Relm leaned away from the canvas and studied her painting, tilting her head and squinting to find that spark of life that used to show up in all of her work. But it wasn't there; the trees in the painting didn't rustle in the breeze, and the animals at their base didn't stir or blink. It was a nice enough painting, but that's all it was: just colors smeared on a canvas, frozen in time. Dead. Or never alive, to begin with.
Groaning, Relm dragged a wide brush back and forth across her palette, then took it to the canvas, obscuring the painting beneath slashes of muddy color. When nothing recognizable was left, she tossed down her palette and brush and turned away from her easel, only to face a stack of canvases in the corner of the room with equally inert paintings. She crossed her arms and pouted.
They did the right thing, she knew, by defeating Kefka last year. She just wished he hadn't taken all the magic with him when he died. Magic was her identity, her birthright; it flowed through her veins for the first eleven years of her life, it gave her paintings something special, it saved her and her loved ones more than once. So, what if some people decided to use it for bad things? They used tools and weapons and technology for bad things, too, and nobody was forced to give those up.
She wondered how Terra and Celes felt in a world without magic. After all, they were practically half made of magic themselves—well, not Terra, anymore, Relm supposed—and they must be affected by its absence. She wished they would visit her; she wished she could ask them directly. Perhaps she should write them. Terra was easy enough to contact, building a new life in Mobliz. Celes was a bit harder to find, traveling the world at the moment, but Relm could always send a letter to someone else—Edgar or Sabin or Setzer—and have them deliver it to her when they saw her.
Or she could get back to painting, and try to force the life back into her work.
The people of Thamasa took the disappearance of magic pretty well, in general. There were a few that had grown accustomed to practicing in private, and learned to hide their disappointment in the same manner. Strago grumbled about the inconveniences of a magic-less life for a few weeks—having to build fires and fetch water from the pump—but soon delegated those tasks to Relm and settled into enjoying his elder years.
Sometimes, Relm felt that she was the only person in the world to notice that magic was gone. That she was the only one who even remembered it, let alone cared what it had done for her. She'd spent most of her childhood more or less on her own, but she'd never felt alone until now.
She cleaned her palette and her brushes, set a fresh canvas on her easel, and began again. Broad swaths of blue for a sky, greens and browns for the earth and trees. And in the middle of the canvas, standing waist-high in the grass and looking up at the clouds, she painted a version of herself. Since there was no more danger in painting a self-portrait, she might as well use it to show how she was feeling.
If only she could capture even that.
The girl on the canvas looked like her, but her expression was dull. Her eyes were vacant, even as they reflected the light, and her body just kind of…stood there. She looked flat against the background, like the first drawings Relm had scribbled on scrap paper years ago. Relm cursed loudly and painted a tree trunk over her self-portrait, destroying the balance of the whole picture in the process.
Maybe I never knew how to paint, she thought, gritting her teeth. Maybe it was just magic, all along. The thought was like a spark to the kindling of her frustration, and rather than ponder whether it was true, Relm tipped her easel over and flung her brush against the wall, where it knocked a picture frame to the floor.
Dread immediately extinguished her rage, and she scurried over to inspect the damage. It was a picture of Strago and Gungho in their younger years, standing over a monster's corpse, their triumphant smiles now warped through the broken glass of the frame.
"Oh, no," Relm muttered, gently picking up the frame and shaking the loose bits of glass about. "Gramps is gonna kill me! It's his favorite picture." Indeed, she'd seen him take the frame off the wall numerous times, usually when he thought she was fast asleep or playing outside. He'd sit in his chair by the fireplace and look at it for a while, then he would take the picture out of the frame and set it on his lap and just stare at it. One time, she even thought she saw him cry. That must have been some monster hunt.
There was nothing for her to do now, though, except carefully clean up the glass and try not to damage the picture. She could get a new frame, but that might take a while. Maybe she could rearrange the frames on the wall a bit, keep Strago's attention away from them, to buy herself some time. Her plan was beginning to take shape in her mind when she swept away the pieces of broken glass and discovered that Strago's picture didn't completely fill the frame. No, what she'd thought was a mat border was another sheet of thick paper.
Another picture.
Glancing over her shoulder to make sure Strago was nowhere to be found, Relm settled back on her heels and turned the frame over, undoing the clasps on the back and lifting it free. She could see the outline of painted people through the back of the paper, but nothing could prepare her for the details on the front.
It was a picture of a family. A blonde woman with bright green eyes sat on a chair, cradling a baby in her arms, while a sandy-haired man stood behind her, his hand on her shoulder. At the woman's feet, a half-grown pup sat tall, its pointy ears still a bit too large for its body. It looked a lot like Interceptor.
And the woman looked a lot like Relm.
Was this her mother? Strago told her that her mother had passed away when Relm was only a year old, but he never told her what she looked like, never showed her a portrait or even mentioned her name. But the resemblance Relm saw in this picture was too uncanny to be a coincidence. She searched the woman's image for more clues, for some irrefutable proof that she really was her mother, and found it in a tiny streak of silver on the woman's left hand. A ring, a Memento Ring, the same one Relm wore around her thumb.
Relm studied the woman's picture, holding the paper up to within inches of her face, and struggled to dredge up just a scrap of the emotion she knew she should be feeling. But nothing came, and Relm wondered if it was because she had nothing to begin with. Apart from a strong physical resemblance, she shared little else with her mother, to her knowledge. How could she miss someone she never knew? How could she miss someone who didn't seem to exist even in the memories of the people who did know her?
Still, it felt wrong. It felt like she was missing out on something important. Relm never had a chance to know her mother, never had a chance to mourn her death; she didn't want to spend the rest of her life without knowing which parts of herself she owed to this woman, without knowing how her mother had felt about her. She made a mental note to ask Strago about her mother directly, and demand some real answers…right after she replaced the frame.
Relm looked over the rest of the picture, from the Interceptor-like puppy to the man standing behind her mother, who she naturally assumed was her father. Though she'd never met him either, there was something familiar in his stance, in the angle of his head. Then her eyes locked onto his painted ones, and an image of a man in black clothing flashed through her mind.
Shadow.
His were the same dark, intense eyes as those on the man in the picture, with the same vertical crease running between them. And the way he stood, as if ready to run at a moment's notice, was echoed in the man's tense pose. And the dog sitting at the woman's feet…was it really Interceptor? Relm remembered Interceptor taking to her easily on their first meeting, much to Shadow's astonishment, and Interceptor chose to follow her home after the final battle, where he chased small animals outside the house and snoozed by the stove at night, his fighting days apparently behind him. Was that because he recognized her? Had he been her dog all along?
But if Shadow really was her father, why didn't he say anything? Didn't he recognize her? Didn't he miss her?
Relm let the picture drift to the floor. It was all too much. Twelve years of secrets, twelve years of silence. For what? She was a smart girl, she would've understood. She was also tough enough to handle the truth. Finding it like this, though, chilled her like an ice spell. She was confused and angry—angry at Strago for not telling her, angry at Shadow for not recognizing her, angry at her mother for dying.
And yet, she couldn't coax out a single tear.
Instead, she rose, leaving the picture and the broken glass where they were, and reclaimed her brush and righted her easel. She set a fresh canvas on it, then painted a chair in the middle of the canvas. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, then opened them and painted a woman on the chair. Blonde hair, green eyes, a silver ring on her finger, but with a livelier smile than she had in the older painting. And on that woman's lap, Relm painted herself, not as a baby, but as she was now, scrunching her shoulders and drawing up her knees to fit into her mother's arms. Interceptor came next, lying at the foot of the chair like he laid next to the stove now, safe and content.
When it came time to complete the portrait, Relm did not paint the man she'd just discovered. Instead, she painted Shadow, but pushed back the visor of his helmet a bit to show off those piercing eyes, the feature that began to put the pieces of Relm's past together.
Finishing the painting, she leaned back and frowned at it. It was a very nice family portrait, but it felt…incomplete, somehow. Squeezing some more red paint onto her palette, she dipped her brush into it and began painting Strago's robe. Still too empty. So, she added Terra to the edge of the little scene, followed by Celes, then Sabin and Edgar and Setzer and Locke. She worked into the night, pulling up the images of the friends she'd traveled with in her mind and transferring them onto the canvas. Gogo's robes were too complicated to replicate exactly, so she placed Gogo in the back, near Umaro. Mog got a place of honor next to Interceptor, and Cyan and Gau framed the group on the left and right, respectively.
By the time Relm laid down her brush, daylight was creeping beneath the curtains, a cool blue-gray, and she became aware of how much her back ached, and how her eyes burned. She slid off her stool and shuffled toward the stairs, right past the broken picture frame and the mysterious picture she'd found inside it.
"I'll let Gramps clean it up," she mumbled. "It's the least he can do, after staying mum for so long!"
As she passed the stove, Interceptor opened his eyes, then rose, stretched, and trotted after her. She turned around to pet him, then let her gaze wander back to the canvas.
It really was a great painting, so full of life, so full of memories—even memories she didn't have yet. A tiny family in the middle, their real names and faces unknown to her, surrounded and supported by the people she did know. The people who, though they weren't related to her by blood, had become her family in the short time she'd spent with them.
Maybe magic isn't really gone, she thought as she climbed the stairs. Maybe it just looks different now. Maybe it looks like people, like friends.
She flopped onto her bed and snuggled under the covers, feeling Interceptor settle at her feet.
Maybe it looks like a family. Maybe…it looks like love.