shades of blue

If you’d be calm, if you’d settle for me, your friend, I’d like to share tales with you from my travels.

It’s true that blue mana has been rough on you. Visions of clicking machines plague your dreams, and the idea of anything encroaching upon your wild kingdom terrifies you. If it’s you who must be burdened with something you see as unnatural, you must protect your world from its influences. The rest of us, aside maybe the lizard, have done nothing but respect that.

But it doesn’t have to be oily, unnatural machines and cold steel. It doesn’t have to be artifice and the destruction of nature. You’re brilliant on the inside, I know that somewhere in there you know that. I’ve been a lot of places now, and I’d like to share my experiences with you, one of my dearest friends.

Your curse doesn’t have to be a curse. Blue mana can be many things.

I once met a man on the plane I was staying who was an embodiment of the wild thunderstorm. Wherever he went, static and lightning followed. He didn’t even have to cast it like a mage, his very presence brought with him rain and peals of thunder.

I met another man who used his mana, wove it with the verdant green, and used it to heal. He could bind wounds with a touch, make others around him stronger. He made his subjects resilient to the cityscape in which he lived, made them beautiful without robbing them of their wild splendor.

I visited a plane whose frozen north, once upon a time, was like your country. The people there were shamans, who used their blue mana to bring forth visions of past and future. They used it to survive, used it to toughen themselves and their families. When it was robbed from them, the people feared for their lives under the thumb of a cruel tyrant, who would do nothing but eat her subjects.

I made friends on a plane who were beings of blue mana. They were wise beings, who lived in the sky and watched the world below. They were keepers of scrolls full of stories and spells both.

I don’t want to see you hurt, my friend. I want to help you through this. So I wanted to assure you that the artifice you know, doesn’t need to be what must come to pass. What you do with this new power is yours to control, and yours alone.

If I know you, I know you can do something great with it.