"Fear not."
That's what an angel is supposed to say when they come into contact with a mere mortal, right? "Don't be afraid. Capital Gee-Oh-Dee sent me, and I'm here to help."
Better an angel than a demon, right? A demon doesn't just want to kill you, it wants your soul trapped in a prison made for it, to suffer for all eternity.
Demons are things that hide under your bed, in the dark, and pull you under to devour you messily if you don't cover every limb with your protective blanket. Every child knows this.
Angels are things of protection and guideness, aligned with the light, sent to help us be the best we can be.
But as any magus will tell you, those who are afraid of the dark have never seen what light can do.
I was lucky as a kid. My parents were in the know before I was born. No snooping around to get my spellbook filled spell by spell. No toadying to a stubborn old magus to earn my first spell. Many such kids took this kind of opportunity for granted.
When this world was revealed to me at eight, I decided I would not be like those kids. I would not simply learn. I would master.
But to master spells, it's not enough to read the runes and keep them memorized. You have to go out and burn some mana, flex your aether, actually use those spells. Telekinesis? Move pebbles, then rocks, then dumbbells. Force strike? Dad knew a place with self-repairing dummies, a place you could throw whatever black magic you knew at them until you spent your last drop.
Healing? That's a little different. In order to get better with healing magic, it has to actually *heal* something.
Just turning nine, I thought I would need to make little cuts on myself and heal those, when my mother pointed out the obvious solution.
The hospital. The kids burn ward, to be precise.
The cover story was that I would go there with a N64- state of the art gaming hardware at the time- and give them a means to distract themselves from being extra crispy via Goldeneye.