Year two passed quickly, most things not new, except for my teacher making me corrupt the temple with some questionable ritual she wanted me to perform. Every week, she grew less and less present in my life, always out on errands to find components for the ritual I was drawing.

At first everything went well, at night I would sneak into the temple and etch runes into the building, while I spend the days searching through her tomes to find some information on the work I was doing.

It worked for the whole rest of the pyro month, until one night, I heard the sigh of a disappointed man behind me.

“Is she making you sacrifice the entire town? She should really stop making her disciples do that. Every time someone shows promise, she twists them into the very same role, its becoming exhausting.”

I turned around slowly, a tall, robed figure standing behind me with obvious sadness barely visible in the light of a distant torch.

“We would have been a well known birthplace of legends at this point, some college contracting with us so we could send our best there. Instead, we remain the smallest place in Leafbloom, not even marked on maps that mark the domain of Riverwood city.”

Most would either say something stupid now or simply freeze, but as anyone following this journal of mine might have noticed, I have never been ordinary. Thus, I decided to grow my scheme just that little bit more.

“I know what she plans on doing, and there is an ancient ritual to get rid of her. It will involve the corruption of divine energy, though.”

Of course, it was somewhat of a lie, though mostly just me phrasing things or leaving out information so he can paint his own picture.

“All I need is to draw here day and night, you can even read it yourself if you want to. I can’t deviate too much from the ritual she wants me to do, some weird hag magic or something.”

I offered, hoping on most peoples inherent laziness and the fact that I still looked like a child to some degree to guide his decision in my favor.

Had he done any research at all, I would have died during the next week.

“You are bold, but I sense no falsehood in your words. I will pray on it and decide whether to trust you or not once the gods have given me guidance.”

Said divines seemed quite happy with me, if the intensity with which he ignored me from then on was any indication.

He even semi left the key to his personal library on the altar, allowing for me to slip in and take a look at the temples knowledge on runes.

The next weeks were a blur, more and more information filling my head, the occasional moment of respite used to organize my knowledge in a way I could work with.

The festival happened at the temple, and still, I drew, working and redrawing parts of the ritual so it would fit the new knowledge.

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Many of the gods no longer supported us, even the shield around our home being week, which the priest used tot ell me that this year's purging light would be stronger than many before it, meant to extinguish even some of us.

Every day, the priest grew to trust me more, many an idle chat slowly breaking the ice between us, to the point he even helped me hide the fourth circle until it would become relevant.

Everyone trusted me, my master praising me for manipulating the priest into helping, and the priest doing his best to keep her off my back whenever possible.

This fourth circle was completely improvised and was meant to designate the way the ritual would unfold, twisting and turning when my skill shot through the roofs.

I had planned everything, tested each circle as a way to ensure it did what I wanted, until the year slowly neared its end.

As you might have noticed, I didn’t trust my teacher anymore, which was based on three things I had noticed during my existence.

Firstly, I didn’t like the way she had control over me, somehow making it hard for me to resist her commands.

At first, I had obeyed happily, but the deeper it went, the more I realized that her commands could be totally inconsequential, and I would still somehow obey to a degree, which was absolutely against everything I ever stood for.

The second reason was her obvious ties to that monster in the deep, which I had read a lot about in her tomes while she was gone, funnily enough completely written in sygils, said deep one being some ancient evil the gods had locked away and contained within the world, meaning this whole planet was a prison for something much bigger than any of us could comprehend. Well, at least those who had not taken a bite out of said unfathomable titan.

His awakening would shatter the world like some type of eggshell, and given the consequences, it was clearly not something I wanted to happen, which meant that I should probably work on making sure it remained sealed. Which brought me to my teacher, who, in my absence, had left her books lying around without a care.

Number three was another piece of somewhat ancient history I had read, a tome filled with hundreds of names hidden in the ground of her cultivation room, signed with her own name.

She was probably quite stupid when she created it, as the art of rituals finally made me realize why everyone used titles instead of their actual names.

Names were unique to their bearer, and under almost every circumstance a powerful part of curses.

Her name was not human, and thus I had allied with the priest, reading his books to deepen my understanding of the mystery before me and linking any hints I had together.

The primary ring was an amalgamation of corruption and absorption runes, holding focussing all energy on the caster to make sure the power of the ritual would not go rogue.

At some point it went into the next ring, where the gathered power would open a portal to the deep one, allowing a bit of his power through before channeling it to the first ring, until both would overflow with power, at which point the third ring would be activated.

Here, the hag wanted me to make the ring stable and ensure a proper execution of a mass slaughtering spell that would leave the village as nothing but ash and corrupted monstrosities, and here was the part where I intervened the most.

I wrote her name into the circle, so that the power would channel into her, which would inevitably link her to the ritual as a stabilizer, probably freezing her for a few minutes.

The fourth ring was perfectly measured to drawn on all the reserved power and create a beam of spatium that would sunder the church for a small area.

My plan was almost perfect, my hands bleeding with the amount of runes I scratched every day, no sleep for many months as I made sure that everything looked perfectly as I wanted it to.

This would be my ultimate test, with only the food the priest brought me from time to time sustaining me in a somewhat humanoid form.

The last rune was etched when the countdown started, my teacher slowly approaching as the wild hunt came to ravage our world.

Hounds of ice and specters of darkness passed through, the latter eaten when they came too close to me, the first ignoring me completely.

Everything was set up, and as I saw a shadow cloaked, winged form approach, I knew I had acted right.

I was no hero, but what would happen next was for my own survival, and that of the few creatures I cared for.

Both my companions had left the village long ago, asked to find refuge with the lizardfolk as I could not risk their lives if something went wrong.

My teacher was a demon, a creation of the deep one and an attempt to break him free.

Her gaze was mad, her toothy grin too wide, and her attempt to kill everyone I cared for too vile.

She had hoped for something out of this ritual, probably to turn me and possibly the priest into demons with the sheer amount of corruption she had forced upon us.

And thus, the countdown ticket down by one, and her wings unfurled.