Selene pursed her lips as she listened to the villagers murmuring around her. The faces of the people talking about her held wariness, curiosity, and contempt in equal measure. She glanced at them, then smiled brightly. She drew a breath and called out in a loud, cheerful voice.

“Hello there, Uncle Hans!”

“…Oh, uh…. Yes, hello.”

The butcher called Hans scratched the back of his head, looking embarrassed. Flustered by her greeting, he gave a few quick shoves to Mrs. Agis, the neighborhood inn owner who had been standing in front of his butcher shop talking about Selene. Mrs. Agis, who would be hard pressed to find a rival in this village when it came to spreading gossip, let out a pointed, uncomfortable cough and crossed her arms.

“Well…. Selene, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Yes. Hello, ma’am. I heard old Grandpa Linguini’s grandson is sick today.”

“…Oh my, is that so? Yes, I did hear that little one wailing loud enough to shake the whole neighborhood earlier. Poor thing must be ill. You must be busy, go on ahead.”

Pfft. A small laugh escaped Selene’s lips. She covered her involuntary smile with her hand and dipped her head. Honestly, how adorable. She could still hear every word they had just been saying about witches plain as day, yet the moment she turned around, they were already chattering again as though nothing had happened.

“See, what did I tell you? A witch, honestly. That woman just can’t stand pretty young girls, I tell you.”

“No, no! My husband really did see it with his own eyes! She was talking to animals!”

“She’s just kind, that’s all! Kind!! She was probably feeding the poor creatures. Honestly…. Tsk, some people just have rotten hearts.”

Uncle Hans’s grumbling voice drifted into her ears. But of course, what reached her was not only the words he spoke aloud. She gave an imperceptible flick of her fingers, and a white light flickered at her fingertips. The voice of his heart, the thoughts he kept tucked deep in his chest, came spilling out along with it.

‘Oh my~ What a lovely girl. If only I had a son, I’d set him up with Selene in a heartbeat.’

Butcher Hans had two grown daughters and no sons. They appeared to be around the same age as Selene on the surface, which was why Uncle Hans was unusually kind to her compared to the other villagers. Even when everyone else quietly shunned and resented her for being a witch, Uncle Hans was at least decent enough to her face.

“A son, he says. How old is Uncle Hans’s daughter again? She was born around the time I was deep into shapeshifting magic, so…. She must be about eighteen by now?”

A light laugh rose in her throat. Her face, touched by the sunlight, was strikingly beautiful as she smiled. Her long, silky hair glinted gold in the sun and took on a faint reddish hue in the shade. 

Her lashes were thick, and beneath them, a pair of warm, pale green eyes smiled back at the world, the kind of eyes that stayed with you once you had seen them. Even the villagers who had been whispering about witches and quietly avoiding her all softened at once when Selene smiled.

She stopped in front of Grandpa Linguini’s door and knocked slowly.

Knock. Knock knock. Before she had finished the second knock, the door swung open. A wrinkled face appeared, belonging to an elderly man of about eighty who looked every bit as kind as he was old.

“Selene! You came!”

“Grandpa, how have you been?”

“Oh, yes, yes. Come in, come in. I’m sorry to have you come all this way.”

Not at all. She smiled warmly at his embarrassed fussing and followed Grandpa Linguini inside. The sound of a child crying reached her. She pushed open the bedroom door and found a small boy inside.

“Oh dear, Ling…. No, Tommy. You’ve really done a number on yourself, haven’t you?”

She had almost called him Linguini. Tommy, Grandpa Linguini’s grandson, was the spitting image of what his grandfather must have looked like as a boy. The resemblance was so uncanny that she nearly burst out laughing at the sight of the crying child, and she pressed her lips tightly together to hold it in. It never stopped being remarkable to her.

Humans grow. Humans age. Humans disappear.

That finitude struck Selene, a witch, as something unbearably beautiful. Selene Hecate was a witch. In truth, a good portion of what the villagers gossiped about her was accurate. Though some of it was complete nonsense, of course. 

For instance, yes. She was indeed a witch, and she was immortal, ageless. That much was true. But the claim Mrs. Agis loved to spread, that she ate humans and drank their blood, was false. With so many things in the world far more delicious than humans, why would she bother killing something so difficult to kill in the first place? 

And besides, the idea that witches needed to drink blood to use magic was nothing but a rumor humans had invented among themselves. Witches were born with magical power, their mana, as a natural gift. So why on earth would she kill humans, who were, for all their faults, uselessly endearing?

“It hurts! It hurts…! Nngh!”

She gave Tommy’s hair one gentle stroke as he wailed with his face all scrunched up, smiled at him, and placed her hand on his injured leg. Without reciting a single incantation, she gathered a soft concentration of energy at her fingertips, and the wound began to close with a quiet shimmer. The gaping, broken skin knit itself back together. Everyone in Grandpa Linguini’s house stared open-mouthed at the sight.

“Th, that’s impossible…!”

“…Now that right there is some witch-like power.”

“Oh! That’s, that’s really…. A, a witch…!”

Someone gasped the words aloud, and she quickly swept her hand through the air. The eyes of everyone in the room went blank, then slowly returned to focus. Memory alteration. For a witch living among humans, it was one of the most essential basic spells. She was already wrapping a bandage around Tommy’s leg, which by now bore no trace of injury, when those present began to stir back from the memory alteration and resumed their conversation.

“Tommy, you little troublemaker! You had better stop running wild.”

“The pretty doctor doesn’t come out here very often, you know~ Understand?”

“Well, the treatment went so well today, maybe she won’t need to come back next time!”

They spoke among themselves as though nothing had happened. Selene watched them and smiled.

“Here now, Selene. Take this with you on your way back. I’ve been saving it up.”

“Oh my? Thank you so much, Grandpa Linguini.”

Selene’s eyes went wide and she lit up with a bright smile. Grandpa Linguini held out a large food basket and pressed it into her hands. He had always been like this, always sending her off with something whenever she came by. It was one of the reasons Selene had never left this village. 

Mrs. Agis, who had a loose tongue but was always the first to step up when something needed doing. Uncle Hans, who greeted her cheerfully every time and kept trying to introduce her to his daughters. And Grandpa Linguini, whose face was lined with age but still struck her as kind and sweet.

She had no real obligation to treat anyone, yet she was happy to use memory alteration on top of it all just to help them. That was how much she loved this warm little village. Because Selene did not age, she had to periodically alter the villagers’ memories as the years passed. Memory alteration was not perfect, of course. 

No matter how thoroughly she erased their recollections, traces of her remained in their subconscious, and so even after a round of alterations, they always remembered her as someone they felt they had seen somewhere before. Since she could not do anything about those lingering remnants of magic, Selene had settled for a compromise: she would remain in this place as nothing more than a slightly odd physician.

‘There is a witch living in the Ida Forest.’

That was why, when that rumor spread, she had left it alone. When you wanted to hide the truth, burying it inside a half-lie was always the most effective approach.

“Well, I’ll be on my way then.”

She gave a small bow and stepped out, making her way through the edge of the village. Her spirits were light. Whenever she returned from the human world, a smile always found its way to Selene’s lips. Her fellow witches, her kin who had been born with magic just as she had, looked at her like she was strange for it, but she simply could not bring herself to dislike humans.

‘They always betray us in the end. You know that, don’t you? You know what we’ve been through!’

‘The reason we lost our home and had to take refuge in the witches’ land was because of that sister who trusted a human, wasn’t it?′

She let out a quiet sigh, thinking of her sisters. They were not wrong. Witches were fundamentally different from humans. They were all born from human mothers, but the moment they came into the world carrying magic, they instinctively set themselves apart. The moment a witch was born, she stepped outside the ordinary flow of the world and became something else entirely. 

She called her kin, those who shared not a drop of blood but carried the same magic, her sisters, and recognized them in her heart as her true family. That was why she respected the choice of the sisters who had grown to despise humans for attacking and fearing them, and had gone off to the witches’ land. 

But Selene did not want that for herself. She loved watching the brief lives of humans unfold, and she took pleasure in learning the human ways that were not permitted to witches. After all, witches were born of human blood too, in the end.

That was why Selene was called the eccentric witch. She did not mind. Witches were individualists by nature. They were beings who did not form packs, who lived however they pleased. So among all those stubborn loners, surely there was room for one eccentric loner like herself.

Turning these thoughts over in her mind, Selene lifted the basket, heavy in her hand, and rummaged through the inside.

“Hehe, he gave me a lot of wild strawberries today. Just what I needed.”