Wand Of Ash: The Proving
By Madison Woods
Casting a protective circle was much harder than I thought it would be. It took two solid weeks of rote training before I’d finally been able to produce the blue-green telltale shimmer. The difficulty wasn’t in the mechanics involved; that part I understood. It was in the seeing of it. If it couldn’t be seen, then the electrons weren’t excited enough. Atoms weren’t vibrating at a high enough frequency. It—by whatever definition was chosen to describe the phenomenon—wasn’t happening.
And then it did. There it was, in plain sight at the tip of my wand. Shimmer. As I watched in utter shock, it spread to a complete unbroken bubble all around me, glowing in glorious atomic excitement. All my dead efforts in the sand around me faded from view as the bubble grew stronger, then reached a visual crescendo and popped, leaving me standing slack-jawed, looking at Stella.
“Finally! And just in time.” Stella plopped onto the beach and stretched out her arms and legs. She laughed out loud while waves lapped at the shore. A perfectly choreographed tide was coming in, and it would soon erase all the evidence of my failures up to this point.
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