Harmony: Harmony Book 1, page 1
Harmony
Harmony Book 1
Alan Moria
Harmony: Book 1
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction. No character in this book represents any real person, living or deceased. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Contents
Title Page
Harmony: Book 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Afterword
About the author
Where to find more books?
Chapter 1
Ten years earlier.
If someone had asked Nathaniel Magnus what he considered the worst ways to spend a Saturday, his current predicament might not have made the top 10, but it certainly wouldn’t have been far off. Perhaps it would have been placed somewhere between ‘going to the dentist’ and ‘accompanying your mother shopping’.
On that day, instead of spending quality time reading a new book or playing his favorite games, Nate - as he preferred to be called - had been forced to attend a ‘meeting’ at the Sinclair estate with the children of some of the most influential or connected Arcane Families in the region.
Considering the Magnus family’s status as one of the Great Arcane Families, one of the only two present in North America, people would normally think that Nate would have no trouble fitting in with the other kids his age. However, the truth was not that simple. So, instead of socializing with the descendants of other families, the 12-year-old boy had decided to hide in the estate’s library until someone came to fetch him.
“There you are, cripple,” Nate sighed upon hearing the voice of the future heir of the Sinclair family coming from somewhere behind him. He really thought no one would find him there, or even look for him, but he was apparently wrong about that.
“He’s not a cripple, Kyle,” still not turning to confront them, Nate heard an irritated voice defending him. A voice belonging to his cousin Lucienne Magnus. Well, she wasn’t exactly his cousin, but they shared the same great-grandfather. Both being descendants of the current Archmage of the Magnus Family, they both carried the name Magnus as their last names, although Nate knew that could change at any moment if the rumors he had been hearing were true. “His mana is just a little late to wake up.”
If Nate were being honest with himself, he would have preferred Lucy not to defend him every time she heard someone say something like that to him. Every time she did, he could feel that she was sincere about believing it, even if no one else did. Not even Nate himself. Turning to contemplate the newcomers, Nate faced a good portion of the young people gathered at the Sinclair estate that day.
“You don’t need to suck up to him anymore, Lucy,” Kyle commented, rolling his eyes and calling her by her nickname. “My father told me that Archmage Magnus is about to declare you as the primary heir of the family.”
“And how does your father know that?” Lucy asked with crossed arms and a raised eyebrow, causing some of the children clearly on her side of the argument to giggle. Kyle tried to retort, but the words escaped his young mind, leaving the boy unsure of how to respond. It was practically common knowledge that the Great Families spied on each other all the time, but there was a difference between everyone ‘knowing’ that and the current heir of one of those families admitting it to one of the most important members of another. Seeing that he was at a loss, he turned to what seemed to be the boy’s favorite pastime for the last few years: mocking Nate.
“Why are you reading a spell book if you can’t use magic, Nathaniel?” the Sinclair heir asked with a sarcastic tone, making sure everyone knew he didn’t want to use the other boy’s name there.
“This isn’t a spell book,” Nate scoffed and rolled his eyes, not at all surprised that the Sinclair family’s ‘prodigy’ didn’t know the difference. “It’s a book about enchantments.”
“Which you still can’t use, cripple,” Kyle retorted quickly, making it Nate’s turn to be unable to formulate a response. It’s not like Kyle was wrong about that, even if he was being a huge jerk, as always.
“Stop picking on him, Kyle!” Lucy exclaimed with her face turning red with anger, once again coming to his defense.
Seeing the girl go up to Kyle with her fists clenched at her sides, Nate momentarily thought she was really going to attack the other boy. At that moment, however, one of the Magnus family’s chaperone ‘coincidentally’ appeared out of nowhere between the two young teenagers. Part of Nate resented the woman who was clearly following Lucy to ensure her safety hadn’t shown up to save him from the bullying earlier, but he knew he wasn’t exactly the most well-regarded person in the family at the moment.
“Miss, you know your mother wouldn’t like to see you behaving like this,” the chaperone, who was actually a bodyguard, said with a voice that was both respectful and reproachful. She had to walk this fine line in case the girl ended up being her boss someday, after all.
“So here you are, young master,” Kyle’s personal butler suddenly entered through the door, an older gentleman who seemed to be around 60 years old. Nate wasn’t fooled by the man’s harmless and kind appearance, knowing that he was probably the most powerful person in the room at the moment. “I imagine you’re eager to share your passion for knowledge with your friends, but you have duties as the host of this meeting. Come on, I’ll accompany you back to the hall.”
Nate didn’t doubt that most or all of the other teenagers surrounding the two descendants of the Great Families also had protectors watching closely, but they remained hidden for the moment. A few years earlier, Nate himself would have had his own protector and a group he believed to be his friends following his every step as if he were a mother duck and they were the ducklings. However, all of that had quickly dissipated along with his hopes of ever becoming a mage.
So, when all the teenagers followed the butler back to the hall from which they probably shouldn’t have left, Nate was left behind in the absolute silence of the now-empty library. His heart hurt a little when he realized that not even Lucy had invited him to join them, but he knew she was too busy imagining the scolding she would receive when she returned home later. He always thought her parents were a bit too harsh on her, but they had become even stricter when it became obvious that Nate was incapable of being the heir of the Magnus family. Not that Nate cared, as he had long understood that the only thing that would matter in any succession was who was the most powerful within the direct lineage. Or, at least, that’s what he liked to tell himself to feel better.
Sighing, Nate closed the book of enchantments that Kyle was right about him being unable to use, placed it back where he found it, and then left the library, having lost the desire to read. Knowing he still had at least a few hours before he could leave, Nate decided to just wander aimlessly while looking for some path that led out of the huge mansion. In retrospect, Nate had to admit that walking through an unfamiliar area that was in some ways enemy territory was not the smartest thing he had ever done, but he preferred to believe that his bad mood had affected his decision-making ability. The boy was about to turn into another corridor, totally lost, when he heard voices coming from somewhere ahead. Unwilling to be discovered and scolded, Nate hid at the corridor’s turn and stayed alert for signs that people were coming in his direction.
“What will we do if someone finds out?” Nate heard a woman ask, panic beginning to creep into her voice. “I have a family! I don’t want to die just because some idiot thought this would be a good idea.”
“Relax,” came the reply of a man. Curious about what he had just overheard, the boy discreetly tried to look into the corridor and saw that there was a man and a woman standing in front of a door that didn’t seem different from all the others he had passed. “She’s lying, hoping that we’ll let her go. And even if we consider the tiny chance that she’s telling the truth, no one knows she’s here, so no one w
“I don’t know,” the woman continued, but the man quickly interrupted her.
“I dislike this as much as you do, but if we let her go, that’s when we’ll end up dead,” the man said with a sigh. “Especially if she’s telling the truth. There’s nothing we can do about it. Come on, there’s a bunch of kids in the building today, so the kitchen is full of ice cream. Let’s steal some before the brats eat everything.”
Nate observed as the two of them walked away, and when they were out of sight, he stopped hiding and entered the corridor, keeping an eye out for any sign that they were coming back. The boy knew he shouldn’t do what he was about to do, but the conversation he had spied on had sparked a terrible curiosity in him. A curiosity that would only be satisfied in one way.
Nervously, he walked to the door the two adults had been in front of a few moments ago, and, looking both ways to make sure no one was coming, he then opened it and stepped into the room before he could be discovered. Closing the door behind him and putting an ear to the door to try to listen for anything behind it, as he had seen people do in movies, Nate satisfied himself that he hadn’t been caught and finally turned his attention to the room. What he noticed first, however, was not any of the furniture and instruments that would have informed him that the room was some kind of laboratory. No, what he first laid his eyes on was the being that was also staring at him.
As a child of one of the Great Families, Nate knew that there was much more to the world and the universe than most people thought. So, he was only slightly surprised to see a fairy for the first time in his life. What surprised him much more, however, was that she was inside a cage.
How someone could do that to such a small and fragile being as she seemed to be, the boy had no idea. In fact, if he hadn’t seen the fairy move while staring at him, he would have thought she was a doll. She certainly had the size of one, standing at only about 20 centimeters tall. Unlike the stories his mother used to tell him at bedtime when he was younger, she wasn’t dressed in a dress made of leaves and flower petals, but in a summer dress that wouldn’t be out of place on a human girl. Besides the size, of course.
Approaching her curiously, Nate got a better view of her and noticed not only how messy and dirty her clothes and long red hair were but also that the little girl’s eyes and face were red and wet, as if she had been crying desperately until a moment ago.
“Hello?” Nate tried to communicate with her, unsure if she would understand what he meant.
Nate heard the fairy try to say something in a melodic language, but he couldn’t understand a single word of what she was trying to say. He tried to communicate using the basics he knew from other languages, but apparently, their problem was less about which country they were born in and more about which world. Fortunately, it seemed that the ancestral technique of pointing to things and making gestures to try to be understood was universal. Or at least, Nate believed he had a good idea of what the fairy was asking when she pointed to the door of her cage and mimicked the gestures of opening it.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you out of there,” Nate said gently, even though he knew she couldn’t understand him, since he had read somewhere that someone’s tone of voice and behavior helped convey a sense of reassurance to the recipient of the message. Well, he was pretty sure the article referred to taking care of babies, or maybe pets, but if it worked for them, why not for a fairy? She certainly seemed smarter than Nate’s old dog that ate his shoe the week before.
The boy soon found out that this was easier said than done. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before, but the fairy wasn’t trapped in a regular cage, instead being locked inside one that had been enchanted, probably specifically for her. Fortunately, Nate was in a room that had exactly the resources he needed to free her. Trying to signal to the fairy that he wasn’t abandoning her, Nate began to search the room for something he could use.
Without having to search for long, the boy found a small metal file in one of the drawers. With a smile on his face, he returned to the cage, where he found the fairy also smiling while giving him a thumbs up, which apparently was another universal gesture.
Holding the cage with one hand and the file with the other, Nate began to file one of the bars of her prison. He didn’t know if this would really work, but whoever had enchanted that object had done it with some purpose other than physically strengthening the cage. Although Nate couldn’t really judge someone for not believing that this kind of enchantment would be necessary to keep the little fairy there. Literally keeping her there, however? That was something he could totally judge.
Nate was already getting tired when he finally managed to finish filing the second chosen point of one of the bars, creating a hole large enough for the fairy to squeeze through. Without wasting time, the fairy did just that, finding the passage tight but managing to get through it without much trouble.
When she was finally free from her prison, the fairy began to flap her wings and quickly took to the air, flying around the room and celebrating her freedom. Nate was laughing at the show, happy to see the joy of the little fairy, when she suddenly changed her trajectory and almost made him fall to the ground by colliding with his chest with considerable force.
“Thank you! Thank you!” Nate heard her melodious voice ring in his ears, suddenly being able to understand what she was saying. In fact, if he focused on those words, he could still hear them in whatever language she spoke, but his brain seemed to understand them as if they were in English. This was the final piece of the puzzle that finally made Nate realize that the enchantment on the cage was meant to keep her unable to use magic. Which should have been an obvious thing to deduce, he knew, since if that wasn’t the case the fairy presumably could simply have destroyed the item with her magic.
“No need to thank me; it was nothing,” Nate commented embarrassed, with the fairy still ‘hugging’ him.
“Oh, but it was,” the fairy said. “And you have my word that you’ll be rewarded for it.”
“What were you doing inside that cage?” Nate asked, wanting to change the subject. “I mean, if you want to talk about it.”
“I was kidnapped!” the fairy suddenly exclaimed, somewhat irritated by the memory and incredulous that it had actually happened. “I just wanted to see what the world my sister was being sent to as an emissary was like, but she forbade me from coming along. She said it was a very dangerous world, but I thought she was talking about monsters or something!”
“Let me guess,” Nate interrupted, trying not to find amusing the little fairy whose anger made her even cuter. “You disobeyed your sister and followed her here.”
“Well, yes,” the fairy admitted, her anger turning almost entirely into shame. Nate couldn’t really blame her and judge her as irresponsible, as he would probably have done the same thing had he been in her place. In fact, that thought made him start to consider that maybe the fairy’s youthful appearance really was an indicator of her true age. “I had barely stepped out of the portal before an idiot kidnapped me. Like, it must have been less than 5 minutes! I bet that must be a record.”
“I doubt it,” Nate scoffed and shook his head.
“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” the fairy shrugged. “Now you’ve freed me and spared me from finding out what those guys planned to do with me while I waited for my sister to realize I was gone. That could have taken weeks!”
“Weeks?” Nate asked, raising an eyebrow. “Why do I suddenly get the impression that this isn’t the first time you’ve been kidnapped?”
“Hey!” the fairy exclaimed, pretending to be offended even though a second later her facade broke and she started laughing. “No, this was the first time I was kidnapped! The other times I was just busy doing something important! Or I was lost somewhere. Or I lost track of time while having fun. Well, there was also that time I tried to be a circus clown. Or the time I followed a group of beautiful birds to see where they were going and only later found out about something called ‘migratory birds’.”
Before the girl could continue listing the reasons why someone would only look for her after a few weeks without news, the door to the room opened, and through it entered the same woman Nate had seen before with the man in front of that room. Interestingly, she was carrying a small pot of chocolate ice cream in one hand. For a few moments, the three of them just stared at each other as if they couldn’t believe the situation, but soon the standoff was broken by the little fairy.
