Wrapped in a fraying and burnt cloth cover, “The Mage and The Vagabond” is a quick-to-read fable that I took as a cautionary tale about the problem with black-and-white thinking. It follows a traveler (the vagabond) who is deeply affected by every person they meet, but fails to remember any of the places they visit and finds little value in science and history. They stumble upon a weird, willow-y tower where they meet a hermit (the mage) who is obsessed with empirical knowledge and fact, but pays no mind to emotion or other humans. Both the Mage and the Vagabond are so set in their ways that they miss the beauty in what the other values: that wisdom is derived from both feeling and fact, not shunning one for the other. The story is accompanied by some whimsical illustrations that made the zine feel like pages torn from a classic fairytale tome.