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The evil sorcerer
Danik informed me that he was writing a story. On enquiry it turned out to be about "a young girl who discovers her magical powers and uses them to save her town from an evil sorcerer. She will have to learn how to control her powers and stop the sorceror before he destroys everything she holds dear". I think he has been reading too many Young Adult book jackets :-p
So after a bit of brainstorming on my part we ended up coming up with a new version. This story is about a grandmother who has spent her entire life hiding and suppressing her magical powers in order to have a normal life and family. When she and her younger brother were little, she tried to teach him to suppress his powers as well, but he was too young to stay vigilant, and he was discovered and driven out when his magic manifested itself. Now she has children and grandchildren and a respected place in the community, but she has spent a lifetime feeling responsible for her failure to protect him and her cowardice in keeping silent at the time.
Now, fifty years later, he has returned as a powerful evil sorcerer to take revenge on the town that tried to destroy him, and she is the only person who may have a hope of stopping him... but she will have to risk revealing her own abhorrent use of magic if she is to have any chance of saving her home and family, and find the courage to face the thought of destroying someone she once loved. He has spent all his adult life honing his powers to use as a weapon for harm; she has barely dared use a trickle of hers in secret since she was a teenager. It's going to be a hopelessly uneven contest.
(I'm assuming she wins, probably via some kind of redeeming confrontation with her brother in which he is induced to sacrifice himself to terminate whatever irrevocable doom he had already set in place for his erstwhile tormentors -- but how the community will then regard her I don't know. She may find that, like Frodo, she has lost her home in the process of saving it.)
I don't plan to write it -- I'd need considerably more detail on which the 'magic powers' actually are and can do, for one thing; Danik's version, predictably was "based on elements like earth, fire, water, and air" -- since the last thing the world needs is yet another generic fantasy without an audience. But I think my version is at least less generic than his.
(For bonus points, it might be less cut-and-dried if the social persecution of those with magic is actually well-founded rather than just being prejudice; if use of magic sucks the goodness out of the land, or if magicians always turn evil the more power they use, or if magic attracts demons to the leakage of power, or various other literary tropes...)
So after a bit of brainstorming on my part we ended up coming up with a new version. This story is about a grandmother who has spent her entire life hiding and suppressing her magical powers in order to have a normal life and family. When she and her younger brother were little, she tried to teach him to suppress his powers as well, but he was too young to stay vigilant, and he was discovered and driven out when his magic manifested itself. Now she has children and grandchildren and a respected place in the community, but she has spent a lifetime feeling responsible for her failure to protect him and her cowardice in keeping silent at the time.
Now, fifty years later, he has returned as a powerful evil sorcerer to take revenge on the town that tried to destroy him, and she is the only person who may have a hope of stopping him... but she will have to risk revealing her own abhorrent use of magic if she is to have any chance of saving her home and family, and find the courage to face the thought of destroying someone she once loved. He has spent all his adult life honing his powers to use as a weapon for harm; she has barely dared use a trickle of hers in secret since she was a teenager. It's going to be a hopelessly uneven contest.
(I'm assuming she wins, probably via some kind of redeeming confrontation with her brother in which he is induced to sacrifice himself to terminate whatever irrevocable doom he had already set in place for his erstwhile tormentors -- but how the community will then regard her I don't know. She may find that, like Frodo, she has lost her home in the process of saving it.)
I don't plan to write it -- I'd need considerably more detail on which the 'magic powers' actually are and can do, for one thing; Danik's version, predictably was "based on elements like earth, fire, water, and air" -- since the last thing the world needs is yet another generic fantasy without an audience. But I think my version is at least less generic than his.
(For bonus points, it might be less cut-and-dried if the social persecution of those with magic is actually well-founded rather than just being prejudice; if use of magic sucks the goodness out of the land, or if magicians always turn evil the more power they use, or if magic attracts demons to the leakage of power, or various other literary tropes...)