The Wandering Warlock

Chapter 7: Guardian

After making a Pact with the Archfey, Ava prepares to set out from the North Woods. She's not sure where precisely her duties as a Guardian of the Feywild will take her, but she's excited to find out. After all, her celestial blessing has come into full focus, granting her powers of light, healing, and charm. She is still learning the nuances of her Eldritch bond, but finds herself to be a tad more persuasive, making suggestions with greater ease.

Having long been curious about magic, Ava is enthusiastic to master her newly granted magical abilities. As she practices the basics, she scribbles into her journal. When Ava concentrates, the feeling of each burst of magical energy she summons imprints on the back of her eyelids like a constellation. She draws these structures in her journal, hoping that capturing them on the page will help her memorize the essence of each spell and reproduce the effects more powerfully in the future. Sometimes Ava experiments with new ideas, drawing patterns depicting how she might combine tendrils of radiance with her affinity for snow and mist. Occasionally inky blue butterflies appear within the journal's pages. They seem to flutter around specific sketches she's made, marking them, and Ava senses her patron's approval.

When at last Ava does depart from the relative safety and comfort of the North Woods, she skirts along the edges of civilization, finding small ways to please her Archfey patron. She's always had a knack for alleviating the constraints of magical marketplace creatures, and continues this work without hesitation. She's less sure about burning pieces of cropland, but perhaps if she could replant the fertile soil with something worthwhile, something more... palatable.

Like mistberries, she thinks. Wouldn't Mama just love it if there were scores more mistberry bushes. She absentmindedly draws her nose closer to the purple pie pocket fused into her cloak where the faint smell of fresh pie wraps twin spools of comfort and nostalgia around her heart.

They only take root when covered by a layer of mist, she hears Mama's voice echo in her mind. Ava furrows her brow and sets to sketching. She takes a few days to experiment, studying the structure of her spells and examining them from a few different angles. Her technique isn't perfect yet, but she eventually gathers a firm enough hold on the spell's energy to heat pockets of air while cooling pockets of soil, inducing a small blanket of mist to form low to the ground. It's no fog cloud, but she finds that it is just enough to plant mistberry seeds and convince them it's safe to take root. Safe to grow back and someday flourish. Ava plants mistberries most everywhere she goes.

Her Archfey patron is satisfied with her initial efforts. Though a long way yet from reaching her full potential as a Guardian of the Feywild, Ava's patron bestows upon her minor boons and grants her access to eldritch invocations. Drawing upon these new sources of power, she practices more - weaving silent illusions, wrapping herself in protective shadows, stepping through mists as if through an ethereal door. Her patron encourages her, promising even greater gifts if her Guardianship continues to progress.

This concludes the story of how Ava au Nieva came to be, but the next chapters of her story are still underway. The Archfey continue to guide her, leading her onwards with trails of blue. She does what she can to assist vulnerable regions of Feywilds while learning from the world around her and sketching in her journal. Between these summonings, Ava remains a whimsical wanderer content to explore enchanted woods. She's not without direction, but usually without the rush to get there. Like all wanderers, she comes and goes with the winds, winking in and out of social tapestries like a thread of soft starlight. Many who meet Ava find themselves wondering how, exactly, she came to be part of their party. And when she leaves, they can't quite remember why she was there.

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Thanks for reading! Ava has played in 2 one-shot D&D games where she's battled and befriended various hags and unicorns :) 

You can find her character sheet here:  https://www.dndbeyond.com/profile/MustangOfMars/characters/51087049