It was on the eve of the longest day of the year that my mother left me. I thought sad things would always happen on a gloomy day where the sun only shone briefly followed with endlessly pouring rain.
It kinda fits I guess. Mother wouldn’t want me to get swept over by the melancholic atmosphere and grieve over her too much. She wouldn’t want me to forget that I have the future to look forward to.
I had always thought that we would always be with each other, even long into the future... but it was just a hopeful wish.
I knew it was something that couldn’t be, but I couldn’t help but hope and pray for her wellbeing when she gets weaker every day.
I sat beside my mother’s sickbed just like I always did since a couple of months before. She was getting weaker and frailer the longer the time went on. The power that flows in her blood and would supposedly rejuvenate her flesh dimming with every day that passed us by.
She no longer had the strength to move around without help, so whenever I had time I sat by her bed to hold her frail skinny hands and just be there for her. For a couple of months, we were there, just the two of us, together in her bedroom on the mansion behind the Saint Avern cathedral.
It looked like mother knew that her time had come because she pleaded that I should not be sad anymore, that I had to keep my sights forward and keep walking one step at a time.
Her words made me alarmed, and I tried to cheer her up and make her try to hold on a bit longer so I could get the healer to maybe refresh and rejuvenate her body or something. But she pressed on holding my hand so I won’t go and haltingly telling me what she kept her silence on.
So distraught I was with worry over her health, I only gave her cursory attention. I thought that It was just humoring a sick person, but it turned out that she kept a lot of things inside for a long long time, maybe ever since she awakened the power of her saint bloodline.
I should have tried to pay more attention to what she said because I could only remember the bare bones of all the revelation she entrusted to me. When I thought she had told me all the secret she kept,
When she took her last breath on the eve of the longest day of the year, I don’t even have the strength to close her eyes. That was how the extent of the secret she hid shook me to my core.
I sat there by her bed in a stupor, not knowing what to do. I should have called for someone to take care of her body and gave her the final rites for the departing person and send her on her final resting ground. But I couldn’t even muster the strength to move, and I was not sure I want to be here in this place that I had always been since I was born when she had been buried.
...
I closed her eyes and arranged her body so she would look like she was sleeping peacefully before walking out of her bedroom carrying the objects she had entrusted to me. I can feel a subtle warmth coming out of it like waves, but there was nothing that I could observe when I inspected it closely.
It didn’t take me long to reach my room, and thankfully like usual, I didn’t pass anyone on the way. There were only two of us in this house most of the time, but sometimes there were people being sent by father to care for his beautiful mansion – and to watch us like a prisoner and report whatever we did to him.
We had long been numb to their blatant observation and left them be as long as they didn’t step closer to bother us, but this time, I couldn’t let them know what I was doing. I was prepared to silence every witness if need be because what my mother instructed me to do, was something that my father should never know, less he tries to obstruct me.
After I took all that I could pack up out of my worldly possession in this mansion and stuffed it inside the magic bag, I walked into the place she told me to go to. It was a hidden section that lied in the seventh alcove from her bedroom.
There shouldn’t be anything in that place, but because of her brooch, I could tell there was something that can’t be felt by mundane sense over there. It was a space that was cleverly made using a combination of magic and technology, and she hid the devices that she had intended me to use along with all the necessities that she had prepared for me.
I activated the hidden magic bag that mother commissioned secretly before her sickness and put everything she hid in the alcove inside. There was a cloak, a mask, two carved scepter that looked like it was made as a pair, a stack of gems and valuables, and an intricate carving of miniature human decorated with mysterious and foreboding symbols.
There was also a heavy-duty memory orb that looked really old, scuffed and marred with time. I deliberated and weighed it in my hand for a while before picking it up and put it together with the other inside the magic bag.
Then I climbed the stairs into the attic and scoured her other hiding place. This one is hidden really well, and I only found it because her instruction to pull at the twelfth beam while knocking at the fifth beam using my leg in a certain rhythm. This time, there was only a duplicate of the miniature human, a knowledge archive array disk, and a small stack of old imperial gold bullion inside the hidden space.
I put everything I could get inside the magic bag quickly and decided to inspect those objects later when I had successfully escaped from this place. It was really surprising that my mother could hide a lot of things from under everyone’s nose. And some of them were not trivial and harmless things.
Judging from what I know of my mother, she wouldn’t risk the knowledge of these two safeboxes if she wanted to successfully hide something inside, so there was no way she would commission people to make it. She must have made the safeboxes and arranged the combination of spatial magic and mechanical apparatus by herself, even if it was just putting a ready-made object together.
And I couldn't help but feel my lips quirked up over this, because people said over and over that mother was just a Saint that was useless except for her beauty and her bloodline’s power. They never knew her... and the tiny joy I felt in knowing that people were thoroughly fooled by my mother's outward facade was gone when I realized that I was similar to those people.
That deep inside, I also subconsciously thought of her as someone trivial.
