Abud-Lei: School of Sand & Shadows

Farrow Wincaster scowled as he surveyed the dusty field, the sun beating down on his bare neck and the wind-borne sand peppering the backs of his legs with bitter insistence. He ran a hand through his red-orange hair, already keenly aware that the sun's oppressive heat would leave an angry, red burn on the back of his neck.  He was every bit as ill-suited to these conditions as the withered remnants of the farmer's crops, but, unlike the farmer's crops, Farrow knew no magic to tend to his own comfort.

The farmer in question watched Farrow nervously from a few feet away, his dark complexion and leathery skin a testament to his stubborn refusal to move to cooler, more fertile climes. How many men and women like this had Farrow met in his six years working the Ebbing Stretch? When he'd been younger - 6 or 7 years old - he'd listened to their stories with great solemnity, taking them to heart and using the emotions their tales of woe conjured up to feed his talent's hunger for fuel. At twelve years old, he thought himself above such silly sentiment. These days, his stepfather supplied him with wyrd, the greenish-blue powdered form of raw magic. It was far more fast-acting than powering one's magic with sentomancy, especially when the art required new, raw emotion. You could only hear the same sad story from the same impoverished family before it no longer left a mark.

"...me father would say," the farmer drawled on, his words falling on disinterested ears, "Ye make of life what ye can and leave somethin' for yer kin. I 'ain't lookin' like leavin' 'em much now."

Farrow sniffed. The farmer's meagre corner of the Ebbing Stretch was paltry even by the region's standards. A sagging farmhouse, two dusty fields without so much as an insistent shoot between them, and an outhouse in better condition than seemed reasonable. Did this family not shit?

"Not to worry, sir," Farrow's stepfather, Gorlam, enthused. "My wife's boy is the best there is. He'll have your farm back in business in no time."

It was always "my wife's son" and never "my son." The distinction did not bother Farrow - he couldn't stand his mother's latest desperate leech - but from a salesmanship perspective, "son" sounded so much more trustworthy. Gorlam was comfortable lying about Farrow's successes and the odds of Farrow's magic saving a family's farm, but he apparently drew the line at drawing a direct connection to the boy whose talents he exploited.

Probably avoiding a paper trail. "It wasn't my fault! The boy did it! He 'ain't right!" Something like that.

"There is the small matter of payment," Gorlam continued. "Farrow is the best, y'see, and we'd be paupers if we didn't charge a small fee for his help. It'll be worth it when you're up to your neck in...uh..."

"Parsnips," Farrow chimed in. "He grows parsnips and..." he paused, scanning the field with the barest sliver of magic, "tomatoes. Some rosemary, too, right?"

The old farmer bobbed his head eagerly. "That's right! How'd ye know about the rosemary? Me late wife used to grow it round the back."

"One of the boy's many gifts," Gorlam explained. "He really is the best. You're in safe hands."

That, at least, wasn't a lie. Farrow was the best. He was also the worst.

As far as he knew, nobody else did what he did. Many claimed to, but he'd yet to come across a single Whisperer who could so much as divine water, let alone conjure it up from the dark places far below the barren earth.

Behind him, Farrow could hear the sound of coins clinking into his stepfather's hands. He wouldn't see a single one of them - not directly - although he would be given enough wyrd to keep his hands from shaking and his teeth from falling out. Gorlam, like the two stepfathers before him, knew better than to slaughter the golden goose. They needed Farrow healthy if they were going to exploit his waning powers.

Are they waning? Or is this place just a lost cause?

The Ebbing Stretch had not always been known by that name. A century ago, Farrow had been told by more farmer's wives over glasses of homemade lemonade (a family recipe!) than he cared to count that it had been called the Emerald Stretch on account of its fertile fields and streams of sparkling water. The Ebbing Stretch had become its name only after the streams had begun to dry out and the fields had gone barren.

"Farrow, m'lad. The good gentlema-"

Farrow waved his stepfather's pantomime of paternal encouragement away. He had already bitten down on the nib of wyrd he'd kept tucked away inside his cheek, and its icy touch was already coursing through his veins. This process had felt much more pleasant when he had relied on sentomancy - a cool glass of water on a hot day rather than the adrenaline rush of being plunged into frigid waters he now experienced. Sentomancy - turning your own emotions into magical energy - relied on the user being capable of empathy, joy, and anger. These days, Farrow felt little more than ambivalence to the people he helped.

The wyrd acted quickly, and it didn't rely on him giving a shit about the people his stepfather was defrauding, so it would have to do.

As the raw magic danced along his limbs, he began to mutter under his breath. Each exhalation pulled the scant droplets of moisture from the air around him - much of it his own sweat. This tiny ball of condensation soon coalesced into a shimming orb the size of a marble. With a thought, he sent it shooting out across the fallow fields, where it sought out the nearest source of artesian water. It then hovered there, a shimmering north star that was all but invisible at this distance.

"There." Farrow pointed, "Dig there."

The farmer clicked his fingers, and a trio of unwashed, unshaven men hurried to follow their master's command. The first time Farrow had realised the people he was helping kept slaves, he hated them for it, hated the way they had made him complicit in their cruelty. Davad—the father before Gorlam—had quickly disabused him of such sentiment, swiftly and violently.

"Get your feckin' head out of the feckin' clouds," he'd growled between swings of his belt. "Yer not some feckin' prince, boyo. Yer a jumped-up magician who helps people dig wells and grow taters. Don't get up yer own arse and think yer shit don't stink."

For a moment, memories of Davad's brief reign of terror caused Farrow's concentration to waver. The tiny sphere of water 'popped', and he lost all sense of where the well should be dug. Hopefully - not that he cared - the farmer and his slaves would dig in the right place.

Shaking his head to clear away the clinging remnants of the memory, Farrow muttered another series of nonsense words. At his feet, the reddish-brown earth writhed with motion as previously dead roots squirmed out of their shallow graves, restored to life. They would wither and die soon enough without water and nourishment, but they would be long gone by then. They never visited the same farm community twice, and the Ebbing Stretch had plenty of desperate communities to visit before they'd need to double back towards the southern coast.

Besides, Farrow's magic did work if the people did exactly as he told them. If this man kept the fields properly irrigated and the fragile shoots protected from the sun's unforgiving glare - he'd have a good harvest this year and every year until the well ran dry.

Or until something changed.

Something always changed.

Farrow stepped back from his place at the edge of the field. Life rippled out from him in a green wave of new life. When he had been younger, he had not known how to limit this sudden burst of life to the farmer's crops, and more than a few farmhouses had been partially consumed by climbers and weeds with far more tenacity in them than crops ill-equipped to survive in the oppressive heat.

These days, his skills were finely honed, and the burst of greenery stopped its growth at the edge of the field. A fine carpet of parsnips now filled the field, ready to be harvested in two months.

He repeated the process in the farmer's other two fields, conjuring up one more field of parsnips and a field of tomatoes to accompany it.

Nobody had asked him to do the same for the rosemary, yet he found himself standing behind the farmhouse all the same. Those watching him might have assumed he was merely seeking respite from the sun by sheltering in the farmhouse's shade, but it was to the small, uncared-for garden that he was drawn. For all the farmer's sniffling sentiment when he'd mentioned his late wife's garden, little had been done to show the patch any love. It was a tangle of dead weeds and stubborn grass.

He reached down to touch the soil beneath the mess. It, too, was too dry to support life for long, so he burrowed his index finger into the dusty earth and sent a pulse of magic coursing through the bedrock below. The others cried in surprise and alarm as the earth shook beneath their feet. The farmhouse swayed and groaned on the edge of collapse as the tiny sliver of magic wormed its way into the stone and, like ice expanding in the winter, forced its way through the stone and to the water below.

When it was done - and it was done in a handful of seconds - the earth fell still, and the gentle rill of water bubbling up from the ground filled the silence. With a wave of his hands, he caused the weeds to wither away, allowing the rosemary, sage, thyme, and lavender to burst forth, their growth accelerated by Farrow's magic.

"Oi!" the farmer called from the middle of his tomato field. "What are you doing, lad?"

Farrow turned around and shrugged. "Sometimes the earth is angry," he lied. "We're fighting against nature."

The farmer scowled. "Fuck nature. This is my land."

And that right there was the attitude that had first soured Farrow against his "calling." These people he helped, more often than not, did not care that their farms were the cause for the Ebbing, nor that their refusal to move on only worsened things. Oh, the sun's sickly heat and a thousand other things contributed, but the stubborn arrogance of the men and women he helped had made sentomancy difficult even before wyrd had dulled his emotions.

Gorlam shot him a warning look. Don't argue, it said. Don't ruin this for us.

Farrow had no intention of arguing. He'd tried and failed in the past. At best, they left with empty bellies and a string of curses shouted after them. At worst, pitchforks, torches, and the promise of a beating from Gorlam when they reached safety.

Instead, Farrow planned a far more subtle lesson. His magic could not do great things like the wizards of lore and legend. He lived under no illusions about his place in the world. Yet, where farmers scraped a meagre living out of the dying earth, he wielded power out here. He couldn't say why or how he managed to commune with the farmland so well - the Gods knew he couldn't do it in forests or mountains- yet he wielded considerable influence here.

He shouldn't have been this angry. How many ignorant hillbillies had condescended to him before? How many beatings had he endured?

Yet today, standing in the shade of a dilapidated shack with the mingling scents of rosemary, lavender, and thyme teasing his nostrils, he was incensed. He had never known anger like this before. Without thinking about it, Farrow's hands danced like spiders on a grill, and as they did, the fledgling parsnip and tomato crops began to grow, their previously inert forms suddenly leant malicious life.

He did not need to look over his shoulder to know that the sudden rampant growth had completely overwhelmed Gorlam and the farmer, although their shouts of surprise and pain confirmed what his connection to the plants told him. They were cocooned in an unrelenting web of overgrown life, far too large for this land to sustain for long. Even now, given steely strength by Farrow's magic, the eager vines and thirsty roots would be digging into their skin painfully.

All I'd need to do is...

Farrow pictured the tenacious green stems of the tomato plants drawing so tight that they would leave welts. Behind him, the two men shouted and cried.

"Don't just stand there, you feckin' idiots!" the farmer shouted at his slaves. Farrow's rage had excluded them. "Cut us down!"

Feckin'

Feckin'

Farrow pictured the plants growing spikes not unlike those on a rose bush. He pictured them digging into the skin of the two men and drinking, slaking their desert-borne thirst on something far more plentiful than water.

The cries and shouts became more panicked. More desperate.

He flinched as he felt the bite of shovels and picks cutting into the plants. Why did these three men fight so desperately to free a man who held them as property? Why not just let the farmer die and leave this doomed place?

Their stubborn stupidity only further angered him. He no longer excluded them from the attention of the verdant overgrowth he barely controlled. Their gnat's bites stopped abruptly as they, too, were trapped by the angry vegetation. These were no longer tomatoes or parsnips or any other crop - these were Farrow's anger and frustration made manifest, and they did not need his anger to guide them.

How dare these hairless apes bring them to this place and force them to struggle in sour earth?

How dare they plant them where they would wither and die in the angry sun?

They were not meant for this place any more than the fool men who had brought them here. If they had to die on this foreign soil, why not the men who had dragged them to this place?

Farrow had no doubt he would let these men die - murder them, in truth - but the arrival of a newcomer put a stop to his murderous tantrum.

With a deafening roar, a dragon swooped out of the sky, its copper scales reflecting the sun's harsh glare and momentarily blinding Farrow. The loss of concentration did not stop his magic from working, but it did take his malice out of it. The plants, incapable of such anger, quickly subsided but did not relinquish their hold on the men.

The pained shouts from the ensnared men gave way to panicked cries. Farrow joined them.

The dragon, twice again as big as the house against which Farrow cowered, landed with such force that the outhouse and farmhouse alike collapsed, sending great clouds of ochre dust into the air.

It regarded Farrow with turquoise eyes the size of dinner plates.

"You're late."