T'faide walked home briskly, practically stomping his feet out of anger. He started throwing his things together in a leather satchel the moment he was in his room. When he finished packing, he left his room to find his mother blocking the exit.

There was a stew of emotions on her face: worry, anger, and determination all boiled together. T'faide saw a backpack full of supplies at her feet. He locked eyes with her, skeptical, and unable to think of anything to say.

"You could have told me you were experimenting with heretical magic in there," she said sourly.

Her halfelf son frowned. "It's not heretical. It's arcane."

Niasha lifted her shoulders and sighed. "Whatever you want to call it. I'd prefer my son not be a heretic, so it's just as well." She lifted the bag of supplies, hung it on her shoulder, and nodded at the door. "Let's go."

"You're coming?"

T'faide couldn't help but look around at their house. His mother had packed a lot, but not everything. She was acting as if she was going to leave her home behind and join her son in exile.

Of course, Niasha nodded; that was exactly what she was doing. "You're fourteen and a terrible Druid. You'll die out there alone. Especially if demons are hunting you."

T'faide knew his mother was neither a Druid nor a hunter. She gathered food and resources near the village, farmed medicinal herbs, and generally lived a simple, peaceful life. She was strong and capable, but she was no warrior.

"You're coming with me knowing all that?"

"I'm your mother. I won't abandon you. If you're banished, then so am I."

T'faide laughed incredulously. "Fine. We'll go together."

He gathered up his things, holding tenderly his scroll of precious knowledge. His other notes, the less important ones written on bark, he left behind. Perhaps someone else from this village would feel the same frustration with nature magic he did and study his work. Or else if a more zealous Druid found and burned them, so be it.

From under his bed, T'faide took out his second most precious possession. It was a wooden staff he had carved to help him cast water magic. From its butt to its head it was covered in arcane runes. It's only purpose was to echo the shape of the runes into the boy's mind so he could just push magic power out without thinking. It allowed him to use his arcane magic much faster.

Niasha looked curiously at the two strange things her son had packed along with his essentials, but she didn't ask anything until they had put the village behind them by several minutes.

"So tell me about this 'arcane' magic of yours," she asked casually. "What makes it different from nature magic?"

"Would you like to see?"

T'faide held his staff and pushed magic into it, muttering the arcane word for water. It echoed a certain water rune into his mind, and both the runes on the staff and the boy's eyes glowed with cold blue fire. A ball of water formed in the air in front of him and shot itself at a nearby tree, impacting against the trunk and shattering the outer layer of bark.

"For one, it doesn't require any connection to nature. Instead, you need to know arcane script. There's also that light... But as far as I can tell, I should eventually be as powerful as any Druid."

"So you're doing this for power then?"

Niasha didn't sound like she was accusing him or any such thing, but her words did give the boy pause.

"... No. No, power isn't why I'm doing this."

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"Then why?" Niasha has witnessed her son choose this strange new magic over his safe life in the village. She didn't believe he had no deeper reason for that.

For T'faide, though, it was hard to put into words.

"... It's just... I found out that what I'd been taught was wrong; that another system of magic exists. It deserves to be studied, and people deserve to know about it. And," the boy twisted his pretty halfelf face into a befuddled frown, "I discovered my magic by doing what came naturally to me. I'm still just beginning to understand it, but it already feels like a part of me. I don't want to give it up and live like someone else."

His mother sighed.

***

They walked through the ancient forest for hours, scavenging fruits and mushrooms when they came across any. T'faide managed to knock a bird off of a tree limb with his water magic, and they set up a rudimentary camp when the sun started to sink.

"I'll dress the bird," Niasha said. "You start a fire."

"Alright. Where did you pack the spark rocks?"

His mother smiled wryly at him. "You can't light it with magic?"

The boy frowned and shook his head. "I haven't figured out the arcane word or rune for fire yet."

The human chuckled and dug in their pack, tossing him a pair of rough stones. They cooked mushroom and bird stew over the fire for dinner.

Niasha looked down at her soup, made with clean water magic. "The demons will come for us, won't they? Because of your magic."

T'faide grimaced and nodded. He thought the head Druid was unfair and stubborn, but he didn't think he was wrong.

"Son, you won't become one of them, will you?"

"What?"

"A demon." The woman frowned sadly. "Demons are made when someone loses control of their magic, isn't that what was said? And here you are trying to develop an entirely new system of magic. Can you look me in the eyes and say you won't make any mistake?"

To that, the boy could only dig his spoon in his bowl and furrow his brow. "To be honest, magic running out of control sounds impossible, unnatural. I can't imagine how that happens."

"What do you mean? Wouldn't everyone become a Druid if magic were so easy to control?"

T'faide shook his head and drew on the ground with a stick. "Here, imagine this is a river. Magic has a natural flow to it, like water. The water flows in the river because the ground is lower there. Doing magic," he scratched more lines, "is like digging a channel for some of that power to flow out. If you dig the right path, it behaves as you like. If not, it's just wasted, seeping into the earth." The half elf leaned back on one arm and sighed up at the dark canopy. "No matter what, water shouldn't act like fire. How badly would you have to mess up to turn water into fire? Why doesn't it settle down and turn back into water as time passes?"

Niasha couldn't help but chuckle. "It sounds to me like you're leaning too hard into this water analogy, son. Fire magic exists, doesn't it? Why wouldn't magic act like fire?"

He glanced at her and exhaled. "I don't know. In the first place, I think I don't understand fire. If I did, I should have been able to find its rune by now."

"Tell me what fire is," his mother smiled.

"Fire is hot, it's bright. It burns what it touches, and it grows and shrinks like a living thing. Water douses it."

T'faide thought about his own words, about fire being like a living thing. If he thought of the process of burning something like eating for the flame, it lined up pretty well. Did it sleep? Not that he could tell. Did it breathe?

"... Does fire breathe?"

"What was that?"

"No, it's just..." T'faide looked at their fire swaying in the wind, "I was thinking of the dancing motion of fire like locomotion, but moving without going anywhere is more like... lungs, breathing."

"Fire does breathe," Niasha told him. "When you cook clay, you seal it in a stone house to keep the heat in, but you have to blow air in or the fire dies."

T'faide picked up a stick and watched the fire creep along it. No matter which way he held the stick, the fire flickered up, but it always stayed attached.

"So it eats on contact, and the swaying body is how it breathes? It dies when it has no food or air, and it's born when something sparks. Then, I only need to understand the spark. If fire is alive, by giving it food and air, it will grow. By controlling where the food and air is, it can be controlled. So I should learn air magic before fire magic."

T'faide rested his cheek on his fist, stared at the burning stick, and frowned. "… No, what am I saying? This isn't druidcraft, it's arcane magic. If I can conjure water from runes, I can conjure fire as well. I don't need air or fuel; whatever is missing, I'll just supplement it with more runes and magic later. I understand the anatomy of fire, so I should be able to design a rune for it."

The half elf blew out the stick and used it to trace in the dirt. He thought of fire and did his best to draw its true form. The magic inside of him twinged whenever he made a mistake, so he carefully corrected each one. Finally, the rune was complete, and T'faide noted it down on his scroll.

He wanted to start learning the arcane word for fire, but his mother placed a hand on his shoulder.

"It's late. Get some rest, T'faide. I will wake you up before the sun rises so that I can sleep as well."

"Yes," the boy sighed and rolled up his scroll, lying down on a hide blanket to sleep. He was exhausted anyway thanks to all the magic he had wasted on trial and error, and he passed right out once he let himself relax.