My memories are a little hazy the further I go, but the earliest I have is around two months old. I’m told our mother died at birth. My father says I drained her life and my brother’s magic in the womb so I wouldn’t be stillborn. Says if I had let nature take its course, my twin brother would have inherited enough magic to meet his standards. Maybe. Declared me, a newborn babe, a freak of both nature and magic. And if the “Grand Caster-Scholar, head of the royal LaSatanna family” deems it so, then so it is. 

Nonetheless, this freak bore the LaSatanna name, and had an annoyingly clingy brother, so even if he wouldn’t take time out of the day to care for us, we had plenty of relatives and people around the manor to do so. Although brief, my time there is one of the only memories I’d like to call “happy”. Until I got my magic. 

It’s a tradition to brand newborns with the balance rune; it automatically activates on magical attunement, so that when they take their first steps they never fall again. On average, Magics become magically attuned around age two. I got my magic at five months. By one year old, my magic had washed away the balance rune completely. It was simply just part of me now. This was unprecedented apparently, and father hates unprecedented change; anything that goes against tradition. 

By two, my brother’s balance rune had still not activated and my father became more and more convinced that I was less of his daughter and more of some sort of magic parasite that fed off my brother's attunement. I was promptly kicked out of the estate to see if my brother could develop normally without me “interfering”. I did get taken in by a nice couple of ladies who took care of me for some years until my magical attunement became disturbingly unnatural. I began memorizing spells after seeing them cast only once. I could cast them myself simply by drawing the rune with my fingers. I didn’t need any special medium; I was my own medium. 

Word of me spread like a wildfire and the consequences followed shortly after. What should have been a miracle was more than utterly terrifying for an entire country of people who saw any slight deviation of tradition as evil. Ironically, the LaSatanna name means nothing when you slap it on a devil. Shunned, humiliated, manipulated, abused, downright tortured. The people of Terra Magica had no shortage of methods to deal with me, the newborn monster, over the years. Xerena: a word that has no meaning. That's what they used to address me. 

Up until the age of ten, it was pretty standard homeless kid stuff; dumpster feasts and newspaper blankets, trash can fires, the whole nine yards. I refused to cast any spell, despite having perfectly memorized hundreds by that point; from either seeing them cast in regular society or eavesdropping on local academy students practicing for their finals.

On our tenth birthday, my brother had the stupid idea to ask father if he could go see his sister. Apparently, one of the caretakers had been slipping him the truth of his long lost sibling over the years. When father demanded to know who, my brother said he would tell him after they go and see me. Father refused to let him “reconvene with that parasitic abomination” and declared the matter over. So naturally, my brother escaped in the night and went to search for me. Multiple times. Of course, this is all just paraphrased from his side of the story which I assume is, itself, paraphrased. I don’t doubt its validity any less, however.

He always found me almost immediately. He said it was “twin telepathy”. I’ll bet he still says that to this day. In a way, it was nice; knowing he was everything I wasn’t. We could fill the missing pieces in our souls. The most beneficial transaction from his visits, among food, clothing, and other amenities, was our education. While my brother was best versed in broader subjects such as mathematics and literature, my aforementioned eavesdropping on students gave me access and insight to more niche subjects of study. Specifically, I managed to mainly retain information about anything Magic; the race, the force, the land, the religion, all of it. I grew a particular attraction to Magical Studies 801: Mythology and modern theology; origins and connections. I even got to sneak aboard some archeology trips the class would take. My brother was a late bloomer, achieving magical attunement at the age of 5, and his ability to memorize and cast runes was barely subpar. As such, we became each other's tutors and managed to teach each other. 

That lasted for about five years. The last five years I ever spent in my homeland. It was a nice time. ‘Course, when he wasn’t around, things weren’t too great. I got in some bad situations, met some bad people, met some good people. Then I met D and, well, let’s just say the end of that fifth year was messy, to put it mildly. 

There were a lot of things that could have happened differently. From all ends. I know how to make sure they do. It’s been a decade since I last was in my country. My education and magic have only ever grown, despite my current circumstances. I sure hope father has been well. It would suck if he croaked before I paid him one last visit.