For the past 2 years, Shiori had felt as if she’d been floating through life.
Seasons flew past her like a film reel. Mahoutokoro was supposed to be her chance to shine. To carve out a place for herself — but that never managed to happen.
Everyday, Shiori walked around with a growing hole in her soul. Her nights were taken up by seemingly endless doubts — doubts that only weighed her down the longer they remained.
Shiori never saw herself as stupid, reading and writing were her first languages. Her whole childhood was inscribed in parchment and papyrus. Magic, studying, learning, it was all second nature to her.
Poetry and Writing filled her with purpose.
But for some reason, somewhere between the vastness of Mahoutokoro and the confines of her mind — her passion, the fire that burned within her, had died out.
Day 896 of being in Mahoutokoro.
Shiori sat cross legend on her bed. An owl lay in front of her, its seal still unbroken. She sat there and stared at it until her mind started going blank and her eyes became unfocused. She couldn’t bring herself to open it, couldn’t bring herself to even lift her finger.
For a while now, Shiori wondered if she should write back to her family. After what had happened last summer, her family had halved in its size, and thus everybody was more eager to keep in closer contact to one another.
was eager.
For the first few months her family was writing back and forth to one another, but as winter came and passed, more and more letters piled in Shiori’s room — untouched, unread.
Shiori was tired. Much more than normal — the tired that couldn't shower without needing to sleep afterwards, the tired that couldn’t eat past 4 scoops of rice, the tired that made her drag her feet through every day. The tired that didn’t go away.
The silence in her bedroom offered no comfort, minutes bled into hours as she lay there — realizing that sleep wasn't coming to rescue her, she gripped the edge of the blanket and pushed herself off the bed, haphazardly falling into the chair by her desk.
She sat hunched over a blank piece of paper, a pen loosely gripped between her thumb and forefinger. But when Shiori reached to dip the pen in her inkwell, it was dry.
She had been so tired, for so long, that the thing that fueled her passion, the ink that she penned all her poems with, that she used for every single story she had written.
It had dried up alongside her passion.
Throughout her whole life, writing had been her clutch. Throughout the years, Journaling had become her habit. And now she couldn’t even lift a pen, couldn't even think of a sentence to write.
Shiori didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Words used to flow from her like water, she used to be able to conjure a world on paper using her words. Now her vocabulary had shrunk, her talent had faded, it was getting harder and harder to express herself.
What was once her reason for living had become a chore.
Then all of a sudden she paused. She straightened her back on the chair. She peered at herself from the mirror on her desk, her hair was a mess, unkept and unruly. And she laughed. She laughed at herself.
Her sides ached as she cackled at her own reflection. That girl in the mirror wasn’t her. Shiori laughed until her eyes welled with tears, and her vision started to blur. She laughed as she fell to the floor sobbing, her hands rubbing at her eyes. She laughed as she laid there on the hardwood floor — her hair sprawled out underneath her as she found comfort in the cold flooring of her dorm room.
When morning came, Shiori Kaito had made peace with the fact that she won’t ever be able to be the person she was before — but that's okay with her.
