The tower’s third floor was an attic carved into the roof, its ceiling rising in a steep cone broken up by narrow wooden shutters. There were no light fixtures up there, but a few candles lined the walls. Bastion quickly ignited them.

  As the room grew brighter, the features of the life-size crystal wizard statue became clearer. It looked exactly like the giant wizard head that hung over the gift shop’s entrance, right down to his twisted smile and eyes that squinted as though he was out of his mind on psychedelics.

  “This thing had to be extremely expensive for something so tacky,” said Bastion. He pulled on some of the fine plastic threads extruded from the wizard’s cheeks. “Look at this. Fiber-optics for the beard. Those pre-Warp people had so much technology that they even used it on frivolous things like this.”

  “There’s a lot of stuff like this in these gift shops,” said Tex. “One place had an alligator sculpture with a price tag of $10,000.”

  “Yeah, they clearly had money to spare, too,” said Bastion.

  “Why’d Walter keep this up here in his super-secure treasure room?” asked Samantha. “Nobody could lug that thing away anyway.”

  “Maybe it’s a guard,” said Kyle. “Like, it’ll start moving when we try to open the chest.”

  That was exactly what Roy had been thinking. “I can try to smash it up first,” he said. “But if it is a guard that might activate it.”

  “Let’s just have our weapons ready,” said Cate, holding up her crossed Batons.

  Roy, Cate, and Kyle stood around it, weapons drawn. Well, Roy and Cate did. Kyle didn’t actually bring a weapon and stood with a flat palm ready to karate chop the statue’s neck.

  Meanwhile, Samantha tried to open the chest.

  It was made of wood-look plastic, with an oversized yellow keyhole. When Samantha held her key out to it, it only enlarged slightly, leaving a lot of space around the edges.

  “Damn,” she said. “Not enough resonance.”

  “So we can’t open it,” said Bastion. “We can just carry the whole thing out of here and crack it open back in West Town. Roy, you’re up.”

  Roy left the crystal wizard behind and approached the chest. He wasn’t 100% convinced the statue would actually come to life anyway.

  He squatted down and gripped it from the sides, trying to wedge his fingers into the seam where the base met the lid. There was no movement. No matter how hard he gripped, he couldn’t even slide it along the floor.

  “I don’t have enough resonance either. It’s got some kind of magic weight to it. People think of these as heavy, right? Maybe that’s why.”

  “I might still be able to do something,” said Samantha. “Put some of these candles out.”

  Roy started blowing them out with the same sharp gusts of breath he’d have used to blow out all the candles on a birthday cake in one go.

  Then he watched Samantha dance.

  As she backed against the wall, the outline of her costume faded into the darkness, so that only the bones remained.

  She made exaggerated movements. Raising her legs, bending her knees so much her feet reached her hips. Next, she waved her arms rapidly like a bird taking flight. Then the bones were folding on top of each other, compressing in a way even a master contortionist would have found impossible. Her arms stretched out overhead, into a looming colossus of grasping elongated limbs.

  Next, her whole body swayed from side to side as though dangling from a levitating skull.

  Samantha sped up, moving in a weightless blur. Bones moving faster, glowing brighter. Until she suddenly stopped and sprinted over to the treasure chest to jam the key back in the hole.

  It instantly became a blocky plastic key to match the novelty lock, and opened with a satisfying click.

  Even better, the statue did not come to life and attack them with its staff.

  They all broke into applause, and Samantha took a bow. “Yeah. There’s this whole thing about dancing skeletons that’s part of the theme. I don’t get the lead time to do it often, but when I do it makes the magic a lot stronger.”

  The group crowded around the chest to see what was inside.

  Bastion pulled open a cloth bag, showing off the colorful plastic gems inside. “We got the tokens.”

  “Has to be a few thousand in there, at least,” said Samantha. “We can get plenty of weapons for the town with that.”

  Roy grinned when he saw what filled the rest of the chest. “Looks like we’ve got plenty of weapons here already. Beneath the bag was a large collection of wands.

  Some of them had fairly obvious functions. Lightning bolt. Icicle. Fireball. There were multiples of these, which meant there had to be a lot of them around in total, especially since Walter would have to keep enough on his person at all times to maintain control of his gang.

  Others were harder to guess at. Dinosaur head. Unicorn horn. Cactus. A slice of pizza.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  Did the dinosaur one summon a dinosaur? Turn you into a dinosaur? Or just a part of you? A dinosaur head, or dinosaur arms, maybe?

  “Watch this,” Kyle put his wizard robes back on and aimed the disco ball wand at himself.

  “No,” Bastion snapped, waving a frantic warning. “You don’t know what that does.”

  “Too late,” Kyle said.

  The ball spun and flashed, reflecting kaleidoscopic colors all around the room for a second. Then Kyle dropped the wand and started doing a goofy dance.

  Everyone but Bastion started laughing.

  “Stop that. It’s extra noise. At least Samantha’s dance had a point to it.”

  “I can’t stop.”

  “Too committed to the bit?” asked Samantha.

  “No, I really can’t stop. I’m not trying to move here, it’s just happening to me.”

  “Cool,” said Roy.

  “Useful,” said Bastion, scratching his beard.

  “OK,” Roy said. “I was going to be responsible and not try any of these out, but since Kyle got to do one…”

  “Don’t,” said Bastion.

  “Not the elemental ones or anything. I know letting off a fireball in this enclosed space would just kill us all, and the lightning one would make a big old boom even if I hit the wooden beams to discharge it, but this one can’t do any harm, right?”

  Roy held up a wand with plastic butterfly wings on the end. It left glowing glitter trails in the air as he waved it around.

  “It can do harm!” said Bastion. “I repeat, you don’t have any idea what it does. What if a giant butterfly appears?”

  “Well now I really want to try it,” Roy said.

  “What if it’s too big to fit in the attic and it brings the roof down around us, or it could do something else, like turn you into a tiny butterfly with no way to change back. This is unknown magic. It could do anything.”

  Roy twirled the wand around himself and pressed the button. The wings began to flap. “Anything, you say.”

  He didn’t notice anything at first, but a second later, the room had lit up more, and there was extra weight on his spine.

  “Yes!” said Samantha. Look behind you.”

  Roy glanced over his shoulder and saw that large translucent wings had sprouted from his back, glowing with pink light around the edges.

  “They look great,” said Samantha. “A winged knight. It has a kind of mythic feel to it. Try flapping them.”

  Roy strained, tensing his back and trying to locate muscles he wasn’t sure existed. “Nngh.” He sighed. “Nothing. They still look cool though, right?”

  Next, he tried jumping. He fell to the ground much more slowly than normal. “OK, so that’s what they do.”

  Roy flicked the dull wand a few times to no effect. A second later, it flashed, color returning to the butterfly. At the same time, a hum filled the air, and the crystal wizard vibrated, shaking the floorboards. A ripple of rainbow light flashed through the statue, lingering in the stands of its fiber-optic beard.

  “What the fuck was that?” said Bastion.

  “The wand recharged,” said Roy. “And it only took a few seconds. The ones back at the saloon still hadn’t recharged when we left, but here…”

  Now he understood why the wizards usually stuck close to their tower. When they were far away, they had to conserve their wand charges.

  He knew what that was like from video games. Holding on to a power-up or a potion for an entire play-through because he never knew if a better opportunity to use them would come along later.

  When something felt too good to use, you ended up never using it. It made you a lot weaker than if you could constantly let rip with everything you had, which the wizards could do here, because of this statue.

  “That flash wasn’t a coincidence. It’s not just this store making the wizard’s theme stronger. It’s the crystal wizard, too. It’s a resonance amplifier for them. The recharge time on the wands is practically nothing here.”

  “Oh man, that’s bad,” said Bastion. “We really don’t want to fight them where they can spam fireballs.”

  “What should we do with it?” asked Cate.

  Roy was about to say it was too good to waste when it glowed again.

  He looked around their group; none of them had used a wand.

  Then they heard voices coming from the floor below.

  “Phew,” said a low voice. “Forgot you had working AC up here. I can finally stop using my fan wand for once.”

  A high, nasal voice replied. “Once our plans are done, the roads will be safe for scavenging parties. We’ll find more of these units, and maybe even a way to get the central system running. I’ll make sure you and the other High-Mages are the first to benefit.”

  Roy stood perfectly still, not wanting to creak the wooden floorboards. Some of the others were holding their breath.

  “The raiders are getting ballsier,” the one with the low voice continued. “We found two dead out by the big Burger Quest. Sliced through the back of their heads. Probably never even got a spell off before those thugs took them out, and the West Town party didn’t come back last night either.”

  “Fucking scum,” fumed the man Roy now assumed was Walter. “I refuse to live in a world where brains and strategy lose to brute force. We have to prepare faster.”

  “How are our weapon stores?”

  “We lost some good wands, if you count the West Town group. One was a skull. The stuff we’ve been taking from the prospectors isn’t good enough to compensate.”

  Samantha scowled, her big eyes narrowing.

  “We should stop sending groups out,” the High-Mage finished.

  “And let that cretin Skeeter have free reign over the whole area? No. I refuse.”

  “The men downstairs aren’t happy, boss.”

  “Arch-Mage,” Walter said flatly.

  “Arch-Mage, yeah. That ain’t what they’re calling you now, though. Their friends keep not coming back, and they keep saying it’s too hot down there, and that the food sucks, and you hoard all the good stuff up here. They say…”

  “What?”

  “They say they were better off following Skeeter. That as mean as he was, the arcade was a better place to live, and they killed way more treasure hunters, so there was more loot to share out.”

  “Idiots. I thought the people who followed me here were smarter than that. Skeeter’s going to end up dead soon. If we don’t do it, he’ll OD on that Krazee-8 garbage. And yes, I know most of my own followers are drinking it too. But from what you’ve just said, I need to do anything I can to keep control, at least until I learn to use my Archetype magic better.”

  Roy snapped to full attention.

  “Have you, uh, been making progress on that?”

  “Yes. That thief in the top hat had exactly what I needed, just as my premonition foretold. I’ll need to watch all those discs for more guidance, as well as the tape. Leave now, I have to get started.”

  A few seconds later, Roy heard swearing and realized the tape Walter was searching for was in his own backpack.

  “Mike! Get back here. Did you see anyone come up this way while I was out?”

  “No, Arch-mage. You saw it, the door was locked.”

  “As if that matters with all the magic around here.”

  Roy and his friends froze as the sound of furious footsteps came up the stairway.