It was more than a promise—it was an oath born of love for the woman who had raised her, for her undying passion, and for herself. A declaration to no one, every word emblazoned with singular intent.
She would become a maid. The most perfect maid this world had ever seen. She’d make her mother proud. She’d make herself proud.
“Blessings upon thee, o maiden of silver,” a voice boomed. “The pact is made, thy soul laid bare, thy heart proven true.”
Celesty whipped her head around but found no one in the room with her. Her gaze landed on the candlestick Selena would always light with her magic. Something called to her, but she could not say what exactly, nor what it said.
“Lamplight,” she whispered, reaching for the candle. “Luce.”
In an instant, light flooded the room, and Celesty tumbled back. She had never accomplished even a flicker of magic in the past, much less such an explosive burst of it.
When she collected herself, she felt something stirring inside her. A current. It was like feeling her own blood moving through her veins, strange and turbulent and not entirely comfortable.
Power surged within her, an overwhelming flood, and its ebb and flow washed against her awareness. She knew it almost instinctively. “Mana…”
Selena had only ever had the capacity to cast Luce once per day. Celesty had cast the spell at a hundred times the typical intensity, and still she hardly sensed a disturbance in the arcane energies that flowed through her.
For all the power that magic promised, it carried an equal amount of risk. Many a practitioner had lost their life walking that treacherous line, and even the kingdom’s greatest casters could attest to struggling to control their magic in their youth. And yet Celesty overshadowed each and every one of them to an astronomical degree. The sheer volume of her mana versus a master’s was like an ocean to a puddle.
But Celesty did not know any of that, having no proper frame of reference. What she did know, however, was that this power she wielded was dangerous. One lapse of concentration and all that radiant light could bloom into a flame that consumed Anavalez whole.
Quite frankly, such power was not the sort of thing that belonged to a fourteen-year-old girl. A gift that should have been earned through a lifetime of careful training had become Celesty’s in the blink of an eye. If you left the gas on, it was not a matter of if it blew, it was a matter of when.
“I’d better put a lid on this,” Celesty said, sensing and fearing the strength yearning to break free.
Thus, she calmed the swirling and crashing of her arcane ocean with an ease that would have enraged the masters who’d studied for their entire lives to reach such a level of control. As quickly as she had obtained her powers, Celesty had mastered them. Truly, her genius transcended lifetimes.
“Lamplight. Luce.”
This time, she called forth only enough light for a lamp. It radiated from her fingertips, steady and perfect.
Celesty could not resist testing her talents further. She conjured droplets of water, flickering flames, and gusts of wind—all at once, of course—as she sent an elemental feather duster to seek out filth and grime.
“Incredible,” she gasped. “It’s as easy as breathing.”
An egregious misconception. The simultaneous manipulation of multiple elements to such a fine degree was most certainly not “as easy as breathing” to most people.
Thus was born the greatest mage who ever lived. All of creation lay at her beck and call.
“With this kind of power, I could…I could…”
She could amass an army and conquer the nations, ruling with an iron fist. She could build a harem. She could set herself up as the unprincipled, boorish protagonist most of us fantasize of becoming if gifted with such might. The devil perched on Celesty’s shoulder, ready to whisper in her ear, to combine her new gifts with her old intellect and bring about a new world order unlike any—
“I could become the most perfect maid this world has ever seen!”
Ahem. As the devil was saying—
“What am I waiting for? It’s time to cook up some maid magic, by maids, for maids! Well, for my master or mistress technically, but the point stands! Oh boy, things are about to get busy!”
The devil gave up. The machinations of her host’s mind were clearly beyond her reckoning, as was often the case with young savants, especially ones with an obsession. Maids, in this case.
Like they always say, genius and insanity are two sides of the same coin. But that’s neither here nor there.
Celesty was happier than she’d been in months.
“Thank you, everyone! For everything!”
One month later, Celesty bid farewell to Anavalez and its people—her home. Those who understood how hard Selena’s death had been on Celesty were reluctant to see the girl off, but she needed this. She needed to march off to the foreign lands of the west on a journey of self-discovery.
Or so the townsfolk believed.
Celesty debated it but eventually decided she could not reveal her true destination or objective. She would become a maid! And though she figured it was far too late for her father to suddenly go searching for his lost lover, she wasn’t going to take any chances on that front. The last thing she needed was a trail leading back to her and an impromptu family reunion squandering her career plans.
In truth, she was headed to the east, to the Theolan royal capital of Paltescia—heading directly opposite of where she said she was going. But even Celesty was hesitant to leave the only home she had ever known and her country all in one impulsive swoop.
The first leg of the journey would take her to Trendivalez, where a stagecoach regularly carried passengers along the route connecting the capital with the kingdom’s western neighbor.
After her goodbyes, she left town and crossed into the forest, but promptly hid behind trees and shrubbery so she could change into a green dress no one back home had ever seen—she’d made it herself, after all.
“Blacken. Annerire.” As the incantation left her lips, her lustrous silver locks and her shimmering azure eyes darkened to a midnight pitch. “Perfect. Now that’s maid magic.”
The world appears to us as it does due to the way light interacts with pigments. Certain materials absorb certain wavelengths, and the color they take on is simply a combination of any unabsorbed wavelengths as interpreted by the human eye. An apple, for example, absorbs all wavelengths except for red, and thus it appears red.
What Celesty had done was essentially manipulate those same properties, altering the wavelengths absorbed by her hair and eyes so they would appear darker. How had she managed to account for every single particle of light regardless of intensity, source, or perspective? It was a mystery even to her. A complication that would have stumped any normal mage wasn’t even a passing consideration for Celesty.
Truly, she was the working mage’s worst enemy.
With eyes, hair, and clothes all changed, Celesty was reborn once again. She subdued the silver and blue that rendered her alluring and mysterious. Her new black locks hung docilely past her shoulders; her dark eyes conveyed maturity. The green of her dress suggested a dryadic tranquility.
“No one will recognize me now.”
Celesty could not appear in the capital while what was left of her community thought she’d ventured in the opposite direction. However, in a world without cameras or photos, no one outside this town would suspect her. Plus, she’d seen enough black-haired and black-eyed people to know she wouldn’t stand out this way. Admittedly, she did also find the quiet colors comfortingly reminiscent of her Japanese self.
“I believe the coach to the capital leaves two days from now. I should check when I make it to town.”
Celesty heaved her pack onto her shoulders and set off.
Incidentally, while black hair and dark eyes were indeed common, the presence of both at the same time was decidedly uncommon. Poor Celesty would have never learned that in her quiet little village, however.