The rain ripped hard at his body, leaving welts as it pounded down on him. Flora flew everywhere striking like hammers against him. He could barely see anything in front of him, and yet he searched the ground where he thought he saw the staff land.
His torn fingers groped through ferns and thistles, trying to grasp his hands around that curious stick that had caused them so many problems.
He pushed at a ten-foot tall thicket as he blindly moved his hands back and forth across the soggy ground. He felt his fingertips probe more than once into the soft recesses of the ground and come back smeared and dark. At least he hoped it was only dirt. The grime stung the fresh wounds on his tips, but the sting from the hard pelting rain was worse.
As he forced himself through more bramble, scoring another dozen scratches against his flesh, he heard a sound that was unlike the great howl of wind. It was a mewling cry of terror.
Ashyn looked up, his grey eyes fighting to see beyond the few feet in front of him. Where did it come from? A moment later, he heard the cry again.
Ashyn moved towards the sound. Pushing against both wind and oversized plants. A few times, he ran into the massive sequoias that only appeared seconds before he would collide with them, his hands raised protecting his nose. He’d learned that lesson the hard way from the cornfields of his childhood.
Suddenly something caught his leg, and he fell forward. Ashyn braced for the impact, as his world tilted on its side. He hit the muddy ground with a splat, and then found himself in a rolling frenzy as the ground descended. Mud flung all around him, and he tore down some of the weaker verdure and wound up burying his side and half his face in the liquid laden dirt.
As Ashyn spit out the foul sludge, he sat up to see what had tripped him up so badly. There only a few feet away buried halfway in flowerage and mire he could just make out a small oblong shape. It looked like an egg.
The now filthy wizard crawled towards the object. As he did, he saw it more clearly. A white stone glistened vibrantly in the rain. Inside the egg-shaped stone he could see natural earthen piping of green, blue, amber, and red.
The wizard reached for it. As soon as he touched it, a surge of energy ran through his body. We are merely its conduit, the words ran excitedly through his head. He grabbed the stone and pulled at it.
Just as he had hoped, a long mahogany shaft slid from the binding vegetation. When it cleared its shrouding, he was staring at a strange staff nearly six feet in length. Aside from the rounded stone that sat on top, he could see a pointed spike at its base. This was it. This was the bull’s staff, and he could feel the magic within it!
Ashyn couldn’t believe his luck! The odds of really finding the staff in the storm were unfathomable. It had to be like finding a needle in a haystack, within a barn full of haystacks, on the other side of the country, buried in a landslide. So not at all in his favor.
Yet there he was, holding the staff and it indeed was the one that harried him for so long. He still had no idea how to work it, but if anything could help him connect with magic again, it would be the staff.
He stood up, and turned to head back up the rise and to the cave when he heard the mewling cry once more. It was much closer now. He recognized the sound. He had heard it twice before now.
Ashyn turned to follow the cries. He moved forward more slowly, not wanting to take another spill. The ground continued to decant downwards. Soon the foliage opened up, and he found himself in a familiar trail-like opening, with a large boulder. Where Ashyn left it, was the bull.
It was standing now, tethered tightly against the boulder with its arms caught up on its horns. The sight reminded Ashyn of how he had used to see Farmer Bib’s dogs all bound up when they were tied off to a pole or their dog houses.
Ashyn noted the peculiar position of its arms pinned against its face. It must have tried to cut the hemp ropes with its horns and, in the process, somehow bound itself up.
Ashyn figured the bull, once it regained consciousness, would have muscled through the ropes somehow. He hoped to be so far gone by that point that it would have lost its ability to pursue, especially after losing its staff.
There was a crack as a long thick branch broke from the tree above Ashyn and was immediately picked up in the gust. It swung about wildly, and he ducked out of the way in time, but not before watching it bounce and bound to its new location. The boulder.
The branch, about as thick around as Ashyn’s thigh, slammed into the flank of the bull creature. It writhed again, burrowing itself deeper into the coiled mess of rope. The beast issued another mewling protest from its assailer, before tumbling on out of sight.
Ashyn realized that the opening where he tied the bull down was just that, an opening. Everything caught in the heavy winds travelled through the empty space easily, and the poor creature was right in its trajectory.
Ashyn cringed as he looked around the bovine and saw detritus everywhere. The bull had been bludgeoned repeatedly ever since the winds picked up. It had tried to free itself, but now it was bound even worse than before, and to make things even direr, its weak flank was completely exposed. Not just to the elements, but to everything flying through the air.
Ashyn wanted to turn away. He wanted to leave the creature who acted as his shadow hunter for so long to its fate. It tried to kill him, repeatedly. It impaled Jenhiro, who in all likelihood was going to die. He should just take the staff and leave the beast to its fate.
There was another snap of a branch and then the loud crack of it impacting the bull. The cry it issued then, Ashyn knew that he couldn’t leave it. Not such as it was. Seeing it tied against the stone, pelted mercilessly stopped him from walking away.
“A wizard values all life,” he said to himself, “not just those of his choosing.”
Ashyn knew what he was about to do could only make matters more complicated, but his conscience couldn’t have it any other way. He thought he might be beginning to understand what it was it that Xexial told him in the fields after they left Czynsk to the Elves. “Politics are not for a true wizard. It is the people’s choice to fight, not yours to fight for them. A wizard is not meant to be a champion. We are meant to keep people alive to the best of our abilities.”
Through it all, Ashyn had been choosing a side, the Ferhym side. Though on many counts he couldn’t bring himself to kill again, he knew he was trying to be Jenhiro’s champion. At every turn he was trying to impress the Wild Elf, trying to get him to value his importance. He had done it in an effort to reach his sister. Now what seemed a simple choice of fighting what he thought was a minotaur had cascaded all the way to the very moment before him.
It was not a minotaur. Ashyn realized that for a while now. It was an intelligent, sentient creature. It controls an awesome power within the staff he held. Ashyn’s decision in championing the Ferhym facilitated this feud. He helped in persecuting, tormenting, and now torturing the bull against the large stone.
No more. He was going to end it his way, a wizard’s way.