Stand Against the Dark | Glowfic Constellation

And there it is. "Excellent! Such an honor to have a blessed person come from my lands. You are only the third Witch I have had emerge from my holdings since I received them from my father, you know."

The seal goes into an inkwell, and stamps down on the parchment with finality.

"I have already given much of my wealth to the war against the Neuroi - enough silver for a few rounds of drink nonwithstanding - or I might have arranged greater gifts."

"That's – thank you for what you've given me," she responds. "I hope to… help make a difference."

"You are very young, and yet old for a Witch... Hm. You plan to leave soon? Normally new Witches tend to stay until they've grown. Or at least for a while. War changes many things, I suppose..."

"I – I've been expecting to leave," she responds. "It seems a waste, otherwise."

"Indeed. My son told me the same. If he dies in battle against the demons, I will have to remember how dutiful he was. I almost wanted to join him. And yet, the land still needs to be administrated, grain must be grown and brought to those brave soldiers."

She nods, solemnly.

"But enough glum things! You have been blessed, I am feeling generous, enjoy the music and have something to eat!"

She smiles and goes to do as instructed. She hasn't eaten since lunch, so she grabs some food first.

Pies and cider and deer haunch that the Baron shot on his way over and cheese and...

She takes some, eats it, and then tries to interact with people before they get too drunk.

This might be implausible and she might leave pretty soon thereafter.

To be fair, most of the beer is pretty weak beer, and some of these people are practiced drunks. But they've brought out the good wine, too.

A lot of the women lament that they don't have magic. One guy drunkenly rambles that his nephew might have been a good marriage prospect for Evelyn. There's more open land because of everyone going off to fight Neuroi and some not coming back, you know, you're not stuck on a rocky half-acre plot your whole life.

… Silver linings and all.

She makes some excuse and leaves to get some sleep.

Sleep is a thing she can get, sure.

And when she wakes up she goes about her daily activity mostly as normal, for now.

There's still a strong current of attention focused on her. A witch, gosh.

One neighbor has some stones from his field to get rid of. Stones always turn up eventually, especially on the worse pieces of land. Would she like to be paid a little bit to turn them to gravel with that Witchly blasting-thing? He can touch up part of the road with enough bucketloads of gravel.

She hasn't actually done the Witchly blasting-thing, yet. Is he okay with her trying it out on the area or should she go… find somewhere to practice first…?

...When you put it like that, better go try it in his empty fallow field for the first while.

Breaking the big rocks into a few medium ones would be a big enough help, too. Doesn't need to be absolutely pulverized.

Sure! She'll go try destroying some rocks in the empty fallow field, that sounds like a good idea.

… How hard is it to go from manalights to that?

It's mostly a matter of sufficient focus and effort behind the light, to turn it from 'powerful light' to 'blast'.

And can she control the blast well enough she feels safe to use it on some rocks?

...Maybe if the rocks weren't near anything breakable. Also, it's actually physically tiring, there seems to be a separate thing than 'running out of mana', like when she stopped being able to do manalights last night with no feeling or physical sign why.

… She'll stop the practice for now, she thinks, and go see if he has any rocks fitting that criteria and if he'd be okay with her just doing a few of them for now.

Sure! Anything that helps with the demolishing, even just partial.

She gets to doing that, then! She tries to be careful to make sure it's unlikely she'll get any… collateral.