A Special Mage (Ike x OC)

Prologue

"Serena, come inside," my mother called. I was sitting in our backyard, playing with the dirt and staring into the woods. Sunlight poured over the area, casting a golden glow on the trees and grass. It was that time of year where cicadas were creating an uproar for most of the day.

I struggled to stand up, but I gathered enough strength to limp back into the house. I had broken my leg not long ago after falling down from a tree I foolishly thought I could climb.

Mother eyed me worriedly. She was a fair skinned woman with faded hair: a heron laguz. She would have had large white wings extending from her back, but she no longer had them because I, her child, had both beorc and laguz blood. It is a well known fact that when a laguz has children with a beorc, the laguz loses their powers as well as their defining features. But even so, the herons' ability to appear eternally youthful somehow seemed to live on within my mother despite the number of years that had passed since she birthed me.

There was another woman in the house with my mother. A kind looking young woman with deep blue hair and eyes. There was a strange blue medallion around her neck, and a beautiful sapphire ring around her finger, matching her eyes in both color and depth.

"Serena, honey," mother said. "Look who's come to visit us." She motioned to her friend, the blue-haired woman who I always referred to as "auntie" in my head rather than her actual name. She would visit my family every so often, and whenever she did, I always had a wonderful time. She was probably the only outsider that came to our home that I actually wished was family.

I forced a painful smile as I clutched my leg.

"She has come from far away to help you."

I looked up at the woman, happy to see her again. 

She gazed at me sweetly and sat me down in a chair in the kitchen. "It'll all be better soon, sweetie," she smiled, holding up a glowing white staff to my shin.

I watched with wide brown eyes as magic happened right before me. The bone that was sticking out of my leg started to sink beneath my pale skin which eventually closed around the once-gaping wound. I gasped. "Mommy, it's all better!" I smiled excitedly, showing the big gap left behind by one of my baby teeth.

The ocean haired woman laughed and stood up again to see my mom's pleased face, watching me while I ran back outside as if I had never been injured in the first place.

"She's an adventurous soul, isn't she," mother's friend said. "She reminds me of my son, a little bit."

"Oh really?" Mother said.

Her friend nodded. "You said she's supposed to have unique powers?"

"That's what the oracle told us. She should start lessons from the Masters in a few years," mother said.

"Hmm. She's going to excel. I can feel it."

After that day, "auntie" continued visiting us every few months as usual. But then, her visits grew fewer and farther between, until she stopped visiting altogether. When I asked my mother what had happened to her, she just said it was because auntie had gotten very busy back in her homeland. I never knew what made her so busy, but I just accepted that explanation, and my life carried on.

My life, to put it simply, was rather interesting. Much of that interesting-ness came from being what's known as a branded. That is, a person who contains both beorc and laguz blood. In most lands, it's both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because branded people are said to have special abilities, superior to those of beorc (average humans), and different from those of laguz (those who can transform into an animal). What those abilities are, however, vary from branded to branded. Some have supernatural healing abilities, others have extra stamina and strength. Those are common examples. But when I was born, an oracle said that I would have a particularly rare one, though nobody knew what it would be at first. We had to find out naturally.