Chương 56: “Search and Rescue (2)”

Anna had always been a timid child. She had a soft-spoken voice, and would often flinch when people around her were loud; she had a habit of looking at her feet whenever someone she didn't know talked to her. And because of that, the other children in the village bullied her for it. They called her names, excluded her from their games, and on the occasions they did include her, it was usually as the target of one.

So, Anna stopped trying to join in and instead spent her time alone, wandering the fields and the treeline near the edge of the village, looking at flowers and plants. She liked them. They were just there, growing in the dirt, doing whatever it was that plants did, and Anna found that comforting. She started collecting petals and leaves that fell, and kept them pressed underneath flat stones behind her house, though she didn't know why. It just felt like the right thing to do. Then one night, she got sick.

It was a common cold, nothing dangerous, but Anna's small body didn't handle it well. Her fever spiked, and her parents, worried enough, sent for the village apothecary. He was an elderly man with a tired voice. He checked on Anna while she lay in bed, her vision hazy and her body aching. Through half-closed eyes, she watched him open the leather bag he'd brought with him and pull out a handful of plants.

She recognized a few of them, they were the ones she'd seen growing along the rugged forest road, alongside other ones she didn't know of. The apothecary placed the plants on the table beside her bed and pulled out a small stone bowl with a heavy rounded stick. He dropped the leaves in and began grinding them in slow circles. When the leaves had been reduced to a thick paste, he scraped it into a cup, added water, and lifted Anna's head so she could drink.

It tasted awful, and she wanted to vomit it out, but she was too weak to complain. The very next day, her fever went down, and the day after that, it was gone. Anna lay in bed on the morning of her recovery, staring at the ceiling, thinking about what had happened. Who knew that the plants she had always enjoyed looking at could fix her? This had sparked a childlike curiosity within her; she wanted to know more. The moment she was well enough to walk, she went to the apothecary's home and knocked on his door.

She asked him to teach her, but he said no. It was the first time in Anna's life that she wanted something, so she came back the next day and asked again. He refused yet again. But Anna was adamant about it. She came back the day after that, and the day after that, until eventually the old man sighed, and told her she could start by sweeping the floor. It wasn't an apprenticeship in any real sense yet. Anna cleaned his house, organized his shelves, and carried his bags when he made visits.

But she wasn't allowed to touch anything plant or medicine-related. What she did find, however, were his books. There were just a few of them, thick volumes with worn covers, hidden somewhere in the back room. She pulled one down, opened it, and found pages filled with detailed drawings of plants, alongside dense blocks of text she couldn't read. After all, as a commoner, nobody had taught her letters. Anna sat on the floor of the apothecary's back room with the book open on her lap, staring at the illustrations.

The apothecary found her like that one afternoon. He walked into the room to get something and noticed the small girl frown at a page of one his medical encyclopedias. He chuckled, and then he sat down beside her. This was the first time he had started acting as her mentor. He taught her letters, and made Anna practice writing every afternoon after her chores were done, giving her a small notebook to write with. It took her several months to finally be able to read at a basic level.

From there, the apothecary began letting her help with actual work. With basic preparations at first: grinding herbs, distilling small samples, and sorting dried plants by type. Then he took her into the forest to forage, teaching her which plants to pick, which to avoid, and where certain fauna tended to grow depending on the soil and the shade. She spent the next four years doing this. Every day that she wasn't helping her parents with household work, she was at the apothecary's side, learning.

She memorized the contents of his books page by page. She learned to tell nearly identical plants apart, and to feel the state of dried herbs by their texture between her fingers. By the time she was ten, she could prepare most of the standard remedies on her own. She would have stayed in that village for the rest of her life if her father hadn't gotten a new job. The opportunity was in a larger settlement, it was closer to being called a town than a village, with better pay and a proper house.

Her parents couldn't turn it down. On the day they were about to leave, she stood in front of the apothecary's home with her hands clasped in front of her, and she sniffled, about to cry. The old man came out and handed her one of his books. It was the medical encyclopedia of plants, the one she'd first opened on his floor when she couldn't read a single word. Anna held it against her chest with both arms, and she cried. The old apothecary patted her on the head, told her to study hard, and went back inside.

With a new home came along with it new opportunities, the school she was attending was a single building with three classrooms and a yard of packed dirt. But it was more formal education than Anna had ever received, and the apothecary's teaching had given her a head start. She could already read and write while many of her classmates were still learning their letters. The years that followed passed quickly.

Her knowledge of plants, built from four years at the old man's side, set her apart in the school's few science and medical-related classes. She earned a scholarship that let her continue her studies, and from there, she threw herself deeper into herbology, learning things that went far beyond what a village apothecary would have known. When she was fifteen, she entered a regional herbology competition and won. It was a good life. She had found something she loved and she was good at it.

Her social skills, however, were another matter entirely. Anna could talk about plants for hours. She could explain the difference between two nearly identical species with genuine excitement. But put her in a room with people who wanted to discuss anything else, and she shut down. She'd stammer, stare at her feet, and apologize even when she didn't make a mistake. It had gotten bad enough that it nearly cost her everything.

A baron's daughter had commissioned her to prepare a cosmetic, something like a tinted cream for the skin. Anna had made the product perfectly. But when she delivered it, she had been so nervous in the baron's daughter's presence that she'd knocked over the sample tray, stammered through her explanation, and at one point accidentally implied that the baron's daughter's complexion needed fixing. She had nearly been thrown into a cell for it.

The baron's daughter had, thankfully, found it more amusing than offensive, and Anna had escaped with her freedom. After that, she observed how people spoke to nobles, how to flatter them, and how to avoid offending them. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. She even got invited to sit in on tea parties occasionally, when a kind hostess needed more bodies to fill out a table. It was at these gatherings that Anna first heard the gossip of high society.

Most of it meant nothing to her, names and scandals and feuds between families she would never meet. One name came up more than others: Celestia von Reingarde. The heiress of a ducal house. Cruel, they said. Overbearing. A girl who treated commoners like dirt and nobles only slightly better. Anna had listened politely and thought nothing more of it. After all, that kind of life had nothing to do with her.

Then Summit Academy offered her a scholarship for herbology research, focused on plant species that originated from inside the Tower. Since it was a way to push through her studies, she accepted without hesitation. She arrived at the female dormitory on her first day carrying everything she owned in a carriage. Then, she spent most of her time unloading everything into her room.

Once she was finished, she went around the dormitory to familiarize herself, before going back to the lobby to simply idle about and look at all the faces she'd be seeing for the rest of the year. That was when a carriage pulled up outside. It was black and gold, with a silver crest on the door. A maid stepped out first, followed by a young woman Anna's age. Golden-blonde hair that fell straight past her shoulders. A fitted dress trimmed with gold, paired with white gloves and a folded fan held in one hand.

Pale skin and crimson eyes that seemed like it could kill you with a glare.

"That insignia's from House Reingarde, isn't it?" Anna recognized the name the moment someone nearby whispered it. And much to her surprise, for some reason, the dangerous-looking woman was looking directly at Anna. The fan snapped closed.

"You there. Show me where the dormitory room assignments are posted." Anna's knees nearly buckled. Knowing better than to outright refuse, she eventually led Celestia to where the dormitory room assignments were, and when she discovered that Celestia's room was right next to hers…

'I'm doomed,' she had thought. Her life here at Summit was basically over. And then the academy tour happened. Anna had frozen completely. Her legs gave out, and she'd fallen to the ground, unable to move. She remembered the staff members dying in front of her, the blood, the screaming students, and the suffocating feeling that she was next. Celestia had grabbed her arm, steadied her, and told her, "Don't look. Keep your eyes on me." Then Celestia had turned and fought the demon herself.

'Why?' Anna had replayed the moment dozens of times afterward. Celestia could have run. She could have left Anna on the ground and saved herself. Instead, she had stood between Anna and a demon, with a spear that had been hidden inside her fan, and she had killed it.

'Could it be that all those rumors were wrong?' Celestia was scary. That part was true. Her glare alone was enough to make most people look away. Her words were blunt, often rude, and she made no effort to soften them. She gave orders and expected them to be followed, and she looked at most people with an expression that ranged from disinterest to open contempt. But Anna had started to notice small things that didn't match the reputation she kept hearing about. At the core of it, she knew that Celestia was kind.

That she was someone who went out of her way to avoid showing it, and from what Anna could tell, it was as if Celestia was afraid that people would see that part of her. She kept it hidden behind sharp words and cold looks. Why this was the case, Anna never asked. Getting sponsored for her breakthrough project on potions. Having a proper lab of her own, stocked with materials she could never have afforded.

Spending evenings with Celestia and Sir Ozy, the pug eating between them while Anna talked about whatever came to mind. It was a truly joyous time, one that made Anna realize that she missed and lacked the human connection as close as she had with her first mentor. * Anna was tied to a chair. Her wrists were bound behind her back with rough rope, and a strip of cloth had been pulled across her mouth.

Below her, carved into the floor, she could barely make out was a circle, lines and symbols extended from its edges in patterns. Her left wrist had been cut. A thin incision along the inside of her forearm. The blood ran down her fingers and dripped steadily onto the circle below. Anna could feel herself getting weaker. Her vision was hazy, and her breathing was shallow against the gag. Her arms had stopped hurting at some point, which she knew was a bad sign. The last thing she remembered before this was her bed.

She had gone to sleep in her dormitory room. And then suddenly, she found herself here, in the dark, tied to this chair and bleeding. The room was decently-sized and the windows looked to be covered with curtains. From what she could make out, there were also expensive looking chairs and tables pushed to the side. A young man stood in front of her. He seemed to be a student, judging from the academy uniform he was wearing. However, Anna didn't know who he was. He had already been talking for a while.

"---honestly be thanking me," he said, pacing in a slow arc in front of the chair.

"A commoner like you, serving as a lackey to that Reingarde bitch, you think that was going to amount to anything? You think she actually cared about you?" He stopped pacing and looked at Anna as though expecting a response. Anna stared back at him through blurred vision. The gag made it impossible to speak. He continued anyway, "I met her once years ago at a banquet my family attended. She acted as if I hadn't asked her hand for a ballroom dance." His voice tightened.

"A lesser noble isn't worth acknowledging, is that it? Not worth a single glance from the oh-so great Celestia von Reingarde." He resumed pacing.

"But that's fine. That's all going to change. And you're going to help, whether you want to or not. Your life has a use now. You should be honored." He gestured at the circle on the floor.

"You were a perfect choice, nobody's going to come looking for you. With how many people were keeping tabs on one another these days, I only had so few options to choose from. Then I saw you… a commoner that vixen doesn't even care about." Anna's eyes were wet with tears; she tried to speak, to beg, to say anything, but the cloth muffled it all into nothing.

'Please. I don't want to die here.' The man didn't notice her crying, or if he did, he didn't care. He crouched beside the circle and examined the blood that had pooled along the engravings. He seemed satisfied. Anna's head drooped. Her body was getting heavier by the minute. The edges of the room were starting to blur together, and her thoughts were slowing down.

'Had Celestia woken up by now?' She had thought about their usual morning routine. Anna was supposed to knock on Celestia's door and take Sir Ozy for his walk while she did her morning exercises. If she wasn't there, who would feed him? He'd press his face against the bars of his carrier and wait, and nobody would come. Her vision dimmed further. Everything, even her thoughts, were getting harder to keep track.

'I don't want to die.'

'Ah... I really don't want to die.'..... Then the wall exploded. The blast ripped through the far side of the room, throwing dust and chunks of stone across the floor. Light flooded in from the hole where the wall had been, blinding after the darkness. The man stumbled backward, shielding his face with his arms.

"W-what's happening?!" Anna raised her head. A figure stood as the dust was still settling around her, and the light from the corridor behind her cast her in sharp contrast against the ruined wall. Golden-blonde hair and crimson eyes that were fixed on the man with an expression Anna had never seen before on Celestia's face. Celestia held her fan in one hand. With a twist of her fingers, the decorative leaves fell away, clattering to the ground in pieces. The outer guard dropped. What remained was a metal rod.

She swung it to her side, and it extended with a sharp snap, locking into the shape of a spear. She raised it, pointing it towards the man.

"You dared to touch what's mine?"