Sometimes, Sean felt that Wizards were like barbarians in robes.
The reason for this thought came from a painting hanging beneath the stands—
"Violent Hand" Gant Is the Winner.
It depicted an ancient German pole-guard game and was also a famous painting.
In it, a group of Wizards wielded sharpened brooms as they surrounded a Wizard with a rope tied around his waist. Behind the rope hung a large, inflated "bladder."
The Wizard had to use every ounce of his strength and magic to drive away the attackers and protect the "bladder" behind him from being destroyed.
That alone would not have been enough to make Sean think so.
But what left him speechless was that the "bladder" belonged to a fire dragon.
That meant that every match cost a fire dragon its... "bladder."
Sean suspected the whole thing might have been a lie fabricated by Wizards to display their martial strength and demonstrate their dominance over the magical world.
Like how some hunters mounted animal heads in their homes.
Yet Wizards' fondness for "bladders" was indeed rather strange.
Beneath the northern stands,
hung a painting of Ireland's once-thriving stilted fire-bucket competition.
It was a theme repeatedly sung of in many Irish Wizard folk songs.
The legendary Wizard "the Fearless" Fingal in the painting was said to have once been a stilted fire-bucket champion.
One after another, the contestants carried a "dom," or ball, swiftly through a series of burning Wooden Buckets propped high in the air on stilts.
The contestant who got the dom through every bucket in the shortest time without catching fire along the way was the winner.
The ball was a sheep's bladder.
Then there was the painting beneath the western stands, where people rode brooms backward.
The athletes rode their brooms backward and used the