Chunhei could hardly believe her eyes. Her first reaction was to reject the reality in front of her. That couldn’t possibly be her daughter—Eui was dead, Eui wasn’t a mage, and Eui had her father’s dark brown eyes. Yet, as Chunhei stared into those crimson orbs—wide as saucers and quickly dilating with unbridled panic—she knew it could only be her daughter. The set of her shoulders, the way she wrung her tail, even the subtle angle of her face as she stared in silent fright was the very picture of the person that Chunhei had thought lost to her forever. More than any of that, however, was a mother’s intuition—some primal instinct deep within that practically screamed that the woman before her was without a doubt her daughter.

When she finally worked up the wherewithal to move, Chunhei practically hurled herself at Eui with open arms, heedless of the table full of refreshments between them. Eui caught her in a tight embrace while her white-haired companion moved in an impossibly fast blur, catching the things that Chunhei had knocked over without spilling so much as a drop of tea. Chunhei didn’t have time to be impressed by that feat, however—her daughter had come home! Tears flowed freely down her face as the words gushed out of her, her questions overlapping each other as she blubbered.

“Eui! It’s really you!? How did—no, are you well? It’s not—when did you—and what happened to your—oh, ancestors, Eui—I missed you so much!”

Chunhei gripped her daughter tighter, as if fearing that she might fly away otherwise. Eui returned the embrace, her own tears starting to soak into Chunhei’s robe.

“I missed you too, mom. I’m—I—I’m so sorry!”

She didn’t know what her daughter was apologizing for, but Chunhei just stayed there for a long moment, reveling in the reunion while her husband watched on with a complicated expression. Eui’s companion also watched them, a smile on her face even as rivulets of tears streamed down her face. After what felt both like a long time, and far too short a moment, Chunhei and Eui were able to compose themselves enough to return to their seats as Eui started the introductions over again.

“Mom, dad, this is Lee Jia, she’s my...”

Eui trailed off a bit, and as if she’d rehearsed it, Lee Jia wrapped an arm around Eui’s waist and pressed herself close against Eui’s side.

“I’m her other half!”

Eui and Lee Jia giggled at some private joke, and Eui’s tail wrapped around Jia’s, but Chunhei felt her own panic returning. Lee Jia was small—shorter even than Eui or Chunhei, as if such a thing was even possible—but the cat girl carried herself with a steady confidence that belied her size. Her eyes were a striking golden color that seemed to catch the light of the setting sun in a way that made them almost glow with an ethereal beauty. Chunhei couldn’t help but notice the quality of her clothes, either—as good as anything she could have made, or even better. It all drudged up dark memories of Sun Jaehwa.

The girls seemed to notice Chunhei’s feelings nearly as soon as she did, immediately sobering from their moment of private intimacy to meet Chunhei’s gaze seriously. Eui cleared her throat.

“Um, Mom, I know what you’re thinking, but she’s nothing like Sun Jaehwa. Jia saved me.”

Lee Jia blushed brightly and averted her eyes, and Chunhei began to piece together a picture. It was her husband who spoke first, Minjun having apparently come to the same conclusions.

“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Lee Jia—and I thank you for taking such good care of my daughter all this time. May I presume, Miss Magus, that we have you to thank for Eui’s survival all these years?”

Chunhei frowned, uncertain whether she liked the implications of her daughter becoming the lover of some powerful mage who held total sway over her life and death. To her surprise, however, Lee Jia shook her head in denial.

“Not really, no. By the time we’d met, we were already both at the Grand Academy.”

Memories came flooding back of the stories the young mage had told her about the An Eui that he knew—and come to think of it, many of them had involved another girl—could it be? No—that was impossible. Her little girl wasn’t—Chunhei shook her head. She had to ask.

“Um, pardon me for asking, but Miss Lee, you wouldn’t happen to be familiar with a young magus named Hyeong Daesung, would you?”

Lee Jia perked up visibly at the mention of his name, smiling brightly.

“Oh! That’s right, Dae asked me to pass on his regards when we met you.”

Then the stories were—and her daughter was—Chunhei met her husband's eyes with a pleading look. She couldn’t bring herself to voice it, but she needed to know. Minjun seemed to read her mind—as he so often did—and nodded.

“Eui, should we take this to mean that you trained at this academy? We heard some stories from the young mage, but...”

Eui nodded.

“Jia and I are both mages—and a lot more besides.”

The four of them spend the next few hours catching up on the time the girls spent together at the academy, from their meeting, to the way they had ended up joining their cultivation together, and all the hardships that they had experienced along the way.

“You met Sun again?! Oh dear, I hope she didn’t spread any more lies about you.”

Chunhei had always maintained her daughter’s innocence. She didn’t know what those foul nobles had against Eui, and she knew that her daughter could be—caustic, at times, but she was no murderer. The entire notion was ridiculous. Chunhei noticed a moment of mutual hesitation between the two girls, but Eui shrugged.

“She made a nuisance of herself—didn’t really know when to quit, either. Hehe, I still remember the time Jia hit her so hard she broke her arm.”

Chunhei covered her mouth and gasped.

“You broke Sun Jaehwa’s arm?!”

Eui snorted, shaking her head.

“Jia broke her own arm. Jaehwa got it way worse.”

Eui’s cat-eared girlfriend scratched the back of her head and chuckled awkwardly.

“Yeah...haha, I was still working on my control back then. We really rushed into things.”

Chunhei frowned, concerned about the casual discussions of violence, and particularly the way that the girls had obviously been avoiding certain subjects. If these were the stories they were willing to tell, then what were they holding back? They still hadn’t mentioned anything about how Eui’s eyes had changed color.

“Well—not that I can imagine anyone more deserving of such a thing, but—were things always so violent at the academy?”

Eui and Lee Jia both made the same identical grimace, as if they’d been reminded of something unpleasant. Eui cleared her throat, not quite willing to meet her mother’s eyes.

“W-well, immortals are a bit—we’ve got a different standard of violence from, uh...you know. Well, anyway, we were pretty reserved by cultivator standards. A lot of people thought we went too easy on Jaehwa, and she did try to kill Jia once. I’d have murdered the bitch myself if she’d succeeded—”

Eui held her hands up to her mouth with a startled expression, as if she hadn’t meant to let that slip. Chunhei furrowed her brows in concern. Did this touch on the subjects that they had been avoiding? Or was she simply worried about lending credence to the false charges she’d been exiled on?

“Eui—I’ve been meaning to ask...we never got a chance to talk to you after...the incident. By the time we even discovered that you’d been charged, your sentence had already been carried out. We thought we’d lost you forever, but now that you’re back—what happened?”

Eui’s face fell, and she stared down at the clenched fists in her lap. Lee Jia placed a hand on Eui’s back to comfort her, and Chunhei tried to stammer out an urgent reassurance.

“N-not that we think you did it, of course! Right honey? We know you’re innocent—no daughter of mine would ever—”

“I killed him.”

Eui’s words froze Chunhei, and she felt her husband’s hand find hers and squeeze it in a tight grip as his face twisted into a pained grimace. She barely noticed, blinking back the tears that began to form in her eyes once again.

“W-what do you mean? That just the story that—”

Eui looked up and met her mother’s eyes with a cold, lifeless glare.

“I murdered him. With the wood carving knife that dad gave me for self-defense. I stabbed him to death. The charges were real—I was guilty.”

Chunhei felt her blood running cold. She felt her husband trying to comfort her—he’d known. Of course he had—he was always better with people than she was. He’d never argued with her assertions that Eui was innocent, but—he’d never really affirmed them either. Minjun had done as he always did—whatever he thought was best for Chunhei. Chunhei felt her thoughts spiraling downward, her mind refusing to acknowledge reality as every sensation suddenly felt strange and foreign to her.

“Hold on!”

The voice brought Chunhei part way back to reality—a foreign intrusion into this private moment, alien to her family, and unwelcome. Lee Jia’s voice, she realized. Chunhei latched onto the intrusion, her emotions flooding out of control as they found an outlet—something to attack that she didn’t already love and respect.

“What the fuck do you want?!”

Chunhei’s voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere else. Like it wasn’t hers—though she knew that she had said the words herself. Lee Jia held up her hands defensively, a shocked expression on her face as she rushed to finish what she was saying.

“What Eui is leaving out is the part where the mage she killed was a jealous fiance that had attacked Jaehwa, and was planning to attack her as well. She was trying to protect her friend, and herself. It was justified self-defense, and Jaehwa lied about it to protect her family’s reputation.”

Lee Jia’s words stopped Chunhei’s thoughts all over again, and she paused, staring down at the teapot in her hands. When did she—oh, she had been about to throw it at Lee Jia. Her husband’s soothing voice brought her back to the present.

“Now now, dear—let’s put that down, okay? We don’t want to attack our guest, least of all someone so important to our daughter, right?”

Chunhei nodded blankly, letting her husband take the teapot out of her hand and place it safely back on the table. She was eased back into her seat, calm now—for a certain definition of calm—but the damage was done. Idly, she wondered what would have happened if she’d gone through with it—mortals didn’t tend to survive throwing scalding hot tea in the faces of powerful mages. Minjun, ever the diplomat, tried to maintain some level of decorum.

“Well, that hardly makes you a murderer, I’d say. A shame what they did to you in court, but I’m just happy to have my daughter back, safe and—”

“He wasn’t the only one.”

Eui’s words struck Chunhei’s heart like a dagger, and even Minjun’s well-practiced merchant’s smile dropped into a small frown. Lee Jia was glaring daggers at Eui, but she ignored her girlfriend’s silent protestations and pressed on.

“How do you think I survived out there? A teenage girl, all by myself in the wilderness. I was on my own for a year before I stumbled into the academy. It was sheer luck that I managed to make it that long—luck, and an uncompromising willingness to do anything it took to survive. And yeah, that meant killing people. A lot of people.”

Minjun cleared his throat, awkwardly trying to balance his attention between comforting Chunhei and addressing Eui.

“I—I don’t understand, Eui. What are you saying?”

Eui scoffed and rolled her eyes—still the rebellious little girl she always had been.

“I was a bandit, dad! I stalked vulnerable travelers on the road and killed them for their supplies. Innocent people. Merchants like—like you...”

Now it was Minjun’s turn to be shaken, and he sputtered over his attempted response.

“But—there had to be other—you wouldn’t—I taught you to—”

Eui stood and raised her voice, cutting her father off.

“You weren’t there! How could you possibly know what it’s like?! I was all alone! You have no idea what I had to do—what I had to become!”

Her shouts slowly transformed into strangled sobs.

“You—you weren’t there—I was—I couldn’t—”

Chunhei felt something stronger than her own distress—stronger than the shock of having her world turned on its head so suddenly. With the kind of certainty that only a mother could possess, Chunhei knew that right at that moment Eui needed her mother. Without a second thought, she shook off her husband and rushed to Eui’s side, sweeping her daughter up into a tight embrace.

“Shh. It’s okay, sweetheart. I’m here. You’re okay. I’m so sorry, Eui. We’re here now—we’ll always be here for you.”

Eui’s shoulders shook as she silently sobbed into her mother’s arms. Minjun stepped forward to embrace them both, murmuring softly.

“Whatever you did, we understand. We forgive you. And I hope you can forgive us for not being there when you needed us. We love you, Eui.”

Chunhei nodded in emphatic agreement.

“We love you, Eui.”

Her daughter let out a shuddering sob before returning her parents’ embrace with an iron-strong grip.

“I love you too.”