Power Grid
10 Worthless Wizards, #2: Schmendrick the Magician
Schmendrick the Magician’s mentor Nikos was one of the most powerful wizards to ever live, but even he couldn’t coax his pupil’s magical talent into obedience. But he saw tremendous untapped power in Schmendrick, if he could only figure out how to control it, and so he cursed him:
Therefore I grant that from this day forth you shall not grow old, but will travel the world round and round, eternally inefficient, until at last you come to yourself and know what you are. Don’t thank me. I tremble at your doom.
So… that sucks. Schmendrick, kind, cowardly, and awkward, successfully uses the deep magic inside himself only a couple of times in The Last Unicorn before he finally comes into his destiny, and each time he has little to no control over the result. The magic in him is responsible for turning the titular Unicorn into a human woman, the source of the great unable-to-be-undone tragedy of Beagle’s story.
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