Fireflies
The forest at night was thick with mana.
Luke sat in the night wind, greedily drawing it in and storing it away.
At home it cost money. Out here, at least, nature's mana was free.
Since he had to restrain himself indoors now, he meant to stockpile as much as he could in the woods.
"Aren't you cold? You sure you don't want to go inside?"
"I'm fine for now. Thank you."
Yerna handed a paper cup of cocoa to Luke, who was sitting out in front of the lodging, and sighed inwardly.
She had already forgiven him.
The child hadn't done it on purpose, and he was clearly reflecting hard enough. How could she not forgive him?
Besides, she had been told that stabilizing a Circle required mana.
She just hadn't imagined it would be that expensive.
I'm grateful he told me, but… ugh. Three million gil still stings…
Whether the expense was for a mana faucet or Luke's overuse, the bill was hers to pay either way.
She hadn't had three million gil lying around, so she had put it on a twelve-month installment plan—but that didn't make the sting any less real.
In the end, three million gil of hard-earned money was simply gone.
To possess a Circle meant the body itself became a kind of wand. And like a wand, it needed to be charged with mana.
Luke, however, was a child of unprecedented mana sensitivity. The amount required just to maintain that Circle was correspondingly enormous.
There's no way I can keep him charged at home from now on…
She had expected that taking in a child would come with all sorts of costs, but the mana bill had been a complete surprise.
At this rate, she could never leave him at a facility either. No orphanage in the world would pour that much mana money into a single child every month.
I suppose from now on I'll have to bring him out to the forest often and let him feed on mana…
For the moment, that seemed like the best she could do.
While she was turning these thoughts over, Luke spoke almost to himself.
"Ah. Fireflies."
Green lights drifted through the empty air. They were rather beautiful.
But the first feeling that rose in Yerna was puzzlement.
"That's strange. Fireflies in winter?"
"So it is. Quite an odd thing."
Luke nodded. Fireflies were insects one normally saw only in late spring or summer.
"But from ancient times, fireflies appearing out of season were said to be the 'messengers' of the spirits."
"Hmm, is that so?"
Yerna played along, half-wondering what fairy tale this was supposed to be, and Luke stretched a hand forward as he continued.
"You don't know? Elves were always meant to be friends to all the spirits, were they not?"
Five thousand years ago, in the age Luke had lived, elves possessed such high spirit affinity that among all intelligent races they were the closest to the spirits.
So the fact that Yerna seemed unaware of this struck him as strange—and seeing the look on his face, she hurriedly said,
"R-right, of course! Haha, look at me… I completely forgot."
Elves being close to spirits was a staple of fairy tales. To a child who loved those stories, an elf like her would naturally seem quite friendly with them.
In this age, of course, the spirits had vanished from the world entirely. Fairy-tale events—spirits fishing a knight's sword up from the water and such—no longer happened.
Yerna, who had already once crushed Luke's childlike wonder at the hospital, resolved not to make the same mistake again. Even if this was an age when the spirits held their breath even from the elves.
Luke nodded at her words.
"Well, you must have simply forgotten for a moment. Though I suppose an elf wouldn't need a messenger in the first place. You can just speak to them directly."
True enough. Messengers were for when space constrained you, or when your mana affinity was too low to see them yourself. An elf would have little use for such things.
So it was possible an elf might not know the stories about fireflies.
Having reasoned it out to his own satisfaction, Luke asked Yerna,
"Then do you have any spirits you usually keep company with?"
Yerna barely managed to hide her fluster and answered almost defensively.
"Um, haha. But I've been kind of bad about staying in touch with my spirit friends lately, so I'm not sure…!"
"Staying in touch…? Hmm. Is that so…?"
Did spirits require something like human contact? That didn't seem right…
Something felt off, but Luke had never possessed spirit affinity himself, so he had no idea how conversations with spirits actually worked.
An elf—a friend of the spirits—would at least know more about them than he did. With that thought, he turned his gaze back to the green cluster of lights dancing before him.
Yerna, remembering how he had tried to catch Laser, fretted that he might try to grab a firefly and offered a warning.
"Luke, if you catch a firefly with your hands, the smell gets terrible."
Fireflies had scent glands; when threatened, they released a ferocious stench. Yerna herself had learned that the hard way as a child living in the forest.
Of course Luke already knew. Fireflies had existed five thousand years ago too.
"I know that well enough. I'm not trying to force one, so don't worry."
"Really?"
Luke extended the hand he had already put forward, offering his index finger the way one might invite a butterfly to land.
Unlike Laser, whom he had never seen before, fireflies had been around in his own era. So he felt no particular curiosity, no irresistible urge to catch one.
But something else was stirring in him now—an instinct different from a cat's.
This is instinct too… isn't it.
Yet it was nothing like the way a cat's body moved on its own. This was an instinct for the handling of mana.
How the mana ought to move rose with startling clarity in his mind, and that alone was strange.
His body hadn't moved of its own accord; a single mana array had simply appeared in his thoughts. So this time, curiosity outweighed any fear of instinct.
What would happen if he ran mana according to this array?
Judging by theory, it doesn't look like a particularly dangerous configuration… Shall I try it once?
Using the knowledge he possessed, he roughly calculated the outcome. It wasn't an aggressive array, so curiosity won: he would cast it and see what happened.
Luke arranged mana at his fingertip exactly as the instinct had shown him and released it. One firefly, flaunting the light at its tail, drifted before his eyes—and settled lightly upon his finger.
Yerna watched, a little startled.
"A firefly flying over to sit on a person's finger… This one's got no fear, huh."
"Perhaps so."
A mana array for luring fireflies? He had half-hoped it might be a method for calling spirits, and felt a small disappointment—but there was nothing to be done about it.
Still, the way the creature dimmed the light of its tail at his fingertip was fresh and beautiful enough that Luke brought it close to his face and stared.
Come to think of it, I've never looked at a living firefly this closely before.
Fireflies and spirits were related, but they had little to do with magic, so he had never had the chance to study one. At most he had glanced at a preserved specimen in passing.
And yet the thought struck him now: wasn't it rather marvelous that a luminous mana array existed in an insect's tail?
Watching him, Yerna thought the whole scene looked like something out of a fairy tale. She stroked Luke's hair and said,
"Pretty, Lu."
"Ah. Yes, it is quite a beautiful light."
Oh no—I meant you were pretty, Yerna thought, and then said it aloud.
"No. I mean our Lu is really pretty."
She said it hoping that Luke would not carry guilt from this whole affair, that he would regain his confidence the way he used to have it.
Luke, however, had no room to consider her feelings. Having the adjective "pretty" applied to himself was deeply uncomfortable—goosebumps-inducing, even. For someone his age, the fluster was enormous.
"W-what are you saying? Please, I beg you—never say that again!"
Luke cried out in panic, and the sudden noise startled the firefly into buzzing away—scent glands blasting a vicious stench as it went.
"Ugh…"
His fingertip now reeked. Luke's face twisted into a full grimace. Yerna, briefly startled by the shout, glanced at his expression and found it looking for all the world as if he had heard something he should never have heard.
And looking at that pure revulsion, the thought that crossed her mind was: Is it really a word worth hating that much?
Perhaps he was unhappy with his own appearance. A cute face, for a slave, could never be more than a mark of market value. Maybe that was why he couldn't stand the way he looked.
"Ah—sorry… If you hate it that much, I won't say it again."
"Mm… I'd be very grateful if you wouldn't."
Luke held his fingertip well away from his nose and let the scowl ease.
Yerna still wondered whether he needed to look quite so dark just because she had called him pretty—but if it made him happier, so be it.
Luke raised the thoroughly cooled cocoa to his lips, trying to forget the awful smell.
Yerna, watching him, hoped she could treat him well enough to help wash that trauma away. For a child this adorable to live with the word "pretty" stuck to him as a wound was simply too sad. Someday, she hoped, Luke would come to know that he really was cute.
And so the two of them, each holding entirely different thoughts, let another day pass.
