I represent a small doujin circle that does illustration and writing work, and I would just like to share a piece that one of my writers had created for us.
I noticed that Original Light Novels had their own section in BT, so this seemed like a good place to share my writer's work, since writing platforms for this genre of original content are hard to find and I don't want my writer's effort (60,000 words and counting) to languish in obscurity.
I'll be posting up the synopsis and prologue first, and if there's any interest in the rest I'll update it here (textwalls are intimidating to start out with). It's pretty far along, so rest assured that if there's interest, there'll be stuff to read (and pictures to see; we're an illustration group, after all).
Synopsis
PrologueWatanabe Mari, seventeen, school photographer, and former believer in magic - former being the key. Pulled along by her overly enthusiastic and overly occult newspaper club president, she goes to a "haunted house" for an article - only to find out that, perhaps, magic isn't as unreal as she thought it to be...
Spoiler! :
Magic is real.
White clouds are suspended in the blue sky. There doesn’t appear to be a breath of wind, but blood-red sparkles colour her vision and hang lazily in the air. Shadows flit across her field of vision, cold and numb against the fiery burn of the sun.
Watanabe Mari is five. She was a pirate yesterday, and a princess the day before that, but neither occupation seemed to suit her very well and both were discarded pretty quickly. The pirate eye-patch and the imaginary princess outfit have been relegated to dusty corners of her mind’s house.
Ah, but today, she is a magician. Her robe is a too-large bath towel draped over her shoulders, the edges kissing the floor like an elegant magician’s cloak. She happily points her magic wand (a pencil) every which way, shouting nonsense words and imagining signs and wonders with the ever-active imagination of a child.
In her mind’s eye, sparkles and fireworks go off whenever she swings her wand. Her surroundings are colours and rainbows and power and magic, and she forgets that in the world where she comes from, magic doesn’t seem to exist. No, no - she is Mari the Wise, the world’s most powerful magician, supreme magical ruler of the world, running and screaming and just having fun in the orphanage’s back garden.
They leave her be, of course. Children are permitted their flights of fancy and wild imaginings. They eventually grow up to be sensible adults, and stop thinking about things that don’t exist - like unicorns and mermaids and magic.
She doesn’t.
Eventually, after a couple of months and a lot of persuading, badgering, threatening and cajoling , she finally, begrudgingly, agrees to stop wearing the cloak and pointing the wand. She doesn’t take it too hard when the big adult gently tells her that no, even though magic is fun, it’s just made up, it doesn’t exist. (“Like Santa”, they would have said, but one thing at a time.)
She doesn’t stop trying, though. When other people aren’t looking, she mutters syllables under her breath, pretending things happen when she pronounces them. When she meets someone she doesn’t like, she still yells at them and commands them to turn into frogs and toads. At night, when no one is around, she sneaks the broom out of the closet and runs around the compound, quietly whooping and cheering.
Time passes, and the seasons come and go. Spring comes and winter melts, again and again.
The cherry blossoms wait, silently, bloom and fade, over and over. Mari grows up, like all little girls do. She decides to let her hair grow out, braiding it and tying the remainder with a blue-green scrunchie to match her eyes’ piercing shade of teal.
More time passes. The orphanage sends her to a nearby school with all the other kids, and although she attends, her mind is often somewhere else altogether. She explores the worlds of books and sports in turn, and decides that neither are really her type. Through it all, she never forgets the magic of her imagination - whenever she is alone, she idly flicks a finger at random objects and imagines them coming to life. For her, it never gets old - her little trick to keep the world interesting.
Occasionally she sits in her old room and practices. She would rush back, still in her school uniform, hide in her room and stare at her little stuffed toy. She would wave her hands, shout, close her eyes really really tight and believe with all her heart. There was one time when she could have sworn she saw the toy move a little - just a little
-
Even late into her childhood, she occasionally points at things and murmurs words, but these episodes become less and less frequent. With the temperament of a child, she eventually gets angry at magic, and angry at herself - why aren’t you real? Gradually, she only performs her magic once a week - then once a month - then rarer - and rarer - and just like that, it gradually slips out of her mind altogether.
She picks up photography to get her mind off things. It sort of reminds her of the magic she used to find in everyday things, but now she tries to capture it by training her lens, not her wand. To everyone’s surprise, including her own, she turns out to be quite adept at taking pictures. She joins the photography club in school, and as her interest and skill increases, her obsession with magic slowly erodes.
Mari is now seventeen. She’s a rising star in the school’s photography club, mostly because she’s the only one in it. The school’s going to close down the club soon, though - not much point in having a club with only one member. She’ll lose the room; and will probably have to move in with some other club. It isn’t much, but it’s kind of homely, Mari thinks, and she feels a sudden twinge of pain.
Mari walks slowly around the small room, dragging her fingers lightly across dusty window ledges and tabletops, and wonders how much she will miss the place. There isn’t much demand around the campus for photographers, so in her free time she’s content to sit around, look at her photos, and think about life.
But not magic. She realises that now - magic is in the territory of childhood, lovely fantasies and how-I-wish-that-was-true. No point focusing on that now.
On that melancholy day, in that the dusty room, she finally thinks: One should focus on other things. Practical things; useful things; things that one can see and feel and touch.
Not magic.
Never magic.
Because it doesn’t exist.
White clouds are suspended in the blue sky. There doesn’t appear to be a breath of wind, but blood-red sparkles colour her vision and hang lazily in the air. Shadows flit across her field of vision, cold and numb against the fiery burn of the sun.
Watanabe Mari is five. She was a pirate yesterday, and a princess the day before that, but neither occupation seemed to suit her very well and both were discarded pretty quickly. The pirate eye-patch and the imaginary princess outfit have been relegated to dusty corners of her mind’s house.
Ah, but today, she is a magician. Her robe is a too-large bath towel draped over her shoulders, the edges kissing the floor like an elegant magician’s cloak. She happily points her magic wand (a pencil) every which way, shouting nonsense words and imagining signs and wonders with the ever-active imagination of a child.
In her mind’s eye, sparkles and fireworks go off whenever she swings her wand. Her surroundings are colours and rainbows and power and magic, and she forgets that in the world where she comes from, magic doesn’t seem to exist. No, no - she is Mari the Wise, the world’s most powerful magician, supreme magical ruler of the world, running and screaming and just having fun in the orphanage’s back garden.
They leave her be, of course. Children are permitted their flights of fancy and wild imaginings. They eventually grow up to be sensible adults, and stop thinking about things that don’t exist - like unicorns and mermaids and magic.
She doesn’t.
Eventually, after a couple of months and a lot of persuading, badgering, threatening and cajoling , she finally, begrudgingly, agrees to stop wearing the cloak and pointing the wand. She doesn’t take it too hard when the big adult gently tells her that no, even though magic is fun, it’s just made up, it doesn’t exist. (“Like Santa”, they would have said, but one thing at a time.)
She doesn’t stop trying, though. When other people aren’t looking, she mutters syllables under her breath, pretending things happen when she pronounces them. When she meets someone she doesn’t like, she still yells at them and commands them to turn into frogs and toads. At night, when no one is around, she sneaks the broom out of the closet and runs around the compound, quietly whooping and cheering.
Time passes, and the seasons come and go. Spring comes and winter melts, again and again.
The cherry blossoms wait, silently, bloom and fade, over and over. Mari grows up, like all little girls do. She decides to let her hair grow out, braiding it and tying the remainder with a blue-green scrunchie to match her eyes’ piercing shade of teal.
More time passes. The orphanage sends her to a nearby school with all the other kids, and although she attends, her mind is often somewhere else altogether. She explores the worlds of books and sports in turn, and decides that neither are really her type. Through it all, she never forgets the magic of her imagination - whenever she is alone, she idly flicks a finger at random objects and imagines them coming to life. For her, it never gets old - her little trick to keep the world interesting.
Occasionally she sits in her old room and practices. She would rush back, still in her school uniform, hide in her room and stare at her little stuffed toy. She would wave her hands, shout, close her eyes really really tight and believe with all her heart. There was one time when she could have sworn she saw the toy move a little - just a little
-
Even late into her childhood, she occasionally points at things and murmurs words, but these episodes become less and less frequent. With the temperament of a child, she eventually gets angry at magic, and angry at herself - why aren’t you real? Gradually, she only performs her magic once a week - then once a month - then rarer - and rarer - and just like that, it gradually slips out of her mind altogether.
She picks up photography to get her mind off things. It sort of reminds her of the magic she used to find in everyday things, but now she tries to capture it by training her lens, not her wand. To everyone’s surprise, including her own, she turns out to be quite adept at taking pictures. She joins the photography club in school, and as her interest and skill increases, her obsession with magic slowly erodes.
Mari is now seventeen. She’s a rising star in the school’s photography club, mostly because she’s the only one in it. The school’s going to close down the club soon, though - not much point in having a club with only one member. She’ll lose the room; and will probably have to move in with some other club. It isn’t much, but it’s kind of homely, Mari thinks, and she feels a sudden twinge of pain.
Mari walks slowly around the small room, dragging her fingers lightly across dusty window ledges and tabletops, and wonders how much she will miss the place. There isn’t much demand around the campus for photographers, so in her free time she’s content to sit around, look at her photos, and think about life.
But not magic. She realises that now - magic is in the territory of childhood, lovely fantasies and how-I-wish-that-was-true. No point focusing on that now.
On that melancholy day, in that the dusty room, she finally thinks: One should focus on other things. Practical things; useful things; things that one can see and feel and touch.
Not magic.
Never magic.
Because it doesn’t exist.
Spoiler! :
“You can’t be serious.”
The smaller girl crosses her arms in a childish manner. “Well, I am.”
Takara Satomi is seventeen, looks fifteen, and acts five. Her hair is much too long for her smaller frame, but she has decided to keep it long anyway. People politely describe her as “eccentric”. She’s on an endless happy adventure (but no, it’s definitely not drugs; Mari has checked).
Somehow, she’s the president of the newspaper club, with the strange distinction of being slightly more newsworthy than any news she happens to report. While she’s actually surprisingly capable, Mari wonders where in the world she gets her news from.
To Mari’s surprise, Satomi was interested in - obsessed with, actually - magic. At any time, she could be seen either talking very loudly and very quickly about magic, jangling magic pendants and necklaces and bracelets on her person, or leafing through a book and learning about the occult magical practices of some ancient civilisation that probably destroyed itself by practicing too much occult magic.
There is a reason why Mari keeps her own interest a secret from Satomi.
The school’s newspaper club had inherited a small room in a lonely corner of the school, which eventually fell to Satomi when her seniors graduated. She promptly christened it “my office, yay” and spent the good part of two weeks turning the tired studio into a busy, if very messy, but workable newspaper editing office.
Today, the club president looks up excitedly at Mari, untidy leaves of paper scattered across her desk.
“Come on, it’ll be fun!” She jumps out of her seat, sending a stack of papers on her table crashing into the floor at a 45-degree angle. The stack whistles and violently spills its innards over the floor in a messy flutter of paper. “Whoops. Didn’t need those anyway.”
Mari sometimes wonders why she gets roped into these things.
The school newspaper club now has exactly two members. One of them, is Takara Satomi; seventeen, overall president, boss, and commander-in-chief. The other is Mari, the new and only school photographer who reluctantly follows Satomi around, not so much to take pictures, but more to make sure Satomi doesn’t accidentally break something or blow something up.
With the holidays here and a whole newspaper due when school reopens, Satomi had spent the last week descending into a ball of nervous energy. She had scratched together quite an impressive-looking paper, and Mari’s secretly impressed.
However, all the news reports were about magic.
“Takara,” Mari explains patiently, “you can’t write about magic for everything.”
“I just did.” Satomi has the giddily happy expression of a kid.
“Takara,” Mari sighs, “you know, while I agree magic’s interesting and all, most of the school doesn’t agree. You still remember what happened last month when you accused the hockey club of being witches.”
“But they are, Mari, I swear th- ”
“Point is, Takara, they don’t want to read about these things anymore, Takara, they’d rather read sometHING LIKE THE ACTUAL - ” Mari’s voice becomes gradually louder throughout the sentence as Satomi doesn’t stop talking - ey’re all witches, I’m sure that last hockey match wasn’t even fixed, that shot wasn’t even possible and then they all started to “- NEWS TAKARA”.
Pause. Nothing but the sound of breathing.
Mari glares at her, then looks away guiltily. Takara Satomi might be soft in the head, but she was at heart a nice person. Scolding her, no matter how reasonable it seemed at the time, always afterwards felt like punching a child.
Satomi finally makes a concession. “Fine. I’ll take out the piece on the chess team winning because they illegally used mind-reading powers.”
Mari breathes a sigh of relief - thankful that Satomi’s willing to cancel that article she wrote, and thankful also because she can’t hold grudges. “Thank you.”
Satomi waves a finger. “But I’m still keeping that other piece on the haunted house.”
Mari considers this for a moment, then nods. Fair’s fair.
Satomi pauses for a moment, then adds, grinning: “And you’re coming with me to go take photos of it for the newspaper.”
“What?”
Mari finds a photo of the so-called haunted (“Magical!” corrects Satomi) house. A battered, dilapidated one-storey project stared back at her from the photo.
“...you can’t be serious.”
A headache and two hours later, an enthusiastic Satomi and a less-than-enthusiastic Mari arrive on the outskirts of town. There’s an old house here, once part of an old terrace house row, but now standing alone. Its neighbour units were gone, claimed variously by fire (two), government bulldozers (twelve) or spectacular cave-ins (one, in a horrifying incident seventeen years ago; four deaths). This lone block has seen it all, withstood it all, and at the end, is still left standing.
The whole district was a target of government-led restructuring. Sometime three decades ago, the big shots up top decided that the place had to go, to make way for something brighter and newer. Five years into the project, they hadn’t even finished the demolitions, having had fires, multiple contractor bankruptcies, and a few deaths (see above).
Someone eventually figured that if they had so much trouble in the tear-everything-down part, the build-everything-up bit couldn’t be any easier, so they decided to cut their losses and drop the project.
That was seventeen years ago.
In nearly two decades, the wilderness at the edge of the city began reclaiming lost land. The uncleared rubble of the demolished units was gradually swallowed up by the oncoming wave of time.
Legends and talk sprang up about the area in general, but also the house. Why would so much misfortune happen? How did that one house survive everything that was thrown at it? The answer, depending on who you asked, was either (a) government incompetence, (b) increasingly insane conspiracy theories or (c) increasingly insane conspiracy theories involving ghosts or magic.
The house was only accessible by a single bus that ran all the way to the town’s abandoned outskirts. Even after alighting, it was thirty minutes of leisurely walking - leisurely walking through knee-high grass and the invading battalions of mosquitos and other unnamed insects. Mari has seen lovelier landscaping in cemeteries.
Satomi rattles off the history of the place as they walk. Mari listens, half-interested, mentally relegating Satomi’s voice to a soothing buzz in the background.
“...with preliminary readings for radiation inconsistent with most other readings, showing an unexplained spike in both gamma and zeta - oh, we’re here.” Mari instinctively looks up. The lonely building looms over them, giant and still and completely silent. It’s almost as if it’s been so used to being neglected, it fell asleep seventeen years ago and hasn’t woken up since.
The silence is deafening, and soundlessly robs both girls of their breath. For a moment, it is as if the birds and the crickets have forgotten how to sing and the world has stopped moving.
Then the wind picks up, whistling in icy rustling bursts across the tall grass. The dry sound of the grass shocks both girls back to life. Suddenly, Mari’s aware of her heart beating awkwardly loud, a little faster than she imagined.
Satomi speaks in a whisper, but her voice is still unnaturally loud in the otherwise-silent picture.
“Okay. Let’s go in.”
There’s no door to push; it has rotted off its hinges and now is flat on the ground, leaving a convenient door-shaped hole where it used to be. The two girls carefully walk across the threshold, Mari wincing when the old door creaks a long, low whine under their feet.
They are standing in what was once the living room. The place is roomy and expansive, and Mari can imagine it being quite comfortable when the place was still alive.
Satomi fumbles around and produces a small torchlight. The weak light throws some comfort around them both, but not quite enough. What it did shine on only confirmed Mari’s suspicions: this whole place was cold, damp and thoroughly unwelcoming. They explore the room a bit, with Satomi curiously brushing aside decade-thick spiderwebs and gently moving old furniture aside, while Mari watched detachedly.
Out of boredom (and a need to keep her wandering mind distracted), Mari started trying out some shots with her camera.
The first flash was like an electric shock throughout the room.The split-second of blinding light temporarily banished all the shadows, but the room for that instant was eerily, unnaturally white, not unlike cleanly bleached bones. The suddenness of it all freaked even the photographer out. Satomi had screamed and violently backed into a chair.
After that, Mari had kept the camera safely away.
Fifteen minutes of watching Satomi probing and tapping random objects later, Mari grows bored. Fidgeting, all she’s wondering is why she even came here in the first place - there’s nothing here, and there’s no one here - even if there were really zombified ghosts from beyond the beyond out to feed on fresh human blood (yes, Satomi actually said that) they certainly would not be here, because nobody else was.
“I think I’ll check the other rooms”. Satomi glances up from molesting an old chest of drawers and nods seriously. “‘kay. See if there’s any magical or ghostly things there.”
The room she finds herself in seems to be an old dressing room. Abandoned combs, necklaces, bracelets and other knick-knacks are left around the area. Whoever was here must have left in a hurry - they didn’t even seem to bother taking anything, leaving the room in a considerable mess.
Mari finds herself being drawn to the sad-looking dressing tables. Hm. Mari turns a single earring she’s holding in her hand. It must once have been someone’s pride and joy, she thought. It looked expensive, and rather out-of-place in this room; but like everything else, it had covered itself with a layer of dust. When was the last time anyone held it? It was stone cold to the touch.
She puts down the earring and starts circling around other tables. Mari finds her mind wandering. The people who were here apparently left hurriedly. Why was that? Surely they would have known that the block was supposed to be torn down.
Didn’t they?
But everything seemed so thrown-about, so rushed, too easily dropped - Mari picks up a necklace, feeling the cold gold chain - something had happened, definitely, no one would have had to rush out at the last minute because of bulldozers outside the house - she puts the necklace down - it wasn’t the bulldozers outside - she finds a little glass pendant - no, couldn’t have been anything outside - the pendant feels odd in her hands, she furrows her brows, wondering, something was wrong - nothing outside - the pendant has a dull warmth, slowly building up in heat, Mari frowns - nothing outside, inside, inside - the pendant is WARM -
Mari, already trying to control two slowly exploding trains of thought, suddenly feels someone staring at her back. She whips around, still tightly clenching the warm pendant, and her hair smears itself across her eyes.
Somehow, from nowhere, an enormous black horse had stepped out from the shadows when she wasn’t looking, and it catches Mari out of the corner of its eyes. It’s black: not just black, it is Black with a capital B. It is so black that where it stood in the shade, its shape just disappeared into the darkness. Mari can’t even be sure it had legs. It’s as if it was made out of the shadows itself, and Mari finds herself wishing for light.
Its head is held proudly, a short cropped mane tracing its way down its spine, then continued and tapered off into elegant tails. Definitely too many tails for a mortal horse.
There’s a horse in the room. Mari tries to make sense of that, and fails.
It was still completely silent. The quietness in the room was unnatural: she hadn’t heard it move, nor did she hear any hoofbeats. Come to think of it, as she suddenly became aware of her own heart hammering away, Mari realised that she couldn’t hear it breathe either.
As it turned its head towards Mari, she found out that she could not see the horse’s eyes.
Mari’s scream is still stuck in her throat when there’s another flash of light. This time, the flash seems slower - a dull orange quickly spreading across her field of vision, everyone caught as if in a slow-motion video. The orange grows bigger and brighter until it obscures her whole vision with a loud whumpf like of an old camera flashbulb going off. She can’t see the horse.
A long neigh pierces the silence. It’s an awful screech of a sound, grating and almost physically painful. Mari hears it directly in her head, high, sharp, and mind-piercing. She stumbles backwards, clapping both hands to her ears and trying to block out the noise. It doesn’t work.
Suddenly, she is struck in the stomach. The horse has reared up in front of her, cutting through the orange mist, and plants a hoof solidly in her midsection. The hoof is cold, and Mari feels as though she’s been hit with an iron bar. She doubles over, crying out, then loses her balance altogether and crashes onto her back.
The orange mist is clearing now, but the midnight horse now isn’t making any sound. Where normal horses would have a snout it has smooth blackness, but as Mari watches, it tears itself a jagged mouth without a sound. The mouth is bare at first, and then unnaturally sharp canines and a jet-black tongue sprout, grow and solidify in the dim light.
The horse charges.
Mari screams “TAKAR-” before the hooves start falling.
The horse (she’s sure it’s definitely NOT a horse, whatever it is) pummels her silently, rearing up to its full height and bringing down iron feet down on Mari’s body. She’s too battered to even think. And all this while there’s not a single sound from the horse, not even the sound of its hooves hitting flesh.
From far off, she hears footsteps, a scream that could have been her own voice or maybe even Satomi’s.
A particularly heavy blow to her temple renders her completely limp. Black fuzziness begins to creep up in the corner of her eyes, and she feels herself slipping into unconsciousness, watching the blackness slowly swallow up her vision.
Just before that, though, a dim flash of light. And sound. Muffled sound and crumbling noises, but sound nonetheless. A drowning part of her brain realises this, and struggles to stay afloat for a few more seconds.
A silhouette - not Takara - has knocked the horse off of her. In her fuzzy state, the horse is just flickers of shadows that she wasn’t absolutely sure was there, and the other person - a man, by the looks of it - is a tall, mysterious shadow himself. How he was forcing the horse away from her? She couldn’t tell, but there were sounds of fighting and shouting and footsteps, and bright patches and rays of light that suddenly appeared and disappeared in the darkness.
At this time, Mari’s willpower whines, crackles and fizzles out, and her vision finally dissolves in a greyish wall of white.
***
Mari blinks.
She’s in a white room – no, a white hall – suspended in a white hall, seeing nothing but white all around. Mari blinks again, maybe hoping that it’ll go away if she blinks hard enough, but no, she’s still there, feeling small and insignificant.
Then, she decides to look down.
There’s no floor.
I’m falling.
She gasps, confusion and imbalance rushing in. She reaches her hand out to steady herself, but since there’s nothing for her to step on or grab a hold of, she only manages to make herself even dizzier.
It’s not a white hall.
She’s in a featureless white space, with whiteness stretching out in all directions as far as the eye can see. And she’s suspended in the middle of it, cartwheeling her arms and legs in a mad dance, trying to feel for a floor or a wall that doesn’t exist.
I’m not falling.
The panic and adrenalin blinds her sight with another flash of white. The mental image of a camera flash going off briefly pops up, then quickly evolves into a nightmare of that flash in the room and the horse’s blank face and monstrous mouth and hooves quickly falling, and this time she can’t even see her hand in front of her face for all the white and the repeatedly-playing horror reel in her mind’s eye.
But gradually, the white sheet fades away, two dark blobs gradually dissolving into her line of sight. As sight returns, she’s suddenly aware of all the other senses rushing back with a roar – suddenly the dull whunn whunn whunng of the fan, the feel of a mattress under her body, Satomi’s muffled voice indistinctly floating in from somewhere –
“Ugh.” Mari shuffled up into a sitting position, trying to clear her thoughts. The place was unfamiliar, but it definitely wasn’t the old house. And as much as she wanted to throttle Satomi right now, hearing her voice at this point of time brought Mari a sense of security and relief. At the sound of the loudly-protesting mattress springs, Satomi herself peeked into her room from behind a doorframe.
“Mari! I thought – ”
Whatever Satomi had thought at that point of time was cut off as the mysterious guy from earlier walked out from behind her with slow, deliberate steps. That, oddly enough, had the surprising ability to shut Satomi up. He gently, but firmly, closed the door with a click, leaving Satomi outside.
Mari realized that in proper light, he wasn’t as shadowy and mysterious as she had remembered him to be. He was tall, and carried the weary air of someone who had seen the ugly side of the world and wasn’t too happy about it; but he didn’t look that much substantially older than herself.
Over an off-white inner shirt, the guy wore another, simple shirt that flapped a little behind him as he walked. Long-ish hair threatened to cover half his face. A cap was perched on his head earlier, but as he approaches her he politely removes it and sets it on a nearby chair.
“Mari?” His voice appears soothing, but Mari senses a vague sense of steel beneath the gentleness. “Relax. My name is Graham, and you’re now at my place. Satomi has been looking after you for the past hour and a half.”
“I’ve been out an hour and a half - ?” Mari’s blurted words are slurred, and she instantly regrets speaking.
Graham doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care. “Yes, roughly. Now, listen. Are you feeling okay? Any dizziness or headaches?”
There’s a dying throb in her temples, but she shakes her head.
“Good. I need you to listen very carefully and answer me truthfully.”
Graham looks back at Mari, then lowers his voice to little more than a conspiratorial whisper. Mari strains a little to hear him.
“In the old house, you were attacked by a Moroven. They’re a certain species of magical creatures, usually appearing as many-tailed horses. Do you remember this? Do you remember seeing it?” Mari nods, slowly, once.
Graham nods back, then continues. “They are usually docile, but are drawn to the use of magic which, in simple terms, makes them very angry and prone to attacking anyone in sight. Your friend over there - I was talking to her before this - claims not to practice magic.”
Mari nods warily. Satomi may have a lot of fanciful ideas on magic and an obsession that bordered on the unhealthy, but for all her interest she herself had complained that she could not practice magic. Was she lying? the thought surfaces in her mind for a second, but Graham continues:
“So. The question is: were you the one that set off the magical flare?”
At this point of time, Mari’s brain finally catches up with reality.
“Magical - flare?”
“Yes.” He sighs, then pulls up a chair to sit beside Mari’s bed. “Someone had set off a magical burst - not directed at anything, not a useful discharge of magical energy, but still a flare.”
“I happened to be passing by,” he says, looking up at Mari. “This place isn’t too far away from the old house. In any case, I felt the presence of the Moroven, and soon after I heard someone screaming. After fending off the Moroven, I found your friend there,” - he nods towards the door Satomi’s behind - “...and we brought you back here.”
Mari frowns, the pictures slowly joining up together in her head. Graham watches her.
“No,” she finally says. “I don’t think I did anything.” She really believes it.
Graham fixes her with a stare, as if he’s trying to determine the truth. Then, like he had suddenly made up his mind, he nods curtly.
“Well. Sorry to disturb your rest, then. You’d better lie down for a while more.”
He bows his head a little, and Mari groggily nods back in acknowledgement. Eventually the door closes behind him, and Mari’s left alone with the low hum of the fan.
A short pause later, she stretches, then gingerly moves into a sitting position. The mattress is simply laid on the floor, so there’s no fear of falling off. She wraps her hands around her knees, her mind blank for the time being.
“Hm.” The sound escaping from her throat is hoarse. It’s as if she had spent the last hour and a half doing nothing but screaming her lungs out (which is probably closer to the truth than she’s willing to admit).
She walks - staggers - across the room, gripping ledges and chairs and tables in her fight to stand upright. The bandages on her arm don’t hurt anymore, but they’re odd to look at. Graham must have done it - Satomi couldn’t figure out how to peel a plaster to paste on a wound if her life depended on it. (She just ambled around the school with open scars; Mari had seen it before.)
Curious, Mari explores the items on the tabletop she is gripping. It’s mostly empty, except for a few spread maps of unknown places, some scribbled writing on paper (probably Graham’s), and...
...and -
The little glass pendant blinks in the light.
It seems to leer at Mari. She vaguely remembers it, and then it comes back to her. She was holding the pendant when the Moroven attacked. And then - and then she can’t even remember what happened to her, much less a pendant she had just picked up.
The pendant is almost circular. Now that she’s seeing it in clear light, it is a beautiful piece of work. No doubt about that - intertwining shapes glancing past past each other that gives the whole thing a wonderful illusion of fluidity. It’s oddly warm to the touch - not hot enough to be uncomfortable, but warm enough to be surprising.
Mari starts. So it wasn’t a dream.
Almost instinctively, unbidden, images claw their way to the forefront of Mari’s mind, hijacking her vision and flooding all her senses with memory and sound and touch and
- nightmare horse - warm grasp of the pendant, the strange orange light -
no eyes. the horse had no eyes, what on earth
and then pain, falling hooves,
caught and stuck and then
tttaa
aa
“TAKARAA!”
Mari’s only half-sure the last shout was imagined. The pendant clatters to the ground, and so does she. Her vision’s hazy - am I crying? - but refocuses soon enough. She’s lying on the ground, fallen backwards - she doesn’t even remember hitting the floor. She had gripped the pendant so tightly it traced itself in her palm.
She just has enough time to say “ow” before the door opens with a bang and Graham strides in aggressively, holding something Mari can’t quite see in one hand. He doesn’t look at Mari, but instead scans the room for - for - what? Mari can’t quite tell. On the other hand, Satomi pushes her way in from behind him, and heads straight to her side. Graham approaches them slowly, still shooting suspicious glances at the corners of the room.
Fifteen minutes later, Mari is deemed to have recovered adequately successfully and permitted to join Graham and Satomi in the room outside. They’re sitting down at a low table, and Satomi hasn’t stopped chattering since Mari has sat down. Mari’s mind is still whirling from the Moroven and the pendant, and only nods and murmurs syllables, and is half-startled when Graham sets down a cup of water in front of her.
There’s a short awkward silence as Mari sips, Satomi fidgets and Graham just sits back and stares at a far corner.
Eventually Graham drawls in a long voice: “Well, Takara.”
“Hm?” she perks up.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll need to talk to Mari.”
“Yeah, sure!” she grins.
“...mm.”
They sit and listen to the fan whirring for a few more seconds. Satomi bobs on her seat.
“...alone, please.”
“...oh.”
Graham sighs. “Look, I’ll just be a while. If you don’t mind, just wait for Mari outside, alright? I’ll show you guys the way back to the bus stop you were talking about after all this is done. Help yourself to the snacks and stuff outside, alright?.”
Satomi nods sulkily, but brightens up a little at the mention of snacks. She wafts out of the room and shuts the door behind her. Mari and Graham both do not move.
A few seconds later, Graham calls over his shoulder: “And no eavesdropping.”
There’s a sound of a stifled grunt and footsteps fading away behind the door.
Mari and Graham breathe out. She realises she’s been holding her breath, but isn’t quite sure why. Graham arcs an eyebrow at her. Is she always like that?
Mari gives a wry smile. All the time.
Graham stands up, beckoning her to follow. “This way.” She accompanies him back to the small room she woke up in, where Graham draws a chair and invites her to sit. The atmosphere is calm, almost friendly, Mari thinks. This guy has many faces.
Then Graham starts talking, and he becomes decidedly more businesslike.
“You’re a copymage.”
It’s the first time Mari’s heard the word, and her brain processes grind to a halt. “...what?”
“Copymage.” Graham repeats himself. “You’re a mage - a magician, as your friend might describe them - specialising in the reproduction of the powers of other mages.”
“Oh.”
“Admittedly this isn’t the easiest introduction to magic I could have imagined, so allow me to start from the start. Mages exist. They hide themselves, blending into the background society of whatever area they happen to be in. Their powers follow certain rules, but these rules are awfully hard to pin down.
“There are organisations employing mages. These mages can do things that a normal person would think impossible. If these mages lived a few hundred years earlier, they would have been burned at the stake as witches and wizards. Magic is not what your friend thinks it is - with ghosts and spooks and awfully common misconceptions - but magic exists.
“And it can be incredibly, frighteningly powerful.
“Copymagic is the innate ability to copy another mage’s magic abilities. If you can master this, you’re essentially a wild card - a joker, a blank tile - and highly sought-after. Some copymages can do it better than others. They can copy faster, more effectively, and remember more copied skills than others. The pendant you were holding - that was a magical amplifier, a kind of magical artifact - I’ll talk more about that another time.
“Importantly, magic, especially copymagic, isn’t anything like you see in the movies. Some unnecessarily buff and good-looking guy waves his arms and a roast lamb dinner for two appears in front of him? Doesn’t happen. Copymagic doesn’t work that way either. Don’t expect to stare long and hard enough at someone and suddenly you’re able to do all that he can do.”
Graham walks towards the center of the room, glancing once in a while over his shoulder to see if Mari is still following him. She gives him a nod. He pauses, then continues:
“When you were little, you had to practice walking, you fell over again and again before you could walk or run or jump. It’s the same with magic, but development is much, much slower – magical abilities take a lot longer to develop fully than your usual walking or motor abilities.”
Graham has removed his jacket and is now rolling up his sleeves as he speaks. Once done, he produces a slim conductor’s baton.
He points the baton at Mari and intones something she can’t quite catch.
Mari’s hair blasts backwards, smearing itself messily across her face before whipping back behind her head. She blinks, and is unable to open her eyes as she finds herself caught in a sudden blast of wind seemingly coming from the tip of the baton, weak enough to be merely irritating, not damaging; but strong enough to give her a serious bad hair day.
Graham cuts the spell, and the wind stops. “A visual cue, or a pointer, helps you focus and visualize where you want your effect to go. The result: a wand of sorts,” he lectures, pausing to wave the baton in Mari’s general direction, “though I have seen people use odder things, like umbrellas or pistols, or in one case an Irish stuffed alpaca, as focusing tools.”
Mari is only now just recovering from the sudden localized wind tunnel. She thinks What’s an alpaca but settles on simply saying “oh.”
“This is Magic 101,” Graham warns. “This holds true for magic in general: beginners usually encounter these problems and they use these means to get over them.”
“‘Usually’?”
His back is facing her, but she can tell he’s sighing. Breathe in, breathe out, then he turns and studies her face. She can tell he’s choosing his words carefully; wary of what he might accidentally leak out, and she can’t help but feel a little frustrated. But at length, Graham finally says:
“No, not all people with magical abilities do this.
“The first group are people who are born with innate magical abilities. They can only perform one specific spell, but they don’t need any tools at all: just their mind.
“The second group are your copymages. When they come in contact with innate magical users, they’re able to copy powers. A single copymage can copy several different powers.
“And then you have your third group.
“They’re your wizards, people who aren’t born with any magical powers at all, but rather with a strong brain for learning magic. You know how some people just seem to be naturally better at doing math, or learning languages, or drawing? There are some people that are naturally better at doing magic.
“They’re not your rarest group, but certainly the most dangerous. A single wizard can learn multiple spells, without the need to come into contact with other people with magical powers. With enough time and effort, they can actually learn as many spells as they please.
“This means they can do things that even we find impossible, and we have even fewer ways of attacking them or defending ourselves against them.
“And the reason I use the words ‘attack’ and ‘defeat’ is because half of these magical people will be actively hunting you down.”
Graham’s expecting a reaction, some kind of shock or awe or desperation from the girl, with her asking asking why or what or how or who.
Mari’s still sitting, waiting for his next burst of speech. She is surprised to find out that she is a “mage”, and is still discovering what exactly that term means. She does feel overwhelmed with the possibility of power that that door opens up to her.
She is surprised that she’s a mage.
She is definitely not surprised that people are now out to kill her.
Where there are people, arguments and wars will always appear. Peaceful solutions weren’t real. Comic book superheroes, the “with great power comes great responsibility” species, didn’t really exist. The motto goes more like “with great power means I can get more stuff NOW” and it holds true whether people have superpowers or not.
And honestly, after all that’s happened today, finding out exactly who is after her blood can wait for tomorrow.
Realising halfway that Graham is still waiting for her response, she nods once. Yes, I’m still listening. Go on.
He seems a little disappointed at her calm reaction, almost as if he was expecting something a little more spectacular.
“Copymagic is a tricky type of magic.” Graham continues. “You’re expected to know a little bit about everything, to be able to control a power that you might not have even known existed five minutes before. It still follows rules, sure. But it’s like playing poker without knowing the rules - you could win big trying to figure it out yourself halfway through the game, but chances are you’ll lose every last dollar you bet.
“In real life you might even wind up losing an arm or a leg. I’m not even joking. I knew someone who blew off a limb trying to copy pyrokinesis unaided.” Mari winces. “Basically speaking, it’s not something that’s easy to master on one’s own.”
“So. I want you to come back tomorrow. I’ll train you up as a copymage.”
This time, Mari’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise.
Graham smirks.
***
“So how did it go? What did he say? What was all that?” Satomi delivers three questions in as many seconds. Mari quavers and holds up her hand to try to ward her off. It’s hard enough to concentrate on the facts while she lies to Satomi’s face.
She had said yes. Graham had told her to come back the next day, assuming she hadn’t changed her mind, and they would start. It would be a mindbreakingly huge undertaking, and even though she tried not to show it to Graham, she pretty much had the breath knocked out of her just thinking about it.
Satomi, however, doesn’t know that Mari was attacked, and was told by Graham that Mari had had a fit, seizure or something of that sort. Satomi has not seen the Moroven. Satomi, though interested in magic, still does not know it exists.
Given the dangerous nature of magic and people wielding it, Graham had said it would be safer for Satomi if she never found out.
What Mari tells Satomi, accordingly, was that Graham was offering her some self-defence classes and some meditation facilities (in order to calm her disturbed mind, fits, seizures etcetera). When the Satomi predictably wants in, Mari tells her that it’s specially for slightly mentally disturbed people (i.e. Mari, but in actual fact that’s actually more Satomi), and the younger girl reluctantly drops the idea.
Other than the obvious perks of learning more about this strange gift she had, there was actually another reason why Mari was drawn so strongly to coming back here.
Graham had dangled the pendant in front of her, and asked her if she recognised it. “Of course,” she had said. Graham nodded.
“This pendant looked familiar to me too,” he agreed. “With magic in general, magical artifacts can be used to boost or suppress one’s power. Copymagic artifacts are quite well-known.”
The pendant catches the light and gleams at Mari. Graham arrests the bob, then presents it to her cordially.
“This is a copymagic amplifier. When you picked it up back in the empty house, it amplified your dormant copymagic abilities. You probably wished for light or something - it latched on to that thinking and reacted, creating an imperfect light that was more magical potential energy than actual light. Though - that’s precisely the kind of thing that attracts Morovens.
“You could activate it because you fulfilled two conditions: firstly, you were a copymage.
“Secondly, this particular crystal only reacts to certain magical bloodlines. So, congratulations, I suppose - you have some magical blood running through you.”
Graham guides them back to the desolate bus stop. He shepherds them onto the bus, but fixes Mari with a look - it was a question mark, written on his face in the language of his eyebrows. She glances back at him, nods a quick yes, before the door closes and the old bus groans onto the road.
Mari wouldn’t lie to him about this. She’s positively giddy about the idea that she’s actually capable of learning magic, and secretly feeling vindicated about her younger self’s obsession with magic. She imagines worlds opening up to her, new people, new sights and sounds and experiences.
All that - in short - is amazing.
But even though she might not show it, she’s equally as wrenched to dig up more of her family history. It wasn’t just a wondering of who her real parents were. It was a question at the back of her head that she had ignored for long enough.
As the bus putters off down the shady road, Mari twists her head back to stare at the strange man they had met, but only finds the empty bus stop gradually being invaded by swirling leaves.
The smaller girl crosses her arms in a childish manner. “Well, I am.”
Takara Satomi is seventeen, looks fifteen, and acts five. Her hair is much too long for her smaller frame, but she has decided to keep it long anyway. People politely describe her as “eccentric”. She’s on an endless happy adventure (but no, it’s definitely not drugs; Mari has checked).
Somehow, she’s the president of the newspaper club, with the strange distinction of being slightly more newsworthy than any news she happens to report. While she’s actually surprisingly capable, Mari wonders where in the world she gets her news from.
To Mari’s surprise, Satomi was interested in - obsessed with, actually - magic. At any time, she could be seen either talking very loudly and very quickly about magic, jangling magic pendants and necklaces and bracelets on her person, or leafing through a book and learning about the occult magical practices of some ancient civilisation that probably destroyed itself by practicing too much occult magic.
There is a reason why Mari keeps her own interest a secret from Satomi.
The school’s newspaper club had inherited a small room in a lonely corner of the school, which eventually fell to Satomi when her seniors graduated. She promptly christened it “my office, yay” and spent the good part of two weeks turning the tired studio into a busy, if very messy, but workable newspaper editing office.
Today, the club president looks up excitedly at Mari, untidy leaves of paper scattered across her desk.
“Come on, it’ll be fun!” She jumps out of her seat, sending a stack of papers on her table crashing into the floor at a 45-degree angle. The stack whistles and violently spills its innards over the floor in a messy flutter of paper. “Whoops. Didn’t need those anyway.”
Mari sometimes wonders why she gets roped into these things.
The school newspaper club now has exactly two members. One of them, is Takara Satomi; seventeen, overall president, boss, and commander-in-chief. The other is Mari, the new and only school photographer who reluctantly follows Satomi around, not so much to take pictures, but more to make sure Satomi doesn’t accidentally break something or blow something up.
With the holidays here and a whole newspaper due when school reopens, Satomi had spent the last week descending into a ball of nervous energy. She had scratched together quite an impressive-looking paper, and Mari’s secretly impressed.
However, all the news reports were about magic.
“Takara,” Mari explains patiently, “you can’t write about magic for everything.”
“I just did.” Satomi has the giddily happy expression of a kid.
“Takara,” Mari sighs, “you know, while I agree magic’s interesting and all, most of the school doesn’t agree. You still remember what happened last month when you accused the hockey club of being witches.”
“But they are, Mari, I swear th- ”
“Point is, Takara, they don’t want to read about these things anymore, Takara, they’d rather read sometHING LIKE THE ACTUAL - ” Mari’s voice becomes gradually louder throughout the sentence as Satomi doesn’t stop talking - ey’re all witches, I’m sure that last hockey match wasn’t even fixed, that shot wasn’t even possible and then they all started to “- NEWS TAKARA”.
Pause. Nothing but the sound of breathing.
Mari glares at her, then looks away guiltily. Takara Satomi might be soft in the head, but she was at heart a nice person. Scolding her, no matter how reasonable it seemed at the time, always afterwards felt like punching a child.
Satomi finally makes a concession. “Fine. I’ll take out the piece on the chess team winning because they illegally used mind-reading powers.”
Mari breathes a sigh of relief - thankful that Satomi’s willing to cancel that article she wrote, and thankful also because she can’t hold grudges. “Thank you.”
Satomi waves a finger. “But I’m still keeping that other piece on the haunted house.”
Mari considers this for a moment, then nods. Fair’s fair.
Satomi pauses for a moment, then adds, grinning: “And you’re coming with me to go take photos of it for the newspaper.”
“What?”
Mari finds a photo of the so-called haunted (“Magical!” corrects Satomi) house. A battered, dilapidated one-storey project stared back at her from the photo.
“...you can’t be serious.”
A headache and two hours later, an enthusiastic Satomi and a less-than-enthusiastic Mari arrive on the outskirts of town. There’s an old house here, once part of an old terrace house row, but now standing alone. Its neighbour units were gone, claimed variously by fire (two), government bulldozers (twelve) or spectacular cave-ins (one, in a horrifying incident seventeen years ago; four deaths). This lone block has seen it all, withstood it all, and at the end, is still left standing.
The whole district was a target of government-led restructuring. Sometime three decades ago, the big shots up top decided that the place had to go, to make way for something brighter and newer. Five years into the project, they hadn’t even finished the demolitions, having had fires, multiple contractor bankruptcies, and a few deaths (see above).
Someone eventually figured that if they had so much trouble in the tear-everything-down part, the build-everything-up bit couldn’t be any easier, so they decided to cut their losses and drop the project.
That was seventeen years ago.
In nearly two decades, the wilderness at the edge of the city began reclaiming lost land. The uncleared rubble of the demolished units was gradually swallowed up by the oncoming wave of time.
Legends and talk sprang up about the area in general, but also the house. Why would so much misfortune happen? How did that one house survive everything that was thrown at it? The answer, depending on who you asked, was either (a) government incompetence, (b) increasingly insane conspiracy theories or (c) increasingly insane conspiracy theories involving ghosts or magic.
The house was only accessible by a single bus that ran all the way to the town’s abandoned outskirts. Even after alighting, it was thirty minutes of leisurely walking - leisurely walking through knee-high grass and the invading battalions of mosquitos and other unnamed insects. Mari has seen lovelier landscaping in cemeteries.
Satomi rattles off the history of the place as they walk. Mari listens, half-interested, mentally relegating Satomi’s voice to a soothing buzz in the background.
“...with preliminary readings for radiation inconsistent with most other readings, showing an unexplained spike in both gamma and zeta - oh, we’re here.” Mari instinctively looks up. The lonely building looms over them, giant and still and completely silent. It’s almost as if it’s been so used to being neglected, it fell asleep seventeen years ago and hasn’t woken up since.
The silence is deafening, and soundlessly robs both girls of their breath. For a moment, it is as if the birds and the crickets have forgotten how to sing and the world has stopped moving.
Then the wind picks up, whistling in icy rustling bursts across the tall grass. The dry sound of the grass shocks both girls back to life. Suddenly, Mari’s aware of her heart beating awkwardly loud, a little faster than she imagined.
Satomi speaks in a whisper, but her voice is still unnaturally loud in the otherwise-silent picture.
“Okay. Let’s go in.”
There’s no door to push; it has rotted off its hinges and now is flat on the ground, leaving a convenient door-shaped hole where it used to be. The two girls carefully walk across the threshold, Mari wincing when the old door creaks a long, low whine under their feet.
They are standing in what was once the living room. The place is roomy and expansive, and Mari can imagine it being quite comfortable when the place was still alive.
Satomi fumbles around and produces a small torchlight. The weak light throws some comfort around them both, but not quite enough. What it did shine on only confirmed Mari’s suspicions: this whole place was cold, damp and thoroughly unwelcoming. They explore the room a bit, with Satomi curiously brushing aside decade-thick spiderwebs and gently moving old furniture aside, while Mari watched detachedly.
Out of boredom (and a need to keep her wandering mind distracted), Mari started trying out some shots with her camera.
The first flash was like an electric shock throughout the room.The split-second of blinding light temporarily banished all the shadows, but the room for that instant was eerily, unnaturally white, not unlike cleanly bleached bones. The suddenness of it all freaked even the photographer out. Satomi had screamed and violently backed into a chair.
After that, Mari had kept the camera safely away.
Fifteen minutes of watching Satomi probing and tapping random objects later, Mari grows bored. Fidgeting, all she’s wondering is why she even came here in the first place - there’s nothing here, and there’s no one here - even if there were really zombified ghosts from beyond the beyond out to feed on fresh human blood (yes, Satomi actually said that) they certainly would not be here, because nobody else was.
“I think I’ll check the other rooms”. Satomi glances up from molesting an old chest of drawers and nods seriously. “‘kay. See if there’s any magical or ghostly things there.”
The room she finds herself in seems to be an old dressing room. Abandoned combs, necklaces, bracelets and other knick-knacks are left around the area. Whoever was here must have left in a hurry - they didn’t even seem to bother taking anything, leaving the room in a considerable mess.
Mari finds herself being drawn to the sad-looking dressing tables. Hm. Mari turns a single earring she’s holding in her hand. It must once have been someone’s pride and joy, she thought. It looked expensive, and rather out-of-place in this room; but like everything else, it had covered itself with a layer of dust. When was the last time anyone held it? It was stone cold to the touch.
She puts down the earring and starts circling around other tables. Mari finds her mind wandering. The people who were here apparently left hurriedly. Why was that? Surely they would have known that the block was supposed to be torn down.
Didn’t they?
But everything seemed so thrown-about, so rushed, too easily dropped - Mari picks up a necklace, feeling the cold gold chain - something had happened, definitely, no one would have had to rush out at the last minute because of bulldozers outside the house - she puts the necklace down - it wasn’t the bulldozers outside - she finds a little glass pendant - no, couldn’t have been anything outside - the pendant feels odd in her hands, she furrows her brows, wondering, something was wrong - nothing outside - the pendant has a dull warmth, slowly building up in heat, Mari frowns - nothing outside, inside, inside - the pendant is WARM -
Mari, already trying to control two slowly exploding trains of thought, suddenly feels someone staring at her back. She whips around, still tightly clenching the warm pendant, and her hair smears itself across her eyes.
Somehow, from nowhere, an enormous black horse had stepped out from the shadows when she wasn’t looking, and it catches Mari out of the corner of its eyes. It’s black: not just black, it is Black with a capital B. It is so black that where it stood in the shade, its shape just disappeared into the darkness. Mari can’t even be sure it had legs. It’s as if it was made out of the shadows itself, and Mari finds herself wishing for light.
Its head is held proudly, a short cropped mane tracing its way down its spine, then continued and tapered off into elegant tails. Definitely too many tails for a mortal horse.
There’s a horse in the room. Mari tries to make sense of that, and fails.
It was still completely silent. The quietness in the room was unnatural: she hadn’t heard it move, nor did she hear any hoofbeats. Come to think of it, as she suddenly became aware of her own heart hammering away, Mari realised that she couldn’t hear it breathe either.
As it turned its head towards Mari, she found out that she could not see the horse’s eyes.
Mari’s scream is still stuck in her throat when there’s another flash of light. This time, the flash seems slower - a dull orange quickly spreading across her field of vision, everyone caught as if in a slow-motion video. The orange grows bigger and brighter until it obscures her whole vision with a loud whumpf like of an old camera flashbulb going off. She can’t see the horse.
A long neigh pierces the silence. It’s an awful screech of a sound, grating and almost physically painful. Mari hears it directly in her head, high, sharp, and mind-piercing. She stumbles backwards, clapping both hands to her ears and trying to block out the noise. It doesn’t work.
Suddenly, she is struck in the stomach. The horse has reared up in front of her, cutting through the orange mist, and plants a hoof solidly in her midsection. The hoof is cold, and Mari feels as though she’s been hit with an iron bar. She doubles over, crying out, then loses her balance altogether and crashes onto her back.
The orange mist is clearing now, but the midnight horse now isn’t making any sound. Where normal horses would have a snout it has smooth blackness, but as Mari watches, it tears itself a jagged mouth without a sound. The mouth is bare at first, and then unnaturally sharp canines and a jet-black tongue sprout, grow and solidify in the dim light.
The horse charges.
Mari screams “TAKAR-” before the hooves start falling.
The horse (she’s sure it’s definitely NOT a horse, whatever it is) pummels her silently, rearing up to its full height and bringing down iron feet down on Mari’s body. She’s too battered to even think. And all this while there’s not a single sound from the horse, not even the sound of its hooves hitting flesh.
From far off, she hears footsteps, a scream that could have been her own voice or maybe even Satomi’s.
A particularly heavy blow to her temple renders her completely limp. Black fuzziness begins to creep up in the corner of her eyes, and she feels herself slipping into unconsciousness, watching the blackness slowly swallow up her vision.
Just before that, though, a dim flash of light. And sound. Muffled sound and crumbling noises, but sound nonetheless. A drowning part of her brain realises this, and struggles to stay afloat for a few more seconds.
A silhouette - not Takara - has knocked the horse off of her. In her fuzzy state, the horse is just flickers of shadows that she wasn’t absolutely sure was there, and the other person - a man, by the looks of it - is a tall, mysterious shadow himself. How he was forcing the horse away from her? She couldn’t tell, but there were sounds of fighting and shouting and footsteps, and bright patches and rays of light that suddenly appeared and disappeared in the darkness.
At this time, Mari’s willpower whines, crackles and fizzles out, and her vision finally dissolves in a greyish wall of white.
***
Mari blinks.
She’s in a white room – no, a white hall – suspended in a white hall, seeing nothing but white all around. Mari blinks again, maybe hoping that it’ll go away if she blinks hard enough, but no, she’s still there, feeling small and insignificant.
Then, she decides to look down.
There’s no floor.
I’m falling.
She gasps, confusion and imbalance rushing in. She reaches her hand out to steady herself, but since there’s nothing for her to step on or grab a hold of, she only manages to make herself even dizzier.
It’s not a white hall.
She’s in a featureless white space, with whiteness stretching out in all directions as far as the eye can see. And she’s suspended in the middle of it, cartwheeling her arms and legs in a mad dance, trying to feel for a floor or a wall that doesn’t exist.
I’m not falling.
The panic and adrenalin blinds her sight with another flash of white. The mental image of a camera flash going off briefly pops up, then quickly evolves into a nightmare of that flash in the room and the horse’s blank face and monstrous mouth and hooves quickly falling, and this time she can’t even see her hand in front of her face for all the white and the repeatedly-playing horror reel in her mind’s eye.
But gradually, the white sheet fades away, two dark blobs gradually dissolving into her line of sight. As sight returns, she’s suddenly aware of all the other senses rushing back with a roar – suddenly the dull whunn whunn whunng of the fan, the feel of a mattress under her body, Satomi’s muffled voice indistinctly floating in from somewhere –
“Ugh.” Mari shuffled up into a sitting position, trying to clear her thoughts. The place was unfamiliar, but it definitely wasn’t the old house. And as much as she wanted to throttle Satomi right now, hearing her voice at this point of time brought Mari a sense of security and relief. At the sound of the loudly-protesting mattress springs, Satomi herself peeked into her room from behind a doorframe.
“Mari! I thought – ”
Whatever Satomi had thought at that point of time was cut off as the mysterious guy from earlier walked out from behind her with slow, deliberate steps. That, oddly enough, had the surprising ability to shut Satomi up. He gently, but firmly, closed the door with a click, leaving Satomi outside.
Mari realized that in proper light, he wasn’t as shadowy and mysterious as she had remembered him to be. He was tall, and carried the weary air of someone who had seen the ugly side of the world and wasn’t too happy about it; but he didn’t look that much substantially older than herself.
Over an off-white inner shirt, the guy wore another, simple shirt that flapped a little behind him as he walked. Long-ish hair threatened to cover half his face. A cap was perched on his head earlier, but as he approaches her he politely removes it and sets it on a nearby chair.
“Mari?” His voice appears soothing, but Mari senses a vague sense of steel beneath the gentleness. “Relax. My name is Graham, and you’re now at my place. Satomi has been looking after you for the past hour and a half.”
“I’ve been out an hour and a half - ?” Mari’s blurted words are slurred, and she instantly regrets speaking.
Graham doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care. “Yes, roughly. Now, listen. Are you feeling okay? Any dizziness or headaches?”
There’s a dying throb in her temples, but she shakes her head.
“Good. I need you to listen very carefully and answer me truthfully.”
Graham looks back at Mari, then lowers his voice to little more than a conspiratorial whisper. Mari strains a little to hear him.
“In the old house, you were attacked by a Moroven. They’re a certain species of magical creatures, usually appearing as many-tailed horses. Do you remember this? Do you remember seeing it?” Mari nods, slowly, once.
Graham nods back, then continues. “They are usually docile, but are drawn to the use of magic which, in simple terms, makes them very angry and prone to attacking anyone in sight. Your friend over there - I was talking to her before this - claims not to practice magic.”
Mari nods warily. Satomi may have a lot of fanciful ideas on magic and an obsession that bordered on the unhealthy, but for all her interest she herself had complained that she could not practice magic. Was she lying? the thought surfaces in her mind for a second, but Graham continues:
“So. The question is: were you the one that set off the magical flare?”
At this point of time, Mari’s brain finally catches up with reality.
“Magical - flare?”
“Yes.” He sighs, then pulls up a chair to sit beside Mari’s bed. “Someone had set off a magical burst - not directed at anything, not a useful discharge of magical energy, but still a flare.”
“I happened to be passing by,” he says, looking up at Mari. “This place isn’t too far away from the old house. In any case, I felt the presence of the Moroven, and soon after I heard someone screaming. After fending off the Moroven, I found your friend there,” - he nods towards the door Satomi’s behind - “...and we brought you back here.”
Mari frowns, the pictures slowly joining up together in her head. Graham watches her.
“No,” she finally says. “I don’t think I did anything.” She really believes it.
Graham fixes her with a stare, as if he’s trying to determine the truth. Then, like he had suddenly made up his mind, he nods curtly.
“Well. Sorry to disturb your rest, then. You’d better lie down for a while more.”
He bows his head a little, and Mari groggily nods back in acknowledgement. Eventually the door closes behind him, and Mari’s left alone with the low hum of the fan.
A short pause later, she stretches, then gingerly moves into a sitting position. The mattress is simply laid on the floor, so there’s no fear of falling off. She wraps her hands around her knees, her mind blank for the time being.
“Hm.” The sound escaping from her throat is hoarse. It’s as if she had spent the last hour and a half doing nothing but screaming her lungs out (which is probably closer to the truth than she’s willing to admit).
She walks - staggers - across the room, gripping ledges and chairs and tables in her fight to stand upright. The bandages on her arm don’t hurt anymore, but they’re odd to look at. Graham must have done it - Satomi couldn’t figure out how to peel a plaster to paste on a wound if her life depended on it. (She just ambled around the school with open scars; Mari had seen it before.)
Curious, Mari explores the items on the tabletop she is gripping. It’s mostly empty, except for a few spread maps of unknown places, some scribbled writing on paper (probably Graham’s), and...
...and -
The little glass pendant blinks in the light.
It seems to leer at Mari. She vaguely remembers it, and then it comes back to her. She was holding the pendant when the Moroven attacked. And then - and then she can’t even remember what happened to her, much less a pendant she had just picked up.
The pendant is almost circular. Now that she’s seeing it in clear light, it is a beautiful piece of work. No doubt about that - intertwining shapes glancing past past each other that gives the whole thing a wonderful illusion of fluidity. It’s oddly warm to the touch - not hot enough to be uncomfortable, but warm enough to be surprising.
Mari starts. So it wasn’t a dream.
Almost instinctively, unbidden, images claw their way to the forefront of Mari’s mind, hijacking her vision and flooding all her senses with memory and sound and touch and
- nightmare horse - warm grasp of the pendant, the strange orange light -
no eyes. the horse had no eyes, what on earth
and then pain, falling hooves,
caught and stuck and then
tttaa
aa
“TAKARAA!”
Mari’s only half-sure the last shout was imagined. The pendant clatters to the ground, and so does she. Her vision’s hazy - am I crying? - but refocuses soon enough. She’s lying on the ground, fallen backwards - she doesn’t even remember hitting the floor. She had gripped the pendant so tightly it traced itself in her palm.
She just has enough time to say “ow” before the door opens with a bang and Graham strides in aggressively, holding something Mari can’t quite see in one hand. He doesn’t look at Mari, but instead scans the room for - for - what? Mari can’t quite tell. On the other hand, Satomi pushes her way in from behind him, and heads straight to her side. Graham approaches them slowly, still shooting suspicious glances at the corners of the room.
Fifteen minutes later, Mari is deemed to have recovered adequately successfully and permitted to join Graham and Satomi in the room outside. They’re sitting down at a low table, and Satomi hasn’t stopped chattering since Mari has sat down. Mari’s mind is still whirling from the Moroven and the pendant, and only nods and murmurs syllables, and is half-startled when Graham sets down a cup of water in front of her.
There’s a short awkward silence as Mari sips, Satomi fidgets and Graham just sits back and stares at a far corner.
Eventually Graham drawls in a long voice: “Well, Takara.”
“Hm?” she perks up.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll need to talk to Mari.”
“Yeah, sure!” she grins.
“...mm.”
They sit and listen to the fan whirring for a few more seconds. Satomi bobs on her seat.
“...alone, please.”
“...oh.”
Graham sighs. “Look, I’ll just be a while. If you don’t mind, just wait for Mari outside, alright? I’ll show you guys the way back to the bus stop you were talking about after all this is done. Help yourself to the snacks and stuff outside, alright?.”
Satomi nods sulkily, but brightens up a little at the mention of snacks. She wafts out of the room and shuts the door behind her. Mari and Graham both do not move.
A few seconds later, Graham calls over his shoulder: “And no eavesdropping.”
There’s a sound of a stifled grunt and footsteps fading away behind the door.
Mari and Graham breathe out. She realises she’s been holding her breath, but isn’t quite sure why. Graham arcs an eyebrow at her. Is she always like that?
Mari gives a wry smile. All the time.
Graham stands up, beckoning her to follow. “This way.” She accompanies him back to the small room she woke up in, where Graham draws a chair and invites her to sit. The atmosphere is calm, almost friendly, Mari thinks. This guy has many faces.
Then Graham starts talking, and he becomes decidedly more businesslike.
“You’re a copymage.”
It’s the first time Mari’s heard the word, and her brain processes grind to a halt. “...what?”
“Copymage.” Graham repeats himself. “You’re a mage - a magician, as your friend might describe them - specialising in the reproduction of the powers of other mages.”
“Oh.”
“Admittedly this isn’t the easiest introduction to magic I could have imagined, so allow me to start from the start. Mages exist. They hide themselves, blending into the background society of whatever area they happen to be in. Their powers follow certain rules, but these rules are awfully hard to pin down.
“There are organisations employing mages. These mages can do things that a normal person would think impossible. If these mages lived a few hundred years earlier, they would have been burned at the stake as witches and wizards. Magic is not what your friend thinks it is - with ghosts and spooks and awfully common misconceptions - but magic exists.
“And it can be incredibly, frighteningly powerful.
“Copymagic is the innate ability to copy another mage’s magic abilities. If you can master this, you’re essentially a wild card - a joker, a blank tile - and highly sought-after. Some copymages can do it better than others. They can copy faster, more effectively, and remember more copied skills than others. The pendant you were holding - that was a magical amplifier, a kind of magical artifact - I’ll talk more about that another time.
“Importantly, magic, especially copymagic, isn’t anything like you see in the movies. Some unnecessarily buff and good-looking guy waves his arms and a roast lamb dinner for two appears in front of him? Doesn’t happen. Copymagic doesn’t work that way either. Don’t expect to stare long and hard enough at someone and suddenly you’re able to do all that he can do.”
Graham walks towards the center of the room, glancing once in a while over his shoulder to see if Mari is still following him. She gives him a nod. He pauses, then continues:
“When you were little, you had to practice walking, you fell over again and again before you could walk or run or jump. It’s the same with magic, but development is much, much slower – magical abilities take a lot longer to develop fully than your usual walking or motor abilities.”
Graham has removed his jacket and is now rolling up his sleeves as he speaks. Once done, he produces a slim conductor’s baton.
He points the baton at Mari and intones something she can’t quite catch.
Mari’s hair blasts backwards, smearing itself messily across her face before whipping back behind her head. She blinks, and is unable to open her eyes as she finds herself caught in a sudden blast of wind seemingly coming from the tip of the baton, weak enough to be merely irritating, not damaging; but strong enough to give her a serious bad hair day.
Graham cuts the spell, and the wind stops. “A visual cue, or a pointer, helps you focus and visualize where you want your effect to go. The result: a wand of sorts,” he lectures, pausing to wave the baton in Mari’s general direction, “though I have seen people use odder things, like umbrellas or pistols, or in one case an Irish stuffed alpaca, as focusing tools.”
Mari is only now just recovering from the sudden localized wind tunnel. She thinks What’s an alpaca but settles on simply saying “oh.”
“This is Magic 101,” Graham warns. “This holds true for magic in general: beginners usually encounter these problems and they use these means to get over them.”
“‘Usually’?”
His back is facing her, but she can tell he’s sighing. Breathe in, breathe out, then he turns and studies her face. She can tell he’s choosing his words carefully; wary of what he might accidentally leak out, and she can’t help but feel a little frustrated. But at length, Graham finally says:
“No, not all people with magical abilities do this.
“The first group are people who are born with innate magical abilities. They can only perform one specific spell, but they don’t need any tools at all: just their mind.
“The second group are your copymages. When they come in contact with innate magical users, they’re able to copy powers. A single copymage can copy several different powers.
“And then you have your third group.
“They’re your wizards, people who aren’t born with any magical powers at all, but rather with a strong brain for learning magic. You know how some people just seem to be naturally better at doing math, or learning languages, or drawing? There are some people that are naturally better at doing magic.
“They’re not your rarest group, but certainly the most dangerous. A single wizard can learn multiple spells, without the need to come into contact with other people with magical powers. With enough time and effort, they can actually learn as many spells as they please.
“This means they can do things that even we find impossible, and we have even fewer ways of attacking them or defending ourselves against them.
“And the reason I use the words ‘attack’ and ‘defeat’ is because half of these magical people will be actively hunting you down.”
Graham’s expecting a reaction, some kind of shock or awe or desperation from the girl, with her asking asking why or what or how or who.
Mari’s still sitting, waiting for his next burst of speech. She is surprised to find out that she is a “mage”, and is still discovering what exactly that term means. She does feel overwhelmed with the possibility of power that that door opens up to her.
She is surprised that she’s a mage.
She is definitely not surprised that people are now out to kill her.
Where there are people, arguments and wars will always appear. Peaceful solutions weren’t real. Comic book superheroes, the “with great power comes great responsibility” species, didn’t really exist. The motto goes more like “with great power means I can get more stuff NOW” and it holds true whether people have superpowers or not.
And honestly, after all that’s happened today, finding out exactly who is after her blood can wait for tomorrow.
Realising halfway that Graham is still waiting for her response, she nods once. Yes, I’m still listening. Go on.
He seems a little disappointed at her calm reaction, almost as if he was expecting something a little more spectacular.
“Copymagic is a tricky type of magic.” Graham continues. “You’re expected to know a little bit about everything, to be able to control a power that you might not have even known existed five minutes before. It still follows rules, sure. But it’s like playing poker without knowing the rules - you could win big trying to figure it out yourself halfway through the game, but chances are you’ll lose every last dollar you bet.
“In real life you might even wind up losing an arm or a leg. I’m not even joking. I knew someone who blew off a limb trying to copy pyrokinesis unaided.” Mari winces. “Basically speaking, it’s not something that’s easy to master on one’s own.”
“So. I want you to come back tomorrow. I’ll train you up as a copymage.”
This time, Mari’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise.
Graham smirks.
***
“So how did it go? What did he say? What was all that?” Satomi delivers three questions in as many seconds. Mari quavers and holds up her hand to try to ward her off. It’s hard enough to concentrate on the facts while she lies to Satomi’s face.
She had said yes. Graham had told her to come back the next day, assuming she hadn’t changed her mind, and they would start. It would be a mindbreakingly huge undertaking, and even though she tried not to show it to Graham, she pretty much had the breath knocked out of her just thinking about it.
Satomi, however, doesn’t know that Mari was attacked, and was told by Graham that Mari had had a fit, seizure or something of that sort. Satomi has not seen the Moroven. Satomi, though interested in magic, still does not know it exists.
Given the dangerous nature of magic and people wielding it, Graham had said it would be safer for Satomi if she never found out.
What Mari tells Satomi, accordingly, was that Graham was offering her some self-defence classes and some meditation facilities (in order to calm her disturbed mind, fits, seizures etcetera). When the Satomi predictably wants in, Mari tells her that it’s specially for slightly mentally disturbed people (i.e. Mari, but in actual fact that’s actually more Satomi), and the younger girl reluctantly drops the idea.
Other than the obvious perks of learning more about this strange gift she had, there was actually another reason why Mari was drawn so strongly to coming back here.
Graham had dangled the pendant in front of her, and asked her if she recognised it. “Of course,” she had said. Graham nodded.
“This pendant looked familiar to me too,” he agreed. “With magic in general, magical artifacts can be used to boost or suppress one’s power. Copymagic artifacts are quite well-known.”
The pendant catches the light and gleams at Mari. Graham arrests the bob, then presents it to her cordially.
“This is a copymagic amplifier. When you picked it up back in the empty house, it amplified your dormant copymagic abilities. You probably wished for light or something - it latched on to that thinking and reacted, creating an imperfect light that was more magical potential energy than actual light. Though - that’s precisely the kind of thing that attracts Morovens.
“You could activate it because you fulfilled two conditions: firstly, you were a copymage.
“Secondly, this particular crystal only reacts to certain magical bloodlines. So, congratulations, I suppose - you have some magical blood running through you.”
Graham guides them back to the desolate bus stop. He shepherds them onto the bus, but fixes Mari with a look - it was a question mark, written on his face in the language of his eyebrows. She glances back at him, nods a quick yes, before the door closes and the old bus groans onto the road.
Mari wouldn’t lie to him about this. She’s positively giddy about the idea that she’s actually capable of learning magic, and secretly feeling vindicated about her younger self’s obsession with magic. She imagines worlds opening up to her, new people, new sights and sounds and experiences.
All that - in short - is amazing.
But even though she might not show it, she’s equally as wrenched to dig up more of her family history. It wasn’t just a wondering of who her real parents were. It was a question at the back of her head that she had ignored for long enough.
As the bus putters off down the shady road, Mari twists her head back to stare at the strange man they had met, but only finds the empty bus stop gradually being invaded by swirling leaves.
