Olivia Lost Her Parents Young
Olivia de Troyes spent a happy childhood.
Happy enough that, looking back now that she was grown, she could not imagine any happiness greater than that.
Troyes was a small manor of some two hundred and fifty souls. From her father's retainers, who lived with the family in the lord's castle, to the serfs clustered in the village beyond the mill, there was not a person who did not know Olivia.
Like other daughters of minor nobles of much the same standing, she grew up in a nurse's care and was inseparable from the nurse's daughter. Once her lessons in etiquette and embroidery were done, she would spend her free hours roaming the fields and hills beyond the village.
It was a happy childhood.
But miracles come easily and leave hard, and good times always find their end. The happiness of her girlhood came to an end as well.
The people of the fief, healthy until then, began at some point to fall ill with a sickness no one could name.
Their lips went a ghastly pale blue. Blood flecked their dry little coughs. They were the classic symptoms of a disease of the lungs — the sort of illness one should never have met in a lifetime, in a Troyes that had not a single mine.
Only much later did Olivia hear that it had been the work of a black magician who had hidden himself in the fief.
An inquisitor who came to Troyes explained that the man was infamous for his research into corruption and necromancy, and for experimenting without scruple upon the innocent.
By then it was already too late. Only Olivia and a handful of healthy, resilient youths in their teens had barely survived. Her parents had not. Neither had her nurse, nor the nurse's daughter.
The one who took up Olivia's guardianship was Count Claudel, a second cousin of her mother's.
Auch, the wealthy heart of the count's domain and a city of trade, was a place nothing like home. The place was hard to grow used to, and the people harder still.
The count and countess soothed her with sweet words and said they would gladly take the orphaned girl as their adopted daughter. Olivia had no trouble reading the greed in their eyes.
What they wanted was plain.
The right to manage the manor of Troyes that she would inherit. Or Olivia herself, a serviceable piece in some marriage alliance.
Or both.
Whatever their reasons, that was how Olivia de Troyes became Olivia Claudel.
Olivia barred the door of her heart. Her words grew fewer of their own accord.
The people of the count's house looked after her only so far as would show well on the surface, and they let it pass as if that must simply be her nature. No one truly paid her any mind.
Even at the social gatherings she was obliged to attend, she was left on the outside. Young ladies of similar rank were busy slighting her as a girl from some country manor, while those of lower rank envied her and whispered that she had lucked into a meteoric rise.
They were lonely days.
It doesn't matter.
Endure another year or two, and she would come of age. She would step free of the bond between guardian and ward and have the chance to live a life of her own.
If she could see no way out at all, then as a last resort she might have to sweet-talk some naive, softhearted young lord and slip away with him in the night. She believed that if that was what freedom cost, she could shut her eyes and do it.
She would have to marry someday in any case, and whatever husband the count and countess fetched for her was sure to be some vulgar upstart with nothing to recommend him but his money.
And around that time, as if to make a mockery of the resolve, Olivia awakened to a magician's aptitude. It happened when her nineteenth birthday was not far off.
At a turn of events no one had foreseen, the count's residence was, quite literally, turned upside down.
An awakening as a magician was said to come somewhere in the passage from child to adult, yes — but this suddenly? Out of nowhere? When there had not even been a magician of any note among her ancestors?
Once one had awakened, there was no exception. One became a magician's apprentice, or one entered a magic academy. After the education was finished, one was tacitly regarded as holding a station fit for a count, or for a bishop.
Only then did Count and Countess Claudel regret that they ought to have looked after her sooner and earned a little favor while they could. Hoping, in their own way, to win her over, they even invited a magician from a mage tower to give her a brief course of private lessons.
But when you think it is too late, it truly is too late. They had missed their chance to win Olivia's heart long ago. Once she graduated, she would never go back to them.
Olivia set out for the Oxenbridge Academy of Magic with her dreams swollen full.
Becoming the magician of a fief and rebuilding the utterly ruined manor of Troyes would be a fine thing. Becoming an inquisitor of the Magisterium and going about to punish heretics and black magicians would not be bad either. She did not want what had happened in her homeland to happen again.
If one thing worried her, it was the matter of friends.
Magicians would have a society of their own. Few as they were, a web of acquaintance as closed and rigid as the nobility's — perhaps even more so — might be waiting for her.
Could she manage it? What if they looked down on her and slighted her, the way the young ladies at those gatherings had?
When she managed, with difficulty, to open her mouth and confide the worry to her tutor, the teacher brushed it aside with a laugh.
"You'd do better to put a useless worry like that away. Add up every magician who comes in from the whole empire and you still don't get a hundred in a year. You think a social network forms in a crowd like that? Noble children among the new students will be six at the outside. Rather than fretting and straining to keep with the nobles, you'd be far better off making friends among the commoners. Rank won't matter in the slightest, there are far more of them, so finding someone you get on with will be easier, and from what I've seen, it suits you."
Sure enough, from her very first day at Oxenbridge, Olivia saw at once that her tutor had been right. She had made a good friend who shared her dormitory — a girl named Anastacia!
Anastacia's friendly approach the moment they met, a little excessive in its friendliness, had startled her, but there did not seem to be anything impure behind it. It was not that she wanted to grow close because Olivia was a noble. If anything, she simply seemed interested in Olivia herself.
Her eyes kept slipping toward Olivia's chest, and every time they did she flushed and jerked her head away, so it was not some furtive intent either.
She had said she had lived in a convent since she was small. Olivia only thought she must not be used at all to the latest noble fashion, with its necklines that bared a discreet hint of the upper chest.
It was a little embarrassing, but still.
Anyway!
Anastacia was absurdly ignorant of the ways of the world, and yet so full of questions that she would ask anything without hesitation, and instead of laughing at Olivia's stammer she leaned in and listened. Olivia had already marked her as a good friend. As a best friend.
Judging by how she had gaped at the basic enchantment Olivia had learned from her tutor, she did not seem familiar with magic at all. Whenever Anastacia lost her way, Olivia would step in and help!
All sorts of pictures rose in her head, of showing a fine side of herself to a friend she had made after so long.
A grown-up Olivia, soothing a crestfallen Anastacia who was trying her first spell and could not get the feel of it at all.
Olivia the teacher, helping her with explanations set exactly at a beginner's height, the way her own tutor had done.
Olivia the magical genius — a friend one could trust and lean on, at least where magic was concerned — receiving from Anastacia a look of respect. Strictly as a friend!
But on the afternoon of the first day of term, in Understanding Spells, those swelling dreams came to nothing.
⟨ Ignis! ⟩
On a single try, Anastacia succeeded in raising a blazing blue mass of fire.
A blue flame — and one that burned so huge. Not only the students, but even Professor Mila Goya looked badly startled by the spell.
When class was over, on the way to the student dining hall for supper, Olivia asked her.
"Th-that... how did you do it...?"
"Oh, Ignis? I'll explain while we eat."
Anastacia had the odd habit of always calling a meal eating rice. Olivia had no idea what rice had to do with it. Some bit of slang from the convent, perhaps? In any case, she listened over supper to the explanation Anastacia unfolded.
"So, when something burns, there are basically two cases. They call them complete combustion and incomplete combustion. The difference is..."
Olivia followed it without much difficulty. She had pictured the pure form of a fire that burned with mana for fuel — a complete burning, with not a single impurity or foreign speck allowed to slip in.
That... was possible...?
Her feelings were a tangle.
On the one hand she was glad, and proud, that her friend was showing such talent. On the other she felt a faint jealousy toward the magic of Anastacia, whom she had privately assumed would be worse than herself. She was ashamed of that ugly corner of her heart.
She had studied ahead for nearly half a year, for all that. It ought to have been Olivia who stood out.
With her head in a knot, she could not have said whether the food was going into her mouth or her nose. Even after the meal was done, the muddle showed no sign of settling.
"Sh-shall we... take a little walk before we, we go in...?"
"Hm? Sure, why not. They said there's some orientation at the dorm tonight, though, so let's just walk a bit and head straight back."
"O-okay... let's."
When your head was a mess, a walk was the best remedy.
Oxenbridge was vast enough that the school's grounds took up more than half the city. A university city, as people called it. You could almost say the city itself existed only to keep the school running smoothly.
She had been looking over the campus in snatches of walking after meals, and still there were plenty of places she had not been.
This evening she had wanted a closer look at the astronomy tower, needling up into the sky, but Anastacia somehow drew their steps the other way, and before Olivia knew it the dormitory was right in front of them. The sun had only just gone down. It was growing dark.
"Shall we go in?"
"Y-yeah..."
She meant to follow Anastacia into the dormitory without a second thought. In that instant an inexplicable chill spread through her whole body.
Her hair stood on end. A shiver ran down her spine. There was no time to think. Her body obeyed instinct first.
"G-get down...!"
She caught Anastacia in her arms and dropped hard to the ground. A sharp, formless force swept past at a rush, right where the other girl had been standing a moment before — about the height of her head.
"...ngh...!"
A spell with a sticky, sickening feel.
Goosebumps rose all over her. The sensation was familiar.
The dank aura that had driven the manor of Troyes to ruin. The foul pressure that had lain over the fief while people collapsed and died of an illness no one understood.
Olivia narrowed her eyes.
It was black magic.
In the very heart of the academy, a black magician had attacked her.
But why?
...Why now?
This was no time to cling to a question she could not answer. Olivia rose with Anastacia at her back, swept the dark, and shouted.