Strixhaven Week 1
taryn_loo for Rootha Squallheart
The orc Rootha is the main character and the first-person narrator of our second story this week A Cry of Magic. She is a student at the Prismari college at Strixhaven, the school for creating art with magic. Generations of her family before her have been famed artists and her mother the most renowned of all. She has grown up in the shadow of this great artist, trying to live up to those standards. Nothing she does feels right though, and her natural magic is destructive, such that she nearly injured her brother when she was young and was subsequently shunned by everyone else.
Rootha is unsatisfied with any work she has made thus far and exhibits signs of ADHD throughout her narration. She is despondent and has resigned herself to failure, when Dean Nassari steps in...
"I don't have anything prepared for a critique, and I don't have a good excuse. I'm not sure what else to say." [Fully prepared to be yelled at by a teacher]
"Fantastic. Good to know how average I am. And I suppose these mages have all grown up to lead happy lives?" [sneering]
[Narration Test]
The Opus Walk is deserted at night, but the witchlights burn along the path, guiding my way. I stagger past rows and rows of past art projects, beautiful and impossible, gifted to the college by grateful students. Everyone leaves something behind when they graduate—it's tradition.
It isn't hard to find my mother's. I know her magic by sight.
Her greatest creation: an endless waterfall pouring out of nothing and disappearing back into nowhere. The magic is flawless, but easy to disrupt. With a touch of my fingers, I feel all the ways it's held together for decades. I could unwind it thread by thread, or I could just smash it.
Vindictive glee rises inside me. Samara Squallheart is famous, beloved, but her work will be just as easily undone as her worthless daughter's.
