Taft Silver was the name of a baby, born on a plantation near the capital city of Ostara, the northernmost kingdom.

His parents were brought to these lands as slaves from a small kingdom. They lived and died poor, lives of nothing but constant grunt work, broke by brief moments of happiness, like the birth of their child.

But if a son is born from slaves, then the child itself is also one.

“For a slave’s womb and a slave’s seed can only create a creature born for servitude,"

Those were the words the owner spoke.

So, they were left with no other option but to seek a way to escape. Even if only their child got to live.

Silver was the name given to all the kids in the Enerin orphanage.

One day they received a baby at their doorstep, a crying, a completely human infant with brown hair and blue eyes, not even a letter with a name on it. This wasn’t an abnormal occurrence. Plenty of children before had been brought in this way, the custom dictates for the director to name the child, and so he did, Taft.

“At some point, you get fucking sick and tired of naming all the little shits,”

The director of the orphanage once said when someone asked him about his naming scheme.

So, Taft was raised among several brothers and sisters, like Daft, Baft, Craft, Maft, Lucila, Liliana, Lucea, Laurel, etc. But being an orphan in the Ostaran city of Enerin wasn’t the easiest of lives. Mainly, the orphanage was situated in the back city.

The Ostara capital, the city of bridges, is a coastal city situated on the border of the continent. On one of the widest rivers know, one part was on the mainland.

King Enerin wanted to build his castle in the middle of the river, in the deepest part, and he did, he also connected a bridge to the other side and built another town, that would become the back-city, a place to which merchants rarely went, life was inconvenient and so, ran rife with crime and poverty.

But even if times got rough, he had a family he could count on to always have his back.

It was discovered early on in his life that young Taft had an incredible talent for magic. And so, he got scouted to attend the Enerin magic school.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, almost unheard of among orphans and even if he was scared of attending a school full of rich lords and ladies from noble clans.

He was heavily encouraged by his tutor and family. So, he filled himself with courage and attended.

One spell at the time he would become an exemplary magician. He spent eight years in there, from age ten to eighteen, but once he graduated, he had done so with the highest of honors, and with the recognition of his peers.

What was it that he could do?

Become a teacher, he decided, while he was still studying, he would help out his friends with their studies and found it thoroughly fulfilling to see someone learn and better themselves.

But becoming a teacher wasn’t easy, at least not at the place he wanted to enter, his alma mater, the magic college of Enerin. The school was administered by the biggest clan of all of Ostara. It was founded by the first head more than 600 years ago, and that very same family has been in control of it ever since. Lineage and status are everything to them. No orphan boy of low birth, no matter how talented, would enter easily as a teacher. It was already shocking enough when they let him in as a student.

He would first have to make a name for himself as a great educator, it would certainly take some time, and it would have been probably easier to just leave the country and ask for a job at some other magical education institution, but he wanted to be a part of the institute that had helped him become what he was today, pride and loyalty are important.

Unfortunately, things weren’t going so well for Taft. No family wanted to hire him as a teacher. It seemed recognition from his peers didn’t translate to actually being liked by them. So, he retreated back to his orphanage, he would spend a few months teaching magic to the younger kids there, but they didn’t seem too interested or talented for it, and even if he wanted to become a teacher, he was used to teaching people who already knew about magic, were literate, and highly talented, so just teaching young kids was neither as fun nor as fulfilling as he had thought of before.

Things really weren’t going well now. He was stuck.

I’m royally fucked

That’s when one of his sisters who had married a blacksmith told him.

“Maybe you should like, go on adventures or something. It would be a waste if you’re stuck in this shit hole all your life since you put in so much effort into learning magic,”

She was right. He could travel the country and go in search of wealthy clans who were interested in his services, making a name for himself that way.

So, he set out into the great unknown, a city boy in the big outdoors, he had never set foot outside Enerin before, he had to learn how the real world worked outside the busied life of the capital, and he learned a great many things.

First of all, those mixed races were more normal the farther you got out of the capital. They were extremely rare back home and overall hated.

When he was growing up, he learned everything he needed about elves, dwarfs and demons, and other of the so-called dirty races, he didn’t outright hate them like the nobles did, except for demons, those are scary as all hell. but he was wary and preferred to not involve himself that much with them whenever he found himself around someone of pure or mixed “other” race.

After about three years since graduating, Taft had finally found his break, during one of his travels he managed to save the head of a small clan in the Erzuli region from a bandit attack, all this with the help of an elven woman who was around hunting at the time and had supported him, but this is a story for another time.

As a reward, he asked the man to please find him a house that would be willing to receive his services as a teacher and to help him spread his name.

This is how he ended up in a quiet fishing town on the other side of the kingdom.

Having arrived from a long and arduous journey, his clothes were tattered and worn, his hair disheveled and wild, he even had grown a full beard, but he had been told to first meet his student, Edwin Donn, the future village head of the town.

To his surprise, it wasn’t just that kid waiting for him, but a mixed little girl too, she was also a Donn, so even if he was wary and would have preferred not to teach her, he readjusted himself and taught her the same way he would any other kid back at the orphanage.

He had also set his mind back at the elven woman that helped him get the job in the first place. Maybe his views on these people were skewed.

A few months had passed since he began teaching his students and now Taft had more developed impressions of them.

Sofia Donn, even though she was a wild child, had good potential, learned fast and if she did a mistake would correct it even faster, never letting pride get in the way, she was also a strange kid, always with a bored, lost expression and wandering eyes, as if everything was boring and couldn’t hold her attention. This got on Taft's nerves, but he wasn’t going to do anything about it.

The other one was Edwin Donn. He, well, was a lot less exceptional, more akin to the orphanage boys that didn’t care much for magic beyond the stories of great characters.

But unlike those kids, young Ed did put in the effort. He just wasn’t as talented, a painfully normal kid.

These two pupils of him were now submerging their hands in wooden bowls he had filled with water.

“Now, the first lesson will be to pour mana into the water until it reacts, doesn’t matter what it does, as long as you cause an effect on it,”

“what’s this for?” Lan asked him.

“This is a good way of teaching elemental affinity, in casting a spell, not everything is chanting a weird verse and channeling energy, for anything to happen you first have to have a mental idea of what you want to happen, that’s why I showed you two my [water ball] so many times, it’s for you two to develop a mental image of how the spells should be like, but that’s not all, the version I casted was a remote version of [Water Ball] that means it didn’t use any water from a nearby source, I made the water materialize out from thin air, this is far more complex but it’s our long term goal, to cast a remote spell, we must first cast a dependent or natural version of it, and to even be able to do that, you first need to have a high affinity with the element you will be casting it from,” he said while putting a finger in the air, he had this custom of pointing fingers while explaining things.

“So, what? I don’t understand, this is quite hard, isn’t it?” Edwin said.

“Really? Well, I guess you two are still young, the idea is like this, you need to feel and have a good understanding of how water works, as weird as that sounds... so that you can create a strong mental image of the spell, then you mentalize yourself while channeling magic and make your abstract image a concrete reality,”

Edwin was just listening to the conversation while pouring all he had into the water bowl. Nothing seemed to happen, his eyes seemed to be spinning in circles.

“For now, try to project a mental image of the water. Imagine it move in an unnatural way and project that while sending mana to your hands, like this,”

He reached into the third bowl he had prepared for a demonstration, place his hand inside the water, it was cold but not freezing. He then tapped into the magical energy, felt it in the tip of his fingers, imagined the water rising as if it were an inverted water spring, and it did, a tendril of water rose from the bowl twenty centimeters up, then fell back down.

“Something like this,” he spoke matter-of-factly

“Teacher, how long did it take you to learn all this?” Edwin asked in amazement

“I think I was around ten when I could reliably move the water around. A few days later I could recite [water ball]”

“So, teacher really is a prodigy isn’t he” he now sounded more defeated than amazed, as if he wanted to give up.

This kid’s spirit dies faster than a farmer with heart problems facing a dragon.

“I don’t know about being a prodigy or whatever, I want to think I put a lot of effort into my practice”

“Yeah, sorry, I’ll put in some effort too,”

The class ended with Lantana being able to move the water slightly, Edwin hadn’t progressed at all, but this was fine for Taft, he was never going to progress faster than his sister, after all, he was still a seven-year-old, he understood that but still felt a bit disappointed.

By the fourth day, Sofia had actually managed to make small swirling’s on the bowl with pretty good consistency, and Ed was trying to replicate Taft's technique, raising the water upwards, he did manage to make it pop about half a pinkie finger.