That night, after dinner, I knocked on Miss Symphonia’s door.

  “Hello, M-...”

  A familiar cowardice clawed onto my tongue, holding it in place.

  I trailed off, unable to call her either ‘Mother’ or ‘Miss Symphonia’.

  I could neither accept what our bond had become or deny what it was.

  I had known implicitly what the names given to us sisters meant to her – the sorrowful look in her familiar yellow eyes as she thumbed over the painting of that figure with that blonde hair said it all – but still, to say it out loud and admit it to the world felt… strange.

  I had promised her I would try to move on, and live under the name she gave me, as ‘Estelle’, but it was hard, it still hurt.

  I still could not help but think of the woman who had given birth to me in my previous life as the only person who I could call ‘Mother’.

  I felt that if I let that connection go, the proof of the love that connected us, then there really would be nothing left of the person that I used to be.

  Then I really would be alone. Trapped in this new world with no way out.

  Perhaps that cowardice that stained my tongue also stained hers - Belle Symponia’s – and that was why we were so afraid to speak of the true meaning behind the words we shared that night.

  She also was afraid of what it meant to pass those names on; what doing so would leave behind.

  But unlike me, somehow, she found the strength to say the quiet part out loud.

  I wondered where it came from.

  I was jealous of that strength, I guess.

  That was why I was here, knocking on her door.

  Perhaps I was hoping she could share that strength with me.

  We had promised each other we would try to move on together, after all, and I was still here, cowering in the past while she lived up to her end of the promise.

  Despite not finishing my sentence, the woman inside answered the room answered anyways.

  She pulled the door open quietly.

  I nearly froze upon looking at the unfamiliar look in her eyes.

  Gone were the usual rough, slanted shape, half-fixed into a harsh, tired glare.

  They were still tired, but they were soft. They were warm.

  It reminded me of how my sister looked back when we still lived in that alley, when I would come home with splintered hands after disappearing for a day and just collapse onto the bed, comforted helplessly by my sister.

  “Estelle,” she smiled softly, the usual coarse scratch from her voice gone, “you’re here about what happened after lunch, right?”

  “...” I did not answer, still too afraid to break my side of the silence.

  “Come in.”

  She pulled the door open gently, inviting me into the room, lit warmly by a few candles, bathing her study in a soft orange glow.

  I stepped in, following her hesitantly.

  “Come on, sit by the bed, I’ll pour you some tea.”

  I sat down on the mattress as she pulled a small table and stool towards it, sitting across from me.

  A steaming hot liquid tipped into a small cup, filling the room with the comfortable noise of flowing water.

  I took it into my hands, feeling the autumn coolness disappear instantly, and took a sip.

  It was refreshing and sweet.

  The familiar tingle of earthy and grassy herbs and flowers tickled my nostrils and tongue, leaving behind a faint, but not unpleasant, bitterness.

  It was familiar. It tasted like my childhood.

  I remembered my mother – from my previous life – would make something similar for me when I was sick, or just when I wanted it, really. Sometimes she would add a couple drops of honey to it even.

  I sat in silence, just staring at the smiling, almost unfamiliar woman in front of me who just sat in that stool with her hands in her lap, waiting for me to start.

  My eyes strayed as I put the teacup back onto the table.

  There was a strange, half finished contraption on the work bench; a series of interlocking rings and gears that made no geometrical or logical sense to me. It had looked like it had been tinkered with recently.

  I caught sight of that familiar book, the ‘Symphonia Sonata’, open on her desk, leaning against the wall.

  And I saw a familiar painting of two figures underneath a night sky.

  That was where this all started, with that page in her grimoire.

  Her deepest, most sentimental secrets and memories, the manifestation of the person she was, the life she lived, and the dreams she carried.

  “Who were they?” I found myself blurting.

  Her gaze followed mine.

  She got up, picked the book off her desk, and brought it back to the table, sitting next to me on the large mattress.

  “He was my fiancee,” she thumbed over the tiny figure depicted on the page with a mournful smile.

  I blinked, surprised a bit.

  Not by much. I knew they were important to her, but I was expecting a different word to come out of her mouth. I thought ‘husband’ or maybe even ‘wife’ would be what was said.

  “...What was he like?”

  Somehow, emboldened by that loving smile on her face, I found the strength to continue speaking.

  She just chuckled wistfully.

  “A fucking moron.”

  That was a more familiar tone of voice.

  Yet despite the harsh language, she spoke no less lovingly of the man, a fond smile on her lips.

  “You two aren’t that dissimilar from him, really. There’s an annoyingly large amount of him I see within both you and your sister. Even aside from the obvious of your sister sharing my eyes and his hair.”

  The unspoken cosmic coincidence finally revealed itself.

  I briefly wondered right then how much would have changed if we looked just a bit different. If my sister had a slightly different hair or eye colour.

  But that didn’t matter now. The connection we had forged was too late to take back.

  “He had the same stupid, brainless devotion and smile that you had, trying to shoulder too much for his own good. But at the same time, he was hopelessly naive and hopeful, walking around with a curious glimmer in his eye at every new passing sight, just like your sister. He was both too stubborn and too self-conscious, paralysed by his self-doubt to ever decide something for himself, always living for someone else’s sake… for my sake.”

  I tilted my head at those last words.

  “How did he fall in love with you?”

  The woman next to me just laughed, further confusing me.

  “That’s the wrong question… really, the more confusing thing was how I ever fell in love with him.”

  She smiled bitterly once again as she reflected on those old memories.

  “Dear Sol, you should have seen me back then… I was a classic Citadel shithead if one ever existed. Stuck up my own ass, head stuck in every book I could find, couldn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone other than myself, and hardly even that. Only thing I wanted was to keep studying and furthering my magic until my dream would suddenly just one day fall into my lap. It’s a miracle that fucking moron of a young girl ever matured to realise just how precious of a person that young man was.”

  “If that’s the case, then how did you two meet? What changed?”

  The woman just flipped through the book backwards, retreating to memories of the past.

  As the pages continued to turn, time unwinded.

  The neat writings and organised research became scrappy notes and messy, almost illegible scrawls.

  Complex, intricate designs with every detail and component broken down methodically became half-hearted dreams of impossible inventions.

  “It was a coincidence. We were out on a field trip one day to a neighbouring kingdom, and had to make our way through a forest. Shit went sideways a bit after wyverns got a whiff of what we were carrying, and we got split up. I was a sheltered city girl raised with absolute privilege, had no fucking clue how to live… almost would have died there if some passing stranger, him, didn’t find me and pick me up. Found me floating down a river, picked me up, nursed my wounds and fed me, just out of the kindness of his heart… do you know what my reaction was?”

  I pondered on it.

  It wasn’t too dissimilar from how I had encountered her, or from what had happened in Cambodia.

  I wasn’t sure what she would have done back then, but I knew how I reacted both times.

  “I would have cried, gotten on my knees, and thanked him with everything I had.”

  The woman just laughed boisterously, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes, making me flinch at the sudden outbreak of noise.

  “Dear Sol, hell no! Could you fucking imagine!? There wasn’t a single functioning brain cell in my head back then, not a single sensible, grounded thought would ever occur to that fucking brat.”

  She snorted, smirking wildly.

  “Of course I didn’t thank him. I kicked his shit in, told him to keep his filthy hands off of me and threatened to burn him to a crisp. I couldn’t allow an unwashed peasant with his hands in the mud to touch me, Belle Symphonia, who would one day leave this lowly mortal coil and walk among the stars, where she rightly belonged.”

  I was stunned, unable to reconcile the vision she was describing with the sad, mournful smile she showed just moments ago.

  “But, well… you know, honestly… maybe I wasn’t even the biggest idiot that day… he might have been even stupider than me.”

  The mirth disappeared from her voice, as she retreated back to a soft whisper.

  “Who in their right mind, after getting their shit kicked in by an arrogant, spoiled, pissy brat, decides to just smile? When he heard me arrogantly declare my lofty, hopeless ambitions of reaching the moon one day as I kicked him into the dirt and made him eat grass, do you know what he did?”

  She giggled warmly.

  “He just smiled, and told me it was beautiful, and genuinely wished me the best of luck in reaching the moon.”

  She shook her head, remembering the idiot she used to be.

  “Somehow, that absolutely moronic response might have actually kept him alive. That spoiled shithead heard him praise her and decided that she was glad someone finally recognised greatness when it graced them with its presence, and begrudgingly kept him around life as a servant to guide her and feed her as she tried to make her way back to civilisation instead of just frying him on the spot.”

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  She rolled her eyes in amusement.

  “Well, not that she had a choice, really. She tried to run off right afterwards and almost died within the day, getting saved by him again. Only after I nearly died a second time did I let him stay by my side.”

  There were a few pages in the grimoire that were filthy; the dirt smudged in them was ingrained in the fabric of the pages themselves. The writing was shaky, containing only a few sparse, sporadic sentences on them.

  “We were saved eventually by a rescue party. I was ready to kick that boy living in the wilds aside and return to civilization, but the rescue party was shocked when they saw him. Apparently, he was some long-lost noble son or something, who disappeared during a massive mess regarding a coup that caught the whole kingdom in a civil war. So, despite my complaints of having to travel with a smelly, uncivilised boy who lived in the woods, we had to take him back to the academy.”

  She started flipping forwards through the book again. The notes started to become a bit more organised than before, though still ripe with immaturity compared to her present self.

  A giggle escaped from her.

  “It’s funny, looking back… I guess I’ve always just had a soft spot for rats who lived in the woods or on the streets.”

  She shook her head, dispelling the stray amusing thought.

  I just kept my eyes on the grimoire. I couldn’t make sense out of anything that was written of it, being completely untrained in magic, but I still wanted to hear the rest of her story out.

  “I met him only a couple weeks after that. He became a transfer student at our academy.”

  I frowned.

  “Did he learn magic within a week or something? You make the ‘Citadel’ sound like it’s a really prestigious place, reserved for only the best of the best of witches and wizards.”

  She just shrugged.

  “The Royal Academy is a bit different. It split students into two main categories, you either entered the Swordsmanship department or the Sorcery department. He spent his entire youth fighting against wild monsters and wyverns and shit with nothing but his instincts, so he fit right in rather well with the prodigal geniuses of the Swordsmanship department.”

  She rolled her eyes, smiling again.

  “And in his spare time, when he wasn’t cluelessly beating the shit out of all his peers and frustrating them to no end with how much they were outclassed by some brat who lived in the woods, he spent all his time chasing me.”

  She laughed.

  “It was embarrassing, but I will admit it was also rather flattering and it satisfied my ego. I was disappointed that it was a dirty savage with no sense of etiquette or nobility, but it was nice to have my genius acknowledged and my dreams reinforced. That was how our relationship started. Clueless savage boy who followed that girl around like a hapless servant, eating up her every word and order, and genius, spoiled, kind of equally clueless girl who selfishly ignored everything and everyone around her so she could reach for the stars.”

  Slowly, the book crept closer and closer to that familiar page.

  “Eventually, I matured. Probably in no small part thanks to his presence. I grew out of my sheltered shell and realised he was important to me, I realised how stupid I was in the forest, just how much his presence had saved me. One day I realised just how much I owed to him, how I might not have been able to keep my head held high during my time at the Academy if not for him… if not for him, I might have eventually just given up on that childish dream of mine, but because he believed in me, I gained the strength to keep on reaching for it.”

  Her hands slowed.

  Every page became precious, lovingly crafted and packed to the brim with condensations of the person she was back then.

  “I guess that was when I started to fall in love with him. A bit too late. He had probably been in love with me for over half a decade at that point. Only took me a whole bunch of years of him cooking every meal for me tirelessly for five years straight to realise he wasn’t just trying to be my butler, he was doing that because he cared.”

  And finally, we came back to where it started.

  The boy and the girl beneath the night sky.

  “So I took him up the Yrd’ll mountains, the tallest place on this continent, the place closest to those stars I loved, where I would one day call home with him. And I confided in him everything about my dream, about what he had come to mean to me, about how his presence had changed my dream, and what I hoped our future would look like.”

  Then finally, she turned to look at me.

  “I never told you how this dream of mine started in the first place, did I?”

  “...”

  She looked back at the beautifully drawn night sky.

  “To be honest, despite my talent, my poor attitude and my hopeless dream made me a bit of an outcast. People found it unbearable to be in my presence, and talk of the moon and the stars is… well… it’s a bit sacrilegious in this country, to be honest. Astronomers and stargazers are outcasts in the current landscape; the people worship Sol… you know the founding legend of this land, right?”

  I nodded.

  “The wanderers of Calybcor, and the Halcyon Land blessed by Sol.”

  She nodded in affirmation.

  “Right. It’s a fairly universal legend in Manusyara. Every continent and country has its own version of it in their native tongue, but the basics remain the same. Most of us still name our nations after it in some form. ‘Tenmai’, over to our east, for instance, is taken from their words for ‘Lost Children of Heaven’, referring to the nomads who found refuge in Calybcor. Sangferrus itself, the kingdom of ‘Iron Blood’, is a descendant of the Calybcor people directly, or so we claim, their name roughly meaning ‘Steel Heart’.”

  She sighed wistfully again.

  “We’re all taught from a young age to be grateful for this blessed land, believed to be the entirety of Manusyara itself. This land is beautiful, it has everything we would ever need, it is refuge from the cruel terrors of the world beyond these borders blessed by the sun, by the goddess Sol. It is only because of her light that we are able to live, and to dream of anything beyond the reach of the Sun is heresy, it is to desire the dark days of the nomads again, wandering from place to place in the cold darkness, with no hope nor means to live. Only the mad, like myself and the folks of the Black Moon Expedition, dare to dream of the night sky and its wonders. To everyone else, all they see is a shapeless nightmare, a reminder of the cold and lonely death that awaits if you dare to step beyond Sol’s loving arms.”

  She shrugged nonchalantly.

  “I was different, I guess. I wasn’t raised as a believer of Sol. I knew of our people’s history, it’s pretty much entirely unquestioned, but I didn’t worship Sol. I came from the countryside after all, where it was remote, and worship was scarce. I might have been a genius who lived in the Citadel, but I wasn’t born that way, my parents weren’t so lucky. I was just fortunate enough to be born with generation talent, and clawed my way towards a full live-in scholarship at the heart of civilization. I let that feat get to my head and became just another one of the arrogant Citadel shitheads.”

  I slowly turned to look at her, finally mustering some of that forgotten courage.

  She continued on.

  “When I heard about it in class for the first time, I just thought it was all stupid. Finding the Halcyon Land was just a coincidence. The nomads were just lucky to stumble into it. Whose to say it’s special? Maybe there’s a thousand places out there just like it, waiting out there in the stars. But we were told not to dream of that possibility. We were told to resign ourselves to our meagre share of Manusyara. The stars would forever be beyond our reach. I didn’t like that. I thought myself above it, high off my feat of earning a scholarship as a child and thinking that I was better than all of the lowlifes around me who resigned themselves from finding a better future.”

  Her hands brushed upwards, smoothly combing over the handstakingly drawn and painted dotted lights that made up the beautiful night sky.

  “If those cowards didn’t want to dream, then I, the prodigal Belle Symphonia, would do it myself. I would show them all that there really was more out there, that the Halcyon Land was not a special place. I would conquer Sol herself, and find an even better, brighter place among the stars… that was the childish, arrogant hope that started it all.”

  Her hand swept downwards slowly, coming to a rest over the two lovers staring up at the sky.

  “Things changed since then. It stopped being about myself, it stopped being a mindless, childish thing. I came to realise that life was hard, that you only got through it because people cared about you. I came to realise the world was cruel and large, but… at the same time…”

  She smiled wonderfully.

  “It was mysterious and beautiful, beyond the scope of what anyone thought possible. There were all kinds of strangers out there, living their own unique, unknown lives, waiting to share their stories with others, filled with kindness that dispelled the harsh coldness of the world.”

  It was a familiar sentiment.

  It was what kept me going in my previous life.

  Slowly, I felt myself connect with the woman in front of me, Belle Symphonia, our hearts starting to sync.

  “The world was a large and beautiful place. If that was not the truth, then I would not have met my fiancee; that dream would have withered and died, crushed by the weight of those around me and the expectations on my shoulders. My dream… started to become a way to live up to that realisation, to share my love for the world, for the moon and the stars, with everyone around me. It was around then I started to learn how to cook… I couldn’t just let him do it for us forever. I wanted to do something for him, for our children as well.”

  A lonely tear trickled down her face, barely missing the pages of the grimoire.

  “I told him that I wanted to do it for our future. I wanted to show everyone in the world there was something out there worth dreaming of. I wanted to craft a loving world for our children, I would show them with my own two hands that the unknown expanse, beyond our tiny homes that we retreat to every day and night, is a beautiful place that loves us back. I would take them to the stars and show them all the dazzling lights and let them know there would always be another corner of the universe to explore, there was surely something out there that could give them meaning, there would always be a stranger out there who would love them, sheltering them through tough and lonely times… there was always another story to indulge in, more food to try, more friends to make…”

  She sniffled uncontrollably.

  “He held my hand and just whispered to me. He told me he had been thinking of our future as well. We sat underneath the stars and just chatted and laughed, wasting the night away with wistful dreams of a bright future. We talked about what we wanted to name our children, how many of them we wanted eventually, what they would look like when they grew up, whether they would follow in our footsteps…”

  Still, even though it trembled, the smile of love on her face did not die.

  “If we had sons… we had three names prepared for them. The oldest would be Altair, the second would be Oberon, and the third would be Apollo.”

  And the final silent truth unwound itself, that weak secret unravelling as her heart bled rawly.

  “And the names of our daughters… The oldest would be Estelle, the second would be Luna, and the third would be Aurora.”

  She closed the book and put it aside, tucking it next to a pillow.

  Finally, we faced each other.

  I looked at her weak, teary smile, and found myself stunned into silence.

  “I never got to meet my children. I never even got to call him my husband… he died before we could even walk down the aisle… he died just as he lived, stupidly protecting me from dangers I couldn’t understand.”

  She painfully rubbed over the invisible ring on her fourth finger, shakily stroking the phantom wound.

  “I buried that pain for the last few years… losing myself in my work, going through every design I had and scouting out every extraplanar anomaly I could find. I just wanted to forget about it all, just lose myself to my dream so I could die thinking and reaching for those last remnants of our memories and times together.”

  She smiled at me.

  It was a truly wonderful smile, her tears glimmering as they trickled down her face.

  “And then I met you. A gutter rat that just did everything she could to provide for the only person who mattered to her. And then I saw your sister’s face, her hair and her eyes… just like I would have envisioned our child. And I let myself get comfortable with your presence in the lab… and then I started to read for your sister, because of the promise I made with you to care for her.”

  She whispered painfully.

  “And I got attached. I started dreaming again.”

  I looked down.

  “I’m sorry. For ruining it.”

  She just ran her fingers gently through my hair, pulling me ever-so-slightly closer.

  “It’s fine. Don’t worry. A silly thing like that never mattered in the first place. It was just a way to reach that silly dream of mine. The reason I had come to want it in the first place was because I wanted to share everything I knew and loved with my children. If it’s between the Paradox Engine or my children’s happiness, then it’s not even a choice at all. Those selfish, childish thoughts have no place in a mother’s life.”

  Familiar words came to her mouth.

  “A mother should only care about three things; whether their child eats well, whether they sleep in a warm blanket, and whether they’re happy.”

  My mind flashed back to the sad look on her face as I spoke of my parents and my regrets, about how I felt I had wasted their care and did not deserve their unconditional love.

  Those words must have been painful to hear for someone who never got to meet their child, yet endlessly dreamed of doing so.

  If I was her child, the woman in front of me would not have cared about any of those pitying thoughts. She would have seen her crying child who felt as if she was alone, and just hugged her.

  My previous mother would have done the same.

  It didn’t matter who their child was or became, whether or not they appreciated or even knew about their endless love, it was all the same.

  In the end, they were just their beloved child after all of it.

  …

  That was what I had become to the woman in front of me, to Belle Symphonia.

  I felt foolish about it all, now.

  The strength of the woman in front of me was frighteningly tempting, beckoning me to reach to her, my mind desiring to take that strength for myself.

  Her dreams and heart were dazzling, so bright and familiar.

  Like me, she had also once looked out and felt alone and smothered by it all, and like me, the world proved itself to not be so cold and frightening after all, filled with kind strangers who would pick you up and provide you with warmth without a care in the world.

  But unlike me, she never lost sight of it all.

  She didn’t just keep running and running away from it all.

  She turned it into strength, she turned those experiences into a reason to live.

  Unlike me, when she looked to the night sky, she found what she was looking for.

  The greater meaning to the world and to my life that I endlessly searched for among the infinite stars, which I never found after countless years of searching, came so easily to her.

  It was enviable, almost.

  I wish I could take some of that strength for myself.

  Perhaps if I had her care earlier in my life, I could have laid all those troubles behind me. If she was one of the strangers I had met, maybe she could have reconciled me and my previous parents.

  …Look at that.

  I was already slipping. She had already infected me with her hope. I was calling them my ‘previous parents’, as cruel as that sounded.

  But unlike before, I could no longer feel the guilt creeping in.

  The visions of my memory started to clear.

  I imagined my previous parents, and going back to meet them.

  But they didn’t look scared, they didn’t look confused.

  There was no doubt in their eyes. They wouldn’t even question who the strange little girl at their doorstep was.

  Right… they would never have ever cared about something like that.

  They would welcome me back home, greet the woman next to me with a smile, and just share endless stories about my embarrassing childhood.

  They’d be okay with it all, they’d understand everything I was going through, they would accept both her and my sister as their own.

  Yes, maybe it was fine.

  Maybe if it was her, Belle Symphonia, I could manage it.

  If I could just take even the smallest fraction of this woman’s infinite courage and strength, let her hopeful dreams infect me just a little bit, I could manage it.

  I could find a way to live as myself.

  It was painful. It was really, really painful, and I was sure that for the next few years, I would still be lost in sorrowful dreams of the past and wake up feeling like I should have been crying, but couldn’t, but maybe, just maybe I could make it out the other side.

  I looked up at Belle Symphonia’s tearful face and tried to smile like she did.

  I borrowed her strength, and said those words that had always been on the tip of my tongue.

  Throughout both this life and the previous one, those words had always been stuck right there, unable to leave my mouth. That demon of cowardice always crept over me, pinching its fingers around my tongue, never letting me say those words, even though they were so simple and frivolous.

  They were simple and frivolous, and their intended targets – all three of them – would have just laughed at how much I struggled to say them, finding it silly how hard I found it to say, but to me, those words meant everything.

  “Thank you for your care, Mother.”