Chapter Text
The witch that raised Shigeru, though never warm to him, had her small kindnesses—perhaps even mistakable for ‘tough love’ by those that didn't know her. Realistically, her motivation was solely the preservation of her unwilling assistant. Any concern for his well-being extended only as far as he was useful to her, as her beatings often made clear. Still, he was grateful for her lessons (better likened to drunken ramblings) of the world's nature. How life cares little for fairness, how women turn on sisters, how men will leave you whenever the whim strikes them. To these wisdoms, he took well. The world worked a certain way, and for that knowledge, he was grateful.
When he came into his magic, as she knew he would (it was, she had told him, why she had even bothered to take him in, for it made him ‘a useful battery, at least’), she even taught him how to use the magic. It was, as always, not out of any genuine feeling for him, but rather in the interest of keeping him from accidentally burning down her hut. An untrained mage can lose control of themselves, after all.
(The witch had used this fact to taunt him often. She informed him that she hadn’t even needed to kidnap him, for his parents begged her to take him when they realized he was a mage. She told him that even if he escaped her, no warmth would wait in the towns and cities, where the common folk hate and fear magic users like themselves. She told him that without her, his magic would twist and distort his body, make a hideous animal out of him, drive him to insanity with unending agony.)
She showed him how to conjure and contain fire, to take one’s energy and convert it into pure flame, to make anger real, tangible, dangerous. (But never dangerous to her, her magic stifling his, keeping him in check, in line.)
He’d watch her, when the well dried, use her rods to divine where next to make him dig. He’d witness her magics call forth and tame lightning, how she’d command tree roots to grow in ways she found pleasing, or hew bricks from stone with little effort.
Tragically, not all of her teachings had held.
“Do not,” she had told him, after belting him for trying to run, “enter the woods, lest you'd like to end up as some feral’s meal, or worse.”
Having spent several days prior shivering in the underbrush, hungry, flinching at shadows, before she had finally discovered and beaten him, he had understood this as being a lesson on him depending on her for food, water, shelter, and life, whether he liked it or not.
But he was older now, eighteen years of age, and believed himself to be wiser, stronger. He had his magics, learned from studying the witch’s work when he could, and thought that surely he was capable of surviving the woods, and so he braved them, seeking freedom, independence.
He would learn in time that his magical fire did not burn as warmly or brightly as the real thing, that it was a pale imitation.
He would learn in time that though his magic could lead him to water, it could not clean it.
He would learn in time that carving shelter from stone was not feasible to mages of so few years.
He would learn in time that there was no freedom to be found in the forest.