The woman who asked for everything and the boy who asked for nothing
There are several versions of how the granter came to this world, and many of them are more or less the same. This one is quite different from the others:
It all started with a woman, born in a world without walls, wind, predators or thieves. A little girl with a loving family, safely playing with friends off all ages in the dark alleys of a city where there was no words for assault, crime, murder or evil. They had a few words that meant "death", tough. Half of them could also be translated as "old" and "aging". She didn't thought much about those things as she grew up into a happy woman who loved her family, because what was there to think? They had the same said that so many civilizations from every world have: "You live, until you don't". So she lived. Then, something or someone distracted her when she was giving a bath to one of her nieces. She wasn't precisely living after that. She was mourning, hating herself and trying to make sense of what had happened; and for some reason the shards of what she had lost, took form in her world instead of this one. Magical baths for toddlers, with a curse that made it impossible for people who get distracted; a well that held an infinite supply of the favorite juice of her niece, and maybe a puppy. This caught the curiosity of a granter, or maybe a door connecting both worlds was opened by her grief. Either way, this guy wasn't the kind you want to meet. He was one of those tricksters... no, not a trickster, he was evil. Maybe he was upset because he thought there was somebody else granting wishes, maybe he was just trying to figure out what had happened. Either way, he offered the woman a wish. He could even bring her niece back from death, he said. So many have fell for that trick, but this one may have had a chance to deal with the results of welcoming an undead in her home, and then he would see what she could really do. He always seemed understanding and trustworthy at first, and she was as heartbroken as all those he had toyed with before. But she had grown in a place where the dead were thought to start again in another place and time. She didn't want to bother the child's new life just because she was suffering. But how could she know if her niece was better getting back her previous life? She couldn't ask for to wishes, or put conditions to one. So she asked for the magic to do all those things herself, he asked for the power of the granters, without the restrictions because she didn't know what those could be and how they would affect what she wanted to do. That's not granter's abilities work, but he didn't tell her that. He let the wish go as far as it could. And that turn her into a granter... with more restrictions that most of her predecessors had had. On the bright side, the evil granter lost her power soon after this—maybe because now it was hers, maybe because of other unknown reasons—and she did a better job than he had, even when she got bitter as she dealt with selfish people with selfish wishes, and learn the violent words that almost every other world has. She would snap at people even before they did something wrong, and would ask great personal sacrifices in exchange for the few wishes she granted. She was already bored of dealing with people who came here asking for things that belonged to others and material things that they didn't need—specially those who didn't know how to take a negative answer— when she was introduced to an outsider who had nothing but money and objects. The boy was thankful for those vane things, at some point he started calling them "opportunities" and more than once he admitted that most of the time he didn't know how to use them to get what he really needed. When they first met, he had so many wishes, that he couldn't pick one. By the time she decided that she could grant her more than one wish, he refused to ask for even one, because he would feel strange by having something "just like that". He already was taking advantage of his parents resources, and a wish would feel like that but worse: like wearing something that didn't belong to him. He couldn't ask for anything, except maybe, her advice. She had a lot of experience after all. But she couldn't help thinking that her area of expertise, at this point, was granting wishes. It wasn't the kind of advice he needed or wanted, but, she could have given it anyway. For the first time since getting her power, she wished for something for her; something that she wouldn't grant or ask for, something she wouldn't even work for, because it wasn't right. She wished to just pass her burden to the boy that was able to forgive everything and to be an optimist no matter how lonely, hurt and scared he could felt. She didn't plan to give her the burden. He didn't plan to get the power. But when does anything go according to the plan?
There's so much fascinating about this story, but I did get confused in a few parts by the pronouns...