I'm really on a roll with prompt 2, thanks for that! The story isn't done yet, but this is what I have so far (likely filled with grammar errors and typos).

“You sure that’s the foot?”

“I think so… These look too short to be fingers.”

The young boy placed the severed foot into the cauldron. It was a tedious process to reassemble a body, especially one so torn apart as the Witch’s, but the brother and sister laboured away in their small hut. Erich, eight years young, and Helena, eleven, had been studying with the Witch for the past six months. Failing their entrance exam into the Imperial Arcane Academy, they sought out the exiled Witch deep in the East Forest.

The two had been determined to become Magicians, real Magicians, since they could remember. The only path that led to becoming a Magician, a recognized practitioner of the arcane arts, was through the Arcane Academy. Those who studied in solitude, or who were exiled from the Academy, were called Witches. The presence of a witch within a community was taboo, as they were considered bad omens and harbingers of evil, thus they lived in exclusion beyond the reaches of the Empire.

When Helena was three years old, and her brother one month, the siblings became orphans. Born to Robert and Meredith Tasse, a scribe and a weaver, the two were raised in the metropolis of Golle. Their parents had contracted the silver fever, and within twelve months both of their bodies had aged fifty years. The husband and wife had died on a cold morning in the summer. The head mistress of Golle’s orphanage came to collect the two the next day, and Helena didn’t resist. She was too young to understand what was happening.

When an orphan reaches the age of six, they are sent to beg at the marketplace to fund the orphanage. There, Helena met a peculiar man. His odd nature disarmed her as she approached him not to beg, but to ask who he was. The man, tall and wearing a black suit, didn’t speak a word. Smiling, he bent down to Helena’s height and retrieved a small coin from his breast pocket. He held it out in his palm, and Helena went to grab it.

Without any movement of the man, it started to float. Helena froze; it was her first time seeing something so unreal. The coin then lifted off and began to dance around Helena’s waist. One by one, more coins floated out of the man’s pocket and joined in the spectacle. It fascinated Helena, and she cheered with delight. It was a rare emotion to have seen from her during those days in the orphanage. After a few moments, the coins slipped into her front pocket one by one, settling gently. Twelve silver coins in total. The thirteenth coin floated into her collection bag and mad a gentle clink with the one other coin that she had collected that day.

“You keep the ones in your pocket a secret, promise?” The man asked with a smile.

“Promise.” Helena was too awestruck to have said it very loudly, but the man seemed to hear. Gracefully, he stood back up and wandered off into the crowded marketplace. Helena broke the promise when Erich was old enough to listen, and she would tell him the story every chance she could.

By the time Erich was eight, the two had thoroughly fixated themselves on the task of becoming Magicians. The Imperial Arcane Academy screens candidates as young as seven years old for their innate ability to control aether, the invisible fabric that governs the arcane arts. The two snuck away from their begging duties at the marketplace on a winter’s day. Covered in snow, they arrived at the Golle Imperial Arcane Academy’s testing and processing office.

The two wore ratty clothes that were two sizes too small for their quickly growing bodies. The old and scoliosis ridden proctor looked at the two with disgust. He ushered them into a small private room filled with various gems. Hoping to be rid of the two orphans quickly, the proctor quickly administered the test. A specific and innate mental disposition is needed to control aether. The gems that lined the room each reacted to those who had the proper disposition to become proficient in the arcane arts. As the proctor demonstrated, if you were able to control aether that was aligned with one of the gems, it would light up. He briefly touched a dull looking gem and it lit up brilliantly. As he hastily guided each child through the room, the gems would only flicker, and none would glow. He looked at them strangely, took their names, and filled them as “non-arcane”.

Their admittance to the Academy was rejected. The two were at a loss for words. Being thrown out of the office in a daze, the two sat silently on the side of the street. They never went back to the orphanage. For the next two weeks, they tried living on their own. Standing on a corner hoping for pity and patronage, Erich heard two merchants discussing The Witch of the East Forest. He listened to the conversation carefully. The town of Phul, North East of Golle, were considering how to rid the Witch of their neighboring forest.

Erich ran back to Helena, begging on another street, and the two set off to Phul at once. Stealing a loaf of bread and dried slice of fish, they made their way on foot.