Set on the planet Ciress, where magic is an everyday profession and the magic guilds rule, the story follows the sisters Genevieve, the hardworking top sorceress, and Giselle, the spoiled socialite.
The magic guilds at the start of the series are:
- Dark Magi Guild, headed by "The Magus", ultimately revealed to be named Sangrid of Walachia
- Astral Guild, headed by Mondru
- Shaman Guild, headed by Zai
- Enchantress Guild, headed by Yinma
- Tantric Guild, headed by Vashua
- Djinn Guild, headed by Atyaah
- Nouveau Guild, headed by Genevieve
In 2011, there was four-issue miniseries that was mostly In Name Only. In this series, Giselle and Genevieve are orphan sisters, who secretly studied magic which is normally reserved for the upper class. Giselle is chosen to attend a Wizarding School, thus thrusting her into the upper class. Meanwhile, Genevieve ends up as part of La Résistance, thus placing the sister on opposite sides of the conflict.
The original Mystic contains examples of the following tropes:
- All Your Powers Combined: Happens to Giselle after she gets the sigil and ends up absorbing the spirits of all the magic guilds.
- And Then What?: As the Guild Spirit advises Sangrid after the fact, this is the downside to having the entire living population of the Dark Magi Guild lands killed and reanimated; the fact the population are now mindless zombies means they can no longer torment them for their own amusement. As he doesn't point this out until well after it's happened, it becomes a case of semantics.o
- Beware the Silly Ones:
- Giselle herself; flippant, spoiled, ditzy party girl... who turns into a world-saving magical powerhouse unlike anything the world has ever seen.
- Initially, Vashua seems to be just a near-naked hedonist not that different to Giselle herself. Then she betrays the world by allying herself with the Geometer Guild, lets a succubus start killing her own students as part of her cover, magically cannibalizes the Dark Mage Tancred, and when Giselle tracks her down into the Tantric Guild lands in issue #40, the new Tantric Guild Master warns Giselle that she had best kill Vashua quickly, or the ex-Guild Master is likely to trigger a volcanic eruption that will destroy her entire homeland just to spite Giselle. And then it turns out she'd actually stolen the body of the Guild Master appointee to try and avoid being punished, whilst also setting Giselle up to murder him.
- Body Snatcher: Revealed to be one of the darker abilities granted by Tantric magic. Vashua steals Brother Thusius' body to evade capture for her crimes in issue #40.
- Burp of Finality: Vashua lets out a genteel belch after magically devouring would-be Dark Magi Guild Master Tancred.
- Cartoon Creature:
- Gorgs resemble a mixture between a bulldog and a lizard.
- Squits look vaguely like a cross between a squirrel and a rabbit, with a bushy-mustachioed vaguely canine face.
- Cloudcuckooland: The lands of the Astral Guild, which embraces unchecked creativity and wonder as the defining attributes of its magical philosophy.
- Dark Is Not Evil: The Dark Magi Guild rules a land of long, bitter winters and rugged terrain, which naturally facilitated their affinity for demon-summoning, Blood Magic and necromancy. Despite this, they're still a people like any other who love, laugh and live peaceful lives.
- Deal with the Devil: Literally, alliances with fiendish entities from other realms are common throughout Ciress, to the point that the organized crime is heavily dominated by fiendish migrants.
- Even Evil Has Standards:
- Archemus, head of the Geometer Guild, and Sangrid are both repulsed by the method Vashua uses to teleport, with the Dark Magi visibly shuddering repulsion after waching her teleport away.
- Sangrid ultimately turns on the Geometer Guild after realizing they intend to functionally destroy magic entirely.
- Evolutionary Levels: Inverted on the "World of Missing Links"; the more devolved a human-like race is, the more wise and benevolent it is. Thus, the beautiful human-like tribe turns out to be a pack of bloodthirsty savages who offer up their own children as Human Sacrifices to fictitious deities, the stereotypical cave-men tribe are benevolent and cultured beings who try to save those same children, and a monstrous hairy yeti-like humanoid turns out to be the wisest and sagest being in the world.
- Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Giselle and Genevieve, Giselle being the Foolish one while Genevieve is the Responsible one.
- The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: Genevieve and Giselle have always struggled with each other.
- Hard Work Hardly Works: Subverted; by issue #26, Giselle has realized she can't rely on the Sigil to do everything for her, and begins trying to learn about each individual guild one at a time in order to wield their magic with her own skill.
- Horrifying the Horror: During her attempt to learn the secrets of the Tantic Guild, Giselle does a perspective flip with a succubus. Whilst she finds its own cold, manipulative view of the world horrible, the exposure to what it really means to feel things like love and friendship is devastating to the succubus, leaving it near catatonic with grief, horror and guilt.
- Lady Land: The realm of the Enchantress Guild is, to the best of public knowledge, comprised exclusively of women. It's ultimately revealed in issue #34 that there are male Enchanters, but they spend most of the year physically and mentally merged into a single super-powerful demon, the Devasura, which engages in a mock war against the Enchantresses to hone the realms' collective mystical abilities. It divides back into its components for one week each year, mainly for procreation. It happened so long ago that only the Enchantresses remember their guild was originally the Enchantment Guild.
- Lethal Harmless Powers:
- The Tantric Guild wields magic based on intimacy and communion. Sounds harmless, right? Disproven quite graphically in issue #36, when the Tantic Guild Master, Vashua, uses a spell to eat the Dark Magi Guild's new guild master.
- The Geometer Guild doesn't sound impressive, but their powers allow them to create dimensional folds and rifts on a massive scale, even creating a sealed-off world completely stripped of magical energies. It also allows them to bend time and space, as seen when Archemus single-handedly kills all humans in the Dark Magi Lands.
- Light Is Not Good: In issue #36, Giselle makes an alliance with Tancred, a paladin-esque mage who claims to want to defeat Sangrid. She learns too late that he is not only a trained challenger meant to ensure the Dark Magic Guild Master is worthy of his position, but he's actually even more warlike and bloodthirsty than the current incumbent.
- Load-Bearing Boss: Invoked; after Giselle defeats the the Geometer Guild Master in issue #39, an angry Sangrid asks why she's looking at the ceiling, to which she explains she was expecting the victory to cause the ceiling to start caving in. The amused Dark Magi then causes a single section of the ceiling to give way and crush Archemus to death.
- Magitek: A feature of the Nouveau Guild. Other guilds are more traditional. It's mentioned in issue #39 that actual science has been demonized by the Geometer Guild.
- Magic Versus Science: Zigzagged. Science without magic has been demonized, actually a ploy by the Geometer Guild to maintain their own unique power set, but magic is studied, developed and pursued in a very scientific fashion, although it's the Nouveau Guild who most openly displays magical progress.
- Power Tattoo: Giselle getting the Sigil sets everything off.
- Right Behind Me: In issue #1, Giselle is talking trash about Genevieve, not knowing she's standing right behind her. Oops.
- The Roaring '20s: The culture of the Nouveau lands is pretty much this.
- The Starscream: Invoked; a secret tradition of the Dark Magi Guild is to take the second most promising student of each generation and train them as a challenger who is then set upon the most promising when he or she becomes Guild Master.
- Succubi and Incubi: Succubi exist in this world as genderless demons that seduce mortals into their embrace, appearing in whatever form is most attractive, and then drain their life away. The Tantric Guild absolutely reviles them, both for the fiends' blasphemous practice of using intimacy as a trap and otherwise mocking the Guild's believes, and for the fact that Tantric Guild members are especially vulnerable to their depredations.
- Token Good Teammate: Mondru is the only member of the five Guild Masters (not counting Genevieve) who refuses to take part in the plan to release Animora to destroy Giselle so they can retake their spirits.
