The Wizard Next Door Has WiFi

Grindlelight was currently residing at Sunset Spoons Magical Retirement Village™—a name that, much like its wallpaper, had not aged well. It was less a retirement village and more a retirement sardine tin, where the prevailing philosophy seemed to be: how many sentient beings can we cram into one building without technically violating any housing policies? At least not too egregiously.

A proud cog in the ever-churning Spoons Care Consortium™, Sunset Spoons was one of a dozen near-identical facilities sprinkled across the continent like mildew, each one promising magical golden years and delivering lukewarm soup and a suspicious rash. Entertainment was limited—unless you considered things like Guess That Smell, Synchronized Coughing, or Shrieking at Furniture That Might Be Haunted to be enriching.

His current roommates included a lonely Blarrot who collected lint with the solemnity of a religious rite, and a Slothrus with a soap allergy and disturbingly strong opinions about soup temperature. Grindlelight, being a gnome of taste and barely restrained rage, was not thriving.

But there was hope.

Across town—beyond the mossy bridge, past the cursed bus stop, and just shy of the dimensional tax line—there stood Sparkglen Hollow, a retirement haven made exclusively for gnomes. No roommates. No stew rotations. No interpretive burrow dancing to "rediscover your root chakra." Just private mushroom plots, ergonomically enchanted rockers, and the gentle tick of properly wound clockwork. That was where Grindlelight longed to be—seated beneath a sunlamp calibrated to gnomish skin tones, sipping lukewarm nettle tea from a ceramic thimble, and never again hearing the phrase “soil-based emotional unpacking.”

Grindlelight had been slumped on the lumpy communal settee, doing his best not to contemplate death quite so enthusiastically. Across the room, his roommate—the Slothrus—was droning on for the twelfth consecutive hour about the ideal temperature for hazlerot soup versus crucklechuck stew, as though the future of civilization hinged on the distinction.

Grindlelight had reached his limit somewhere between “ambient broth equilibrium” and “bivalve infusions.” In a haze of idiocy and quiet desperation, he’d turned to the flickering television—the sort that hissed every few seconds like it had unresolved trauma—and begun to scroll through the late-night magical classifieds.

That’s when he saw it.

The ad.

It featured a poorly animated tree growing silver coins like oversized fruit, while a bearded wizard with unsettlingly exposed ankles proclaimed:

“Grow your wealth—literally! A brief stint of magical assistance in exchange for riches beyond imagination. Seven silvers to apply. Serious inquiries only.”

The wizard’s name? Fred.

But Grindlelight, caught between madness, soup fumes, and the bleak inevitability of another evening spent listening to his Slothrus roommate discuss soup thermodynamics, had clicked “Transfer” without a second thought.

No sooner had the last silver left his account than he was magicked directly to the middle of bumfungus nowhere. One moment he was on the couch; the next, he was standing in a sun-drenched field, surrounded by buzzing insects and poor decisions, with a woven basket shoved into his arms, a smudged ingredient list flapping in the wind, and a spittle-dampened decree echoing in his ears:

“This is life or death, Grindlelard.”

And that was Fred. The wizard. The very same barefoot lunatic from the ad, standing there in person, offering him a radiant smile and what could only be described as scam energy in human form.

Which brings us, tragically, to the present.

And along with it that toad-bitten Cactree.

Trust Grindlelight to not even manage getting scammed correctly. No, he had achieved something far worse. He’d signed an unpaid magical internship with a man who wore open-toed shoes and believed air conditioning was “an affront to the arcane flow.”

But Sparkglen didn’t come cheap. If Grindlelight wanted to trade sardines for solitude—if he wanted his own moss-lined nook and a quiet, Slothrus-free retirement—he needed silver. And if he wanted silver, he needed that cursed Cactree fruit.

Grindlelight retrieved the now semi-translucent paper from his pocket. The ink had faded, smeared by pond water and various slimes, but the title remained:

The Moondrinker Ritual

A knob of Mooseshroom antler

7 Cactree fruits

2 Wanderplums

3 Crabbernacles

A tuft of Dandeliope fur

1 Screamleaf

1 Sprig of Mourning Glory

He squinted at item four. Crabbernacles. Glimmerfouled Crabbernacles. His nose would never be the same. The paper had joined him in the pond during that particular escapade, dragged in when one of the blasted creatures caught him by the face and refused to let go until bribed with an emergency sachet of dehydrated Glimmersprite-flakes. He never left the house without one. Sensible people didn’t.

Now he stood beneath the prickling shadow of the Cactree, contemplating the best method of ascending its barbed trunk without impaling eighty-five percent of his body. Seven fruits. Why seven? One, perhaps two, was acceptable. Three, ambitious. But seven? What sort of recipe called for seven Cactree fruits? Was Fred planning to poison an entire village of peludapspins? Honestly, that tracked. Fred seemed like precisely the sort of man to do such a thing on a quiet Tuesday afternoon.

Grindlelight could’ve been back at Sunset Spoons Magical Retirement Village™, enduring another three-hour game of Mildly Suggestive Charades and pretending not to hear the Blarrot humming lullabies to his sock collection.

But no.

He just had to be the kind of idiot who thought “tree-grown silver” sounded plausible, and now he was stuck doing sun-drenched penance under the authority of a wizard who thought indoor plumbing was a government conspiracy and believed kombucha “could realign your ancestral ley lines.”

But hey—he’d done his time. Thirty-seven years of honest work, three magical tax audits, and one deeply unfortunate incident with a teleporting badger. By gnome law and common decency, it was about time he had his own mushroom plot.

He reached for the lowest branch. His fingers brushed air. He leapt, hit a rock on the descent, and landed squarely on his nose.

That would have been bad enough, but then the screaming began. And it wasn’t even his.

He groaned, located the wicker basket, and gave it a good kick.

The screaming intensified.

Apparently, physical violence was not the answer to silencing a Screamleaf. Noted.

Grindlelight was down to the last few ingredients. He had been kicked in the nose (twice), pinched by a Crabbernacle (three times), and was now host to a Mourning Glory vine that was affectionately wrapping itself around his leg with the slow inevitability of despair. With every movement, it clung tighter. It would likely require divine intervention to remove it. Or an apocalypse. They were due for one, any day now.

There was a pause. Then, a voice—haughty, irritated—echoed through the clearing.

Cursed cockleberries! Will you cease that infernal cauterwauling!

Grindlelight blinked. Had the tree just spoken to him?

I’m talking to you, Grindlefart said the voice, with the distinct nasal quality of someone attempting self-importance while stuffed with moss.

Grindlelight squinted up at the tree.

“Fred?”

A long-suffering sigh issued from somewhere vaguely metaphysical.

I have told you a thousand times, said the voice, it is Fredwartanian the Second.

“And I have told you a thousand times,” said Grindlelight, “that I will sooner french-kiss a chaos gremlin than call you that. How are you even—”

The grocery list. Said the voice.

“What?”

The grocery list. Repeated the voice.

Grindlelight pulled the soggy, half-mulched parchment from his pocket and shook it out.

A deep exhale issued from its folds. Awfully stuffy in there. You really ought to improve your hospitality.

“You magicked yourself into a grocery list?”

Don’t be ridiculous, Grindletrout. I’m merely observing your progress remotely. This task is of utmost importance. The fate of the world—

“If it’s that important, why not send a raven? Or, you know, a text?”

Pah. Phones are surveillance tools. Smoke and mirrors. Capitalist scams.

“Says the literal magician,” muttered Grindlelight.

At that moment, the paper let out a great wracking cough.

“Gesundheit,” said Grindlelight.

What was that?

“I said gesundheit.”

That’s quite enough out of you, snapped the paper, beginning to wilt. The world may very well depend on the success of your mission. Now get on with it. And remember—I am watching you.

Grindlelight crumpled the paper with rather more force than necessary and stomped over to the tree, now filled with a grim and fatalistic determination. Without thinking (as was increasingly his custom), he grabbed the base of the Cactree and shook.

It was said that gnomes, though diminutive, were capable of tremendous strength when properly motivated by rage, caffeine, or debt. In this case, it was all three.

The tree promptly dropped all of its fruit at once.

This would have been bad enough, but Cactree fruits, as their name suggested, were covered in spines. And Grindlelight, being a gnome, was approximately fruit-sized.

By the time he had collected the requisite seven, he resembled a pincushion with an attitude problem. The Wanderplums had attempted an escape, leaping from the basket mid-chaos. They were retrieved, reluctantly, and returned to their thorny companions. The Screamleaf wailed. The Crabbernacles snapped. The Mourning Glory vine sighed.

Grindlelight, bleeding slightly, marked the fruits off his list with a shaking hand:

The Moondrinker Ritual

A knob of Mooseshroom antler

7 Cactree fruits

2 Wanderplums

3 Crabbernacles

A tuft of Dandeliope fur

1 Screamleaf

1 Sprig of Mourning Glory

Only one ingredient remained. The Mooseshroom antler.

Grindlelight had saved it for last. It was, after all, a fourth-category hallucinogen, banned in ten continents and rarer than a smiling tax inspector.

As it turned out, it was also pathetically easy to obtain.

The legendary Mooseshroom—whispered of in gnome taverns and sockling songs—turned out to be the greyhound of mythical beasts: perpetually spooked, vaguely apologetic, and utterly terrified at the very notion of existing. It froze at the sight of Grindlelight, trembled like a cursed soufflé, and voluntarily shed a small knob of its antler in what could only be described as sheer existential panic. Grindlelight didn’t even have to ask.

So that, as they say, was that. Grindlelight had done it.

He made his way up the cobbled road—a path so meandering that it often forgot where it was going and had to pause to remember—toward the cottage, which had been most unhelpfully labelled with a piece of half-rotten plywood bearing the word “COTTAGE” in large, looping letters. The handwriting appeared to belong to a child of three, or perhaps to a much older person who had been raised by an enchanted tablet and never taught to hold a quill properly.

In his hands he carried the basket—an object so thoroughly abused by time, thorns, and screaming foliage that it now bore more resemblance to a small, sentient compost heap than a container. He clutched it not from any sense of reverence toward the contents, but rather to prevent the Wanderplums from executing another escape attempt. They had, at this point, developed what could only be described as a team dynamic. And given that they were to be diced, boiled, and quite possibly weaponized in a potion of unknown consequence, Grindlelight found it difficult to fault their lack of enthusiasm.

He swung open the cottage door—an action which required a precise mixture of strength, bitterness, and the willingness to inhale something that could only be described as the scent of spoiled ambition steeped in rancid hotdog water. The door, which had last been properly maintained around the time of the Second Soup Rebellion, groaned in protest. So did Grindlelight.

He entered with all the dignity of a gnome who had just fallen down three flights of root stairs, rolled through a hedgehog commune, and still insisted he’d meant to do it. His garments were in tatters—more hole than fabric—and his skin bore fractures in no fewer than a dozen places, each one courtesy of the claws, spines, or leafy appendages of the ingredients he now carried. It would take far more than the complimentary GnomeGear Warranty Plus™ to patch him up—assuming it hadn’t already been voided by “reckless interaction with volatile shrubbery.”

“Hey honey, I’m home,” he called—not out of hope, but because sarcasm remained one of the few luxuries not yet taxed by the Gnomish Revenue Council.

A voice replied from somewhere deep within the clutter: “Grindleshort?”

It sounded both tinny and aquatic, like a crystal bell rung inside a soup pot.

“No,” Grindlelight snapped. “It’s your mother-in-law. Gerta.”

A head emerged from behind a precarious stack of magical detritus—a perfectly ordinary face, which was all the more infuriating for belonging to a man capable of causing so much chaos with so little expression. He looked, as always, like a wizard who’d wandered out of a mushroom commune and into a book of mildly inconvenient spells. And of course, he was once again barefoot. Because apparently, decorum had flown out the window—right alongside the assertion that deodorant was a necessary cosmetic and not, as he put it, “an olfactory prison for the soul.”

“Grindlesnort, dear fellow! I thought you had perished.”

“If only,” muttered Grindlelight, crossing the threshold like a martyr attending a particularly inconvenient funeral.

Fred wrinkled his nose. “Whatever took you so long? It is nearly a quarter-hour past my after-supper tea. You know what happens to my digestion if I drink too close to bedtime.”

Grindlelight made no reply, except to begin depositing the ingredients onto the workbench—though by this point, it more closely resembled the countertop of a necromancer-themed curiosity shop. The Screamleaf resumed its wailing. One of the Wanderplums began to vibrate ominously. The Mourning Glory coiled over the edge of the basket and made an unsuccessful lunge for the wall sconce.

Fred, having produced a laminated pamphlet from beneath a pile of unrelated magical gadgets (including a cursed cheese slicer and a self-scribbling napkin), began scrutinizing the ingredients with the seriousness of a man choosing between two slightly bruised apples.

“I am not,” said Grindlelight, “a twig-drenched sockling. If you wanted a manservant, you might have considered asking for one of those.”

Fred looked up. “Now there’s a thought. I daresay they’d be far more agreeable than you. I shall ask Cassandra when she returns.”

He did not appear to consider it necessary to explain who Cassandra was, nor how she intended to procure him a sockling—though Grindlelight had several concerns about both.

Fred resumed his perusal. Spectacles appeared on his nose with a snap—enchanted, naturally—and he squinted through them as though daring the ingredients to disappoint him.

Grindlelight attempted to retreat, but was halted mid-slink by a raised eyebrow and the words, “It is considered rude to leave before one is dismissed.”

Grindlelight spent the next several minutes muttering to himself and mentally listing the many, many injustices he had suffered in recent history, until eventually curiosity—relentless and uninvited—overpowered his indignation.

“What exactly are you making?”

Fred did not look up. He had begun to toss a pinch of this and a whisper of that into the cauldron, which was precisely the shape and size one expects a cauldron to be, but colored an unfortunate and rather suspicious shade of luminous green.

“A cure,” he said, vaguely.

“For what?”

Fred’s tone acquired the distinct defensiveness of someone who knew they were going to be asked follow-up questions. “A great ailment.”

Grindlelight raised a brow.

Fred adjusted his spectacles.

Grindlelight folded his arms.

The cauldron began to bubble.

And the Wanderplums, sensing a fresh opportunity for chaos, began quietly inching toward the door.

Fred tossed him the pamphlet.

Grindlelight was prepared to throw it across the room. But the title, written in neon-green lettering beloved by unlicensed street wizards and 1990s clip art enthusiasts, caught his eye:

The Moondrinker™ Throat Soothing Herbal Blend

(Now with Crabbernacle Bits!)

“You said,” Grindlelight muttered, waving the pamphlet like an indictment, “the fate of the world rested on the procurement of these corn-husked ingredients!”

“Well,” said Fred, not looking the least bit apologetic, “if I were to perish from a sore throat, it might very well feel like the end of the world. To me.”

“You could’ve bought another box!” Grindlelight gestured wildly. “I passed a shop that sold these two towns back!”

Fred looked aghast. “You know how I feel about corporations.”

Grindlelight stared. He was too tired for this. Too bruised. Too punctured. Possibly bleeding. Possibly not his blood.

“Oh, go shove it up a dragon’s teacup,” he muttered.

Then he stomped over to the bubbling cauldron, grabbed the edge with both shattered hands, and tipped it. The entire steaming concoction of Moondrinker™, wanderplums, and Crabbernacle Bits sloshed across the warped floorboards like a fragrant, vengeful tsunami.

Fred shrieked.

Grindlelight didn’t look back.

“You can rot in a sandblasted oubliette,” he announced to no one in particular. “And Cassandra can stick a wand in an electric socket for all I care. Turns out”—he adjusted the strap of his battered satchel—“there are worse fates than retirement with a lonely Blarrot.”

He kicked the door open with a surprisingly musical clang. As it groaned shut behind him, he muttered, “I’ve got a bingo game to sabotage and a custard to interrogate.”

And with that, Grindlelight the Gnome stomped off—limping slightly, glowing faintly, and bleeding from at least one questionable puncture—to return to the only place that had ever offered him boredom, filtered light, and semi-edible pudding: Sunset Spoons Magical Retirement Village™, where the tea was lukewarm, the walls were mildly sentient, and not a single soul had ever heard of Crabbernacle Bits.

At any rate, it would be the last time Grindlelight ever signed a contract with anyone named Fred.