Diary
The green light shone on your body once more, sucking you into a new world of fantasy. Your world seemed to spring to life, where its monochrome grays suddenly were replaced with color. Just for a split moment, you could see the whole world, from its denizens in their medieval castles to the majestic legendary creatures that lived in the deep jungle. Before you had a chance to even begin processing, your soul grew weary, falling into a deep slumber.
As you woke up, you found yourself in a comfortable dorm room, with warm dirt brown wooden walls surrounding you. You pinched your orange fur, trying to ensure that this wasn’t just some hallucination of yours. Yep, it hurts.
Glancing around, you could see that this was a private minimalistic room. Various thick textbooks stacked on top of one another on the desk while a small calendar hung on the side. It reads 2nd Freka with its date highlighted in red. In that same column, all the dates were red before moving onto the next row. You figured it must be a weekend of sorts, heaving a sigh of relief. It would be awkward for you to enter into class, completely clueless about this world. What even is a Freka? December?
A gust of cold wind brushed against your fur as you huddled almost on instinct in your warm blanket. Guess it was winter now. You then noticed how soft it was, was this silk? Wait, it's actually silk. God damn she was also rich. But that added to the mystery, why would someone leave their comfortable life?
As you got out of bed, clumsily still trying to balance yourself with your new hindpaws, you turned back to see a bloody incomplete magic circle. Arcanic symbols written on its circumference, leaving a message in dark red behind in its dead center: “I’m sorry.”
Your body trembled upon the sight of it. Goosebumps appeared on your arms. Your tails quickly froze as you tried to understand what had just happened. Was this their way of reality hopping? It has to be right?
Once you regained your balance on your two hindpaws, your tails swished back to normal, knocking over a red book beside your pillow. You grabbed the book with your paws, still feeling like an alien. Everything was all so sensitive from your squishy paw pads and your twin tails that brushed against the surfaces of your bed.
You squinted at the book, making out the faint faded text as “My Diary”. Fortunately, you could still understand the words as proper English. You flipped through the yellow faded pages, noticing how violent and dark the words were. Once you came to the end, the pages were torn out with the final message of how sorry she was to her mother.
With your sharp claws, you carefully flipped back to the start. You returned back to your bed, your fur fluffing up in response to the cold. There, you start to uncover her story.
From the start, she was talking about how excited she was to attend Eratix school of magic. She wrote her dreams of becoming a witch and how she was going to protect her land with all sorts of spells. Her words had a certain lightness to it that you felt. Like her joy and hopes were being etched onto the pages. You smiled a little, she reminded you of youth. One that you wished you had, the childlike naivety to embark on your dreams.
Yet life was cruel. In one of the paragraphs she wrote out:
“Dear Diary,
Today was rough. Very rough. Today, we had an aptitude test to test our affinity for magic with two parts: Mana Pool and Manipulation.
It is exactly what it sounded like. Mana Pool being the amount of mana your body can carry for a day. Mana Manipulation being the usable mana to cast spells.
And I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Being the bastardized daughter of Count Lewis was bad enough for my reputation. Being a kitsune on top of that was the deal breaker for most. It’s fine. I could live with all of their disdain glares and insults. But this. I needed this.
As I went forward to the crystal, it lit up a bright blue. I calmed myself and tried to control the mana inside the crystal, only for it to be unresponsive. And their eyes. Their damn eyes. All of them lit up as if food had just been served.
They were right. At the end of the class, they showed our results, revealing that I was the last on the list. My mana pool was more like an ocean apparently, which caused my mana manipulation to be absolutely non-existent.
The worst part? Mrs Delli talked to me after class. With pity in her eyes, she told me that it would be very difficult for me to become a spell caster and that I should change into something easier.
But it’s fine. These were tiny setbacks. I can still live with them.
Yours Truly,
Alice”
Written by lim2357 on 01 November 2024