...was going to have to wait a little longer to get his/her claws
into your soul.
Your father Joseph was a carpenter by training and a
wand-maeker by trade.
It had long been known by simpler folk that in a realm where
blood is magic,that nature would see about her flora and fauna
making use of blood as a means of day-to-day survival.
Hence monstrously sized serpents went about slithering down from the forest canopy to poke their fangs into sleeping elephants and drinking elephants blood on scorching hot days.
Not because the serpents were vampires,but because their natural instincts told them to do so.
Those instincts had also evolved over countless tens of millions of years
so that the magic from the ingested delephants blood served as a sort of cold generating radiator fluid,which on
scrorchingly hot days could mean the survival of the serpent into cooler seasons.
Which also meant their were mountain ash trees in that forest that were covered in thorns that pricked passing animals such as wolves and obtained a drop of blood from their unknowing victims.
Then the ash trees,though not possessing of any 'instincts",had evoled so that
the magic in that drop of wolves blood caused their root systems to sprout
more fur-like roots,which came in
handy for the tree to collect more moisture out of the ground
during those droughty summer scrorchers.
So your dad,the wand-maeker,often went into the forest to collect the thorny dead branches
from those ash trees and take them to his woodshop where he carved them into the wands that the more risk adverse common folk used to employ magics.
The ash wood contained the naturally occuring veins in the branch that the drop of wolfs blood was drawn along to those roots far below ground.
The common folk thus had learned to dip the ends of the wand into a bowl of
diluted blood ( their own often) and holding that wand
would <think the nature spell> that they needed to do the minor magics.
However your father also was capable of making wands capable of destruction,
weapons.
He kept those locked up in a glass case away from the general public,and wouldn't
even let the mages and demonblooded know of their existence,since they
were so dangerous.
However four years earlier you,a 12 year old boy at the time,had
accompanied your dad into the forest to capture a poisonous serpent and ,forbidden,take the still living wood from a mountain ash tree.
The two of you had killed the serpent,and there in the forest your father had taught you how to make a wand to kill any human ,mage or demonic creature.
He'd carved the blood dripping ash wood into a three foot long wand,,slid on the skeletal ribs of the dead female serpent along its shaft,wrapped its snakeskin spirally on the outside to bind the serpent ribs and ashwood in a tight embrace and finally affixed the serpent skull to the end,its jaws agape and its fangs at the ready.
Frankly your wand-maeker father hadn't a clue what dark magic
it contained and didn't want to find out.
You both went home and your father locked it up with the other dangerous wands.
Now what your father hadn't known at the time was that you were
at that age when bows and arrows,spears and other weapons were
a fascinating topic to boys your age.Your best friend was a kid named
James,whose rich uncle had left him a similar
killer-eagle wand.
Complete with wooden shaft covered in eagle feathers,the skull of a
she-eagle and the outstretched taloned feet of a eagle tied
onto the other end.
James had shown you one night how the thing worked bt taking you
to the local aviary-zoo,where various small songbirds tweeted
and sang their songs.
There was one small yellow amourous male canary that was flitting
about trying to mate with a female.
"Just what we want" said sadistic James and you watched him point the wand at the clueless male and recite the trigger spell.
The wand glowed in his hands and a beam of magical fire leapt out of the she-eagles skull and struck the male canary full forces.
The glow died away and you gasped as you could see that the
male had just tripled in size and was still growing.
Though he still tried to tweet that soon stopped as his feathers began to change their colour and she lost interest in mating with a smaller yellow female
bird.
She thrashed about a bit and grew bigger and bigger as she changed
into a handsome looking she-eagle.
A hungry she-eagle.
Soon she had eaten her fill of the prey birds and coughed up some yellow feathers,including
those of the female canary she'd once tried to court in her past life.