The mansion was abuzz. My daughter, who had turned three years old just two days prior, was bedridden with a fever. According to the physician, her body’s mana was destabilizing. They said this was a rare occurrence among children of noble houses.
The servants all looked gloomy, and my wife wept without end. The successor of the house, our eldest son, remained at her side in silence.
“Why? Why did this have to happen to Tafelina?” she moaned.
All she had done was cry since our daughter had fallen ill. Frankly, I found it dreadful.
“Would you quit crying already?”
“How could you?! Don’t you care at all that our daughter is suffering?”
I grimaced. My marriage to this woman was a political one, and I had never felt anything resembling affection for her. Naturally, I felt the same about our children; they had been made purely out of obligation. I thought my wife understood this.
“Ohh, Tafelina, Tafelina...”
We had given birth to our daughter at my wife’s insistence. I imagine that she really wanted another son. It was common for families to have a second son, just in case something happened to the first. She had been hoping to strengthen the position of our house, probably because being unloved by her husband was too much to bear for a lady of the nobility.
What she gave birth to instead was a daughter, and now that daughter was at risk of dying. My wife had fainted on the spot when we were told to brace for the worst if the girl’s fever didn’t subside. Destabilized mana could be fatal, and there was no known way to prevent it. Researching a cure in itself was said to be unfeasible because cases were so rare.
Three days had passed since our daughter’s fever first broke out. I didn’t think someone her age could take much more. It seemed she was a goner. But I had another daughter, from another woman. She was much cuter than this one, and I planned to take her in once she was old enough to attend the academy.
Illegitimate children weren’t permitted to attend the noble academy, but there’s no obstacle without a work-around. It wasn’t anything I couldn’t solve with my family’s influence.
My train of thought was interrupted by shrieks coming from my daughter’s room.
“What?! What happened?!” I asked a servant who had just rushed into our room. However, I didn’t get any useful responses. The servant merely trembled and kept repeating, “The young miss, it’s the young miss.”
I wasn’t going to get anywhere with them, so I rushed past the servant as they collapsed and headed to my daughter’s room. What could have happened? If my daughter had passed away then the servants were supposed to say so. I had made sure they were prepared for the possibility.
When I reached her room, my small daughter was sitting up in her bed, almost as though she were completely unaffected by the fever that had been ravaging her. But...was it really my daughter? Her previously chestnut hair was now a bluish silver and she looked at me with eyes that had shifted from brown to a deep blue. Who would’ve thought such a small change in colors would make her look like a completely different person?
I stood in the doorway, at a loss for words when I heard the screams of my wife from behind me.
“Wh-Who is that?! What happened to Tafelina?!”
Apparently she didn’t see the girl in the bed as our daughter.
“An abomination...” our eldest son whispered as he peeked in from behind my wife.
In the midst of the panicked clamor, I was the only one capable of deciding what to do about her.
“Get that thing as far away from this house as possible!”