Chapter 707: A Fated Encounter
Alex let his eyes move across the crowd one final time. Then he turned toward Venedikt and gave a single nod, and the darkness came, rising from the floor around him like something alive, wrapping him in its pitch embrace, swallowing him completely before falling away just as swiftly, collapsing back to the ground and vanishing without a trace, as though it had simply never existed.
He was gone, and with Alex gone, the grip on their minds was released.
It happened all at once. The clarity that had been imposed on them, the enforced sharpness that had held their emotions at arm’s length and allowed them only to listen, simply lifted. And everything it had been holding back came rushing in to fill the space it left, the way water rushed into a depression the moment the hand was removed.
The three choices he had offered became the center of it, and around them, every consequence began to take shape.
The good and the bad and the parts that had no clean name, the weight of every action they had taken in the Ancient World arriving now with its full reality attached, no longer abstract, no longer something that existed in a separate category from the life they lived on Earth.
Some forgot to breathe properly, fainting minutes later, while others wailed, openly, without restraint, the sound tearing out of them before they had decided to let it. Some buried their faces in their hands, or pressed their foreheads to their knees, and the sounds they made were smaller and somehow worse.
Some questioned. Loudly, urgently, the need to argue with the truth the only available defense against it, and many simply denied it, again and again.
This time, no one stepped forward to calm them, and no one offered explanation or justification or the next thing to hold onto.
As Alex had said, the choice was theirs to make.
Alex moved through the space between realms, the ordinary weight of reality absent here, the fabric of things responsive to intention in a way that the solid world never allowed.
He pulled at the space around him and let it carry him, the speed of it being many times that of sound, the distance between where he had been and where he was going collapsing away.
His destination was a modest hotel in one of the core cities, a place that served a tea he had grown fond of and had wished to drink many times through the decade he spent within the Ancestral realm.
He was going to drink it now.
He was also going to finalize the trade with Magnus, give him Sin of Envy’s heart as promised, and make the agreement of two more Sin General hearts in exchange for four guilds’ loyalty official.
Soon, he stepped out of the space between realms into the shadow of an old tree. The Bronze Cups hotel stood before him, modest and bearing its old age, the kind of establishment that had existed for long enough to stop trying to impress anyone and was now simply known for its taste.
The sign above the entrance showed a bearded dwarf holding two bronze mugs full of something that steamed, his expression carrying the satisfaction of a man who had made a decision he was entirely at peace with.
Alex stepped toward the entrance, but was stopped short of a few steps by a hand, small and quick, before a small figure stepped before him.
It was a young girl, twelve, perhaps thirteen, small enough that the top of her gray head barely cleared four feet. Her eyes were purple, and they looked up at him with the specific combination of hope and assessment that belonged to people who had learned early that the world required them to read it carefully.
She wore a dress that was rugged at its edges and clean everywhere else, the cleanliness of it clearly deliberate and clearly maintained with effort.
In her hands she held a bowl carved from wood, the kind that had been made for soup and repurposed for this.
She smiled at him, wide and sweet and entirely unafraid.
"Mister, can you spare a bronze coin?" Her eyes made a quick, almost involuntary trip to the armor visible beneath his dark cloak before returning to his face.
"I am not a beggar," she added quickly, with the particular urgency of someone for whom that distinction mattered a great deal. "I am only trying to collect the enrollment fee for the mage training school."
She shifted the bowl slightly, as though presenting her case more formally.
"For my food, I work at an inn, washing bedsheets, cleaning eating utensils, helping with whatever needs doing." She said it without complaint, without performance, just the plain accounting of someone who had arranged their life around what was available and was not ashamed of it.
Alex looked at her for a moment.
The smile that found his face arrived without effort, small and genuine, the kind that came from encountering something uncomplicated in the middle of a day that had been anything but.
"You are not talented enough to enter the Domain sponsored school?" Alex asked it with genuine confusion, because even through ordinary sight he could feel it, the way mana gathered closer to her than it did to most, drawn in the particular way of someone the world had already decided to pay attention to, whether they knew it or not.
He activated his ancient eyes, and the confirmation was immediate. Malnourished, having no progress made on the path of Ascension, and yet still, unmistakably, exceptional.
Not the best he had ever seen, but upper tier, without question, so his question was genuine.
"I am not good enough to go there," she said slowly, the bowl rising slightly before her face as she swayed in place, making what was clearly a poor attempt to break eye contact without appearing to.
"That’s a lie," Alex said.
Her head came up instantly, the exact movement of a child caught in the middle of something and not yet certain how to respond to being caught.
"I will give you a silver if you tell me the real reason," Alex said, and a turn of his fingers produced the coin from his inventory, holding it between them where she could see it clearly.
Her small eyes lit up with a brightness that arrived before she could decide whether to let it. Then the brightness dimmed slightly, replaced by something more guarded, and she lowered her bowl.
Hesitation.
"Clink."
The coin hit the wooden bowl before she had finished deciding, and she looked down at it with an expression of genuine shock, as if she hadn’t fully believed it was real until a few seconds had passed.
"The silver is yours if you share your name," Alex said, his voice carrying the same easy calm. "And if you share the reason the Domain school won’t take you, I will give you another."
She looked up at him, and then back down at the coin, and then back up again.
"Really?" A pause while she confirmed the coin was still there and had not somehow left while she wasn’t looking. "You won’t take it back no matter what the story is..." Another pause. "Promise?"
"Promise," Alex said.
Something in her expression shifted, the last of the hesitation making way for something that had decided, provisionally, to trust.
"Moon," she said, and her smile came back immediately, bright and entirely genuine. "My mother saw it after giving birth and named me after it. She must have been really tired." She snickered, appearing very proud of her name.
Then the smile tempered slightly.
"As for the reason..." She took a small step back, the movement subtle but deliberate, the posture of someone positioning themselves with a clear path if one became necessary. She watched his face for a moment, and finding no reaction that alarmed her, she began.
"Mister... I have this gift. A way of seeing." She said it carefully, the way people said things they had learned to be careful about. "When I am fighting someone, I can spot their weakness. These white threads appear, and if I follow them, I land my strikes, and I win."
She looked up at him again, reading his expression with the practiced attention of someone who had told this story before and had learned most people refused to believe her.
"The thing is, once I start following the threads, that’s all I can do. Until the person is defeated." A pause. "Can no longer move, and that’s why I don’t use it."
She seemed very reluctant to continue, and then she did anyway.
"There was a boy in the trial. He beat my friend and even broke her rib." Her voice was matter-of-fact about it, turning cold for a breath. "So when we fought, for the top sixteen, I was angry with him. I followed the threads and went straight for his head."
A long pause.
"And cracked it open." She looked at him steadily, waiting. "The elders said I was too violent, and that I wasn’t fit to enter the magic training school."
Alex looked at her for a moment. The confusion he felt was genuine, and it had nothing to do with the story, because a trait as she described came either from legacies, elemental physiques, or even bloodline, yet Moon carried none.
This was troubling because Alex was using the eyes of the Ancient, and few things could hide from them, and yet he saw nothing out of the ordinary in the young girl.
The other thing that startled him was the encounter itself; what were the chances? A minute later, and he would have never met her. She would be collecting bronze coins someplace else.
"My silver coin," she said.
Alex looked back at her, and without saying anything, produced another coin and put it in the bowl.
The smile that followed was immediate and uncomplicated and entirely real. Then, with the particular efficiency of someone who had learned not to let good fortune sit exposed longer than necessary, she plucked the silver from the bowl and tucked it somewhere inside her dress with practiced speed.
He reached out and patted the top of her head once, a light touch, brief and easy, carrying nothing in it that she would have noticed or found strange.
It left a mark she would never feel. A thread he could follow later, from any distance.
He had already made the decision. If fate had genuinely brought this encounter about, then it deserved to be taken seriously, but carefully.
Guardian Elmara would be best to take care of her, as she would surely find her nature interesting, determine whether something was anything more than met the eye, or whether Moon was simply and entirely what she appeared to be.
"Thanks, Mister!" Moon announced, and the jump that accompanied it was spontaneous and unself-conscious, the full-bodied celebration of someone for whom today had gone considerably better than expected.
The silvers vanished somewhere in the folds of her dress, and she turned, light on her feet, and was gone, skipping to his right with a humming that had no particular melody but carried a great deal of contentment, fading as she went until the sound was gone and then the sight of her.
Alex turned and walked into the hotel.
Comments