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wizard with wide round eyes, fear filling his heart.
    What else has the wizard heard from my mind? he wondered as he frantically tried to remember if he had formed any insults in his thoughts in the past two days. He couldn’t find any, but he didn’t trust his memory.
    “I only listen when I care to, boy. Trust me when I say, your thoughts hold very little interest to me. Now keep moving.”
    Resuming his climb, Benen carefully thought of nothing. He soon found this too hard and instead thought of elephants. Of course, he had never seen an elephant, he’d only heard of them from stories and travelling peddlers, but he had a mental image of what one looked like. The wizard burst into laughter in front of him and could not stop chuckling for some minutes. So much so, that Benen caught up to him again on the stairway.
    “When your studies begin, boy, I will make sure you see what an elephant really looks like,” the wizard said with a mocking smile.
    I guess I really know nothing, Benen thought, sadly disillusioned.
    “That’s a very good lesson for you to take to heart,” commented the wizard as he continued moving smoothly up the staircase.
    After having climbed the staircase, all seventy steps, the pair reached the landing at the bottom of the tower. Benen noticed the landing was open to the air, as if to make it accessible to flying visitors. He guessed the wizard could just as easily become a bird as a wolf. Not that his transformation to wolf had looked easy.
    There was a heavy, metal-reinforced, oak door leading into the building here and the wizard stepped up to it. He placed a hand on the door.
    “I am home,” he said and a flash of light rippled from his hand over the entirety of the parts of the building Benen could see, including the staircase. As he looked, the staircase’s steps began merging one into the other, starting from the bottom and moving upward. Within seconds, the staircase was no more. Benen had a moment of panic that the tower would no longer have sufficient support, but then realized this was silly. The staircase could never have supported this structure.
    “Wards, recognize Benen, my apprentice,” continued the wizard.
    He knows my name, Benen hadn’t thought he did.
    The wizard pushed open the door and walked into the base of the building.
    “Come, boy,” he called to Benen.
    Not that he ever uses it.
    The inside of the tower was just as wondrous as the outside had been. Many of the outer walls of the building were translucent, offering majestic views of the lands over which the tower hovered. As he watched, Benen saw something disturbing. He reached out and grabbed hold of a wall in panic. The tower was drifting! Would they fall?
    The wizard looked at Benen levelly until he felt silly and got over his feeling that the tower was somehow out of control and possibly headed for a crash. The wizard must have willed it to move.
    The tower flies! he thought in wonder. It doesn’t simply hover.
    “Yes, yes, but it also needs cleaning,” said the wizard, dismissal in his voice. “Follow this ball of light and do the work it directs you to do. It will prioritize tasks and report to me if there are any problems with your work. Now go.”
    The wizard cast a very short spell and a small hovering blue light sprang into existence before him. It moved to Benen and spoke, pulsing with each word.
    “This. Way. Ben. En. Ap. Pren. Tice,” it paused with each word and each syllable was like an individual word to it.
    It hovered before Benen impatiently, moving up and down rapidly while waiting for him. Benen turned back to where the master had been standing to say an obligatory Yes, Master to him but the master had already gone and was nowhere to be seen. Shaking his head, Benen resigned himself to getting used to such things. He walked toward the blue light and it began to move ahead of him, leading the way.
    “Are you intelligent? Can you talk?” he asked it. He felt lonely and hoped the