Chapter 1
The spell had gone terribly wrong and now it was up to him to save his damsel. He decided he would be her knight in shining armor, her savior.
Admittedly, he was the one responsible for her current woes, but he didn’t like to dwell on it too much. It was a simple mistake, and he was sure she would have understood if she could understand anything at all.
Maybe she would have even found it amusing.
He didn’t truly believe that. Princesses seemed to suffer from a chronic lack of a sense of humor. Besides, it wasn’t his fault that the spell went wrong. Although he was the one who cast the forbidden spell, so maybe it was partially his fault.
Instead of blaming himself, he blamed the magic. After all, the almighty wizard Rad couldn’t have made the mistake himself.
Thinking that, he couldn’t help but detest his own name. How could anyone take him seriously with a name like that?
Why didn’t his parents give him a more powerful name? Arius, that sounded like a good name, or even Asim, but no, they had to choose something as unimpressive as Rad.
Even his beloved, his one true love, laughed at him when he first introduced himself to her Royal Highness.
It hurt so much to see the one he desired more than anything else in life looking down on him.
Even though Rad knew she would have done so even without the inconvenience of his name, that didn’t stop him from blaming his parents for his romantic failures.
When the princess laughed at him in front of the entire court, he decided it was high time he did something about his ill fate. His solution wasn’t the most logical one, but he thought it would be the most productive.
The High Council of Magical Worlds prohibited love spells, but in his moment of despair, he didn’t care. All he wanted was for his darling rose, his spring of life, to feel for him what he always felt for her.
He didn’t think it was too much to ask. After all, he dedicated his whole life to serving the Kingdom, the least the haughty princess could do was love him.
It was just a small token of appreciation that she refused to bestow on him, and that made him furious.
In a fit of anger, he did something unprecedented. He tried to cast a love spell on Princess Andromeda.
Those kinds of spells were notorious for always going terribly wrong, but he didn’t think clearly. He certainly didn’t want THAT to happen to her.
One moment she was standing in front of him, confused, while he cast the spell. The next moment, she was gone.
She vanished as if she’d never been there.
At first, he thought he had made her invisible, or that he transported her to some other place, but after a few moments, he heard a small tiptoe of clawed feet. As he looked down, the realization hit him like a hammer hitting the burning sword. She wasn’t gone.
She was just... transformed.
While he tried to figure out how it had occurred, the lovebird that was once the princess, flew up, and he barely caught it before it flew away, never to be found again.
The king was beside himself when he found out what had happened to his precious daughter. And incomprehensibly to Rad, the king dared blame him, the grand wizard, for the misfortune that fell upon his household.
Although it was certain his spell changed the princess, he still refused to see it as his fault. It was just a consequence of the princess’s stubbornness.
Rad wasn’t surprised the king couldn’t see his perspective. He was always old-fashioned and harsh towards his most loyal subordinates, such as Rad.
“You did this to my darling little girl. I banish you from this kingdom until you cure my lovely daughter!” the king had told him that day.
The punishment was too harsh for such a valuable member of the king’s court, but Rad felt it would do no good to argue. Besides, he didn’t want to quarrel since he also preferred to see the princess in her human form. She couldn’t marry him if she stayed a lovebird.
To find a way out of the impossible situation, he went to visit the Seer.
Although his powers were greater than anyone’s in the land, as he often stated, he thought the Seer would be slightly more versed in seeing beyond what mere mortals could perceive, and even some magical beings.
Upon arriving at the Seer’s temple, he didn’t lose a second of his time and immediately said: “You have to help me! I need to fix a love spell gone wrong!”
The seer seemed surprised by his presence. Her face turned bright red, and she started fixing her hair self-consciously.
“Rad, the grand wizard! I wasn’t expecting you!” she said, barely controlling her trembling voice.
“Then you are not much of a Seer, I guess,” he said as he turned to leave.
“Wait! You don’t understand! I can see things only when I focus on them. As years went by, I learned to control it so I wouldn’t be plagued with unwanted visions. I can help you,” the Seer said.
Deciding that the Seer was telling the truth, he sat down on the low bench next to the center of the temple as she went into the trance in search of what he needed to do.
“To fix what’s broken, you must find the Scroll of Destiny and rearrange the broken pieces into a whole. That scroll has been lost for centuries, but you have to go on a quest and find it. It’s the only way,” the Seer said in a distant, hollow voice that wasn’t her own.
“Where can I find the Scroll of Destiny?” Rad asked.
“The Scroll of Destiny lies under the great pyramid in the land of sorrow. The land never traveled, the land forever lost. It is the dreadful place known as No Magic Realm,” the Seer said.
Rad couldn’t help but let a gasp of horror escape him. The No Magic Realm was rumored to be one of the most dangerous realms that ever existed. It was said that many magical beings went there, but none returned. No one knew for sure what happened to them, but they all presumed the worst.
If he wanted to fix the enormous problem that he might have had something to do with, he had to brave the unknown and go where no wizard had gone before. All that he was to accomplish without the use of his magic.
It seemed impossible. He couldn’t even imagine who he would be without magic. It was a part of him, as much as his soul. Was he ready for such a great sacrifice for his loved one? Absolutely.
“How do I get there?” Rad asked.
“You must know this is a perilous journey that mustn’t be taken lightly. Future hasn’t been set yet. You might succeed or fail in your quest, but one thing I can see for sure,“ the Seer tried to warn him. “It will change you. It will change who you are forever. You must ask yourself if you are ready for that.”
“Faith, let’s cut all these formalities. You might be the Seer, but I have known you since we were children. One thing you must know about me by now is that I don’t walk away from a challenge,” Rad said.
Faith’s eyes widened, but not in the capacity of her seer eyes. They widened in surprise.
Rad had always acted so high and might. She didn’t think he even remembered her. His calling her by her given name was quite a shock, since people rarely did so.
For others, she was just the Seer. Someone who they sought when needed, but never remembered after she helped them out. Most of them didn’t even know that she had a name. Some of them were so dense that they thought her name was the Seer.
She always assumed Rad was one of them.
Although she remembered every single moment of the time they were friends, when they shared everything, she didn’t believe he remembered any of it.
Magic had changed him.
The more his powers developed, the more he distanced himself from people. He thought magic was the solution for everything and that brought him heaps of trouble. It wasn’t the first time he had made a mistake while casting a spell, but it was the most dangerous mistake he had ever made. The king considered his daughter as his most revered treasure. If Rad didn’t break the spell, he could be executed.
What Faith didn’t understand was how he could be so blind.
Couldn’t he see that true love had to be a gift someone CHOSE to give you, not something forced on them by a silly spell? Luckily for Rad, Faith couldn’t see thoughts that ran through his head, or she wouldn’t have helped him.
Instead of focusing all his energy on just breaking the spell, he was contemplating if the Scroll could help him make a better spell next time, to make it work. It didn’t even occur to him that the princess couldn’t fall in love with him, couldn’t truly and honestly love him. Unlike Faith, whose heart was breaking as she was looking at the man she loved, ready to die for the love that would never be returned.
She knew no spell could do that. In the same way, there wasn’t a spell that could make her love for Rad possible. After all, being the Seer meant she wasn’t allowed to ever marry. Technically, she was forbidden to fall in love.
Yet the heart can’t be controlled.
It wants what it wants.
A person’s heart doesn’t know about rules and prohibitions, it just loves.
It was said by the kingdom elders that if a Seer were to fall in love, her visions would be tainted. That was what they thought of love, that it would be a stain on their perfect Seer. A stain that could never be washed away. That would always stay.
How wrong were they.
