Life Changes, and So do People

And so the years passed on, and the four children would grow even closer to each other, sharing hobbies, losing some, and gaining others.

With Ryuji’s influence, Altair began to pick up an interest in bonsai. Her father also encouraged the idea because he believed that it could be used to cultivate her patience and attention to detail.

Yoruhi also began to pick up one of Ryuji’s hobbies as well.

During a visit to the apartment-tree that he lived in, Yoruhi came into his room for the first time and was impressed by the papercrafts that adorned the counters and hung from the ceilings on tiny strings. With a little encouragement, he was soon making small origami animals and being taught by Ryuji who learned from his mom.

When the school season began during the Blossom Moon, the two remaining illiterate children learned how to read and write. It was here that Ryuji and Tatsuko began to take an interest in reading stories and books about the many different places around the world.

“I want to see the Perseids Lake!” Tatsuko declared one day while the group was looking at travel pamphlets. “I heard that the lake is like a camera that captures the night sky and shows it to you the next morning! And when the shooting stars fall across it, it becomes really really pretty!”

“What about the Rainbow Sea?” Ryuji added, “I heard that the water is so clear that the colorful fishes that swim through it make it look like a rainbow!”

They turned to Yoruhi as if expecting him to add on.

“I uh… I like the Butterfly Palace,” he said, “because floating in the sky using butterflies is pretty cool.”

They look to Altair.

“What about you?” Tatsuko asked eagerly.

“Umm… probably the Mountain of Gold in Elmsvale,” she said, “I like how it’s not actually a mountain nor is it really made out of gold, and that it only looks like its name because of how pretty the tall buildings shine at night.”

“Hehe, those are some good choices,” Tatsuko, “let’s go see them all one day!”

Indeed, another one of the reasons why the group was so close was because there wasn’t a single day that Tatsuko didn’t express her desire to all be together in the future. It reminded them that they were all in this together, and that they always had someone to talk to about their dreams.

Every day, each child practiced and trained for their future roles in the imaginary guild they made. Tatsuko would be the assassin, in charge of scouting forth and weakening dangerous monsters; Ryuji would be the swordsman, charging into battle and protecting his teammates in the back; Yoruhi would be their mage, focusing on dealing most of the heavy damage so that Tatsuko can finish them off; and most importantly, Altair would be their healer, making sure that they came out of every battle okay.

When Tatusko turned seven, Vivian deemed her old enough to begin to play with daggers, and gifted her her first dagger set on her birthday. It contained a wide variety of daggers each used for a different purpose and each hidden in different ways.

There were the karambits for slashing, rondel daggers for puncturing armor, push daggers for close quarters and stabbing, and the throwing knives for ranged attacks. “A good assassin always carries around one of each type of dagger so that she is prepared for every situation,” Vivian explained to her.

In order to improve Tatsuko’s accuracy and skill, Vivian used tough fruits and vegetables as target dummies; which the friends always enjoyed eating the aftermath of, especially during the summer.

Tatsuko’s acrobatic skills also improved with time, and the various spins that Vivian taught her proved to be useful in more ways than one. Like its original purpose did, it taught her how to remain balanced while moving at fast speeds, especially through the air, but most importantly, it also helped develop the muscles for powerful pivot attacks. Her skills would rapidly improve, and by the time she was eight, Vivian began taking her on hunting trips to get her used to killing things.

Next came Ryuji, who, even before he developed his first magical capabilities, was excelling in the dojo. His swordsmanship was remarkable and his innate strength allowed him to stand on par with those who had already developed enhancement magic before him. When he eventually figured it out at the age of eight, he became unstoppable, and Hayate began to see him as an adoptive son.

Their bond together would only improve when it came time to choose which sword path to go on. Being the jack of all trades, the Draconic Balance style was used as the precursor to the other styles taught by the other family heads of the Sakura Noble Family, who specialized in either attack, defense, or randomness. Many children often branched off to specialize in the fields they think they were the best in, but Ryuji stuck with the Draconic Balance, swearing to master the art of a well-rounded fighting style, and making Hayate ever proud of his best student in years.

Meanwhile, Yoruhi came to excel very quickly in his magic studies with Arien and Ezekiel. He learned to control his fireballs and began practicing using his Frost magic to mix in attacks. His most inexperienced field by far was in Life magic. He couldn’t find a practical use for it since he was not a healer, and he was far from capable of being a proper summoner, which were the two magic styles that Life magic excelled at.

There was also the prospect of Weaving, but he had trouble detecting the magicule makeup of things, and so he was not very good at it. Ezekiel helped to bandaid this by teaching Yoruhi what he could, and Yoruhi managed to finally pick up Enhancement Magic when he seven. But at last, Ezekiel was growing old as most dwarves could grow, and so he left the estate by the time Yoruhi turned eight, in order to go visit the grave of his late wife in Ruhrberg one last time.

Cedric eventually left the estate soon after Ezekiel did, preparing to report his findings to his colleagues and teacher in Weiming.

Arien would go on to train Yoruhi into a capable caster, and by the time he was nine, he was able to cast a wide array of attack patterns.

Lastly, Altair continued the studies of medicine and healing under her father. When she turned seven, she touched the Attunement Crystal for the first time and discovered that her three elements were Life, Storm, and Frost. Mr. Weiss was ecstatic upon discovering this and began buying her plants to practice cellular regeneration on.

Yoruhi would often come by to watch her practice, learning and processing how Altair used Life magic to apply it to his own studies. She would exceed him by far with her capabilities however, and by the time she was nine, trips with her father to heal clients would become more common, and she became capable of healing small cuts and minor injuries.

The children, now nine, were all now able to wield magic, besides Tatsuko, who had a hard time figuring it out.

Ryuji also became a bit of an anomaly after touching the Attunement Crystal and finding out that he was only capable of wielding two elements: Earth and Wind. This was actually not too uncommon of an occurrence, and there have even been many cases where a person was only capable of wielding just one.

Tatsuko was understandably deflated by this, seeing her friends all excel magically ahead of her. She patiently waited for the day she would be able to wield the three elements she had: Light, Life, and Wind.

Over the years however, she slowly started to lose her charm and ambition she once had when she was younger. Not being able to use magic at an age where most people already were, was one cause of this, but another cause with the deterioration of one of her closest friends, Fukuro.

The owl had been acting strangely in the past year. Its wings grew darker and the vibrant iridescent colors it once had were starting to fade into black. It had also been wheezing like most birds do when they were infected with a disease, but even with the help of Mr. Weiss, he could not figure out what was wrong with her. It eventually culminated to a point where the owl seemed on the verge of death, and seldom ate the food it was fed.

“Fukuro what’s wrong?” Tatsuko silently asked the bird as she watched it perched lopsidedly on her counter.

Sometimes she could swear the bird was already dead, but its tiny heaves as it breathed indicated that it was still alive.

“You’re supposed to be my scout-in-arms, when we grow up,” Tatsuko murmured. “Don’t die okay? Get better soon… okay?”

She gently patted the bird, and watched its eyes as it gazed out the window.

What could she be staring at? Tatsuko wondered. Where are you looking to, my dear friend?

Meanwhile, faraway on the other side of town, a murder had occurred and the body had not been properly buried. Over the year the scene was left undiscovered, a strange crack in reality began to form…