My name is Kia and I've done something awful. 

I was born from a loving family fifteen years ago, although nobody remembers that now.
Well, maybe 'loving' might be an understatement. They've always done what they could to make sure everyone respected and loved me.

From a small noble family we have become a high ranking one that everyone in the kingdom knows -- that's all thanks to their diplomatic work, getting alliances on the base of my power.

"My power" -- that's another one of the key points in my life. Since the first time I've shown my magic I've been constantly praised. The people who didn't do so, mostly the ones that had my same age, were jealous of the talent I had been born with. 

And because of it, agreeing to the general opinion, at a very young age I've begun researching new sorts of magic thanks to my high affinity. That led to new discoveries, the optimization of already existing spells and some other achievements. At fifteen, I was most definitely the most known person in the kingdom, if we don't count the king.

Now to what I did. While researching the fundations of mind magic, it seems like I've accidentally created a spell with insane utility. One that deletes the memory of the person who casted it from the mind of everyone, as if I had never existed. But that leads to more explanations: how did that happen?

I was researching alone in my laboratory, looking for the key to controlling other people's minds. That was the job that had been assigned to me by the king a few months ago, which I had decided to accomplish as fast as possible. Of course, it's really hard, maybe impossible, I'd say now, to control someone's mind because of how frail that system is, but not knowing that I put myself in that situation.

And originally, I was even making progress! Spells with more and more accuracy to make people forget what they had said a few seconds ago were working perfectly, but then I hit a dead end. I could make people forget, sure, but I could never make them say something new.

It was as if they were hard-coded to always be the same. It was then that I understood something important that was strictly linked to what I knew best: magic.

Magic is the ability to use one's mind to control the particles that make the world. I won't explain it any further, because just this extremely simple explanation will be enough. It's not as limitless as one would think after hearing it, though.

That is, minds are created by experience and genes. You can't really edit either by adding, only by removing. That's the reason why I could make people forget what they had said a few seconds ago, yet they'd say the same thing again and not something else. The personality that had been formed caused them to say the sentence they forgot they already said once again, so they had no reason to change their sentence because they hadn't changed at all.

This might be hard to understand, but keep listening.

The thing is, this naturally brings up a question: 'if I remove enough experience, will the person they are change?'

Of course, I already said I can't add anything. So what happened? I made a mistake with the range of the spell, so I made everyone forget about me somehow. I don't know what else to add, really -- I only know it happened, and I don't know how to reverse it. You can trust me on that.

After using the spell, I was sure it hadn't even worked. Watching the yellow particles from my cast mix up with my long white hair, I felt like it had been a failure.

"Well, that's a new low. This one didn't even work," I told myself, alone in the barely lit up lab. Luckily my green eyes were used to this lack of light nowadays, otherwise I'd be forced to wear glasses at my young age. That's a bit shameful.

"Ahh, for today I guess it's enough. I'll have to keep track of what happened today."

At that point, I stood up from the seat I had been sitting on for the past four hours, waiting for a sign, and headed upstairs. It was 8 PM and the same thing happened every day if I failed to go upstairs at that time. My family would've come downstairs and said they were preoccupied -- it was an interaction I wanted to avoid, so I put a stop to my curiosity.

But as I went to the door of the lab, I realized something weird.

"It's closed?" I muttered to myself. "I guess they really forgot I'm here." 

'Teleport.' I casted and found myself at the other side of the door, away from the dim lights of the lower floor of our palace and in the lit side of it.

But the uselessly romantic side of the castle that had some windows showing a nice view of the valley down the mountain where this palace stood had changed from the last time I had been there.

"Where's everyone?" I asked myself, remembering all the other times where there had been many maids in this side of the palace. After all, most of the staff had been assigned to me by my parents.

"Something's definitely wrong." I concluded. "Maybe there's been an attack and they wanted to protect me, but why didn't I notice?"

'Cloak.' I casted and immediately I became unseen, then headed for the other side of the palace.

But as I opened the other wooden door that separated my side of this place from the one where my parents were, the view I was subjected to was completely different from what I expected.

My parents were sitting at their usual wooden table, alone. The maids were looking at them intensely and I could understand why without much of a problem. They were different.

You see, my parents had lost the 'spark' more than eight years ago. I don't really know how to explain it, really, I can barely even grasp the meaning of that word. When the maids had explained it to me, they said my parents didn't love each other passionately and they hadn't done so in a long time.

Honestly, that was normal in my view. A good part of political marriages like the one between my father and my mother were doomed not to be as sentimental as profitable. Still, they actually loved each other for the first part of their nuptial adventure, which is already an achievement. Yet, the people I was looking at now were deeply in love with each other.

My father, balding but looking younger than before, looked at my mother as if she was a precious treasure. That same look was shared by the latter, whose wrinkles weren't as visible anymore. 

"Did I go back in time or something?" I asked myself. "No, that makes no sense." 

"What the hell is going on, then?" Those were the last words I muttered to myself, because more surprises met my eye. On top of the well-decorated room there was a coat-of-arms, just as usual, but it was different. While my father was a Duke, he hadn't always been one. He had previously been a Baron and only achieved real greatness when he was able to rank up thanks to my efforts.

But in reality, the coat-of-arms was still the one of a Baron for some unknown reason. At that point, my mind started connecting the dots.

"Is this really the world before I was born?" I asked myself, but shook my head. That was not the spell I had casted, so there was absolutely no way it had worked like that.

"Then, what's the change?" Was the next question I posed to myself, one for which I soon enough gave an answer. "This is the world where they don't remember I exist."

As I thought about it, that made extreme sense. I had played too much with fire and now nobody knew about 'Kia Landsworth.' But the craziest thing in my eyes was how my family was actually happier without me, or it seemed. 

Baron Lanza Landsworth and his bride Deria. My father and mother... gave each other a smile they hadn't given to me for as long as I can remember. Not because they hadn't smiled, but because all their smiles had been dull if I compare them to the one they gave each other now.

"Is it even worth trying to find a solution?" Seeing that, tears started to fall from my eyes. Luckily, nobody could still see, while they could hear the teardrops on the floor.

"Is there a leak?" A maid immediately asked her co-workers as they went on to check and left the room.

But that didn't influence me in the slightest as I was blocked in my own mind, wondering how I had become a person so disgusting that my own family was better off without me.

At some point during my cries that nobody could really hear, though, I understood something.

For the first time in my life, probably, I could empathize with my own parents.

"They felt just as trapped as me..." I realized soon enough. They had made an obvious mistake, it seemed. They thought that an increase in their ranks would bring them happiness, that becoming more rich would've led them to live a better life. But they were in the same spiral I was.

"They lost their freedom when they gave birth to a heir with my talent." That was my conclusion. At that point, I stopped crying. It was my fault, but at the same time it wasn't.

"If I could have chosen, then I would've never decided to be born so talented! I could've given them a better life where they had freedom to act how they wanted, plus I could've given myself a better life, where I didn't have to listen to any order." 

"Maybe this was a blessing, after all. Let's see what kind of life I can live as someone who nobody knows. If I don't like it, I'll find a way out."

With newfound optimism, I decided I'd take the same path that my parents had created for theirselves.