The young woman with the radiant pink eyes waved with a laugh, before turning and walking into the guild hall.

The young girl to whom she had been waving dropped her hand and began skipping towards the crowds of the capital circle, a small stick in hand, waving about like a magic wand. She veered away from the guild hall, the city bank, and the castle-like manor of the city lord, and towards the bridge leading to the heart of the city.

An astute and observant watcher may have been able to pick out that while a young child stepped onto the bridge, she never stepped off the other side. Rather, an elderly woman, with a twisted cane of dark wood, matched in texture only by her gnarled hands and twisted wrinkles. She shuffled slowly off the other side, continuing on. While ‘astute’ was a relative term, it had been several centuries since any watcher had seen through her, so her standards were perhaps a little high.

However, she did pause to interrupt a very hurried young man. Oh, she'd heard of this one, Oor's little plaything. He liked to pick one every few decades to grant a blessing and this one had turned out more stable than the others, or at least better at hiding it. Regardless, he was at this very moment positively rocketing towards the guild hall, and she knew better than most what an extra few seconds can mean.

“Young man” she said a stern yet melodic voice, quite distinct with her aged appearance “I think, perhaps, you ought to slow down, before you do something rash.”

She let a fraction of her aura through, just enough to make the man freeze in place. For him, it was a blink of an eye, hardly even a fraction of a second, but it was enough. He had been to the capital when that boy Gaius has made appearances and was at least aware.

She kept shuffling on, not stopping to do any more, and manipulating her aura, as well as the ambient magic around her to go completely unnoticed by the man's piercing golden eyes. He whipped his head around a moment longer, before eventually dashing back off again.

The elder merely chuckled to herself, pleased with the very slight alteration she'd made to the path of the inexorable march.

Lethargically moving with two small steps and a sound of clanking wood, the woman passed under houses connected on upper floors to span the walkways beneath, passed inns and taverns, gardens and shops.

Finally arriving at an ancient graveyard behind the only church of death in the city, she navigated past the single large tower, and the black and gold window reliefs to a simple rough iron fence. But as the woman reached out to open a gate, a passing monk said, “Please young madam, allow me” and smiled amicably at her as he opened the wrought iron fence.

He said this, of course, because what he saw was not a young child, nor an elderly woman, but a woman in the peak of her prime. Flowing silver hair poked out from under a black hooded robe, sharp observant eyes and a powerful, durable staff of clearly magical design accompanied her, as she nodded her thanks to the monk, she passed into the serene silence that accompanies a place of ultimate rest.

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She kept walking, and walking. The headstones and tombs became more weathered and worn, until finally at the very end of the last row of graves, she sat with her feet tucked underneath, and looked at the aged tomb.

It was cut into the hillside against which the temple now abutted. A symbol that would now be completely unrecognizable to most lay eroded, yet detectable at the top. Once fine pillars of granite held up a ceiling of pitch-black marble. Inside the tomb, beyond the delicate bars of dull copper, lay a single raised stone lid.

“She’s decided to enter a guild, after what I can only imagine to have been an interesting few hours in the city.” The woman said in a melodically accented voice. Like she was saying the words to an old forgotten tune that only she could hear. “Blasted fool of a thing to do. She has no idea the powers involved, or what her entrance into the guild will mean. I give it a year at the outside before we see open warfare… You’d be proud” She finished with a laugh that fell away quickly, as the little girl hugged her knees to her chest.

“Oh, the fun you would have had with her, I'm almost certain she'll use your item too.” She said, her voice unchanged, coming out as that of a much older person. She’d been told it was unnerving to hear, coming from a child's lips. She didn’t care. She never cared. He’d found it fun, after all.

“But now it all falls to me, and you know I never wanted this. I have no idea how to move the pieces on the board like you.” A little hand came up and wiped at a tiny nose. She sighed forlornly, and gazed down at her wrinkled and veiny hand, before making a weak fist.

After a time longer, she brought out two small glasses, and filled each with a liquid so concentrated in its raw power, she had to actively suppress it before others noticed. It glowed like magma from the heard of a volcano but was colder to the touch than the peaks of the Cheole mountains.

She raised her glass high in a firm powerful grip, "Here's to hoping I can do things better. At least half as well as you could, my love. Here's to wishing you well and wishing me luck." Before lowering it down to lightly tink the side of the other glass, and then downing the whole thing in one gulp.

Muttering several curses in languages lost to the ages, stamped her feet and hopped up and down, looking every bit the silly child playing a silly game. "I know you loved that stuff, but it's just... poison" she bit off the last word while pursuing her lips and nodding her head back and forth like a small bird.

Finally, when the suns began to move again, she struggled to her feet, relying heavily on her beaten-up old walking stick to make the journey up to her full and hunched over height. She poured the contents of the second glass down over the stones in front of the gates to the tomb, before passively cleansing the area of the residual effects such a powerful concoction had.

"I'll help her again if she earns it. That's always the first step. She cannot simply be able and willing; she must be worthy. How she goes about doing that is up to her, but I've given her a small boone already here today, I won't do more until I know she'd worth it." She said, her sing-song voice carrying the words like a cadence.

Skipping forward, she squeezed through a small gap in the bars just big enough for a young girl such as herself to reach, and then looking back at the city with deep, timeless lavender eyes, she pressed a hidden latch, and descended into the earth.