Cato woke up with the rising of the sun, and she laid in bed until she heard a light passing of footsteps outside her door. From them, she knew that Andric had walked past and gone to the stairs leading to the first floor of the house, and she slowly exited her bed.

It had already been five years since Andic and his father moved in with her and Susanna, but she couldn’t stop the strange palpitations that came whenever he walked by and she let her imagination run wild. He was so close, and yet they were so far apart.

A few minutes later, after getting dressed and meticulously combing her hair, Cato left her room and also went downstairs. Like most days, Andric left the house before she came downstairs, and she had purposefully until he was gone before she came out of her room.

Their relationship wasn’t bad; it just wasn’t good, and Cato didn’t want to risk it deteriorating. In the morning, Andric went to work at Boele’s forge on the northern side of town, and he usually wouldn’t return home until after dark. The job didn’t even play Andric very much money; he just didn’t want to stay home all day.

During the day, Cato studied textbooks with the help of Susanna, and she theorized new ways to apply her magical affinity. She hoped to eventually attend a magician school, where she could further advance as a magician.

Her magical affinity - momentum magic - was very special. Her mother had an affinity for speed magic, which could already be considered useful, and she obtained an extremely advanced root affinity. Momentum magic could alter an object’s speed, and it could also alter the direction it traveled and how much relative mass it contained. Her magical affinity was equally useful as it was difficult to understand.

Susanna’s speed magic affinity allowed her to either increase or decrease the speed of an object. However, because she needed to touch the object, her magic didn’t have many practical applications. Cato, on the other hand, could use her magic at a range, which allowed her to use her spells on anything she could see. Thus, when she wanted to hit Andric with a random toy, she only needed to look at it.

Although Cato’s magic wasn’t impressive at the moment, she worked tirelessly to create something she could show to Andric. Most recently, she began dabbling in personal flight, and she could already float her body a few feet off the floor. She occasionally dropped herself or smashed into a wall, but the series of spells needed was a work in progress.

Very few magicians could claim themselves proficient in magic that allowed them to soar through the sky, and even fewer were able to realize a method to allow it to happen. Once Cato developed her magic into a spell that allowed her to fly, she would surely be able to impress Andric with it.

At noon and in the evening, Cato left home with her mother to pick up ingredients, and they returned home to cook. Once a week, Andric and Wolter stayed home all day and ate with them, but most days were just Cato and Susanna.

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Wolter and Susanna would occasionally laugh when they talked about Andric’s crazy work ethic, which had him leaving the house at sunrise and returning hours after dusk, but Cato didn’t think it was a laughing matter. He was only two years older than her, and she didn’t believe he had any reason to be hanging around an iron forge for sixteen hours a day.

One morning, after spending two weeks working up the courage, Cato followed Andric when he left in the morning. She had spent much too long knowing about his job and never seeing it, but sneaking around would be the only way she could get past Andric’s obsessive need for secrecy.

She told her mother the night before she began operation follow-Andric, and Susanna and Wolter had a good laugh over it - in private, after Cato had gone to sleep. Susanna and Wolter enjoyed having a morning to themselves, and they encouraged Cato in their heart. They understood how roughly Andric handled the death of Lieve and Hedy, and even Wolter didn’t know what Andric did at night, after the forge cooled down.

After leaving the house, Andric walked south and exited the town’s boundary. Cato carefully followed him by using her floating ability to hop across rooftops, and she stayed out of sight all the way until Andric arrived at the edge of the town.

Once outside of Gallus Town, Cato followed Andric by laying on the ground and hiding behind bushes. Most of the land had been cleared of large trees, but there were still a few patches of flora left behind. Further away from the town, the grass turned into fields of crops, and Cato hid behind them.

Andric walked for almost an hour and arrived at a chicken farm. The farm had several workers checking on the roaming chickens in a fenced area, and Andric greeted several of them by name, and he waited outside the fence for a couple minutes while one of the workers went inside the chicken coop to get something, then handed a bowl to Andric.

After receiving the bowl - which Cato easily guessed and later confirmed the contents of: eggs - Andric walked back to Gallus Town and headed to the forge. Once again, Cato followed him from rooftops. He walked slowly, almost irritatingly so, and Cato had to pause her stalking at several locations where she couldn’t find somewhere to hide.

Almost two hours later, Andric arrived at the forge where Cato had thought he was immediately going every morning. She had no idea he visited one of the farms that bordered Gallus Town, and it surprised her. He must have befriended the farmers by using his magic, she thought.

Once at the forge, Andric walked around the open-air area at the front of the smelters, where four blacksmiths were preparing for the day’s work. Cato watched from a rooftop on the other side of the street, and she couldn’t follow Andric when he entered the building attached to the forge area.

A minute later, Andric walked out of the building while carrying a pan and a spatula, and he no longer had the bowl. The eggs were rolling around inside the pan, and Andric brought them to the front of a smelter, where heat bellowed out of a hatch on its side.

With his magic, Andric changed the eggs into a single mass of yolks and whites, and they fluidly mixed under his gaze. Then, a few minutes later, Andric distributed portions of the scrambled eggs to the blacksmiths, who brought out plates from inside the building.

Suddenly, Cato’s stomach rumbled, but she could only lay flat against the roof while she watched Andric eat breakfast.