“AND DON’T EVER SHOW YOUR FACE AROUND HERE AGAIN!” Lydia ran away as the angry store owner shouted after her. She was clutching her bag, which she had hastily grabbed on her way out, as she ran around the corner. Stumbling because she tried to dodge a black cat that suddenly entered her pathway, she let go of it for one moment before catching herself on a nearby bench.

It was an old thing, covered in spray-paints that only the people who made them could think were any sort of artistic expression, and a few splinters of rough wood penetrated the outer layers of her skin as she regained her balance. It was unpleasant, but in her hazy state, she barely noticed it.

‘My dishwashing job is going to be unpleasant the next few days…’ she thought before realizing that that was the job she had just lost. A girl of thirteen years shouldn’t ever be this tired, a voice at the back of her head told her. Pushing it aside, Lydia got up and checked the inside of her bag. The money she had stolen was still there.

This was a last resort she had went to two times before that already, making this one the third. The stealing always worked out, unlocked doors, opportunistically breaking cameras, faulty cash registers and lucky safe combination guesses. However, the reason why she only resorted to this when she absolutely had to, even though she never got caught, was because it always seemed to be followed by a massive streak of bad luck.

She hadn’t even stolen this load of cash from the job she had just gotten fired from; this was the job she went to directly afterwards. A plate had slipped from her fingers, and when she tried to pick it up, she had accidentally caused a chain reaction that saw an insane amount of collateral damage. Not only to the restaurant, as a dull pulsing pain in her shoulder let her know. A large pot had fallen on top of her.

Injuries like that weren’t abnormal after stealing; Lydia often caught herself thinking, when she had the energy to think that was, that it was some sort of karmic balance at play. She got a streak of luck allowing her to get away with stealing, and then the world punished her. She didn’t complain, she had no right to; after all this was the thing that helped her over the rounds.

Although it would become increasingly harder to find a job. The sort of scumbags that would hire a 13-year-old girl without asking questions or even attempting to sign a contract were somewhat well networked.

On other days she would now head towards the next job. If she got there earlier, she would get paid more because she could work longer. Today, however, she had informed the man who did that particular thing that she had something else to do.

It was the second anniversary of her mother’s death.

Lydia didn’t even know how the last two years had passed. They were all just a melted mess of hazy, tired days. Act through school like nothing is really happening, go work, sleep too little, repeat. She got home and opened the door.

Lying in the entrance was her father; it was no surprise to see him there. He recently had taken to drinking, and she was almost relieved by that. He wasn’t a violent drunk, he just cried and eventually fell asleep, and he didn’t care what it was as long as it was strong. It was way cheaper for him to pass out in the entrance of the house than to spend the majority of time gambling away what they still had.

Lydia didn’t even try to lift him up and get him somewhere else; he had gotten fat from the amount of cheap bread he stuffed his face with. ‘Maybe I would be better off if he just died.’ Lydia shook her head at thought, disgusted with herself. That was even worse than that regular invasive idea to report her situation to the authorities.

If she did that, then she wouldn’t even have her father anymore. She would be all alone. No, the hell she currently was in was the best hell she could have bargained for. There was no heaven on an earth where mothers died anyway.

“You won’t be able to come with me to mom’s grave, will you?” Lydia mumbled, shaking the passed out drunk while getting a pile of due bills and warnings out from under him. Of course, it didn’t achieve anything. The only movement that was in the still body came from his chest pumping heavily. Lydia grabbed a little bundle of flowers, left him laying there and went out again.

It wasn’t far from her home to the local church. Hiding from the priest, he was a good but insistent man and would ask her how she was doing, to which she had no answer that wouldn’t have ultimately led to a confrontation she didn’t want to have and made her way to her mother’s grave.

She had a couple of flowers with her. Plucked from her garden, uncared for since Mathilda’s death, they looked sick and halfway withered being already several days old and the autumn air doing them no favours.

A breeze rolled over the land, waving her messy braid as she hid her hands in her pockets. She hadn’t been to a hairdresser, instead just cutting her hair herself. She would have liked it short, but this way of styling her hair was her mother’s last peaceful action before everything had taken a turn for the much, much worse. At some point, the rebellious insistence of a girl had become a memento.

Quietly, an arm extended next to the kneeling girl and placed a second pair of flowers on the soil in front of the gravestone. They were pristine, properly arranged in a bouquet and made the ones Lydia had left behind look even more like biological waste.

Lydia whirled around and saw three men. Two of them were tall, muscular people in suits, one of which had been the one to place the flowers. However, the old man in the centre had an aura around him that Lydia couldn’t quite place. With his declining, barely aristocratic hairline, he had an air of authority around him, but his whole-body language and on-setting frailty made him look more like the friendly grandpa type.

“So she is dead after all,” the old man said; “May I ask who you are little girl?”

“Who are YOU?” Lydia asked in return slowly inching away. People in suits were way too likely to mean trouble.

“That depends on your answer to my question,” the old man said, flicking away a pebble with his walking stick out of boredom; “If you are just a random passerby, then I am no one to you. If you have knowledge of the Abyss, that would make me someone you should know already. If you are just the daughter of the bashful child that lies underneath that stone, that’d make me your grandfather, of some description at least.”

The adolescent girl got big eyes. “You are my mother’s father?”

“For the ease of simplicity, yes,” the old man stepped closer and narrowed his eyes as if he was trying to see something beyond her. “I had no idea she had a kid with an Innate Ability. She really disliked us when she left, didn’t she? Kid, what is your name?”

“Lydia…” the stare of the old man combined with a asking gesture urged her to state her full name, “Lydia Goch.”

“Bah. No, no, no,” the old man stabbed his cane into the ground with each denial, creating little dark holes in the otherwise light-coloured dirt. “Not even Van Goch, that would have been acceptable, just Goch. Can’t have you run around with that name when you got a gift from Gaia.”

“Gaia?” Lydia asked, and the old man raised an eyebrow.

“She didn’t tell you anything? Mhm, let me give you the short of it then. Starting with the most important thing…” In the background one of bodyguards raised his hands, and suddenly the wind stopped. “…your last name should be Hohenzollern, and you can be part of another world...”

___________________________________________________________________

“That is crazy!” Lydia decided when the old man was done with his explanations.

“Is it? I can see in your aura, you have some kind of ability. Did nothing weird ever happen to you? Some twists of fate that seemed to work out in the short but got you a streak of bad luck in the long run?” Frederik the Great, her supposed great grandfather, said and then cackled like only old people could when he read the answer from her face. “So there is something!”

“Those cash registers and cameras…” Lydia mumbled, “the doors…” They hadn’t been left open, her powers had instinctively broken them open, and because everyone had been convinced they had checked their security, and had been right, this Gaia entity had punished her for it.

She glanced at the wobbling mass of liquid metal that had been Frederik’s cane. There was no doubt that this was either real or she had finally gone coo-coo from the stress. Honestly, the latter seemed more likely.

“Mhm, what do registers, cameras and doors have in common,” Frederik mumbled behind a raised hand. It didn’t take long before he snapped his fingers and grinned. “Catch!” he exclaimed while throwing a piece of the liquid mass at her.

She reached out with her hands, and remarkably enough, that did the trick. It caused something inside her to stretch and cry like a muscle that hadn’t been moved in a day. In her defence, she only just had been told that she indeed possessed that muscle.

“About twenty centimetres, that’s pretty good for a starter in metal magic,” Frederik commented; “Actually, that is highly promising.”

“Why?” Lydia asked while watching this blob waver in front of her; everything seemed to waver as well as her eyes became wet. It was a realization that hit her, one for which the man in front of her wasn’t to blame but the woman underground behind them. “Why did she not ask you for help? Why didn’t my father?”

“Mathilda parted with our family to marry your father together with a vow to never touch the Abyss again. It was smart of her; both she and Ivan were weak. She hated our family because she never felt acknowledged by us,” Frederik shrugged; “Maybe she was right, our family is big and the weak often fall by the wayside. Maybe she wanted to keep you out of this whole life; her asking for help would have meant we would have found you immediately. Maybe she thought it would have been useless to ask anyway. Only she can tell you that.”

Lydia sniffed as small tears ran down her face. “What now? Will you abduct me?”

“Abduct you? What? I am a gentleman, young lady!” Frederik announced in a genuinely offended voice; “What kind of family would ever abduct its own members? No, no,” he stabbed the ground twice with a cane that quickly reformed, “I am giving you a choice. If you come with me, I will see that your father is cared for where you can see him, that you get those powers under control and that you have all the money and security you could ever need. That comes with a feudal oath to an immortal god-like being, but I assure you he is a master conversationalist and a nice and artistic fellow.”

Minutes passed as she thought about it. Wasn’t this just the same as running to the authorities? Yes, yes it was. However, now that she was actually face to face with a whole other world and powers she didn’t understand, another thing became perfectly clear. She had been lying to herself because she was afraid, and unless she suddenly woke up from this dream, she now had the choice between continuing to work the skin off her bones for a father that became increasingly more likely to die of some overdose by the day or to dive into the Abyss.

She looked up with determination.

___________________________________________________

Five years later on the day, she hurried back to the grave in the middle of the night. Those were five years filled with hard work in all aspects of life. Education, art, music, finances, governing. She had to learn all about everything, and with the discipline of a girl who knew the struggle of working out of utter necessity, she had worked through all of it.

She had so much to tell her mother, enough to sacrifice sleep on a workday to go all the way out here. To this day, she still admired the woman, even if she had come to understand that she had been imperfect. She had a slight smile on her lips and hummed a song that she had been writing on her piano, advised by the elemental she had contracted. Someday soon, they would become one; Lydia wasn’t sure if she wanted that yet, but Frederik said it wasn’t a bad thing, and Cath agreed to the procedure.

Just two days ago, she had been declared heir of the Hohenzollern’ estates. That was a great honour and had caused some surprise in the nation, especially since together with that she, a total newcomer on the world stage, being previously unknown, had a chance to get on the throne of Rex Germaniae after her grandfather.

Although that may not become necessary; Maximillian, the other candidate, was an attractive and interesting man. Maybe they could strike some sort of agreement? She giggled a bit as she took the final corner and felt her stomach turn upside down as she spied a man climbing out of a hole where her mother’s grave was supposed to be.

It was Ivan, her father, holding the silver key pendant with a look of feverish accomplishment on his face. At that moment a part of Lydia already knew.