"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
"I-- It-- it'll... it'll be okay."
The heiress of house Laurent is a slight girl. Fair skin and bright-eyed, twiggy and graceful as she bounds around her seemingly endless manor. As she runs down the hallway, she cannot suppress the grin that splits her face. How could she, when the hem of her pastel dress billows and trails behind her like an playful ghost?
“Miss! Look!” the young girl shouts, doing a twirl.
Her shoulders sag when she sees her nursemaid isn’t behind her. She dressed herself today— that was the only reason she’d been allowed such an outfit. Sometimes, even though it’s been a couple months, the girl still forgets that most of the servants were dismissed. When she’d asked why, all she got was a sad look and an evasive answer, which only confused her more. Gone to help dad, her mom always said. She is not unaware of how her mother never answers where dad is, or what, specifically, he’s doing. A moment later, she perks up, her nose having caught the whiff of breakfast cooking— it smells of buttered toast and tea.
Without wasting any more time, the little mage runs through her carpeted hallways, paying little attention to the rows of paintings that she’ll eventually have to sell. Bounding up to the door, she opens it carefully, spying the ornate, homely kitchen her mother had begun taking her meals in.
She takes a moment to stare at her mother’s back, watching to see if she had noticed her daughter’s presence.
Tiptoeing, the heiress quietly lets the door close, shooting her mother a glance when it clicks, only to silently sigh in relief when she doesn’t turn. She quickly pads along the tiled flooring, past the sprigs of herbs she cannot yet name, beneath the hanging pots and dormant stovetops, before she reaches her mother.
In a spring of energy, the little girl leaps up behind her mother, shouting, “Boo!” while hugging her in the side.
Her mother doesn’t flinch— she never does, anymore, and her eyes only flicker to her daughter before returning to the sizzling pan before her.
“What have I told you before?” Her mother’s voice is tired with the futility of a phrase uttered a hundred times before.
Her daughter draws away, her lips in an exaggerated pout. She murmurs, “Don’t scare someone that’s doing something dangerous.”
Her mother nods. “Very good.”
“But! Cooking isn’t dangerous for you!” The girl’s expression brightens. “So it’s okay, right?”
“My dear, anything is dangerous without sufficient attention.” There is an odd tone in her voice. “… Even things you’ve done hundreds of times before.”
The heiress frowns. “… okay.”
Mariam’s hand reaches down to ruffle her daughter’s hair, though neither feel the warmth. She sighs. “Can you wait at the table for me? I’ll be finished up in no time.”
Her daughter slowly shuffles to the table, unable to get the way her mother sounded out of her mind. She kicks her feet while waiting for her mother to finish cooking. She resists the urge to say something, since she already knows her mother will reprimand her for being impolite. Despite it, she still knows something is wrong, even if her mother refuses to voice it, and she cannot ask about it. She is uncertain as to whether her mother thinks her fooled. She is eight years old, not quite old enough to understand the deeper intricacies of the world, but not quite young enough to be ignorant of them.
Eventually, her mother joins her at the table, setting down the pan, as well as retrieving utensils for the two of them. It is now, bathed in windowed sunlight, does the girl truly examine her mother.
Despite the clear differences, their resemblance to one another is uncanny.
Her daughter’s eyes crinkle with joy and amusement, while only exhaustion and despair tug at her mother’s blue eyes. Her daughter had inherited her hair, straight and wavy, always worn down— but her own is a complicated bun of ever-increasing tangles and curls. Even if she no longer wears them, soot-stained robes and tarnished plate armor weigh down her shoulders, phantom clinking as she shuffles about her own home. Meanwhile, her daughter giggles and twirls up and down the halls with her pastel dress as assured as a dancer.
No words pass between the two— the mother makes no attempt to speak, and the daughter’s tongue is caught by the long look of exhaustion her mother gives her plate. Eventually, over the scraping of utensils and a bite of toast, her mother glances at her daughter. The words come out like a beloved poison. “What’s bothering you?”
“Nothing,” the daughter says quickly.
“You understand you can talk to me about anything that’s bothering you, yes?” Her mother looks sad. “But if you’d rather not…”
“I…”
“Yes?”
The daughter’s fork lays unused. “Is everything okay, mom?”
Her mother smiles, though it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Of course it is.”
“Are you sure?”
“… why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know… you looked a little sad this morning.” The girl picks her fork back up, but doesn’t take another bite of her food.
“Did I?” her mother laughs, but the energy isn’t quite right. It makes her laugh sound weak and sad, and her expression is creased.
The little girl kicks her legs some more, pushing around the eggs on her plate with a fork. “When will dad be home?”
For that, she gets another sadder, almost sharper look. A look that says, Do not ask a question you already know the answer to.
The girl clams up, dropping her gaze to her lap. She resists the urge to say, I’m sorry, mother and something feels wrong even though you say everything is fine.
“Soon,” her mother responds.
The frustration in her daughter’s chest grows, climbing out of her throat. “You say that every time,” the little girl accuses. “You say that every time and then another week passes and dad still isn’t back.”
Her mother is quiet a heartbeat, staring, slowly blinking at her daughter.
The frustration mounts, boiling into unrighteous anger that pricks at the corner of the girl’s eyes. “You think I’m just a kid,” she hisses, “but I’m not! I’m not a kid! Stop lying to me! When is dad coming back?!”
Her mother frowns. The girl is heaving, and neither are sure whether the tears in her eyes are from anger or sorrow.
For a moment, there is a glint of guilt in her mother’s eyes. “I don’t know when he’ll be done with his work.”
“What work is he even doing?” her daughter cries, “I thought you two worked the same job?”
Her mother’s lips thin. “It’s a little more complicated than that.”
Her daughter frowns, and she continues, “I’ll explain when you’re older.”
“You say that every time too! Why can’t you tell me now?”
“This conversation is over.” Her mother suddenly stands, a look of deep exhaustion on her face. She turns towards the door.
The little girl scrambles out of her chair after her, shouting, “Don’t run! Why can’t you tell me?”
Her mother’s expression strains further, and she makes no attempt to answer.
[][][]
The heiress of house Laurent is a willowy girl. Sallow skinned and dull-eyed, awkward and slouching as she sits with her knees drawn to her chest, caught halfway between growing up and growing up. She is barely twelve.
She is also currently locked in a closet, having familiarized herself with failure.
Silent tears prick at her eyes, and every so often she dabs at them with the corner of her sleeves. She does not wail, she does not sob, she does not weep, she knows better than to let the whimpers and shaky breaths climb out of her dry throat. The little heiress is more silent than the snow that flits past the windows of her home.
Tentatively, she lifts a hand in front of herself, clears her throat, and winces as the burning headache buzzing in her skull intensifies.
A cold spark lights in her hand, and before she can speak, it flickers out. She feels her ether slip out of her grasp like sand.
The little girl allows herself a single breath to settle the tears threatening her eyes, before snuggling into the fuzzy cardigan she’d brought. She tries not to think about how she ended up here. It doesn’t work, and she finds herself examining the memories in her head like a broken record, over and over and over.
Her mother’s frown is imperious, like a ruler staring at a dirty beggar beneath their throne, her eyes a never ending question of “why is this worthless person here?”
“Again,” her mother orders with the tone of a velvet-wrapped knife.
The girl bites back her instinctive I’m sorry. She already knows the response to apologies. She finds them to be rather unpleasant. She sniffles, rubbing her nose across her sleeve and gritting her teeth as she attempts to glare the shaking out of her cupped hands.
The little mage winces, feeling her ether sputter and spark in her palm. Her fingertips are beginning to turn numb, though from the heat or cold, she doesn’t know.
A vicious crack of pain echoes through her headache, sending the ether dripping from her grasp like molten glass. Her gaze remains fixed on her hands, bereft of light. She doesn’t need to look up to know how her mother feels.
Then, before she can react, a hand grabs her wrist, and with a rough tug, she falls to the floor. Dull pain blooms in her knee, but it’s overshadowed by the foreboding dread that accompanies what she knows to come next. The tears begin, and she begins to plead with her mother.
“Please— please— mom no— please!”
The pleading falls on deaf ears.
She drags her daughter towards a closet both know to be empty in a dusty room. Her mother speaks a singular, assured sentence to her daughter: “You don’t get to come out until light
All the while, the little girl is attempting and failing to tug her wrist away. “Pleaseplease— please— mo— it hurts! Mom please—“
Her mother roughly shoves her into the closet, and the lock clicks. Her child continues sobbing, scrambling to her feet to claw and pound at the door. “Mom! Mom! Please— please let me out— I’ll do better— I can do it! Please— please don’t leave me…”
Eventually, the girls tantrum dies, and her incessant wails peter out. She hugs her knees to her chest, asking the same question again and again: Why?
Each time she does, it feels as if she knows the answer: Because you failed. You are a failure.
Each time, the answer splinters her heart more and more. It feels as if her heart had shattered into a million glass needles, rooted within her chest and growing with every breath. It is exhausting to attempt to shove it away, to revisit the same answers again and again, to try and fail to comfort herself surrounded by cold darkness. The exhaustion makes her eyes feel heavy. It is at times like these that the darkness around her doesn’t feel quite so hungry, where the hard floor of the closet beneath her begins to feel soft, and the light playing past the edges of the locked doors seem to wink at her, like sharing a secret with her. The darkness feels as if it is filling her head with cotton, stuffing her eyes with velvet, and plunging her ears into quiet dream-static.
If she listens closely enough, she swears she can hear a lullaby swaying in the endless dark, slowly luring her to sleep.
The girl lets out another soft sigh, slowly pulling her ragged emotions back together. Her hand, clutching at her chest, slowly loosens, and she wraps it around herself. Her stomach grumbles, but she can’t do anything about it, so she ignores it. She has realized several key things, over the course of her numerous trips to her second bedroom.
One, answers formed of her own rationale are logical and objective, and while they are somewhat biased from her view, they serve well enough as impartial observations of the world as long as she remembers to be open-minded about it.
Two, while those answers are fact, facts are not inherently malicious or meant to cause pain. They embody truth.
Three, crying does little to change the truth.
And four, even if she cannot cast the Light Imitation Spell, which makes her a failure, her mother eventually lets her out, without fail. Both statements are, undoubtedly, fact.
So, the course of action she must take is simple: If she is unable to cast the Light Imitation Spell, with expended effort on any given day, then she must wait to be let out— and she should not cry, she silently adds. Crying never made her mother let her out earlier, if anything, it always just prolonged the process. This logic of hers hasn’t failed her yet.
Though, the keyword is there: Yet. It hasn’t failed her, yet. and despite all she tells herself, she cannot stop the part of her that reminds her that she must stay open-minded to contrary evidence, the tiny, insidious part of herself that whispers: What if you’re wrong? You thought you were good at magic, before. You were wrong then. What will you do if this time you’re wrong? If, this time she forgets? If, this time you’ll be stuck in here?
She doesn’t have an answer to that.
A part of her yearns for her pocket watch, which she’d left on her nightstand earlier that morning. A part of her wishes to do something other than wait, even if the alternative is staring at a clock. Eventually, the part of her that wishes to be productive settles on revisiting the events that led up to her visit to the closet, over and over and over. Eventually, the pain in her chest starts to subside, replaced by cold detachment, like she is watching another go through the actions, rather than her.
Eventually, as the light peeking around the edges of the closet door begins to dim, and her back begins to become sore from being hunched over for some long, the frantic rattling of a lock drags her out of the cotton-dark haze.
Light floods her vision as the doors are thrown open, and she blinks away the pain as standing before her, breathless and ringed with the light of a savior, is her mother.
Their resemblance to one another had only strengthened with time.
Exhaustion weigh at the corners of their eyes, devoid of joy and amusement. The girl had taken after her mother, styling her own hair into a bun, though she wasn’t quite good at it, and it frequently came undone. She no longer wears pastel dresses, no longer dances through her hallways with a grin, rather, her eyes are dull as she drags herself through the estate, dressed in an austere skirt and blouse that often felt too tight.
Her savior falls to her knees, crawling towards her daughter. She babbles, something incoherent and something about whether she’s okay.
The heady cotton-haze detachment is scoured clean by the light, and in its last moments, all it can think is why.
Why ask if I’m okay if you shoved me into a closet? Why care if you yourself threw me in here? Do you not see the bruises on my wrist? Why? Why? Why?
The words crawl to the tip of her tongue, before uselessly tumbling to the floor in silence when her mother draws her daughter to her chest in a deep embrace.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” her mother whispers, over and over, like some kind of prayer. “I’m so sorry, my little star.”
The daughter never asks why, she knows the answer already. Instead, she returns the hug, blinks away the tears that threaten her eyes, and whispers back: “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay, mom.”
They repeat it so often that they begin to believe it.
[][][]
Snow laps at the windowsill like waves on the shore, a young girl solemnly thinks. Her head rests upon her arms, and her arms upon a cluttered desk. Her gaze lingers on the closed window. Besides her head sits an open book with a colorful illustration of a sun-bleached beach. Besides that is another book, haphazardly stacked so that the pages overlap with a journal. Both are filled with long prints of ink-black scrawl.
The old, nettling sting her chest has settled into a familiar ache she can shove away.
A part of her still mourns the loss of her mother and her father. It is the same part that awakens her at night, gasping and silently sobbing as a gaping hole in her heart widens with every memory that she revisits. She considers it to be the sniveling, unnecessary child within herself, and does her best to never let it rise to the surface.
She smothers that part of herself through action, hiring new servants: a spry, older girl by the name of Esmerelda, who works to support her family in the lower districts, who has bright green eyes and hair the color of coal; a rough-and-tumble carriage driver who goes by Stephen, who comes from a place she’s only read about in history books, who follows her orders and catch himself when he speaks too harshly and has a knack for horses; an older gentlemen who speaks politely, who politely addresses her despite her age, and diligently assists her without a word.
They help her cover the old paintings— eventually, she will order Javier to auction them, to fund her purchases— and lock the old doors in her home— the small dining room she ate in will gather dust, she moves her meals directly to the library she has become accustomed to calling her bedroom, and throw the keys beneath a hill of boxes in a disused room.
The thudding of a knocker makes the girl flinch out of her idle reverie. The knocking comes again, a little more insistent, and she drags herself out of her chair, wrapped in a blanket and makes her way towards the estate’s front door.
On the other side of the door, a spry boy as old as she greets her. His face brightens, his brown eyes crinkling as he waves energetically— the kind of wave meant to say goodbye, or hello to someone outside of shouting distance. “Hello!” he yells, “hi! Hello! How are you? I missed you!”
A polite smile comes to her face, and she spies the small little basket that peeks around his back. “Oh... yes, hello. What brings you to my doorstep today?”
“Mom sent this!” the boy holds up a basket covered with a cloth. The girl knows there is carefully curated food, even if she cannot see it. This scene had happened enough times for her to know what had to come next.
“That’s very kind of her.” The girl steps back. “Come inside— please, before you catch a cold.”
The two of them make their way into the house, trailing back until the girl finds the cluttered desk she’d initially been at. The two spend some time moving papers and books, until they have space sufficient for the basket the boy carries with him. The girl drags over a chair, and settles them down.
“So,” the girl exhales, smiling. “What brings you here today? Not just delivery, I hope?”
“Oh…” the boy has a small expression of surprise. “Well— yeah— sorta, I wanted to check in again— y’know— after the whole thing with your mom…”
A part of her no longer truly considers herself a child of the Duchess Laurent, but that same part is the one that knows better than to expect the world to follow her whims. It is the same part that acknowledges the fact that for as long as she exists— dead or alive— she will be tied to her house. Her mother’s shadow will haunt her until she breathes her last. It is this part that speaks, the part that grew up, that can eloquently play the part of a mourning daughter who has come to terms. “Ah… no— no…” She gives a small smile she hopes to be reassuring, and prays that he cannot see through her lie. “I’m okay. Thanks for checking in.”
In a way, it isn’t really a lie. The little heiress is alright— she can talk and smile and laugh, still, and while she can’t sing or walk into certain parts of her house without crying, she never really needed those parts anyway. This is the refrain she whispers herself every time he asks, and every time she lies to his face.
“Oh,” she says, suddenly remembering, “I’ve something for you. One moment.”
His friend scrambles off, rooting through a pile of books until she finds a certain one with a burgundy cover and gold etching. It’s some kind of thick fairy tale book, and she plops it down in front of the boy.
For a moment, the boy only stares. The girl grows sheepish, running a hand through her hair. “You mentioned it the other day, so…”
“Oh!” The boy’s grin splits his face. “You didn’t have to!”
“Well— I owe you a lot so…”
“It’s not like you owe me for it…”
“Whatever— just go on— read it. I’ll focus on eating.” The girl makes a show of grabbing a sandwich, turning away to wait while he picks through the book in wonder. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches the boy’s expression, gauging how large his smile becomes at each illustration. Silently, she plays a game of rearranging the reactions she expects out of him, carefully keeping them in mind for next time. Over the years, watching her mother has made her passable at picking out people’s behaviors.
Occasionally, the boy peaks over, pointing ecstatically at a particular picture or drawing that excited him. “Look— look—“ he points to a small illustration of a knight in gleaming gray armor and a blue-robed magician “— aren’t they so cool?”
“Are they now?” His friend tilts her head. She doesn’t really get it anymore, but if he was smiling, then she was content as well.
“I can’t wait to grow up! I’ll be our knight! And you’ll be our party’s wizard!”
“What—“ the little girl snorts “— I’m to be your mage lackey?”
“Court Mage!” The little boy crowed. “Trusted Adviser! Imperial Mage! My closet Confidante! My Best Friend! We’ll be equals! I’ll be a knight, and I’ll protect you!”
“Will you now?” The grin comes easily to the girl’s face.
“I promise!” Arthur valiantly declares, a single foot on the table, pointer finger raised skyward.
The little mage pauses. For a moment, she can believe it— that the little knight across from her could become the hero he always speaks of. A small smile crawls to her face, and she responds in a playful tone that clashes with the resolve she holds in her chest, “And I swear I’ll take you on an adventure to another world.”
Arthur laughs and cheers, plopping back down into his chair without a care in the world. The girl barely contains her shock at the way the atmosphere seems to tense— the way her words seem to carry weight. A lackadaisical childhood promise turned Oath. Deep down, she knew she was playing with fire, but it is two different things to play with fire and be burned by it.
To Arthur, the words meant nothing. To me, though, they meant everything.
