>>5777359You felt your heartbeat quicken, and start to move to hide. You shouldn’t have been there, obviously! Or, well… You actually SHOULD have, to get your notes, but you shouldn’t have just listened in like that, surely?
And yet… You didn’t move. You can’t. And so you came face-to-face with Archmage Theresa Henzler for the first time.
“Hm? What’s this?”
She peered down at you, past a pair of glasses that, from a quick survey with your mage’s Second Sight, you could tell are neither for correcting her eyes nor purely decorative—they were enchanted, a magical item.
“Ah,” she says, when you didn’t speak up, “the half-elf. Yes, I’d heard about you.”
“Y-you have?” you asked, unable to help yourself from fawning a little bit, even blushing. The Archmage of Hawksong’s Mages Tower has HEARD of you? PERSONALLY?
“Well, if I hadn’t, the ears would still be a dead giveaway,” she noted. “And anyway, my… DAUGHTER… has spoken of you. A reasonable student, I’m told, and gifted in the Artes Vitae—biology, living alchemy, medical magic. That sort of thing. A worthy discipline. She says you can even cast a <Cure> spell of some potency and reliability, despite your age.”
“I can,” you saaid proudly.
“Well,” the Archmage corrected herself, tutting, “I say ‘despite your age, but I guess I ought to refer to your stage of development, in your hybrid lifecycle. You are in fact… What was it? Twenty years old, in a class of sixteen-year-old humans, and among the shortest and least mature among them. Hm. Still, respectable enough.”
Your words dried up in your throat.
“Now, move.”
You didn’t, and so Archmage Henzler raises an eyebrow. For a moment, you feared that her gaze would strike you dead—like a <Power Word>, but silent; like a <Chill Touch>, with just a glance. You trembled, slightly, and yet:
“You’re wrong about your daughter, Madame Archmage."
