As the clock showed six of the evening, the Sun didn't coincide with that fact, still as high as it was at twelve. Thus, how could have she known she read eight hours?

Once she had stumbled on Hoenir and Ember (and played matchmakers), Jade had caught a book and... yeah.

But the enemies had just become lovers!

So if she had swallowed the seven novels of "How to Ruin an Empire," it wasn't her fault. (And please do not judge her on her book taste. Titles were getting out of hand these days.)

"Jade! You're here!" A voice shouted to her. "I was sure to find you here."

She just smiled. "Great to see you Ben."

Benjamin, the tallest of all her siblings, who was twenty now, was horrified by books, yet had came all the way here. "I needed your help with something. I wasn't able to find Declan, or Xander, or... well, anybody else." He deplored. "So I wondered if you could have helped me."

"Uhm, not really since I haven't crossed paths with many of them." Jade shrugged at the six feet build that made her flex her neck to a breaking point. "I've seen Calis earlier, at ten, I think, but I don't have an idea where she is now. You could just go see their favorite spots, as you did for me."

Benjamin fiddled the edges of his vest. "I really need you to come with me."

She shot him an awkward grimace. "How come a twenty-year-old is scared in his own house?"

"If the house is enormous, I think there are reasons, Jade."

Absurd justification but Jade didn't desire to elaborate. She only chuckled.
"Point accorded, Ben. I'll go with you. Where do we start our investigations?"

"The fourth interior garden."

"You put all the chances by your side, don't you?" Jade giggled.
Of the four backyards, it was their family's favorite, where you could find at least one member of their family at any time of the day.

"I'm too lazy not to."
He shrugged, perfectly knowing he wasn't.

Wavy red hair, round nose, same smile, and their mother's eyes were just a few examples of their similarities; Benjamin and her could have been real twins if there wasn't the ten years gap.

Her brother suddenly decided to stop as they attained the door to the leafy backyard.
"I'll start in the hallway as you'll do the garden. Does that suit you?"

She jolted, surprised by the casualty of the declaration.
"I'll go with it, I guess—"

"Nice. Later!"

"Yeah."
Jade waved, Ben despawning of the corridor and walking into the garden.

"She's here!"

"I know."

"We know, you mean!"

"Shut up!"

"Flanagan, language."

"Could you just stop fighting for once? Just this day of the year, please."

What the...
"Is someone there?"

Silence.
She walked a little to gain the middle of the garden, planning to discover the sources of those voices.
Spirits, servants, daytime hallucinations?
Wait, when was the last time she did drugs already?

"SURPRISE!"
They screamed altogether.

Before she could even see, everyone was there.
Her whole family.

"Uh? S-surprise? Surprise what?"
She let out, stunned.

"Your birthday, dummy."
Said Benjamin as he tousled her hair out of habit.

Birthday?
It was today?
She didn't specifically like her birthday since it was the day when she quit her old life, but forgetting it was a little... extreme.

"Wow, we've really made it!"
Exclaimed Harlow, dazzling of pride.

"Of course we did."
Declan threw back with his always sufficient tone.

"You made Telin explode, or what?"
She frowned at them in incomprehension.

"Oh," her twin Ian, coming out of nowhere, enthusiastically began.
"I'll explain. When we met before lunch, I realized you hadn't got an idea about today. So, from then, I planned with Mom and Dad everything, so you don't remember about it!"

"I still wondered why Gilbert wanted to make fifty plans when we all know you're a airhead and wouldn't remember your own B-Day." Declan specified out of the blue.

Her brows rose in question. "Fifty—"

"No. Just forget about that." Xander replied, pinching his nose bridge, in the voice of trauma.

Jade had no choice but to wheeze out loud. "So, to sum up, you made fifty plans, depending on my memory, to make a surprising birthday scream for me? And you," she menaced, now pointing at Ian, "didn't warn me as you remembered the date?"

"He practically ruined the last four plans." Pouted Flanagan in his childish manner. "Gilbert would have killed me by mirror for that."

"Jade..." Her name sounded delicate.

Her attention had been tugged back to the moment.
"Yes? What's happening, Harlow?"

Harlow was the eighth of them, older than Jade on a physical level, yet... she was the most naïve, and always rambling about something weird.
But Jade loved weird things.

She leaned to hear her sibling's mumble.

"Y-you shine."

"Thank you, I guess."
Jade hesitantly replied, in front of her oddly concerned sister.

"No," Harlow worryingly shook her head, "your eyes are literally shining, Jade."

"Funny one." Jade giggle on the pick-up line, wondering where Harlow learned that.

"I-I'm not joking, your eyes and-- YOUR HANDS, JADE."

Her sister's shouts grabbed everyone's attention.

"Her what?" Their mother arrived. "OH MY GOD!"

Jade peeked at her fingers.
Holy something or whatever, they were dazzling in a chartreuse color.

"JADE HOW..." The empress snatched her in panic before borrowing a sharp breath. "H-how do you feel?" Her panicked expression, one Jade had never seen, froze the blood in her veins.

"A DOCTOR. CALL A DOCTOR, IMMEDIATELY."

She didn't identify who talked in her family anymore, her eyes locked into her mother's one.

"Did she eat something wrong?"

"'Did she eat at all would be the real question."

"Sister..."

Woah.
Everything was too loud right now.
Her legs quit and she fell on her butt.

"Ouch!"

Yes, falling on your ass wasn't the best, but it wasn't her who wailed.

She threw a glance under her.

The rabbit, Spirot, armed with a gigantic scroll under the paw, was flattened like a pancake.

"A bunny!"

And she wasn't the only one to see it since she still didn't open her mouth.

"Ooooooooooh, he is so cute." Harlow amazed, creeping up to the fluffy bunny.

"He is a it." Spirot uttered, his long ear standing up in one move on which her siblings jolted.
"I am a spirit," it shrugged. "I do not have any gender. So I'm an 'it'."

"You..." Harlow wondered with all her might since her brows were glued one to the other, "...and why not they?"

"You are talking to a rabbit. I don't see why it's your first question." Replied Declan while there wasn't the necessity of an answer.

"Who are you, and why are you in my home?" The empress always had that shady expression when something unpredictable happened, totally ignoring the childish debate.

"Our home." Alexander couldn't restrain, with the same look as his wife on the face.

Spirot cleaned his throat to maintain an illusion of dignity under the two terrifying glares.
"Very well." The rabbit undertook in that lawyerly manner, unfolding the scroll as it could.
"I'm Spirot, and I'm here to give your tenth child my community's benediction. As she met all the conditions to receive this blessed ability, corresponding to her will and actual age, she is now contracting magic control."

They all stiffened.

Magic was surely not well-seen here, but still, a corner of Jade's mind hoped for a little support from them.
Or something like that, maybe?

She realized she actually never asked for their opinion on the subject.
Wanting support for something this controversial was perhaps a little too much.
And if they were really opposed to it?
Will they throw her in the streets of Menless without money, like other family did with bastards?
Or maybe... torture her?
Even ignoring her would be enough torture for her.
Because, in nine years, she loved them already more than she could.

These people only knew her for nine, well, ten years.
It was a short span for a human life.
But one thing was sure, she didn't want another one-sided love feeling like she had had in her past life, in that part of her she vow to forget.

"In other terms," finished the bunny, cutting her inner monologues, "if she's glowing, it's because she's a magician."

Silence dropped harder than before.

She'd finish alone again, like after Andrew, who took the children with him and let loneliness fill the weeks apart from the Saturdays, where she could finally see her children.
But this time there will be no Saturdays, just the empty weeks to accompany her.

"You're telling me my daughter's a wizard, spirit?"
The emperor snarled.

Spirot floated higher to match his height.
"Kind of."
Its head cocked to the right.

Before Jade could even chuckle, think, or do anything that asked for her participation, she found herself in the air.
Threw by Ania, ecstatic, who caught her right back.

"MY CHILDREN ARE THE BEST!" She shouted, smiling more than imaginable.

The empress hugged our writer with all the tenderness a mother could give, and, at that moment, all of Jade's doubts were gone for good.
She did three hops on the spot under the perturbed stares of her children.

"Ann, calm down--" Alexander uselessly attempted.

"I CANNOT! FIRST I HAVE TWO HARD-WORKING BOYS, NEXT A BEAUTIFUL GIRL, AFTER AN ARTIST, A PASSIONATE GIRL, ADORABLE GREMLINS, HARLOW, AND A SPORTY BOY AND A MAGICIAN TO FINISH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, THIS IS PARADISE!"

The household could only give a puzzled glance.

"Mom," Harlow said, tugging their mother sleeve as she did every time she craved attention, "why am I the only one to not have an activity?"

"Well, you are Harlow--"

"You really think I'm sporty, Mom?" Ian added.

"And that I'm hard-working?" Outbid Benjamin -- sparkles in the eyes -- under Xander's you're-to-old-for-that stare.

 The rabbit discretely floated to her. "Pfiou, you see, everything is going for the best!" Spirot muttered.

She killed him with a glare. "Stop reading my thoughts, dumbass."

"Hehe."

Spirits and magicians had a special connection which made the spirit and the magician able to read each other's thoughts, that's how she wrote it.
Yet, that's the first time she wished to erase a whole paragraph of all the copies on the earth.

"How much time do I need to glow?" She whined, catching Spirot to pat it.

"Dunno, and don't want to know." It shrugged. "It's not always the—"

And Jade wanted to listen, but chill wandered her body from her feet to the tip of her head.
She silently jerked.
Violet.
A vivid, absolute violet filled every inch of her mind.

"What's going on?" Spirot queried, both of its eyes filled with a tint of surprise and worry.

"I-I don't know," she stammered. "Just a weird presentment."

Now that she gave it thought, irony of life wasn't going easy on her.
She was a magician now. Like the one she'd have to get rid off.
God, she'll have to train so it doesn't end with her, a pancake, and him able to kill her family.

It passed its bunny face right before her eyes. "Since you don't shine anymore, I guess it has finished."

Her eyes illuminated.
"What can I do now with magic?"
Her fanatical mumble began.
"Are there things I shall not do for my own security? And for others?"

"..."

"What if the contract didn't work in the end? Are you sure I'm capable of manipulating the power?"

"..."

Between all the gabbles there was only one that needed an answer.
"When will you go?"
She mumbled, the voice low, knowing it had to go.

The small bunny answered in a rub on her collarbone.
"Now."
And the weight left her shoulder.

She resisted to weep.
People come and go; that's a part of life, as she learned it with time, and showing her inner crybaby wouldn't help much on that occasion.

A calm breath came out of her throat as she tried to ignore its departure.

She already missed Spirot.

"You alright, Small one?" Xander, her oldest brother, got next to her on the bench, a concerned expression of a precious rarity displayed.

"Yes, Xander."
She tried to smile, lifting her figure to a more respectful posture.

"You don't look as you do? Need a chocolate?"
He said, pulling the dark tablet of cocoa he always had on him out of his interior pocket.

Jade had already stars shining in her eyes.
"Do not have the need, but the desire, sure."
She yanked it out of his elegant hands, leaving them floating in his action.

"Your stomach remains a thing I won't understand. Yours, Ember's and Flanagan oscillate between a regular organ and an infinite pit."

"It's a pit filled with chocolate desires." Her fingertips wiggled. "Now, the desire needs to be fulfilled. Give it."

An amused smiled lifted the corner of his lips as the black square landed in her palms.
"Desires cannot always be fulfilled, Small one."
His mumble didn't attain Jade's ears.
"For political issues for example..."

"I beg your pardon?"
She queried.

He wave off and sighed.
"Nothing. Do you feel any changes?"

"Not really..." she hesitantly replied, destabilized by the abrupt shift.
The question that burned her lips and mind slipped out without a warning.
"Why are you all so kind after that?"

Her oldest brother looked at her, a little outraged and grandly shocked.
"Kind after what? Your new status quo of magician?"

She tried to nod as he unfolded his exasperated figure.
"You're my sister and a part of the family."
Xander shrugged.
"Why would it change something? You being a magician was predictable. Mom is one."

Yes, Ania was a magician now that she gave it some thought.
Damn, her two brain cells should connect to each other once in a while.

"And we love you. Whatever choice or thing you are or do won't change it." His true smile melted her heart.

She hugged him so hard he choked for air.

This life was so nice, she couldn't find another to describe it.
Loving siblings, affectionate parents, close friends and books.

Yet, he caught her face and stared.

"Xander?—"

"MOTHER, FATHER! JADE'S EYE COLOR CHANGED!"
Xander shouted, the face as amazed as panicked, deleting Jade's ears.

"Whaaaaaaaaat? Really? How?"
Their mother instantly asked, evading their father's cuddle, irritating him in that act.

"They are fully jade now!"
Harlow screamed, arriving from God knows where.

She chuckled. How stereotyped is that again? "That makes me a little odd now."

Her twin, arriving to her side, immediately hugged her.
"You'll never be odd since we're all odd here!"

Jade just laughed, leaving the worries fly away.

"The cake has arrived!" Ms. Lessie, the lady's maid of their mother, proclaimed, stepping in the garden, followed by Gepard, their father's butler.

"Nice!" Rejoiced Flanagan and Ember in the same voice. They didn't wait a second for grabbing cutlery and gulping a cake's piece under the servants' chuckles.

"And the honor of the first for the birthday's one has disappeared?" Whined Ian.

"Yesh." Jade responded, next to Ember in their attack on the dessert out of nowhere and already having cake in her mouth. "Firsh come, firsh sherved."

For now, collective chuckles resonated in the fourth interior garden.