A Flower Blooming in the Garden
There is a saying that flowers bloom where a spirit mage has stayed.
It is a phrase meant to praise spirit mages, those who receive nature's love — and the garden of House Remington looked as though that saying had been given physical form.
Ornamental trees densely adorned the grounds, arranged into what is commonly known as a maze garden. It was the visible trace of an effort to offer spirit mages, who lived their lives alongside nature, even a little more contact with the natural world.
Within that garden of House Remington, we had settled into a corner of a space accessible only to blood relatives.
There, I planted a flower.
A very beautiful wild rose by the name of Ariella.
"You're not making fun of me, are you...?"
The flower spoke to me. Her voice was laced with anxiety and a touch of resentment.
"This must be your first time experiencing anything like it, so of course you're shaken. I understand. Even so, you have to trust me. You know what it means when a noble stakes his family's honor, don't you?"
"W-well, yes. But this is still so far outside anything I know..."
Of course it was.
She had been raised like a hothouse flower, after all.
I spread a blanket beside her and sat down, then took out one of the elixir pills I could now manage three of at a stretch and began to chew.
A flower named Ariella, with only her head poking free of the earth, staring straight ahead. And roughly fifty centimeters away, a man sitting on a blanket, chewing poison.
...Even I had to admit it was a strange sight.
"Outside anything you know, is it. Then what kind of training did you have in mind when you agreed to follow me out here?"
"Um, well... you have to be able to see the spirit with your eyes first, right? So I thought maybe something that blocks the other senses...?"
"Covering your ears or pinching your nose, that sort of thing?"
"Yes, exactly. And, um, maybe singing songs the spirit might like? William, my brother, used to hum one whenever he went walking..."
There was something wistful in her voice.
Ordinarily, that much would be enough.
The training methods Ariella had just described were not wrong. Her brothers had almost certainly trained that way themselves. For an ordinary spirit mage, it would have been sufficient.
But Miss Ariella was different.
"Yes, that is one approach. I know it must have been frustrating to see no results after all this time, but I don't believe the effort you've poured in has been meaningless or worthless."
"...You think so?"
"Did I not swear it on my family's honor? That I possess a secret art even the spirit-mage houses don't know."
"R-right... so it wasn't meaningless..."
It was a murmur soft enough to be swallowed by the gentle wind stirring through the garden. And yet that tiny mutter seemed to carry a weight of feeling too heavy to simply let drift away on the breeze.
"Edwin."
Miss Ariella, who had been sitting with her eyes quietly closed, called my name in a voice that had grown distinctly gentler.
"Yes, Miss Ariella."
"I'm sorry I keep sounding so weak. I'm the one who said I wanted to do this..."
I shrugged at that.
"What's wrong with sounding a little weak? You're a noble young lady, and you're only sixteen."
"...You're only a year older than me."
A little pout.
I glanced over and found a butterfly perched at the corner of the flower's mouth.
"If it bothers you that much, you should have been born first."
More pouting.
Her fluttering looked so mischievously sulky I almost wanted to give it a light pinch.
"Anyway, this is training! No more weak complaints. Right! Absolutely none!"
Miss Ariella declared it with resolve — but that resolve did not last long.
"Edwin? E-Edwin!!! A bug! A buuug! Get it off, hurry, hurrryyy!!!"
So the saying that beautiful flowers attract insects was true after all...
Entertaining that useless thought, I brushed away the bug that had appeared in front of the weak-voiced Miss Ariella's eyes. Then I dug an insect-repelling herb from my pack and lit it.
"It seems we'll have to stick with Stage One of the training."
"...Hah, hah, hah — n-now what?"
Miss Ariella, her face gone deathly pale, carefully opened her eyes. As if to say that this situation was already more than enough, and what on earth could there still be?
"This secret art is something I heard from a certain individual."
"...Edwin."
Why was she giving me that look?
"I am not lying. I staked my family's honor, remember?"
Had she spent her whole life being lied to?
"He is someone trustworthy, so I trusted him. That is all there is to it."
Was he toying with someone's desperation? Was she the one being toyed with right now?
All manner of emotions flickered across Miss Ariella's complicated expression. Then, as though she had suddenly understood something, her eyes flew wide and her lips parted slightly.
"C-could it be...?"
"Whatever you're thinking, Miss Ariella, you're probably right."
"Ah — aaah!"
The earth burying Miss Ariella gave a brief, soft shudder. It felt as though her emotions had swelled so full they had to express themselves with her whole body.
To a spirit mage, the fairies were the foundation of everything. No wonder the fantasies she held about them ran so deep.
She's going to faint when she meets that bastard later...
"If it isn't too forward of me! Um, er... if it wouldn't be improper, could you please tell me just a little more about that story?"
"It isn't an improper story in the least."
That said, this world had its share of secrets people were better off not knowing. There was no need to drag someone so thoroughly steeped in fantasy back down to earth. I would package it nicely enough.
"Then...!"
"Fairies think differently from humans. They live for hundreds of years at the short end, a thousand at the long — so of course their way of thinking diverges from short-lived humans."
Miss Ariella nodded faintly and waited for me to continue. Her focus was on an entirely different level from before.
"That is why understanding their mindset is difficult. And the secret art I heard from one of them is precisely this."
"...Really?"
No joke. It was the truth.
"Yes. He named this secret art the Breath of Great Nature."
"The Breath of Great Nature..."
The fairy who had passed on the secret art called the Breath of Great Nature was a well-known, utterly pathetic dopamine junkie by the name of Grandier. If you met him as a spirit mage, he would pull out the secret art in exchange for taking on his gambling debts. Accept the deal, and the next scene was a CG of the player character buried in the dirt.
It was a CG that had developed a fairly cult following on the Path of Guardians community boards — a famous training method even players who never rolled a spirit mage knew about.
"Stage One is exactly what you're doing now."
"...If this is Stage One, does that mean there are things even worse?"
"Once you've looked at the world through a plant's eyes, you look through the eyes of the insects that gnaw on it, then through a bird's eyes, then an animal's... yes. Something along those lines."
The longer I talked, the more the color drained from Miss Ariella's face.
"Stage Two — up to Stage Two..."
I hadn't even sprinkled water on the crown of her head, yet her face looked as damp as if she had been caught in a downpour.
"Stage One will be more than enough."
"R-right, of course."
Miss Ariella looked visibly relieved. I had taken her for someone who kept her feelings carefully bottled, but she was surprisingly quick to ride emotional roller coasters. At this rate I half-wondered whether she was going to develop a mood disorder.
"Um, so. Just asking, just in case."
I nodded in answer.
"How far did you go with it, Edwin...?"
She was asking the obvious.
"All the way, naturally. A few bugs won't make you sick, and chewing a little raw meat won't kill you."
"I feel like it absolutely would make you sick..."
Would it?
"I-I can do Stage Two too... up to Stage Two...!"
"Oh, look. An earthworm crawling over there."
"Kyaaah!!!"
Miss Ariella let out a small scream and squeezed her eyes shut.
It was a joke, of course. She had been flinching at every insect since earlier, so I already had the repelling herb burning.
Miss Ariella cracked her eyes open a slit and scanned her surroundings in a frantic hurry. With her head buried in the ground her field of view was so narrow I half-expected to hear the sound of her eyeballs rolling from here.
"Ugh! Ughhh!!!"
She was thoroughly furious. Watching her, I found the bright white teeth I had inherited from my father baring themselves of their own accord.
"And I thought you were a good person...!"
"I am not a bad one, at least."
I had yet to harm an innocent person, so my karma value — ranging from −100 to 100 — was probably not in the negatives. I had dunked one assassin, but assassins were not the sort of creatures you counted as people to begin with, so they didn't count.
"Hmph."
A sulky voice drifted over. It was a side of her I never would have imagined from first impressions.
This must be her true self.
The precious youngest daughter of a count's house, raised like treasure. She had been close with her considerably older brothers, so she must have grown up monopolizing the love of her entire family. As a child she had probably been every bit the youngest — coaxing and clinging, throwing little tantrums.
But the world around her had changed. It had smashed her shell open, dragged her out into the open, pointed fingers, and shoved her hard in the back. Someone who did not even know how to walk had been forced to navigate this maze of a garden alone, with no idea where she was supposed to go.
Six full years of living that way, and somewhere along the line she had become the sort of person who could not even voice a complaint — who simply swallowed it down and endured.
It was a little sad.
Which might have been why I was teasing her more mercilessly than usual. In a situation like this, it was easier for her to drop the act and be herself.
"Ah. It looks like it might rain soon."
"...What are you talking about? The weather is perfectly—"
A thin trickle.
"Well? Can you feel the Breath of Great Nature a little now?"
"E. Dwin."
Or maybe I was just doing it because her reactions were fun...
If a youngest sibling had been born into my family, I would have spoiled them rotten. What a pity. What a real pity.