Chapter 52 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 52: Flame in the Swamp 08
Lucita was a foreign soul. This body, even this world, had always carried a faint undercurrent of resistance toward her.
Because of this, even as a human soul, she had found it difficult to cross that barrier and access the elements of magic, and could only draw on the innate gifts of her physical body.
Until today. She had completed the gradual fusion of her five senses, and had finally arrived truly and fully in this world — to be precise, this was in the truest sense the first day that the complete Lucita had come into being here.
Everything became vivid and real.
A few hazy fragments flashed through her mind.
The whole Lucita remembered the missing memories she had lost, not memories of "Lucita's" past, but memories belonging to her own.
These memories had been worn away for too long in unknown reaches of time and space. Only fragments remained, curled in a corner of her inner world, pitiable yet stubborn, testifying to a past that had been.
After all, she was not a person without origins, without a homeland.
Her place of origin, the blue star Gaia had once mentioned, was called Earth.
In the east of that planet was her home.
She was a human being with dark eyes and yellow skin. The people there differed little from those here.
She had been about the same age as Lucita, sixteen or seventeen. She couldn't remember precisely.
She had died in a traffic accident.
As for her name, and the rest of her life, all of it had been swallowed by the vastness of the universe.
Lucita understood that this was everything she could recall.
She could even remember how those memories had been worn away and lost… and for the ones that were truly gone, their loss was permanent.
For this Lucita, the blurred history of a former life felt like something from another world entirely. Only the ground beneath her feet, and the six months of experience behind her, were the indispensable parts that had shaped who she was now.
After leaving the place where the dragon had fallen, Delphine faced this new and vibrant world with tremendous excitement, floating around Lucita and peering curiously at everything.
Her original body had been the origin of space itself. Now that still-unextinguished origin of space had crossed the world's barrier, descended into reality, and remerged with the substance of the world. Delphine's consciousness had lost its anchor.
Lucita steadied herself and, reaching through all the layers of the world accessible to her five senses, observed the form Delphine now took as she floated in the air.
She arrived at a startling conclusion: Delphine was now a soul body.
A soul that had never passed through gestation, one that had arisen from the origin of space, and been wrested into being through the sheer force of a mother's longing.
This was nothing short of a miracle.
Noticing that Lucita's attention had returned to her, Delphine stopped and said eagerly: "I... I want to see my mother. Is that possible?"
Her mother?
Lucita thought of the woman, and only then noticed that the body on the table was gone.
The box was gone too. The table's surface, bare and empty, had gathered a layer of dust.
Lucita felt a jolt.
How many days had passed? And where had Dalila gone, the one who had brought her here?
She made a quick search through the house. Everything was clean, quiet, and empty.
The flour bag in the kitchen did not look as though it had been used up normally, but rather as if someone had poured it out. A scattering of flour dust still lingered on the floor.
Further searching revealed nothing more.
Lucita pushed open the door from the living room to the courtyard. Delphine followed close behind, tense with anticipation.
In the courtyard, a well, and a simple wooden swing.
Lucita went around to the back garden, where a linden tree had been planted, one that had clearly been growing for many years. You had to tilt your head far back to see its crown, and then the sun was too bright, forcing you to squint.
It was June, the finest season for linden trees. Layer upon layer of branches and leaves shifted in the sunlight, catching it in small shifting patches of light and shadow. The tree was in full bloom, and the layered yellow flower clusters released a fragrance like flowing honey.
A fine place for an eternal rest, wasn't it?
Beneath the tree stood a grey-green stone tablet.
Lucita crouched down to make out the words carved into it.
On the face of the stone, a single solemn line.
“Here Delphine rests. May she find peace.”
After the name "Delphine," there was a line of uneven scratched letters that appeared to have been added by someone using a stone — “and her mother Heather.”
The soil was moist, with the look of freshly turned earth, the loose crumbles not yet packed down, already dried to powder by the sun.
The name "Heather" stirred something in Lucita's memory — on every portrait in that box, the bottom right corner had been signed with this name.
Heather. Delphine's mother. The woman who had taken her own life in the living room. The painter who had filled an entire box with portraits of her daughter.
She had been buried here, apparently alongside her daughter, to rest together forever.
Was it Dalila? Had she taken the last of the food, taken the box of paintings, and laid Heather to rest?
Lucita crumbled a pinch of sun-dried soil between her fingers, paused her thoughts, and told Delphine, who was watching without understanding: "As you can see… your mother has already died. Together with the original Delphine. I am sorry."
Delphine's brow creased, she pressed a hand to her chest. "How strange. It feels a little congested here."
She pressed down that vague, nameless feeling and said: "I never met her."
"No." Lucita rested a gentle hand on the stone. "But she loved her daughter very much."
"Love? Is this what humans call love? To give up something as wonderful as being alive."
"Not entirely." Lucita chose her words carefully, and told this fledgling Delphine with deliberate gentleness: "A bond of love this deep, even between parent and child, is very, very rare in the human world. So you see, it was her who created you, and no other mother."
Delphine seemed to half-understand.
After wandering through the house once more and confirming that nothing had been left behind, Lucita pulled the courtyard gate shut and left the street.
Delphine followed along behind her. "Where are you going?"
"To find my friends."
"Where are your friends?"
"Ahead." Lucita answered vaguely, then turned to ask: "Why are you following me?"
"Where else would I go?" Delphine countered, then called out cheerfully to a vagrant in the alleyway: "Hello!"
The vagrant stared at Lucita, apparently talking to herself, with an expression of pure alarm.
Good Lord. Not only was Grande dealing with a plague, had it started spreading madness too?
Delphine received no response, and gave a look that said she had expected as much. "You see? No one else can see me. Only you can see me and hear me. If I don't stay close to you, how terribly dull would that be."
Lucita was momentarily at a loss.
Delphine asked again: "Can I meet your friends?"
"They can't see you either."
"Oh. Right."
…
Lucita's figure disappeared around the corner of the alley.
When Lucita returned to Dalila's rented house and knocked, the door was opened by Dalila's uncle.
Lucita had not expected this, and stood staring: "Hello?"
The man stared too.
After a moment he came to his senses, and apologized in a flurry: "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. We thought you weren't coming back, so we moved back in. We'll get out right away."
Lucita stopped him. "It's fine. Do you know where my two friends have gone?"
"Why?" The man looked confused. "Didn't all three of you go out together?"
Lucita creased her brow.
"Uncle, let me talk to Lord Lucita!" Dalila had apparently heard the voices from inside, and came rushing out, nudging her uncle back toward the house. "Go and make dinner. I'm starving."
The uncle's face creased into a fond smile the moment he saw Dalila, agreed readily, and made way for the little girl who had clearly become the household's real decision-maker.
Dalila pulled Lucita into her own bedroom.
It was the only secondary room in the house, and even it was extremely cramped, barely enough space to set a foot down. Lucita and Dalila perched side by side on the edge of the bed.
Dalila had hardly settled before she leaned forward conspiratorially, lowering her voice, eyes bright with excitement: "Are you a magician?"
"That day I saw you go whoosh and just disappear." Dalila demonstrated with an energetic gesture.
In the past, Lucita would not have called herself a magician. But now, in truth, she could.
With her human soul fully arrived, she could now access the magical layer of the world completely, and could command basic magical elements with a gesture, except that she had not yet learned the particular techniques that past generations of practitioners had developed.
Of course, the actual reason she had disappeared had nothing to do with magic whatsoever.
But Lucita did not offer any detailed explanation, and gave a vague sound of assent, which only deepened Dalila's impression of her as something mysterious.
Nothing seals a dramatic young girl's lips more reliably than a yearning for the mysterious.
"So," Lucita returned to her question: "Did you see my two friends?"
Dalila shook her head. "After you disappeared that day, your two friends also stopped coming back. Everyone thought you'd finished handing out medicine and wouldn't be returning. Can't you find them?"
Lucita's expression grew serious. She thanked Dalila and turned to another matter: "Was it you who buried Heather?"
At that, Dalila swallowed, and her expression shifted uneasily. "Yes."
Lucita was about to say more when Dalila dove under the bed, its cover a tattered quilt, muttering "just a moment" as she rummaged for a long time. At last she emerged dusty and disheveled, dragging out a box.
It was the box that had once held all the portraits of Delphine.
Dalila said: "You disappeared, and I didn't know what to do. I worked up the courage to bury her in the back garden alongside Delphine. I meant to bury this box with her, but the paintings seemed too precious to put in the ground, so I took them out and hid them under here. Now you've come back. These should be in the hands of someone who will keep them safe and appreciate them. Maybe in your hands they'll see the light of day again, and let everyone see their beauty."
Lucita was no art-appreciating connoisseur, nor a member of some collection-owning upper class, but with her abilities and what those translated to in human-world terms of material means, none of that would be difficult to arrange.
With Delphine present beside her, she took the box and said: "I promise I'll take care of them properly."
A magician was hardly likely to be moved to greed over something like this, and besides, in Dalila's eyes, Lucita was a kind one.
The girl nodded, visibly relieved.
Lucita then asked: "Was it you who took the flour from her house?"
Dalila's face went red immediately, and she became evasive: "I… I already asked Heather to forgive me! Those things were just going to spoil anyway, and I was only making use of what would otherwise go to waste."
Lucita was only confirming what she already suspected, she had no intention of scolding her.
For people living in the most rundown corners of the slums, a bag of refined flour was enough to feed an entire family for nearly a month.
People only begin to think about morality and shame, the things that hold society together, once their most basic needs for food and shelter have been met. For the poor, that threshold was still far off. That was why they never quite learned to queue, why they fought constantly over resources, why they came to blows over the smallest things.
Their grasping was not greed for its own sake. It was the most fundamental human drive for survival.
The fine people in the main city district believed this to be the result of inferior breeding. But put those same fine people in conditions like these, and they would likely behave far worse.
As for Dalila… she had not taken the box, full of precious paper and paintings. That alone said something about her character.
Paint, after all, was extraordinarily costly. Regardless of the artistic merit of the works, a painting in vivid color alone was more than enough to tempt a newly rich social climber into buying it to adorn their walls.
Lucita tucked the box under her arm, stepped over the threshold, gave Dalila a smile over her shoulder, and walked out with a long stride.
In the afternoon light, that smile was gentle, her black pupils warmed to a faint amber glow.
Dalila blinked.
Years later, when Dalila had grown into a commander of armies and encountered legendary magicians of noble birth, she would never again see a smile quite like the one she saw that afternoon, a warmth so encompassing it bordered on mercy.
Lucita's next destination was the apothecary at Number 32, Sycamore Street, the last place Stasia and Kelsey had been headed.
Like many streets with official names, Sycamore Street was one of the main arteries of the city district. Shops established on streets like this were invariably either wealthy or well-connected. After all, anyone who had made their mark in Grande was unlikely to be out of their depth anywhere else in Kenting.
She made her way along the desolate street until she stopped before an imposing red-brick building.
A stone plaque by the door was engraved with the number "32." Another tall wooden sign standing nearby bore the words "Primavera Medical Hall."
Primavera was a typical aristocratic title.
This establishment, calling itself a medical hall, was shuttered like every other shop on the street, with one difference: a sword-bearing guard stood watch at the door.
Lucita approached cautiously, and smiled at the guard's cold stare. "Excuse me, ma’am, is it still possible to purchase medicine here?"
The guard looked her over with a critical eye, and when she concluded that Lucita's clothes were reasonably presentable, her manner softened very slightly, though she still looked down her nose: "No. We're closed."
Lucita kept her smile. "When will you reopen?"
"Not certain."
Seeing that entry was unlikely, Lucita hesitated a moment, then ventured, "A few days ago... did you happen to see two women with golden hair come here?"
At that, the guard's pupils contracted slightly, locking onto Lucita for just a beat.
Then, as if nothing had happened: "No. I don't recall."
Lucita gave a sound of acknowledgment, put on a disappointed expression, and turned to leave.
The moment her back was turned, Lucita's eyes went cold.
Something's wrong with her reaction…
Lucita turned the corner, and found a vagrant to ask: "Excuse me, do you know where the Primavera family lives?"
The vagrant's eyes fixed on the silver coin gleaming in Lucita's hand. She swallowed and said, "The Duke of Primavera lives in the capital. Our city lord also comes from the Primavera family. The city lord's residence is at Number 42, Ivy Street, right in the center of the city. That's all I know."
Lucita nodded, tossed the silver coin to her, and in the same motion twisted aside to avoid a sword thrust.
The vagrant was already shaking too hard to stand.
Along the entire street, other vagrants began to scatter in a hurried rush, and very quickly the street was empty.
Lucita stood in the middle of the street, a longsword drawn from her space in one hand, the other slightly cupped. She reached into the air and pulled out a gathered ball of red light, her gaze sweeping over the four knights surrounding her.
"A convenient moment to try out some of what I've learned lately." Lucita smiled slightly. "Ladies, who wants to go first?"
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