The Transmigrated Author

Chapter 311: A Long Time After

[Pinnacle Academy — Second Year Dormitories, Evening]

The academy at night was the same as it had always been.

Lamps along the walkways, the low sound of students still awake somewhere in the upper floors, the training fields empty and dark past the treeline. Two days back and the whole place still hadn’t noticed that eleven of its students had died and come back in a world that didn’t exist.

I was halfway across the courtyard when I saw Jan.

He was sitting on the steps outside the dorm entrance with his elbows on his knees, and in his hands he was turning something over slowly, the way you handle a thing you don’t fully understand yet.

A hilt.

Just a hilt.

Wrapped grip, a plain crossguard, and above it, nothing at all. No blade, no stub of metal, not even a break where a blade should have snapped off.

It simply ended, finished and complete, like the sword it belonged to had never been made in the first place.

_So he did get it._

_The reward for putting Richard down._

I knew exactly what I was looking at.

I’d written the description of it once, in a note file I never published, back when the Sword of Hope was still three arcs away from mattering.

The soul comes first. The body comes later.

Jan noticed me and lifted his head, and the hilt disappeared into his coat in one easy motion. Not hidden, exactly. Just put away.

"Evening," he said.

"You’re up late."

"So are you."

Neither of us said anything else for a moment, and I could feel the shape of a conversation sitting there between us, the one where he asked me what I knew and I had to decide how much to lie.

Not tonight.

He wasn’t ready to ask, and I wasn’t ready to answer.

"Get some sleep," I said.

"You first."

I left him on the steps and kept walking.

_*******_

Valencia was waiting on the roof of the west wing, which surprised me, because in the original story she never once went up there.

She was leaning against the railing with her arms crossed and her jacket open over her uniform, looking out at the lights of the city past the academy wall.

The wind up here was strong enough to pull at her hair, and she didn’t seem bothered by it at all.

"You came," she said, without turning around.

"You made it pretty clear I didn’t have a choice."

"I nodded at a chair."

"That was a very threatening nod."

She snorted, which was not a sound a heroine was ever supposed to make, and I filed it away with all the other things about her that had stopped matching the character sheet a long time ago.

I walked over and leaned on the railing beside her, leaving a normal amount of space between us, and for a while we just looked at the city.

Then she said it.

"When I touched the shard, I saw a place."

I kept my eyes forward.

"What kind of place?"

"That’s the problem. I don’t know." Her fingers tapped once against her arm.

"It wasn’t like a dream where you know where you are even when it makes no sense. It was more like... I was standing somewhere real, and I’d just never been there."

"Describe it."

"Everything was broken."

She said it plainly, and something in my chest went cold before she’d even finished.

"Buildings. Roads. There was a sky, but it was the wrong colour, and there was this sound underneath everything like the air itself was still ringing from something that had already happened." She paused.

"It wasn’t a battle. It was after one. A long time after."

A long time after.

"And I was there," she went on.

"I could see my own hands. I was older, I think. And I was walking toward someone."

"Someone."

"You."

The wind filled the gap where my answer should have been.

"You were standing with your back to me," Valencia said.

"And you were wearing black. Not a uniform, not anything I’ve seen you wear. It was cut like a suit but it had plating on the shoulders and the forearms, like armour someone had made to look formal on purpose."

My hands went still on the railing.

"And there was a mask," she said.

Don’t react.

"It was hanging off the side of your face. Broken. Split right down the middle, like it had taken a hit and you’d just never bothered to fix it."

Don’t you dare react.

"I called out to you," she said quietly.

"You didn’t turn around. That’s where it ended."

The city lights kept going, indifferent, thousands of windows belonging to people who would never know how close I was to throwing up over the side of a roof.

She had described Prime.

Down to the plating on the forearms. Down to the crack in the mask, the exact half-broken shape of it resting against his cheekbone.

She had described a man she had never seen, standing in a place that hadn’t happened, and she had described him perfectly.

The second effect.

The Momentous Future had listed it as ???, and I’d been too busy dying to think about it since.

Our hands had touched the crystal at the same moment. I got pulled into the void to meet the man I’m supposed to become.

She got shown the same man.

Just from further away, and further along.

_Which means what she saw isn’t a possibility._

It’s the road I’m currently standing on.

"Rel."

I realised I hadn’t spoken in a while.

"Sorry," I said. "I’m listening."

"You’re not, actually. You’ve been gripping that railing like it owes you money."

I made myself let go.

"That’s what’s been bothering me," she said, and finally turned to face me properly, her back against the railing and her arms still crossed.

"Not the broken city. Not even the mask. It’s that when I saw you standing there, I wasn’t surprised."

"...What?"

"In the vision. I saw you dressed like that, in a place like that, and none of it surprised me."

Her eyes stayed on mine.

"It felt normal. Like I’d already known you like that for years."

Because you had.

Because whatever version of you was standing in that street had spent years watching me become him.

"So." She tilted her head slightly.

"Are you going to tell me what it means?"

There it was.

She wasn’t guessing, and she wasn’t accusing me either.

She was doing the thing that made her genuinely dangerous, which is that she’d looked at a set of facts that didn’t fit together, decided the person standing next to her was the missing piece, and then simply asked.

I could lie. I’d been lying since the day I woke up in this world, and I was good at it now in a way that occasionally worried me.

"It means the future’s not fixed," I said.

Which wasn’t a lie.

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s the part of the answer I’ve got."

Valencia studied me for a long moment. The lightning that lived under her skin sparked once, faintly, at her collar, the way it did when she was thinking about pushing.

Then she let it go.

"Fine," she said. "For now."

"For now?"

"You heard me." She turned back toward the city.

"I don’t need to know tonight. But if that place is somewhere we end up, I’d rather know before we get there than after."

"...Yeah."

"And Rel."

"Hm?"

"When I called out to you." Her voice was steady, but she wasn’t looking at me anymore.

"You didn’t turn around. I want to know that you would."

The wind moved through the space between us.

I thought about the void, and the man with the tired eyes, and the last thing he said to me before the white swallowed him whole.

I hope you can change everything I couldn’t fix.

"I’d turn around," I said.

Valencia nodded once, satisfied, and pushed off the railing.

"Good. Then I’m going to bed. You should too, you look terrible."

"That’s the second time in three days someone’s told me that."

"Then maybe do something about it."

She walked toward the stairwell, and just before she reached the door, she stopped.

"For what it’s worth," she said, "the black suit looked good on you."

And then she was gone.