§
I’m not the original Mireia, My Lady. My real name is Nan Ankenda Edihaz. My friends called me ‘Daz’. I was older than this, but the years are different here, so I’m not sure by how much. At my age, mothers already have children attending school, so… perhaps around thirty in Huadean years?
I had no children though. The honor name ‘Nan’ is one that the Emperor grants to women who become Imperial Holy Protectors. We cannot marry, so he grants one of his names as our married name at our consecration, to mark us as his family. He does it so that it’s treason against him to lay hands on us.
I became a Protector because I possessed the aptitude to learn divine arts. Diur used the term “Holy Wizard” for my job in the Protectors, but we didn’t use that term. The Protectors recruited me into the division that maintains the climate and sends rain where it is needed. In the Empire, we leave the day-to-day weather to chance, but the Emperor decrees that neither droughts nor catastrophic floods may occur, and we rainmakers proudly carry out his will as his loyal servants.
I had a good life there. I was the most powerful rain artist in the order, so I could do my work quickly, and spend plenty of free time on simple entertainments like magic games and dramas. And my work was a job which helped everyone, so my days were always very fulfilling.
My world is very different from Huade. It’s less dangerous than here, I think. We don’t have monsters and demons everywhere. There are only three language-using species, and the civilized world is just us humans. A race of giant upright apes who live solitary lives like bears, using their magic arts to survive, dwell in wildernesses and the arctic, and dragons live in the seas and the mountains.
The dragons are our main problem, as Protectors. They have divine powers and can undo our work for whatever inscrutable reasons they have. The military can’t do a thing about them. They cause us extra work to get around whatever random trouble they’ve caused. Like when a mountain dragon covered his mountains with snow while we were trying to hold back the winter storms until the harvest finished in the nearby valleys.
I and two other divine artists were sent to the Opal Coast to fend off a great cyclone that an ancient sea dragon created. I had no art to stop a cyclone, but I could bring the blessing of rain to a chosen location. If I could cause enough rain to fall into the sea ahead of the cyclone and suck the water out of the atmosphere, I could cause it to lose power. Once I weakened it enough, my wind-working associates could steer the storm away from land. We were working on that when something yanked me, as if someone had grabbed me by the neck and pulled me upward. That was my last memory of my homeworld.
I woke up in a vaulted chamber with a moldy stone ceiling and a weird smell. Strangers in robes were standing all around me, looking down at me and muttering in a language I didn’t recognize. I could feel my bare skin against the stone floor, so I knew I was naked, but I couldn’t even twitch. I could just lay there on the cold floor, feeling a weird sensation, like ringing in my ears, but throughout my body.
Then the muttering stopped and the ringing went away, but I still couldn’t move. One of the strangers spoke down at me, then spoke again, then grew angry at me. But I couldn’t say anything back. He frowned and yelled something to people behind him, then suddenly men in armor carrying swords came and lifted me up.
That was so strange to me. Nobody in my world has used swords for hundreds of years, except for sports competitions, but these looked like actual sword-carrying soldiers. They tried to pull me to my feet, but I couldn’t stand, so they carried me to another room and hung me up by my wrists.
I could see my body now, but it wasn’t me. My old body was flat-chested and dumpy, but what I was actual breasts and a flat tummy. And… well, I could see pink hair hanging from my head, even though mine was black. I had never even seen pink hair in real life before that moment.
The man held my head up by my hair, still talking in a strange language, then he frowned and slapped my face. I couldn’t react at all.
Then he spoke to someone behind me, and I felt my butt getting whipped.
He spoke again, and then the whipping again, and it continued like that, speaking, whipping, speaking, whipping, while I couldn’t move. Then they tried hitting other parts of my body and the pain kept getting worse but I still couldn’t move. Finally, after the pain grew too much, suddenly I could move and I cried out.
“Finally!” the man yelled at me, the first word I understood in that place, then, “You’re a stubborn slut. Learn faster!”
I cried that I didn’t understand, which made him even angrier. I was whipped more, then the man just stormed out.
The soldiers attached a chain to the collar I was wearing, and let me down. They led me to a cell with a mat and a thin blanket and left me there to sleep. That was my first day on Huade.
When I woke up, I could remember the life of the girl whose body I was in. Her name was Mireia and she grew up in Suldor, until the local baron forced her mother and her into slavery. He wanted their land, so he kidnapped them and sold them to Parna Duchy.
He broke Royal law when he did that, but Mireia and her mother were just helpless peasants and could do nothing about it. Duke Parna’s son bought them because Mireia’s mother was still young and attractive, and he could see that Mireia would also grow up to be a beauty. He paid well for pretty slaves and didn’t care if they were illegal. Mireia’s mother went into his harem and Mireia became an apprentice maid. Then, when she was thirteen, they used her to summon me.
Nobody said anything about summoning me, though. In fact, the guards believed I was Mireia, and I was in that cell for angering the lord. But once a day, a stranger would bring me my one meal of the day, then point a black orb at me while muttering things while I ate. I couldn’t escape even when the door was open, because the chain on my collar was bolted to the wall, so I could only stay there and take it.
But my divine vision began returning to me after a few days, and I started to see that the man had an unclean aura no living human should have. Later on, Diur told me that it was a demon in human disguise, and the ‘unclean aura’ was demonic mana. I know mortals shouldn’t be able to see it without tools, but I see unclean auras where other people say there is miasma or demonic mana. Diur said this universe has different laws, but my divine sense can grasp them.
So I had the ability to see certain kinds of mana, but for some reason, I firmly believed I was unable to use my divine arts. If I could use them, I would have escaped. I didn’t learn until Diur captured me that I had been brainwashed. He had captured and tortured one of the demons who had been in control of me, so he was able to learn what they were doing with me.
Duke Parna’s son released me from the cell after a week and made me Lady Sasie’s attendant for school. Duke Parna wanted me at the school because the children of the Royal Family were there. They were going to use me to attack them directly when Cullen was ready to take power. While they waited, they kept sending me along with Lady Sasie on trips to see various allies of His Majesty King Owen.
As long as I had seen my target and knew their name, and I knew exactly where they were at that moment, I could cast Divine Bane on them. Someone would put me in a trance, and have me use my divine arts. Mostly, I used Divine Bane, which Diur calls [Holy Scourge]. All divine artists of the Imperial Holy Protectors learn Divine Bane, even though we never use it, because it’s the Empire’s greatest deterrent for war. As one of the most powerful artists in the Protectors, I could use it especially well.
I was being used to slowly destroy one person after another surrounding the King. During last school year, before you came to school, they used me on several important people. I could only hurt one target at a time, or I’m sure they would have used me a lot more.
I never knew it when I was awake. Even though I was maintaining the art the entire time, I remained convinced, when I wasn’t in the trance, that I couldn’t use Divine Arts. It never occurred to me to even try, even though I was maintaining the spell the whole time.
Then, when Lady Sasie was injured while we were traveling, I became desperate to heal her and accidentally discovered that I could still use curative arts. Or rather, that my training in curative arts allowed me to use this world’s [Healing]. But I convinced myself it was only because that one magic happened to exist in both worlds. I still believed my other divine arts were not available to me in this world.
Mireia had already learned some simple Light magic, like [Fairy Light], before my summoning. You shouldn’t be able to do both, so when the school learned I had Healing magic after they already knew about my Light magic, they drafted me into the Royal Army as a military student. But I couldn’t stop obeying the Parnas. I didn’t know why, but I kept following Sasie’s orders, even though the teachers kept telling me I didn’t have to.
My handlers never gave me directions for how to curse my targets. They simply told me to ruin their lives. So when they made you my target, I must have imagined you as a villainess and myself as a heroine. I began to cast Divine Blessing on myself, and Divine Scourges on you with that same old scenario in mind. So, when I was awake, it looked to me exactly like I was somehow caught up in a maiden game. And the result… well, you know the result, My Lady.
But then Diur captured me and broke my art, and my brainwashing, and I learned what I had done. And then he left me with the prince, and warned him never to let me fall back in the enemy’s hands. That’s why His Highness keeps me with him all the time, My Lady.
§
Obviously, we interrupted her and asked for clarifications several times, and I edited those out. The preceding was a condensed version of Mireia’s words.
“This is… so terribly difficult to believe,” Lady Chiara declared when she finished, but then looked over at me and said, “But, My Lady, it’s what you described at the Fairy King’s Castle, isn’t it?”
“The Fairy King’s Castle?” Mireia echoed, sounding slightly baffled.
“It’s exactly what I was talking about,” I nodded, and thought carefully. “So you can actually use these magics, even now? Blessing, bane, rainmaking…”
“Diur warned me not to use them anymore, or the demons might trace my location. And I actually can’t use rainmaking. It’s a divine intervention, so it requires communion with my goddess, and I can’t commune with her anymore.”
Perhaps she could commune with Oranos, but I didn’t mention it. But rain would be his department, if it was anyone’s
Mireia was beginning to fade a bit, and I noticed her pneuma looked very fatigued. I told her, “It’s time for you to sleep, Miss Mireia. Stop using whatever you’re doing to keep yourself awake.”
She nodded drowsily. “I think so, too.”
“And time for you to feed, My Lady,” Lady Chiara teased, kneeling next to my cot with a light smirk on her face. She was already unbuttoning the collar of her uniform.
I wondered, “Don’t you want to wait for her to fall asleep?”
She chuckled and gave Mireia a teasing look. “It depends upon how Miss Mireia feels about watching.”
“Does it… feel the same way for you that it did for me?” Mireia asked carefully.
“Oh, from the way you’re blushing, I suspect that it does.”
