Fufufu... you sure seem interested in a girl's dark history. I can barely recall the details, but I assume you will press me for them anyway, mmmm?

Well... you may find this difficult to believe, but the first Sage was taught by the original Dragon, Rah'lyeh, long before there were true kingdoms of demons and men. The dragon was akin to the nine gods in its power, and doubtless just as whimsical. It disappeared from the world after that. Who knows what its goal was?

The first Sage was quite insane. Too much knowledge, I think. But he managed to think of the future, creating the 'Path Down', splitting his knowledge into seven, and passing it to seven apprentices.

Myself? Well... I was the child of plantation slaves. I was nine years old, and had just started my life of endless toil; when there was an uprising, which eventually led to the abolishment of slavery and the formation of the Kingdom of Jeraldine from the ashes of the Empire of Syjil. My parents died, and I nearly starved, when I fled the civil war. Through chance, whilst desperately trying to live off the wild, rather ineffectually, I came across the Thundergash and its tower.

I don't know what drove the previous Thunder Sage, Velour, to pick up a slip of a girl like me. Maybe she didn't want a young girl’s rotting body on her doorstep. But likely she was just near the end of her life, and even back then, the tower was not a frequently visited hot-spot. Probably that.

But she sheltered and fed me, and then, as I recovered, gave me strict lessons on magery, languages, mathematics, and culture, with food and a nice bed as my reward.

Being a simple creature back then, I honestly thought I had died and gone to the heavens.

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Over the next two years, I developed quite well. Apparently I had good potential in my head, it was just that my prior upbringing had failed to utilise any of it.

I'm sure you can guess the remainder. As I turned eleven I realised Velour had really started to age; and that this was probably not normal. She had been a beautiful lady with waist-length copper locks when I first beheld her, which is what enticed me to grow out my own hair, but shortly after I turned eleven and began the first blushes of my adolescence, she was almost a bedridden old crone.

I didn't really understand what I was getting into, but I accepted her Crest just a week or so before my twelfth birthday, as she was nary skin and bones.

The flood of six generations of memories is quite something...

But here I am today. I have taught several students in my days. Time is something that is relative when you spend months at a time researching magical theory, so the days often blur together.

It is not especially unusual to have to deal with the chore of an upstart mage or other assailant who has come to the foolish conclusion they can kill me to take my power. But I had never been quite as close to death as I had been with fighting the demons for the first time, especially their leader, who almost seemed tailored to fight me.

My life has actually been very lucky, now I look back on it. A slave turned archmage, and now, a strange man and his entourage of young girls saving me from almost certain death. A man who is quite ridiculous, but whom has been the first thing I have found interesting outside of magic for many, many years. Fufufu… I wonder how this will turn out?