Chise’s situation seems to be going from bad to worse as of late. Following the capture, near-auction, and rescue of one of two stolen dragon chicks, Chise has been cursed by the dragon and while so far the curse is only affecting her left arm it is also putting her already-fragile life in even more danger. Many people have suggested different solutions for Chise to rid herself of her curse but when Elias secretly chooses to go with one of the more reprehensible ones, to sacrifice the life of Chise’s normal friend in her place, she lashes out and turns instead to Cartaphus to see if they can trade a curse for a curse and make them both whole again.
Volume 9 wraps up the first major arc of the series, one where I suspect Kore Yamazaki originally intended to end the series, and it’s right around where the first anime ended. As the anime went on I saw fewer and fewer people talk about the series and while I don’t know if the anime was following this manga story line as closely as it had adhered to the original story in the earlier parts, I would really recommend any fans who enjoyed the early bits of the anime to start reading the manga from this point, if they haven’t already, since this is probably The Ancient Magus’ Bride’s strongest volume yet.
As Chise works with Cartapulus she is forced to relive her early childhood memories before her life went to hell and it’s almost a surprise to the reader how mundane it was. These flashbacks do clarify a few things, such as the fact that Chise’s mother also appears to have been a sleigh beggy and that both Chise’s father and toddler younger brother had some innate repellent effect which balanced them out (something I hope comes up again in the main story, I’d especially love it if one or both of these characters comes back into her life). There’s a bit of ambiguity over Chise’s father leaving with her younger brother, he could clearly see the monsters that plagued Chise and her mother as well and was unnerved by them but when he tells her he’ll come back for her and her mother it’s unclear if that was a lie to make himself feel better in the moment or something he genuinely intended to do. Either way he doesn’t of course and, without his canceling influence, soon the spirits are interfering too much with both Chise and her mother’s lives for them to do anything and this all culminates in a truly tragic end to their relationship.
But, as Chise tells the specter of her mother, this isn’t truly her — this is the memories and conjectures of a small child so Chise will never fully understand what was going on in her mother’s mind. In a powerful moment she declares that no, she will not forgive her mother for this life. Even if her mother hadn’t meant badly in their final months together, and even if their hadn’t been any other options, Chise declaims that these final moments poisoned all of her memories of her early life. She hadn’t even remembered such quite, happy moments until this unwanted trip into her memories, and no she will not forgive her mother for them.
Chise also isn’t in the mood to forgive Cartapulus for pulling this trick on her either and forces it back in return, causing her to see how Cartapulus and Joseph became one and why they have both been trying desperately for millennia to undo a curse that they don’t even remember sinning to commit. Chise, with help from all of her allies, is able to wrangle a compromise between these curses so her life is no longer in any more danger than it previously was, and we can see how much she’s been able to change over the course of the series as she no longer comes off as merely willful, stubborn, and overly-giving of herself but as determined, thoughtful, and passionate to pursue the paths she wants to take.
Her newest path may not sound strange to the reader but it’s practically unheard of in her world — she’s decided to enroll in the College, where Alice and the other alchemists study, as one part a subject to be studied and one part a student auditing classes, even though she’s a mage with a completely different way of utilizing magic. Elias of course is tagging along and he’ll be teaching a class on magic, another rarity for the College, and this actually allows both Chise and Elias to still be major characters in the story but to also be more separate than they usually are. She has the opportunity to meet more of the students of the College, now her classmates, and hopefully form some desperately needed friends her own age, and Elias’ personal growth is even more obvious as we see him have to interact with “regular” people for once.
Plenty of new subplots are being introduced but the one that interests me the most is actually not at the college but concerns Elias’ church acquaintance Simon who has been apparently quietly trying to make the church less and less interested in the both of them for the past ten years. This plot appears to have backfired however, especially since Simon’s predecessor had a very different opinion on Elias, and looks as if the church may start playing a significant role going forward for the first time; this is something that will be interesting in a world where both gods and creatures with godly powers explicitly live but where the church has been, so far, drawn with influences from monotheistic Christianity instead.
When I started volume 9 I thought that this is where the series would end and was concerned that Yamazaki had decided to continue (or had possibly been nudged by her publisher) writing more. But volume 10 is thoroughly enjoyable and shows how much more of the world Yamazaki has left to introduce to the readers and how different the story is now that Chise has begun to grow and come into her place in the world.