Nestor (The Magician – Chapter Six)

This is the sixth chapter of the serialization novel I am working on, The Magician – < click there to read the other chapters if you missed them.

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Nestor

Vanessa was unaware she had been spoken of in such a fashion as she rode the elevated train across the city. She was heading from her apartment to her late father’s family home in the northern edge of Allium. She was lip syncing along with some of the songs on her wireless earbuds, quelling the urge to dance with the beat. Dancing would bring forth her magic and that could bring unwanted attention. 

But the emotions sometimes were hard to control. She had Nestor’s gift. With it came an immense responsibility to control her magical powers. She had learned that years ago.

The historian in her thought back to the stories she had learned about her ancestor, as it often did when she made this trip.

Nestor Tamberlane was the first magician documented in Vanessa’s family tree to wield the power she commanded. He was from the old country and was the first in the line of Tamberlanes.

His tale was sad and sordid.

Once upon a time, Nestor was born to a magician father and mother. It was rare in that part of the old country that two magician families would meet and marry, since they were persecuted and kept their distance, carrying on their lines with normal blood.  Yet, the two lines that created Nestor were unsullied by normals, making them unusually powerful. He was one of five children, but only he and his elder sister Helena survived to young adulthood.

In the midst of the courtyard of the modest family home was a huge ancient oak, planted long before the family was even prosperous. It was a beautiful and formidable specimen. Nestor’s parents, like the generations before, had married under that tree. 

It was also under this tree that Nestor discovered that not only was he as talented a magician as his father, but he also held a magic that could be even more powerful. It was a magic that had not been seen in any lines of his ancestry for generations. It was a power that was spoken of only in whispers because it could be disastrous if used incorrectly.

The power behind this magic terrified Nestor’s father, for its origins were emotional and fervent. Because tensions between magicals and normals were often tenuous at best, the elder magician worried that perhaps one day, the power Nestor held would cause their family’s ruin. So, Nestor’s father cautioned the young teenaged magician to control his emotions and his magic.

For years, Nestor was able to keep control of his passions and his powers. He honed the spells he learned, ignoring the emotional magic he possessed. He did so because he respected and adored his father.

Helena had also become a strong magician by her own right. But she had fallen in with a normal who came from a line of purists. His family frowned upon magicians and their magic and wished to rid the old world of their kind. But this man, though firm in his convictions, was also beguiled by the beauty that Helena bore. He could not help but fall in love with this kind and generous magician, despite his family’s beliefs. The couple courted secretly, for though Helena knew her family would accept him, the young man knew his own kind would not be so forgiving. 

But then one day, his family did find out. His elder brother happened to spy on the two as they talked of their future beneath a tree in the forest. Outraged, he had told his parents of the secret meeting and the family coerced the young man to speak of his courtship. They then forbade the young man from seeing Helena. He was sent across the region to family there, in hopes to rid him of his infatuation for the young magician.

Through an intermediary, he sent Helena a note. In it, he had promised he would return for her. He vowed he would never love another being like he loved her. Finally, he had asked her to wait for him.

So Helena did. She pined for her young man for three long years. She waited anxiously for his return, ignoring the suitors her father had brought to meet with her. She ignored her mother’s pleas to forget the young man and marry amongst their kind. Her only wish was to be reunified with her dearest love.

So when news finally came from the young man, it broke her heart into two. Her beloved, the one who swore he would come for her, had married another.

Despondent, Helena took to drastic means to deal with her pain.

Young Nestor found her body underneath the oak tree, purposely chosen as the place of her demise. Nestor was heartbroken over the loss of his sister. But he was also furious. Even though his mother and father pleaded with him, he decided to let loose the control he had on the magic that made him so powerful.

In an impetuous rage, he cast a magic that was awash with a flood of colors. Chaos ensued as the villagers became highly alarmed. The magic that raged about them was unlike anything they had ever seen. It terrified them to the point they took to arms to combat it.

Magician faced off against normal in a battle that left the town in ruin. When the smoke had cleared, Nestor’s mother was dead. Their home was destroyed. The oak beneath which generations of his family had lived and wed and his sister had died was still standing but was also half gone. The leaves fell from branches barely hanging on, reiterating all that Nestor had chosen to lose as his father fell to his knees in agony.

Nestor had no choice but to flee the region of his birth. He gathered what he could under the cover of darkness. With those in hand, he deserted his father and abandoned him in his time of need. He took to the road, ruminating on his folly.

Because words of his deeds traveled far and wide, he knew he needed to flee the old country.   He worked as a deckhand upon a ship bound for the new country, learning the ways of the sea as he once readily learned magic. When his magical abilities were discovered, he put them to good use by keeping the flames of the below deck lanterns lit with magical fire. He even saved other members of the crew once or twice on his journey to the new world with spells he knew.

By the time the ship docked in the new port, he had adopted the surname Tamberlane, taken from one of the books he had read when he had free time.  He decided upon that name because it came from a man with an iron will.  He had learned that he had to always remain closed off to any emotions.  He even created his family crest, that of an oak tree in full glory. Yet, if one looked carefully, one would see the magically embedded crack in the tree and the leaves that had fallen.

It was his reminder.

While his first few years in the new country were rough and hard, Nestor persevered as best as he could. Magic was not shunned there. It was embraced, for it helped to build this new world. Nestor found his calling, working hard to make his way in business and amassing a small fortune. Yet, he continued to lock away his emotional magic, working hard to never demonstrate that class of spells. The memory of the rage with which he had lost his family remained forefront in his mind. 

Eventually, Nestor married a beautiful magician named Victoria.  But because he shut off his emotions, he never fully loved her.  They had a companiable marriage nevertheless, one full of mutual respect even if there was never love. From it came came three children.

Alexander Tamberlane was a strong magician, though his magical prowess appeared to be the spells and magic from Victoria’s side of the family. He strived to make his father proud even though the man never showed him love, honing his skills and working harder than any other magician to become strong and stoic. While he lacked intuition, he had his father’s drive and the means to accomplish a great deal.

Edmund Tamberlane had inherited the recklessness of Nestor’s youth as well as the magical gift of emotional magic, rare as it were. Nestor forbade his younger son from using such skills, for he feared his folly being recreated anew in this younger generation. Like his own father, he trained Edmund from an early age to hide the emotions. But Edmund did not have the same desire to keep his emotions in check. He had not yet seen what the magic could do when it was raging. And he did not attempt in vain to seek his father’s love as Alexander had.

Helena Tamberlane was the couple’s last child, born after a series of pregnancies that ended in disappointment and grief.  Because she was born in the middle years of Nestor’s life, when he thought his iron will would continue to keep and the folly of his youth would be held in check, she was especially loved by her father. She was the apple of his eye, much like his elder sister once was. Though she varied greatly in looks from her departed aunt, Helena Tamberlane was just as feisty and just as strong a magician as the young woman had once been.

As Helena neared the eve of her fifteenth birthday, there was a tragedy that rocked the Tamberlane family. That fateful summer morning, she had been reading underneath one of the trees in the front lawn of the Tamberlane mansion, enjoying the coolness of the breezes that blew in from the lake. Edmund was raging about some silly bet he had placed and subsequently lost. When Helena scolded him because he was causing her a disturbance, Edmund reacted with a careless fit of rage that shattered the tree limb directly above the young girl. It fell atop her, crushing her skull and killing her almost instantly.

Since the light of his life had been crushed, Nestor became despondent. The iron lock he had put on his emotions had broken and the tree of his youth was vividly in his mind once more.

Wave after wave of colors washed the mansion as he railed in his grief, tormented by sorrow. In a fit of grieving rage, he fled the mansion and the city in which he had established himself. He cast himself from the family once more. Abandonment was his greatest folly, and it was a folly he had made twice in his lifetime.

Edmund could not live with the torment of having caused the death of his sister and the disappearance of his father. The torment his mother and brother demonstrated towards him for being the cause of their family’s shattering would not allow him respite. In the middle of the night, he took his leave as well, packing a few belongings into a bag and disappearing.

Neither man was ever heard from again.

Alexander took up the reins of his father’s business and the position as head of the household. He worked to make the Tamberlane name something to be proud of. He worked quietly to make sure his mother was guarded in her perceived widowhood as he married and had a family of his own.

He hated that both his father and brother abandoned the family, something he wanted to make sure would never happen again.  He even cast a decree, one created from powerful magic that no one could go against. It forbade anyone from mentioning those who had abandoned the family fold, aside from Nestor and Edmund, who had been given up as the examples.

For generations, the greatest fallacy anyone could make was in turning their back on their loved ones. Those who did were written out of the family annuals and cast away forgotten, as sure as the oak tree shed its leaves. For the love of family was the strongest bond that could be created, and each family member that broke that bond also broke the magic that bound them to the family. Once the leaves were shed, they could no longer be put back on the tree.

Because of the stories, very few ever left the family. They protected the family that Alexander had built. Those who gave in to Nestor’s folly were apparently few and far between.

Because they were all written out of the family and their existence was erased, Vanessa knew of only one person who had ever fallen to the folly of Nestor. She only knew of him because it happened in her mother’s lifetime.

He was her mother’s cousin, the only child of her mother’s aunt Constance. While his name was forbidden in the household, Vanessa knew of him nevertheless. He was a young man when he turned his back on his family and had taken off for parts unknown, never to be heard from again. Vanessa often wondered what he was like, though the only two things she knew about him was that he was once her mother’ favorite cousin and he was a powerful magician in his own right.

No one would ever speak of him. The magic made that so. 

The historian in Vanessa wondered if the bonds that were once broken could be mended.

Was it even worth a try?

Click here to read the next chapter – Allium

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Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction written by K. S. Wood, and thus is copyrighted 2023. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.  All rights reserved.

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