ON a normal day, Zarin the Entertainer would be basking in the warm glory of admiration from his audience as he ended his performance, right about this time. Today was a different yarn to spin and so he sat at the bar of The Tavern, contemplating what went wrong.“What went wrong, of course, was that no one turned up. Why? Why me? Did I do something to anger the Universe or summat?”
The bartender silently slid a glass across the counter, stopping it in front of the dejected master of entertainment, and flipped a bottle over his shoulder to fill up the crystal-based tumbler.
“Maybe it was a rival,” said the soft-spoken man behind the marble countertop. “It’s a cut-throat industry, surely.”
“What do you know about entertaining people?” remarked the patron with contempt.
There was only one thing for the bartender to do, and that was to give a thin smile as he performed incredible feats of balancing and coordination with bottles and glasses, dispatching order after order for his clients as the delicate bar items soared and danced nimbly in the empty air. At the end of his performance he gave an elegantly simple bow to the clapping of approval from the watching customers.
“You should join the circus,” Zarin said, more with admiration than with disdain. “Make a lot more money doing that than sitting here all day.”
The bartender responded with, “Milk and cookies?”
“Yes, please.”
After the order was completed Zarin the Entertainer sat there sighing, dipping his chocolate biscuits into ice-cold milk and savouring the spectrum of flavours and textures. The bartender himself had moved on to the other end of the counter, leaving his female co-staff to cover this section. And for that evening, everyone was happy.
* * *
Evening turned into morning. The Tavern shifted to a different location at that time so that the patrons were able to experience the splendour of a foreign world. While they spent the night in a city world, they spent dawn on a world where nature and the elements dominated. Sunrays broke through the canopy of the seemingly eternal forest as birds chirped their morning songs and explorers returned to camps after an early hunting session. Zarin sat by the window of his accommodation, watching the city world dissolved into this one. No one knew how long he remained there, immobilised by the beauty of the forest and the untamed animals that played in and around the trees. What was important was that he had found internal peace. That was all that he wanted.
A knock on his door and he was snapped out of his reverie. He eased himself out of his chair, poured himself a drink, then went to answer the visitor.
“Zarin the Entertainer?” asked the delivery man. “Package from the Overworlds. Sign here.”
Now this was peculiar. He wasn’t expecting anything from anyone anytime soon, but judging from this deliver it appears that someone managed to track him anyhow anywhere he went. The question now was anywhat was it?
He placed the package, not a foot in width and height and one and a half feet in length, onto his desk before finishing his drink and unwrapping it. Inside was a box made of wood, ornately designed and carved by some of the finest workmanship skills he had ever seen. Must be from someone rich.
He turned the handle to open the lid of the box, not expecting it to pop open and have the entire room be engulfed in bluish light. He found himself falling, falling, just falling down a bottomless cavern made of wood and stone. Instead of screaming in fear, this ordeal turned out to be far more therapeutic than he could have anticipated. When he finally reached the floor of the cavern, his descent slowed and he gently touched the wood and stone surface with his feet. The place was lit, but by what means he could not discern.
The sound of glass caught his attention and he turned around slowly. It was the bartender, cleaning tumblers at his bar, which seemed so out of place in this magical realm. Apart from the two of them, no other person was in sight.
“Is this retribution for something?” Zarin asked.
The bartender flicked the glass he wiped over his head, caught it behind his back, and placed it back at its place on its rack. He said, “Someone wishes to speak with you, sir. He is important so I hope you can overlook his dramatisations.”
The bartender picked up a bottle and uncorked it. An ethereal blue mist flowed out instantly, forming shapes of sentient beings around the area. The magical display culminated with the mist taking the form of a robed man some distance from Zarin.
“The Magus?” Zarin exclaimed. “Is that really you? What’s going on? Did I break a law?”
>Continued in part 2
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