The Regressed Heir of Ravencrest

Chapter 46: Ashwood

"If she is who I think she is..."

He let the thought stop for a moment. There would be time to confirm his doubts later.

Sepharina had already reached for the ladle when she caught the change in his expression — small, barely there, gone almost as fast as it arrived, but she’d spent enough years reading her mother’s face for signs of a bad day to have learned how to notice things people thought they were hiding.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing." Ethan recovered his composure quickly enough that most people wouldn’t have caught the gap at all.

Sepharina served him the soup, followed by everyone else in the family.

Elene’s cough was persistent throughout the dinner.

Cough... cough...

Ethan asked, "Can I know from which disease you’re suffering?"

Everyone’s expression darkened immediately.

"It’s—" Elene began.

"Silveravyn," William said quietly.

The spoon in Ethan’s hand stopped halfway to the bowl.

Silveravyn.

Of all the names he had expected to hear, that wasn’t one of them.

His gaze drifted back toward Elene almost involuntarily. The pale complexion. The persistent cough. The slight tremor in the hand resting against the table.

A person affected by it would die within four to six years. The symptoms started with a weakening of the body, followed by fever that came and went without warning, then cough, and eventually paralysis of the whole body — nose bleeds, blood vomit, joints that stiffened past use long before the paralysis fully set in, the kind of decline that gave a family plenty of time to watch and no way to stop it.

Ethan’s expression became complicated immediately. It was one of the rarest diseases on the continent, incurable even by high priests. Even the alchemist known as the miracle healer had never found a cure for it — but there had been one person who’d come close to finding the source, before she was killed by an unknown organization who never let her finish. To this day, no one knew where the disease actually came from.

The only other known paths were the fruit of a World Tree which is processed by elves to make the cure, effectively impossible to acquire, or an elixir said to be kept somewhere within the dungeon of the Magic Saint — a place currently under investigation by the Emperor himself, and had been for years, without result.

"If you don’t mind, can you tell me how many years it’s been since you were affected?"

William’s hands trembled. Elene placed a hand on his shoulder before he could answer.

"It’s been two years."

The conversation drifted to something Ethan was curious to ask, but wondered if it would come out as rude.

"If you don’t mind, can I ask your family name..." he said, keeping his tone light.

William looked up, mildly surprised by the shift. "Ashwood," he said, without hesitation.

Something shifted in Ethan’s eyes. Everything he had suspected until now — a detail he’d forgotten he still carried, buried somewhere deep in his memories — suddenly jolted awake. The name Serene Ashwood. This confirmed it.

He’d never met her. Everything he knew of the name Serene came from rumor and reputation, fragments passed down through people who’d never met her either — an SS-rank talent, awakened late; an S-rank Mage Core, rare enough on its own to make her name worth repeating in rooms Ethan had occasionally stood in. There’d been talk, unconfirmed even by the time he’d died, that she’d studied under the Flame Tower itself, though nobody he’d ever spoken to claimed to have witnessed it directly. A legend built entirely out of secondhand certainty, the way most legends were.

Until now, watching a fourteen-year-old girl glare at a ladle like it had personally wronged her.

And if it was her — if this was genuinely the same Serene whose reputation had outlived her actual history by the time he’d heard of it — then he already understood something the girl in front of him didn’t.

In whatever version of events he remembered dimly enough to no longer fully trust the details of, her family hadn’t survived the way this one just had. A father and sister lost to something he’d never learned the specifics of. A mother gone a few years after that, to an illness nobody had ever named to him, because by the time rumors of Serene reached rooms Ethan occupied, her origins had already stopped mattering to anyone telling the story.

He’d saved two of them already, without knowing it, weeks ago in a bandit camp he’d cleared for entirely unrelated reasons.

He looked at Elene, watching her daughter with open fondness despite the tremor in her own hands, and understood, with the particular clarity that came from finally seeing a puzzle’s last piece, that he wasn’t finished yet.

"You’re staring," Sepharina said, not looking up from her bowl.

"I was just thinking."

"About my mother’s disease, probably. Don’t worry — I will definitely make a cure for it. I am already learning alchemy from the village chief. He is a great mage, you know."

Yeah, maybe you will find a cure, but we don’t have the time for it, Ethan thought.

"I think you will."

William smiled, looking at his daughters’ confidence, but couldn’t help thinking it was impossible.

But Ethan caught the way his fingers tightened around the wooden spoon until the knuckles turned pale.

William believed in his daughters.

He simply no longer believed fate would give them enough time.

Ethan noticed his change. He asked, "Are you attending this year’s Awakening Ceremony in Northwatch?"

The table’s mood dimmed slightly. Anna, who’d said almost nothing through the entire meal, set her spoon down without quite meaning to.

"We don’t have high hopes for it," William said, after a long pause. "Anna already tried two years ago. This is her last chance."

"No — both my sister and I will definitely awaken." Sepharina immediately came to her defense.

"You know most won’t awaken if they fail their first time."

Sepharina immediately pouted.

"No — there are people who can awaken at the age of sixteen too." Ethan’s voice was steady. "I think they have the talent."

"If you think so, young master." Elene asked, with curiosity, where he was from.

Ethan considered whether he should answer that. He was already thinking of recruiting Sepharina — but if Anna also awakened a good talent, that was something he definitely couldn’t afford to lose out on. And he wanted to be honest with these people—

"I’m from Ravenhold."

Silence.

Four pairs of eyes turned toward him.

William blinked once before asking carefully, "The capital... Ravenhold?"

Ethan nodded.

That single nod somehow made Sepharina look even more excited.

Their reactions made him embarrassed.

"Have you ever seen the Sword of the North?" William asked, like a child.

"How is the capital?" Anna also couldn’t hide her curiosity.

"Can you take me there? Please?" Sepharina asked flatly, without considering anything.

Elene cleared her throat — gently, but with the precision of a woman who’d been managing her family’s enthusiasms for years. Everyone came back to themselves.

"No, it’s nothing," Ethan said.

If they learn I’m Adrian Ravencrest’s son... Ethan almost smiled.

William might actually faint.

The conversation drifted naturally, gently, back toward the harvest, the state of the roads, and other safe ground — Rune’s opinion of the soup, which he made known by attempting to climb halfway onto the bench beside Ethan until Sepharina swatted him away with a wooden spoon and got an unimpressed stare in return.

Dinner wound down slowly. William cleared the bowls with Anna’s help while Sepharina argued with her mother about whether she was allowed a second cup of tea this late, an argument she lost without much real resistance.

"You’ll want to sleep soon, young master," Elene said, setting the last dish aside. "The road’s long, wherever you’re headed next."

"I will."

He said goodnight to the rest of the family in the doorway — William’s hand on his shoulder a moment too long, Sepharina already halfway back to her herbs before she’d finished saying it, Anna’s quiet, genuine smile that carried more than her words usually did — and made his way to the small room they’d built specifically for guests who’d never before had reason to use it.

Rune was already curled at the foot of the bed, entirely unbothered by anything that had happened over the dinner.

Ethan closed the door quietly and sat down on the edge of the bed.

Underneath everything the evening had carried, he was already thinking of finding a cure for Elene — she had two years behind her and no more than four ahead, if the disease ran its usual course.

He suddenly thought of the War Merit store. If it had something which could cure this, he could definitely build trust with both of them. And he didn’t want to see Elene, who reminded him of his own mother, die.

A golden screen unfolded before him.

The War Merit Store.

Thousands of entries stretched beyond the edge of the panel.

Weapons.

Pills.

Ancient manuals.

Rare herbs he’d only heard mentioned once or twice during his previous life.

He ignored all of them.

"Disease..."

Nothing.

"Healing..."

Hundreds.

His eyes moved faster and faster as the list continued scrolling.

Time passed.

Then...

Something caught his eye.

At last, he found one.