Fherwil and the Tunnels of Time Book 1: The Anomaly Awakens

The alarm on Ben’s old digital clock blinked insistently: 7 AM. The sound, a sharp and annoying beep that Ben despised, seemed to tear right through the morning stillness. With a groggy grunt, he stretched his skinny arm from beneath the messy sheets of his bed, hitting the alarm with far more force than necessary.

His small room, set in a modest apartment in the town of Río Piedras, was bathed in pale morning light. The Puerto Rican sun, already strong by this hour, fought its way through cheap curtains patterned with shooting stars, so sun-bleached that the stars looked more like blurry smudges. The light barely managed to dispel the lingering shadows of his dreams, which, as always, had been filled with dazzling spells, deafening applause, and him—Fherwil—at the very center of it all.

He dragged himself out of bed like goodness knows what. Reality is never going to live up to my dreams, he thought. As his first foot hit the floor, “Oof!” he groaned, feeling how cold the tile was beneath his bare feet. Shuffling along, he made his way to the small mirror hanging on his closet door—a mirror whose surface was faintly stained by failed attempts at potion-making (which were really just mixtures of soda and kitchen spices).

He stared at his reflection with a furrowed brow. Ben wasn’t tall; his build was slender, almost lanky, with shoulders slightly hunched from long hours spent reading and from a shyness that made him shrink into himself a bit. His brown hair, an ordinary, common shade, was tousled into an untamable mop that defied every attempt at combing. A rogue lock fell perpetually across his forehead. Beneath that disarray, his eyes—deep brown and often sleepy—nevertheless held a spark of intelligence and an insatiable curiosity. Faint dark circles hinted beneath them, evidence of late nights buried in books or chasing dreams of magical greatness. All in all, he didn’t cut the imposing figure of the mighty wizard he imagined himself to be; he looked more like a perpetual student, a bit scruffy, but with a gaze that held the promise of entire inner worlds. His eyes, still swollen with sleep, reflected the disappointment of yet another night without magical revelations.

Ben had always been fascinated by magic. Ever since he was a kid, he didn’t just devour fantasy books—he lived them. He watched wizard movies with shining eyes, rewinding VHS tapes until they wore out just to analyze the exact movements of the actors’ hands. He spent hours practicing clumsy card tricks that always ended with cards scattering on the floor, and hand gestures that, according to him, channeled energy—though they never seemed to channel anything more than a cramp in his fingers.

He had dubbed himself “Fherwil,” a name he had pieced together letter by letter on a boring afternoon, a name that sounded mysterious and powerful inside his mind. In real life, however, whenever he used it, it only drew timid chuckles or confused glances from his few friends.

Today, like so many other days, Ben firmly intended to dedicate time to his “magical studies.” His desk was an organized mess (or so he liked to believe). Piled upon it were several dusty tomes that were his prized treasures, hunted down at garage sales and in the forgotten corners of thrift-store bookshelves: Spells for Beginners (and the Not-So-Beginners), The Secret History of the World’s Wizards (a book of doubtful authenticity, complete with coffee rings on the cover), and a well-worn conjuring manual, dog-eared at the pages for “levitation” and “vanishing.”

With that renewed optimism (a trait that, despite his constant failures, stubbornly persisted like a weed), Ben attempted the levitation spell from page 42.

He held a small gray feather (probably from a pigeon) on his palm. The morning breeze drifted in through the cracked window, carrying the rich scent of café colao from the neighbor’s apartment and the distant sound of the day’s first AMA buses, with their noisy engines and the sharp fssshhh of their air brakes.

—“Okay, Fherwil... focus,“—he whispered to himself.

He squeezed his eyes shut so hard his eyelids ached. He scowled, picturing the feather floating, light as dust. He muttered the words from the book: “Aerthos... Venti... Sursum...” He poured all his intention into it, feeling a faint tingle at the base of his neck—maybe this time!

He waited one second. Two. He cracked an eye open.

A long, trembling sigh slipped past his lips. It wasn’t just frustration; it was that old, familiar taste of disappointment. He felt heat creeping up his neck. Who am I kidding? he thought in a fleeting moment. I’m just Ben, the weird book kid.

He shook his head, refusing to concede defeat.

—“No!“—he exclaimed aloud, glaring at the feather as if it were an enemy.—“Float, you stupid feather! I am Fherwil, the... the aspiring master of the arcane arts!”

The feather, utterly indifferent to his drama, remained defiantly still.

After that, the morning went much the same way. He attempted a spell to change the color of an apple (and ended up bruising it from squeezing too hard in concentration). He attempted an enchantment to find lost items (and spent the next half hour searching for his keys, only to find them in yesterday’s pants pocket).

Finally, he attempted a charm to speak with animals, aiming his most mystical gaze at his cat, Mittens, who was curled up on a pile of clean laundry.

—“Mittens... Felis catus... listen to me. What is... what is the secret of the universe?”

Mittens met his gaze with her usual feline detachment, yawned to reveal tiny sharp teeth, and proceeded to lick her paw. Ben sighed. Not even my cat takes me seriously, he thought.

He let out another sigh, deeper this time, and slumped into his desk chair, which groaned in protest. Mittens watched him from her throne (the laundry pile) with that feline serenity that Ben found infuriating at times, and comforting at others.

Mittens was a tabby with a coat of swirling grays and blacks, flecked with touches of washed-out orange like echoes of a distant sunset. Her eyes, a sharp yellow-green, seemed to have witnessed everything. And in a way, they had. They had seen Ben practice his hand gestures in front of the mirror until his fingers seized up. They had seen him whisper to feathers, celebrate with a ridiculous dance the one single time a card trick worked in front of the mirror, and fall asleep with his face glued to an open book on “ancient runes.”

Mittens was neither delicate nor excessively fastidious. Her fur, often slightly rumpled, carried the faint scent of Ben’s indoor escapades: a trace of dust from the corners, a hint of that mysterious sticky spot near the desk (likely from soda spilled weeks ago), and perhaps, on particularly frantic days, a stray noodle from the instant ramen (chicken flavor) Ben had eaten at his desk the night before.

Mittens navigated the labyrinth of junk across the floor with a feline grace and dignity Ben could only envy. It was an obstacle course of discarded T-shirts, charger cords and headphones tangled like snakes, precarious towers of books and comic books, old video game cases, and the remnants of half-finished creative (or magical) projects—like a scattered deck of cards or a spoon slightly bent from a failed telekinesis attempt.

More often than not, she was found curled up on the pile of clothes marked “clean, but not clean enough to fold away,” or dozing peacefully inside an empty cardboard box (which once held a computer part) that had sat there for weeks because, according to Ben, “it had potential.”

Her whiskers, long and delicate, twitched faintly as she inspected new mounds of clutter. Her tail, sometimes held upright with curiosity, other times swishing with lazy indifference, served as a quiet barometer of the chaotic yet cozy home they shared.

Despite the mess, Mittens felt right at home. This disorder was her ecosystem. She knew every nook, every hurdle, and had staked out strategic vantage points from which to observe her young human’s bizarre universe. Her purr, a soft, steady hum cutting through the quiet, was the only reliable soundtrack to Ben’s failed brushstrokes of magic.

By the time the sun climbed high, streaming aggressively through the curtains and warming the dust dancing in the air, Ben’s spirits had hit rock bottom. Magic felt like a phantom—an unattainable dream reserved strictly for the characters inside novels and movies. He felt utterly ridiculous: just an ordinary boy from Río Piedras with outlandish fantasies that not even his cat would respect.