Objectively, it was a beautiful day. The afternoon sun was shining, the breeze flowing off the ocean visible to the west was pleasant, and there were only enough wispy clouds in the sky to add visual interest to the paintings that would be made of this moment.

Oscanion, the mage whose campaign of conquest had plunged the world into total war for twenty years, was now only a black smudge on the ground, annihilated by his own final attack.

Oscanion's attack had not been aimed at an army, for this had been no clash of armies. There was no point in having armies of common soldiers nearby when elite mages battled; indeed, the devastation of the land to the horizon in all directions testified to that. The grand armies were doing battle elsewhere. With Oscanion gone, those battles too would assuredly be victories for those allied against the tyrant-mage.

No, there were only three victims of this particular attack, three black smudges on the ground.

One that had been Oscanion himself.

One that had been my adoptive father, Azenum Corza, equal parts master of black magic and unifying diplomat.

One that had been his daughter, my elder sister Izena, universally considered to be as great a prodigy of black magic as I was of white magic.

White magic. As I stared at the smudge that had been my sister, I recalled the first time I had heard of it.

----

The camp smelled so bad. I smelled so bad. Everything smelled so bad, was so dirty. I would vomit, but I hadn't eaten in days. It didn't seem like there was a bath anywhere no matter where I looked. All the soldiers, including the ones who had brought me here, had too many jobs to do; I couldn't bother them. So, I stared at the ground, waiting for someone to tell me where I was supposed to go, and tried not to remember the past.

People hurried around in all directions, while others screamed, wept, shouted, moaned, coughed, or, like me, just stared.

"Hello young lady, what is your name? Are you alone? Are you bleeding?" a man asked suddenly. I turned to my left and looked up. It seemed like he was talking to me. He crouched down so I didn't need to stare up to see him. He didn't smell bad. He didn't need to be here.

"Menelyn," I mumbled, turning back toward the ground. "Mama bled a lot and I couldn't stop it." Somehow I felt like I must be in trouble, but he was speaking gently.

"But you are not bleeding yourself?" he asked again, leaning back and forth to look me over.

"Don't think so." That didn't seem like something I should be in trouble for?

"Is your mother here somewhere? Is she being healed?"

I shook my head a little, my chin quivering.

"...Is your father here?"

For the first time since Mama died, I started sobbing. One word at a time, I choked out, "Mama, says, he's, never--"

I was stopped by an abrupt hug from my left, not from the man who had talked to me, but a black-haired girl a few years older than me, who had been standing next to him. This was going to make her smell bad. I tried to say so, but she ignored me.

"Hi Menelyn," she breathed out, tears of her own sliding down her cheeks. "My name is Izena. This is my father Azenum. My mother is gone too."

Leaning in while still crouching, Azenum hugged us both until we had all stopped crying. They were going to get dirty and smelly.

"Menelyn," he said at last, releasing us. "Izena and I are both mages. Do you know what mages are?"

I leaned away from him in alarm. "Like Ox-, Awk-, Awkscan-?"

"No, no, no," Azenum interrupted, waving his right hand. "Not like him, not in the ways that matter. We cast spells like him, but only at bad people."

"At bad people like Awkscaniun?"

"Yes," he confirmed, nodding. "Exactly. And because we are mages, we can tell that you are one, too, but different from us. Our family, the Corza family, can use black magic, which is magic for breaking things."

They must get in trouble a lot.

"But you have very, very strong white mana, the strongest I've ever seen, but you don't know how to access it yet. If you learned, you could fix things and heal people, help plants grow and be healthy, and make shields to protect people."

He and Izena looked at each other. Izena nodded, and he continued.

"Would you like to come live with us, as part of our family? Our family has been full of mages for a long time. You would be able to learn."

I stared at him, astonished. "...I could fix people who are hurt like Mama?"

Azenum smiled, and nodded once, but I realized a problem when I looked at Azenum and Izena in turn. They looked the same, and not like me.

"My hair's really dirty right now," I confessed to the ground, running my hand through my hair to pull off some soot and grime. "It's not normally like yours. It's more silvery."

At the time, I had genuinely thought this was disqualifying, but Azenum and Izena had looked at each other, Azenum chuckling then Izena giggling.

"That's ok," Izena giggled out, crying for a very different reason now. "You don't need to look the same as us. Your hair isn't the same as both of your parents', is it?"

"...No," I realized, eyes getting big.

----

"Shields," my mouth spoke soundlessly, fifteen years later, toward the smudge on the ground that had been Izena. "To protect people."

They had trusted me, had said they could trust no one else in the world to protect them from Oscanion's infamous black magic, extraordinarily powerful, spells mysteriously stinking of rot. We would intercept Oscanion as he moved to link up with his besieged western army, and end the war, the three of us together! Then, we'd enjoy the peace that followed. All had gone according to plan, until Oscanion knew he was beaten. Then, he'd been determined to make the world a worse place one last time, unleashing a final, self-destructive ocean of putrid brown flames.

When the stinking flame was about to overpower my "prodigal", "historic", "unprecedented" white magic and kill us all alongside him, I had withdrawn my family's shields to reinforce my own. I had chosen to let them die. I had no real choice.

Now, Azenum and Izena were smudges on the ground.

"The Goddess Menelyn" the people had named me! Even beyond the other superlatives, that one had always bothered me most of all, especially because some were dead serious about it. Azenum had encouraged me to stop fighting it, saying it helped people cope, but I still felt like a fraud whenever I heard it. At least Izena got the same treatment.

The same Izena who I chose to allow to die.

I didn't really have a choice. I couldn't have dropped my own shield. Otherwise, I wouldn't be alive to maintain their shields. My limit was one, just one shield strong enough to survive that attack. Either I survived the attack, or no one did. A lifetime of total war had long ago made the cold calculus of triage automatic, instinctual. This was not the first time that I had needed to make sacrifices.

Izena's face, eyes wide as she turned towards me, her shield suddenly disappearing, mine fortified enough for me to survive at her expense. Plus our father's. Izena's smudge on the ground.

I shuddered...The thought of presenting my excuses in a report made acid radiate from my chest along my nerves. My body ached.

I couldn't go back to Ezenta, to the Academy. I couldn't tell anyone what I had done.

I wondered if, in his last moments, Azenum had regretted the last fifteen years? How had he reacted to his shield dropping? Izena's? I would never know. I had been looking at Izena.

Fifteen years of showering love on a random girl that they'd adopted from a random refugee camp, and this was their reward. This was how she showed her gratitude.

I couldn't go back. What did it matter, anyway? Oscanion was dealt with. The world would be fine. No one needed the details.

I stared at Izena's smudge on the ground, wondering where I was supposed to go.

Everything smelled so bad. Soot, ozone, and Oscanion's characteristic rot.