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"The Ivory Tower. They hold all types of magic equal."
Ivory. White. Eren claimed to, but really didn't understand the difference.
"You want to join the mages of Trovaire?" Tammas demanded, wishing he could shake his nephew in his exasperation.
"We are all mages of Trovaire," Eren snapped back, mouth hard, face stiff. Of course, it was perfectly reasonable for any young mage, raised on the national education of their day to believe so, but that didn't make it so.
Tammas' family went back generations on this land, but he was a wizard of the Ivory Tower, the luminous structure of its magic singing from a power well deeper than Eren had learned to cultivate. If only Tammas could have apprenticed Eren, but no, he'd gone to study under Elswind, a prodigious White Mage, the commissioned guild of the king himself. They were responsible for enforcing the kingdom's laws concerning the use of magic, and from what Tammas could tell, their instruction was not nearly so thorough nor rigorous as that of the Ivory Tower or as obligatorily polite as that learned by independent apprentices.
The Ivory Tower had existed long before this land became Trovaire. Tammas was fairly certain it would last past it as well, not being bound by the boundaries between nations or race or histories.
Ivory. White. The mages of Trovaire appreciated purity, having heard stories of the dangers of unusual magic from their earliest child, instead of hearing of its wonders.
"You're living in the ancient past, Uncle." Earnest concern creased Eren's face. "Shouldn't you be glad that our family is so honored? I'll be working for the royal household and learning the most developed magical spells. I could share with you—"
Tammas raised his hand. He wasn't young by any means. "It's your time to learn, Eren. I wish you well in it."
Even the white magic of Trovaire, carefully analysed into various affinities and particular skills, as if magic would ever be so constrained, and augmented with prewritten spells and artifacts—it had its place. It kept order. It was useful, if one didn't overstate its ability to constrain. The bounds set by white mages could even sort out a wizard's light magic into something understandable, and Tammas was aware the guild thought Eren a mage with light magic who preferred a paper medium to give it shape. He was further aware that Eren thought of himself as only that, so never argued against it.
Perhaps he had been wrong to never correct his nephew, for now he would lose the opportunity altogether. But working for the king wasn't wrong of Eren.
"Ah, youth," Tammas sighed.
His current apprentice, Analisia, watched Eren's departing back with shrewd eyes, only looking pleased when the house wards were no longer irritated by his presence.
"He's a handsome young man, my nephew," Tammas commented.
She always watched his departures so assiduously. But she only looked offended and gently folded a slip of paper. It grew green and lush, light slipping out to blossom into a flower in her hand. "I think I got the hang of this spell, master," she said simply.
Well, she'd make a very fine wizard. Not a mage. Not a mage of Trovaire.
"...the wizards, their magic is pure structure."
"You are very young," Dasyel told him when he first came to her for study. She watched him with black eyes and without smiling, black hair falling over her dark-skinned shoulders and loose colorful wrap.
She was not of Trovaire at all, but of the neighboring Wood. That is all its people called it, the Wood, and both neighboring nations claimed the road that ran through it as its territory, but no village occupied beneath the great branches, nor did any of the few residents consider it a nation to itself. It had no rule of government but that if you lived within one of its ivory towers, you were responsible for any trouble that went on in the Wood directly surrounding and you must eventually take an apprentice.
"Your power could run deep," she commented lightly, holding a hand near her eye as if to see him better thereby. "But you've not dug in your well. Your power is all lines."
"You can see it?" Tammas was quite young then. He could see magic clearly, most of the time, if he looked carefully, but he'd heard from other mages that sight was one of the lost talents.
Dasyel smiled. He only learned later, over time, how rare those smiles were. "Of course, child. Now show me something magical."
He folded some light with difficulty into the ring he used to see by and murmured the words that brought him sight.
"Ah, you are to be a wizard then," she said with some triumph.
The wizards of the Ivory Tower dug their magic wells deep, poured their power in the form of light into spells shaped by word and form—pure structure.
"Ours is the magic of shape," she told him simply. "It is not the only magic. You must be kind to all kinds of magic, that which feels, that which hungers, and that which rules."
"What kind is the magic of Trovaire?" Tammas asked curiously.
"The white magic? That which measures." She gave him a long, steady look until he felt the weight of her seriousness. "There is great power in that which measures, but knowledge and understanding are different skills."
"Chaos magic. Have you taken up believing fairy tales?"
When dragons roamed the earth and trees still walked, when fairies dipped their toes in living waters and humans minded their manners accordingly, the great trees of the wood were awake and they were hungry. Little children should always be in their bed before they uprooted themselves and walked across the land to hunt.
In those days, a hunter lived in a small cottage near the wood with his young wife and his small, hungry child, and at night, he went forth to hunt their food, for he worked at the mill when the sun was still shining.
On one night, he met a tree. Frightened, he said to the night, "Hide me," and he said to the wind, "Protect me," and he said to the earth, "Strengthen me." In his extremity, he prayed upon the elements and they answered him. Night took form and entered him, wind made it move as it willed, and the earth lent it power to destroy any enemy that would harm him.
Magic without intention to guide it, power only good for destruction.
The tree reached to spear him with its roots, but the magic rose up from within him, hiding him from view. It poured from his eyes, from his fingers and his limbs, and it rent the tree to pieces.
Then the wood no longer accepted him and it threw him out.
When he returned to his own wife and child, they could not see him through the inky blackness over his body, nor make him out from the destructive whirlwind rending all but the earth beneath his feet. They screamed and she took the child and ran to the nearest village, where she was given shelter.
This, little children, is why you do not call upon the earth or the night or the wind for power, nor go out in the wood where chaos still wanders.
"Untaught, strong magic may take odd forms, but there's no adept who by their nature can only destroy with magic, not control it."
She was different. Tammas didn't know what to make of her the first time he saw her at the king's court in Trovaire. Dasyel had brought him as her apprentice when all the mages and wizards and sages of the surrounding lands had been invited to share their wisdom in a single great conference of the magically adept. She had been skeptical enough of any such respect being granted to all the different forms of magic, but then...
"The White Mages like to remake the world in their own image. This is likely more of the same. It's your own home, child. Would you like to go?"
Tammas had not yet seen the court, for he was still only a teenager, and he'd yet to meet that which hungered or felt or ruled; the very thought brought him shivers. Yes, he would like to go.
So they went, and that was where he first saw a woman whose magic was tucked away in such a fashion he could not even make it out, but something in him felt it was certainly there. She was not a wizard, nor a White Mage. Their magic wells felt like bright springs inside them, or shining mirrors of all the magic they encountered.
He did not ask Dasyel what sort of magic the woman had. He went over to say hello.
As he came closer, he caught sight of the child beside her, who was blinking back magic. Tammas froze, unable to assess it as anything else, dark night black power slowly seeping back inside the little girl's eyes. She rubbed them, as if sleepy, then tucked her hand into what was likely her mother's.
Dasyel's heavy presence was suddenly beside him. "The Wilgrimore family," she said simply. She nodded in the woman's direction.
The woman nodded back.
It looked just like an illustrated copy of a common night tale, the cautionary bedtime stories of Trovaire.
"Is she all right?" he asked.
Dasyel barely glanced at him. "Of course, child. She's just very young."
Far younger than Tammas. He watched her totter after her mother a little longer and remembered he must be kind to all kinds of magic.
Slowly she soothed her aura, keeping her chaos contained.
Lily Wilgrimore went to the Wood after the conference. She had certainly wandered around enough, picked up enough copies of treatises to give her insight into many different kinds of new spells and descriptions of what sorts of magic various affinities could most easily produce. She herself had what the White Mages called a healing affinity, just as her daughter didn't.
Ah, but Lily wasn't much inclined to explain her daughter's natural warding magic—that which knew its own.
She took her to the Wood where their magic, that which felt, could most easily run free.
"It's all right," she told her. "You don't have to hide it right now."
The little girl looked wide-eyed into the thick spread of ancient trees, towering high enough to hide even the ivory towers scattered throughout. She spread her arms, laughter bubbling up her little body, and ran forward under the trees.
Magic danced and swirled from her body, tendrils snapping out into the wind, rushing over brush and trunk and branch like a swift brook of laughing water. Lily kept a mindful eye but let her daughter run.
The trees shuddered, rustling overhead. Bright-eyed beasts poked their heads out of the dense undergrowth of the Wood. Roots rose from the earth, and wolf song howled to the cadence of her daughter's magic.
All together, the Wood danced.