Backstage for "Mephistopheles" (Patreon)

I was obsessed with the Police song "Wrapped Around Your Finger", but as a kid, I never met a metaphor I didn't prefer to turn into something literal and fantastic -- I thought "Hotel California" was really about a hotel you couldn't escape from, also. I came up with the idea of the arcana and their rings -- bound to the lifeforce of their student, able to draw from their student until the student is no longer an apprentice -- based on the lyrics of that song. The title comes from a line in the song, "Mephistopheles is not your name..."

I had actually invented the arcana for a horror story I'd written a few years previously, but it was bad, with a completely unlikeable protagonist and most of the horror deriving from convenient amnesia. The villain of that story was Donald Ward. I re-used him here as a secondary character.