Re: Pequenauds] in the Swamp
"I had been inducted into the Guild on my ninth birthday. This next day was one of my mother's worse days; she was not truly coherent, and I had only begun to learn Sahudese so I could not understand her mumblings and rantings. Despite that, I managed to put her in her bed with a pot of tea on the side table, and I came to the Guild for my lessons.
"Perhaps I should have been placed with the Mages' Guild, for by then I had been able to cast magic for nearly three years, but I thought and still think my mother would not have done well from moving to Sonne, so I took my lessons mainly from Spielgud at the Adventurers' Guild.
"Sakemoko was Guildmaster in those days, so many of the staff at the Guild hall were Sahudese, and it was common for them not to speak Aralaise well. On this day, there were three stable hands and the ostler present, because the stalls were full. They were conducting the morning feeding and grooming of the horses (and one other mount -- I never learned what it was called, but it was smaller than a horse, with paws instead of hooves, and the teeth of a predator).
"As you have surely noticed by now, I am not quite human, and my very presence is often disturbing, especially to more intelligent animals like horses, dogs, and pigs. On this day, with so many stalls open for feeding and grooming, when I entered the stable the horses began to kick up despite the grooms' efforts to calm them.
"Normally, I'd have simply hurried through and the horses would have gradually calmed after I was beyond their perception. This day, however, one of the grooms or one of the horses knocked over the farrier's forge, so that the coals fell into the straw, and in a few heartbeats, fire had spread across much of the open floor of the stable. Horses and grooms were trapped in the stalls; it had the making of a disaster.
"I had not yet studied elemental magic; Spielgud thought I should learn other things first. However, the reason I was inducted to the Guild so young was that I am a spontaneous caster; that is, I can sometimes cast spells I have no studied, and if I choose, I can remember how I have done it. On that day, I cast a fairly simple spell to create water, with the intent to use the stream issuing from my hand to dampen down the straw to slow and hopefully extinguish the fire, or at least to give the grooms a chance to get themselves and the horses out.
"The casting was imperfect, however, and instead of water pouring from my hand as if from a pitcher, a great cube of water, more than a yard across, appeared in the air in the center of the stable and fell to the floor.
"The fire was out, but the weight of the water did considerable damage; three horses and a groom were injured and one of the horses had to be destroyed, and repairs to the structure of the stable took more than a week. Worst, however, was the creature that came along with the water -- like a squid, it seemed, but when the water had fallen and dispersed, it stood on its tentacles and walked, and immediately grasped one of the horses.
"Others from the Guild eventually slew the creature, though the horse it had battened to was also lost. When Sakemoko heard the tale, he understood that it was not my fault, in terms of being due to something I had done, but that my presence had caused the original situation he had no doubt, and I was banned from entering the Guild stables from that day."
