Lilia's Tale

Chapter 41: Light

"A mirror out of water..?" Father simply repeated.

"You know what a mirror is, so I don't have any worries about that. However, I noticed two things. The first is that when you're standing next to vast expanses of water, such as a lake or the ocean, the surface of the water tends to act like a mirror. I also noticed that it seems to be even more effective at doing that when the water is more compressed. So, I'm thinking, why not put a thin shield of highly compressed water around my wings to hide them?"

"But....Then, wouldn't people see their reflection while looking at your back and figure something's wrong?"

"Ah," I simply replied.

And thus Father told me where my grand idea was flawed. I didn't think about that, as I was too heavily focused on making my wings not seen rather than seeming like I didn't have anything to begin with.

"Well, I guess my idea wouldn't have worked in the end," I laughed.

As I replied, I moved the water back over the Cataract and released it, giving me a much needed break from the constant headache I was under. I sighed both out of relief and sadness, and jumbled the paper I had.

"Well, let's go back to your idea. You said you wanted to try creating an invisibility spell, right?"

"Yeah. My idea is for your wings to not appear in everyone's eyesight."

"So basically to have my wings not reflect light?"

"More or less, yes. I don't have an exact idea of how this is going to work, but there exist Fire magic spells that create major flashes of light."

"Fire magic for light?That's interesting. But continue."

"I was thinking that maybe we could use the basics of those Fire magic spells that create those flashes of light and transfer them over to Blood magic to have the opposite effect. Instead of sending a lot of light, it will not affect it at all."

"Well, the problem is that my wings, just like the majority of solids, is opaque. It will reflect any light that hits it."

Father seemed a bit confused about what I said, so I figured I should explain how light works to him. I went to grab another piece of paper and planned on putting it on the middle table, but it was too high for me to write on it while standing. I went to grab his chair, sat down, and started explaining.

"Basically what light truly is is a lot of those small particles called photons. Those photons go absolutely everywhere, and when they touch matter, the said matter absorbs the photon. However, that makes the matter have too much energy, so it creates and sends away photons with a very specific energy in random directions. What we see are the photons that hit our eye," I said as I drew it on the paper.

"I don't get it. Why are you drawing a single circle...Photon, was it? For light."

"I would explain that, but that's a whole other topic. Basically, what we see is light that is absorbed then sent back by matter."

"So you're saying the light we see is actually not from the object we see?"

"Well...Not exactly, no. If there wasn't a light source, something that produces those photons in the first place, we wouldn't see any of those objects."

"So my idea of making your wings not interact with light won't be possible?"

"According to what I know, it won't. After all, whenever any form of light hits matter, it will give it energy that will eventually be thrown away as photons. That's just a law of physics, we can't change that."