The Witches' Game- Sacrificial Spotlights

Edmund Barrow: the King of Winter

Eight Years before the Ticking of the Clock.

Stalra's End, the seat of the Winter College, Orphan Dormitories

The children never expect anyone important to visit, not in this place, here at the very bottom of the mountain that supports the city of Stalra's End. The world of the witch is a curious one, it takes as much as it gives, and once it realizes what it can get, it often wants more.

So it calls. It draws those close, it demands pilgrimage so that even the weakest among the world may hear the call of Winter magic. A farmer in the fields may one day look to the mountains in the north and begin to walk, and that is because they have been chosen for some purpose unknown.

Most die before they ever find out what the purpose was.

Most leave children behind.

Edmund is one of those children, born of the lowlands with his olive colored skin and tousled black curls. He watches the world as though waiting for something to come along to impress him, and even the other children in the dormitories stay as far away from him as possible. He is not cruel, he is merely quiet. He is thought thoughtless, merely patient.

When Tamarack Frost, the Ascendant Provost of the Seasonal Lyceum, and Provost of the Winter College enters the dormitories when Edmund is ten years of age, no one is surprised. The boy, at this point, has been mastering the Core Rites so perfectly that whispers have already begun about his choosing a Path, nearly unheard of for an orphan at his age. Only those born into the higher families, handfed their magical tutelage, pick a path before the age of eighteen in the Winter College.

There simply is no need for fodder.

Yet there the Provost stands at the back of the room as young Edmund learns the small magics, the magic that everyone knows as the binding between the Seasonal Colleges. It is impressive. To Edmund, it is effortless, as though he has learned all of this over the course of years that he does not possess.

This is enough for Tamarack to know.

When he summons the boy to his office in the heart of the Winter College, he expects a sense of awe. Not everyone is allowed to see the inner workings of the Ascendant, especially an Ascendant who has been in power for as long as Winter has. Tamarack's study is filled with all sort of impossible things: a fiddle that can play itself, a fish that can only breath air, swimming in a bird cage. Yet the boy, still only ten years of age, watches these wonders with no emotion. He is disappointed. He is looking for something else.

"Edmund, is it?"

"If you'd like it to be," the boy replies. "My mother named me such, before she died."

Edmund has no real memory of his mother given that she only lived for six hours after his birth, although he can conjure the occasional wisp if he tries. He doesn't often, and has not since he was six and learned from the other children that it's not common to remember the songs your mother sang to you while she waited for you to be born. He gazes up at the old man, knowing what he is. Not caring.

"Do you understand why you are here, Edmund?"

He nods. Tamarack raises an eyebrow.

"It's because of that."

Edmund raises his arm and points to the portrait behind the Ascendant Provost. It is an ancient portrait, but still painted from memory, of Stalra as she had been in life. Youthful with her white blonde hair, she looks out at Edmund with black eyes. Before Tamarack can speak, Edmund stands and walks across the room, and the Provost can feel the power resonating within the boy, a power that the man, a master of ice, cannot understand.