Author Games: Path of the Guildpact

Task Three Entries: Azorius-Simic

Newt-Ella Doe-Knott

Isn't it strange how things can change in the course of a sentence? How, in the time it can take a person to tell a few stories, they can change in a way that is so drastic that suddenly, they're unrecognizable? How a person can seem silly and foolish one day, and then pull a complete one-eighty the next?

Two signets in and I have to admit that I feel fantastic. I've always known I was magical – or at least, ever since I was four years old and accidentally flooded my basement. Speckle, the cat we had at the time, didn't seem very happy about the surprise, and he hadn't stopped hissing at me since until he died. But even knowing what I had the ability to do, I never thought it might all lead up to this. Signets. The Guildpact. One of the last sixteen candidates vying for a single spot.

It all seems so much, doesn't it? As though this was something completely in the realm of the impossible, taking place in a world which didn't really exist, written by an author who finally decided to pull it together and give me the treatment I deserve? Although I guess I didn't really deserve it, did I? Who'd waste their time on a girl with a weird name and whose key defining traits seem to be an obsession with a boyfriend who has an even weirder name? It's almost as though I was created to be laughing stock, destined to fail almost immediately. But I'm more than that, aren't I?

The thing with Pete is that he used to be the nicest boy, once upon a time. Before he knew what I could do. Mama always told me not to show him – that people weren't to be trusted around what they couldn't understand – but you have to understand, Guildmaster, that when you love somebody you want to believe in them. You've been in love, haven't you? Oh, you must have. You're a reasonably handsome man, after all, and surely you've at least had a heartbreak or two. You must know what it's like to realize that you were wrong; that all those moments you've shared don't mean anything after all, and that the people around you were right when they warned you about the person you love?

Mama told me not to. Papa told me not to. Craea told me not to. But, nonetheless, I trusted him.

I still remember the day, Guildmaster. I wanted it to be special, so I'd made a picnic all by myself and brought him to this waterfall we loved. You should go, one day. The water looks like a shower of stars going down into a blue mirror, unbothered even as they fall, and there's a meadow so green even emeralds would feel ashamed of how faded they look. Magic must have been involved in its making, because there's no way people could have done this. People are ugly. They would've corrupted its beauty so much so that it would never be the same. And then, slowly, I made the water climb back upstream. I watched as the laws of nature reversed themselves to fit my will, waited for Pete to notice, and hoped that it would all go like I had planned. That he'd realize that my magic was a gift, and that it was beautiful, and that it was nothing to be afraid of.

Of course, I know that here in Ravnica, we think of my skills as something that makes a person better, but it's different in the towns. When people don't understand something, no matter how much we try to convince them otherwise, their first reaction is to think it's evil. To decide that anyone who can use it shouldn't be trusted. Because what we can't explain is horrifying; it defies the laws of everything we know and forces us to realize that the world is so much bigger than us. That threatens people, you see. And Pete? Boy, was he threatened.

"Stop that!" he'd screamed. I'd jumped back, startled, and the water had come crashing down, shattering against the lake's surface as it escaped my grasp. "I don't know what you think you're doing, but stop it, Newt!"

"It's magic, Pete."

"It's horror," he'd replied.

Tears had swelled in the corners of my eyes as I shook my head. "It's beautiful," I'd insisted, "but only if you let it, Pete. Please," I'd begged. "Let it."