Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Apprentice
    Apprentice
    Apprentice
    Ebook126 pages1 hour

    Apprentice

    By Eric Guindon

    3/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    What would it be like to be a wizard's apprentice?
    This first novella in a series of three covers the first part of Benen's life as a wizard: his apprenticeship.
    When a wizard visits Benen's village and chooses him for his apprentice, the boy's life is irrevocably changed. Unfortunately for Benen, his master is far from kind and often cruel. His education becomes a trial he must survive.
    >>>Now Available As Part Of The A Wizard's Life Complete Bundle!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEric Guindon
    Release dateJun 8, 2013
    ISBN9781301882830
    Apprentice
    Author

    Eric Guindon

    Eric Guindon is an IT professional who consumes much more fiction than he produces. He's working to change that.He is supported in his work by his lovely wife, Kathryn Norman, and his son, Luke.Some of his favorite authors include Neil Gaiman, Neil Stephenson, George RR Martin, Octavia Butler, Gene Wolf, Roger Zelazny, Brandon Sanderson, and John Scalzi.Eric and Kathryn keep an improbable amount of pets, including a very large Doberman Pinscher, Thor, three cats, three snakes, and two geckos.His ramblings can be read at: http://chimericwhimsey.com

    Read more from Eric Guindon

    Related to Apprentice

    Titles in the series (1)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Fantasy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Tornado!

      Jul 16, 2020

      Tornado!
      4 min read

    • Article

      Timespiral

      Feb 1, 2020

      Timespiral
      7 min read

    • Article

      Abandoned

      May 24, 2022

      Abandoned
      5 min read

    • Article

      Abandoned

      Jun 3, 2021

      Abandoned
      5 min read

    • Article

      Dust

      Jun 1, 2018

      Dust
      5 min read

    • Article

      Let’s Play Dead

      Mar 3, 2020

      There was a man, let’s call him Henry VIII. There was his wife, let’s call her Anne B. Let’s give them a castle and make it nice. Let’s give her many boy babies but make them dead. Let’s give him a fussy way of being. Let’s make her smart and sneaky,

      17 min read

    • Article

      A new START

      Aug 19, 2020

      A new START
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Lady In WHITE

      Oct 18, 2023

      The Lady In WHITE
      6 min read

    • Article

      DON’T GO INTO The Cellar!

      Jan 21, 2020

      DON’T GO INTO The Cellar!
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Gnome

      Oct 1, 2019

      The Gnome
      5 min read

    • Article

      THE BOY WHO KEPT Bees

      Oct 6, 2021

      All you could hear was rain, rain, rain. Rain drumming on the slate roof, streaming down the kitchen window, saturating the meadows and the dark woods beyond. Jess waited until her dad had turned away to check his phone, then dropped her half-eaten s

      8 min read

    • Article

      Waiting

      Sep 3, 2020

      Waiting
      6 min read

    • Article

      Kids & Angels

      Jun 25, 2022

      Kids & Angels
      4 min read

    • Article

      Into Our World

      Jan 21, 2019

      Into Our World
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Way Things TURN OUT

      Jun 3, 2020

      The Way Things TURN OUT
      7 min read

    • Article

      Someone To Watch OVER ME

      Jun 8, 2022

      Someone To Watch OVER ME
      9 min read

    • Article

      Alexa, Call 999!

      Apr 14, 2022

      Alexa, Call 999!
      4 min read

    • Article

      Our Year With Penny

      Dec 24, 2019

      Our Year With Penny
      5 min read

    • Article

      Quiet Night

      Aug 7, 2023

      Quiet Night
      19 min read

    • Article

      Begin Again

      Jun 14, 2022

      My grandfather came to live with me. There was nowhere else for him to go. What had happened to all his children? Death, decay, exile—I hardly know. My own parents died of pain. But I must not be too gloomy, at the beginning, or you will leave me, an

      6 min read

    • Article

      Downpour

      May 18, 2023

      eading into the bathroom to brush my teeth, I paused. What’s that? I thought, scrunching my nose – there’d been a funny smell for a couple of days. And when I looked up, I noticed a damp, mouldy patch on the ceiling above the bath. That can’t be good

      4 min read

    • Article

      Partners

      Sep 15, 2018

      Enter,” she says, and is obeyed. He’s taller than before, or perhaps he only seems taller now that he’s here, in the house. She walks behind him, moving toward the living room, and wonders if he might be too tall for her house. It soon dawns on her t

      8 min read

    • Article

      Equinox

      May 18, 2022

      In this strange world, where identities change with the rising and setting of the sun, supernatural forces are at work – and they’re causing trouble… St Leonars prison was an appropriately imposing building. It rose out of the surrounding shacks and

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Yogi In The GARDEN

      Mar 23, 2022

      A Yogi In The GARDEN
      6 min read

    • Article

      Timber

      Jan 27, 2022

      Timber
      4 min read

    • Article

      His Lordship’s LAST GAME

      Jan 31, 2024

      His Lordship’s LAST GAME
      9 min read

    • Article

      Dark DEEDS

      Jan 13, 2021

      Dark DEEDS
      9 min read

    • Article

      In the DOG HOUSE

      May 13, 2020

      In the DOG HOUSE
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Apprentice

    3/5

    7 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Apprentice - Eric Guindon

      APPRENTICE

      BOOK 1: A WIZARD’S LIFE

      ERIC GUINDON

      Text copyright ©2013 Eric Guindon

      All Rights Reserved

      Smashwords Edition

      Chapter 1: Villager

      Benen knew something was wrong when he heard the hard edge in his sister’s voice. She was ordering all the little ones back to their own houses.

      Run home now, she urged them. She tried to sound calm, but he knew her too well; her voice was tense and high-pitched from the near-panic she was holding back.

      Benen and the other young children were in his sister’s charge during the day while their parents worked. They knew and trusted Esren and responded to her orders as swiftly as children under ten could, but each of them needed to find their things before leaving. Esren had to help them to get this done as quickly as possible. When the last of the other kids was gone, she turned to Benen. His worry must have shown on his face because she paused and knelt down in front of him.

      It’s all right, little Benny, she said as she hugged him, you just have to go hide for a bit, like hide and seek.

      It was obvious to Benen that things weren’t all right at all, but he could also tell Esren was trying to seem calm for his benefit. He smiled and nodded for her benefit and took her hand when she offered it. She led him to the room past the kitchen where the family stored their food. Once there, she let go of his hand and applied her slight frame to the task of pushing the barrel of water kept there. She managed, with no small amount of grunting, to shift it enough to expose a wooden trap door set in the floor below it. Benen had never known the thing was there. The house’s floor was built directly onto the ground with no foundation; he hadn’t known it possessed a cellar. Esren opened the trap and motioned for him to go into the hole beneath it. He peered dubiously at the unlit darkness the trap’s opening had revealed and took a step back.

      You have to go in, Benny, Esren insisted. She took two strides toward him and grabbed Benen by the hand. She pulled to get him to come with her back to the hole in the floor. Benen didn’t want to go into the hole and resisted, but she was bigger and stronger than he was and won the contest. Having no other recourse left to him, Benen started crying. Esren shushed him and hugged him again until he quieted a bit. He relaxed in her embrace. He felt maybe she had changed her mind, but then she suddenly put him bodily into the hole. He reached out to grab hold of Esren, but all he managed to grab was a rung of the ladder in front of him in the hole. She had let go of him and Benen tried to scramble back up the ladder, afraid of the darkness below him. But then he felt Esren’s hand pushing down on his head.

      Stop it! he yelled at her.

      She shoved one more time and her strength overcame his white-knuckled grip on the rung. As he fell, he saw the square of light above disappear; Esren had closed the trap.

      Benen landed on his back, the impact knocking the wind out of him. Next, his head hit the ground, causing his vision to fill with stars for a few moments. He struggled to get his breath back, sobbing uncontrollably. He knew he was panicking and needed to get himself under control. He focused on his anger at Esren for shoving him down in this cellar and managed to stop crying.

      He took a few very deep breaths and found that although his back hurt, it didn’t seem like anything was broken. If something had been, he’d have expected agony in his back. He tried to move his various parts and everything seemed to respond. He tried sitting up, but his back was stiff and painful. Instead, he rolled onto his belly and from that position onto all fours. This stretched his back out and helped to dispel some of the pain there. He finally managed to get to his feet.

      Benen decided he mustn’t have fallen far. The fall didn’t seem to have lasted long. His lack of injuries also confirmed this assumption. He looked around and saw that the cellar was not in total darkness; some light came through cracks between the planks that made up the kitchen floor above. It wasn’t much illumination, but with his eyes now accustomed to the dark, he could make out some of the room’s features; not that there was much to see. The entire place was one large room, perhaps ten meters on its longest side, four meters on its shortest. Its main feature was the ladder up to the trap door in the ceiling. Benen had heard his sister put the water barrel back over the trap, so he didn’t bother climbing the ladder to check it. Instead he moved to the far end of the room and examined a patch of extra-deep darkness he had noticed there.

      Upon closer inspection, he found the cause of this deeper darkness was a hole. It looked to have been deliberately dug as a sort of tunnel. It wasn’t very big but neither was Benen. An adult could probably have fit into it if they crawled on their belly. Benen was able to walk in it so long as he bent nearly double. He had no certainty the tunnel led anywhere interesting and he hesitated to leave the supposed safety of the cellar. Esren had seemed very concerned for him and desperate to get him to hide there. If he followed the tunnel and got outside, would he be in danger? He didn’t know. He did know that staying in the cellar was boring though.

      His hesitation only lasted a few minutes as Benen was quickly bored of the cellar room and the allure of the unknown tunnel grew to overcome what doubts he had about leaving the cellar.

      If the tunnel leads outside, I’ll just make sure to hide out there, he told himself as he bent down and entered the tunnel.

      The tunnel, it turned out, was longer than Benen had expected. This was unfortunate, for the darkness combined with the closeness of the tunnel walls and the earthy smell that pervaded the whole made him feel like he was buried alive. He’d never suffered from claustrophobia before, but he had never been trapped in a small underground space before either. He took deep breaths to keep himself from panicking, but found that this accentuated the smell of earth and made him even more panicked. He instead hustled along the corridor faster, taking less and less care with what lay ahead, moving recklessly down the passage. He found the end of the tunnel quite suddenly when he ran into the wooden barrier that lay at its end. He hadn’t been moving terribly fast in the dark, but fast enough that when he hit the wall, his nose bled. He cursed with words his sister would have spanked his bottom raw for if she had heard him and fumbled for a handkerchief he knew should be in his back pocket; it wasn’t. He remembered that it was dirty and he’d put it into the laundry. He used his shirt to sop up the flow from his nose. He knew his father would beat him for ruining it, but that was a concern for later. His nose taken care of, he reached out and touched the barrier that had stopped him. It felt like a wooden plank wall wedged into the dirt of the tunnel on all sides. No light came through it.

      Benen tried pushing with all his measly might, but the wall didn’t budge. He wondered if this was simply the end of the tunnel, leading nowhere at all. He beat his fists against the wall in frustration to no avail other than to perhaps vent some of his frustration. He didn’t want to just go back to the cellar and wait to be let out. He’d have ruined his shirt for nothing!

      He worked at removing dirt from around one edge of the wooden barrier and found that it wasn’t in the wall of the tunnel very much further than two or three centimetres. He cleared the dirt from the right side of the barrier and then from the top and bottom. This done, he grabbed at the right edge and pulled the barrier. It moved!

      Not a lot, but it moved. He could see some light now, coming through the gap he had created. He cleared some of the dirt the movement had piled up along the bottom edge and then pulled again. Again, the barrier moved. Benen felt a mad grin form on his face. The light and fresh air coming through the gap were intoxicating. By this point he was able to position himself with his feet against the tunnel wall and pull with all his strength to widen the gap enough to make his exit. He moved past the barrier and found himself on the side of a gentle slope. He knew this place; it was not far behind the family home. He looked back at the tunnel and saw the barrier was buried under dirt on this side. No wonder he hadn’t been able to push it out!

      Benen guessed the cellar and tunnel were precautions taken years ago by his great-grand-father, who had built the house. The cellar could be used as a place to hide and the tunnel prevented the hiding place from becoming a trap. The exit was probably deliberately buried by the builder. His sister had likely not expected him to find the tunnel and use it, or possibly

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1