Description
This is Folklore AU!Elain- so not quite Archmagi, but close enough. Folklore AU is essentially the Spiderwick Chronicles, IE, "What if we put all our OCs in the English Midlands, also, fairies are real?" AU. I like alternate universes. I am trash. Admittedly, i find it pretty amusing that I've held onto Elain for so long, because when the witchsona thing became popular on tumblr I already had a READY-MADE DARLING.
Here's the post on tumblr , and here's the copypaste description:
Witches in-universe are simply humans that are genetically predisposed towards magic, the knowledge of which is passed down from mother to daughter through the maternal line.* Rather than straight-up conjuring, witchcraft generally manipulates what nature has already brought into being; in other words, magical herbs, potions, healing, enchanted fires and magic circles all fall under the domain of witchcraft. In addition, they can occasionally see into the past or future, alter the weather and bolster or kill crops.
Elain was raised by her grandmother in northern Wales; like her mother before her, she was unnaturally ambitious for a pagan witch whose job was to uphold the pattern of the natural world with few personal desires. Gifted with unfortunately large amounts of power and little responsibility to govern it, she would often seek out spells greater and more powerful than necessary.
Self-confident and forthright, she drew the ire of the Unseelie court when she competed with a fairy for the affections of a human. As revenge, she was transformed into a child (a teenybopper preteen, to be exact), supposedly to bar her from using her physicality ever again. Mostly, it just serves as a mild annoyance and an unending reminder that the fae are assholes.
The human was taken down into the mounds and never seen again, and Elain gained nothing but a smaller body and an extreme oversensitivity to imagined infringements upon the people she holds dear. Her monotonous life is once again thrown into disarray when she tries to summon a familiar spirit, and instead gets a sullen shaman with a thousand-year-old destiny set in stone.
*All humans, in theory, possess vast magical reserves that normally remain untapped. The most common ways that humans use magic is often in regards to protection against evil: only humans are able to employ faith-based protection methods (religious symbols, IE: crosses) and salt lines.