Odd Partners

If you think he's pompous now, you should have heard him when I met him. It was during those really unpleasant "witch hunts", and he was thrown into the dark cell I had been in for a while already.

As soon as I couldn't hear the guards anymore, I made my own light and tried to cheer him up a bit.

"You'll get used to it."

"I'd have thought this place had safeguards against magic," he said, referring to the glow between my hands.

"Their idea of a joke, I guess. Whatever could an illusionist do? The guards are protected." He did that contemptous sneer you get from some mages when I said "illusionist", which annoyed me a bit, but I kept it under wraps. Mostly. "And what is your power they are not afraid of?"

He snorted. "Summoner. Can't do a thing without chalk or something else to draw my circles." The walls were poured concrete, not pebble in sight.

So I made some suggestions starting with blood and going downhill from there, until he went on a short lecture about required spiritual purity of materials if you didn't want to get something a lot more dangerous, particularly for you, than you were aiming for. He looked really dejected, in an annoyed way. I went over the obvious idea to see if it had any holes in it.

"Circles and runes, yes?"

A snort and a nod.

"Well, if you can describe them exactly..." I did a little flourish and turned the unfocused light into a bright spiderweb spanned between my fingertips, smiling at him through the gaps. "What is purer than light?" Things started looking up from there.