An Old Person Losing Their Job

So a friend and I have started exchanging creative assignments to keep ourselves from falling into work-and-drink-and-go-to-sleep pits, which I think is a wonderful idea.  Her first assignment for me was to "write a short story about an old person losing their job."  I haven't written a short story about anything since high school, so I've been freaking out on it for the last several weeks, trying to work out some astute metaphors and drawing plot diagrams and blah blah blah.

Then today I'm kicking it with my most metal-head homedawg, and we're drinking coffee and we're listening to Necros Christos and everything is dandy, and when I tell him about the assignment and how stressed I've been over it, he goes, "dude, fuck that noise.  Why don't you just write about a fucking wizard getting defeated by this other fucking wizard?  Wizards are old as shit."

So with that, I give you my fictional debut.

The Defeat of the Good Wizard

 

The battle raged for three days, tumbled across wind-ravaged peaks and through the swampy plains where the Horg clansmen subsist upon the cast-off refuse of those more fortunate.  It's said that the howls of fury could be heard as far North as the Trogian fjords and as South as the mesas of Akkhema, that children awoke in the night from horrible nightmares only to find that the visions were real, that the desperate clash of good against evil was happening in their waking life as terrifyingly as in deepest sleep, and their parents' arms trembled and could offer them no comfort.  No birds would sing during those days; even the cruel and mocking raven held his breath.  The wind itself seemed to pause, fearful that the slightest move could effect the result, could lead somehow to that outcome so unthinkable that even the wise and warlike Aerethians dared not utter its possibility.

We wearied both, and both fought in the fatigue; we were both cut through the soul with magical lacerations and through the flesh with steel.  My mount fell before his but I was the first to puncture his thought-defenses.  I mustn't lose. 

At noontide on the third day, my enemy and I were locked in wretched battle deep in the sacred heart of the Pyrneen forest, a place so hallowed that my opponent's mere presence there would have been unthinkable but two years prior.  On that ground, ground that would henceforth be a place not of glory but of curse, the power of good proved too weak and I fell beneath the cold blade of Evil.

Here I now sit, locked fast in a cage of flame, beneath the bowels of the Earth, beneath the oceans of lava that feed the now-ever-flowing volcanoes, beneath the passage of mortal Time itself.  My fate is sealed; hope has been lost.  Earthly creatures know naught but blood and fury.  The reign of Kaan has begun, and the reign of Kaan shall never end.