Chapter Text
It was an accident.
Tirnisse hadn't wanted to hurt the man. Really, honestly, she hadn't. He'd just been so drunk, and it had been so dark, and she had wanted so badly for him to just stop touching her.
She'd only meant to kick at him. That's all she'd been planning to do when she whirled about that last time - just kick him, just once, just in the shin or something. She hadn't meant… she'd never thought…
She wasn't a mage. She didn't have any relatives she knew of who were. She'd never shown any signs before; how could she have known what the choking, gasping, dizzying feeling had meant? She'd had… episodes, before. Panics. It had felt just like those. How could she have known what was coming?
She wasn't a mage. Mages were liars and sneak-thieves, traitors to their own nature, meddlers in affairs not meant for mortals. That wasn't her.
It wasn't her.
It wasn't.
(Sweet Light, she'd panicked like this before, and so often around friends and relatives. How many of them could have been hurt? Was it really panic, or just a signal of something worse coming?)
She wasn't a mage. She wasn't.
(How many times had she almost attacked her own parents?)
She had helped the poor man drag himself to a healer. She'd turned herself in for what she'd done. She'd shaken and wept until her throat went raw and never, never stopped apologizing even as she was hauled into the little shack that served as the local court.
No one would listen to her. She was tried for attempted murder, and only just avoided serving time in the nearest prison because she promised instead to leave the province altogether unless and until she learned to control her own magic.
(Magic I never knew I had! she'd wailed during the trial. The judge - a man who had been a beloved friend and role model when she was a child - had looked at her with such betrayal in his eyes that she'd had to be escorted from the court until her sobbing had subsided. People she knew were there in court, and acted like she'd lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite - all but her family had flinched away as she passed.)
She wasn't a mage.
(Magic was not looked kindly upon in her hamlet. She learned the hard way that not even accidental magic, awakened by the need to protect oneself, was easily forgiven.)
She was not a mage - but she was filled with magic like a pouch full of poison and all the seams were ripping.
And she didn't know how to stitch them back up again.
She was not a mage - and look what had happened.
(Magic did not belong on honest soil.)
She had heard of Dalaran. City of magi and magic. She had been left to apply for an education at the school there, and - after reviewing the details of her trial - and been accepted “for the good of the citizenry.”
Tirnisse was no dumb hick. She knew that was the polite way to reiterate what the court had already ruled: She was a menace to society.
They would hate her in Dalaran even more intensely than they hated her here.
Her mother was sympathetic, at least. Her father tried to be, but… it was her father. Emotions in general were difficult things for him to express (though she knew by now how to see the hurt in his eyes, how to hear the anxiety and loneliness already setting into his words.)
A mage came for her three days after her trial. Tirnisse trembled as the boy (and he was a boy, young enough to have been her brother) spoke alien words that ripped a hole in the air before her.
“Right then,” the boy said, as calmly as though he hadn't just torn the fabric of reality. “Miss Fay Rederric?”
Her parents had started at that; it had only been Tirnisse nodding and stepping forward without hesitation that kept them quiet.
She hoped they would understand why she had given the administrators of the Dalaran school a false name - or else that they would guess at an alternate explanation that didn't hurt their feelings. She would have to find a way to tell them in secret that she hadn't wanted any shame she earned in Dalaran to reach them here at home. A false surname would protect them from that.
And “Fay” would protect herself from any well-bred magi who might take offense to a farm girl with so dignified a name as Tirnisse. She had hidden her mother's real name, as well - rather than Alcatirisse, when asked who her parents were, Fay had named her mother Lilly. She had done a good enough job stammering and shaking and falling into the coarsest slang she could manage that the administrator who had spoken with her had taken her at her word, smiling and gently remarking that it was always lovely to deal with simple folk from simple upbringings.
She'd ignored the insult. It wouldn't be the last of them, and it had helped her skate through her application on a half-course of lies.
Her departure wasn't a secret thing; gossip and the weight of her crime had made that impossible. By the time she was finished hugging her parents and gathering up her single bag of clothes and personal items (hair brush, a year's worth of willow tea, a small carving her father had given her when she was small, a book gifted to her by her mother just the year before, supplies not fit to be mentioned but essential for a young woman to carry), the entire village had gathered to watch their latest - maybe deadliest - menace leave.
And there, at the front of the crowd, was the man responsible for all this, bald now and hideously scarred for the rest of his life because he'd been a drunken oaf, and she had been afraid of him.
Tirnisse turned away and approached the portal to Dalaran before anyone could see the tears welling up in her eyes.
She hadn't meant to burn him so badly.
The portal made its own wind, and she could smell perfumes and foods she had no names for as she hesitated before it. Would it hurt? Could she fall out of it before she reached Dalaran? What if something went wrong before she reached the other side, and she was trapped in some horrific void forever? What if--?
“Go on,” the Dalaran mage urged her. “It's just like stepping through a doorway.” His voice was gentle, and she appreciated that, even if it did make her feel small and weak. She needed a little gentleness just then.
Tirnisse Collingwood squeezed her eyes shut, clutched her luggage closer to her, and stepped through the portal.