What Father Taught Me
Zenith Meyrud.
The summer she turned six.
Crack.
Her head snapped sideways and she went down hard. Her cheek burned a beat later, but she did not lift a hand to it. That would only earn her another scolding for letting her composure slip.
"Pathetic. You still cannot even demonstrate a proper multi-incantation. What have you been learning all this time?"
"...I'm sorry, Father."
"Stand up. The one who will become the next head of this house must never show weakness."
Zenith said nothing as she adjusted her grip on her staff. She had already given up counting how many times she had repeated the same formula since morning. Her mana was scraped to the dregs and her legs trembled beneath her, but she could not stop until the Patriarch told her to.
Then, unbidden, the sight of children running and shouting beyond the window caught her eye. A small festival was being held in the territory that day. For days she had watched the servants carrying decorations, and she had overheard children her own age talking about going out to play.
She hesitated a long time before she carefully opened her mouth.
"...Father."
"What."
"Could we... end training a little early, just for today? I wanted to go outside with the other children and..."
The Patriarch's brow twitched.
"You want to play."
"...Yes."
Crack.
The other cheek, this time.
"Tsk. Insolent child. Get it out of your head that you can live the same life as other children. Spend the hours you would waste on worthless games learning one more formula instead."
Zenith could not say a word. The Patriarch looked down at his daughter for a moment, then pressed her in a low voice.
"Well?"
"...I'm sorry, Father."
Training that day did not end until the sun had already begun to sink.
Zenith had meant to wash and go straight to her room, but laughter drifting from the garden stopped her in her tracks.
"Da... ddy! Daddaa!"
Two-year-old Iris was there in front of the flowerbed, pointing at a single blossom with her tiny hands and laughing as if it were the most wonderful thing in the world. The Patriarch was crouched in front of her, chuckling softly at the child.
"Flo... flower! Pretty! Fun!"
"Heh heh heh. This little thing is starting to talk properly."
"She's come so far lately. She picks things up so quickly — she must take after you, my lord."
The Second Wife said it with a smile, and the Patriarch shook his head.
"If she took after me, she'd be slower."
"There you go again."
Iris laughed along with them, understanding none of it. Zenith watched from behind a corridor pillar, half hidden.
Iris could not use magic yet. She could not manage a multi-incantation — she could not even pronounce her own name properly. All she had done was point at a flower and call it pretty.
And Father was smiling.
Zenith had no memory of ever seeing that face, not even when she learned a new spell. Finish a formula days ahead of schedule, and the words that came back were always the same.
Not bad.
Well done.
Learn it faster next time.
"...Me too," Zenith whispered, so quietly it barely existed. "I want to be praised like that too."
She did not know how. No one had ever taught her.
A few days later, Zenith was sitting alone in a corner of the garden.
"Oh my, Zenith. What are you doing out here? Why the long face? Are you hurt?"
She looked up. The Second Wife was standing there. Out of habit, Zenith straightened her back.
"...No. I'm fine."
"Really?"
"Yes."
You must not say it hurts. You must not say it is hard. If the Patriarch heard, he might hit you again for a successor who starts by whining about weakness.
The Second Wife did not press her. She studied Zenith's face for a moment, then sat down beside her and drew the small body into her arms.
"...?"
"...I'm sorry."
"Why are you apologizing?"
"...No reason. You just looked like you were having a hard time."
The hand stroking her hair was nothing but warm. Zenith went stiff at first, not knowing what to do with herself, but after a little while the tension drained out of her on its own. The Second Wife did not hold her any tighter, and she did not pry into what had happened.
"Your father wasn't always such a hard man, you know. I'll try talking to him."
"...All right."
I don't know what she's going to say to him. But I feel a little better anyway.
A few days after that, passing down the corridor, she happened to hear her own name from inside a door left slightly ajar.
"...I'm worried about Zenith."
The Second Wife's voice. Inside the room, the First Wife — Zenith's own mother — was with her. Even a child as young as Zenith knew which of them held more of the Patriarch's favor, but the two women got along better than one might have expected.
"He's so warm with Iris. I don't understand why he is like that only with Zenith. She's still only six."
"I have asked him about it myself," the First Wife answered evenly. "He said it is a process that anyone who will become the future head of the house must go through."
"That's..."
"I understand it no better than you do. But that is what he believes."
The conversation fell still for a moment. Then the First Wife added, quietly,
"...That it is the fate of the one who will be Patriarch."
Zenith did not stay to hear the rest. She withdrew from the door in silence.
Fate.
The one who will be Patriarch must not play with other children. She must endure pain. She must learn faster than everyone else, even when it is hard. She must never show a shortcoming, and someday she must become more outstanding than anyone.
That was her fate.
She could not understand it. What Zenith wanted was nothing so grand. Smile when she named a flower. Stroke her hair and tell her she had done well when she succeeded at one small spell.
That would have been enough.
Time passed, and Zenith turned fourteen.
By then her name was already well known at the magic academy. The professors agreed with one voice that hers was a talent that ranked among the finest in Meyrud history, and the house mages likewise judged that the seat of the next Patriarch was nothing to worry about.
That summer, she climbed the Tower alone as far as the fortieth floor. It was a rare record for anyone still a student. So this time, she allowed herself a little hope.
"Hmm."
The Patriarch read the report from beginning to end, then set it on the table.
"Not bad."
"..."
"Your mana expenditure got a little sloppy toward the latter half. Don't neglect your allocation just because it is a live situation. Finish more cleanly next time."
"...Yes."
"You may go."
Zenith could not rise from her seat.
"Father."
"What."
Couldn't you just tell me I did well. It was harder than I expected, and there were dangerous moments in the middle, but I still did it alone. Couldn't you be just a little happier for me.
In the end, nothing came out.
"...It's nothing."
"Fine. Go on, then."
Zenith bowed her head and left the room.
A few hours later, she stepped out for a meal, and a voice rose from below.
"Dad! I did it! I really did it this time!"
Iris, from the training hall on the floor below. Zenith looked down over the railing and saw her ten-year-old sister holding a few small ice crystals afloat above her palm. The shapes were crooked. The sizes were all over the place. It was magic Zenith herself would have finished at a far younger age.
And still the Patriarch was smiling.
"Yes. Well done. Much more stable than last time."
"Really?"
"Yes. Excellent work, Iris."
"Hehe."
It was a scene she had watched any number of times as a child. Only now it did not simply hurt the way it used to. Zenith had results of her own now. At the academy, professors came looking for her just to see her formulas. In the house, mages old enough to be her seniors watched her face before they spoke. The climb itself had almost never been enjoyable — but at least the things Father had made her do had not been for nothing.
Perhaps her younger self had simply failed to understand. Why he had driven her so hard.
For the first time, Zenith tried to find the reason.
The following year, the Second Wife died of illness.
After the funeral, the atmosphere of the estate changed quickly. The attendants the Second Wife had brought from her own family left one by one, and the tutors and servants assigned to Iris dwindled away as if by natural course.
Iris had taken after her mother a great deal. The face, and the way the corners of her eyes softened when she smiled. For a time the Patriarch could not look at that daughter properly. Perhaps the dead wife rose in his mind every time their eyes met; he stopped seeking Iris out the way he once had, and filled the empty hours with nothing but the work of the house.
It could not have been because he hated his own child. He had only been too sunk in grief to bear the sight of her.
Zenith, too, could not help but grieve the Second Wife's death. This was the woman who had held her for no reason at all when she was small, who had slipped her snacks in secret, who — Zenith knew — had asked Father to ease up on the training, just a little.
But she did not hold onto the feeling for long. When she was sad, she picked up her staff. When it hurt, she recited formulas. That was the only method Zenith had ever been taught.
She had not been back in her ordinary routine for long when, walking the corridor after training, a voice from one side made her slow her steps.
"Um... the heating implement in my room hasn't worked since yesterday."
Iris. Across from her stood one of the servants who had worked in the estate for years.
"The repairman is busy, Second Young Lady. Please bear with it a little longer."
"...But that's what you said yesterday, too."
"We're handling the urgent places first. You'll have to wait."
It was a different tone entirely from when the Second Wife had been alive. This was a man who, back then, would have come looking for Iris before she even called, asking if she needed anything. Now he did not even bow his head properly.
"If you could just tell me when it might be possible..."
"I don't know either. It's not as if I'm the one fixing it."
The servant started to turn away — and then he saw Zenith standing at the end of the corridor.
"...!"
His face changed first.
"I greet the Heir."
His waist bent low.
"Did today's training go well? If there is anything you require, I will have it prepared at once."
Zenith did not answer. She looked from one of them to the other.
Strange.
Sisters who shared the same father, and the way they were treated could not have been more different. Of course, she was the heir of the house. That alone was explanation enough. And yet another reason rose in Zenith's mind first.
...Is it because I am strong?
She was already better than most of the house mages. She had cleared the Tower to the fortieth floor by herself, and now even people far older than she was found a formula duel with her an uncomfortable prospect. Would that servant have dared take the tone he had just used if he were speaking to her?
Almost certainly not.
"...That's enough. Go."
"Yes, Heir."
The servant left at once. Iris walked off in the other direction without a word. She did not bring up the heating implement again, and she did not make an issue of the way she had just been treated.
Zenith watched her little sister recede for a long time. And that night, a sentence she had heard a very long time ago rose suddenly in her mind.
The one who will become the next head of this house must never show weakness.
At six years old, she had not understood those words. Now, she thought she was beginning to.
"...If you have no power, things get taken from you."
The time you can rest easy under someone's protection does not last forever. The moment that shield is lifted, a cruel reality shows its naked face. The same people who knelt willingly yesterday bare their teeth the instant they catch the scent of a weakness, and their faces change.
Perhaps Father had known it from the start. The law of this merciless, merciless world.
And a few days later, that thought only sank in deeper. The Patriarch placed the Second Wife's staff — the one set with a blue gem — into Zenith's hands.
"...Wasn't this the piece the Second Wife said she would leave to Iris?"
"It is also an asset of the house." The Patriarch's answer was simple. "There is no reason to let a fine magical implement sit idle. Better that you use it — you, the heir of House Meyrud."
Zenith looked at the staff for a moment, then took it.
"...I understand."
There was no room to argue. The Patriarch had decided. And with the scene from the corridor still sitting in her head, the decision was not as hard to understand as it once would have been.
A few days later, as she had expected, Iris came to find her.
"That staff... that's the staff I was supposed to inherit."
Her voice was stiff, unlike usual.
"Father gave it to me."
"But Mother clearly said, while she was alive, that she would give it to me..."
Zenith did not think the words were a lie. And yet, before the thought of handing over the staff in her grip, another thought arrived first.
Why can't she just take it herself?
If it had been her — if someone had taken what was hers — she would not have simply stood there. She would at least have thought of standing up to them. Iris had not. She had endured the servants' rudeness. She had done nothing while the people around her disappeared. Even her mother's keepsake had passed into someone else's hands. And now here she was, clinging and begging to have it back.
Zenith defined the gap in a single phrase.
It's because she's weak.
If this child were as strong as she was, no one would be able to take anything from her. Nothing at all.
"...Father gave it to me. Isn't it better for the heir of House Meyrud to use it?"
Iris could not say a word.
From that day on, Iris threw herself into magic. The light in her room burned late into the night, and whenever Zenith passed in the corridor, the desk inside was buried in paper densely written over with Magic Formulas.
Zenith did not think badly of the change in her sister. If anything, she believed Iris was finally headed in the proper direction. She herself had almost never gotten what she wanted, either. Say you wanted to play, and you still had to train. Say it was hard, and no one accepted it. She had resented Father then — and in the end she had become strong enough that no one could look down on her.
So she thought Iris needed the same thing. The strength to never again have a request ignored by a mere servant. The strength to not turn away in silence when something of hers was taken. The strength to stand alone even after someone's protection was gone.
Whether kind words were necessary to obtain that, she could not have said.
Zenith had never received any.
A few years later, Iris graduated at the top of the magic academy's five-year course.
The news itself did not surprise Zenith. She had seen that room where the light never went out at night more times than she could count, and she knew how precisely Iris handled orthodox magic. The problem was what came after.
The Iris she met at the house was satisfied with her own achievement. At least, that was how it looked to Zenith.
"Top of the magic academy? Are you still going around bragging about praise you got at school?"
So she tested her. The result did not stray far from what she had expected. Accurate, tidy, few gaps — good magic. Except for one fact: every bit of it was an answer someone else had already made.
"Your formulas are neat. Like you just memorized someone else's answers as they were."
But to climb beyond that, reciting a finished answer was never going to be enough. So she believed it was right to tell Iris where she fell short. Even if it hurt. Even if Iris hated it. Once she was strong, she would understand why.
And in fact, Iris did grow stronger. She clung to magic as if she meant to overtake her sister, and that march did not stop after she left the academy.
A long time later, they met again in the training hall of the White Magic Tower.
Zenith watched her little sister tear apart, with her own hands, the Ice Spear she had used all her life. She added an Elemental Formula. She stripped out the expressions she judged unnecessary. And on the spot, she built a spell no one had ever taught her.
Glacial Orb.
It was still rough, still inefficient magic — but that hardly mattered.
At last. Iris has stepped beyond the answers other people made for her.
At last, she had set foot on the threshold of a Magus.
Now the time had come. Teach her a little more, properly. Show her the path she herself had walked, and force-correct the weak parts, and Iris would become far stronger. That Iris did not want it did not matter much. Zenith had never been trained because she wanted it, either.
If you said you did not want to, you still had to do it. If you were told you were weak, you had to become stronger. That was the method she had been taught.
That was how she had become a Grand Magus.
So of course. It would be good for her little sister, too.
So.
...So.
"...It was all my fault... I took that child's freedom entirely away, and forced her to walk the same path I had walked..."
...Why are you crying like that, Father.
"And now... after all that, I turned around and scolded her for treating that child the same way... kh... how can a man like me even call himself a father..."
Why are you saying you were wrong.
I wanted to play and I held it in. It was hard and I still did not put down my staff. You told me never to show weakness, so I didn't. You told me to become strong enough that no one could ever look down on me, so I did.
I became the person you wanted so badly.
And if you say now that that was wrong. If the way I have lived is wrong.
"..."
My life. My whole life, and that is the only thing I know how to do. What am I supposed to do to make it right?
Then, from beside her, a long sigh.
"Haaah..."
Leon was dragging one hand down his face.
"I don't even give a shit, and you're putting me through the whole fucking spin cycle."
...?
...Spin cycle?
She could not make sense of it. Zenith had never heard anyone talk like that.