Dr. Hendy was nodding, watching with great interest as well.
“What did you just do, Miss Meg?”
“I just roasted the leaves a bit. It’ll help bring out the flavor.”
“Can you do anything you want?”
“Not anything. It takes a lot of knowledge to cast a spell.”
Magic was often misconstrued as miracles with no limits, but that wasn’t the case. There were many fields of magic, and to create the intended effects required significant knowledge of the substances and phenomenology at hand.
To ignite a fire required magical friction against a combustible substance. To create water required breaking apart and merging its elements. Whether something exploded or burned depended on the method used.
A mage needed to understand the principles of physics, then fill the gaps with magic, which required knowledge. This left most mages with very narrow fields of expertise. I was studying pharmacy and botany, but there were those who studied different subjects such as science or chemistry.
The point is, you need to know your stuff if you want to be a mage.
Time magic, or chronomancy, that my teacher used was on a whole ’nother level of its own in terms of difficulty. The theory of time had components of both physics and philosophy, and to pull off time magic required a thorough knowledge of pretty much everything.
Plus, my teacher could use her All-Seeing Eye. My best guess was that it took an immense amount of knowledge to manifest a time magic spell itself, and then she needed knowledge of the human body and medicine on top of it to actually use it on a person. It wasn’t something I could ever hope to pull off.
“So did you find the album?”
“Yeah, I did! Here it is.”
Anna placed the album on top of the desk. It was very thick, with a somewhat dated cover. The album was clearly filled with memories spanning many years. We opened it up, and every page was packed with pictures.
There were pictures of Dr. Hendy with a beautiful woman. This must’ve been Anna’s mother. She had sharp features, but there was something vaguely ephemeral about her.
The album started with pictures of Dr. Hendy and his wife. Then, somewhere along the line, Anna joined them. The family’s entire history, every step they’d taken together, was all kept safe in this album.
“There sure are a lot of pictures from trips in here…”
“My wife and I loved to travel. We traveled the world together before Anna was born.”
“How extravagant. I’d like to travel the world, too.”
“I understand Lady Faust travels quite often, does she not?”
“For work—and she always leaves me home. I would only get in the way if I went along.”
“Well, someday, when you’re a full-fledged witch, I’m sure Lady Faust will want to bring you along.”
“Someday…?”
I don’t have a someday. I almost said this out loud, but I swallowed my words. I flipped through some pages to try and change the subject.
Dr. Hendy and his wife really had traveled all over the world. America, Germany, France, Russia, and Asia. They’d traversed the globe.
As I flipped through the pages, I could hear Dr. Hendy remarking here and there, “I remember that day.”
“Here’s a picture from when we were in Asia.”
“Those are Japanese clothes and buildings, right? They look so old and traditional.”
“Japan is a country of tradition. It was one of my wife’s favorite places we visited. She always said she wanted to take Anna to see it.”
“Wow, I didn’t know it was such a nice country.”
“They have a unique food culture as well. Lots of fish and fried foods, unlike what we have here. It all felt so new. But what left the biggest impression on us was a strange experience we shared there.”
“A strange experience?” I asked with a puzzled tone, and Dr. Hendy continued with a nod.
“We went to visit a temple on the mountainside, and it was snowing. The thing is, it was the middle of spring and warm outside. Strange, isn’t it?”
“So it was snowing during the spring?”
“Yes, and it was as bright and sunny a day as there ever has been. There wasn’t the slightest sign of snow in the sky, and yet it snowed. And the snow was pink… It was very beautiful. My wife and I could’ve watched it all day. It’s something that’s stayed with me after all these years.”
“Pink snow during the spring, eh…? You don’t say…”
I looked through the album for a picture of the event but couldn’t find any.
“Looking back, there’s so much I couldn’t do for her…”
Dr. Hendy muttered this to himself quietly.
“Just before she had Anna, she said she wanted to take our daughter to Japan when spring came around. But once Anna was born, my wife did everything around the house. I focused on my job instead, thinking I needed to feed my family. I worked and worked and worked. If I knew things would turn out this way, I would’ve figured out a way to make the trip.”
This is something that must be eating away at Dr. Hendy. The fact that he couldn’t do anything for his deceased wife. That he couldn’t save her, even though he’s a doctor. There must be a long list of little things like this accumulating inside him.
He was hunched over, making his frame appear small, and smiling weakly.
I turned the pages until Anna started appearing in pictures. Compared to the beginning of the album, which was filled with pictures taken in foreign lands, the pictures of Anna were all taken in England. The pictures were of the house, of the park in Lapis, and of family gatherings. And the final pages were all taken in the hospital, of Anna and her mother smiling. Her mother was very thin.
“When did your wife get sick?”
“It happened about a year ago. That’s when she grew severely ill and was hospitalized.”
“A whole year…”
It was the same amount of time I had left to live. I wondered at which point Anna’s mother had finally accepted her death. She didn’t seem too distraught in any of the pictures, at least. In fact, I’d never seen such a happy person before. Her mother had a big smile in every picture in the album. She must’ve been truly happy.