ankewehner.de

Magic, in principle, was easy. He concentrated on what it should do, and made the signs that his intuition told him epitomised the idea. In time he learned that some designs belonged to grand concepts – a circle was “protection”, a rectangle “order”, but a square “containment”. That knowledge was useless when a concept central to a spell refused to connect to a shape he could draw or carve.
The scribbles for “to the other side” had been clear even in a panic, taking him far further than expected.
The problem now was that he did not know what “home” was.

If you think he’s pompous now, you should have heard him when I met him. It was during those really unpleasant “witch hunts”, and he was thrown into the dark cell I had been in for a while already.
As soon as I couldn’t hear the guards anymore, I made my own light and tried to cheer him up a bit.
“You’ll get used to it.”
“I’d have thought this place had safeguards against magic,” he said, referring to the glow between my hands.
“Their idea of a joke, I guess. Whatever could an illusionist do? The guards are protected.” He did that contemptous sneer you get from some mages when I said “illusionist”, which annoyed me a bit, but I kept it under wraps. Mostly. “And what is your power they are not afraid of?”
He snorted. “Summoner. Can’t do a thing without chalk or something else to draw my circles.” The walls were poured concrete, not pebble in sight.
So I made some suggestions starting with blood and going downhill from there, until he went on a short lecture about required spiritual purity of materials if you didn’t want to get something a lot more dangerous, particularly for you, than you were aiming for. He looked really dejected, in an annoyed way. I went over the obvious idea to see if it had any holes in it.
“Circles and runes, yes?”
A snort and a nod.
“Well, if you can describe them exactly…” I did a little flourish and turned the unfocused light into a bright spiderweb spanned between my fingertips, smiling at him through the gaps. “What is purer than light?” Things started looking up from there.

Stories of 55 words? Well, ’s better than the 140 characters minus the “#microfiction” tag on Twitter…

Stretching Limits
They had called him mad, but he had proved them wrong by creating a being that they had considered impossible, showing that not a natural law, but merely habit had dictated the humanoid shape of golems so far.
He loved it when learning about his tortoise-shaped mobile home gave people new ideas.