When T'faide's mother heard that he'd skipped a day of his training to goof off by the river, she struck his bottom with a reed until he cried and promised to be better.

Since then, he attended his lessons faithfully. Although he paid attention and took notes on everything he was taught, he still under-performed. Despite being a halfelf with a deep supply of magic, his connection with nature was weak. Of course, anytime he tried using workarounds to achieve a similar result, Adl'gar chided him. It was frustrating, so he kept most of his research to himself, tucked away in his precious leather scroll.

His notes contained everything from the habits of humans and animals to careful diagrams of how trees grew and how water flowed in a river. With each line, he felt like he was skirting the edge of something much deeper.

Adl'gar took pity on the boy who was so far behind the rest of the apprentices. Although he kept his exercises focused on the basics, he allowed him to observe the lessons that others his age had moved on to. The old man thought it wouldn't be a problem if the boy studied the theory of more advanced magic ahead of time. At the least, T'faide had a good head on his shoulders.

So, the day came when the Archdruid was happy to teach the apprentices Druidic. It was a closely guarded, secret language that Druids from across the world could use to safely communicate with each other. Since none in this village could write aside from the Druids, it was their only written language.

This, T'faide picked up ahead of his peers. He memorized the spoken vocabulary and dozens of rune-like letters casually.

"The words sound strange," he mentioned after his teacher quizzed him. "Who came up with this language?"

Adl'gar smiled and patted the child's head, "It was not invented, but learned. Ancient Druids who came long before us listened closely to nature and asked each thing to name itself. Their natural names are the words we speak."

The little halfelf put on a deeply ponderous look upon hearing that, and Adl'gar finally felt like he'd won the child's mind. He was peace-minded and easily satisfied in his old age.

***

T'faide walked home from the hollow tree and sat on his bed. He stared at his notes with wide eyes and lips slightly parted. There, sketched in low-quality ink, was a cascade of Druidic runes. He singled one out in particular and muttered its meaning out loud. "Water."

The boy was close to fixated on this symbol. Something about it was incredibly familiar. He took out his many piles of bark scratched with notes and redoubled his efforts, pouring over them in an effort piece together what he was missing. There was little there, so he unfurled his leather scroll and scanned it with his eyes.

There he found it. Within his diagram depicting the motion of water, there were lines that resembled the water rune.

He wasn't sure whether he used the water rune or his diagrams as the base, but combining them yielded a more complex rune, or perhaps it was a more elegant diagram. It looked and felt much better that way, but T'faide wasn't satisfied yet. He sketched the design dozens of times with minor changes until he was finally satisfied. The resulting symbol looked somehow regal.

Guided now by a strange sense of intuition, T'faide focused magic on his tongue and spoke the Druidic word for water. It fell flat, and again he realized something was slightly off. He twisted his tongue and lips to subtly edit the sound, using his magic with every breath. It was a way of speaking that was exceptionally tiring, but the slight feedback he felt was leading him to making the right changes.

When he was satisfied with both the symbol and its pronunciation, he spoke the word again, with more magic and more confidence. This time, it felt right, and his magic flowed smoothly. It seeped into the edited rune, causing it to light up with a beautiful blue glow. T'faide marveled for a second before the piece of bark burst into flames and vanished. He gasped and reeled back, although there was no heat to the fire. A moment later, water flowed from nowhere, pooling on the floor and leaving a sizeable puddle.

The boy pulled his feet up onto his bed and stared at the pooling water. Even if he ignored all of his previous breakthroughs, this alone proved his theory. A connection with nature wasn't necessary to use true magic.

***

Over the next few weeks, T'faide experimented endlessly. He discovered that it wasn't necessary to draw the rune for water. Each time he practiced with it, he felt his magic leave his body to enter the room and follow its shape. If he simply forced it into that shape himself, it had the same effect. Since the activation then happened inside his head, instead of a piece of bark lighting on fire, his eyes burned with cool flames.

He had many more hypotheses to pursue, but writing in his mind with magic power was a difficult task, so he tested most of them on bark.

T'faide learned that the spoken words could be expanded on. At first, when he told the water to spread out in a mist, his magic would try to enter the rune and then overflow. It turned out he needed to supplement the symbol if he wanted to add any additional traits. That took several days, but he was able to create a symbol that could host the "mist". It was thin and covered a small area, but it worked.

Volume, density, temperature, shape, direction, inertia, he slowly pieced together the elegant arcane diagrams that could give form to those magic words. However, he spent an entire year just practicing with water. For other concepts, his diagrams were lacking, and he wasn't able to piece together a proper arcane symbol.

By the way, the word "arcane" was what T'faide named his particular kind of magic. It was different from the nature magic of Druids, and as the inventor he felt he ought to name it, even if he was keeping his hobby secret from the others.

When evidence of his practice was left in his room, T'faide's mother assumed he was practicing Druid magic, and he didn't correct her.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The first one to notice that something was wrong wasn't Roth'm, who clearly didn't like T'faide, but Adl'gar who had practically been trying to stay oblivious. At a certain point, he could no longer deny that the feeling of the ever growing magical force inside the halfelf child felt unusual. It felt unnatural.

That wasn't to say it felt bad or evil, but it was clearly rebelling against the other forces around it, trying to assert dominance rather than attain coexistence. Although T'faide had studied hard and grown much over the past year, his connection to nature hadn't deepened at all. Adl'gar felt he could no longer leave the boy to his own devices.

"T'faide, step aside for a moment. I'd like to speak with you." The old man interrupted the boy during his practice period where he was still working on his most basic Druidic magic. The halfelf frowned as he left his position, expecting to be scolded for his lack of progress. He was partially right.

"You have continued to struggle with forming a connection to nature," the Archdruid stated. "And yet I sense that the magic in you has grown."

The boy glanced off to the side, "Maybe it's because I'm a half elf."

Adl'gar smiled wryly, "Even considering that, your growth is noticeable."

"Perhaps I'm becoming a man then."

The old man was not knocked off balance for a moment by the child's antics. "You have a way of deflecting that doesn't suit your years." Adl'gar's face turned serious, "T'faide, I know that only progress in the study and application of magic can increase a caster's power. Tell me honestly, have you tapped into the divine force?"

T'faide looked at his master with obvious surprise. "The what?"

Adl'gar lowered his head and drummed his fingers on the side of his tall staff. "We don't teach such things in this village, so I suppose you wouldn't know if you had. Listen carefully, for I do not speak this lightly. There exists another kind of magic in this world. There is the nature magic we Druids practice, and there is the religious magic of far-off peoples. It's power that comes from worshiping a great being and receiving their boons. You're my apprentice, T'faide, and so it pains me to say this, but I sense no natural force in you. I can only think that what you possess is the divine force peculiar to religious magic instead."

The boy fell into thought. He searched through his thoughts and memories, wondering if he'd started worshiping some being separate from nature at some point. He turned up nothing. He didn't want his magic to be divine. His hard work this past year was his own.

"No," he said. "I've never met a being like that. All I've done is learn and study."

The old man hummed and looked contemplative. He furrowed his white brows as a sudden guess entered his mind. "Have you kept practicing those naturalist techniques from back then? Perhaps if it's that, you could grow a sort of attributeless magical force..."

The boy said nothing until the old teacher shook himself out of his thoughts and waved for him to go back to practicing.

From the other end of the room, Roth'm glared at the halfelf child who held their teacher's attention only by the virtue of his inborn talent and lackthereof. After their lessons were over, Roth'm couldn't stand watching from the sidelines anymore. He followed T'faide on his way home and stopped him.

"Hey!"

The halfelf turned around and looked at him curiously. Roth'm was tall for his age, and he was already a year older than T'faide. He used his height advantage to glare more fiercely down at the other apprentice.

"You should quit already," Roth'm asserted. "You clearly don't want to be a Druid. Just quit so teacher can spend more time on those of us who actually care."

T'faide frowned, but before he could answer, Adl'gar walked briskly past them. He was close enough almost to brush up against them, yet he didn't even turn to look at them. The old man had a serious look on his face, utterly focused on something out in the trees. It was strange enough behavior to put the boys' argument on hold.

"To think they would show up here." The old man rapped his staff on the ground. A wall of twisting vines burst up out of the ground, blocking off the village from something yet unseen.

But the balls of fire lobbed over the wall were very visible.

Roth'm tried to mimic his teacher and summon vines as a shield, but they were too small and slow. Part of the blow was offset, but he was knocked onto his back, and his clothes and hair had caught fire.

T'faide always thought he was the calm type, but even he couldn't have known that his head would clear up and work faster under deadly stress. He quickly drew up a simple arcane water rune in his mind and chanted the activation word. His fellow apprentice was doused, putting out the fire. Behind him, he heard rushing water louder than any stream. When he turned around, he saw Adl'gar holding his staff above his head. He had conjured a river above the vines, and it rushed torrentially down the outside of the wall.

While T'faide offered Roth'm a hand getting up, more Druids from the village gathered at the source of the disturbance and helped Adl'gar hold back whatever was attacking them. More fireballs came over the wall sometimes. Clearly, from the sound of it, the battle was fierce, but it was kept separate from the village by the strong wall of vines.

After a few minutes, the wall finally retracted. Curious villagers came to see what had attacked them, only to see a strange, twisted, stone-like humanoid.

"What is that thing?" Roth'm clutched his burn wounds. He should have gone to rest, but he had to see what had scarred his shoulder and face.

"That," Adl'gar spoke solemly, "is a demon."

"A demon?" T'faide echoed. He was surprised when the Archdruid looked at him coldly.

"They are twisted beings, made of creatures who lost control of their magic. They're mindless things that only keep their bodies stable by consuming magical force, even if they have to kill for it."

A painful silence hung over the crowd.

"... You brought them here," the Archdruid accused. He was looking at T'faide. "We used to be indistinguishable from the trees because of our natural magic. Your heretical practice lured them here like a beacon."

T'faide was caught speechless. Was it even possible that this was his fault? His magic wasn't even that strong. Adl'gar had gone such a long time before particularly noticing that it seemed different. How could he lure these creatures from miles away?

"I did this?" It came out sounding somewhat sarcastic, and he couldn't help smiling unhappily.

The old man's face was hard for once. "I will let you choose. Abandon that magic right now. Learn proper Druid magic with the rest of the apprentices or abandon all magic. Otherwise, you can no longer stay in this village."

The boy thought of his year of hard work and his years of aimlessness before that. He weighed the magic system he had created as a labor of love against the Druidic magic he was apathetic to at best. He was only fourteen. It would be hard to live on his own in the wild--particularly because he wasn't a talented Druid--but he absolutely couldn't stop pursuing the arcane.

"There's nothing bad about my magic," the halfelf said through gritted teeth. "I won't stop."

His former teacher pointed coldly out at the trees past the twisted demon corpses. "Then you must go."

"Really?"

T'faide looked out at the other villagers. Many of them looked uneasy and worried because of the sudden attack. His mother was looking anxiously between him and Adl'gar.

"Yes." The old man was firm.

The boy turned cold eyes to his former teacher, who was inwardly shocked by the sharp and venomous gaze.

"... I'll pack my things."