𝐌𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐑𝐂𝐇. enhypen

seventeen

Jihye straightens her back. "Did you get to see when it completely stopped?"

"Once again yes..." Hanbin says, pursing his lips in thought. One second the rain felt as if it wouldn't go away until the next day, but then the dark clouds dispersed completely. As if Magic. "I don't see where you're going with this." He truly didn't.

"I stopped it, Hanbin." Her tone hardly matched her words, she had said so flatly that Hanbin wondered if he had misheard her.

Though when Hanbin realized he in fact didn't, he couldn't stop the chortles in disbelief that spilled past his lips. "Are you feeling well? Did you perhaps catch a cold? You're probably just hungry... Have some tea to help you orient yourself again." Hanbin begins pushing the mug towards her but she pushes it back to him.

"No, I am as best as I can be after finding out there are spells that can vanish the darkest of rain clouds!" Jihye says in one breath, huffing for good measure. "I skimmed through the rest of this- spellbook journal thing, and there's types of Magic we never knew existed!"

Hanbin is blinking rapidly at all this, seemingly trying to take it all in. Finally, he manages, his voice weary. "But there are already so many spells known to man, there couldn't possibly be more."

"Oh but there is..." Jihye turns the journal so that it wasn't upside down for Hanbin. He looked down to the ink covered pages, listening to every word she said. "There are four sections in this journal. All of which contain spells even Magians have only dreamed of casting. You can't possibly fathom how powerful a Magian can be if they even learned one of these spells." She explained, but Hanbin was filled with too many questions that he wanted her to answer.

Hanbin thumbs through the journal and notices for the first time that it was in fact sectioned in different parts, although he had no clue what the scribbles meant. "How did you even get to understand what it says? Even if you are extremely bright, I highly doubt you can learn a new language under a week."

"It wasn't some foreign language, it was a code." She stated and crossed her arms over her chest.

"A code? And how did you manage to decode it?" Hanbin asks and Jihye immediately reaches into her satchel to slap the code's key on top of the journal. The shopkeeper picks it up and begins to examine it.

"Heeseung, one of two who I brought into your bookshop last month- he was the one to figure it out. Just took one look at it and knew it was a code." Jihye explained. Hanbin didn't know the real reason why Heeseung and the others were staying at the castle as their arrival was kept secret from the people of the East Kingdom for their safety. To Hanbin, they were probably just children of noblemen that were visiting from their expensive estates further into the Kingdom. And Jihye preferred to have Hanbin believe that.

Hanbin tried his best to keep up with all the information Jihye was dropping on him, but it was a difficult task when he himself was still stuck on what she had said about controlling the weather. He cleared his throat as he set the paper down. "Well, you were saying something about stopping the rain. Were you being serious about that or.."

"I am being dead serious." A frown marred Jihye's brows at his dubiety but understood where it came from. "Do I really need to prove it to you?"

"If you didn't mind..." Hanbin trailed off, bracing himself. "I would like to understand why you're entirely convinced that it was you who did that and it wasn't just a phenomenal coincidence."

"Fine." Jihye said curtly, taking off her satchel and placing it on the floor. She takes a few stationary steps to prepare. "Just try not to be too astonished."

She outstretched a hand in front of them, her palm facing upwards as she began uttering words Hanbin had no way of understanding. Once she finished reciting her spell, something began to swirl and form on top of her palm. It settled down into a small, miniature cloud before the faint sound thunder came from it, and finally came tiny droplets or water that mimicked rain.