Life is like a sandbox. Every step you take you’re not quite sure how your foot will land, or how everything will shift under you’re weight, but you know it’s going to move, and if you’re not careful you’ll trip.
Memory is like a sandbox, one filled with land mines. The longer you live the harder it is to cross from one side to the other unscathed.
People are like sand in a box, each one a little grain, being toyed with by the world outside, tossing them through the air and building them into things, and sometimes like me, getting thrown out of the box entirely and forgotten…
Grains of sand can be used to craft castles, even by children. But a single grain of sand, alone, outside the box, one that distanced itself away from the world. That grain of sand would never be made into anything.
“You’re nothing but trash.” A voice called out as a poor excuse for a punch slammed into my jaw. “I thought adventurers were supposed to be rich. But all you have is this trash long sword.” As his friends held me against the wall he picked it up, and walking over, stabbed it into the worn-down shack behind me. “Well, I guess it will still get us a few talons. Maybe I can sell it to one of those trash peddlers.”
My voice was so coarse that it sounded like dying crows scratching a chalkboard with their talons. “No…” Two of them were holding me up against the wall, and one was in front towering over me, while the other three were still lying on the ground crawling back to their feet after I gave them a good beating. Not that it mattered though… I still lost in the end.
My body may have nearly stopped working, but my brain was still on fire. ‘He’s an ogre… So even if I break away I won’t be able to hurt him much. The government won’t care about this level of crime, but if they start breaking my bones or worse then I might be able to get the red mantles to do something. I need a blood sample though for their tracking magic to work properly.
“What was that? Sorry, I couldn’t quite hear you.” He said, taunting me with a grin. He bent over, placing his hands on his knees and turning his ear. ‘There’s my blood sample.’ Without a moment's hesitation, I clamped my teeth down on his ear and ripped half of it off. He screamed, punching me in the stomach. I coughed the ear out. He hit me again, pulling the sword and stopping it just short of killing me.
“Boss said no killing, remember? We can’t do anything that would cause the red mantles to take notice.” It was hard for me to hear him clearly over my own wheezing breaths, but I could still make out most of it, and fill in the gaps from what I couldn’t.
‘Awfully level-headed for an ogre… Turns out I get away without anything serious after all...’ As the man dropped my sword I took the chance to open my storage magic and let it fall inside. ‘ And now there's nothing left on me worth stealing…’
After that I remember getting hit a few more times, collapsing to the ground, and somehow making it back to my house. Once there I found the food stores empty… I almost cried for the first time in over 8 years… Almost.
In the end, I had no broken bones, and I stopped them from stealing anything, there was no evidence it was the same group that took my food… So the guards weren’t going to do anything about it, they had bigger problems than some thugs beating someone up in the alley. ‘Maybe I should have let them at least take the sword…’ I pulled it out and laid it down on the table, staring at its worn-out blade. ‘No, it’s my best weapon… Not to mention it was Dad's
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The leather wrap around the handle had disintegrated long ago from use, and the crossguard was a little shaky, but it was steel, high-quality steel at that. Any C-rank adventurer or higher would probably laugh at me for thinking steel was so great, but it was a heck of a lot better than iron. I mean, the fact that the sword was still in one piece after 8 whole years was proof enough of that.
I slowly collapsed into a chair and ran my fingers along its cold blade. ‘I could sell it for food…’ I thought briefly before slumping back into the chair and crossing my arms.
‘Adventurer? Yeah right… I’m even thinking about selling my best weapon… Adventurers are people who excel at everything. There isn’t any impossible task beyond their reach; The kind of people that carved a chunk of the world out for themselves and never looked back… Adventurers… Can do everything… And they can do it well… So someone like me, who just tries their hardest and sucks at all of it…’ My thoughts drifted off for a moment as my eyes wandered across the small one-room house to the cracked mirror on the wall. ‘I’m average in every way… Human, black and grey hair, matching eyes, shorter than average… And I’m a girl too, so if anything I’m below average… What would you even call someone like me?’
I stumbled over to my bed, choking back my tears until the sorrow and self-pity turned into a numb, emotionless depression. ‘Trash… They said it themselves… How many times have I been called that I wonder. If I sell my gear for food I would just be proving them right. I never gave up before, so I won’t now… Even if it kills me, I’ll die an adventurer, I’ll die… Trying to be an adventurer, trying to be something great…’
I never bothered to give my life much thought until I found myself lying in bed waiting to die, but in that moment it felt like nothing mattered anymore. I could pretend to be some kind of deep philosopher and spout nonsense to myself all I wanted. My life was trash anyway, so if it were to end then so what… God wouldn’t miss a defective grain of sand that had fallen outside the box…
‘If I really am trash… I wish I could at least be the kind that gets set on fire and burns stuff… Then at least I could say I went out in a blaze.’
In the blink of an eye over a month had passed, and I was still lying in bed trying to conserve energy so as not to starve to death. The snow piled up around me and work during the winter was suicide, so no matter how hungry I was I just had to suck it up and hope it would melt soon.
To stop myself from losing my mind, I would cast spells, and focus on controlling my mana, while not moving my body. ‘Am I just being stupid? Any sane person would do anything to not starve to death… But I just accepted it. I never even thought about stealing food, but that might not have been a bad option… Although I bet God wouldn’t like it much.’
I sighed, rolling my head to the side and letting the warm sunlight shine down on my face. ‘I could have handled two or three, or even four… But six of them… And one of them was an ogre… No, I should have been able to still win, those are just excuses.’ No matter how much time had passed, I continued to reply to the fight in my head, looking for a way I could have won… But I couldn’t find one.
‘If my magic was stronger… Or if I… If… What good do ifs do me in a real fight…’ The lingering anger was just about the only thing I could feel as the days passed on without me eating so much as a grain of rice.
Turns out that when you go from a modest diet of lentils to fasting for weeks on end your body starts to break down. It was something I had to deal with to some extent every winter... I knew it was coming though, that was why I always stockpiled my food just before the snow fell… Three weeks was the most I had ever done.
It was awful, every year it was the same. The same symptoms, the same hole in my stomach as it twisted until it started trying to eat itself… First, your clothes start to feel a bit looser, every girl's dream… After the first week, you get used to the pain and lose interest in food altogether. Sometime during the second week, it starts to take effort just to get up and use the toilet.
By the end of the third week, your breasts are gone, and you’re ribs show through your skin. Even without that happening I was still mistaken for a man… But it wasn’t worth dwelling on. If I survived long enough to eat another meal I would start putting on weight again… At least that’s how it went in the past. The third week was the last one I was familiar with.
After that, everything kind of blurred into a haze. My body stopped regenerating mana, so there was nothing I could do but sleep. I couldn’t tell what day it was anymore, and before I knew it I lost count. Some time after that I looked out the window. Finally, the snow had melted.
‘Time to get to work.’