#its so much easier & less punishing to just swallow what the blade & ministry feed her

[hawkepockets]

realizing i totally neglected the Whys Wherefores and Rammies here ☝️ prem is a natural at glamours but didn’t get any instruction in other mesmer skills, or the history or theory of the magic, until he was 13.

his moms didn’t know any mesmers, and the only information they could share with prem was an old luxon cautionary tale for children about a mesmer possessed by love and envy for the saltspray dragons, who studied them for years to craft a glamour so they could look and feel like a dragon themself. at first they just played with the real dragons in the tidepools, remembering that they were still limited by human abilities and couldn’t fly through the air or deep ocean. but the longer they stayed glamoured, the more they forgot of their human life, until they believed they’d always been a dragon, and tried to follow the other saltsprays when they went fishing in the open ocean. in one version of the story, the mesmer has a lover who runs out into the surf holding a hand mirror, and saves them by forcing them to look at their reflection and remember their true form. but in the most common iteration, the mesmer plunges deeper and deeper into the water, and drowns, happily, without ever recalling that they needed air to breathe.

so yeah. prem’s self-taught :-)

and when anise finds out that he can maintain a glamour for hours, days, or weeks without draining his magic reserves, she’s astounded that he made it into his teen years practicing the old technique and hasn’t lost his sense of self yet. she’s also horrified by the threat he poses to kryta’s national security, if he can impersonate any member of the government or nobility, more and more convincingly over time, for an indefinite length. even livia confirms the technique has been banned among establishment mesmers ever since she can recall. too dangerous to the user and the stability of any regime they live under.

and this is not a paranoid hypothetical “what if he copied someone important?”

prem drew attention from the shining blade in the first place after he’d snuck onto the royal terrace disguised as various noble children to amuse jennah, multiple times, right under anise’s nose. and he got caught because jennah roped him into her scheme to slip out of DR and meet personally with a centaur high sage, because she felt she couldn’t trust what her regents told her about the war if she’d never seen or talked to a centaur herself. she left prem in the garden glamoured as the just-crowned teenage queen, and he attended 40 minutes of an etiquette lesson before slipping up and getting caught as an imposter.

every shining blade officer from the sewers to kessex hills was rallied to track down the real jennah and find a suitable centaur hostage to trade for her before the ministry, seraph, or general public noticed she was missing. (they just assumed the talks would have gone sideways and gotten violent right away, but it was a safe bet in such a long and idealogically dirty war.) at which point prem, very helpfully, suggested that he just glamour himself as one of the high sage’s children. the shining blade could exchange him for jennah and save on time and spilled blood. anise was pleased with the plan and readily agreed. when prem was exposed as human, the centaurs would kill him, and tie up the loose end for her. she promised him a gold coin for his service to kryta.

except six hours later he turned up at the palace, covered in mud and hoof-sized bruises, and asked if he could have the gold now because his moms needed veggies to make dinner.

hence anise’s decision to groom him to be a loyal second-in-command on a short leash, and her pointed disinterest in teaching him a lot of vanilla mesmer skills, since he’s dangerous enough with what he learned on his own. no matter how she spun it, she couldn’t really justify killing a middle school boy in cold blood, especially a plucky little immigrant to kryta who’d been running his mouth about being blessed by dwayna and a friend of the crown. just a really bad look. and anyway, he’s so obedient.

moving this to its own post. 🌟🌟mesmer glamour headcanons🌟🌟 aka what makes prem special 👀