Flamme

Flamme wore her orange hair in a heavy braid that hung all the way to her knees, with bangs swept to one side and a pair of strands loose at her chest. She dressed in flowing tunics and toga-like garments, and laced sandals of dark brown leather climbed her legs to just below the knee, calling to mind the styles of ancient Greece. Gold featured in much of her jewelry: thick bracelets, a banded cuff high on her left arm, and a choker set with a single teardrop of red.

Frieren remembered her teacher as a trying woman, one who toyed with her as a matter of course and tended to overstate things. Toward demons Flamme showed no mercy. Sharing Frieren's loathing for them, she trained herself to keep her mana perpetually suppressed in order to catch and kill them, a tactic she privately scorned as a cowardly insult to the art she loved. She counted herself among those, like Serie, who could not picture a peaceful age and therefore could never fell the Demon King. Yet there was real warmth in her too. Her favorite spell simply grew a meadow of flowers, and she gave her life to opening magic up to everyone. She knew Frieren so thoroughly that she foresaw the day her student would blunder and long to reach someone already lost, a prophecy fulfilled by Himmel's death.

Renowned for over a thousand years, Flamme is so celebrated that the barriers she raised still hold against demons in the present day. As a girl she was taken in on a whim by Serie, though her earliest years were spent at home with a mother and father, one of them a spellcaster who introduced her to the flower-field magic that first won her heart. Demons are implied to have killed them, which is how she came under Serie's wing. Years later, when those same creatures destroyed Frieren's elven home, Flamme adopted the young elf and taught her to fight and to channel magic toward vengeance. Anticipating that Frieren would one day seek to understand humanity, she hid a grimoire of notes on Aureole and set an enchanted sapling to guard it until her pupil returned.

Her great ambition was an era in which all people could cast spells. In her youth magic was branded a demonic art and openly studying it was forbidden, so she persuaded the emperor of the continent's largest unified realm to sanction nationwide research and helped found and school a new corps of Imperial Mages. For this she is hailed as the one who founded mankind's magic, the figure who armed all of humanity to stand against the Demon King's forces. Her own spellwork bordered on the miraculous: explosions conjured in an instant, barriers that outlast a millennium by drawing on the life of great trees, and golems so finely made that one of her cooking constructs still worked after a thousand years. Before old age finally claimed her, she passed the flower-field spell to Frieren, told her to live quietly until the day she etched her name into history by felling the Demon King, and entrusted her with a final message for Serie, certain her old master would tear up the will yet glad to say their shared dream had come true.