At age seven, Morgana Benevolent was the spitting image of her father whom she had never known. Her mother saw that man in her daughter’s face every day, and that was the only thing that kept the spark of life inside her aflame.

Godric the Kind died during the Rock War of End Times tending to the wounds of the enemy in a trench. During a retreat, he was unable to keep up with his battalion, and so he hid in a trench waiting for a more opportune time to flee again. To his surprise, a wounded soldier too injured to attack crawled toward him. Godric’s strong belief in his Hippocratic Oath prohibited him from turning a blind eye to the dying woman, and so he tried to patch her up. Upon further inspection, her wounds were so severe that his efforts were in vain.

Perhaps because of this delay, he missed his chance to flee. An enemy platoon descended upon him and ended his life in the trench fearing he had killed the very soldier he had tried to save.

Word of her husband’s death destroyed his wife, Nina Benevolent, and left her magically sterile. The source of her magic, as was the tradition with the Benevolent family line, was from the concentration of intense emotion in her heart. It was not enough to simply feel strongly, but one must also have control to channel just one emotion at a time. Intense, cycling emotions of sadness, grief, anger, loss, confusion, and more prevented her from ever feeling just one way for very long. Once a revered magical lawyer, the constant emotional turmoil within her prevented her from scrying the pasts of her clients to help them argue innocence, and so she resigned from law and fell into a deep depression.

In an attempt to spare her daughter from a similar endless cycle of sadness and futility, she moved them out of the city and into the countryside where she could surround them both with nature’s beauty and innocence. Unfortunately, it was not the environment that she needed to flee, but the feelings inside her heart. Nina’s coping mechanisms followed her and she heavily abused magical memory-dulling substances to just barely operate day to day.

After her mind reached its inevitable limit, she laid on her bed and called young Morgana to her side. She turned to her daughter and impressed upon her the view of the world as she saw it.

Begin The A-Team by Ed Sheeran

INSTRUMENTAL

♫♫♫

“Morgana, my beautiful daughter.”

“Yes, mama?”

“This world is not fair. I know I’ve always told you different, but now I know that we are not owed anything and you must fight for your right to live.”

VERSE 1

White … men.

With the last of her strength she took her daughter’s hand.

“You must go to magic college. Learn to use your gift. I’m sorry I won’t be there to guide you. Look for the joy in your heart and focus in on it. Never embrace fear, never let it take you over. You can’t. We can’t.”

“Yes, mama.”

Nina Benevolent passed away leaving behind her daughter alone in their country home. In the days to come, Nina’s substance suppliers would come to her home looking for her. They found only Morgana.

PRE-CHORUS

And … us.

Morgana lived a life of servitude and mistreatment at the hands of the same people who hastened her mother’s death. After a day of constant labor on the streets, at night she would look at the starry sky and imagine a place where she could find the joy her mother spoke of.

She wallowed in a sea of sadness, fear, and resentment for her captors. Over time, specific feelings would boil over and crowd the others out. When this happened, somewhere deep inside her soul she would feel a warming that she could not explain. It caused a tingling sensation to her fingertips and toes.

CHORUS

Cause … fly.

Was this the magic her mother spoke of? In passing, she would ask her captors questions about wonderful professions that used magic she would read about on street flyers. None of them had ever practiced magic before so they did not have anything to say.

With each passing year, she began to practice channeling her resentment into small tricks. She would make objects go invisible in plain sight, burn the stove extra hot and evaporate the soup, or sometimes conjure sounds of beasts in the middle of the night to frighten her captors. Even with these tricks, she was fearful of being discovered as their source.

VERSE 2

Ripped … phone.

At age ten, Morgana was ordered to clean a filthy rec room. She opened the door and saw discarded magical substance containers strewn carelessly about the floor. As she always did when told to handle these bottles of evil that took her mother, she cried and pleaded not to be sent into the room, but her captors tossed her inside.

She picked herself up off the floor and angrily kicked the bottles away. Suddenly, a sickness in her stomach boiled to the surface and she coughed a searing fireball onto a pool table. As the flames engulfed the room and then into the house proper, she heard the screams of her captors. She stood engulfed in the flames, unaffected and protected by her feeling of joy in hearing their cries of agony.

PRE-CHORUS

And … us.

Was this the joy that her mother spoke of?

Morgana walked out of her prison, the building ablaze and spreading to the neighborhood around her, with a smile on her face from cheek to cheek. Surely this was the joy her mother told her to find, for her mind was filled with a wonderful feeling of liberation and discovery, silencing her heart still drowning in pain.

CHORUS

Cause … fly.

Morgana decided to explore as she closed her eyes and imagined herself soaring higher and higher. She felt herself being lifted off the ground, filled with a fire in her lungs.

Opening her eyes in a fright, the city’s horizon grew larger below her as she truly began to float above it all. She observed the few city blocks that had become her world the past three years aflame.

Between fits of laughter, she felt the burning in her lungs grow unbearably uncomfortable. She let out a roar of defiance over the city and balls of fire spewed across the buildings that she resented so.

BRIDGE & INSTRUMENTAL

An … ♫♫♫

Her body seethed with magic, pouring from of her fingertips like water and flowing out of her eyes and mouth like steam.

She saw her dreams from the last three years coming true right before her eyes and by her own hands. The satisfaction was intoxicating.

Law enforcement from all over the land descended onto the city. A few caught a glimpse of her terrifying face, but none were able to get close enough to capture her.

PRE-CHORUS

And … us.

Once she was satisfied, Morgana flew far away into the deep uninhabited Rhythm Forest of the neighboring Death province.

Alone, dirty, and uncared for, she spent four years refining her resentful heart against the wild beasts of death metal.

She was never taught to play a musical instrument or how to develop a rhythm and thus she was rejected by all the creatures of the forest big and small.

Thankfully, with enough time, she found that the ambient sounds of the forest provided a deep beat to which she eventually developed a musical prowess in order to survive.

CHORUS & CODA

And … die.

At fifteen, Morgana met an ogre that she finally could not best.

As he raised his axe guitar to rid the forest of the devil, she threw up her small hands in deference.

The ogre saw fear in her eyes that he knew all too well. Instead of striking her, he extended his hand.

She grasped tightly and felt something in her heart she had not known since she was a girl.

Reacquainting herself with kindness and disrupting the singular burning passion of resentment in her heart, she decided to return to the world of people and complete her mother’s dying wish to attend magic high school and then college.

After years of isolation, no one recognized the young woman with no background. She was able to enroll in high school and succeed all the way to the Boston College of Magic, the continent’s premier school.

End The A-Team by Ed Sheeran