a little bit about my dumb fantasy novel

it's truly come to dire straits around here so i'm going to tell you a little bit about the plot of my novel

in a small village in the woodlands of fantasy midaevaissance frangland lives a miserable, magical little boy. the relationship between the misery & the magic is not accidental: besides his catatonically depressed mother, this kid is the only magic-user (okay, we'll say witch & wizard) he's ever met. the other children bully him severely for this, and he doesn't totally not deserve it; set on by big groups, he'll respond with an explosion of untrained force, to which they feel their only possible response is ganging up on him, to which he feels like his only possible response is magic, etc etc etc. they don't just bully him because he's a wizard, though, they also bully him because he's a bastard--fathered by, the rumor goes, the faraway feudal lord of these parts, who is the only noble to also have magic powers. as miserable as he is the kid seizes on this idea eagerly & decides he doesn't get along with these kids because they're peasants, he's better suited for court life, his father will come for him any day now, etc etc etc.

(i'm not sure where to mention this exactly so i'll mention it here: a generation or two ago a plague with a bubonic-level death toll swept midaevaissance fantasy europe, so there's this horror in living memory but the land is also emptier & full of opportunity....& wizards/witches survived the plague better than non-magical people.¹ so the population ratio is much more shifted towards wizards now, let's say they're a very small minority instead of vanishingly rare, & the previous equilibrium where normal people just outnumber wizards too hugely for them to do too much, no longer holds. likelihood of social upheaval high)

anyway, one day, the kid is like nine, a family of wizards comes to town--a man, his pregnant wife, a girl (👀) a couple of years younger than our hero, and like a toddler boy. when they find out that they're on the land of the only lord who's a wizard, they decide that this is where they'll settle down. (our hero obviously doesn't understand this, but the parents anticipate that a lord who's also magical, will both feel less threatened by magical tenants, and less need to make them do stuff for him.) at first they're just living in a tent in the woods but the parents basically start magically homesteading. and this is super fascinating to our hero, whose mother only uses enough magic to basically keep them going, and whom he doesn't learn a lot from. he's coming over all the time, he's trying to learn stuff from them, he wants to help them. the parents are welcoming but not infinitely welcoming. when they find out that he's using magic to fight with the village kids, the dad tells our hero that he absolutely has to stop or the doors of their house (that they're building) are closed to him. this family needs the villagers on their side to survive, & if the villagers think, "hey, this little shit is using magic against our kids & these people aren't doing anything about it," then the villagers will be against them, etc etc. also the kid explicitly asks to be part of this family & the dad is like no. but he does promise the kid that when he's twelve, he can become his apprentice, a binding magical agreement which among other things makes the parties involved incapable of using magic to harm each other.

meanwhile of course he's becoming besties with the girl, they're always hanging out, learning & working on stuff together.

but before the apprenticeship can go through, the kid's mother dies, & the feudal lord, eventually hearing about this, sends a summons for our boy. he doesn't have time to say goodbye to anybody, he has to choose right away between everything he's known & this possible father. he picks the possible father.

what's happened is, the old goat of a lord has had yet another titled wife die in childbirth. he's been through a lot of them, his only surviving child is this bastard, & the lord is starting to get old & feel iffy about his ability to produce a living legitimate heir, so he's bringing this kid closer into his orbit. but only as a backup plan: the lord has married one more young noble wife, and if she can't give him an heir, this kid will do. on that note the lord packs our hero off to the king's court to be fostered & taught to be a knight, as is typical for noblemen's sons in midaevaissance frangland. the only difference is that the lord also expects the kid to simultaneously train under the king's court wizard.

so our little elitist is finally at court….will it be everything he predicted……….or will he find that he still feels out of place………………….and then you would not believe how much more stuff happens haha this is just the beginning of the setup. but this is what you’re getting tonight.

1. it is beneath my dignity to say muggle.