I knew that Felix really didn’t mean what he said.

I knew that Felix just wanted to blame my behavior for not being able to use what I had learned properly.

I knew that Felix didn’t have any intention of slandering me.

I knew that unlike his face, Felix isn’t good with words.

However, did he have to talk like that in this situation?

I knew that Felix was worried abQout me, but he might have told me in a little better way.

I kept trying to open my eyes, which was closed after shouting at Felix, but I felt like I had no strength left in my eyes to open them.

Tears that had got piled up kept pouring down through my cheeks.

I asked Felix with my eyes closed, since I didn’t want to see his face.

“Thank you for saving me, and thank you for treating my wound, but | don’t want to see your face right now. What do you want to do? Do you want me to go out with the little boy or....?”

I couldn’t hear the answer.

I couldn’t see Felix’s expression due to my closed eyes.

Is he angry or is he making a ridiculous face?

It’s really funny.

I first saw Felix when I was three, and it’s already been 15 years since I’ve known him.

But still I couldn’t get to know him.

Were those 15 long years insignificant.?

“Should I go out?”

Even this time, there was no answer.

Still, I couldn’t imagine his expression.

For a moment, a heavy and unwelcome silence pressed strongly on my shoulders.

“Okay, then I..”

At that moment I heard the door opening and closing from behind my back before I could finish the sentence.

After that, the only sound that filled the room was the whining of a child.

“Mammaamuuuuu.”

“Yeah. You’re sleepy, right? Okay okay.”

I cleared my mind by patting the sleepy little boy on the back.

I lay the little boy on the bed and patted him on his chest.

The little boy’s eyes started closing little by little.

However, the clot that formed on my heart doesn’t seem to be closing.

I know very well what this clot is.

I knew it so well that I even got sick of it.

The anger that bursted out a little while ago was not pointed towards Felix, but towards me, and my inferiority complex.

As he said, I haven’t performed well since I entered the academy.

Although I worked hard to study, I only managed get only bare minimum marks to pass the exam.

So if we line up people in the order of their grades, then | would probably be at the end.

Very far away from Felix, whom the principal himself took in.

At least, thanks to the remarkably good performance in theory subjects, it was possible for me to make up for the gloomy score in practical subjects.

No matter how hard I tried, my skills didn’t go up as | thought, since I had low Magic affinity.

So, it was natural for Felix to see me as a pathetic person chasing a ridiculous ideal.

However, lack of ability did not mean that I had no dream.

I too had a dream.

It was a summer day when I was eight.

My mother, who I always thought would be by my side, left me without warning.

It was a wagon accident.

The wheel of the wagon slipped on the rainy road, and it was said that my mother died on the spot.

The words death was new to me at that time.

I couldn’t understand what death meant.

I felt as if my whole world had collapsed, when the adults said that my mother would never come back.

– Why can’t my mom come?

-Is she angry because I hid in the garden and didn’t do my homework.

-Is she angry because I didn’t want to learn the common language of

the Empire?

– Is that why she’s not coming? Because she don’t like me?

Without being able to process the sadness, I celebrated my first St. Maxmas holiday without my mother half a year later.

Perhaps, in consideration of the depressed eight-year-old child, the table was more colorful and abundant than the previous year.

But I didn’t have a family next to me to share the warmth.

My father devoted himself to business more after mother’s death, and my brothers did not come from the academy.

It was Aunt Jane who saved me that day, the Countess of Christian family, and Felix’s mother.

She came to our mansion with Felix early in the new year, perhaps worried about the daughter of her best friend.

“Now, Elly. It’s been a while since you saw Felix, right? Isn’t it nice to see him after a long time? Felix, what about you? Elly got prettier, right?”

At that time, Felix was a more blunt and selfish child than he is now

“ No, she’s ugly.”

Aunt Jane was visibly embarrassed and asked Felix to apologize, but he didn’t.

Since I was grumpy that day, hearing his words, stomped on his foot very hard and ran to the garden.

Whenever I skipped the Imperial class, I hid in that place.

After my mother’s death I hid there, whenever I felt anxious or lonely.

In a desolate garden with no life and in the face of a knifelike cold blowing, I sat alone in the garden.

“What are you doing here?”

Felix found me and grumbled that he was scolded by his mother because of me.

I sat squatting his long lament on the cold floor and listened silently.

“There’s nothing to see here. What are you watching alone?”

He looked at me and asked in a blunt voice.

“There is nothing right now, but flowers will bloom in the spring.”

I replied with a voice as blunt as his.

“I will plant pink roses with my mom when the spring comes. My mom said she would buy me a pink rose that resembles my eyes as a birthday present.”

I wrote my birthday on the calendar and was waiting for that day.

But I knew vaguely.

That the day will never come.

“I miss my mom.”

I murmured softly.

Even now, I don’t know why I said that to Felix, not to anyone else.

Adults tried to tie him and me with words like childhood friends, but in reality, I was not that close to him.

There was never a secret between the two of us that could not be told to others.

I don’t know, whether it was because he was a kid same age as me, words that I had kept closed in my heart started pouring out.

“I want to see the pink rose.”

“I want to plant it with my mom.”

Felix quietly watched me crying with a runny nose under a thin tree.

Like I said, Felix was more blunt and selfish than he is now.

He shook his shoulders in front of me and didn’t say a word of consolation to the crying me.

He just said.

“Then you can plant it, the pink roses.”

Suddenly, at that moment, under the hazy winter sky, the desolate garden, which did not even get the right sunlight, got filled with the scent of roses.

It was like the scent of my mother, and the scent from my body when my mother hugged me in her arms.

When I looked up, I felt as if my mother had returned.

As the cold wind shook my body fiercely and the heavy gray clouds were sprinkling white snowflakes...

The place in front of me got filled with a lot of pink roses that I wanted to see.

No, it wasn’t real pink roses, but the roses created my Felix’s Magic.

That was the magic Felix showed me for the first time.

I looked at the pink rose, which was in full bloom with a blunt face as if an unimaginable miracle was performed in front of me.

A white butterfly flying from somewhere fluttered its wings and flew on the rose.

“It’s pretty.”

“Isn’t it.”

Everything felt so realistic.

I couldn’t believe what was in front of me.

I wanted to go and touch the roses and smell them, but the moment I approached and touched them, everything seemed to disappear.

“What are you doing?”

Felix, who still spat out in a blunt voice, pointed to the rose with his chin.

Only then did I got up from my seat and approached the rose vine.

The rose I saw up close was much more beautiful than when I saw it from a distance.

Pink roses in the garden. It’ll be pretty, right Elly?

While seeing the roses, my mother’s words started ringing in my ear.

Tears started pouring out of my eyes.

“Yes, mom! It’s...... really pretty”

“I miss you mom”

In the rose garden in winter without my mother, I was with Felix instead of my mother I missed so much.

“Can I meet my mom again?”

“Can I plant roses with my mom again.”

Without knowing I asked a silly question to Felix.

Felix lightly frowned.

I didn’t know why I asked the question, even though | knew the answer very well.

A dead person can never come back.

It was a different story from blooming roses in winter.

However, Felix soon let go of his frowned face and made a serious face.

“I’ll bring Aunt Vanessa back when I grow up”

“I will become a great wizard and create a Magic that can change TIME.”