Eruk and I were walking down the road the next day when a man walked out of the corn field we were passing and waved to us. He had shoulder length purple hair and held a staff tipped with a red, spherical crystal in his right hand.

"Teacher!" I cried. "What are you doing here? I haven't seen you in ages!"

"You know how it is," he called back cheerfully. "Busy, busy, busy! I looked for you at home but you had already left. Do you know that your parents are worried sick?" He didn't sound particularly concerned.

"They knew I was planning to leave."

"Yes, but they expected you would at least wait for your birthday."

"I know. That's why I left early."

"When's your birthday?" Eruk asked suspiciously.

"It's today."

"Oh, happy birthday! So are you fourteen or fifteen?"

"Fourteen."

"But you told me three days ago that you were fourteen!"

"I was! This is the anniversary of the day my parents found me. I don't know my real birthday." I sighed.

"Yes, happy birthday, Lana," my teacher said. "I'm going to give you clothes as your birthday present since you seem to have lost your old ones."

I wrapped my arms around myself protectively. What was it with men and making rude comments about my outfit?

"I thought I'd told you that you would need protective spells woven into your clothing if you wanted to become an adventurer," my teacher said, holding out a small stack of neatly folded clothing.

"Give me, give me, give me!" I shouted, snatching my present from his hands. "I'll go try it on. You talk amongst yourselves," I added haughtily. "Teacher, this is my new friend Eruk Nels Traurig. Eruk, this is my teacher. He taught me all the magic I know." I dashed far enough into the cornfield that they wouldn't be able to see me.

Behind me, I heard Eruk say, "So, do you have a name, Lana's Teacher?"

"Mmm. You can call me...Mr. X. Yes, I like that," my teacher replied. From his tone of voice, I could tell that he was smiling his most irritatingly, ineffably cheerful smile. "So, Eruk -- It was Eruk, right? -- where are you from?"

"Sairaag," Eruk said shortly.

"A lovely city. Is the tree still alive?"

"Flagoon, you mean?" Eruk sounded wary. "Yes."

Flagoon is the holy tree of Sairaag. It is said to absorb evil energy and convert it into pure, clean energy. In other words, it eats black magic and gives off white magic. It was killed when the city was destroyed thirty years ago (or around then) but they replaced it when they rebuilt the city. It's considered one of the holiest objects in the world.

"How did they manage to revive it?" my teacher asked. "I've been wondering about that for a long time."

"Cuttings. There were trees grown from cuttings taken from Flagoon in some of the other towns in the area. We took cuttings from those trees and planted them back in Sairaag."

"How clever."

There was no sign of sarcasm in my teacher's tone, but Eruk bristled anyway. "Yes. It was."

At that point, I finished getting dressed. I ran back out to the road. "How do I look?" I called.

"Very cute," my teacher said approvingly.

Eruk nodded. "You look decent for the first time since I met you."

"Eruk," I growled warningly.

My teacher forestalled the fight by saying, "Eruk, if you're from Sairaag, perhaps you know a young woman named...Slyphiel, I believe."

"That's my mother's name," Eruk said stiffly.

"Really?" my teacher asked with interest. He leaned forward and peered into Eruk's face. "Yes, I can see the resemblance. What an amazing coincidence."

"Your eyes are just like Lana's," Eruk commented uneasily.

Perhaps I should take a moment to describe my teacher's eyes. He keeps them closed most of the time. I've asked him why about two hundred times. Half the time, he just told me that it was a secret and the rest of the time he gave me a hundred different answers, most of them obviously false. So, basically, I don't know why. Anyway, it doesn't seem to have any effect on his ability to see where he's going or where the things around him are. When he does open his eyes, which he does sometimes if he's startled or if he wants to look at something more closely, they're angular and exactly the color of amethyst. I know because my mother has a pair of amethyst earrings and they're exactly the same color as his eyes. My eyes are a few shades darker but they have the same oblong pupils. Maybe it's a black mage thing.

"I met your mother once, briefly," my teacher was saying to Eruk. "She seemed very pure and good." Somehow he managed to make that sound not entirely complementary. "She was a very powerful healer."

"She still is," Eruk said softly. The tenderness in his voice made me want to cry with envy.

"Teacher," I said, "do you know anything about my real parents?"

He seemed to freeze momentarily at the question but his voice was unconcerned when he asked, "What makes you think I would know anything about your real parents?"

"I don't know. You know a lot of stuff so I thought you might."

"Lana, if I knew anything about your real parents, don't you think I would have told you years ago?"

I scuffed a toe on the ground. "I guess so."

"They must have been amazing people to produce someone like Lana," Eruk said. I did not take that as a complement.

I was about to challenge Eruk over that, when a...creature burst out of the corn beside us. It was followed by several more.

"My, my, I didn't think there were any orcs in this area," my teacher commented in a tone of amusement. "I'll let you two handle them."

"Why you...!" I shouted but by the time I looked back to grab him, he was gone. "That slippery, no good coward," I muttered under my breath. "He always does this." Usually there was nothing worse to face than my parents coming out to see what caused the explosion but my teacher still always reliably vanished at the first sign of trouble. What was worse, he always teleported so far away that I couldn't read his jump to follow him.

That left Eruk and me to face the orcs. Or rather, since Eruk was useless, that left me. I swallowed hard, but my teacher had trained me well, even if he was too much of a coward to fight himself.

"Freeze arrow!" I shouted. The lead orc froze in its tracks, literally. Good. They might be ugly but they were still just as stoppable as other flesh-and-blood creatures. "Fireball!" I tried. That knocked the next pair out of the fight, but the rest kept on coming. They were already almost on top of me!

I drew my staff. The orcs lumbered closer, drool running down the sides of their pig-like snouts. I backed up until I bumped into Eruk. "Eruk..." I said. I grabbed his hand. He gave my hand a reassuring squeeze. "...Run!" I shouted.

Shoving an orc out of my way with the end of my staff, I ran past the orcs at top speed, dragging Eruk behind me. Once we were a safe distance behind the orcs, I dropped Eruk's hand and spun back into the fight. The orcs, being incredibly stupid, were still trying to figure out what had just happened. I took out another two of them before they figured out that I was behind them. A fistful of flare arrows took out a third while they were running towards me but the last two had almost reached me again.

I fixed an expression of terrified indecision on my face and waited for the orcs to come into reach. Just when they thought they had me, I lunged forward, shouting, "Mono Volt" Both the spell and I bounced off the inside of a magical shield.

"Ouch!" I shouted. "Eruk, do you know how much that spell stings when it rebounds on the caster?"

"Uh, sorry," he said. "Lana, if you're going to try something like that, would you warn me first? That was terrifying!"

"Oh, sorry," I said, "but there wasn't really time."

Meanwhile, the orcs were prodding the shield spell in bewilderment.

I thought quickly. "Okay, he's what we'll do. Drop the shield when I tell you to."

"That isn't much of a plan," Eruk complained, but I was already chanting, "Source of all power, burning bright, gather in my hand. Now, Eruk! Fireball!"

The shield went down with perfect timing. Suddenly deprived of the surface they had been banging their fists on, the orcs stumbled towards us only to be annihilated by my fireball.

I brushed off my hands. "Well done, Lana, if I do say so myself. And I didn't even have to use any of my big spells."

"Yeah, that was pretty good," Eruk agreed, patting me on the back. I blushed with pleasure.

We turned around and started up the road again.

"Have you known that guy long?" Eruk asked.

"My teacher? Yeah, as long as I can remember."

"Is he always that, well, strange?"

"No, sometimes he's much worse." I laughed. "Actually, I'm surprised he showed up while you were around. Usually he doesn't let anyone see him but me."

"That must be awkward for you."

"Yeah. Until I was nine years old, my parents thought he was a figment of my imagination. They used to call him my 'imaginary friend.' Even though I told them that he wasn't imaginary and he wasn't my friend."

"What changed then?"

"They decided that a purely imaginary friend couldn't teach me real spells or give me real spell books. Then they got really worried."

"I can imagine. Most parents don't like the thought of their children getting involved with strange men."

"And my teacher sure is strange! He's a good teacher though. I like him, except when I want to kill him."

"You don't seem very respectful."

"The man's a freak, but he's my freak. You know what I find really strange?"

"What?"

"That he said he's met your mother. I always think of him as living in woods behind my house. It's odd to think of him having a life outside of teaching me."

"I always felt that way about my teachers too. There was one..."

At that moment I heard a snorting sound behind me. I whirled. The orc I had frozen before was right behind us! Time seemed to slow so that I could see the water slowly dripping off its body. I heard my own scream. There was no time to cast a spell but somehow, without knowing what I was doing, I managed to grab a wad of my fear and throw it in the creature's face. The orc crumbled to ash.

"Lana, what did you just do?" Eruk breathed.

"I...I don't know," I gasped. "I just threw raw black magic at it. I wasn't thinking. I just did it. I can't believe it worked!"

"Shh," Eruk gathered me into his arms. I clung to him. The orc had scared me, but not half as much as my own response had. If anything, my non-spell had been more powerful than the formal spells of the same magic level, and it shouldn't be. Where had I gotten the power from?

White magic, black magic and shamanism all draw on external sources of power. White magic draws on the gods, black magic on the Monsters, the mazoku, and shamanism on the elemental forces of nature. A mage shouldn't be able to draw enough power from her internal energy to disintegrate an orc. Unless maybe she used up her own life force.

"Eruk," I asked desperately. "Is my hair white?"

The most obvious sign of overextending your magical abilities to the point where you drain your life energy is that your hair turns white. The second most obvious sign is that if you drain it deep enough, you drop dead.

"No, it's still bright orange," he reassured me. "Do you feel weak?"

"No, I feel great." The fight had exhilarated rather than exhausted me.

"Then, don't worry about it," he decided. "You're fine. I'm fine. All the orcs are dead. We should just be happy that everything turned out all right."

"You're right," I agreed. "I won't worry about it. Everything's good."

We stood in silence for a long moment.

"Uh, Lana, you can let go now," Eruk suggested awkwardly.

I reluctantly unwrapped my arms from my beautiful protectee. Shucks. It's not everyday you get a hug from a gorgeous blonde like that.

Author's Note: First, I would like to thank Ysengrinn for pointing out the problem with Eruk's last name. It has been fixed.

Since I'm at it, I would also like to thank RurouniGochan for giving such wonderful reviews. I love your stories too. I recommend them to anyone who likes Rurouni Kenshin. In fact, I would like to thank everyone who has reviewed this story. You are all kind and insightful. Your guesses are always good even when they're wrong.

Now you know most of Lana and Eruk's parentage, the fun will be watching them figure it out. For that matter, you still don't know most of the why or how. As always, the review button is available for guesses and any other comments you would like to make.