A sleeping sorcerer, quite like a domesticated cat, is seldom best pleased when awoken abruptly. Opening a single, sleep-encrusted eye, Oliver Midwinter stared at the archway that began the short hallway leading to the front door of the tower. A circle of light, daylight, unwelcome as much as his visitor, told the boy all he needed to know about the length of time he had slept at his desk.

“Stevvains…”

He peeled his forehead away from the middling pages of Rhythmic Fluctuations and Bonding, a weighty tome on binding wild magic to mundane objects – a posh way of saying ‘how to make a wand for dummies’, and began to make himself presentable. This involved, quite like the grumpy woken cat, careful pruning, wetting of fingers, and flattening of errant curls.

If you have even seen a cat arriving at the conclusion that it is feeding time, and it is free of charge, you will be able to appreciate the sudden calamity that befell Oliver as it dawned on him to whom the visitor was referring. The nobbled, walnut oak chair fell backwards and banged against the floorboards as he skidded and bounded towards the hallway. Here, past met with present.

“Leona, bloody, Stevvains.”

Straightening himself out, he applied a brief knack to his robes to do away with the creases a night on his desk bed ironed into the cloth. He glanced sideways at the oval mirror fixed on the wall next to an overburdened hat stand resembling a tree of cloaks and hats. A dozen alchemical satchels hung from its prongs, like medicinal fruits.

“It’s been two weeks.”

There were doubts in his mind as to wherever or not the Tarot Hierarchy still existed. Many organisations in the blisteringly complicated echelons of Radasanthian power came and went without fanfare. Sorcerers and wizards, and to some lesser extent, mages and witches all belonged to more lists and obligations than most could remember.

Hoping that this would be a new life, a worthy beginning to a slow year finally free of his master, Oliver turned to the panelled door, broke into an uneasy smile, and turned the wild knob of sanded driftwood. A heave pulled the door inwards, and the magic that separated the inner sanctum of the tower to the roughshod, red brick exterior brought the Midwinter boy before his hopeful saviour.

“Oh,” he said softly, when it appeared the master had no titbits. The man, noticeably male and not female, was not Leona Stevvains after all. “I’m he. Who, though, are you?”

Presented as a studious youth, Oliver may not have fulfilled the messenger’s expectations of a member of the Tarot. He did not appear to be any more of a magician than your common street urchin was. All the same, if one were to look closer, there were vestments of power in his eyes – sparkles of potential, and a winged shadow behind him that lingered even in the furiously warm sunlight of midmorning.