The bone-rattling roar of the Blood-Starved Herald shook the slate roof of the watchtower.
I knelt on the floorboards, pressing both hands against the jagged crossbow bolt still lodged in Commander Kaelen’s shoulder. Black poisoned blood stained my fingers. Half of his armor was melted into his skin from the Herald’s acid.
"Cassian," Seraphina said from the cot. Her amber eyes moved from Kaelen to me. "How are you doing this?"
"Doing what?" I kept pressure on the wound.
"All of it," Isolde said from beside the hearth.
Her blind violet eyes were fixed on my voice.
"Heat stones.
Clean water.
You knew the exact layout of a Church cache under the floor.
You knew Alaric’s real plan.
You knew Vane’s rituals.
A disinherited bastard who never left the capital should not know any of that."
Outside, something heavy slammed into the oak door. The ward talisman flared red. The iron bar groaned, but it still held for now.
I did not lie to them. There was no time and no point.
I bought a Purifying Phoenix Tear from the System Store and poured the glowing red liquid down Kaelen’s throat. The black veins on his neck began to fade. His breathing steadied, though he stayed unconscious.
I stood and turned to face both women.
"I am not going to feed you a story," I said. "There is no secret network. There is no spatial ring. I know the future because I am not the original Cassian Voss. I am a transmigrator from a world called Earth."
Seraphina stared. "What?"
"This world is a web novel I read in my past life. It has a script. In that script, Prince Alaric and Cardinal Vane win. You two were written as tragic sacrifices."
Isolde’s voice was thin. "A book? You expect us to believe our lives are just a story?"
"I expected you to think I was insane."
I bought a Memory Resonance Shard and pressed it into Seraphina’s palm, then guided Isolde’s fingers over it. I covered both their hands with mine.
"Don’t fight it. Just look."
I crushed the crystal.
White light filled the room.
The watchtower disappeared. They were pulled into my memories.
They saw Earth.
A world with no mana.
Crowded orphanages.
Towering glass buildings that pierced the clouds.
Metal beasts that moved without horses on black roads.
Flying ships that needed no wind magic.
Then they saw me in my original body, holding a glowing glass rectangle - a smartphone.
The text on the screen translated itself into their language.
They read the exact descriptions of their own lives. Seraphina’s poisoning by her own regents. Isolde’s blinding, carefully arranged by Cardinal Vane. Then the planned endings that the novel had written for them:
Prince Alaric would heal Seraphina just enough to make her walk down an aisle as a grateful, submissive concubine. He would use her name to take Aldemoor without a real war.
Cardinal Vane would break Isolde’s mind until her shadow affinity became the perfect living anchor for an Abyssal Seal.
The vision ended.
We were back in the cold watchtower.
Isolde stumbled backward until she hit the hearth. Her hands shook hard. Seraphina lay on the cot, tears running down her face, eyes wide and empty of every royal mask she had ever worn.
For a long moment no one spoke. The only sounds were the rain outside and the heavy breathing of two women whose entire world had just been rewritten.
I did not push. I stayed where I was and let the silence sit. The Herald outside had gone quiet for the moment. The ward still glowed faintly at the edge of my mind, but it was not screaming yet.
Seraphina was the first to find words.
"My people..." she whispered. "My life was just a prop for Alaric’s story. He never wanted to save me. He only wanted a broken puppet with a useful name."
"Yes," I said.
Isolde pressed both hands over her face. Shadow mana leaked weakly from her fingers, uncontrolled and flickering. She stayed like that for several breaths before she spoke.
"Everything... the blindness, the pain, the way my own family looked at me... it was all planned. Written down like lines in a play."
"Yes."
She dropped her hands slowly. Her sightless eyes were wet. "You saw all of that before you even met us."
"I saw the setup," I said. "I never finished the novel. I only knew how it started and what was supposed to happen to both of you."
Seraphina turned her head toward Isolde’s voice as best she could. The two of them sat in the same silence for a while longer. The rain kept hitting the roof. Water dripped somewhere near the hearth in a slow, steady rhythm.
I gave them more time. The truth was heavy. Pushing it faster would only break the moment.
"When I woke up in this body," I continued after a stretch, "a System bound my life to yours.
If I heal you, I gain power.
If you die, I die.
The items I pull out of nowhere come from that System every time I fight the script that was written for you."
Isolde let out a short, broken breath. "So every time you protected us... every time you refused the easy path... you were choosing against the story itself."
"Yes."
Seraphina’s voice came out low and hard. "We were never meant to win. We were meant to suffer and then die so that Alaric and Vane could look like heroes."
I did not disagree.
`[System Alert]`
`[World’s Will Plot Deviation: +10%]`
`[Cause: Heroine & Villainess Aware of Written Fate]`
`[Total Plot Deviation: 15%]`
The room stayed quiet for a longer stretch.
Isolde wiped her face with the back of her hand, then wiped it again.
Seraphina stared at the ceiling for a while, then closed her eyes once, hard, and opened them again.
The tears had stopped, but the look underneath them was different now - colder, clearer.
The royal mask was gone.
What remained was something sharper.
Isolde’s fingers curled slowly against the floor.
Black shadow mana gathered around them again, still shaky but no longer purely panicked.
It was starting to take shape.
She breathed through it, slow and controlled, the same way she had learned to move through the dark without sight.
"Cassian," she said at last. Her voice was steadying. "Don’t let that thing in."
Seraphina’s eyes burned with a new, hard light. "Then we rewrite the script."
Only then did the Herald slam into the door again. Wood cracked. The ward screamed a sharp warning in my mind.
I drew my shortsword and moved toward the cracking door.
The quiet truth was out. The next fight was already here.