Headcanon (kind of?)
Finally sat down and worked out a timeline for Madeleine's backstory. It's under a Read More because it turned out to be quite long.
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| Madeleine Wetherell is born. She is a winter baby, born in late December. | Madeleine is 4 1/2. Sarah is born in early summer. | Maddy is 6 1/2, Sarah is is 2, and it is summer; from this time to the year the Aunt arrives (3 1/2 years), the sisters manage to chase off six nannies. | Maddy is 10, Sarah is 5 1/2. This is the winter that the Aunt arrives, bringing with her her stories. The girls decide that instead of being partners-in- -crime, they will be heroes. Maddy will be the greatest enchanter that ever lived, and Sarah will be the second-greatest, or possibly a knight. | Maddy turns twelve and decides to be Madeleine, not Maddy. This is the beginning of Madeleine's angry period as well as Sarah's shy and uncertain period. This is also the year that the girls (Sarah is 7 1/2) first meet the Professor, who is eccentric and fascinating and studies all the different kinds of magic there are. Also he is a cursebreaker. This is the first Madeleine has heard of this profession. | Madeleine, 12 1/2, has for some time been showing a great deal of promise as an enchanter. Her parents are very pleased, almost enough to make up for Sarah's utter lack of talent for magic. That summer the Aunt secures permission to take the girls to her old home in New Mexico. The winter following, Madeleine does a great deal of thinking. She comes to the conclusion that she will not be like her parents and finds that she very much wants to do something worthwhile with her talent. | Madeleine is sixteen. She has been visiting the Professor, listening to his stories of strange magics and far-off countries, and helping him with his notes and experiments for several years. He offers her an apprenticeship: the chance to travel the world and study magic in all its many forms. She begins to make plans to cut loose from her parents' world. | Madeleine is seventeen when her plans come to fruition. She finally provokes an argument with her father bigger than any before, introduces the idea of leaving, and is disowned. The following day, having been stripped of the Wetherell surname, she changes her name to Ward. She and the Professor sign an apprenticeship contract on New Year's Eve and leave for southern Europe within the week.
| In the course of her seven-year apprenticeship, Madeleine travels, learns, studies, and meets people all over the world. | Madeleine strikes up a friendship with Theo, a student of mathematical magic who studied with the Professor for a few years before seeking instructors nearer to his specialty. Madeleine and the Professor begin to make a habit of wintering wherever Theo happens to be studying at the time. | During the fourth year of the apprenticeship, it becomes clear that the Professor is making a point, among the various people and places they visit, to seek out unusual curses and magic users who break them. His interests lean towards the anthropological approach, while his student is clearly aiming at a more proactive career. | Theo begins developing a set of fascinating new theories about the application of modern physics to spatial magic, as well as exploring the field of thopothesimorphology. | Towards the end of the fourth year, shortly before Christmas, when Madeleine is about to turn 21, she screws up the courage to write to Sarah, now 15 1/2. She is very worried that her sister will never forgive her for having left and, worse, for having failed to reestablish contact before, but it turns out that Sarah is just delighted to hear from her again and has apparently grown up and out of her preteen timidity and lack of confidence. | Madeleine and Theo run experiments and test new ideas in the Professor's old house in Campobasso, which contains a number of old magically-bent rooms and passages. When their research runs out of space, they acquire an old, magically-saturated building in San Francisco. This becomes home base for all kinds of experiments; even the Professor takes advantage of the place sometimes. | Their first great triumph occurs when they manage to link the back hallway of the research building to the side door of the library in the Campobasso house. Over the following months, the building becomes a marvel of bent space, containing rooms and bits of space from a half-dozen buildings in various parts of the country. By the time Madeleine and the Professor depart in the spring, Theo has flung himself into a new avenue of research: windows and doors. It is the sixth year of Madeleine's apprenticeship; she is 22. | Sarah lets slip that she is a dragon-slayer. This is news to Madeleine, and she only comes down from her haze of protective fury when Sarah points out that she is also really damned good at it. The Aunt, who knows a thing or two about dragons, confirms this. Nonetheless, Madeleine finds new impetus to explore protective magic. | Madeleine and Theo discuss the possibility of entering private research after they complete their education. After all, they already have the space, a fully- equipped magical laboratory, and a research partner with comparable levels of sanity. Also, they blow up the back room and replace part of it with the front. | Sarah writes that she intends to take a gap year after she graduates, in order to travel. Madeleine resigns herself to having a little sister who habitually goes around picking fights with things that would like to eat her. | Madeleine turns 24 and, shortly after, graduates her apprenticeship. She and Theo open a small magic shop in what used to be the back room of their research building but, due to certain bends in the physical shape of the building, is now an admirable front room with a Door that goes a great many places. The Shop earns a capital letter by making very clear that, as they suspected, it has a will of its own. This is not unheard of in locations that have been drenched in magic for many years, and Madeleine at least is rather pleased. | Towards the end of January, they stand on a couple of hovering chairs and paint in bright red letters, Drake & Ward Custom Spellwork and Misc. Magic. By the time the paint has dried, the Shop has decided that it prefers to be known as The Dragon's Lair.
