Maria sat firm on not talking about what happened with Aza, and why they had started arguing over something that seemed so small. She and Dario set the table in silence. Dario felt the dinner table wouldn’t be the best place to bring it up again, so he left it alone while they ate.
Dinner itself wasn’t too awkward, as Nyota always talked more than she ate. A constant stream of noise coming from her mouth, like she’d die if she didn’t keep talking. Tonight, they were subjected to her newest fixation, how the night sky looks upside-down in the northern hemisphere compared to here in the southern hemisphere. Then she gives the definition of hemisphere for good measure.
Dario’s mother wasn’t there, working late again. She almost never got off work on time and complained about it. Too many cases, not enough time, not enough people to deal with them all. Being a healer was quite the thankless job, but whenever she was confronted with the obvious question, "Then why don't you quit?" her answer was always "It's a job that needs doing". But that job that needed doing clearly wore her out.
Dario and Maras work on the dishes together without bringing things up. He bit his tongue, thinking it probably was for the best. But while Kamari was putting Nyota to bed and Maria was getting ready to leave, Dario remembered what Aza said about Maria having a big sister instinct. If it were Dario having a problem, Maria wouldn't leave him be until the issue was resolved. So shouldn't he do the same for her?
“Are you sure things are alright with you and Aza?” Dario asked once Maria had laced up her boots.
“We’re fine.” She shifted uncomfortably on her feet. “We’ll be fine. Really.”
“Does it have something to do with Basil?”
“No. Sort of. It’s—” She sighed. “I told her about wanting to study in Danaus, and she did not take it well.”
“Wait, you only just now told her?”
“Because I knew she would act like this. Like it’s such an offense for me to do anything without her, and when I do try to include her, I’m still in the wrong somehow. I don’t know what she wants from me.” She threw her hands up. “I was wrong, alright? What else does she want me to say?”
“But why is she mad about you leaving?” Dario asked. “She’s staying here to work in her parents' shop.”
“I— I told her before that I was hoping to go to Starton College. I mean, the campus isn’t too far from here, and we would have been able to stay close to each other.” She sighed. “But I said that like three years ago. I’m not getting into Starton College. Are you kidding me? I’m being realistic by going into healing. I’m allowed to change my mind.”
“Well, yeah, but— Danaus? You’re going from being around the block to being in another country. Maybe she just needs time to process that.”
“Or maybe she just needs to grow up. We’re not kids anymore.” She grabbed her coat from the rack.
“That’s a little harsh, isn’t it?”
“Don’t worry about her, okay? I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”
“I’m more worried about you.”
Maria paused, an arm halfway through her coat. “What?”
“Aza said you took that breakup pretty hard, but don’t you want to talk to me about it?”
“Well, maybe Aza should keep her mouth shut and you should mind your own business.”
“You don’t want to talk about much of anything anymore.”
“What’s there to say? I’m supposed to just stand here and have someone else tell me that I’m an idiot who should have known better? I already know that, so why can’t you just mind your own business, please?”
Dario put his hands up in defeat. “You know what? Do whatever you want. Because whatever I say means nothing.”
She opened her mouth as if to say something else, but closed it. She grumbled and left out the front door.
ˋˏ-༻❁༺-ˎˊ
… Every living thing has some amount of essence, as it is the life energy of all living things. If the essence of a living being is running low, they become fatigued and fall ill. Once they are completely drained, they will die.
Different natural born magic users have more essence than is necessary to sustain life, and this extra energy manifests as markings unique to each type of magic user.
For entomon, that magic also manifests as the ability to summon wings of a specific insect…
Dario sat at his desk some hours later, going over his reading once more. He’d read the same paragraph several times, and he still didn’t process any of it. It was word salad, a jumble of letters that he was too exhausted to decipher the meaning of. He rubbed his eyes and gave a long sigh.
His brain space was still taken up by the girls and their little spat. Although it wasn’t just a spat, he was sure of it. But if they were bickering about Maria going away, maybe it’s natural that they’d have a falling out. Friends who outgrew each other. He didn’t want to think about it much, but things couldn’t stay the way that they were.
There was a soft knock at his bedroom door, and his mother was already sticking her head in. She’d finally made it back home from work.
“You’re still up,” she said, stating a fact rather than asking why he was still awake at this hour. “Reading in the low light isn’t good for your eyes.”
Her face was one that drew attention. A spell scar stretched over the right half of her face. The scar was made by an ether witch, gold tendrils exploding out from her right eye. Or, at least where her right eye should have been, as the spell that gave her the scar also took out her eye. How exactly she’d gotten it, she didn’t say, a master of evasion.
He waved his packet of papers. “I just want to make sure it sticks,” Dario said with a yawn.
“Nothing is going to stick if you don’t get some sleep.” His mother combed his hair back with her fingers, planting a kiss on his forehead. “And it’s not the end of the world if you don’t go down the healing track.”
“Mom, please.” They’d had this talk before.
"It's just that it's very demanding work. I just want you to know there are other options."
"I do." He turned back to his notes.
Dario does admire his mother, being a skilled healer who can do things most would consider miraculous, and since he's starting to show the same ability, shouldn't he use that to help people?
“Are you alright?” she said, taking a seat on his bed. “Maria was here earlier. You had a fight?”
Dario sighed. Kamari had obviously heard the hold thing, the apartment was far too small for those sorts of arguments to remain private. He had enough courtesy not to bring it up, but of course, he would talk about it with his mother.
He pulled off his glasses, not wanting to see things in focus anymore as he stared blankly at the desk in front of him.
“I think she hates me,” he said weakly.
“I don’t think that’s true.”
Dario paused, not knowing how much of the situation was safe to mention. “We used to talk about everything. And that’s all I was trying to do, just talk to her. She said I should start minding my own business.”
“Maybe you’re just outgrowing each other. Drifting apart.”
“But I don’t want that.”
“It’s not the end of the world, really. Maybe it feels like it right now. You’re still family, and you still care about each other, but you’re going your separate ways. Fighting that is a bit of a losing battle.”
Maybe that’s what Aza had been feeling. The one constant in your life suddenly becomes inconsistent, like the rest of life. It throws you off kilter. Dario hadn’t entirely registered just how far away Maria would be. He’d been intentionally stopping himself from thinking about it for too long. His entire childhood, she’d always been close by, a stone's throw away. What was he going to do when she was gone?
His mother got up from the bed. “Don’t stay up too late,” she said as he made her way out of the room. “The midnight oil eventually burns out. Don’t learn that the hard way.”
The door clicked closed, ever so softly. Dario stared at the papers on his desk for a bit longer, blurry and disorderly, before he decided it was time to finally put his reading down. It would still be there tomorrow.
ˋˏ-༻❁༺-ˎˊ
Dario sifted lazily through a book he’d pulled from the shelf. Something something, jadeite vs nephrite scarab carvings, blah blah, hard shell and soft shell beetles, something about ladybirds.
“What is this for again?” Dario asked Woo-Jin through a yawn. He didn’t get nearly enough sleep the night before.
“A project,” Woo-Jin said. He sat hunched on the library floor, studying the index of a huge tome with yellowed pages. He snapped it shut with a groan, putting it back on the bottom shelf and pulling out the book right next to it that was just as big.
“But what for?” Dario rubbed his eyes. “Which professor was enough of an asshole to assign a project like this on top of midterms.”
“It’s not for class. It’s more of a personal, pet project.” Woo-Jin seemed to have found something in the index and started flipping through the tome. “I’ve been looking through this section for a while and need a fresh pair of eyes. Remember, something about a gold scarab amulet.”
“Yeah, yeah, I remember,” Dario mumbled. “Shouldn’t you use this time to study instead? Can’t you do this over break?”
“Busy. I wouldn’t have library access anyway after campus closes.”
“Then do it after break.”
Woo-Jin glared at him for a moment, then went back to the book. “Actually, maybe I don’t need your help if you’re just going to complain.”
Dario was about to take him up on that. They’d been combing through this shelf for everything on the beetle family of entomon, and didn’t have anything to show for it. Dario had only tagged along as it gave him a good excuse to be away from Aza and Maria until they’d sorted things out. He’d tried to talk to Woo-Jin about what he thought they should do about it, expecting him to have at least some opinion on the issue, but Woo-Jin was thoroughly disinterested. “They’re girls,” he’d said as he dragged Dario along to the library. “It’ll sort itself out.”
Dario flipped through the book a bit more. A section on ladybird luck charms had caught his eye. Sure, there was a lot of skepticism about whether they worked or not, but the picture looked off. Ladybirds were rounder with smaller legs, and this charm had the clear segmentation and proportions of a scarab. The charm was also made of gold, so it was the closest they’d gotten to finding what they were looking for all afternoon.
Dario crouched down next to Woo-Jin, turning the book to him. “What about this?”
Woo-Jin only glanced at the page, quickly going back to his tome. “That’s a ladybird.”
Dario put the book on top of the tome. “Actually look at it.” He pointed to the picture. “That isn’t a ladybird. Maybe you can’t find the thing because it’s been miscategorized.”
Woo-Jin held it closer to his face. He read through the whole page that Dario had barely skimmed. He read a bit more of it over Woo-Jin’s shoulder.
An amulet recovered from a Silph battlefield. It appeared to have been made from pure gold, an anomaly as pure gold is far too soft for jewelry, especially an amulet that has remained in such good condition over the years. Experts speculate on the use of charms in the forging process, a technique that has since been lost and cannot be replicated. Currently housed at the Silphion History Museum.
“Silphion History Museum,” Woo-Jin said under his breath, eyebrows furrowed. He ran his fingers through his hair, eyes closed as he put something together in his head, deep in thought.
He stood up suddenly. “That’s where we go next,” he announced.
Dario was taken aback. “That’s all the way in Assel. There's no time to get there and back before the last train.”
“Then we can go tomorrow.”
“‘We’ is gonna have to be ‘you’,” Dario said as he stood and stretched. “I’ve got to watch my sister after class.”
“Then you can bring your sister. We’ll make a day of it, it’ll be fun.”
“You want to take a six-year-old on a two-hour train ride? Both ways? You can just go on your own.” Dario pulled out his pocket watch, flipping open the ornate gold clock face. He preferred it to a wrist watch, this watch being an antique that needed to be wound instead of using an aurum battery. He’d gotten it as a birthday present from his aunt some years back, a not-so-subtle nod to how horrible he was at keeping track of time. “Shoot, I should really get going.”
Dario stepped out of the cramped space between shelves, grabbing his bag from the corner. “But tell me if you find anything cool,” he called over his shoulder as he made his way to the exit, earning a harsh shush from the librarian.