For all that Wanda has given up for this world of magic dampened by war and politics, she could not forget her passion. On the back shelves of her expansive library, hidden behind books on tradition and debate and magic that springs from one's fingertips like lightning blazing bold across the night sky is a collection of ancient scrolls and handwritten maps and well-read tomes thicker than the dictionaries she keeps in plainer view. It is these she visits in the evening hours when she does not have the heart to review battlefield deaths or the energy to argue with men who twist people as easily as magic.
They sooth her. Sometimes she reads Ward Breaking tomes, thick with Runic magic and warnings. She knows them by heart, her knowledge of the ancient symbols has saved her life more than once (1922, Valley of the Kings) though the books are nothing more than multiplication tables would be to a statistician. They smell of school corridors and fresh snow, and she finds a freesia dried in the pages of one. She inhales the long-forgotten scent and smiles.
When she is distraught (three thousand four hundred twenty three men died on the battlefield, lost in a desperate surge for a plan she had contributed to and agreed upon. It was a miserable failure) she re-reads the slighter Curse-Breaking books. They are filled with dire warnings and death, but they are straightforward, clever, and demand nothing more than power and creative spellcasting. Men have their organs boiled while they yet live and die cut in half, bodies to lie in the tombs for many months while their colleagues study the traps they missed, but there is always a solution to the strangest, deadliest of traps. The books are not always guides, but they offer hope. There is no solution in war, and as she reads well-remembered pages that hold life saving advice (1932, Giza Necropolis) she finds a white carnation half-crushed by weight and time in the pages.
There are days when she joins the battlefield, magic dancing from her wand, power enforced by acromantula web and rigid cypress. She casts spells of vivid violet (it tears the flesh from a man's bones, causes his wand to splinter, organs spilling to the ground, uttering one last screech as he falls) and shamrock green (a werewolf howls more in surprise than fright when a large green vine erupts from the ground, wrapping around her neck and recoiling into the earth with such force her head tears from her body). She ends the battle with a artic blue spell sailing over the battle, ripping trees from the earth, tearing them into large shards of pointed wood and driving them with incredible force into the incoming enemy forces. Her clothes are damp with blood, adrenaline pumping through her veins, words fierce with bold spirit, and eyes gleaming with the freshness of battle (there is a azure larkspur on her bed when she retires to her quarters).
Today, she is exhausted with politics, magic trickles from her fingers, and does not find reading things she learned long ago calming. She digs out the bag not-quite-hidden in the far corner of her closet, spreads maps based on ancient pathways drawn over modern roads and cities, pins the corners with paperweights with velvet bottoms, and begins to track the location of a tomb given only in material most of the modern world cannot read. She traces new lines over the gentle sketch of the paper and when Noir tips open the door he finds her working with a soft smile that does not falter through the confusion. She does not wear it in battle nor can she force it for the sake of argument, but it returns when she finds pink-tipped white ranunculus tucked into the vase beside her door. Wanda does not relish in sending men to war, planning battles for them to die in drains the light from her eyes, and the threat-filled peace talks she attends with a sweet smile sends the fire which she culls from her words to her eyes. She misses catacombs and underground tombs and deadly wards as a bird misses flight, but children die and her countrymen fall by dozens a day and she could ignore these things save for her father's fault in their deaths.
She is a daughter of magic and her hands will shape this world, leaving gouges and holes as she creates something wonderful. A mind that wades through layered Runic magic has the capacity to subtly word threats underneath sweet words and kind smiles (they have seen her on the battlefield, their eyes do not meet hers). She spends her free time forming battle strategy to have it pulled apart by those with kinder hearts and her argument comes from the stone eyes of one who has stood in trenches and fought through labyrinths, fearing no man save the commander who is half her age and twice as foolish as any other soldier on the field.
She wakes in the night from nightmares born of underwater undead and spells searing against her skin, eyes opening not to half-rotten rafters or blood damp battlefields but to silken sheets and silence broken only by the deep breathing of the cool body beside her. A gladiolus rests on the nightstand, casting a shadow in the moonlight over her bed. The sight of it makes her stomach turn but settles her mind.