Please explore. That's what worlds are for after all.
Rick Wasserman
Knoxville, TN
RickWass
WARLOCKED: OUT
From the time of the Sorcerers Rebellion, The Regents of the Universe of Calissei have ruled their world unopposed. Or so they would have you think. Their secret army, the Warlock Corp, is a group of highly trained, magically gifted, intelligence agents. Troubled youths with the Spark are recruited and made into weapons of the state and keep the rabble in line.
In a modern world dominated by a minority of magical elite, those without the gift of power will do anything to gain it, even sell their souls for sorcererous gifts that always come with too many strings attached. They endanger the world with their unholy bargains.
Hedge Wizards, born without the Spark, but armed with the knowledge of science have reshaped the world with their technologies that threaten to destabilize the status quo.
...but that is just background, this is a story about one family. A young girl, and the grandfather trying to save her from the life he once knew.
A teenage girl fresh into her power does something stupid and gets in over her head. It is only a matter of time before the warlock headhunters come snooping around. So her grandfather takes her under his wing and lets her in on a secret. He was once a great and powerful warlock for the state before a secret conspiracy took it all away. Maybe she can learn from his mistakes, and not make the same choice he did when the headhunters came calling on him.
Thomas Drury, aka Defenestro the Warlock, is a covert operative of the central government and the Regents of the Universe. When suddenly out of the blue and in the middle of a mission, he is declared excommunicated. He is quite literally dropped out of the sky into the city of his birth Moira, and wakes to discover his credit trashed, accounts frozen, and most importantly of all, his spark has been extinguished. He has been reduced to a penniless, homeless, mundane with no name, and no one from his former life will speak to him, much less tell him what his supposed crimes were.
He didn’t like his life as an operative, in fact, he was on the fast track for burnout. But they took his entire life away. So He wants it back, and he wants the people who took it to pay.
His first step, get his spark back, then collect enough fund to finance his own operation of redemption and revenge. Fortunately, Moira is a city of scum and villainy, ripe with opportunities. A former lover repays a favor that he performed for her in his youth and rekindles his spark, but it is just a fraction of what it was at his height. A former protégé give him a lead on a job. The job is impossible, and the pay is small, but he has to start somewhere and he is desperate, so he takes it.
An employee of a wealthy mining magnate is accused of aiding a robbery of his employer. If he is arrested, his son\ will become an orphan and be thrown out on the street. He needs his name cleared, the stolen loot recovered, the bad guys caught and prosecuted….he is offering his entire life’s saving to see it done. But it is a paltry sum. Small wonder everyone else told him no.
Set in a foreign world, that is analogous to America in the 1980s, it is a world ruled by powerful mages and the extremely wealthy with an iron fist from their central capital. Moira and its prime resource the mines sank deep into The Maw is the sight of an ancient meteor impact, far out on the fringe of the civilized world. It is a city set against rusting iron ore mountains set in the middle of a black glass desert where all the water is brought in by truck. The Maw is the only source on their world for the mystical mineral Unilpentium, which some think is the source of all magic in the world. But they couldn’t be more wrong.
Warlocked : Out
by Rick Wasserman
This is a 47,000-word self-published work of fiction: science, urban, historical, magical, and otherwise, Set in an alternate world analogous to our American 1980's where the ruling elite has magic powers and rule with a velvet fist.
Copyright 2012 De Planetae: Traveling the interweave. All rights reserved.
Rick Wasserman
Knoxville, TN
RickWass