The Last Spell

[Author's Note: This was written for the third /r/Fantasy short fiction writing contest in 2017. It did not win. The theme was the last spell.]

“Are you sure?” she asked.

I double-checked the reader. “Yes. There’s only enough magic left for one more spell.”

“But I need at least three to do this right.”

“You’ll have to manage with just one. Maybe one and a half.”

She made an annoyed and frustrated noise.

“Can you combine them into a single spell?”

She thought about it. She opened her mouth to say something, but then she thought about it some more. “Not easily.”

“Let’s write it out, see what we can do.” I cleared the screen and started writing on its surface. “We’ll draw a diagram, see if that helps.”

After discussing it a length, I had a pretty complex diagram. I circled an area. “Maybe we could turn this into a single spell, and let the wild magic carry it the rest of the way.

She shook her head. “No.” she pointed to another part, drawing a circle around that. “We don’t include that, and the universe ends.”

I looked at the diagram. “Dang,” I said.

We both looked at it again. She surrounded two areas in boxes. “I could extrapolate these into a single command, that would simplify the spell a bit.”

“Good,” I said. I put some triangles on the screen. “We might be able to reference these, like with potions and artifacts. Maybe a daemon.”

She shrugged. “Yeah. But where would we get catnip at this hour?”

“Muffins has a mouse toy. Maybe that would work? Heck, we could even run this part,” I put an ellipse on the screen, “through Muffins. The amperage is low, so it won’t hurt her, just make her surly.”

“You’re sure this is the last one we can do?”

I opened the reader again. I showed her the readout. “Yeah,” I said.

“Dang,” she said.
Then she had an idea. Her eyes widened. She took the device from my hands and started swiping the diagram around. When she was done, it was unrecognizable. I looked at it. My eyes grew when I saw what she had done. “You’re crazy,” I said.

“That’s what it takes, sometimes,” she said. “Now, go get Muffins.”

The setup looked more Rube Goldberg than Nicholas Flamel, but once we both double-checked the setup, and triple-checked, just to be sure, she said the magic words. The room shook, Muffins growled, and a bright light shot up from the cauldron in the middle. She walked over to it, plunged her arm into the liquid and pulled out a seed.

“There it is,” she said. “The last spell.”

I took the seed. It had a sort of life to it, not exactly moving, but not exactly standing still. “Let’s plant it,” I said.

“Tonight,” she said. “Under the full moon.”

I set the seed down on the counter. I looked at her. She was beautiful in the glow of the light that came from the cauldron. “I love you,” I said.

“Not now,” she said. “First we have to kill the elder gods.”