Life in Strafford's Harbour was a dull affair, each day blending into the other with such monotony that entire years seemed to pass in the blink of an eye. Countless days spent tending to chores, apprentice work at the tanning rack, occasionally broken up by festivals and religious celebrations.

  For someone who had lived decades in the opulent throne room of an emperor, it was an absolute monotonous hell.

  Marrah poked her head through the backdoor of the family home, drying her hands in an old rag. Her eyes roamed across their modest vegetable patch, then to the quartz patch where chunks of citrine were steadily being recharged. "Luna!" she called. When no answer came, she sighed and closed her eyes. "That girl," she muttered under her breath.

  She quickly bustled from the backyard, to the modest tool shed just beyond their rickety tin fence. She pulled the corrugated metal door to the shed open and, as expected, the intruding sunlight revealed her daughter hard at work.

  Luna Alcett, second child of the Alcett family and their sole daughter, was gripping a pair of bars bolted to the ceiling and was steadily lifting her modest weight again and again in a series of chin-ups. She was short and slim, a waif of a thing who nevertheless exercised like a soldier under the eye of a drill sergeant.

  As ever, she was dressed in a rather bland fashion. A white blouse, dark green trousers, black suspenders, and simple brown moccasins. Her ashen hair was done in a simple braid, falling over her left shoulder.

  "Luna!" Marrah called, making the girl visibly tense mid-pull.

  She dropped to the ground, landing uneasily on her. The teen turned quickly, looking up at the older woman with shining amethyst eyes. "Yes, Mother?"

  What was it now? The question pulsed inside her mind, annoyance bubbling under her skin. She'd already watered the crops, bought groceries from the crone in the village centre, and made sure her father got his lunch. What more did she want? Training was far too important for Luna to slack on, she always shot through her chores as quickly as possible so she could move onto the real work.

  "I haven't seen your brother for a while now. He said he was going to pick shells by the shore but he should have come back at this stage..." Marrah admitted, frowning and looking over her shoulder. "Would you go and look for him?"

  Sighing, Luna tucked her hands inside trouser pockets. Her damn idiot of a little brother, always making a nuisance of himself. "Fine, I'll find him." She had found it generally easier to simply go along with what her parents wanted. For now, at least. Until she was finally given the opportunity to leave Strafford's Harbour behind, just as her elder brother had.

  "Good," Marrah replied, giving her daughter a nod. "And er... please double check the shells he's gotten. We don't want a repeat of last time." Feris did have atrocious taste when it came to finding winkles and mussels.

  She regarded Luna warily for a moment. In truth, she never knew what to make of her daughter. The strange intelligence that lurked behind her eyes, a coldness that left her unlike any other child her age. Marrah loved her daughter all the same, but... certainly, she was an oddball.

  "I'll check, don't worry," she said, running a hand through her ashen hair. She waited until her mother left, at which point her expression shifted into an irritable glare. There was always some other nonsense to get in her way.

  Magic, which the brutish locals of this world referred to as ‘Qi’, was something that had to be cultivated and maintained through physical effort. Frustratingly, she could sense the lingering knowledge of her old grimoires in her head. All those spells at her fingertips. Yet she couldn't tap into many of them because her puny, youthful body couldn't even begin to withstand the recoil of her strongest spells. Or, for that matter, output enough magic to create some of them in the first place.

  The only solution, for now at least, was to hone her body and improve her capacity. At least, until she had the means for some arcane rituals.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  A shame that her home town had yet to suffer attacks from the monstrosities beyond the coast, despite all the horror stories she had been told at sleepy campfires.

  Venturing from the shed, she activated her mana sense, an ability even the most rustic novice was expected to learn. The colour of the world dulled in her vision, save for the glowing golden auras that emerged around any living being. Her gaze roamed to the coast, homing in on the familiar hum of her brother's energy. Bordered by a trio of equally familiar, and much more unpleasant, energies.

  "Great," she muttered in annoyance. She made for the foggy grey coast, her hands tucked in the pockets of her trousers, dispelling her mana sense.

  Just as she had expected, she found her younger brother pinned to the overhang near the shore. A scrawny boy with silky blonde hair, dressed in a grubby shirt and shorts, who looked like he was on the verge of tears.

  Damon Harvia, a chubby boy in finer clothes, sneered as he loomed over Luna's brother. He was flanked by his usual pair of goons, two scrawny teens with acne-riddled faces. "What's the matter, Crybaby?" Damon reached over, pinching and twisting her brother's ear and making him squeal. "Fight back, why don’t ya? Too much of a wuss? Well you're getting your arse kicked anyway!"

  Scoffing, Luna rounded the overhang and rushed the nearest punk. Her fist cracked him in the cheek, bursting several of his spots on her knuckles, and knocking him into the sand. His companion stumbled with the lanky awkwardness endemic to teenage boys. He tried to make a fist, only for Luna to hook him in the gut and send him wheezing to his knees.

  Damon turned, growing pale and wide-eyed. Feris, meanwhile, smiled and looked as if he could cry tears of joy. "You two," she said, pointing to the two groaning teens and then jerking a thumb over her shoulder. "As for you, Damon."

  The chubby boy tried to run away, just as his cohorts did, but Luna was faster. She caught him with her foot, pinning him to the root-strewn dirty wall of the overhang. Feris scurried to hide behind his sister, staring wide-eyed at the two.

  "I thought I made myself clear, Damon, what would happen if you hurt my brother again," Luna said in a low voice.

  Damon gripped her foot, trying and failing to move it. The qi slowly burning in her muscles made her stronger, overwhelming him with ease despite only being a few inches taller than him. "You... you better not lay a finger on me! O-or I'll tell my da!"

  "Oh yes, the captain of the local militia." Luna grinned wolfishly, tucking her hands in her pockets. "Sure. By all means. Run along and tell Captain Harvia that you, his eldest son, got his backside kicked by a girl. I'm sure he'll be so proud of you."

  Damon hesitated. "W-what are you saying?"

  "I'm saying, you fat sack of shit, that if he finds out that you're this much of a snivelling little failure..." She leaned forward, making Damon wince from the extra weight on her heel. "That he'll save me the trouble by killing you himself."

  Damon's eyes widened, his jaw hanging open. He stuttered, trying and failing to come up with some kind of counter. He stared into Luna's luminous amethyst eyes all the while, and found nothing in them but a bottomless pit of ice cold contempt.

  "So here's how it's going to be, going forward. If you say something to make my brother cry... I'll hit you. How hard and how many times depends on how annoying I find his crying to be. But, full disclosure, I find it very annoying by default. And if you physically hurt him..." Luna looked at the sky, pretending to be deep in thought. "Guess I'll have to break a bone of yours every time. First fingers. Then toes. Then ribs. And so on, until you either get the point... or die. Are we clear?"

  "Y-you... you wouldn't..." He looked her in the eye again and understood, at once, that Luna would if she had to.

  "Are we clear?"

  Damon stiffly nodded. A faint smell of urine began to rise off of him.

  "Good." Luna lifted her foot from him, and immediately backhanded him with such force that he was nearly knocked over. The bully stumbled away, clutching the red mark slowly forming on his cheek. "Now get out of my sight, you damn pig." He did so, running with a speed that would make a race horse seem sluggish.

  Silence fell, interrupted only by the crashing of the waves behind them. "That was amazing Luna!" Feris cheered, his eyes sparkling as he stared up at his sibling.

  Sighing, Luna looked down at her brother. "For goodness sake Feris, you need to learn to fight your own damn battles," she bluntly told him. Feris was family, after a fashion. And weakness on his part reflected poorly on her.

  It was not any sort of sibling love that directed her to protect Feris. She just couldn't abide anyone disrespecting her by proxy. And taking her frustrations out on Feris would just land her in a heap of trouble from her parents, which could cut into her training time.

  "It's just... I'm not like you," the boy mumbled.

  "Clearly." She made for his fallen bucket, a few paces from where she'd found him. Then, quietly, she checked each shell. The shellfish actually seemed decent this time.

  "I don't like fighting. And... I'm not strong like you are," Feris said, crouching across from her.

  "Then you'll want to get strong. I won't be living in this village for much longer," she replied, narrowing her eyes at him. "Which means you'll have no one to protect you but yourself." The prospect made the boy cringe, who looked down at the sand and started drawing patterns in it with his fingers.

  "Ah, Luna. Still rich with compassion," a wizened voice remarked.

  Luna glanced back to the overhang, which now had a man in a flowing red coat standing atop it. His skin was a light shade of brown, his black hair slicked back. The hair on his temples had grown grey, and wrinkles edged his eyes.

  He watched her with luminous golden eyes, an arcanist rife with honed qi.

  Luna grunted at the sight of him. "Hello, Helsen."