Zheng Jingao/Astragalus and Eddie Blum/Hero approved!
I love the worldbuilding you've put into Hakem's backstory, I can't remember the last time someone put so much work into into rounding out their character's origins and it was an extremely enjoyable read. Unfortunately it's tricky for a few reasons:
Hedge witches are intended to be very rare; their magical abilities are the product of past interbreeding between humans and spirits (few people know this OOC and only a handful of people know it IC, the topic briefly arose during a meta-event conversation with Llyr
here). So there are two possibilities for the presence of magic in other nations:
- Hedge witches traveled out of Sunderland a very long time ago and their genes mixed with other populations
- The spirits of the Wardwood are not the only spirits in the world, there are (or were) more of them in different places
The latter option is something I've considered at length, because I think it'd be questionable if 100% of the magic in the entire world originated from one region and was largely restricted to white people. On the other hand, canonically introducing additional populations of spirits would have big implications for the plot and setting. I think a safer option might be to say that the spirits of the Wardwood are the last ones hanging on, and while other spirits did once exist they all died out by around the time of the War of Flowers (approx. a millennium ago). We could assume this is the case with Malgham; depending on your preferences they could have forgotten about spirits because they vanished so long ago, or they could remain a part of the country's ancient mythology.*
However even supposing that Malgham-spirits were a lot, uh,
friendlier with humans than Wardwood-spirits, a thousand years plus is a long time and the amount of magic in the population would have diluted out considerably by now. I'm fine with hedge witches being better understood and slightly more common in Malgham than in Sunderland, but having a country with a large population of magic users would be contrary to the established tone of the shop's lore. Would you be able to retain Malgham's political/religious structure if you adjusted hedge witches to be rarer?
*Keep in mind that Sunderlanders themselves barely know anything about spirits despite interacting with them a little over the past few hundred years, other countries' knowledge about spirits should not exceed Sunderland's to a significant degree.
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