What strange children.
    The view of those innocent sleeping faces from the wooden beam high overhead prompted the sudden thought.
    Two boys were fast asleep on hay piled thick on the floor of the rickety old barn. There wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy about their appearances. The boy on the right, sleeping on his side, had flaxseed blond hair and deep-green eyes, when they were open. Those colors were common enough here in the NNM (Norlangarth Northern Middle) area. His height and weight were within average values for a boy his age.
    But the boy on the left, his limbs thrown about with abandon in his sleep, had both hair and eyes of pure black. That was different. Those dark colors were designated to appear with much higher likelihood in the E and S areas. While it was rare for a child to be born with those colors in the north, the probability was still greater than zero. With the total population of the Human Empire as high as it was now, it wasn’t out of the question. His size was so similar to the other boy’s that they might as well have been twins.
    Master had given the order to directly observe these two boys 163 days ago, and the result was a bit of a letdown after the long trip from Centoria. Nothing about their appearance or actions suggested talent greater than other units of the same gender, region, and age range. In terms of planning and ability to avoid danger, they seemed below average, in fact.
    But now it had been half a year of carefully following their travel, making sure not to be spotted. The rains had passed, and now that summer was waning as well, Master’s interest in these particular boys was becoming clear at last.
    That lack of planning and regularity could also be called healthy curiosity and love of adventure. Even after more than two centuries of life, few things had surprised the observer as much as the ingenuity and agency of the black-haired boy. He had nearly broken the Taboo Index’s laws on a number of occasions in the period since the observation had begun and seemed likely to continue doing so.
    In a sense, it had to be this way, or else he could not have done what he did. After all, it was otherwise unthinkable that someone could break down one of the eternal barriers that Master’s archrival had placed around the world—and do so in just a matter of days, no less…
    Whatever the black-haired boy was dreaming about, his limbs jerked into movement. The hem of the shirt he wore as a pajama top pulled upward. He stopped wriggling, oblivious to his now-exposed stomach. The observer rolled its eyes.
    Even in late summer, here at the border of Norlangarth’s north region, the night breeze could chill. The barn was drafty to begin with, so sleeping with exposed skin on top of a bed of hay could very easily cause an illness effect that would slightly downgrade his total life. And tomorrow—August 28th in the year 378 of the Human Era—was the biggest event of the boys’ journey thus far.
    They’d made a fair amount of money working at this farm over the summer, so the observer had wanted to tell them to at least spend some of it to stay at an inn on this particular night. But direct contact was absolutely forbidden, and so they were sleeping in this rickety old barn yet again. And look at him now.
    …Oh well. I’m sure Master will overlook a tiny bit of meddling.
    Atop the beam, the observer waved an arm, muttered an incantation in a tiny voice, and produced a little point of green light, hovering at the fingertip—a wind element.
    The observer carefully guided the light downward. It descended right next to the black-haired boy and buried itself about thirty cens into the hay, where it was silently released.
    The resulting gust of wind was enough to lift an armful of hay into the air, where it gently settled over the boy’s exposed midriff. It wasn’t much of a blanket, but it would at least shield against the chill of the breeze seeping through the walls.
    The observer watched the oblivious boys as they continued to sleep and reflected on this action.
    In over two centuries since Master had frozen its life and recast it as a familiar, it had undertaken similar tasks a number of times. But never had there been any attachment to the target above the level of interest. In fact, the observer was not supposed to have emotions at all. It was not, after all, even a human unit of the type that ruled over the human realm or the Underworld as a whole.
adventure.
    It was fine to anticipate that the boy would catch a cold the night before a major test. The problem was, why use arts to interfere, rather than simply stand back and watch? In fact, if the boy fell ill, failed the test, and had to return to his original village, the observer’s stint would be over, allowing it to return to that corner of the bookcase in the great library where it liked to be.
    Did that mean…it valued the travel with these boys over the prospect of going home?
    It was impossible. It was irrational. It was as though the irregular nature of the youths had infected it.
    Enough thinking. This was not part of the job. The only thing that mattered was sticking close and watching until blond Eugeo and black-haired Kirito reached their journey’s destination.
    The observer shrank its body down to the minimum size of five mils and leaped off the rafter beam. At this size, there was no life penalty for falling, so arts would not be required. It landed on a straw of hay without a sound and scurried on little legs to its usual spot: the shaggy black hair of the boy named Kirito.
    It grabbed a few hairs its own color and fixed itself in place, then felt its small body fill with that inexplicable emotion again.
    Peace, calmness, relief, and, somewhere beneath all that, something tiny but rising…No matter how much it pondered, it would never know why.
    What strange children, the observer thought again, closed its eyes, and settled into a light sleep.