Private - Lady Of Black Magic

Manya Boole.

A three foot, nine inches Faerin boy. He wore an oversized wizard's hat, wore flowing and fancy robes, and held a clean and new grimoire in his hands, with the first few pages written out with healing spells and warding magicks. But most of all, he had a bright grin on his face, the kind that could illuminate a room.

He was walking along the beach, having heard rumors and talk of a black magician on the beach of Dunnstads, a few miles north of Bryrwich, which was his last town on the route before he set his bearings and traveled here. A house, made of driftwood and seawood, and inhabited by a certain Madison Freebird.

Now, why would a White Magician go to visit a Black Magician?

Because Manya's grimoire wasn't as white as the neat and tidy pages it sported. Besides his major focus, there was also Black Magic written in. Spells to harm, attack, and kill. Spells that could cause a lot of problems and grief if used wrong. To fight off the foul users of dark magic, one should know them. Only then would you realize your weaknesses and by extension, their own weaknesses as well. So he was seeking a teacher or at least the first person in a line of teachers. He wished to see why others dabbled in the Black Arts, to learn how they handled it, and to understand how he too could use it not just for the allure and power, but also to help and save others, in a selfless and kind application.

Nothing needs to be black and white. Rather, morality was a very gray area. It mattered not if magic was evil or good - what truly counts was the heart of its wielder.

And he saw it. So far, he was walking quite forlorn, unsure of the truth within the rumors. A mile more and he'd have given up for the day, but he saw the yurt. His pace quickened into a run, and he ran the distance towards the house.

"HELLO?! ANYBODY HOME?!"

He was certainly energetic, but not subtle. He meant no ill will, of course, and he was excited to meet another veteran wanderer of this world. What kind of person would they be? Would they be angry and grumpy? Would they...actually be evil? No, that'd be horrible!

Maybe they'd be mysterious and strange...or perhaps just normal and boring, save for a twinkle in the eye and a dark fog on their hands - signs of a well-hidden prowess.

He stopped a few feet from the yurt, waiting with barely-contained anticipation.

@Madison Freebird

 

The one thing Madison loved about living on the shores of Dunnstads? Nobody ever traveled out this far enough up the cape to bother her.

A couple miles away from the fishing town of Bryrwich, she had set up a small camp for herself. It was a sort of yurt crafted from dead trees and driftwood, woven together with vines to keep the walls sturdy and a thick canvas covering the top to keep the rain away. With the bay at her doorstep and the forest at her back, she was content.

It was where the plagueslinger lived whenever she wasn't visiting Lucia's domain in Astorea, helping with the ziggurat or whatever other tasks the necromancer needed done. While a lot of other adventurers dreamed of buying property in Stokbon or Vintergard with their hard-earned gold and lording over a massive mansion filled with the spoils of adventure and the staff to keep it all nice as shiny, Madison just wanted a small place to herself, one that she could call her own.

She was never a big city kind of girl, anyway. And it was a quick jaunt to Bryrwich anyway, if she needed any groceries or supplies. The witch had an accord with several of the merchants and other service providers--if Madison kept a watchful eye on any bandits or occult activity in the area and helped out their healers and farmers, they'd give her obscene discounts on wares and whatever else she might need to conduct her own experiments as well as tell travelers to stay the seven hells away from the shoreline north of town.

When it came to that last bit, Maddy encouraged them to get creative with their stories. Direbears in the forests. Savage fishmen lurking along the rocky beaches. A cult of devil-summoning child murderers who only speak in tongues that do not know what vowels are. Ghost pirates. Whatever tales they wanted to weave, so long as she was left to her own devices and nobody asked questions.

Which meant she was incredibly surprised to year a young man shouting outside her home one sunny afternoon.

Madison was inside, bent over a pile of books, a bubbling cauldron off to one side. The inky contents gave off a plume of smoke that somehow managed to sparkle as it escaped through a flap in the canvas roof of the hut. According to the glyphs and scribbles in the book, that's what it was supposed to be doing. What the mixture was supposed to do, on the other hand, is best left for another time.

The witch froze, her hand hovering in midair, unsure of what to do next. Bounty hunter? Emergency visit from a villager? Courier? A cultist out for revenge? Probably one of the bad choices, she decided.

But that didn't mean she was going to turn into something small, like a wasp or a rat, and escape through the cracks of the driftwood wall. She was strong enough to face her troubles head-on by now. A snap of her fingers and a whisper from her thin lips, and a storm of vines would burst from the ground and envelope anyone who even entertained the thought of pulling steel on her.

She left the bubbling liquid stew in the cauldron. It was going to take a while to cook anyway, and she'd already put in the final ingredients. Sauntering over to the doorway of her little home, Madison considered fishing through her inventory for her corrupted deck of playing cards--the one with the eye of Titanius on them.

Nah, she decided as her spidery fingers gripped the canvas flap that served as her door.

Madison threw it aside, and standing outside her home was a little faerin she'd never seen before. Most of the citizens of Bryrwich were human, with a couple felis serving on the various fishing vessels that called its port home.

The boy had sandy hair long enough to be used as a mop if you held him by his ankles, and a blue coat that looked a size or two too big for him. In his hands, he held a grimoire. He stood there, smile on his face, expectant of... something, she wasn't entirely sure what.

"Can I help you," Madison finally said, her voice flat and cautious.

 

The tiny Faerin boy was nearly staring at the witch who had come out of the yurt. It was like a figurative jester chariot (the current equivalent for a clown car, of course), with the non-descript yurt housing a very spooky and impressive looking lady. Black hair and black clothes, could there be a better way to announce what you specialize in? He reminded himself to get some black dye if he's ever asked for a wardrobe change. She was also really, really pretty, but that wasn't the point here, magic was!

He clutched the book to his chest before bowing, making him look more like a brownie than a Faerin.

"H-hello there! I am Manya Boole, White Magician, and I am an adventurer! I c-came here because I heard that you were a p-powerful Black Magician!"

Oooh, was he going to challenge her wicked ways?

"I w-wish to learn from you, about Black Magic!"

Nope. Going on the offensive wasn't his style, and this lady didn't look like the evil kind - if she really was evil, she'd live in a huge castle and have spooky creatures as familiars and keep a lot of equally evil if less powerful servants at her beck and call. Instead, Miss Madison was just living in a lean-to of sorts. The people of Bryrwich were reluctant to talk of her, spinning fiction in its place, but after a lot of poking, prodding, and pleading, they finally told him about her. Sure, she might be a bit standoffish, but she did help the people out a lot!

And that means she was a good person with a good heart, case closed!

@Madison Freebird

 

Is this how Lucia felt whenever someone new to the game showed up in her territory unannounced? Just some starry-eyed little nerd shouting for attention because they don't have an actual door to knock?

If so, then Madison already hated it.

Gods above and below, this boy looked a little too excited to be there. The stutter in his voice, the fact that he addressed himself as an adventurer--the faerin was most definitely new to Terrasphere.

It was kind of hard for her to remember that she was once like him. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to carve her bloody path through both NPCs and players alike who stood in her way of her goal of controlling the criminal underworld. But even the day she spawned, she never referred to herself as an... an adventurer.

Cursemage, sure. Plagueslinger, definitely. And then cultist. Which was followed by witch. And now dark druid--specifically, if she felt especially entitled, she'd call herself The Dark Druid of Dunnstads. Mostly because nobody else was going to argue with her.

Madison swallowed the sour taste that the young lad left in her mouth and let the canvas flap fall back in place behind her. She had no real reason to shoo @Manya Boole away; the brew cooking in the cauldron was going to take a while to finish anyway. And what else was she going to do with her time? Flip through another chapter of those tasteful novels she picked up from her last jaunt in Stokbon? A bit too early for that, innit?

The witch hummed to herself and licked her lips in contemplation as she sized up the faerin. "Not exactly sure I'm the most powerful Black Mage around," she said almost as an apology. "But, yeah, I know a thing or two about it."

With a wave of her hand, Madison grew a small tuft of mossy earth from the rocky ground Manya stood on. Motioning for him to sit, the woman plopped her butt down on the driftwood porch and let her feet dangle off the edge.

"I suppose the first thing I should ask is what you plan on learning Black Magic for," she began, resting her hands on her knees. "It was the first school of magic that caught my eye. I found it's one of the most versatile masteries out there; curses and hexes that can drain health and debilitate over a long period of time, rituals that can corrupt the devout and taint the land, or incantations that channel your anger and hatred into something a bit more... immediately damaging."

Madison's hand hovered over the edge of the porch. It began softly glowing with the green energy of life. "Me; I use it to supplement my other arts. Not sure what they might have told you in Bryrwich, but I'm a master Nature Magus first and foremost."

The mana coursing through her hand flared up, and a braid of vines grew from the dirt at her feet into the air as high as her knees. "I study and practice the process of rot and rebirth. I'll spare you the specifics, since they probably don't interest you. But I use my knowledge of Black Magic to supplement my Nature, and--"

The wisps of green emanating from her hand turned a sickly purple as they drifted off into the air. Within moments, the tangle of briars began to turn brown and wither away, collapsing under its own weight as it began to disintegrate into a dark goop that coated the nearby rocks.

Her little demonstration over, she shook the excess mana from her hand and placed it on her knee once more. "So, yeah; you can use it straight, or you can use it to supplement your other skills. Which are you most interested in learning about?"

 

Manya watched with a mixture of awe and respectful fear on seeing Madison work her magic...literally! As she formed soft and springy moss over a rock and gestured for him to sit, he sat down, becoming even tinier in appearance in the process - it was like a miniature garden kobold.

Her first question caught him off-guard though, to the point that he couldn't answer her in his usual bubbly and cheery manner. Instead, he watched her own explanation of how she came to practice Black Magic. Now he felt bad at making very rude and untrue assumptions about her about things...she seemed to just use the magic as a tool, prizing its versatility and tandem properties over say, any actual attachment to its evil applications. He could respect that. Nay, he actually respected that a lot. He nodded in firm assent to her explanation.

And she was a Nature Magus! That was such a cool skill too, considering that the forests were all around them. It'd help to traverse such places safely if you were strongest in such an area, but the only reason Manya didn't pick that was because he wanted to be self-contained and consistent all throughout - it was not that such magic was bad, but Manya might not have been able to use it to its full effect.

Rot and rebirth sounded interesting too! Despite what people might think, the rot was a good thing! Everything had to die, and rot would clear them away and return them to the soil, which perfectly melded with her second ability - rebirth.

Perhaps she was not as black as many people painted her to be. She seemed completely decent, in fact!

"U-um...first off, I want to thank you...f-for taking me seriously!"

That had been a hurdle for a looong while - so many people didn't even bother to give the Faerin a second glance, much less take his claims of wanting to learn Black Magic at face value. But now he was here and Madison was humoring him, he felt a lot better!

"And secondly...um..."

Why did he want to use Black Magic?

"...I am learning White Magic, to help my friends in battle and strike down evil, and I also use Spellbane, to protect allies. But I know that sometimes, we all need to take up arms. And I didn't know what I should choose, so I chose the strongest out of the many I saw...the strongest and most versatile, but also the most opposed to what I do, Black Magic! Because if I can learn all I can about it, and be a master...then I will know how to protect the people I care for from its dark clutches!"

Even as he spoke, the unsure quality of his voice would simply fall back to reveal a bit more grit and strength than what was on display. He gave Madison a bright grin. "That's why I want to learn from you!"

"Please teach me the basics of Black Magic alone first!"

That truly was the first step - he could always learn how to combine his schools later on, and by himself if needed, but he needed a proper guide to learning Black Magic first.

@Madison Freebird

 

The dark druid thought about Manya's reasoning for a quiet moment. She didn't agree that White Magic was the best for helping out others. That title obviously went to Nature magic, for being so versatile--and the fact that you could rely on the strength of the world around you as opposed to the fickle whims of the gods above. Because once you did something they might not be terribly fond of, your prayers might get answered with an ethereal "not tonight, I have a headache".

But from a pure aesthetic standpoint, Madison couldn't argue with the faerin's choices. Light and Dark, Good and Evil, Yin and Yang. A perfect balance between the two schools could make him quite powerful indeed. And a good defense against the dark arts stems from a deep understanding from it--the intricacies of hexes, curses, and rituals must be known to one if they stand any chance of reversing their effects with holy magic. You can't just wave a glowing wand at the target and shout some Fake Latin and make everything right and wholesome again.

It was something @Manya Boole seemed to understand already, despite being so new to the game. For a moment, the boy reminded Madison of herself shortly after she first spawned and reached out to Lucia for advice. The necromancer was kind enough to give Madison an entire afternoon of her time--and it meant the world to her. So why not return the favor with someone just as eager and ready to learn?

"Right, sure, okay," the plagueslinger said as she stood up. She cracked her knuckles and worked the kinks out of her neck, then motioned the faerin to follow her. Madison led him down closer to the shore, where the rocks gave way to a small patch of sand. It'd be easier for him to focus if he didn't have to worry about his footing. "We'll start off with a basic withering spell."

With a wave of her hand, another cluster of briars snaked out of the beach and grew several feet into the air. Madison turned back to the boy, squared his shoulders, fixed his posture, and guided his hand straight out in front of him.

"What I want you to do now is to close your eyes, take a deep breath, and imagine. Picture in your mind's eye... decay. The skin of those vines turning black and shriveling up as the life within slowly bleeds away. And then, when you are ready to impose your will upon the living, say these words--"

She whispered an incantation in his ear, one he could write down later in his grimoire for future use if he so choose.

Madison waited for him to cast the spell, her expectant eyes glued to the green tangle of vines.

 

Manya waited patiently as the plagueslinger studied him. He stood up a bit, so she could see him clearly if she was judging his worthiness for tutelage. It felt like an eternity had passed...but soon, she nodded and gave a short enough reply indicating assent.

It was still enough to make the Faerin lad almost vibrate with excitement. He was in, yes! He'd have pumped his fist and hooted, but he wanted to stay calm and well-mannered in front of his new teacher, who seemed so at ease in her demure and focused stance. When she motioned for him to follow, he quickly did just that, his quick stride and manic energy helping keep pace with Madison. Once they reached a patch of the beach that was sandy instead of rocky, they had stopped.

A withering spell...yes. One of the fouler magics, it would directly affect a target, causing their defenses or body to take harm from dark energy, both from without and within, as the spell didn't rely on using brute force but instead, prompting a reaction from within the target itself. He nodded grimly. Had he been less prepared, he'd have hesitated to use the spell. Had he been given a target other than summoned vines, he might have protested quietly, even if he'd cave in and do as his teacher said. When Madison spoke the magic words, he committed them to memory. Running the words over his mouth, thinking in his mind. He looked at his hand and spoke the incantation, in parts, as a whole, and so on.

And he aimed his hand towards the vines, before speaking it out once more.

From deep within, a geyser underneath a verdant forest seemed to crack open. Black Magic hidden within him surged out from within the seals formed by his other two Masteries, and his fingertips tingled. And a miasma of darkened energy flew from his hands, a silent owl swooping at prey.

The vines, green and full of animated life from Madison's magic, now withered slowly. Blackening from the tips and then spreading down, slowly turning to infected tissue and then...ash. Crumbling away into the salty sea breeze.

And it spread, right down to the roots. Black Magic was thorough, and it was efficient. Had the plant been sustained by Madison, it'd have been easily repelled, but it wasn't, and now it scattered in the wind.

Manya felt slightly numb. He lowered his hand, and his face was pensive. Not fearful, nor in doubt. Just deep in thought.

Could he do the same with a person? A living person? In his mind, he had to imagine it, see it in vivid detail for it to work. But could he see a person in that much agony and keep his focus? It was doubtful...

...but his first lesson was done. Despite his inexperience, he was a very quick study.

@Madison Freebird

 

She watched on in silence, hovering over @Manya Boole's shoulder as he focused on the spell she taught him. It took a few seconds for him to commit the incantation to memory; but once the faerin was confident, the words hit the breeze with a practiced authority. Tendrils of dark miasma grew from his fingertips and snaked through the air before hitting the clump of hastily-grown vines sitting in the sand.

Within moments, they shriveled up and disintegrated into ash. Fine by her--Madison hadn't put any extra effort into growing the plants, and put even less into sustaining them. The witch wanted to show Manya the immediate destructive effects of Black Magic.

"Very good," she said with a nod. "A bit untrained, but that's alright."

The woman snapped her fingers, and grew a third length of vines before stepping alongside the faerin. "Black Magic is one of the purest and most dangerous forms of offensive magic, along with Pyromancy. A lot of people assume that it's one of the most direct and single-minded, too; but that's where they're wrong."

Madison held her hand out in the air and channeled mana corrupted by her inner darkness through it. "Sure, you can tap into your anger and cast a spell that will maim and kill. That's well and good, but sometimes the situation calls for something with a bit more depth to it. Something that will debilitate, rather than destroy."

As the witch spoke, the vines twisted and writhed, seemingly in pain while her magic coursed through them. Black spots began to cover their skin as the fungal infection took over, leeching life and feeding off the host. The leaves shriveled up as cream-colored mold chewed away at them.

She continued, "Your spells will never be strong enough to outright take out most obstacles that stand in your way; but a curse or a disease can go a long way to weakening it so you and your friends can overcome them. A sudden fit of vomiting to stop a charging foe. A memory curse to make an enemy forget about you. Spoiling the food stores of a camp of bandits to force them out into the open."

The wisps of miasma oozing from Maddy's fingertips turned a bright green as she tapped into the leylines around her and restored the cluster of vines in front of her to their full, natural, healthy state.

Madison took a step back and kept her link with the plants up. Just enough to sustain their energy in case the boy got a little too carried away.

"Let's see if you can do that. Just picture it all in your mind's eye."

 

Manya listened to her explanation as he watched the vines grow once more. Another test, now.

Of course, it wasn't the School that was dangerous, it was the person using it. In the same way, it wasn't the School that was good, but the person who could be most creative with it. He watched the plants be grown, and then afflicted by Madison's own Black Magic, causing drawn-out suffering instead of the quicker and perhaps cleaner damage from her Rot spell.

Manya watched with fascination, but also a hint of trepidation. Yes, his friends and allies would be counting on him to weaken their enemies...

He must master this. As Madison stepped away and offered Manya the chance to act, he began to think.

He had to craft his own spell this time. Something simple, that'd affect plants and debilitate them...
As she had spoken of harming humans, he could understand how important such abilities would be, tactically. A single ill-fortuned moment would be enough for someone to fall, and he could induce that if needed. Now, he had to learn to do that here. He aimed his palm towards the plants once more.

It was strange. Despite being right-handed, he was using his left for Black Magic alone. After a minute of thought, a spell was formed.

Again, a surge of energy welled up from his darkest recesses, and it shot out towards the plant...

...before seeping into the sand under it. Corrupting its roots, forcing it to draw the salt of the beach instead of the water. It was a subtle technique, but the vines slightly faded, shriveling up from being imbalanced physiologically, as well as having some of the residual miasmas from the spell itself contribute to harm the plant.

This time, he found that he needed to maintain the spell to keep the ground and roots corrupted. After about thirty seconds of holding it in a tenuous balance, he let out a breath and withdrew his hand. The afflicted soil began to smoke, sublimating a dark energy into the air which was swiftly burned away by the light. The roots took a bit longer, but it too faded.

He looked at his teacher once more for her judgment. He did not seem as excitable as before, but instead, he was calm and balanced.

@Madison Freebird

 

The dark druid nodded as the boy practiced a more controlled spell. She had to admire the creativity in the method--drawing nutrients from the sand instead of the water that permeated through the earth below, the vines began to show signs of dehydration, their green flesh turning the color of the beach itself as they were deprived of the element that sustained their life.

"Neat," she said as she waved a hand to dismiss the vines. "Interesting idea, dehydrating the plants. Just another trick of Black Magic you can use against your enemies. You better write all this down in that little book of yours."

Madison noted that @Manya Boole was starting to show signs of fatigue. Without a word, the woman ducked into her hut and came back out a few seconds later with a glass vial filled with a sort of unappetizing, soupy green liquid.

"Here, this'll refill some of your energy reserves," she called out while tossing the bottle at her student. "You're gonna' need them for your next test."

The smile on her face only grew as she stopped ten feet away from him. "Now, you're going to cast a spell on an actual, living being. More complex organisms are going to require more concentration and more energy to cast the spell. They'll also require more energy to dispel curses and status effects from, so you may as well get a sense of how everything works now."

Madison threw her arms out and pressed on, not giving Manya a chance to object. "Give me a migraine. Or make me throw up. It's okay, I can handle it. Just... don't fucking kill me, okay?"

She waited for him to cast his spell, but after a few seconds she could sense his trepidation. "Or if you want, we can go to town and drag a prisoner or some orphans back for you to practice on."

The law in Bryrwich had an agreement with Madison that, if there were any assholes locked up that they felt deserve to be punished in such a way, they'd allow her to steal them away and simply turn a blind eye to her experiments and magic. However, trying to kidnap an orphan would've been a bit of a hassle, so she hoped he didn't pick that option.

 

He smiled again at her, nodding. He knew that such a creative method would appeal to her, and perhaps such creativity was something that she, having chosen Nature Magic and Black Magic, would like to improve upon both in herself and others. He looked at his book and nodded. "Of course! I'll need a scribe's stand and an owl quill to inscribe the spells, so I'll do it later, ma'am!"

When she spoke about the next part of his training though, his own smile faltered a little. He had caught the vial by reflex and would have uncorked it and downed the concoction, had he not been caught up in her words. His smile was swiftly turning from cheerful to unsure, though, and then it outright vanished as she offered herself as a target. She might not have let him protest, but he just couldn't grasp the right words to express his sheer and absolute refusal of the offer. But before his mute wrestling with words turned into vague blubberings, she had gotten the message, and Madison backed down. He sighed in relief at that.

And then she made her second offer, which just sent him right back to inelegant blubbering.

"B-b-but! People are people! You can grow plants and vines over and over, but once people die, or are harmed, it's over!"

He might be able to protect them from the effects of Black Magic himself, but more so than that, it was the pain that he might inflict on them, that worried him. He looked at Madison, searching her eyes to see if this was a secret test of character or an actual and true suggestion.

And orphans! No, Manya wouldn't dare do anything to orphans, but he'd also not let anything happen to them.

"No harming children...please."

He asked this a lot more meekly. He did not delude himself into thinking that he could stop Madison if she wanted to. But he could try to convince her to not go through with it.

He had to decide, though. Three targets were there - his own teacher, prisoners, or orphans. And two of them he'd refuse out of hand. But the third...

Did anyone truly deserve to be harmed by black magic?

Of course. Otherwise, he'd not be here, trying to learn it so he could use it against the truly wicked. But what was justice but a relative scale? A criminal to him might be a hero to others...

He was looking to his teacher for guidance. His morality blinded him from a lot of harsh truths, letting him see things in a softer lie. Someone had to break it to him that not everyone is as nice.

@Madison Freebird

 

When she realized that @Manya Boole wasn't going to pull the trigger, Madison's arms dropped to her side. She couldn't help but to feel just a little disappointed--but she had to remember, not everyone who studied the darker side of magic was a heartless wretch like herself.

The witch's face twisted in stern disgust. "Jesus Christ, kid. I was joking about the orphans." Not the prisoners, though.

"But I get it. I can see it all over your face. You're not really the kind of person who wants to hurt someone." Maddy offered a soft shrug of her shoulders. "And that's fine! That's okay! You're a better person than I am, that's for sure."

Madison, the one whose first impulse after spawning in the game was ascending the ladder of The Aristocracy and gaining control of the criminal underworld. Madison, who just wanted to play another VRMMO and rack up another stupidly-high kill counter. Madison, whose first thought whenever presented with a situation she did not fancy was to go right for the murderdeathkill option.

Of course Manya was a better person than her. The bar was set pretty low to begin with.

She knelt down next to the fae and placed a hand on his shoulder. "But one thing you need to understand about Terra is that it's not a friendly place. Nice and colorful, sure. Has its share of plucky adventurers like yourself, yeah. But in every shadow, there might be lurking some monster who sees you as dinner, or some mercenary scum or rogue wizard who wants to practice some new techniques out on you. And for those situations--"

Maddy's gaze darkened considerably as her words became harder. "--you will need to learn how to defend yourself. And sometimes, the best defense is a good offense."

The woman heavily considered wrapping her hand in plague magic and bringing it inches from the boy's face, but she stopped herself. The faerin came to her to learn Black Magic; not how to wash his freshly-soiled trousers in the waters of the bay.

She stood up, took a step back, and scratched her chin in thought for a quiet moment. An idea finally sprung to mind-- "Tell you what, kid. If you're not comfortable throwing dangerous plague magic around right now, I know a couple people that might be able to teach you a trick or two that are a bit more..."

...what was the word she was looking for here?

"...friendly."

Yeah, that'll work.

Flicking open her palm menu, Madison pressed buttons and scrolled bars until she found the boy's information under a "nearby allies" menu. She spent the next several seconds preparing a message with the contact information of a couple other players.

"Sending you the details on a couple people I know. One's Lucia Mierz, a master at Black Magic, Spirit Magic, and Necromancy. She's got a place of her own carved out of Astorea. Everything in her domain's dead--the people who live there, the earth itself, everything. But don't let that scare you; she's one of the nicest people I've met on this planet. A bit eccentric, but she'll help you out big time."

Madison pressed the translucent send button on her UI, and closed it down. "The other's another weird-ass witch who lives in the woods, like myself. But while I'm all spooky plagues and twisted briars and shit, she's all Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland aesthetic and frog people the size of yourself. Her name is Grand Witch Majolica. She uses Black Magic to... ah... how shall I say..."

The dark druid's lips pursed into the thinnest of lines as she muttered, almost embarrassed to say the words, "Well, she's half my age, punctuates every sentence with a cackle--" Madison did her best impersonation of the Grand Witch's trademark "hehehe"-- "calls people she hates 'goblins', and uses Black Magic to transform people into toads. So that's what you'll probably learn if you go visit her."

She dug through her inventory for a couple spare coins and tossed them his way. "It's getting a bit late, and I have a cauldron brewing inside that needs to be watched. Go ahead and stay in Bryrwich tonight--tell them I sent you, and the food they serve'll be a bit fresher than normal." Madison winked at the faerin before continuing. "Remember what I said about sometimes people just need to be hurt in order for you to survive and protect your friends. Think about it, sleep on it, and get back in touch with me if you'd like to learn my brand of Black Magic some more. If you don't want to; that's fine. Lucia and Maj can also help you out a great deal."

 

Manya blinked a few times, as relief flooded through him. Ye gods, that was tense!

Madison might think that he was a better person than her, but as far as he could see, Madison wasn't that bad a person. A bad person wouldn't have humored him as much as she had done right now, nor would they have taught him all this, as well as taught him that one important lesson, that of applying necessary force, when needed.

As she spoke, Manya listened to all of it intently, nodding his head when needed. He had to first swallow that lump in his throat before speaking, anyways.

When she spoke of other teachers though, he lit up, listening intently to the details. Lucia Mierz, in Astorea in a place full of dead creatures. A necromancer...that's something.

Then there's Grand Witch Majolica. She was a witch, so his first image was of bubbling cauldrons and toads (not frogs, funnily enough). He'd need to find her too, but that'd be a tricky proposition.

But he should be considering it part of his lesson! His quest to find them would be dragging himself through monster- and evil-infested paths, and he'd not be able to just run away or hide or simply defend himself. He'd need to fight back, and for that, he'd need Black Magic.

He resolved to seek their tutelage at a later date when he was stronger. But then...Manya was special. He introduced himself as a White Magician, but his aptitude for Black Magic was simply staggering...

Even this brief encounter had taught him greatly. About directly harming enemies, and leaving them crippled. And soon, he'd need to develop it further.

When she tossed him a few coins, he caught it again, by reflex. He looked at the gifts his teacher had given him - a vial of potion to restore energy, and some coins to spend the night in Bryrwich. And he looked back at Madison again.

"I understand. And...thank you. For everything."

Sure, he wasn't done learning from her. He'd return at a later date, perhaps. He might even work into learning Nature Magic so he could learn her discipline in a closer form, but for now, he understood a dismissal when he heard it. He did not mind it, though.

And the tiny Faerin did something very surprising. Stepping forward, he wrapped his hands around his teacher and simply hugged her tightly. As short as he was, it was like a child embracing their teacher, which wasn't too far from the truth of it. A platonic, if grateful, embrace.

"No one's better or worse than others, Miss Freebird. But some have found their places in the world and settled in better. As you have, and as I hope I will."

A squeeze, and then he let go stepping back. His smile was back before it split into a brilliant grin, that grin that just seemed to make everything seem alright!

"I'll see you later, then! Bye! And thanks for..." He held the potion up, before turning around and running back. "...for the potion!"

He too was interested in medicine and alchemy, and he wondered if the next time, Madison would teach him more about that as well. But for now, he must say farewell...

@Madison Freebird