The Witch and the Prince (1)
I took a sip of the tea Joshua had brewed for me and let out a contented hum. “Mmm. This tea is delicious. The aroma is wonderful too.”
It seemed to have a calming effect; a gentle warmth spread through my body, leaving me pleasantly drowsy. The scent felt strangely familiar, like something I’d smelled often before. And the color—how unique it was. It carried a vivid blue that reminded me of Joshua’s butterflies. At first the sharp, tingling aftertaste had felt a bit bland, but thinking that the very mildness came from her special affection made it taste even better.
Waking up in the morning, sharing breakfast with Joshua, then leisurely drinking tea while helping her study. Just another ordinary day. Maybe it was because something I’d taken for granted had suddenly gained new meaning.
Mom. I’m her mom now. Hehe.
The memory of yesterday’s events kept flashing through my mind, making it impossible to focus on the tea’s flavor. I barely managed to stop the corners of my mouth from curling upward. Every time she called me “Mom,” she expressed her embarrassment with her whole body. If I smiled now, she’d probably puff out her cheeks and go straight into sulking mode.
“Right? I dried the petals that grow on my body and steeped them. I was worried there might be poison, so I tried it alone first, and it was fine.”
Joshua reached up and gently touched the butterfly-shaped flower blooming above her right eye. Come to think of it, the flower bud that had been on her right shoulder was nowhere to be seen now.
She even worried about the poison for me.
A small wave of emotion washed over me. I was about to take another sip when a sudden thought crossed my mind, and I set the teacup down.
She made tea from flowers that grew on her own body…?
That scent, that taste… No wonder it felt familiar. The cozy, sweetly comforting body scent I’d noticed when sleeping beside her—it was exactly the same. I’d even felt strangely calmed while breathing it in.
Recalling my memories from my previous life, this tea could basically be considered Joshua’s bathwater.
I’d thought it tasted bland because it lacked that sharp bite, but mentally speaking, it was anything but bland.
“Never serve this tea to anyone else, okay?”
This was a dangerous tea. The useless worry that someone might discover its true nature and turn Joshua into a lifelong tea-brewing slave flashed through my head.
“Does it… taste strange?”
“It’s not about the taste. You need to value yourself more!”
Serving someone your own bathwater! I didn’t raise Joshua to be such a shameless girl. I’d only taught her magic, alchemy, medicinal herbs, and medicinal plants. I’d never once given her proper sex education. Or explained how humans currently lived, what kind of culture they had. Since I didn’t know everything myself, I couldn’t teach her all of it. And ever since Joshua became my assistant, we’d never gone down to the village even once. Maybe it was time to make an opportunity.
“Flowers grow back quickly anyway.”
Seeing her smile so innocently made me feel like the weird one. I suddenly felt drained.
“Mom, I have one question.”
“A question?”
While we were tidying up the teacups after tea time, Joshua asked hesitantly.
“Why did you become a witch, Mom?”
“Huh?”
“Well… witches are usually scary, right? They curse people and do evil things. In all the stories I heard as a child, witches were always portrayed as bad. But Mom… you’re so different from the witches I know. Even if you weren’t a witch, I think you’d still be an amazing person. Like a hero who saves the world, or a mage who defeats an evil dragon.”
It wasn’t easy to answer right away.
A witch who, in exchange for immortality, shoulders a curse instead of the usual witch’s burden. Witches were generally avoided by people. The very nature of a witch’s power was closer to a curse that easily corrupted human hearts. There were rarely good intentions behind the use of that power.
To a witch, a curse was a mass of obsession born from the depths of selfishness. Because it stemmed from emotions like love, jealousy, or hatred, the more power they used, the more people around them got dragged into the mess.
Most of the witches who appeared in the original story ended up wielding that power to destroy kingdoms or threaten the world, only to be defeated. It was only after the love story of one particular witch across multiple series ultimately saved the world that people’s perception of witches began to change.
Even if I had chosen a different path, witches would never have been viewed favorably. A bitter smile rose to my lips.
“Joshua’s gotten so plump and soft lately. Should I just eat you up?”
“I’m not joking.”
I pinched her cheek and tried to change the subject with a joke, but it didn’t work.
“Didn’t I tell you before? The reason I became a witch.”
“That was a lie, wasn’t it?”
It had been three years since Joshua became my assistant. The stories I’d told her while making love potions, just to have someone to talk to, apparently hadn’t felt like the real reason.
But it wasn’t a lie. At the time, among the conditions I wanted, becoming a witch had been the easiest to achieve. I hadn’t cared much about the disadvantages that came with it. Whether it was curses or witch hunts, it didn’t matter. As long as I survived, that was enough. In time, the protagonists would step forward and improve how witches were treated anyway.
I’d been so excited about becoming a witch that I hadn’t even properly listened to the whispers of the curse echoing in my head. And that curse had a way to lift it later, so I hadn’t worried about it much. Right now it was a despised and scorned profession, but later it would become a premium job—so much so that the academy would invite witches as professors of dark magic. Only I knew that.
I realized belatedly that to Joshua, it must have sounded like a lie.
But saying I knew the future… the original story was set three hundred years before the main timeline. I didn’t even know when the man lying in that sickbed would wake up, so I was hesitant to casually claim I knew the future.
“We’re family now. You can tell me the truth. If it’s difficult, you don’t have to…”
She said it was okay not to tell me if it was difficult, yet she was using even the butterfly on her body to look all droopy and pitiful. That was cheating.
I had to come up with some believable reason, anything would do.
“Hehehe. Looks like I have no choice but to tell you now.”
With a resigned sigh, I sat down on the sofa and beckoned Joshua over. Her eyes sparkled as she hurried to sit right beside me. It was adorable.
“The truth is, witches can wield a special kind of power. It’s different from curses—a power so wonderful it could even be called a miracle.”
The ultimate technique that characters in other games possessed. Also known as an ultimate skill or a finishing move—the technique that decided victory or defeat.
In Aria Chronicle, there were also ultimate skills called Ulti. You could only use them once per battle, so they had to be used strategically—a secret trump card.
A swordsman could cleave the sky with a single sword dance. An archer could send arrows to places they couldn’t possibly reach. A mage could summon a meteor to end a war. A hero could defeat the Demon King and bring peace to the world.
All of that was possible because of their Ulti.
A witch’s Ulti belonged to the realm of invisible concepts. In the game it was implemented as a debuff, so most players just thought of it as a debuff skill. But if you dug into the lore, it was described as “a wish so pure and noble that calling it a curse would be wrong.”
The monologue spoken by Zeke Fricks, the protagonist of the fourth series, when he witnessed the End Witch’s Ulti, made it sound far closer to a miracle than a curse. So what I’d told Joshua wasn’t exactly wrong.
“Someday, a great danger will come to this world. And a witch’s power is something this world will desperately need.”
Unlike the previous works where treatment improved somewhat, in the epilogue of the fourth series, the Holy Kingdom even halted its witch hunts. Witches had played a major role in protecting the world.
“But the one who saves the world is the hero, right? Is it really so dangerous that even you have to step forward, Mom?”
It wasn’t that the hero was weak enough that I had to intervene.
“Even a hero can’t protect the entire world alone. Someone has to help, don’t you think?”
A hero couldn’t save everything by himself. That’s why there were companions and supporters.
“Hmm… I still don’t really understand. Then witches are good people, right? So why do people hate and fear them?”
The only witch Joshua had ever met was me. It would be problematic if she started viewing all witches through a positive lens. In the actual story, most witches were violent, self-centered, and saw people only as tools to further their own plans.
“Even good people can’t always be good. And even bad people can’t always be bad. That goes for witches and everyone else. No matter how kind you are, Joshua, there are moments when you get angry, right?”
“I’m going to check on the patient!”
Apparently struck by a guilty conscience, Joshua hurriedly fled the room. I let out a deep sigh as I watched her go.
I didn’t feel good about lying to her. If I just told her everything—that I knew the future, that this was the world of the original story—what if she decided to become a witch too?
Had I ever received this kind of attention from someone before? Even when I lived with Dorothy, the West Witch, it hadn’t been like this.
So this is what it feels like when someone else’s interest becomes uncomfortable.
Feeling the need to create a proper justification that others could accept, I headed toward where Joshua had gone.