The Orphanage Head’s Fall (3)
Magic.
The first time I realized I could use that power—one that existed in this world—I had already been reborn for seven years.
Fortunately, it happened while I was locked alone inside a prison locker.
“What the hell is this?”
My hair had begun to glimmer faintly.
At first, I thought I was hallucinating from stress. It was already my third hour trapped in a space too narrow to sit in and too low to stand in, leaving me no choice but to hunch there miserably.
But at the same time, I felt something else.
...What is this?
An immense power. A flow. Or perhaps a law.
And yet I couldn’t reach it.
It’s so frustrating.
It felt like wearing earplugs and listening to music, or trying to see outside while blindfolded with cloth. Something was there.
I was sure that if I could just touch it, I’d understand how. I just didn’t know the way.
“Ellie!!”
Doloria’s voice thundered toward me from outside.
“Have you reflected on your sins yet!? If you’d just say you were wrong, I’d let you out of there!!”
I understood one thing instinctively.
I can’t let her find out.
That I had touched some kind of power, and that my hair had turned shining white—she absolutely could not know.
Hide it. Please, let me hide it!
I didn’t even know how magic worked, let alone what kind of power I had just gained.
Black! Black!!! A normal black!!!
The cry I vomited from within myself was crude, chaotic, more like grabbing at the world than truly touching it—but somehow, it worked.
“Ellie!”
With a crash, Doloria yanked open the prison locker door, and my hair was once again dyed pitch black.
“So... ready to apologize?”
I stared at Doloria’s smile, all teeth and menace, then turned my head aside.
“...Yeah.”
Doloria shut the door again and locked it.
“Then sleep in there tonight. Sweet dreams, Ellie.”
The sun had not even sunk below the horizon yet.
And now.
The moment the count’s carriage disappeared from view, Doloria lunged straight at me.
“El! Liiieee!!!”
And instead of killing Doloria on the spot with magic, I sprinted into the building. Not to run away—but to kill her safely and without fail.
Everyone in the orphanage had come outside to greet the count. That meant no one could see what happened inside the building.
“Running won’t help you!!! I’m going to rip you apart!!”
Doloria, mistaking herself for the hunter rather than the hunted, came after me with delighted glee.
Let’s go to the second floor.
If it happened on the first floor, someone might catch a glimpse. Up on the second floor, that wouldn’t be possible.
It didn’t matter if they saw me using magic.
But there was still something I could never allow them to discover.
When I use proper magic, the spell hiding my hair will probably come undone.
The fact that I was the emperor’s illegitimate daughter could never be exposed.
One day, I would reveal it to the world.
But when that day came, it had to be on my terms, in the way I wanted. Not by letting rumors spread through the staff and the children now.
Where do I go?
There were several rooms on the second floor. The one suited to my purpose was...
A room with no entrance except the door.
If Doloria thought I’d been trapped there like a rat in a jar, she’d follow me in without doing anything rash.
And there was only one such room on the second floor.
With a loud crash, I burst into the most horrible place in the entire orphanage.
More horrible than the dining hall, where all they served was thin soup and coarse bread.
More horrible than the dormitory, crawling with insects and stinking of blood and pus.
Even more horrible than the graveyard that was supposed to belong to an orphanage, not a hospital, and yet somehow received new occupants far too often.
The punishment room.
Click.
I entered the room steeped in the smell of blood and tears, then locked the door from the inside.
That would make Doloria focus entirely on getting the door open.
Meanwhile, I’d have time to apply the knowledge I had just gained in actual practice.
First, calm down.
Inhale deeply, exhale once, and the unnecessarily elevated heartbeat began to settle.
“Ellie!! Are you not opening this door!? If you don’t, I’ll kill you! I really will! I’ll rip out your eyes and shove them down your throat!!”
Bang!!! Bang bang bang!!! Bang bang KRAAANG! BOOOOM!!
Calm.
First, review.
The power filling the world is Ether. What the body accepts is Mana. And by using Mana, one can affect the world through magic.
The part I hadn’t understood was the second proposition.
How did one convert Ether into Mana?
Since the day I succeeded in hiding my hair color, I’d tried every method I could think of.
Gestures.
Random words, spoken like an incantation.
Focusing my consciousness, even praying.
And yet no matter what I tried, I could only feel Ether—not draw it up and make it my own. It was like being trapped in a river with my mouth sealed shut, unable to swallow a single drop of water.
But now...
I get it.
The approach had been wrong.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t find the right key.
The key needed for an individual to connect to the world was something they had to create for themselves and use.
“Ell, Liiieeeeee!!!!!”
I had to make my own key.
KWAANGGGGG!!
With a full-body charge loaded with all of Doloria’s weight, the hinges of the solid punishment-room door shattered.
The thick wooden slab shoved its way all the way to my feet, deep inside the room.
“...Ellie.”
Doloria whispered it, in a voice that sounded almost affectionate—as if addressing a cute little cat.
“You waited so patiently, didn’t you?”
The corners of her mouth had curled upward so far they seemed almost diseased, twitching and trembling. Her eyes, stretched too wide into a grotesque stare, were spasming too.
“Then I guess you deserve a reward, don’t you?”
Even in the fifteen years I had endured in this hell called an orphanage, I had never seen her this angry.
Or rather, she was so furious that the rage had gone cold. And that meant she wouldn’t kill me in a fleeting burst of passion—she would torture me slowly, until she was satisfied.
“What do you want first?”
Doloria stepped inside at a measured pace.
“Plucking your nails? Tearing holes in you? Smashing your ribs for fun?”
Foamy saliva dripped from her lips, still grotesquely split into a wide grin.
“Or maybe I should bounce your skull? Crush your guts? You choose, Ellie.”
“...I hate all of them.”
I reached out my hand.
The room was dark, with no light coming in, so Doloria didn’t seem to notice the change in the color I wore.
“My, my. Then I’ll pick one for you—”
“Doloria.”
As though asking the condemned for their last words before execution, and also to satisfy a curiosity that had been festering in me until now.
“Why do you hate children so much?”
I didn’t know much about this world, but if you were going to make money by cruel means, there were plenty of other ways besides running an orphanage.
And she wasn’t the type to enjoy praise for pretending to be kind either. This orphanage was too far from town for anyone to visit, and Doloria hardly ever went out.
“Hate them? Me? Children?”
Doloria tilted her head to the side.
She looked like a doll with its neck bent at an unnatural angle.
“I love children more than anyone else does.”
One step.
“I love their screams. I love the high-pitched barking sounds they make.”
Two steps.
“I love that their bodies are so soft my hands don’t hurt when I beat them. I love that they’re small and light enough to throw.”
Three steps.
She was close enough to touch if I reached out.
“So isn’t it only natural that I became the head of an orphanage?”
“...I see.”
I shouldn’t have asked.
I almost threw up right there and then.
“Now then, come on, Ellie, let’s have some fun too... hmm?”
Doloria’s muddy eyes blinked.
“That hair of yours... what’s wrong with it?”
This was a world where talent in magic was inherited through bloodlines.
Who had inherited whose blood was a more valuable asset than anything else, the only true inheritance and the only heirloom that mattered.
And so this world had developed a certain custom.
If a great mage acquired a territory, became a noble, and founded a house, they would choose a hair color and an eye color to be engraved into their blood, so they could pass them down through generations.
And then—above all of them, higher than anyone else—the emperor’s chosen colors were:
Hair white as purity itself, shimmering brighter than snow.
And eyes blue enough to hold the stars.
“Yo-you’re... royalty...?”
For the first time, fear entered Doloria’s eyes.
But then—
“S-so what?”
Her teeth began to chatter, as though she were chewing the air itself.
“Once I kill you and bury the body, nobody’ll ever know. I’ll tear out your hair and burn it, and pluck out your eyes too, and then what are you going to do about it?”
“No more.”
I didn’t want to see it anymore.
Didn’t want to hear it anymore.
I just wanted to remove the disgusting insect from my sight and from this world.
But I had no intention of clearing away the pest that had inflicted so much pain on so many children with kindness or ease.
“What are you going to do by glaring at me like that?”
Doloria sneered.
“Even if you were born with incredible magical talent, you haven’t learned a thing. If you don’t know the magic language, you can’t use magic!”
If you didn’t know the magic language, you couldn’t use magic.
That was true.
Half true.
Even Doloria, a resident of this world, had lived her life with no connection to magic at all—and, having spent most of it in this isolated place, she was mistaken.
Doloria walked toward me again.
“Ell, Lii...”
Her massive body blocked the entrance, plunging the room deeper into darkness.
Inside that blackness, I drew a breath and let it out.
Focus.
I felt the Ether that made up the world.
The mistaken belief that magic couldn’t be used without knowing the magic language. I had held a similar misunderstanding until just now, but seeing the count’s daughter using magic had made me realize.
“Ell, Lii... our soft little Ellie...”
Magic language wasn’t fixed.
“Now! It’s time for the child!”
What mages did was give names to each subject and phenomenon, then gather those names together into what became the magic language.
In other words...
If I didn’t know any of it, then I could make my own.
“It’s time for you to die, Ellieeeee!!!”
She came closer. Those thick, bear-paw hands reached for my throat—for the purpose of crushing my neck bones and grinding my flesh to pulp.
I opened my eyes. I could feel the stars embedded in them. I stretched out my hand. At its tip, Mana was surging wildly.
“Burn.”
A single short word.
But it was enough.