[ WP ] Write a story about an elderly wizard and his young female apprentice .

Though Moira slept far from her master's eye in the Arcanum Tower, he was always watching her. `` She is a weapon. And like any weapon, she must be cared for with great vigilance and control. Do you expect me to leave a cask of gunpowder open out on the street where any fool can get to it?'' Master Hullum once told a colleague from the college over a lunch of fried eel. 
 
 `` She is hardly a weapon, Hullum,'' stiff-shouldered Arcanist Wynters said, taking a sip of tea. `` She is a girl, nearly fourteen. She has a right to privacy. And she has a right to learn the proper fundamentals of magic. Not the watered down muck that you are teaching her. I mean, really, the fundamentals of a circle in correlation to the distribution of magic? Do you take her for a toddler?'' 
 
 `` I take her for someone with aspirations,'' Hullum sighed. `` She wants to achieve greatness. She wants to be the next Eva the Great, Josephine the Wise, Dalla the Cunning. But she will only ever be Moira, a poor girl cursed by her mother. If I teach her any further, she'll no doubt become one of the greatest arcanists the world has ever seen. But the risk is not worth the reward.'' 
 
 `` Tell me more about this curse,'' Arcanist Wynters said, nibbling down on a mini-sandwich. `` In the letter you sent a few years back when you first made her your apprentice, you described her as a'living bomb'. Harsh words.'' 
 
 `` She is a siphon for magic. Her mother, may the Gods punish her dearly, died and with her final breathe cursed Moira with a spell far beyond my comprehension. Magic clings to her, but it does not leave her. It is building up and one day... well you know the rest. Do you remember what happened to the old college? What our master's used to tell us?'' 
 
 `` The Big Boom?'' the Arcanist recalled. 
 
 `` They were sitting in class one day and a professor by the name of Huxlet was teaching a rather bland seminar. It turns out a similar curse was placed onto him by a disgruntled student. Within a month, the magic built up and he exploded. An entire building crumbled, because of the high magical concentration of the college it all just clung to him. That took a month. She has lived for a few short years and I'm afraid her time will be coming soon.'' 
 
 `` You mean to keep her here then?'' Wynters asked. 
 
 `` I do.'' 
 
 `` If another Big Boom occurs and she... you know. Then you will die to, old friend. A merciful man would kill her and be done with it. He would use a draught of sleep to soothe her then do the deed himself. But you would die alongside her? For what?'' 
 
 `` I could never harm her,'' Hullum said with sadness in his voice. He took a sip of tea and looked to the window, where the Arcanum Tower stood a few feet from his cottage. `` I suppose it is me being selfish then. I ca n't bare to see her go and I will take as many extra moments as I can to teach her, to help raise her. The plague took my wife long before I was ever able to have children, Arthur. She is the closest thing to a daughter I have ever known.'' 
 
 Arthur Wynters rose and wiped the crumbs from his robe. `` You are a queer sort of man, Hullum. What happens when it finally happens then? Will you watch her explode, see the suffering in her eyes as the world she knows ends in the blink of an eye?'' 
 
 `` I will sit beside her and hold her hand,'' Hullum said, smiling. `` And hopefully, in those last moments she will not hate me for being so selfish.''
