A wizard sits in a basement room of her old plantation house, poring over a scale model of the surrounding environs. She's testing a spell intended to detect surges of black magic in the area. It's not her creation; she's of the opinion that the Council as a whole has way too much of a stick up their collective woke moralist asses about the Laws of Magic. If some person wants to fry their brain being a warlock, that's not her business. As for those who get hurt along the way, she never signed up to save every drowning child in a pond somewhere.

But Mara's daughter, Alyssa, is absolutely the sort of person who considers every drowning child her business, and had asked Mara as a favor to test out her new detection spell. "You don't have to turn anyone in to me, or to any Warden," Alyssa had said, "just tell me if the spell can pick up anything or not. You're free to use whatever personally satisfying method you want to deal with what you find."

An hour a day for two weeks, Mara had promised. She isn't really expecting to find anything, even if the spell does work; nothing happens around here. Fifty minutes in to the hour of the eleventh day, however, a spot of light blazes to life on her model.

A wizard sits in a basement room of her old plantation house, poring over a scale model of the surrounding environs. She's testing a spell intended to detect surges of black magic in the area. It's not her creation; she's of the opinion that the Council as a whole has way too much of a stick up their collective woke moralist asses about the Laws of Magic. If some person wants to fry their brain being a warlock, that's not her business. As for those who get hurt along the way, she never signed up to save every drowning child in a pond somewhere.

But Mara's daughter, Alyssa, is absolutely the sort of person who considers every drowning child her business, and had asked Mara as a favor to test out her new detection spell. "You don't have to turn anyone in to me, or to any Warden," Alyssa had said, "just tell me if the spell can pick up anything or not. You're free to use whatever personally satisfying method you want to deal with what you find."

An hour a day for two weeks, Mara had promised. She isn't really expecting to find anything, even if the spell does work; nothing happens around here. Fifty minutes in to the hour of the eleventh day, however, a spot of light blazes to life on her model.