Darling: awarded for his work on magic as focused through machines and objects. Inventor of many simple machines that hold or collect magic charges and disperse them in very specific useful ways. Lots of papers written on cursed objects. He writes down all his research so he never forgets anything. He’s rumored to be so brilliant though that he sometimes throws research away on purpose, just so he’ll forget it and find new ways to accomplish his achievements. He’s very suave and quite the charmer.

They used to be colleagues, close friends even, before they wanted to kill each other. They were brilliant and famous and they could have changed the world if they had learned to chill.

It was the usual story, two brilliant minds with big egos who start to work together for the greater scientific and magical good, only to always subconsciously be competing for the title of ‘The Smartest Dude’.

It was little things at first. Who’s name was first on joint research. Which one the students preferred to go to when they had problems understanding their rune work. Who was fawned over more at a dinner party.

Who wore it better?

They kept most of their bitterness for each other under wraps in the company of others but in private their fights were split between vicious personal comments and one-uping death matches they referred to as ‘spell testing’. When they entered their classrooms with tired, haunted eyes or asked an assistant for a salve for fresh magic burns, everyone just assumed that they were really passionate about their testing.

Then things got a little public.

Neutral remarks turned artfully catty. Then hateful. They separated their labs, then their students, then their entire bodies of work. Their feud encompassed everything. Their research and the education of their students slowed to a crawl. The dean advised vacation time, that they just needed to get away from the pressures of fame and academia.

Firing them would waste two of their school’s most brilliant minds.

Time off was just time to plan.

If research had slowed before, it was at a complete stop now. Each of them endured threats on their lives from the other. Each of them blamed the other for their fall from grace.

There were projected nightmares that kept him awake and on the brink of madness for weeks. Illusionary stairs on broken staircases. Waking up panicked after seemingly sleep-walking to the nearest body of water and holding his head under. Shadows that crawled over delicate eyes, blinding, reaching for airways if he wasn’t quick enough with a disbursement spell.

A library of hand-written research burned down.

They were both paranoid. Unstable.

Someone had to do something.

Someone did something stupid.

One of their students, a spiral boy with a naïve streak and an unprecedented amount of horrible planning, who believed that the world could not lose such brilliance no matter what, who was ultimately driven by the immense love and respect he had for both of them...

Slipped them a very strong love potion.

They might have been proud of him for the brew-work and craftyness to get them in the same place without bloodshed if what he did wasn’t super illegal and it hadn’t backfired horribly.

The spell corrupted. With their powerful magic and their incredible hate, the ‘love’ effect wasn’t really going to go through. It did the next best thing instead.

It gave them the magical equivalent of a forced angry sibling ‘make up’ hug.

They were suddenly stripped of all their magical powers. Painful trial and error soon showed that they couldn’t get more than a room or two away from each other or even say hurtful words in their general direction. The spell gave the finishing touch of wiping their previous fame from a good amount of minds. Gotta get to the root of the problem after all. They were now nobodies magically strapped to each other and whoever was the biggest jerk would probably wind up dead. They had to fix this. The biggest jerk was supposed to win this thing.

They had to be free to murder each other in peace and gloat over the dead while everyone loved them again. Like gentlemen.

They took off at once, leaving their old lives behind. They searched out clans studying magical anomalies and eventually settled on visiting Darling’s old friend Thelema in the arcane lands. There were explanations, deals made, poorly hidden amusement, a small observation period and then they were in. two new teachers in the clan.

They carry on their studies with fervor now. They’ve already found a few loopholes. Affection and cooperation, no matter how fake, gives them the inkling of…something. Something close to power over it. Like tugging at a weakening chain. They’ve stopped using each other’s real names because of this, preferring the sarcastically slurred pet names that the whole clan now knows them by. They’re catty and obsessive and if you got hit in the head with a rock and squinted really hard you might mistake them for mates.

On days when they seem to get along the most you can maybe catch them twisting hands in familiar intricate patterns under a table during lunch or muttering dead spells under their breath.

Either they’re gonna break this thing or it’ll wear off on it’s own one day. They are both determined to get the first shot off when it does.