The Bureaucromancers’ Duel

One fine afternoon in early autumn, Clive of the Endless Sentence challenged Grimelda of the Precise Paragraph to a sorcerous duel over a particular phrase in a vital document, and so the world’s greatest bureaucromancers prepared for battle.

It took three years and a veritable army of scribes, assistants, and clerks to draft the initial terms of the duel—endless reams of clauses, subclauses, limits and definitions, all exactingly penned in the priceless enchanted ink which empowered such things. Innumerable documents which needed signing, dating, notarizing and initializing.  Two more years to haggle over the location, the date, the victory conditions, and of course the consequences. (The bureaucromancer’s three tenets: Precision, Meaning, Intent. All of this constituted a spell of immense proportions…)

Vital to this process were Hazel and Jeanine, two apprentices tasked with running errands and delivering messages, whatever strange and arcane thing needed doing at any given moment. Hazel, tall, lithe, and dark, who’d walked with a cane and a limp most of her life, who admired Clive for his ability to spin sentences of infinite complexity. Jeanine, short, plump, and blonde, who idolized Grimelda’s manner of shaping reality as succinctly as possible. Their first encounter came in the Grand Library, each tasked to locate a minor loophole in an exceedingly rare, obscure volume. 

†

“I was here first!” Hazel insisted.

“We filed our request first!” retorted Jeanine.

“Well, we applied for expedited access, which trumps your request!”

“The Grimrock Decision of 293 clearly gives precedence to the defendant of any challenge.”

“Well, Caspian v Radaghast amends that decision to allow for the instigator to claim priority if, and I quote, lack of access would unduly affect their immediate scheduling needs…”

“Unless you invoke Harbiter v the Kingdom of Absconia!”

“THAT ONLY APPLIES IF COWS ARE INVOLVED!”

Jeanine was on the edge of blurting out something truly unforgivable when a librarian descended in a cloud of disapproval to suggest they act like adults and just share the damned book. Yielding to an authority even greater and more terrifying than their masters, Hazel and Jeanine murmured apologies and reluctantly complied, jostling one another as they flipped to the same chapter and started taking notes. And if either enjoyed the way they fit together while working, they weren’t about to admit it.

†

After that, their paths crossed dozens of times. At the Grand Library, Alzabar’s Exotic Inks, Burrell’s Finest Paper, or Willow Bookbinders. Standing in line for coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, stiffer drinks in the evening, as the duel’s preparations ground on with inexorable exactitude.  To their surprise, despite their opposing allegiances and personal differences—Hazel spoke in elegant, looping sentences that took forever to get to the point, Jeanine never used five words when one would do; Hazel was at her best in the mornings, Jeanine was a night owl par excellence—they slowly became friends. They started looking forward to—even planning—their encounters, sipping drinks while reviewing the day’s notes or sharing reference materials, heads bent close together as they sought the right precedent or bylaw to satisfy the latest queries.

Though this manner of cooperation was highly unusual, there was, amazingly enough, no rule against fraternization, and Hazel and Jeanine were diligent in protecting their respective master’s secrets. When on the clock, they were all business; off the clock, they discussed recipes, favorite books—Hazel preferred lurid, rambling romances, Jeanine enjoyed biographies of obscure historical figures—and so it went.

Four years into this process, they realized they’d fallen in love at some point, but it took another three months to admit it out loud. I love you can be as powerful and binding a contract as the most complicated of legalities, and a kiss as good as a notarized signature. They’d unintentionally forged a connection completely at odds with the spirit of the duel, a blush of raw emotion contradicting the thousands of pages and millions of words which would determine which bureaucromancer’s influence would reign supreme for a generation.

Neither would switch sides—there’d be no defections or resignations at this late stage and they had been written into the great sorcerous working in a hundred ways, their fates tied to their masters. But they kept their love private—Hazel feared their masters would forbid the relationship on general principle. Jeanine worried it could set things back, when they were so close to the duel’s fulfillment. For such reasons, they kept their silence.

As the fateful day of the duel approached— a thousand sorcerers descended upon the city, with an armies of scribes and clerks prepared for the final push, and  the rest of the world held its breath in anticipation—Hazel and Jeanine found themselves back where it had all begun, sharing a book in the Great Library, desperate to clarify one particularly troublesome clause which had troubled them both for months. It was a matter of phrasing, of translation, of precedent; they’d come back to it innumerable times, sure they’d overlooked something.

To Hazel’s shock, she finally found it: a faded footnote in a thin handwritten volume dating back centuries, penned by the Bureaucromantic Order’s founder and obscured by two larger books. She showed it to Jeanine, who cursed most eloquently. 

Neither Clive nor Grimelda were right. Nor were they wrong. The very subject of their contention was intentionally ambiguous and had always been so. Thousands of pages and millions of words, all rendered irrelevant with a single sentence of original determination.

After weeks of verification and scrutiny, both sides accepted these findings, ultimately dismissing the duel. Life returned to normal… mostly.

When Hazel and Jeanine wed, Hazel’s vows ran to twenty pages of flowery devotion, Jeanine’s to a single paragraph, but they were precisely united in both meaning and intent: I love you. They sealed this arrangement with a kiss.

© 2025 Michael M. Jones

Michael M. Jones lives in southwest Virginia with too many books, just enough cats, and a wife who does all the driving, especially up strange mountain roads. He's a professional book reviewer for Publishers Weekly, the editor of anthologies such as Scheherazade's Facade and Schoolbooks & Sorcery, and his stories have appeared in venues such as Hexagon, Metastellar, and Stupefying Stories Showcase. He has a shiny new Masters in Children's Literature from Hollins University. For more, visit him at www.michaelmjones.com.