Chapter 5: Who Are You?
I gave it a few seconds before I tried the handle myself.
The hallway was empty. No silver hair, nothing to prove anyone had stood there at all except the cold draft she’d left behind.
I went back to my room.
It was clean. Well maintained. Like it had been waiting for its owner to remember he existed.
I’d barely sat down by the hearth when the door opened again, no knock this time. I noticed the missing courtesy before I noticed who’d walked in.
"You’re meant to still be resting, Young Master."
Steward’s coat, same as before. He set the tray down without a sound. Tea. Bread. Something pale and steaming I didn’t recognize.
"Sebastian," I said. The name surfaced on its own, one more fragment of Itsuki’s life finding its way to me without asking.
He hesitated for a moment before answering.
"Yes, Young Master."
I almost asked how long he’d worked for the house. I didn’t. Some instinct buried in Itsuki’s memories told me the answer would be a number, and the number wouldn’t explain why a man could pour tea with the same economy a veteran used to draw a sword.
I let it go. For now.
"You’ve been staring at that shelf since I walked in," he said, setting the tray down. "Looking for something specific, or is that a new symptom I should report?"
"Something to read," I said. "I’d like to know what century I apparently live in."
If that struck him as a strange question for the heir of House Amagi to ask, he didn’t show it. Which meant either Itsuki had a habit of asking stranger things, or Sebastian had spent long enough in this house to stop reacting. Possibly both.
He pulled a book down without being asked, which was its own kind of answer. A Continental Primer. Dry title, dry cover, handled like something he’d already read and had opinions about.
"Most of this you’d already know," he said. "But you’ve had a hard month."
He left it on the table beside the tray and walked out as quietly as he’d come in. A second later, it was almost hard to believe he’d been there at all.
I opened the primer a few Chapters in, skipping the introduction. Books like this always seemed to spend the first dozen pages explaining why they existed before getting to anything useful.
The first diagram showed a city block cut away like a doll’s house, mana conduits running beneath the streets exactly where I’d have expected gas lines, glowing faintly even in black-and-white print.
I’d drawn diagrams like that myself, for a different city, with different labels.
Sylvania, and the World It Replaced.
I read the Chapter title twice before I let myself keep going.
I flipped a few pages ahead without finishing it. The next Chapter had no diagrams at all, just a clan registry that looked like nobody had bothered updating it in decades, and I gave up trying to read it in order somewhere around the second page.
A name halfway down the page knocked a memory loose—a long table, candlelight, a guest seated three chairs down with skin too smooth for the rest of his face. Vampire nobility. The staff served him without a second thought.
No wonder the protagonist never picked a fight with one before Chapter four hundred.
I took a sip and immediately burned my tongue. Right. Hot tea.
Fox clans lived farther north, according to the registry. Itsuki’s memories offered one small scene in return: a fox clan guest politely declining a seat, exchanging a few quiet words, and leaving before the second course. Nobody else seemed surprised.
I lost the thread after that. A paragraph on elves that didn’t trigger anything at all.
Dwarves got half a page and a brief mention of a three-hundred-year alliance with House Amagi.
Of every standing power on the continent, none has gone to war with the Dragon Kingdom in recorded history.
No memory came with that one. Just the fact, sitting there with nothing behind it, the way a closed door sits there without needing to explain what’s on the other side.
Second on the same page, ranked by raw power and apparently nothing else, were the vampires.
I put the book down for a second, mostly to think about that. I picked it back up only because the next Chapter heading looked worse.
****
The War of Catastrophe.
Five hundred years ago, more or less the book hedged on the exact year, which for some reason made it feel more real than if it had just committed to one.
Too many separate fights folding into one bigger fight to call it a single cause. Land. Borders. Grudges nobody alive still remembered the original shape of.
At some point someone swung first, and after that nobody bothered counting reasons. A third of the continent’s clans went into it and came back smaller. Some didn’t come back at all. Their names simply stopped appearing in later records.
The land didn’t come back clean either. Something stayed in it. The book used the word residue and didn’t elaborate, which I appreciated more than I expected to.
Two hundred years of nothing, and then the first daemon turned up near one of the dead clan territories. Then more. Nobody made them on purpose, as far as anyone could tell they just happened, the way mold happens, given enough time and the wrong conditions left alone too long.
The war against them ran for decades. The book’s last line on the subject didn’t bother switching to past tense.
I read that twice and put the book down for real this time.
The novel I’d spent two years building zones for had treated all of this as something happening at the edge of a map nobody zoomed in on.
I knew, because I’d built the edge of that map myself, and I’d never once asked the writers what was supposed to be burning out there while the hero trained and the academy ran its exams on schedule.
Last page of the Chapter, set apart the way the book set apart anything it considered finished business.
The Witch of Envy.
A name like that should have shown up somewhere before tonight. It hadn’t not the wiki, not any outline that had ever crossed my desk.
Itsuki’s memory had been surprisingly cooperative up to this point. Here, though, it just... stopped. No image. No feeling. Nothing.
Two lines under the title, smaller print.
Love says, "May you flourish."
Envy says, "It should have been me."
Sebastian knocked before I’d worked out what to do with that, back for the tray.
"Who’s the Witch of Envy?" I asked, before I’d actually decided whether I wanted the answer.
He didn’t move for half a second longer than the question should have taken.
"I wouldn’t know, Young Master."
Even. Correct. Polished enough that I almost believed it.
He took the tray and left.
I closed the book.
"...Why don’t I remember you?"
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