Making Up Adventurers writing prompt — This wide-eyed adventurer is chasing the moon. They’ll catch it, someday
They’re halfway along the coastal road from Redwater to the Wall when Dinki goes a little missing. Not that missing; they’re in a town, and they have rooms at an inn, and her bed’s slept in and everything, but they were meant to be on the road again, like, three days ago.
They find her, finally, coming out of sagging shack on the slowly-sinking-into-the-swamp side of town, a one-eyed two-toothed hag leaning against the doorframe of her wetly rotting hut, watching her go. Dinki’s strung with new charms, things of feather and wire and sea-ground fragments of glass; tattoos poke, redly fresh, from her sleeves.
There’s a bunch of ways to do magic.
Well, there’s a bunch of ways of taxonomising ways to do magic, and a lot of academic infighting about which is Correct; hence the joke that there’s actually two ways, doing it and fighting about it. There are folks who think of “wizard” as being the type who fight about it, and everyone else as — everyone else. There are those who slice and analyse and spin ontologies of power and sources of power and applications of power and worldviews on the application of power, in which “wizard” and “sorceror” and “warlock” and “thaumaturge” and so on and so forth all mean exactingly defined different things. There are those who divide it into Our noble and useful Arts, and Their corrupt and perfidious Corruption.
What there aren’t, on the whole, are many generalists. You can’t sit in a wizardly tower in magnificent seclusion and construct crystalline palaces of reified abstract thought, and reconcile it with licking toads and hallucinating an aspect of some fecund, feverish Goddess into being to fuck ineffable mysteries of flesh and intuition into you. Magic’s not much of a field for synthesis.
Dinki is a fucking lunatic, is the point. She’s got a six-section collapsible brass wizardly staff in her pack; a light-drinking cyst of pearly unreality embedded in the skin of her sternum, inescapable anchor to some outworldly patron; self-scarified runes of elemental assertion on her limbs, ink from a dozen or so traditions on various parts of her, trinkets and badges of initiation from a double handful of others.
“Enough licking the salt and honey,” Gardwen snaps at her. “Are you done dawdling?”
Dinki smiles, wide and starry-eyed, high on new mysteries. “Ready to go,” she says.
Houndred asked, once, low in their cups round some dismal campfire, out past the Wall, what it’s all for. And Dinki’s smile had slid off, for once, leaving a fey and alien look beneath it, that chills Houndred still to remember it, not only because it was the face of madness, but because all of Dinki’s usual face and foolishness is a constructed mask above it, and hardly anyone ever sees beyond.
“I had a vision, in my youth,” Dinki had said quietly. “From — I don’t know. The gods, perhaps, or something like. You believe in fated souls, destined to be — joined, not necessarily any specific way, but inescapably? Lovers to shake the world, if they’re lovers, or enemies to raze empires between them, if they’re enemies; free to be anything to each other they make of it, but something, whatever it is, of terrible magnitude?”
Houndred had make a dubious noise.
“Well, I don’t know that I would, either, if not for my vision,” Dinki had said. “But you can’t not believe something that you’ve been given a vision of, can you? That’s what a vision means. And I have such a fated counterpart.”
Houndred had made another noise, wishing perhaps to simply be over with the conversation-turned-monologue, regretting asking, but Dinki had taken it as provocation to extend a hand, one finger unwrapped from her tin mug to point into the night sky.
“The moon,” she’d said simply.
“The moon’s a light in the sky,” Houndred had said, unwisely.
“Maybe.” Dinki had shrugged, looking at it. “Maybe, but magic, magic’s a way of things being what-they-are and not-what-they-are, all at the same time, sometimes, eh? All I need is the right…” and she rolled a thought around in her mouth, seeking the right shape to spit it out of her mouth. “Perspective.”
“And what,” Houndred had said. “You’re going to make the moon your girlfriend? That’s mad, Dinki. You’re the shitty apprentice start of a hundred different kinds of sorceror already; have you ever managed to think the moon into anything but a light in the sky?”
“No,” Dinki had said.
Houndred had huffed, feeling obscurely needled, and deeply unwise for having spoken. But Dinki had just smiled, then, and it shivers Houndred all over to remember; a calm smile of insanity entire.
“Not yet,” Dinki had said, looking at the light in the sky, with the matter-of-factness of somebody who takes for granted that one day they will.
