Khemi's sorcery

(short story for the June 2026 edition of the Community Magazine Contest) Khemi is a young sorceress saved from certain death years ago by a mysterious man. Her new master quickly put her shapeshifting capabilities to good use while sharpening her natural dark art gifts through increasingly harsher training. Together, they travel the world of an antediluvian past, seeking relics and accomplishing rituals Khemi does not know the objective of. She is meant to be a recurrent antagonist and occasional reluctant ally of Soren in the later books of my main series. The two will regularly bump heads as she keeps stumbling on this stubborn young barbarian, who's making a mess of the careful schemes she devises to please her master. You can still follow this if you'd like to read a short story from time to time. I have a lot of ideas for her and might turn this into a short story collection if there is interest.