Ravenspell Book 3: Freaky Fly Day Read Free Page B

hesitated for a moment and then added, “If history is any indicator, our enemy does not yet pose a great threat. He will bide his time and gather his supporters—lesser sorcerers that grant him aid.”
    “After he’s born, he’ll need time to grow,” Ben said hopefully. “It could be years before he’s grown.”
    “Humans take years to grow,” Lady Blackpool objected, “but most animals reach maturity in only a few weeks. Some mature in a matter of hours. What form the Ever Shade will choose this time, we cannot know.”
    “I’ll be ready for him,” Amber said.
    “You’re not even close to being ready,” Lady Blackpool said. “Together you and Ben have great power, but you don’t know how to use it. You must go to S.W.A.R.M., the Small Wizard’s Academy of Restorative Magic. We can only hope that there you can gain the wisdom and skills that you need to defeat the Ever Shade.”
    “But . . . I’m not going to S.W.A.R.M,” Ben objected. “Amber promised to turn me back into a human. I have my own school. I have things that I want to do with my life!”
    Amber grew nervous at that. She liked Ben a lot. He was strong and brave and handsome. She had promised to turn him back into a human, though.
    But suddenly she wondered if that was a good idea.
    Maybe I should keep him, Amber thought, as a pet.
    It only seemed like the natural thing to do. Humans had been keeping mice as pets for thousands of years.
    Why shouldn’t I be able to keep him? Amber wondered.
    “What would you do with your life, Benjamin Ravenspell?” Lady Blackpool asked. “What great thing would you accomplish? The world needs you to go to S.W.A.R.M. Would you rather spend your days watching television and playing video games?
    “How sad! People talk as if their lives have great value, but then they waste them minute by minute, spending their hours and days in frivolous pursuits.”
    Amber peered hard at Ben. He was a handsome mouse, the handsomest mouse she had ever seen. He was brave and bold and wise in ways that other mice were not, and he had a goodness to him that ran to the core of his soul.
    But he wasn’t a mouse—not really. He had been born as a human, and it seemed right that he be one.
    He wasn’t a mouse by nature.
    But that could change, Amber told herself.

Chapter 3
    THE FRUITCAKE AND THE FLY
    No one really knows what is possible and what is not,
for the universe is far stranger than we dream.
—THORN THE MOUSE
    Two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Aristotle observed that life can come from practically nowhere. To prove his point, he placed a bit of fig in an earthenware urn for three days and then opened the lid. To the astonishment of his students, a single fruit fly was perched upon the rotting fig.
    Thus Aristotle formed the theory of “spontaneous generation,” the idea that life could arise from inanimate objects.
    Unfortunately, it was an idea that lost popularity. Further experiments showed that every animal and plant had to have a father and mother of some sort, and it was assumed that Aristotle’s fly must have come from an egg that had been laid by a mother fly before he placed the fig in the urn.
    But of course, the know-it-all scientists were wrong, and on the night that Ben Ravenspell sat in his home listening to dire tales of the Ever Shade, Aristotle’s fly was reborn.
    It happened this way: 666 years earlier, in a small coastal fishing village in England called Hartlepoole, a young woman was baking a fruitcake for her mother-in-law. The young woman detested her mother-in-law but felt obligated to give her something. It was the day before Christmas, and of course the young wife had to give her mother-in-law something, and so by age-old tradition she prepared to give her that most hated of holiday fare—a fruitcake.
    Now, it is a well-known fact that no one likes fruitcake. Fruitcakes are nasty in taste, completely indigestible, lacking in sustenance, and most of them are as hard as a