They sat around the campfire as the night went on.
As a templar, ${name}'s duty was to track down and capture unsupervised magic users. In this world magic was extremely chaotic and dangerous so all spell casters were shunned and feared by society.
His profession required him to travel with a bound witch, a subdued magic user whose job was to help him locate sources of magic and to provide support in battle with defensive spells. All bound witches had their tongues cut off to prevent them from chanting dangerous incantations.
Despite all his training it was still hard for him to see Mirabelle as a threat— she was nothing but polite and obedient to him, not the chained beast his comrades told him bound witches were supposed to be.
Like all mages she had been one of the few who were randomly born with the arcane spark; as such she never had a chance to live a normal life.
"Do you ever wish you were born a normal girl?" he asked her.
"..." she stood silent and looked at him with her beautiful green eyes, the wide brim of her pointy hat almost obscuring them; her dark hair flowed into a braid and she wore a cloak over her tunic.
"It's not my place to complain, my master." she wrote on a piece of paper.
"Thanks, you don't need to call me master though." he said, he disliked the term master since it felt too much like she was his possession.
She quietly nodded and turned her gaze back to the book she was reading, a romance novel.
"You have a very specific taste in literature." he said.
Mirabelle blushed slightly "It's the only way I will ever experience something like that." she wrote.
${name}'s oath as a templar prohibited him from having any sort of intimate relationship with his companion. Still, he couldn't help but feel sad when he read that.
There was something about her which made him struggle between his duty and his heart— almost as if abandoning everything just to make her smile was a good idea.
How could something that felt so right be forbidden?