It didn’t make sense. Not even a little bit, actually. Every time they repeated their inane story, Talia’s head hurt.

She’d come with news - great news - but she’d wanted to tell it to her sister first, and she wasn’t there. Her parents told her about demons, dragons, and other such crazy things that didn’t belong in Malek.

After a while, she lifted her hand, and the words stopped.

Oops.

She’d forgotten, how much power she now had at her fingertips.

“Sorry. Please be quiet. Aleria, would you tell me what happened?” she asked her older sister.

The blonde beauty smiled sadly.

“You won’t like it. Darsen the oaf tried to rape Alexandria, then accused her of being possessed by a demon, because she pushed him back with fire. Father and Mother took his side. She was imprisoned, and sentenced, too. They tried to torture her. They couldn’t. Finally, she was rescued by a dragon; we all saw it fly away. No clue how that happened.”

That was plainly said, and made a little more sense; not a lot, though.

“Dragon?”

Aleria shrugged.

“No clue how that came about, but at least she didn’t get drowned. I don’t think she’s dead. I’ve done location spells and they had worked for a time - now, though, they’re vague, as though some shield is protecting her.”

Talia nodded.

“Come on, there was no proof that…”

She lifted her hand again, this time intending to shut her mother up.

“Truth,” she ordered.

Her parents were class four mages. Some of the most powerful in the land. Few spells worked on them, fewer mages could hope to best them.

She wasn’t a mage, though. Not anymore.

“The girl was a disgrace.” Daria clapped her hand over her mouth in an effort to stop her own words for damning her further, but there was no resisting the magics of Talia. Not anymore.

They had what they’d wanted. They’d sent their child to the capital of the Northern Var in hopes that she’d be noticed by the Order.

She had been. “We wanted rid of her honorably. If she had married Darsen, as planned, she might have salvaged a little pride and undone the damage she’d done to our name, but she was always a wayward child and refused to obey. I curse the day she sprang from my loins and am glad she was snatched away by some dragon. May it not choke on her bones.”

Lars Astria stood behind his wife, thunderstruck. Talia could read him. He wasn’t alarmed by what he heard from his wife, he was worried what was about to come out of his mouth. Talia turned her attention on him, binding him with the same truth magic she had laid upon her mother.

“I didn’t believe she was mine,” said Lars.

Daria clouted her husband over the head.

Talia smiled. They were their own worst enemies. She didn’t need to do more to punish them for what they’d done to Xandrie. They would keep telling the truth for days and by the time her truth spell wore off, their reputations would be in tatters and their business a shambles. They deserved no less. No self-respecting parent sentenced their daughter to be tortured and murdered. They’d only get what they’d brought upon themselves.

She left her parents, screaming obscenities at each other, and headed towards the Guard post, stopping at the door, only to turn to Aleria.

“You’re coming?”

The woman didn’t hesitate.

Darsen was lounging at a small table in the corner of the common area, where the guards loitered when they were on break and playing at cards and dice. His tunic was unbuttoned and his suspenders off his shoulders and around his sagging waist.

“Down,” said Talia.

Darsen’s pants fell around his ankles. His colleagues wept with laughter.

“Again,” said Talia.

Darsen’s underpants were on the floor in a trice.

Talia smiled. The man was well endowed. Not for long.

“Walnuts to hazelnuts, then hazelnuts to pinenuts.”

She didn’t wait to see her handiwork, but his shouts could be heard from one end of Malek to the other. With a nutsack that small, he wouldn’t be dropping his drawers any time soon.

Talia washed her hands of the small, backwards, oppressive town of her youth and set off. Truth be told, she may have stayed in the Northern Var - might even have carried on working for her parents - if things had unfolded in a different way, but, instead, Natalia Astria, the only living Enchantress in Eartia, set off, without knowing where her steps would take her, and embraced her destiny.