The story of one sorcerer

“I am Gargamel, I begin to write these notes so that whoever finds them knows who I was, and does not consider me someone else, whom I never was, and for the reason that I simply want to immortalize my name in history. I was born back in 1158, when in Belgium not a single sorcerer or witch hid their origin and when people believed in magic and sorcery. My mother was a forest witch, their magic is inherited but in full only through the female gender. My mother's name was Isis, just like the ancient Egyptian goddess, although later this name would be forgotten and turn into another... In her youth, she was a beautiful and kind girl, she worked as a herbalist and made various potions, all forest witches are always well versed in plants and potions. At the age of 16, she fell in love with a man, but this man was a simple peasant, without a surname, without money, but with great love for Isis. No matter how I asked my mother, she didn’t tell me his name, she just said that he looked like me... They loved each other, although her mother and aunt were against it, but lovers always do not listen to someone and, as you know, do everything as they see fit. Soon Isis became pregnant, but a misfortune happened: her lover was killed by robbers during one of his trips to a neighboring city to earn money. Isis could not come to terms with this for a long time, but she was still able to bear the pregnancy and on one stormy night, she gave birth to twins. Me and my brother. She named me Gargamel and brother Gourmelin. She loved us very much, and believed that when we grew up, we would provide for her and be her breadwinners - sons. She had already decided our fate for us in advance: she decided that we would become sorcerers. But we were poor; my mother barely had enough money to buy food for us. Then she made the most terrible decision in her life, she decided to ask Balthazar for help. Balthazar was the husband of the daughter of Aunt Grisella, sister of Grandmother Celeste. Everyone knew that Balthazar was rich and cruel, he was a sorcerer by birth, but unlike me, it was not his mother who was a witch, but his father who was a sorcerer, and therefore the magic was passed on to him in full, he could cast magic with his hands. But he was also a womanizer, and loved beautiful women, while his wife bored, him and went to other women. And so my mother went to him, he was the only rich relative (or at least someone she knew). That day, his mother made a very terrible, shameful deal with him: he must provide our family with money and when Gurmelin and I turn 7 years old, he must make sure that we can study at the school of sorcerers. In exchange for this, she was with him for three nights. But the mother was cunning, she knew what medicine to take and therefore did not bear a child from him. Until we were two years old, our mother fed us breast milk, and after that she took care of us. Until the age of 6, my brother and I had a happy childhood, we didn’t have to think about witchcraft abilities or all the problems, we just lived and enjoyed life. My mother always called me Gargi and my brother Gurmi, affectionately. Although there was one thing that my mother hated and I loved very much: cats. I really wanted to have my own cat, I even had a favorite toy in the form of an orange kitten with black beady eyes. I always slept with this toy when I was a child. My brother Gurmelin had a toy in the form of a wooden bird whose wings could move; this toy was given to him by his girlfriend, whose father was a carpenter. At the age of 5, we looked exactly the same, it so happened that my brother and I always dressed the same, only I always preferred red shoes and he preferred blue ones. We both had shaggy thick black hair. Apart from friend Gurmelin, who was an orphan on her mother’s side, my brother and I never had any friends, since everyone considered us bastards, because my mother never managed to marry her lover before he was killed. What added fuel to the fire was that Balthazar allocated money to our family, and every sane person hated Balthazar for his cruelty to ordinary people. But while my brother and I were together, we were still happy. As soon as we turned 6 years old, our mother revealed to us the secret that at 7 years old we would go to the school of sorcerers. Since then, my mother began to put all her efforts into teaching us at least something, but all she could do was teach us to somehow understand herbs. And so at the age of 7 she took us to the school of sorcerers. We had a hard time there. Everyone at school knew that we were accepted only because Balthazar's mother asked about it. We struggled to do well; in first grade we were taught Latin, Herbalism, Reading, Writing and Maths. And only at the end of the first year we were given the task of preparing a potion that could turn a withered flower into a living one. But this potion required not only simple skills and knowledge, but also innate magic. I was the older brother, so unlike Gurmelin, I had a little more innate magic, although it was very weak, but I was able to create this potion. But alas, this did not work out for Gurmelin and he was expelled from school. This was a blow for me, because I really wanted to study with my brother. The following weeks I saw my brother only in the morning and evening when I left for school and came back from school. But fate decided to deal with us even more cruelly: my mother gave Gurmelin to be raised by her aunt Grisella, who lived in Paris. Since then I have hardly seen Gurmelin... Then I was left alone, I never made friends at school. Instead, it became more and more difficult every year. To my mother's disappointment, it turned out that I did not have strong innate magic, and all I could do was practice alchemy and brew potions, some of which required only a small part of magic. All my classmates were very skilled in magic; they could cast spells with ease. I tried to study with all my might, I was not a noisy child, I was not confrontational. I just studied, loved reading new books, learning something new. Thanks to this, some teachers even loved me and I was not kicked out of school earlier. But my classmates hated me, they considered me a bastard and chose me as an object for bullying. Gradually, every year, my mother began to understand something, then I didn’t know what exactly, but I began to notice that her love for me began to slowly fade away. When I turned 16 years old, my last year at the school of sorcerers began. Every day it became more and more difficult. I was lonely because I never had any friends. It was then that I unexpectedly made my first and true friend, who is still always by my side. I was walking from school and noticed how some woman was drowning kittens in the river, I quickly ran there but the woman had already disappeared, I began to take the kittens out of the water, all were already dead except one. He was red-haired with a piece of his right ear torn off and purred pitifully. I pressed him to me and just held him like that for a while until he was completely dry and when I looked at him he opened his eyes, because before that he was still blind, and looked at me with his devoted yellow-black little eyes, as if saying that he will always be devoted to me. I immediately realized what it was - I had found my animal familiar. Despite my mother’s hatred of cats, I performed a ritual and tied the kitten to myself as a familiar, thanks to which it, like any other familiar of any sorcerer or witch, will always live as long as its owner. I named the kitten Azrael. When the mother found out about this, she was seriously angry, but soon calmed down because she knew that a familiar was a special animal for a sorcerer. The most important week has arrived: the last week of sorcerer school. The school director called all the students and told them to do something special magical in three days that could surprise him. At that moment, my classmates looked at me with ridicule and contempt, and I realized what I should have understood: I will never graduate from the school of sorcerers if I don’t create something special and magical. I left school that day in tears. I went to my favorite part of the forest where I always practiced potions and alchemy, I leafed through all the books, trying to find any kind of magic trick that I could do myself, without potions, alchemy, or anything else that would be done. magic. I tried my best to bring this to life, but the magic simply did not come from my hands, because it was too weak. For 2 days I came to this place in the forest and tried to use magic, but all attempts were in vain. On the third day, when I came to that place in the forest, my cat Azrael caught a creature: it was a creature three apples tall, with skin as blue as the sky, and a white hat like a gnome on its head. There could be no mistake, it was the legendary Smurf! I quickly took the creature in my hands and began to rummage through my book, it was written there that the Smurfs are unique forest elves - gnomes, and it is this creature that every sorcerer dreams of catching, but for more than 500 years the Smurfs have been considered mythical creatures. Then I realized - this is my chance. A chance to graduate from the school of sorcerers. I knew that you could make a philosopher's stone from a Smurf. If I had done this, I would not only have graduated from the school of sorcerers, but also become the most famous sorcerer. But here, too, a misfortune happened, something that I could not foresee: more Smurfs appeared from somewhere. They saved the Smurf I was holding in my hands and ran away, hiding in the depths of the forest, as if disappearing into space. For the rest of the day I tried to find them but could not. The next day there was an exam at school. I witnessed my classmates demonstrating their skills. They created magical flowers out of nowhere, created magical creatures with just a wave of their hand, and could change their appearance with the snap of their fingers. I couldn't do anything. When it was my turn, I tried to create the simplest of spells - some kind of precious stone using only my magic. I closed my eyes and concentrated, but when I opened my eyes, all I saw was the director’s angry face and the mocking faces of my classmates, and empty palms. At that moment I felt like just an ordinary person, or, to put it simply, worse, I felt like a laughing stock and a failure. I tried to explain everything to the director, I even tried to tell about the meeting with the Smurf, but the director did not want to listen to me. He simply kicked me out of school and told me never to cross its threshold again. When I left school, my classmates were already waiting for me, I was the only one who did not graduate from school and did not receive a scroll about its completion. They were no longer restrained by the rules of the school, the rules of morality, and they attacked me. That's when I lost half of my teeth. Azrael tried to protect me, but he was just a kitten and could not do anything. I came home in tears. All my mother’s hopes and dreams that I would become a successful sorcerer disintegrated into dust. She also informed me that Balthazar would no longer support our family. I tried to calm my mother down, to console her with the fact that I could still become a successful sorcerer, but she did not listen, and the next day, saying that I was a failure, she left for Paris to visit Aunt Grisella. I was left alone to fend for myself in my family home. By the way, speaking about our family home: once it was an old small church with a bell tower, my great-grandfather and great-grandmother on my mother’s side settled in it, and made a living room from the second floor of the bell tower (this room is now my bedroom), they planted it next to the church or rather already your home, Sakura. It was a beautiful place when they lived here. But after their death, when my grandmother and mother began to live in the house, the house gradually began to deteriorate, although even in my childhood it was more neat here compared to how it looks now. I even remember how, as a child, I climbed the sakura with Gurmelin while it was still blooming and had not withered... Let's go back to my youth: when I was left alone as the owner of the house, the first thing I realized that I needed to do was find a way to earn money. It’s worth saying right away that there weren’t many ways for sorcerers, firstly, some people were afraid of sorcerers, and secondly, sorcerers had a different education, not for physical work. There was really another way for someone like me - a monastery. I had skills in Latin, writing, and many monks practiced alchemy. But I didn’t like it, and anyway, sorcerers are not always tolerated in religious communities. So I decided to make money by making simple potions and medicinal potions that I knew how to make quite well. and sell. But even with this, as it turned out, it was not so simple, since I did not graduate from the school of sorcerers, I could not run my own business. To make it clearer, I will give an example: for example, there is a pharmacist who has not studied for this and does not have a certificate; of course, he will not be able to sell his medicines legally and he may be arrested for quackery or for the invalidity of his medicines. So here is a sorcerer who makes medicines and potions. For example, for witches everything is simpler, witches do not have to graduate from the school of sorcerers/witches, a witch can be on her own, but for sorcerers it’s not like that. Because of this, I was forced to make potions and potions and sell them to resellers. It brought in half as much money, but it was still at least some money."