Potatoes, Come Forth!
Inconvenient Magic
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Everett de Schael is a Journeyman Magicker, which sounds far more impressive than it pays. His spells are real, his rank is legitimate, and none of that changes the miserable fact that magic has saddled him with a collection of talents that are erratic, inconvenient, and almost never useful in the ways a hungry man actually needs.
Still, when a skeptical farmer agrees to hire him for the potato harvest, Everett delivers a result no plow team could match. With a shouted spell and a great shuddering of the earth, potatoes burst from the field in leaping, rolling, colliding waves and pile themselves into a small hill. It is a spectacular success, right up until Everett discovers that success does not necessarily mean coin in hand.
Paid in potatoes instead of money, dusty, hungry, and trying to preserve the last scraps of his dignity, Everett sets out on foot with a wheelbarrow full of produce and the uneasy knowledge that magic has once again solved only the least important part of his problem.
That is the rhythm of Everett’s life: astonishing magical effort followed by practical humiliation. What should have been a triumph becomes a trudging roadside ordeal of creaking wood, burlap sacks, empty pockets, and boiled potatoes for supper beneath whatever shade can be found. Everett is smart enough to see the joke, proud enough to resent it, and stubborn enough to keep walking anyway.
As he makes his way through the flood-plain farms of Heimgelberg toward town, the world around him reveals its own brand of rough wonder: hedge-lined roads, summer heat, campfires in roadside woodlots, and great steam mechanisms clanking over the back roads in the name of progress. Everett may be a magicker, but he knows perfectly well that technology often looks a lot more useful.
Along the road, Everett finds brief companionship with Bob Wiggins, a genial grader operator and fellow magicker whose practical steam machine does more honest work in a day than most spells manage in a season. Their conversation turns, as it must, to the unfairness of magic, the limits of useful talent, and the uncomfortable truth that a man can be genuinely gifted and still be catastrophically unlucky.
Potatoes, Come Forth! is a comic fantasy adventure about bad breaks, bad spells, stubborn endurance, and the dangerous absurdity of speaking one frustrated wish too many. It is a story of roadside mishaps, rural magic, hungry pride, and a decent man trying to make a living in a world where the miraculous is often far less helpful than advertised.
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