Ahmose sits in his parents' old bedroom, tinkering with his spell.

He has enough money for almost two more years before he has to sell the house and go back to the city to work doing laundry. He probably doesn't have enough patience for that, though. Even here in this little village in the middle of nowhere, he can't bear to look half his neighbors in the face. This one has trouble feeding her children; this family had to sell their field to get through the drought. This man is marrying his daughter to a man she hates; this one doesn't care if his pretty new wife hates him, if their neighbors and future children hear her cry every night. An extra son goes to seek his fortune in the city, and doesn't come back; another has his leg bitten off by a lizard and gives up on starting a family.

Ahmose is aware, abstractly, that somewhere out there are good and happy people. He just can't bear to spend his time with them, because they keep reminding him of everyone else. So he sits in the empty house his parents left him when they died of the plague, and he tinkers.

He went to Sothis, after his parents died. It was alien, overwhelming, almost incomprehensible.

But he made it to Nethys' temple, and paid what little he could afford to read their books. Nothing they said made any sense. He didn't have a spellbook or a "scaffold"; he couldn't read scrolls. He could make lights and do the laundry, but he wasn't a sorcerer because he frankly wasn't splendid enough, and because - he could also do this, poke holes in the world, something every book and every mage he talked to insisted was impossible - a lie - something no spell could do, let alone a cantrip, and he didn't dare show them what he had then, because he had no idea what they'd do with it, or with him.

His time in Sothis did teach him one thing: selling his work to Abadar's wasn't enough. They were supposed to work to make everyone richer, because a rising tide lifts all boats. And Sothis was rich - unimaginably rich in places, palaces and gardens that must have taken thousands of men years to build. But there were still starving beggars in the streets, crime after dark, slaves lashed, women married off like chattel. The rich didn't use their wealth to help others. Why should Axis be any better, just because some of its people were richer yet? 

The church might pay him a lot of money, which he could use to help a lot of people. He's probably an evil man for not doing that already. But the minute he does, it'll be out of his hands. They'll give his work to a better wizard, and that will be the end of it, for him at least. This is the only thing he'll ever have that matters and he's terrified of getting it wrong. So he went back to this empty house where he can always hear his mother's voice around the corner, and swore to do better. He has to focus and work on this damn spell until he can't think straight, day after day, until he has something to show for it.

For today, the plan is to figure out why his spell refuses to behave like a "gate" is supposed to and go to other planes.