Nika Pešek was born an ordinary girl, or as ordinary a girl as one might find in Iliad City, where the rhythms of the Epic of Making echo as though it had been sung only minutes before. She found her start in life as the daughter of Pavel Pešek, a stoic, methodical crafter of armour, tools and weapons for the city’s elite – after all, no amount of industrial precision can improve upon the technical mastery, or ability to produce custom orders, of a mage-smith – and Atanasija Pešek, herself daughter of Pavel’s major supplier of raw materials with a finely honed business sense and a wicked sense of humour. Though a match primarily made for commercial reasons, the two found that they were not only a capable team but also emotionally complementary and quickly became a mutually reliant, perhaps some might even say loving, couple. Nika was thus born into a moderately wealthy household with two capable and affectionate parents. Things seemed to be looking up for her.

For the first years, they were. Nika learned to take in information, manipulate it and communicate it quickly, picking up reading and writing earlier than most children and extrapolating concepts that she hadn’t learned elsewhere from her previous knowledge; indeed, one of her earliest memories is Atanasija’s delight (and Pavel’s horror) at her having figured out the basic premise behind foreign exchange trading. As such, when her parents announced that they were having a second child, she took quite a bit of reassuring that she wouldn’t lose out on affection as a result.

In the end, though they did manage to convince her, it wouldn’t matter. For all the magic of the healers at the hospital and the advancements of modern medicine, Atanasija and her son died in childbirth when Nika was six.

Life carried on. Pavel’s work continued, even if he couldn’t negotiate such good prices for his pieces as his wife used to be able to and often found himself waking to a pillow wet with tears. Nika still did relatively well in school, even if her mind, whose keenness let her understand what had happened better than many of her age, became clouded. Forward they marched. That cloud, however brewed lightning. Nika’s grief quickly became determination. Her mother was gone – and thus she had to make up for her loss through effort; so went her child’s reasoning. For all her father saw this and first tried to quell this feigned strength born of pain, then to channel it safely by having her help him in the forge, it only grew more powerful and all-consuming within her as she aged.

Seeing that he had to do something, and also noticing her burgeoning magical ability, Pavel decided that it would be best to send Nika to one of Iliad City’s famous magical academies; there she might be able to find a place for herself, out of her mother’s shadow, he reasoned. Of the two, he decided to send her to Marduk; he had always liked the idea of the place more than Ishtar and, moreover, he felt that the sense of order there might be stabilising. Nika, of course, passed the entrance exam with flying colours and was thus enrolled at the Marduk Academy for the Mystic Arts at the age of twelve.

Unfortunately, two things stood in the way of Marduk being a good place for Nika. Firstly, though Nika’s style of thinking was primarily logical and systematic, like the one that Marduk espoused, that logic was incisive rather than constructive or stabilising. Where Marduk sought to impose rules for its students to follow, Nika tried to prove them flawed or circumvent them as she believed right; where Marduk laid out a system of magic for its students to rely upon, Nika sought to tweak and customise it for her own ends. She quickly became known as a maverick to the staff and a smart-alec to her peers, though she was at worst a bit prickly to those who actually got to know her.

Indeed, as a result of the second factor keeping her from aligning fully with Marduk, she didn’t have much focus left over to hurt anyone or engage in the school’s social landscape. Over the last few years, Nika’s goal had gradually shifted from filling the void that her mother had left in her and her father’s lives herself to simply bringing her mother back. She was a strong mage, after all, and stories abounded in this most storied of cities of strong mages challenging the dictates of fate and the natural order; why could she not do the same? Once she arrived at Marduk, she dived into the academy’s library, searching for ways in which that might be done. Necromancy Nika quickly dismissed; its abilities, she found, tended to be unpredictable, bringing about a facsimile of life as often as real life from beyond death. She would not risk her mother for that; she needed something predictable and consistent. Thus Nika turned to chronomancy; she borrowed some books on the subject, read them cover to cover and began to practice.

Now, chronomancy is a stable magic, bound to some of the simplest rules of the universe, but it is also a highly dangerous one. Nearly every book Nika borrowed was filled with warnings and cautionary tales of mages freezing themselves in time only to be unable to think and thereby loose the spell or people being pushed into the wall of a slowed zone and being shredded into chunks as individual parts of their body sped up going through to the other side. For this reason, Marduk itself only typically teaches chronomancy as a subject in students’ final years and only then to those who have excelled elsewhere and are of a cautious, considered disposition, for they, in the staff’s opinion, are most able to approach it successfully.

Nika? If it was dangerous for her to use it on people, she reasoned, she’d just do so with objects instead. That’s what she’d been doing for most of her life, after all.

Taking a dozen books on chronomancy out of the school library over the course of a term would have obviously raised some alarm bells with the librarians anyway but the school really took notice when Nika began using her new magic in her practical Elemental Magic classes, hastening the velocity of her projectiles to a degree that became suspicious to her teacher in the subject. Of course, when he asked her, she told him exactly what she was doing; there wasn’t any sense in hiding what wasn’t wrong in her eyes. This gave him sufficient cause to raise it with the remainder of the staff and, before long, Nika found herself embroiled in something that wasn’t quite a disciplinary process, given that this wasn’t against the rules, per se. The school, meanwhile, was left with the problem that Nika had apparently been skilful enough to use chronomancy on her own and would undoubtedly carry on using it, potentially endangering herself and others, but to let her do so publicly might be seen as condoning it generally and cause the rest of the student body to plunge headfirst into the discipline.

The solution that they came up with was to prohibit Nika from using her chronomantic spells in her regular school life until she was able to take chronomancy as a regular class but to assign her private tutoring with the specialist teacher who taught it as a subject, one Doctor Hannah Baumann, up to that point alongside it. Irritated but with little choice in the matter, Nika complied – at school; when she was at home she continued her practice – and started attending the sessions. These became the major reason that she stayed at Marduk. For all that she chafed at the school’s more structuralist tendencies, Dr Baumann, a patient, analytical and empathetic soul, in line with the archetype of most chronomancers, had a disposition that was perfect for focussing Nika’s passion. It was she who, deconstructing Nika’s understanding of chronomancy, tailored their private lessons to expanding that ability to its fullest; she, alongside Nika herself, is responsible for guiding her to alter her frame of reference to move objects in space by moving them backwards and forwards in time. The two have developed a close bond over the years, one that they retained even after Nika joined her class properly a few years later; from the outside looking in, one might even regard her as a mother figure.

Nika would be horrified at this perception. She hasn’t forgotten her original goal, not in the slightest, and, even as darkness begins to suffuse Iliad City, it remains her foremost objective. Now eighteen, only a few months from graduating, she believes that she has all the power and prowess that she needs to return Atanasija Pešek to her life. The long wait, years of lost connection, could be over, if only she can end them.

It’s time to see if she’s up to the task.

Nika has infused several items with magic and spells and stored them in the basement of her house. By recalling them through time with herself (or her gauntlet) as the frame of reference, she can summon them to her person, use them as she wishes, then return them to storage.

Familiar summoning, and promptly melding said familiars with himself temporarily.
STRONGER FIRE MAGIC.