It was my first day of school, and before I knew it, I’d challenged her to a game. To me, it felt like I was about to greet her, but instead I offered to play rock-paper-scissors. After that was over with, I immediately came back to my senses.
For some reason, the fact I won made me feel like I’d taught her a lesson. I stared at my palm, wondering what in the world I was doing.
“Let’s play a game. Rock-paper-scissors.”
“Pardon?”
The girl in front of me was different from the phantom lady who had suddenly appeared in my childhood. The only thing they had in common was their dark-brown hair. Something felt similar about their clothing too, but their ages were completely different. And this one wasn’t the calm and collected type.
“Where... Where is this?”
“This is my home!”
I don’t know where it was. And my memory of it is too strong for it to have been some hypnagogic flight of fancy. It wasn’t like I could simply leave the count’s mansion without permission. I could’ve just shaken it off as a dream, but that little box I held that day ended up in my room at the research facility when I woke up, and I was still wearing clothes I had never seen before then.
“Is your magic playing tricks again?” asked the count when he came to wake me up and saw my new clothing. “It’s concerning that you can still use magic at all, as suppressed as we’re keeping you. I need to make something even stronger...” he quietly added with a serious look on his face.
I have a memory from when I was a newborn. My late great-grandfather, when he saw me back then, had this to say to my mother, an uneasy expression on his face: “A defective one? Give birth to a better boy next.”
I came to understand that word as I grew up. I suspect I already knew what it meant by the time I was one or two years old. Whenever adults called me defective right in front of me, they would frown. I could tell they weren’t saying something nice about me. I didn’t yet know the exact meaning of the word “defective,” but their anger stood out plain as day.
However, at the count’s mansion and back home, the servants never used that word towards me. Instead, they would call me adorable, flush their cheeks, and pat my head. So I wouldn’t say I wasn’t loved in my early childhood—quite the opposite. Still, as it became painfully obvious to me that whenever I expressed happiness or sadness, it wreaked havoc on the adults around me, I wouldn’t smile back at people.
There was a plethora of magical items scattered about my room like they were toys: a metallic cane, a wax doll, a rotten piece of a large tree, a red gemstone, a large green stone, a thick dictionary, and a wooden clock. Touching them would drain the energy from the center of my body, bringing me comfort. The things around me didn’t break, and I could spend my time in that room without anything to worry about. The only adult who would enter my room was Dr. Aristo, and I think I smiled at him pretty often.
“In the future, you will be an awesome mage!”
As I played with those things in my room as a child, I would sometimes recall that memory I couldn’t place, and try yet again to place it. When I held hands with that woman, it brought me the very same comfort, that ebbing feeling I got from the trinkets that kept me company. I ate sweets in that memory, sweets I’d never seen before. Their taste stayed with me long after.
If it wasn’t a dream, then I really must have ended up in a different place. Magic had caused me enough misery; a little more was no surprise.
But then who was that Naijeiri woman? Where is she, and what is she up to? I want to see her again... When I ran through my routine in my room with all its clutter, that thought was all I had on my mind.
I saw plenty of places I’d never seen before. I saw someone make sweets for the first time. She told me I would become an awesome mage, with such confidence it was almost as if she were talking about herself. I’d never heard such a thing from anyone before, so it surprised me.
She was always smiling. So was I. I wished we could stay together forever. And yet, she told me we couldn’t. It was a very realistic thing to say. She told me it was impossible, since I was a child, and that she didn’t make promises she couldn’t keep.
“If you always keep this lid closed, then maybe, certainly, even if you don’t want to, we’ll meet again, I think. We’ll start fighting all the time the moment we see each other. I’m sure I’ll freeze your arms. I’m sure you’ll burn my hair. But I won’t freeze you solid, and you won’t burn me to ash. It’ll go on like that, for years and decades. We’ll be rickety old geezers, squabbling to the end of our days. At some point, we’ll have both realized that we’ve gotten older, together.”
“We will not be siblings, not friends, not even lovers. But you and I will always be connected. It’s not that lonely if you think about it that way, is it? Here, here’s my box. It’s yours. Don’t cry.”
And this girl was neither my sister nor related to me in any way. She wasn’t my friend, and she wasn’t my girlfriend. Just a girl who sat beside me. Someone whom I saw for only a third of the day. I spent more time with Prince Zenon and the noble girls.
“Let’s see who’s best!”
She kept coming at me over and over. It felt like we’d fight until the end of time. Having such a girl sit by my side the whole time was irritating, and dealing with her was a pain.
“We’ll start fighting all the time...”
This Nanalie Hel was not her. There was no point in fighting this girl, and all it did was make me waste my energy. And yet those eyes, that self-assured expression, and that swaying hair... They spurred me on.
In retrospect, it might’ve been something close to desperation on my part.