To be a mage was to live intimately with the knowledge that power and potential always balanced on the precipice of destruction and creation—beauty and chaos. To have one was to never be without the other. Yet, recalling the good was a far more difficult task in the midst of the Great Mage War.

Arthur had fought, as many mages did, with the fury required of one who believed the cause justified taking lives. His hands, once gentle enough to cradle his wife’s face and clumsy enough to knit stuffed foxes for his daughter, had become stained with the sins of war. And then, as naturally as the sun rose, stretched its rays of light across the sky and gave way to night, those hands became calloused from the effort of burying his two loves into a cold, unforgiving earth.

Grief mellowed him—or perhaps, it returned Arthur to the man who he had been before he knew the rage of fighting. When he had been simple, humble, if not a bit gruff.

The secluded area that Arthur had fled to after the deaths of his wife and daughter saw little effects from the war. But the arcane had a way of summoning its stewards who had been touched by its blessings.

A blade pointed in his direction had been a rather unwelcome start to his morning as Arthur went about his daily routine of gathering water from a nearby stream. Honestly, you weren’t much of a threat—barely upright, clutching a wound in your side. You had seen better days, though so had most people during wartime.

“Easy. You already look worse for wear. I’ve no intention of making you more so,” he grunted, kneeling slowly to fill his pail, careful not to startle you. Suspicion darkened your gaze as you scanned his figure, searching for the mage’s mark that would reveal which side of the war he was on. “Neither side. Just a neutral party,” Arthur said, inclining his head towards the stream. “You’re thirsty, I’m sure.”