The Eternal Phoenix & The Second Affinity

Between the time when Miss Anare alerted us she was returning, and her arrival, Marin and I continued practicing in the training hall. I taught her the absolute basics of strengthening magic through sigils, and we spent most of the time making small mounts of stone. It reminded me of when I first started learning magic; her excitement for it all was infectious, to a certain degree.

When I felt Miss Anare's flames, I walked out of the training hall to greet her, that warmth in my chest quickly spreading to the rest of my body as she got closer. How excited she was going to be at the prospect of someone with two affinities in their body!

"Miss Anare! Welcome home!" I shouted out as her glow appeared over the ridge. As much as I wanted to run to meet her halfway, the pain in my legs was a grim warning of what the morning would bring already, so I waited.. albeit, impatiently.

It only took a few minutes for her to actually make it to the gate of the estate, and as ever she looked radiant and powerful. She smiled as she walked up to me, and I returned it.

"Mari, Marin. I'm glad to see you up and about already! Though, are you sure you should be?" She asked with a bit of concern in her voice, while she looked over me carefully.

"Well I'm still pretty sore, but I couldn't take sitting around all day anymore, so.. we got a bit of practice in. And.. we might have made a discovery." I teased. Her eyes immediately lit up, and she looked around me as though that discovery was somehow hidden behind me.

"So," I began, "after I had cast my first spell, Marin raised an excellent question. Was she capable of magic?" We walked toward the house as I spoke, "I figured there were two possibilities; either that everyone in our world is capable of magic because of something inherent to the world itself, and she'd eventually develop some, or, because she's half of me, she already had some."

Inside, Miss Anare started some tea, before sitting down to hear the rest of our discovery. "I realized that there was one way to find out for sure; the affinity test!" I said with a bit of a flourish. Miss Anare was obviously intrigued, but there was something else pressing at the edges of her smile it seemed.

"So, I set up the circle, and tested my theory. At first there was a bit of confusion; how do you test the affinity of someone who doesn't have a physical body? I decided it was best if I stood in the circle, and as you might expect it lit up white." She nodded along, but remained silent.

"And that is what happened, yes. At least, before my right foot entered the circle. As soon as it did, the circle turned yellow, which as you know isn't a colouration for any affinity we know of. As it turns out, at least as far as the magic of our world is concerned, Marin DOES possess a body, or at least, half of one. My right side."

It seemed to have clicked for Miss Anare the moment I mentioned that the colour had turned yellow, yet still she remained silent, her attention fully on me as I spoke, but her smile had fully faded. "So I put my right foot in first, and as you seem to suspect already, the colour was orange. This confirmed that not only was Marin already capable of magic, but that she had her own, separate affinity! Earth!"

She remained silent for another moment, then stood. She walked up to me and placed her hands on my shoulders, and her voice came out quiet, but gravely serious. "Mari.. you are not to speak of this to anyone else, nor are you to show this to anyone else. Do you understand me?"

"I.. yes, I understand what you're saying Miss Anare, but.. why?" I asked hesitantly.

"Obviously you're aware that you're not my first apprentice. There have been many, before you. It was mostly my own thinking that brought this tradition to life. I thought that if I helped people to reach similar levels of power to myself, or somewhere even close, then we could all work to better the world. I was.. mostly correct."

She turned around, and I saw what must have been the exit wound to that horrible scar, as this one seemed to have expanded compared to the first. "My first apprentice was an exceptionally talented witch, much like yourself. They seemed to have no upper limit, and in my naivete, I pushed them hard, with little restraint. I believed whole-heartedly that if there was even one more person like me, that I could live as I wanted to, as carefree as can be.." She stood in silence for a few moments, lost in her thoughts. The room felt cold.

She suddenly pulled her top back into place, and turned back to me as she did it up, "There are those of us in this world who have been given a task, either by fate or divinity. I tried to offload that task onto someone else, and in return, I and others around me paid a price I could never have been prepared for. Where you now stand Mari is at a precipice entirely unknown to me. Your magic was already astonishing during the assessment, and now has seemingly only grown. To then add a second affinity, and in an element that strengthens your first affinity.." She trailed off as she gazed at me..

I suddenly felt like a ticking time bomb, waiting to go off and change the flow of the world. I felt that I was shaking, but I couldn't stop myself. "Mari, when I look at you right now, I can't imagine the world that your existence will create." She stepped forward and wrapped her arms gently around me, and pulled me close. I could hear the mana roaring through her body.

"I don't want others to look at you and see nothing but a weapon they can use. So, we're going to train this newfound power of yours. We're going to make sure that you have absolute control over it, and we're going to keep it between ourselves for now. Okay?" She asked as she gently stroked my hair.

All I could do was nod. I was terrified, and I couldn't shake the feeling of dread that things were going to change even more than they already had.