I adore Laerryn Coramar-Seelie almost as much as I do Aabria Iyengar.
However, this is ostensibly a contest of wizardry. Says it right above: "wizard to wizard." Not "fighter to fighter"; not "bag of HP to bag of HP"; not even "smartypants to smartypants"āwizard to wizard. And the Architect Arcane has a grave defect in that arena.
Laerryn's greatest failing as a wizard, and perhaps even as a person, wasn't hubris. It wasn't losing Evandrin. It wasn't destroying the Tree of Names, or starting the Calamity, or annihilating an entire continent.
It was lack of curiosity.
Faced with something she didn't understandānot in the trivial sense of, "I'm not currently able to explain or predict this thing, but it fits within a paradigm I already know and, if I apply myself, I will be able to explain and predict it without really having to learn anything new"; but in the sense of, "this thing belongs to a paradigm that is entirely mysterious to me and challenges my fundamental conceptions of the universe and my place in it"āshe consistently chose to ignore, dismiss, and attack it.
When she cast Blight on the Tree of Names, it was nothing less than what she'd wanted to do for years, and the threat to Patia and Loquatius was barely more than an excuse. Decades on decades that thing had been at the heart of her working life, and even before Evandrin, she showed zero interest in trying to understand it. She simply refused to be curious.
That was tragic for Exandria in fairly straightforward ways, but it's deeply tragic for Laerryn herself, too. She saw a beautiful future, but how much more beautiful might that vision have been if she'd had the imagination to see a beautiful present?
What might she have achieved if she'd been just a little braver in the face of the unknown?
Meanwhile, on Wildemount:
Many people would dispute the suggestion that Caleb Widogast is anything like brave, the man himself among them. But he has that stubborn, inconvenient kind of bravery that just keeps reasserting itself no matter what, even in the moments he least wants it to.
He has the courage of curiosity.
After escaping Vergesson, Caleb had:
one of the worst cases of, specifically, educational trauma in the history of Exandria.
He had nothing. Arcane learning is so expensive it makes US higher ed look good, and Caleb Widogast (who didn't even exist yet) didn't have a copper for bread he didn't beg or steal.
Sorry, I take it back, he had one thing: fear. Consuming, constant fear. He spent five years terrified of wizards finding him, scarred on every possible level by his experiences of arcane learning and power so far. Far and away the safest thing for him would have been to give find a quiet hole to be a day laborer in and give up magic completelyābut Caleb never did that. He never could.
Instead he scrounged, and starved, and got kicked, and came back, drawn again and again to any potential source of learning until he happened upon a real spellbook in a smut shop. And in 835, he'd tell Beau and Nott that vengeance was what kept him going through that time, but one of the first uses to which he put his magic once he'd clawed it back was to summon a creature to love.
The man slept in ditches. He ate out of garbage. He probably got himself arrested on purpose to survive the cold sometimes. Until he met Nott, he barely survived. And through it all, he kept learning.
Anybody with the kind of educational trauma Caleb Widogast has would be entitled, to put it mildly, to thorough cynicism about the entire enterprise. Hell, if they found particular subject matter or the process of studying itself so triggering that they never wanted any part of either ever again, that would be fair, too. This guy packed on seventeen (17) levels of wizard in the span of five years.
Laerryn Coramar-Seelie's divorce took longer than that.
Eventually, Caleb learned enough to be confronted with the same thing Laerryn was, in a way: a mystery. Mere arcane exercises, those weren't mysteries, not even the ones that occupied him for months and culminated in things like restoring Veth Brenatto to herself. Mysteries are the things that are profoundly illegible to us and call into question everything that we think we know.
Like the Mighty Nein was to Caleb.
You've got Beau, who on top of everything else about her uses this mystical force that according to Jeremy Crawford isn't even exactly magic. You've got Molly, who does hemocraft, walks around with total retrograde amnesia, and still manages to walk into every single room at ease. You've got Yasha, whose stark, pure belief is even starker beside Caleb's faithlessness. You've got Fjord, who, when facing the prospect of having to rebuild himself from scratch, chose a path diametrically opposite to Caleb's and rose to greatness in it. You've got Caduceus, whom Eadwulf addressed as a what and who demolished Trent Ikithon in under ten seconds and without even trying. You've got Veth, who's two goddamned people, both of whom Caleb loves, each of whom means something completely different to him. And you've got Jester, who, like. I mean.
The Mighty Nein were a great and terrible mystery, and instead of seeking to destroy them, Caleb chose to love them. He loved them because he learned from them, and he learned from them because he loved them. In a very real sense, Caleb's willingness open himself to the bag of bizarro the Mighty Nein rolled up with contributed more to wizarding than any arcane experiment. Because it gave him the strength to face down Trent Ikithon, the lost lovers of his youth, his own crimes, the Cerberus Assembly, and the fabric of society in order to make sure every wizard potentially like him gets a fair chance to be curious, too.
Curiosity is a kind of love. Real wizards love a good mystery.
So vote Widogast, the man so curious that not even eleven years in a literal and figurative oubliette could make him close his mind to what he didn't understand. Vote Widogast, the man who loved the beauty of learning so much he faced his worst fear to defend the right of all to pursue it. Vote Widogast, the man who appreciates magic deeply enough to use it for practical jokes as readily as for saving the world.
Besides, Veth would want you to, and I hear her naturals are superb.
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