The Emerald Garden

[Lady Chess]

Yuna
All the movements have to be exact. Relaxed but restrained; open yet strong. They warned me that the art of creation was a difficult one, but I've always felt like out of all the art forms, I could master this one. The arts of fire and wind were too difficult for me to control, water was too unpredictable, and I always thought that earth took too much concentration. Creation was imaginative, but it also took up every ounce of my being to conjure. My magic sparked warm energy in the tips of my fingers as I pulled my wrists in small circular motions to try and summon my object.

I was trying to summon a sprout for a willow tree. The masters had been talking about this area of the garden being too muddy lately and I thought a tree as thirsty as a willow would thrive. It was difficult, though, concentrating my energy just right. I came out to the temple courtyard specifically at noon so that while everyone else was eating lunch I could work without any prying eyes. I wasn't nearly as strong as the other students, but once I got my power to come through m creations were something to be admired. I took pride in that.

 

[Penelope Sky]

Delynn

She planned for it to be a daily practice, Delynn had so carefully decided, to escape the confines of lunch for the silence and sanctuary of the temple gardens to not only practice her feeble set of spells, but to take shelter from the overshadowed world she once referred to as a life so full of potential.

A solid plan, wandering away like that - a solid plan indeed - for a girl balancing a precarious set of spell books stacked dangerously to her chin. Delynn was not a tall girl - in fact, she was the exact epitome of what many would refer to as a short girl - but there was enough space from her midsection to her throat for her to carry a large, rather inhuman, stack of magic tomes. Way too many to study all in one shaved off lunch period, she figured, but at least a wide enough selection to make her picks on what worked and what simply did not. Excess, to Delynn, was not the word - the word was progression, and she needed a whole lot of it.

The temple gardens were, as she heard from her tendency to eavesdrop on the masters, supposed to be rather muddy looking nowadays, although that wasn't the first thing she noticed when she arrived, attempting to clumsily balance a whole library in two chubby hands. The first thing, in fact, that caught the vibrant green eyes of novice mage Delynn was another girl, a thin one with curly brown hair who seemed to be engaged in some sort of magical practice - one that Delynn, being generally nosy - soon vowed to find out.

At the moment, however, she knew not to interrupt. Even being naive for her tender age of 18, Delynn knew the concentration it took to perform any sort of spell or incantation, and she would not break the girl's focus on her experiment - in Delynn's case, her younger brother had done that enough times already.

In the spirit of silence, and hoping the other mage's work would turn out as planned, Delynn quietly took a seat on a stone bench along the edge of the garden, carefully stacking her books beside her, and flipped to the first page of a thick, purple bound tome, an intriguing study of healing magic in the time of the first Great War.

Today, she would begin to surpass them all.

 

[Gelatinous Cube]

How in any of the seven hells did you get here, Matheos?
He had been grading exam papers for the last three hours and his hands were beginning to cramp. The candles in his chamber were going out, but with a wave of his hand they were replenished. The older mage sat back in his chair, a ghastly, ostentatious thing that looked like it may have been picked up from a Romanian castle sometime in the 1400's.
It had been a strange, terrifying and ultimately painful journey that had brought him to this point in his life. A tale complete with evil Vampire Lords, vengeful (and supposedly dead) Warlocks, dead loves and enough fire and blood to last anybody a lifetime or ten.
He was aware of the rumors that the students told about him. He was only afraid of the ones that he knew were true
(He's a murderer...a warlock...his old master came back from the dead for revenge...he's killed more people than we've ever met...)

He clutched at the locket around his neck, and closed his eyes in remembrance of her. The witch that had stolen his heart, then cast it away only to ultimately find it again for so short a time before she was cruelly snatched away by the claws of evil.
Ray had had his revenge though, had ripped it from the heart of his enemies in what was supposed to be a final act of savage vengeance before he could pass on and meet his Kyra in the next life. Alas, it had not gone that way. He'd lived, and been given an opportunity. The White Council of Mages had forgiven him his past crimes for dealing with two of their most powerful enemies, but had concluded that he was still a danger to the outside world at large.
So they shoved him where he could do some good and where they could keep a close eye on him.
The Academy.

So now, he had gone from being the unwilling servant of a vampire lord (which was the one thing keeping the execution at bay) to defying said Vampire lord, to...becoming a teacher. He had to admit, he had not seen that one coming.
The room was growing too stuffy, and he as ahead of schedule anyway. Ray decided it was time to take a walk.
He grabbed his coat and headed out, squinting in the midday light. His hair had grown long, and he'd grown somewhat unaccustomed to shaving, and with the dark grey creeping into his beard and temples he must really be beginning to look the part of the stereotypical wizard.
He'd been at the academy long enough to know his way around fairly well. He found himself (as he so often did) walking the parapet that surrounded the Temple courtyard. He peered down at the scene below where a student was attempting a creation spell.
He knew Yuna, but not too well. She was hopeless at Pyromancy and Thermatology (which were Raymond's subjects), but showed a fantastic grasp of the magic of Creation. Sitting nearby with her nose deep into a tome was Delynn. A studious girl to be sure, with an exceptional talent for white magic.
Two young women who had chosen the path of light, they seemed the antithesis of this older Mage with a black magic stained soul.


((I promise I won't make my future posts that long :P))

 

[Lady Chess]

Yuna was too deep in to concentration at this point to notice her solo audience sitting on the bench. Her mind revolved around the image of a tree fully grown and thriving. She lower herself to her knees and planted her pale hands into the mud, feeling it squish between her fingers. The seed formed between her fingers, gentle and fragile. She lifted her hand with the stalk of the sprout as it pierced out into the air. She moved her body in a circular dance as magic wove the plant to grow larger and larger. Wood started to form, creaking and cracking as it grew. Long, slender leaves started to appear from vines that grew from its branches. Yuna opened her eyes as the willow towered eleven feet.

With a sigh Yuna broke her magic and lowered her hands. Amidst her spell Yuna had managed to cover her sweater and pants in brown, slick mud. Completely forgetting, she wipes her hand over her forehead, streaking the mud just over her left eye. Her mind was busy examining the willow, making certain that her magic was stable. When Yuna was 16, she created a rose bush for one of her masters, but within an hour the bush had decayed. It was an unfortunate loss of life energy. Three years later she still had nightmares about it. Now, every single creation was a delicate piece to her. Perhaps that attributed to her reputation as a creation mage.

It was nearly a half hour before she had finished. She built and stabilized the willow with extreme caution. A creation that large wouldn't take much to become unstable, and Yuna wasn't as sure of her powers as she should have been. Brushing her hands together as the dried mud flaked off from her fingers, she finally became aware of her surroundings.

That was when Yuna realised her company. A round faced red head sat on the bench just across from Yuna. Rather or not the younger mage had been studying or watching, Yuna couldn't be sure. In her realization of the other mage, her face lit up a nice pink on her pale skin. She opened her mouth to ask what the other mage was doing there, but stopped herself for the sake of sounding rude. Instead, she continued with a simple yet shaky, "H-hello."