The air was dry, everything began to wither without distinction. In the middle of the forest stood a weird stone and a small dot of mixed coloured light, that was next to it, seemed to be the source of it. A single, fast moving, unintelligible weave run out of the glimmering light, leaving nothing but ashes behind. For miles the weave ran free, engulfing everything in its path.
It could be said that this was just another fire spell, but it wasn't. The blood coloured flames felt alive and an insatiable hunger could be felt within. It moved so fast that no animal, regardless of its speed, could escape. Despite leaving nothing but scorched earth there was no high temperature to be felt. The flames were smokeless and little light came out of it. It was silent and deadly, and showed no distinction.
In the village, where the master's castle were, live continued as usual. No one suspected the inferno heading towards them. Inside the library, in the castle, the apprentice was behind a mounting of books. While hastily searching for some information, a few of the servants went to confront her about the whereabouts her their master. They all saw her leaving with him in the middle of the night and only she had return. Any apprentice would have never been confronted by servants so boldly but her ineptitude was commonly cause of laugh, and she was never taken seriously.
That day the servants knew otherwise. A powerful magical surge came from the apprentice and even though regular people can't feel magic, they could sense the danger around her. After the master completed the sacrifice ritual and dying, the magic that usually siphoned her power stopped working and her strength was back, and it was beyond comparison. She could sense the elements clearly, something that she never could, and among them, fire was the easiest to perceive. It turns out that she had a special latent ability towards it and that was the reason why the master chose her. Siphoning her powers to complete his own was only one of the many things he did to achieve his dream. Of course, he never thought that he was creating a forbidden spell, and although he suspected it, the sight of his name immortalized among his peers blinded him and continued forward.
Although the apprentice tried to find a way to stop her master's spell, of which its details were in a book inside the package he left her before dying, she could not catch up with so much information. Only minutes before it reached town she manage to understand part of it and, to her choking surprise, she realised that the spell would actively seek any source of magic, living or not, to consume it making it stronger and hungered. As she came to know this, she also realised that only if the spell were to encounter a large patch of magically deprived land it would starve and die.
The apprentice despaired. In this world magic was everywhere, even in rocks, and was very unlikely that the spell would ever stop. Fortunately, the castle surroundings, the village and the forest were in an island and, perhaps because of its particular geographical situation, the master chose to cast it here. The apprentice gave up saving people, there was nothing she could do. Perhaps since the spell only sought after magical sources it would spare the commoners but that was rather unlikely; even the most talentless of people would have at least a bit of magic in them, enough to attract the attention of the spell.
The apprentice might have used the portal stone, given by her master earlier within the package, to save some people but, because of her bad reputation, no one would had followed her and she had no time to waste. She took everything she could and without thinking on it she open the portal and left.