emerged from the jungle.

  “I really hope you get your sight back soon.”

  “You and me both,” Seymour agreed.

  The Riftborn was putting on a good act, but even from this great distance Gorgudan could hear the worry in his voice.

  “Maybe I could pay for a healer to come down from Ghizo’s Crossing?” Penelope suggested. “I still have a few chits, after all. An insufficient sum to hire an experienced practitioner but perhaps I could locate a healer-in-training who would be willing?”

  Penelope June Amberwine had caught Gorgudan’s attention some years earlier. She was at that time the most gifted child artificer he had ever heard tell of, and her abilities had only increased as she grew and learned. But after witnessing the enthusiasm with which she had unleashed lethal violence upon the obsidian hornet, he thought that perhaps she had another calling, too.

  Were these two the future? Was Seymour the one prophesied by Oscar Rusk? Or could it be by some twist of The Fates the girl, instead? The idea of possessing them both was what most intrigued his dragon-intellect.

  Stretching out, he drifted along lazily, keeping an eye on the pair until they were nearly back to the shop. Then, he cured Seymour’s blindness before soaring ever-higher into the sky and dropping his aura of invisibility, climbing and climbing beyond the planet’s atmosphere and then escaping the pull of its gravity, until the enormous dragon would have been visible as only a speck against the night sky to anyone who might have been watching, easily mistaken for a star.