Chapter 9: The Shadows of the Past Linger Like a Constant Companion

After recounting what had just transpired, Kalia fell into a long, heavy silence. She sat on the floor, knees pulled to her chest, head bowed low.

Roland wanted to say something, but after weighing his thoughts, he held his tongue. Instead, he went upstairs and returned with a thick blanket, which he draped over her shoulders.

"Rest for now. There’s an empty bed upstairs."

"No, I’m afraid... I’m afraid it might happen again," Kalia said, shaking her head. "It’s safer if I just stay here."

"Don't be ridiculous. It’s precisely for the sake of safety that I want you upstairs," Roland said, sounding annoyed. "If something goes wrong while you’re on the first floor, I’ll have to jump out a window to make a run for it. The second floor has protective inscriptions my father set up—they’ll trigger an alarm if there's trouble and hold things off for a while, which would make my escape much easier."

"Go upstairs and rest immediately. If you want to wash up, there’s a bathroom on the second floor, but you’ll have to manage with your own change of clothes; I don’t keep women’s attire in this house."

"Oh..." Faced with Roland, who was clearly becoming irritated, Kalia gave a timid nod. Clutching her staff and the pendant wrapped in Roland’s cloak, she headed up the stairs.

Roland let out a sigh of relief. After the night’s events, he knew there was no chance of a peaceful rest. He would have to make do with the recliner; it wouldn't be comfortable, but he hardly required a restful sleep tonight.

Kalia entered the room Roland had opened for her. It was furnished simply: a wooden desk by the window, cluttered with books on magi-engineering and spell theory, stood next to a large bookshelf packed with everything from academic texts and continental history to a fair number of novels. A notebook lay open on the desk, filled with Roland’s observations. Beside the desk and shelves sat a large bed that looked soft and inviting. The quilt was somewhat tangled—a sign that its owner wasn't one for folding bedding—yet the room itself was kept quite clean.

"It seems the stories in those novels aren't entirely true. Who said boys' rooms are always filthy? This is quite tidy."

Kalia put her staff away. Her innate magic was versatile enough to handle storing items without issue. After placing the wrapped pendant on a chair, she began pulling a change of clothes from her own shadow. "Thank goodness I brought enough."

"Wait!" She suddenly realized where she was. She was in a man’s bedroom—and she had actually been planning to shower and crawl into his bed!

The clothes she had just retrieved were silently tucked away again. She proceeded to neatly fold Roland’s quilt, close his open notebook, and set the bundle containing the pendant on the corner of the desk. Then, wrapping herself in the blanket Roland had given her, she decided to simply rest her head on the desk for the night. She didn't dare fall into a deep sleep anyway.

She hadn't expected this—a situation that hadn't occurred in so many years—to manifest precisely today.

Resting her chin on her arms, Kalia pursed her lips. She was a witch, but her circumstances were peculiar even among her rare kind. Typically, a witch’s powers awakened on her sixteenth birthday, when the small source of origin within her reached a state of equilibrium. At that point, a witch could perfectly control the innate magic born from that source—a safety mechanism installed by the Creator to prevent their powers from spiraling into catastrophe.

Unfortunately, Kalia’s safety mechanism had failed. Her abilities awakened the moment she was born and let out her first cry. The resulting magical outburst destroyed her hometown, killed her parents, and plunged half the territory into an eternal, nightmarish gloom.

Kalia didn't know if this was the absolute truth, as it was only what her teacher had told her. Her teacher, an elven sorceress who had once fought alongside the Hero to defeat the Demon King, had happened to be searching for potion ingredients near Kalia’s home at the time. Yet, even as a legendary-rank mage, she could not stop the disaster once it had erupted. After quelling the fallout, for reasons unknown, she chose to adopt Kalia.

Even now, Kalia remembered the look on her teacher’s face a year ago, when she asked about her origins on her fifteenth birthday. In the end, the teacher had told her the truth. At the time, Kalia had forgotten to ask another question: Why adopt her? Why not let her starve in the ruins, or better yet, kill her as an unstable threat? But she never asked. She was terrified that the teacher would abandon her if she did.

Even without the question being asked, her teacher had left the forest of the Blackthorn Territory before Kalia’s sixteenth birthday. "I’m going on a long journey. Stay home, and I’ll be back soon," she had said.

But for an elf, sixteen years was much like sixteen days to a human. Kalia didn't know how long "soon" would be. Three days? Three months? Three years?

Kalia spent her sixteenth birthday alone, caught between anxiety and expectation, and completed the awakening of her powers. At the time, she believed she had gained full control; the subsequent journey on the run from pursuers only reinforced her belief that she would not lose control again.

But... Kalia buried her face in her arms. At least Roland was safe. At least he had reacted quickly. If a kind soul who had risked everything to help her had died by her own hand... Kalia didn't dare dwell on the thought.

"But why did he insist I come upstairs to rest?" she wondered. "The reason he gave didn't make any sense at all. It couldn't be that he actually just wanted me to get some rest because I looked exhausted, could it?"

Kalia began to speculate on Roland’s motives. He had already discovered the solution to the danger—the Light spell. If it were just the lingering shadow from her subconscious outburst, a single Light spell would have cleared it. Reflecting on how Roland had looked after her—despite his sharp tongue, he had provided food, drink, helped her evade pursuers, and given her shelter. He had even handed over an invisibility cloak, a magical item that couldn't possibly be cheap, without a second thought.

Could it be that he truly just wanted her to rest well?

At this thought, a faint flush crept across Kalia’s cheeks. Moonlight cut through the carved wooden window, casting a diamond-shaped patch of light upon her face, crystallizing the sudden flutter in her heart.

Kalia sat bolt upright and patted her cheeks vigorously. "Hush, don't think too much! Don't think too much!"

"Sleeping in the bed is out of the question—not in this lifetime!"

"I'll just stick to the blanket on the desk!"