#mage stuff

I love writing Mages who don’t use their magic as their dominant weapon. I love writing Mages where you forget they’re mages until when pressed, they use some magic to get them out of a corner. I love writing Mages who don’t carry spellbooks, who are bad at pronouncing spells, and don’t aspire to be in the traditional ranks. I love Mages who hate the Circles not because they want to pursue magic unpoliced, but because they want to pursue things, period. Mages who are clumsy, unfocused, who hate carrying around staffs. 

Yes, I love writing Mages who want to be good at being Mages -- who are ambitious, experimental, and bold with their powers. But I also deeply, irrevocably love Mages who take one look at the ideal of the powerful, elite enchanter, and go “okay, but nobody asked me first what my dreams are if given the chance to finally live the way I deserve.” 

A Mage with aspirations and ambitions can look like so many things other than what the Circle Heirarchy entails or typifies. And it further damns the Circles and the Orders for what they force onto them: if all Mages want to be are powerful Mages, the Circles can be a natural go-to logic for creating that space. It’s when Mages want to be anything other than “Mages” as they have been defined (either powerful for the sake of being powerful, or servants/utilities to the Orders) that the record scratches. 

GUH Zal'ria’s just started on Ebonchill. That’s gonna take a while to get!

When the gentle passage of sleep washed over her, Ilyea could always tell that she hasn’t slept enough when the sound of the drums echoed like steady heart beat. The mage slipped into the familiar stance of a dream could never shake. 

Something she could never get rid of. 

The dream opened up in the familiar swamps of the Amani enclosure. It burned her nostrils as her ears picked up the delicate rhythm of the war party nearby. The sun had just set and the shadows lengthened among the reeds of the shallow pool. Ilyea as she was then moved silently using the location of the drums to move slowly around the pool to avoid their wanderings eyes. Night time was always the hardest because that is when the tribe seemed the most active but their patrol patterns were predictable. The young woman just had to keep moving to avoid them. 

It was as she dipped lower into the pool that her stomach growled a meager noise against the drums. Ilyea gulped the fetid waters to try and silence her stomach from making more of its  protests. She knew she was hungry but it was not the time she could eat. She could probably find some bugs on her second pass around if the trolls had not walked along the banks where they liked to gather. 

She took a step at each passing of the drums, the sediment against the water flushing against her heels. Ilyea inched along with a slow purpose that the cover of the bank gave her. 

Survival. 

The dream never really changed much from the purposefulness of the journey that Ilyea had remembered. The fear and the dark and the desperate way of her trying to survive. 

So it made her pause when she made another careful step in the water that her footing slipped into what seemed like some quick sand.  The lingering though it wasn’t her normal dream briefly flashed into her mind as the water swallowed her. The water pooled and rushed over her face before she could even scream. Her vision darkened as she choked back the scent of the water as her head began to feel fuzzy. White dots lined her vision that seemed to separate and elongate until she felt she was in another dream entirely. 

She felt baptized as she glanced at a long hall way lined with pictures of various sizes entirely curious as to what her dream decided to change into. Fear was slowly replaced into curiosity....

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Mavas if still observing the cube in his study would recognize the device flashing again as it activates.