Hireth began her story. “When I was fourteen, my father volunteered me for a magical procedure. My natural magic is red, which is thought to be the epitome of destruction magic.”

“Is it?” Eric asked.

“Yes,” she answered, “but it’s not quite that simple. It isn’t elemental—it can’t destroy anything just by touching it like black magic can, but it can destroy anything magical. And in a world that basically runs on magic—yeah. Anyway… the procedure was to graft black elemental magic from a therian.

“Magic is never supposed to be… ripped from anyone like that. It never should have happened, but I was fourteen—what could I do?”

“That’s how you got your black magic?” Eric asked.

“Yeah. It was… horribly strange at first, and it made me… pretty unstable. It felt like I was getting eaten from the inside. Funny enough, the person who helped me the most was the therian they’d ripped it from—Enix.”

“Your magic is from the demon lord?” Illius spoke up.

She nodded. “Not just from him—with him. The connection is still open, or rather, I re-opened it when I unsealed my magic. My graft is the only one where both participants survived… to my knowledge. I helped him escape. My family was furious, especially my father, but they covered it up, because it happened during my father’s campaign to be the Allchosen.”

“I didn’t realize anyone had to campaign for that.” Eric narrowed his eyes. “I thought the Senate chose the Allchosen, and then they’re the single voice of the Allfather or whatever such bullshit.”

“Partially,” Hireth explained. “The Allchosen is picked by the Senate, but they undergo a lot of scrutiny, and that includes their family members. The Allchosen is supposed to be the best of the Senate—the person with the happiest family, someone who only good is spoken of, etc.”

“Hm,” Eric said. “I’ve never thought of the Allchosen as upstanding—just the most fanatical nutcase.”

“Yep,” the witch agreed. “Anyway, I spent most of the time my father was the Allchosen in school, which is where I met Kaz. With my black magic came certain… obligations. They weren’t experimenting for science—I was supposed to be a weapon. The ultimate weapon. So, I spent my days learning magical theory and my nights learning how to wield my black magic. Kaz was the bright spot of my education. He was a bit of a bastard.”

Her lips twitched at the memory.

“Still is. Never took his studies seriously, know-it-all—whatever. I never paid much attention to him until we were talking about the trial of Porta Thwaites. It was national news, of course, and everyone had an opinion about it. Patria being Patria, the teacher went on and on about how the girl had attempted murder. Twenty-some odd men—I was the only woman, of course—and it was the foreign Seratian who had to make a scene.”

“Why were you the only woman?” Eric asked.

“Ah… I was at Megaliotechnica, which is generally for military only. My father pulled some strings, so I could study there. I was a bit of a special case because of my magic. Women aren’t usually allowed to even study magic. Anyway, back to Porta.

“Porta… you guys were probably too young, but Porta Thwaites was raped by her stepfather. She tried to get an abortion because… she was fifteen, and that attempt was ruled as premeditated murder by the courts, because… fuck the patriarchy. Her stepfather’s crime never got much attention, and I think he got off with, like, six months in prison.

“Porta, though, was sentenced to death. It wasn’t fair. I knew that at the time, but… Kaz was the first person who seemed to agree with me, and that made me realize the world was a lot bigger than Patria. We started to spend time together after that, and I got really political. I couldn’t tell my parents, of course, because he was a heathen, and oh, think of the scandal.”

“I imagine that escalated after the Novidians rescued Porta?” Eric asked.

Hireth laughed with a bitter smirk. “The Novidians didn’t rescue Porta. There’re a million and one things no one knows about what really happened.”

“So, what really happened?”

“The 12th of Elago. That was the day the verdict was read—the verdict my father handed down. They ruled to execute her—to protect the sanctity of life. How fucking ironic. Protestors and counterprotestors showed up at her holding facility. It was going to get ugly no matter what. The enforcers showed up and started to disperse the crowds, and I—I was standing next to my father.

“They beat those people for protesting an innocent girl’s death. They dragged protestors out to beat them with clubs.” She spoke softly as she relived the memory, a thrum of fury hiding behind her eyes. “Something in me snapped. I ran forward, grabbed one of the enforcers, and hauled them off a protestor. They turned on me, and… I was terrified. I held up my hands to block the blows, and… I saw my scythe go right through his neck.”

“Holy shit.” Eric ran a hand through his hair. “Holy shit. You—it was you? You started the war?”

“Sorta, yeah. I could have stopped, but… I stopped being scared and started being angry. My magic boiled over. It was like I blinked and all the enforcers… dead. My father stopped me, or he tried to. I should have killed him, but… I don’t know. I hesitated. He started to shout about how I’d been inhabited by Baalth because of my black magic, and… I ran.

“I went into the facility to pull Porta out. I remember running down the halls, looking in every room, destroying the building as I went. She was chained to a metal table in a lab—six months pregnant—the verdict hadn’t even reached her yet. I probably looked a little crazy at that point—I was crying and covered in blood. I convinced her to go with me, though.”

“Where did you go?”

“I mean, we couldn’t go home; I didn’t know anybody. The whole thing was an accident, really. I bumped into Kaz outside a building and he looked at me and Porta and he asked us to come in. I was a complete mess and I told him I didn’t want him involved. He told us to come in anyway and I—I was desperate.

“He took us into the basement and told us that we’d be safe there. They couldn’t search the building, because it was the consulate of Serat. None of it made any sense, until he told me he was the prince of Serat, Kazure Kattan.”

“Hence the whole bit about being an exiled prince,” Eric mused.

“Yeah. Exiled because of me,” she said with low eyes. “He got us on a boat that night, but… by time we reached Serat, my father had already demanded we be returned. Of course, the Senate voted almost immediately to impeach my father. Nobody was surprised.”

“What happened?”

“We… made it to Serat, and Kaz pleaded with his family for us. His mother took in Porta and shielded her, but they arrested me. I was supposed to be sent back, but somehow or other, Enix found out, and he helped me escape. Well, at that point the only place left for us was Noviad.

“They were the most prosperous and progressive part of the country, and a lot of officials helped us secretly. At first, all Enix and I could do was get a few friends and disrupt a couple of strategic locations. But then, we hit Fort Stalworth—Enix razed it to the ground. Patria retaliated by burning Dotric—the city where Porta had been held.”

She grimaced. “There were over fifty thousand civilian casualties, and it honestly caused the opposite reaction the Senate expected. They thought they were going to crush our rebellion, but with so many civilian casualties, there was backlash. Noviad felt justified to split, and that was more or less the actual start of the war.”

Illius had set half his bean sandwich down. He felt sick. Even Eric looked a little ill.

“Maybe this was the wrong story for dinnertime,” Hireth said.

“That’s why you’re called the Witch of Dotric?” Eric’s voice betrayed his horror.

She nodded. “That’s my legacy. Fifty thousand people I couldn’t save.”

“What happened to Porta?”

“She… uh—she died.” Her voice broke, and tears started running down her cheeks “After Dotric… she didn’t do very well. She thought it was her fault. So… she committed suicide on her sixteenth birthday.”

“Tissues?” Eric asked her, getting up.

She sobbed. “Just bring the whole box.”

He came back in just a second and handed them to her.

“Sorry,” Hireth said, “I don’t know how… I feel like I’ve told this story a million times to my therapist, and I cry every time.”

“It’s alright.” Eric squeezed her hand.

She continued, wiping the tears away. “I went back for her funeral. We buried her in the sand, far away from her home and her family. No one knew that she was dead—it’s still not public knowledge. We had to keep it a secret, because she was the reason a lot of people were fighting.

“She was the reason I was fighting. It felt so wrong. I wanted to scream it to the skies that she was gone, that we had failed. But I couldn’t take that hope away from everyone else, even though I knew—I knew the truth.”

“I’m sorry,” Eric told her with a gentle, kind voice.

“I think,” she reflected, “that’s when the war changed for me. I didn’t care about the cost anymore because it felt like I’d lost everything. Enix was—well, brutal. We both were. It’s hard to walk through a city where the streets are charred, and there’s babies melted into their mother’s chests, and not hate the people who did that.

“How are you supposed to bury a sixteen-year-old girl who wrote in her suicide note that she wasn’t worth saving, and not hate the society that made her feel that way? We wanted them to regret it.”

“Well, I think you succeeded,” Eric said.

“But they weren’t the only ones who regretted it.” Hireth stared off into the distance. “I thought I didn’t have anything to lose, but every life I took, I lost a little more of my humanity. We took Abzu, and the war started to tip in our favor. Then the battle of Ravensheart… Venice died, and we lost so many. And Enix—he wanted to destroy the capital.”

“That didn’t happen though?” Eric asked.

She shook her head. “No. I said no. After Venice died—I drifted, disassociated… All I could see was Dotric, and I swore it would never happen again. I wouldn’t let it. Enix didn’t care—it was a war. We had to expect casualties. Anyone still living in Patria was complicit. And that was too much for me.

“We got in a huge fight. He called me a traitor; I told him he wasn’t a fucking king. He threatened to have me arrested, and I snapped. Valerie got between us—Valerie’s a fucking saint, by the way—and she’s probably the only reason we didn’t kill each other.”

“Who is she?”

“Valerie Kita,” Hireth said with a fond smile. “She was—probably still is—the political leader of Noviad. She’s the one who convinced Noviad to split from Patria and back us. Without her, there would have been no rebellion. Anyway, she got me calmed down, and I left the next day. I… remember finding Kaz, but very little of the actual time I spent with him.

“I was starting to lose days, and it terrified me. My magic was unstable—all of me was unstable. I wondered… if it would just be better to end it all. Kaz found a way to seal my black magic though, giving me another option, and I took it. I wanted to disappear into a new life, so I moved to Debendorf. I was in therapy for years, and it got a bit better.”

“A bit better?” Eric reached for her hand. “Auntie?”

“It’s a lot better now,” she assured him, “but I’d be lying if—I’m never going to be okay, Sweetheart. I’m never going to be normal. I tried for a very long time, and ultimately, my new normal is a person who’s still… shattered. Between my childhood and the war, um—it’s just a lot of pain that I can’t make go away.

“You don’t go through a war and come out unscathed. I have a lot healthier coping strategies now, though, and just being around you has helped me a lot.”

“You’ll tell me though, right?” Eric’s voice wavered. “If it gets bad again?”

She nodded.

“You’re not going to try to keep it from me or something because you think you’re a burden or ‘the adult’ or something right? You won’t do that?”

“No,” she told him. “You deserve the truth. I’m not going to lie to you. I haven’t truly thought about… harming myself since before I became your aunt. I wouldn’t do that to anyone. The people left behind are the ones—I wouldn’t do that.”

“Fuck,” Eric whispered. “I guess that explains all those morbid songs you sing.”

“Yeah.” She smiled through her tears.

There was a pit deep in Illius’ stomach. “You shouldn’t have come back for me.”

“I had to,” she told him. “I absolutely love the two of you. You make me laugh, make me feel human again. Even if we die in the middle of all this… This is the happiest I have ever been, and I regret nothing.”

“Aw, I thought you’d never admit how awesome I am,” Eric teased, but his voice sounded flat, as though he had lost all energy.

She reached out to run her hand through Eric’s hair and tug on his ear. “You are awesome. You’ve always been awesome. Bit rough around the edges and entirely inappropriate at times, but so unapologetically you, it inspires this old witch to be a bit more herself every day.”

Eric blinked back the tears shining in his eyes as he embraced her. “I love you.”

“Same, lovely.” She hugged him back.

“Will you still be my aunt?”

She laughed, dabbing at her eyes. “Yes, of course. You’re never getting rid of me, you know?”

He nodded.

“Come here, Illius.” Hireth held out her hand. “You’re a part of this mess too now.”

He joined them, squished between Hireth and Eric. Hireth was the first to pull away, “Well, we’d probably better go to sleep now—it’s getting late, and we have training tomorrow.”