This was my little contribution to the Sunday Vignettes post over at According To Hoyt. The others are also quite amusing, intriguing or both. There are also book promos, so do check them out!

Sevhan sighed, and frowned at the cringing apprentice before him, babbling near-incoherent, panicked apologies. “Do not fear, boy, I shan’t punish you for what was my mistake in the first place.”

The elvish wizard-master had noticed that Havisham wasn’t at breakfast, so had gone looking for him, puzzled as to why the boy hadn’t come down as normal. He’d opened the door to the communal washroom to the startled yelp of “SHAVE!!!” and found himself sprouting a full-fledged beard and moustache, the kind any Tandarrii pirate would have been proud to braid and decorate.

“You’ll just have to teach me that cantrip you created, since rather obviously, it worked perfectly on your youthful whiskers,” Sevhan said, scratching at his cheek. “How humans and similarly bearded folk can stand this, I will never know.”

“Yes, Master Sevhan, I will.” Havisham rubbed his own cheek self-consciously. “I’ll get to it right away.”

“No you won’t,” the wizard-master said sternly. “I’ve taught enough human students to know that when puberty hits them, they’re also especially hungry in the mornings. Have breakfast first, then bring me the spell to my office.” He shooed the boy off, then turned to the mirror with a sigh.

“You’d think that after so many accidents, they’d learn to just use a razor,” his reflection quipped. Sevhan’s daemon-familiar chuckled.

“It’s a rite of passage,” Sevhan shrugged. “I get off easy. Janeesha gets explosive spell-misfires whenever her students start their female courses. One of her hedge-mage students was working on a carnivorous plant when it hit, and instead of growing just enough to eat roaches, it grew so large it almost ate her. And unlike the males, they’ll always have odd power surges and reactions.”

“I find it strange though that after five hundred years of teaching humans, no same shave cantrip works on every misfire,” the daemon mused. “It always has to be from the same apprentice that had the misfire.”

“I think it has to do with the quirks of surging hormones.” Sevhan scratched at his face, and teleported to his office. He had no desire to hear the dwarven stonemage Brandig bemoan the waste of a ‘good beard any dwarf would love to have.’

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Unfortunately I got distracted after this and lost the train of thought. Drabble writing can be rather fragile that way, but I think of this as good, as it means I actually got enough rest for a change – enough to write down something for fun.