The Parking Duel

Yorn the yeti had been circling the town square for eight minutes.

Eight measured, increasingly spiritual minutes.

Not frantic circling. Not panicked circling. Yorn was above that. He drove with the rigid composure of a man trying very hard to remain civilized while fate repeatedly slapped him with small humiliations. His slightly battered hatchback rolled slowly past the square, past the florist, past the Raul Julia Memorial Knowledge Emporium, past the fountain, and past the Snowdrift Diner for the fourth time.

The diner windows glowed with the particular warmth of a place that knew exactly what it was doing to people. Inside, booths were filling up. Silverware flashed. Coffee was being poured. Somewhere beyond the glass, someone carried a slice of butterscotch pie from one table to another with the solemnity of a religious rite.

Yorn watched it go by and tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

“All I want,” he muttered, in the tone of a man making a final appeal to a negligent universe, “is one legal parking space and a hot meal.”

Snowdrift Bay, as usual, offered no concession.

He passed the diner again.

Nothing.

A delivery cart was parked halfway over a curb near the square.
A man in a scarf was standing beside a truck labeled CEREMONIAL LINENS with one hand on his hip and the expression of someone losing an argument with fabric.
A wagon full of pumpkins had somehow taken up two spaces despite not being a vehicle.
A tiny car Yorn was almost certain belonged to Daisy Davenport was angled diagonally across a spot in a way that suggested style had once again triumphed over geometry.

Yorn exhaled slowly through his nose.

Then, on the next pass, he saw it.

The spot.

Right in front of the diner.

A clean, perfect opening at the curb. No cart. No cones. No handwritten sign saying RESERVED FOR A VISION. No suspicious chalk symbols. No overturned crate someone had declared “basically a vehicle” and dared others to challenge.

Just a space.

A simple, beautiful, lawful space.

Yorn went still.

“There you are,” he whispered.

He flicked on his turn signal with reverence.

The hatchback eased toward the curb.

He was already picturing it: parking, stepping inside, sliding into a booth, ordering something hearty and unapologetic with potatoes, maybe pie afterward if the night improved. Perhaps coffee. Perhaps two coffees. Perhaps, if things really turned around, no one would start shouting in the diner before he finished eating.

Then—

FLASH.

A burst of light detonated in front of his car with such force and theatrical malice that Yorn instinctively slammed both feet down. His hatchback lurched to a stop. Tires squealed. Something in the glove compartment flung itself onto the floor. The whole world briefly became white-gold glare and magical insult.

When the light faded, the spot was no longer empty.

A sleek black sedan now occupied it.

It shimmered.

Not polished shimmered. Not expensive shimmered. It shimmered with the glossy, infuriating perfection of something that had recently been conjured by a person with both power and terrible judgment. Its paint reflected the streetlamps too beautifully. Its tires looked smug. The hood ornament may have briefly emitted a tiny glint on purpose.

Yorn sat motionless behind the wheel.

Then he said, with profound quiet hatred, “You have got to be kidding me.”

The driver’s side door opened.

A wizard stepped out.

He was tall, bearded, robed, and carrying a staff, which under other circumstances might have been merely dramatic. Unfortunately, he also carried himself with the easy serenity of a man who had never once had to circle for parking like the common cursed. His hair fell in glossy waves around his shoulders. His robes were midnight blue with silver trim. He shut the door with the soft, deliberate care of someone who believed his arrival had improved the street.

Then he turned and saw Yorn.

“Ah,” the wizard said pleasantly. “Excellent. You noticed.”

Yorn got out of the car.

Not fast.

Not wild.

He unfolded himself from the driver’s seat with glacial deliberation and shut the door behind him with a controlled firmness that suggested he was doing active emotional labor not to rip it off the hinges.

“You teleported,” Yorn said, “into my parking spot.”

The wizard smiled.

“I arrived in it.”

“That,” said Yorn, “is not a distinction any sane person recognizes.”

“I find that depends on the quality of their imagination.”

Yorn stared at him.

The wizard rested one elegant hand atop his staff.

“I am Zephyrus,” he said. “Good evening.”

“I was signaling.”

“Yes,” Zephyrus said, nodding thoughtfully. “I did see that.”

“And yet.”

“And yet,” Zephyrus agreed.

“You cut me off with magic.”

Zephyrus tilted his head slightly. “That sounds so accusatory when you say it.”

Yorn took one step closer. “Move your car.”

Zephyrus’s expression remained maddeningly calm. “No.”

That was, more or less, the moment the town began to gather.

Not in a panicked way.

Snowdrift Bay did not panic over this sort of thing. It curated. It assembled. It drifted toward conflict with the warm communal interest of people who had accidentally stumbled onto an outdoor performance and suspected it might become stupid enough to remember later.

A woman carrying groceries paused near the florist and leaned against a post.
Someone inside the diner put down a fork and pressed both hands to the window.
A pair of teenagers stopped mid-conversation and immediately took sides without any discernible basis.
One old man from the chess table wandered over, squinted once, and announced, “Parking dispute.”
His companion joined him and said, “No, no. Wizard parking dispute. That’s premium.”

A child tugged on his father’s sleeve. “Who’s winning?”

“Emotionally?” said the father. “Neither yet.”

Another voice from somewhere in the growing crowd said, “Oh, this is going to get municipal.”

“That’s what I’m hoping,” said someone else.

“This is exactly what my therapist said I should stop enjoying,” muttered a woman in a long coat, making no attempt whatsoever to leave.

Yorn heard the murmuring, closed his eyes briefly, then reopened them with the patient misery of a man whose bad night had become public entertainment.

Zephyrus, meanwhile, had noticed the audience and straightened very slightly.

This was not a man embarrassed by attention.

This was a man who ironed his sleeves before casting spells.

“I’m asking you one more time,” Yorn said, his voice low. “Move the car.”

Zephyrus folded his arms. “And I, respectfully, am declining.”

“You can’t just take a space because you happen to be able to bend reality.”

Zephyrus gestured lightly toward the town square around them, where a trumpet could be heard in the distance and someone was currently arguing with a decorative archway.

“My dear cryptid,” he said, “you are in Snowdrift Bay. Bending reality is practically commuting.”

“That doesn’t mean anything goes.”

“Oh,” Zephyrus said, smiling wider, “it very often does. You simply haven’t been here long enough to resent it properly.”

“I have been here long enough to know this is cheating.”

“Magic is not cheating,” said Zephyrus. “Magic is initiative.”

“It is absolutely cheating.”

“Show me the ordinance.”

Yorn opened his mouth.

Paused.

Then frowned.

He hated that.

He hated, specifically, that he did not know the answer.

“…I don’t carry parking ordinances on my person.”

Zephyrus spread his hands. “Then what we have is not law. What we have is a philosophical disagreement.”

“What we have,” Yorn said, “is your car in my space.”

“Oh, this is excellent,” said someone in the crowd.

A woman near the diner turned to the man beside her. “Do you have cash? I’m suddenly asking odds.”

“What are the categories?”

“Physical escalation. Magical escalation. Surprise legal intervention. Emotional breakthrough.”

“Put me down for plumbing complication,” the man said.

Zephyrus drew himself up and planted the end of his staff lightly against the cobblestones.

“Very well,” he declared, his voice now carrying in a way that made it clear he had done this sort of thing before and found it flattering. “If you insist on contesting my rightful claim—”

“You are absolutely about to say ‘challenge,’” Yorn said flatly.

“—then we shall resolve this,” Zephyrus thundered, “with a challenge.”

The crowd reacted with immediate satisfaction.

“There it is.”

“Knew it.”

“God, I love this town.”

Yorn pinched the bridge of his nose so hard it looked like he might disassemble part of his own skull.

“This is about parking.”

“Yes,” said Zephyrus, “which makes it symbolic.”

“It makes it petty.”

Zephyrus smiled. “Now you understand.”

Five minutes later, because Snowdrift Bay had never seen a minor disagreement it couldn’t escort toward theater, they were standing in front of the fountain in the center of the square.

The crowd had followed.

Of course it had.

A few more people had joined on the way, drawn by the speed at which public nonsense traveled through town. Someone had brought cider. Someone else had brought a folding chair. A woman Yorn did not recognize was sketching the scene in a notebook with astonishing speed. Two diner servers had come outside and were standing shoulder to shoulder under the awning like they’d been waiting all week for this.

The fountain burbled in the center of it all, unaware that it was about to become involved in matters far above its pay grade.

Near the edge of the plaza stood a maintenance worker with a clipboard, a wrench, and the exhausted bearing of a man who had once believed infrastructure would be straightforward.

He looked at the gathering crowd.
Then at the fountain.
Then at Yorn.
Then at Zephyrus.

“No,” he said immediately.

No one acknowledged him.

Zephyrus stepped forward first, robes whispering dramatically around his boots. He raised his staff with the ease of a practiced performer and cast a glance over the audience that was just shy of a bow.

“Observe,” he said.

Then he began.

Water surged up from the fountain in a smooth twisting column, rising higher and higher as the crowd murmured in appreciation. Under the guidance of his staff, it unfurled into elegant shapes—spirals, arches, ribbons, and then, with escalating self-satisfaction, the form of a dolphin leaping through the air.

He shifted his wrist.

The dolphin became a lion.

He turned the staff again.

The lion flowed upward into a great coiling dragon made entirely of water, its jaws open, its body circling above the square in glittering suspended motion before exploding into a cool silver mist that drifted over the crowd.

There was applause.

Real applause.

A few whistles.

One man clapped hard enough to spill his drink and still did not stop.

“That was beautiful,” someone said.

A second voice replied, “He always does the dragon.”

“Well, yes, but tonight he meant it.”

Zephyrus lowered his staff with a modesty so artificial it ought to have been taxable.

He turned to Yorn.

“Your turn.”

Yorn stepped forward.

He looked at the fountain.

Then at Zephyrus.

Then at the crowd.

Then back at the fountain.

His jaw shifted once.

“You think this is about spectacle,” he said.

Zephyrus gave a tiny shrug. “I think it is now.”

Yorn nodded once.

“All right,” he said.

Then he crouched.

The mood in the square changed instantly.

There was a visible ripple through the crowd, that collective little inhale people took when a situation stopped being stupid in an abstract way and started becoming stupid with force.

“Oh,” said one of the diner servers.

“Oh, no,” said the maintenance worker.

Yorn bent down, wrapped both enormous arms around the stone base of the fountain, dug in his boots, and heaved.

The entire structure tore free from the ground.

Not metaphorically.

Not partly.

The whole fountain came up.

Stone scraped. Pipes shrieked. Water exploded outward in a sparkling, violent sheet that drenched the nearest row of spectators before anyone had even fully processed what had happened. Several people screamed, though in Snowdrift Bay the screams were less fearful than delighted. A child shouted, “YES!” with the unfiltered joy of witnessing extremely bad judgment in action.

Yorn stood upright with the fountain in his arms.

Water sprayed in all directions.

The maintenance worker had gone pale in a deeply personal way.

“You absolute lunatic,” Zephyrus breathed.

Yorn, thoroughly soaked and now committed past the point of reason, turned slightly so the crowd could see.

Then, with perfect seriousness, he said, “Raw, undeniable strength.”

And set the fountain back down.

Wrong.

Catastrophically wrong.

It hit the plaza with a heavy crack and a hideous plumbing sound from somewhere below the earth, like a giant taking a wet, furious breath. The basin landed crooked. One side dipped lower than the other. The cherub in the middle tilted at an accusatory angle. Water blasted sideways from a seam that absolutely should not have had water in it. One jet shot twenty feet into the air and began coming down in a slanted, hostile arc across the square.

The crowd exploded.

Laughter, shrieking, applause, pure civic delight.

Everyone nearest the fountain was soaked instantly. People stumbled backward, laughing too hard to flee effectively. Someone lost a hat. A little dog in a raincoat barked at the wild water stream like it had been personally insulted.

The maintenance worker stared at the wrecked fountain, then looked at his clipboard as if hoping reality might have changed while he wasn’t looking.

“No,” he whispered. “No, no, no, no, no.”

Zephyrus turned to Yorn in utter disbelief.

“You ruined it.”

“I demonstrated strength,” Yorn shot back. “You demonstrated decorative moisture.”

“That was controlled magic!”

“This,” Yorn said, gesturing to the chaos, “is controlled strength.”

“It is not controlled!”

“It was controlled enough.”

“By what standard?”

“Mine.”

Water struck both of them in the side from the rogue jet.

Neither moved.

The maintenance worker closed his eyes.

“I’m not fixing that today,” he said to no one, to everyone, to God.

From somewhere across the square, Mayor Llama’s voice rang out before the man himself appeared.

“Oh, yes you are!”

Heads turned.

Mayor Llama came striding across the cobblestones in full mayoral indignation, sash slightly askew, flanked by the energy of a man who had sensed public disorder and arrived to supervise it into something worse.

“What happened here?” he demanded.

The maintenance worker pointed mutely at Yorn, then Zephyrus, then the fountain, then perhaps the general collapse of standards.

Mayor Llama squinted.

“…Was this sanctioned?”

“No,” said eight people at once.

“Was it compelling?”

There was a pause.

Then, reluctantly, “Yes,” said the crowd.

Mayor Llama nodded. “All right.”

Zephyrus threw up a hand. “This man ripped a public fountain out of the ground over a parking dispute.”

Yorn rounded on him. “You teleported into my spot.”

“That is not the point anymore.”

“It became more the point.”

“It became several points!”

The rogue water jet struck Mayor Llama in the chest.

He did not flinch.

Instead, he slowly turned his face into the spray, blinked once, and said, “This does improve the square’s energy somewhat.”

The maintenance worker made a sound like a man losing a private war.

Zephyrus stared at Yorn for a long moment.

Then, despite himself, he laughed.

Just once at first—sharp, incredulous, unwilling.

Then again.

Soon enough he was actually grinning, soaked robes clinging to him, beard dripping, all his wizardly dignity washed down the plaza in a stream of municipal failure.

“Fine,” he said. “Fine. You win.”

Yorn crossed his arms. “Good.”

Zephyrus looked toward the curb where the black sedan still sat in the space that had started all this.

Then back at Yorn.

Then at the diner.

Then at the fountain, now wheezing and spraying in several contradictory directions.

Finally he sighed, long and theatrical.

“Very well,” he said. “I will move the car.”

“You will.”

“You are unbelievably stubborn.”

Yorn stared at him. “You materialized a sedan out of thin air to avoid walking twenty yards.”

“Yes,” Zephyrus said. “And that was elegance. This was barbarism.”

“This was parking.”

Zephyrus gave him one last look of damp resentment and stalked back toward the curb, muttering something under his breath that sounded arcane and deeply bitchy.

Several members of the crowd applauded his retreat.

That broke what little tension remained.

The crowd started dispersing in satisfied clumps, talking over one another.

“I’m telling you, the fountain added something.”
“It did not add something. It is dying.”
“No, but the angle is kind of modern.”
“He lifted the whole base.”
“Did you see the wizard’s face?”
“I thought Yorn was going to kill him.”
“I thought Zephyrus was going to turn him into cutlery.”
“This is why I never miss dinner hour.”

By the time Zephyrus had re-parked somewhere farther down the block—legally, and with visible suffering—Yorn was already at the diner door.

Zephyrus approached a moment later, still wet, still annoyed, though now with the reluctant air of a man who had enjoyed himself against his better judgment.

Yorn pulled open the diner door.

For a brief second the warm smell of coffee, fry oil, pie crust, and butterscotch poured out into the street like forgiveness.

Zephyrus glanced inside.

Then at Yorn.

Then back toward the square, where the fountain gave a horrible metallic cough and sent another stream of water into the air at a frankly imaginative angle.

“…Pie?” Zephyrus said.

Yorn held the door open.

“Pie.”

And together they went inside, still dripping, and called a truce over a slice.

Meanwhile across the square the maintenance worker stood before the mangled fountain in stunned silence, one hand on his clipboard, his whole posture suggesting he had been forsaken by every god of pipes and stone.

At last he looked up toward the darkening sky and said, to no one who would help him,

“I should have become a florist.”

Behind him, the fountain sprayed enthusiastically into the evening like it had discovered joy through violence.