Overwriting Onahole Plee's Happiest Memories

When I was little, other children my age were lost in games of house and jacks. I was already teaching myself to understand the four elements of magic.

"Father! Mother! Look! I figured out how to make fire and water at the same time!!"

I was smiling with my whole face, and in my small hands fire and water showed off their separate colors while drawing together into a single sphere. At the orb of magic I had made, Father and Mother froze with their mouths open in the very same instant, neither of them a heartbeat ahead of the other.

Then Father broke first. He rushed over, lifted me high in both hands, and smiled bright as the sun.

"Incredible. That's our girl... You must have inherited your mother's hidden talent. There's no doubt about it!"

Seeing him like that, Mother laughed shyly and stroked my hair.

"Of course she did. Whose daughter do you think she is? Our Plee is going to become a great mage—a grand mage who saves weak people like us."

In those days my house was dirt poor. Even so, it held my parents' warmth and the love they poured into me, and that made it the happiest home in the world.

Then my talent shattered that happiness, and my everyday life along with it.

"I'll be taking Plee to the Magic Tower. Shape her properly from here on, and that talent of hers may well surpass Kalzeon... that man."

An old mage with his robe drawn up over his head, the air around him heavy and oppressive, declared he would take me to the Tower on the strength of my talent. Father found the courage to stand in front of me.

"Th-that's far too sudden, and more than anything, it ought to be Plee's choice..."

"He's right... If Plee herself wanted to go, that would be one thing, but we can't send her off just because we decide to."

Emboldened by Father, Mother wrapped her arms around me and added her voice. The old mage seemed to find that irritating. He flicked a finger through the empty air.

"I see. So if Plee wishes it, I'm to take her."

The moment his mouth closed, the mother and father who had been shielding me coughed blood and collapsed to the floor. The parents I loved writhed as if the pain were unbearable, gasping for breath, and before I knew it their movements had dwindled until they hardly stirred at all.

He looked at me—frozen in panic, shaking where I stood—and opened his mouth.

"Yes... Your parents told me that if you wished it, I should take you to the Magic Tower. Well, Plee? What do you want to do?"

"I-I'll go... so please, sob, save Father and Mother... please... ngh—"

It was the moment a shadow called despair, riding in on tears, first carved itself into eyes that had always shone so brightly.

"Good. Unlike your parents, you're a clever child..."

The old mage smiled as if deeply satisfied, the corners of his mouth threatening to split, and a green light rose from Mother's and Father's bodies as their wounds began to close.

"Come along, then."

Father... Mother... no. Mom, Dad... I'll come back soon.

That was my last memory of the home where I had been happy.

Life in the Magic Tower was plentiful. I wanted for nothing. There was food more lavish than anything I had ever seen, a fine bed, a private room furnished with all sorts of expensive pieces. And yet the cream soup Mother used to make tasted better, and falling asleep between Father and Mother had been far softer, far cozier.

So I hid my magic on purpose, trying to bore the old mage. I worked to make him believe the talent he had seen was nothing more than a breeze that had brushed past me in childhood and gone.

Years passed with my magic stuck in place. At last the old mage rose without a word and left the Tower, and only months later did he reappear, badly wounded, with a blond boy beside him.

The boy's body was a map of ugly scars, as if he had been tortured, and filth clung to him. His eyes, though, had not lost their warmth—a warmth the same color as his blond hair. Looking into those eyes, I felt the despair etched into mine begin, just a little, to fade, and my face grew hot.

Even after the old mage dragged him in, the black-haired boy never lost his spirit. Unlike me, living on fine food in a proper room, he had to eat and sleep among the livestock. About once a month the old mage subjected him to some inexplicable experiment, and every time it ended he lay collapsed in the pigsty, breathing hard.

I held out a hunk of bread I had saved for him.

"Eat."

He hadn't so much as glanced at me when I stepped into the pen—only steadied his breathing—and now he shook his head.

"You eat. You pitiful."

I'm pitiful?

I flinched, and the black-haired boy spoke again.

"Eyes dead. Dead eyes. Pitiful person."

I knew. From the day I was dragged to the Tower, every time I looked in a mirror my eyes were completely dead. The bright eyes Mother had praised as the loveliest in the world no longer shone at all.

"Who... who do you think you are?! What would someone like you know, going on about dead eyes!! You were dragged here too!!"

I lashed out at the black-haired boy, shouting, trying to cut him where it hurt.

"I haven't given up on escaping!"

It was the first time he answered me in a complete sentence. It was absurd. And yet that voice, that word, that sentence set my heart pounding.

"Let me in on it too..."

I said it low, my face red, then ducked my head and started watching for his reaction.

"Then teach me. The common tongue."

From that day on I went to him every dawn and taught him the common tongue of the Aios Continent, and all manner of other knowledge besides. He took it in at an impossible speed, and the hours I spent with him were the only happiness I could feel inside the Tower.

Before I knew it, years had passed, and he and I had both become proper adults of twenty.

"Hey! That's not how you do it!!"

When I was with him my eyes shone, and my mouth was full of laughter.

"This formula's more efficient."

"Oh? Look at you, all grown up. Talking back to me now!"

I threw a playful one-two into the black-haired man's forearm, and he stared straight at me before he spoke.

"Give me a name..."

"What...?"

"They say they're going to experiment on me again tomorrow... This time... I've got a bad feeling.... If... if something goes wrong, I don't want to be left in your memory as nothing but 'hey, you'..."

He stared at the floor with unsteady eyes, shaking, and I pressed my lips to his.

"......Plee, what is this..."

His face was red, his fingers at his own mouth, and I smiled as I answered.

"Don't be afraid. You were the conviction I refused to let break, and you still are... so from now on, your name is S—"