Marci was the greatest wizard in the Southlands.

Well, she could have been, if she'd wanted, and if life hadn't conspired against her. Or, if not life, then her mother. Or, if not her mother, then her so called friends who had kicked her out of her adventuring party for 'drinking on the job.' Or, if not her friends, then the University that said she 'wasn't meeting minimum performance criteria.'

Well, she hadn't wanted to submit her Arcane Mastery thesis anyway. The academy was full of has-beens and hedge-wizards who wouldn't know real magic if bit them. She was better off without them, and she didn't need a slip of paper to tell her how brilliant she was. She was a strong, independent fairy; she didn't need anything, or anyone.

However, Marci was nothing if not benevolent, so when the leader of her old adventuring party, a svelte cat-boy who Marci may or may not have still been in love with, showed up, begging for her assistance on an expedition to a hitherto un-raided tomb, she decided to magnanimously acquiesce to his request, make some space in her busy schedule of tavern crawling, and come along. Maybe she might even rejoin the party permanently—if they were lucky.

Except, the tomb isn't what anyone expected, and quite by accident, and through no fault of her own, Marci finds herself bound to a terrible artefact and promptly declared an 'enemy of mortal-kind.' And no matter how strenuously she tries to tell everyone the truth, that it's all a big misunderstanding, that any collaboration with demons isn't what it looks like and makes sense in context, and that she's not actually a Dark Lady bent on world domination, no one seems to believe her.

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Cover art by Renu: https://artistree.io/renu , https://lenuer.tumblr.com/