The next afternoon, Roya marched out of Madame Clara's tailor shop with a singular focus. She headed straight for the village butcher.
She stopped in front of the wooden cages stacked outside the shop. Inside, several Blue Chickens clucked and scratched at the straw.
"Give me a small piece of the chicken," Roya demanded, tossing down a copper coin.
She rushed home, placed the raw, blue-tinted meat on a wooden cutting board, and closed her eyes. She summoned the warm Aether from her chest, letting the thin purple aura pool in her fingertips, and pressed her hand against the meat.
She didn't try to cut it. She tried to feel it.
Through the Aether, she could faintly sense the structure beneath her fingers. The nervous system. The muscle fibers. But it was incredibly dull. Blurry. Like looking through muddy water.
(Not enough,) Roya frowned, pulling her hand back. (It's too bland. I can't sense the deep tissues. Why?)
She stared at the piece of chicken.
(Because it's not alive. The energy isn't flowing. I need a live subject.)
Within minutes, she was back in the forest.
Catching a rabbit without traps or an axe was notoriously difficult for grown hunters. For a fourteen-year-old girl who had spent the last five years reading medical books instead of playing with other children, it was near impossible.
She spent the entire afternoon running, diving, and scraping her elbows against tree roots. Her lungs burned. Her legs felt like lead. She wasn't athletic in the slightest, and the forest floor was unforgiving.
The sun was bleeding red over the horizon when she finally cornered a fat, brown rabbit against a rocky outcrop. With a desperate, incredibly ungraceful dive, her hands clamped around warm fur.
"Ha!"
Roya wheezed, lying face-down in the dirt, clutching the aggressively kicking rabbit to her chest. "Finally! I caught it!"
By the time she dragged her exhausted body back home, it was pitch black outside. She carefully locked the rabbit in a sturdy wooden crate.
She walked over to the bed. Elara's eyes fluttered open for a brief second.
"You're back... little bird..." her mother whispered, her voice barely a breeze in the heavy chill of the room.
"I'm here, Mom," Roya smiled, her body aching with a glorious, triumphant soreness.
"I'm right here."
Roya collapsed onto the floor right beside her mother's bed. Before she could even think about the Aether, her eyes slipped shut, and she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
The next morning, the sky over Oakhaven was a bruised, dreary gray. A light rain was falling, turning the dirt paths to mud.
After completing her morning errands and hauling fresh water from the village well, Roya stepped back into the house, completely soaked. Her patched clothes clung to her freezing skin.
(Great,) Roya grumbled internally, shivering as she wrung out the hem of her shirt. (It's going to be a massive headache if I catch a cold right now. The Little Miser definitely can't afford sneezing medicine.)
After quickly changing into dry clothes, she marched over to the wooden crate.
She opened the lid and reached in. The brown rabbit instantly stomped its hind legs and tried to bite her finger.
"Oh, come on. I'm not going to eat you," Roya sighed.
Realizing force wouldn't work, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of damp clover leaves she had gathered that morning. She dangled one over the box. The rabbit sniffed the air, looked at her suspiciously, and slowly hopped forward to snatch it.
Exploiting its hunger, Roya scooped the chewing rabbit up and placed it securely on her lap. She crossed her legs, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.
She summoned the Aether. The faint purple glow enveloped her, slowly creeping over the rabbit's fur.
This time, it was entirely different. As her Aether seeped deeper, the blurry image in her mind sharpened. She could feel its tiny heart pumping blood. She felt the dense structure of its bones and the elasticity of its tissues. It was like she had a second pair of eyes that looked purely at the mechanics of life. She was sensing complex organs she hadn't even read about in her father's heavy medical textbooks.
Four days passed in a blur of intense focus.
Roya sat in her corner, the rabbit fast asleep on her lap. Her control had skyrocketed. She could now sense the microscopic world inside the animal. She could feel the individual blood cells, and more importantly, the foreign entities—the viruses and bacteria that had come from the outside.
(I'm getting the hang of this,) she thought. (But sensing the disease isn't enough. I have to destroy it.)
She thought about the doctor in her father's diary. He used the Aether-Edge. A blade of energy as sharp as a needle.
She held out her hand, trying to force the purple aura surrounding her fingers to extend outward and sharpen into a blade.
Fzzt.
The moment the Aether left her skin by a few inches, it violently destabilized. It flared up wildly before vanishing into thin air, looking exactly like throwing a cup of oil onto an open fire.
(I can't just mimic the final result,) Roya analyzed, dropping her hand. (There has to be a trick to learning it.)
The next day, she paced her house. Left to right. Right to left.
By now, keeping the thin coat of Aether over her body had become second nature. As she paced, she aggressively scribbled notes on a piece of parchment using an ink brush.
She stopped pacing. She blinked, looking down at her hand.
The wooden ink brush was glowing. Her Aether had naturally coated the object she was holding, wrapping around the wood and the bristles perfectly.
(Objects...) Roya's eyes widened. (If I can't shape the Aether in the empty air, I'll use a medium!)
She dropped the brush, ran to her mother's sewing kit, and pulled out a long steel needle. She sat down, gripping it tight, and forced her Aether into the metal.
For two grueling hours, she poured her focus into the steel. The Aether condensed, becoming sharper than before, but it still wasn't the dense, microscopic edge her father had described. She pushed harder, compressing the energy until her head pounded.
Suddenly, the frantic energy snapped into place.
Surrounding the steel needle was a dark, incredibly dense purple aura, honed to a beautiful, razor-sharp edge.
At that moment, a harsh gust of evening wind blew through the cracked wooden window at the side of the room. The moonlight spilled in, illuminating her silhouette.
The wind caught her jet-black hair, sending it fluttering wildly around her face. As the strands waved in front of her eyes, Roya froze. She dropped the needle.
The ends of her black hair... were dark purple.
(Whaaaaaat?!)
Roya grabbed a handful of her hair, pulling it in front of her face. She rubbed her eyes, thinking it was a trick of the moonlight. But it wasn't. The Aether was permanently staining her cells.
Panic flared for a second before the realist in her coldly stamped it out.
(Whatever,) she sighed, letting the purple hair fall back. (If I can save Mom, I don't care if my hair changes color or if it all falls out completely.)
The real test began the next night.
Roya sat on the floor, breathing heavily. A few inches in front of her was a small field mouse she had caught in a wooden trap. She couldn't risk the Aether-Edge on the rabbit yet.
She didn't touch it. She simply hovered her hands over the shivering mouse, flooding the small space between them with Aether, and tried to manifest the microscopic edge inside its bloodstream to target a natural bacteria.
She pushed the energy. It was too dense. Too violent.
The microscopic Aether slipped from her mental grip.
Pop.
Roya flinched violently, falling backward. A small splatter of dark blood stained the wooden floorboards. The mouse lay completely motionless.
A heavy, suffocating silence filled the freezing room.
Roya stared at the blood, her hands trembling. Bile rose in her throat, and she gagged, covering her mouth. She had put up a tough front for years, fighting merchants and acting like an adult, but she was still just a fourteen-year-old girl. She had never taken a life before.
Tears pricked the corners of her eyes, but she ruthlessly wiped them away, leaving a faint smear of dirt on her cheek.
She looked at her mother's pale, unmoving form on the bed.
(I can't stop,) Roya told herself, her voice shaking but her resolve turning to iron. (I have to get it right.)
Two weeks later,
the whispers in the market were impossible to ignore.
"Did you see Roya today?" Silas the vegetable merchant muttered to the blacksmith, shivering. "Her hair... the purple is creeping up to her roots. Day by day."
"Creepy," the blacksmith agreed, keeping a wide distance. "You think she's cursed?"
From his bakery counter, Finn watched Roya walk past. The other villagers looked at her with unease, but Finn couldn't look away.
(Creepy?) Finn thought, his face flushing slightly. (Are they blind? She looks... incredible.)
Roya didn't care about their stares. She bought her scraps and hurried home.
It had officially been a month since she discovered the diary.
Elara had been completely asleep for three days. Not a single word. Her breathing was so faint it was terrifying.
Roya's clinic corner looked like a scene from a nightmare. Her once meticulously organized space was a chaotic wreck. Discarded medical notes were scattered everywhere, wooden cups were knocked over, and dull needles lay abandoned. Worst of all, the floorboards were stained with tiny, dark blood spots from a dozen failed mouse experiments.
Roya sat in the center of the mess. If the villagers thought her hair was creepy before, they would be terrified now.
Her hair had turned entirely dark, vibrant purple. Even her eyes had changed—the irises were now a deep, hollow violet. The grueling, bloody experiments had taken a heavy mental toll, stripping away whatever childhood innocence she had left.
But today was her graduation exam.
On her lap sat the brown rabbit. She didn't strictly need to touch her subjects to use Aether—hovering her hands close enough worked just fine—but she had grown attached to the grumpy little furball. It was the only big subject she had left.
She took a deep, shuddering breath and gently placed both hands firmly on the rabbit's sides. The physical contact steadied her trembling fingers, and using both hands made the immense mental burden slightly easier to bear.
Deep, dense purple Aether flooded out of her palms, completely engulfing the animal. She closed her hollow violet eyes, her mind diving in.
Inside the rabbit's body, her dense Aether fractured. Rigid needles would be useless here; they couldn't bend or navigate the complex, curving pathways of a living bloodstream. Instead, her energy shaped itself into hundreds of microscopic, highly flexible threads.
At the very front of each thread was a straight, microscopic, razor-sharp point. The true Aether-Edge.
With surgical, ruthless precision, Roya guided them. The mental strain was agonizing. It felt like trying to guide a hundred writhing snakes simultaneously while carrying a boulder on her back.
She hunted down the foreign viruses. As the sharp edges of her Aether sliced through them, she felt a distinct snap in her mind, like plucking a tightly wound violin string.
Snap.
Snap.
Snap.
She was severing the sickness on a cellular level without damaging a single drop of healthy blood.
Sweat poured down Roya's face, stinging her eyes. Her hands trembled violently under the exertion.
One minute. Five minutes. Ten minutes.
At twelve minutes, the rabbit gave a soft, relaxed huff.
Roya pulled her hands back, collapsing backward onto the floor, gasping desperately for air. The purple glow faded.
The rabbit sat up, shook its fur, and casually began munching on a leftover clover, completely unharmed and healthier than ever.
Her test was a total success.
Roya laid on the floor, her chest heaving, her hollow purple eyes staring at the ceiling. She slowly turned her head to look at the bed, where her mother's skin was pale blue.
Roya pushed herself off the floor, her expression hardening into absolute iron.
"Now," Roya whispered into the cold.
"It's time to save my Mom."