I had not noticed it last night, but walking now, I felt it without question.
My body had grown stronger. The difference was stark enough to be undeniable, my steps lighter than they should have been, the muscle beneath my skin denser than it had been before last night.
And yet for some reason, my figure was still as gaunt as ever, bordering on frailty.
The weight in my stomach stayed constant now, churning faintly, pulling at something with every step I took. Ichor. An energy that existed all around us, and always had, for as long as Crimson had hung in the sky above it.
Nobody in this world so far had ever settled whether it was a gift, or just another wound left behind and stitched in with everything else Crimson’s arrival had brought.
No one but me knew what it had meant.
Since my Reliquary had been formed last night, I could actually feel it now. An eerie, weightless sensation, impossible to see, and yet undeniably there, like faint droplets suspended in the air, clinging lightly to anything they touched.
My Reliquary pulled that into itself, slow and constant.
Its function was simple enough. It drew dormant Ichor from the air around me and stored it, to later be used by my Aspect. But it was not unlimited. A Reliquary could only hold so much Ichor at once, pulling continuously like a second heart, held against a ceiling that did not move on its own.
Though you could raise that ceiling, by saturating the Reliquary further, and the only way to do that was through concentrated Ichor.
Which only meant resolving Rifts or much more simply killing. Hollows, Fissures, and, uncomfortably, humans too.
The Touched world did have rules against that, strict ones on paper. Though in practice, rules had never been enough to stop people willing to do it anyway. You did not need to be a Fissure to be the worst thing in the room. Plenty of humans managed that on their own.
Hollows and Fissures did not carry Ichor though, the way people did. What ran through them instead was something twisted, something more corrupted. Humans had termed it Miasma. Just like a Touched’s Reliquary reached for Ichor, theirs reached for Miasma instead.
Nobody had ever really understood where Miasma came from, whether it drifted through the air the same way Ichor did, why it remained invisible to Touched senses, or whether it came from somewhere else entirely.
But what mattered more, and the part that actually unsettled people, was what happened at the moment of the kill itself.
Killing a Hollow did not just stop at you receiving Ichor. Going by what I myself had written, you felt it, something foreign, the Miasma entering you directly, punching into your own Reliquaries in a way that felt nothing like the slow, steady drift Ichor gathered on its own. Violent was the word I had used for it.
Then, apparently, you felt your own Reliquary answer back. Some part of it turned that foreign, wrong energy over and forced it into something usable, into Ichor, before locking it away the same as anything else stored there.
Whether you killed a Hollow, a Fissure, or a human, a Reliquary would pull it in regardless of the source, converting it the same way every time, like the distinction between clean and corrupted had never mattered to begin with.
Why. That was the part nobody seemed to have an answer for.
Why standing near a Hollow felt like nothing, instead of feeling like something wrong. And the part that actually should have made people’s skin crawl, why Fissures and Hollows, going by everything, seemed to have so damn much in common.
I mean, you had to give it to me. That book really had been one of my masterpieces in the lies I had woven into this world.
And the readers had agreed too. They could not get enough of it themselves. But that very thing had led to my eventual demise, the stakes having become too stacked against the world in the end.
I let out a sigh as I came down the staircase, and spotted her waiting at the bottom, leaning against the frame in a way that said she had been there a while.
Aela’s silver hair caught the pale morning light spilling through the hall’s high windows, and whatever exhaustion had been behind her eyes last night had mostly burned off, replaced by the same easy warmth she always carried.
Hearing my footsteps, she turned, that same smile already in place.
"Yun. You are finally here."
As I looked at her, the same weird feeling once again emerged. The same one I had felt last night.
Like she was nothing but someone to take advantage of, to manipulate in my favour.
Noticing my body tense, I pushed the thought away before approaching her.
Ressa had come by earlier to tell me Harren wanted me at breakfast again, likely to hear about the trial and whatever Aspect had come out of it.
Apparently the only time this man could spare for his family was over a plate of food.
I fell into step beside her, and we made our way toward the same heavy wooden doors as the day before.
"Better than I expected to, honestly. I did not think I would manage to sleep at all after last night."
It was true. After the horrors of that trial I had not expected to sleep at all. And somehow I had.
The phantom pain still lingered, dull and unplaceable, and the visions were still there whenever I closed my eyes too long. For an Earthling who had done nothing in his last life but sit in a chair, all of it had been far too much.
"I did not expect you to join us," I said a moment later.
She paused, her eyes dropping briefly to the floor.
"Neither did I... But I leave for Reliqua soon."
Right. Her second year.
To think I would eventually have to go through that too. Reliqua, the academy I had written to shape the best of the world’s Touched into whatever it needed them to survive next.
It had been the centrepiece of the whole novel. Where the story had started, where every friendship in it had formed, and where a fair number of them had died.
And with him gone, the one man who was supposed to make all of it survivable, I had no option left but to fill the gap myself.
Which only meant one thing, getting stronger.
I still had time to worry about it properly, though. I was eighteen, and you needed to be twenty-one to enter.
As we stood in front of the doors now, his voice reached us, the same cold as always.
"Come in."
Pushing them open, I found him seated exactly where he had been the day before, working a knife through a slice of roasted meat, Cavell near the hearth in the same attentive stillness as always.
The same strangeness from yesterday settled over me the moment I stepped inside, heavy enough to slow my steps. Even with an Aspect sitting in me now, it had not made any difference at all.
For a brief second his eyes flicked to us, settling on me before shifting, with clear surprise, toward Aela. He had not expected her.
She crossed to the chair opposite mine without acknowledging the look, a chair that had already been set for her regardless. Cavell appeared with cutlery for her within seconds, while she settled in and rubbed her palms together near the hearth.
Taking my own seat, I reached for my cutlery, already bracing for whatever was coming.
My eyes caught Aela’s for a second, a faint trace of amusement tugging at the corner of her mouth, like she found something quietly funny about being here uninvited.
Setting his knife down, Harren wiped his mouth with a napkin and finally let his gaze settle fully on me. It moved over the marks along my arms, visibly darker now than they had been yesterday, pulling the thin morning light in around them.
"So you succeeded."
His voice carried easily across the hall despite barely rising above a murmur, more a statement to himself than a question aimed at me.
"I did, Father." I met those deep violet eyes as I said it.
"Then I imagine you know what your Aspect is."
He said it, returning to his meal, without waiting for a response.
I did. I had made myself look that morning, the moment I woke.
I was still not finished thinking about what I had found there.
Most of the house had assumed Dream from the day that Mark appeared, given the blood I carried. And luckily enough what had been sitting in those runes was close enough to pass for it.
"Unwritten," I said quietly.
The second the words left me, his knife paused mid-cut, his eyes lifting to mine and staying there a second longer than felt comfortable.
I felt Aela’s gaze shift toward me as well.
"You are certain."
"Yes, Father." Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
He turned back to his plate without another word, and a long silence settled over the table.
I knew what it was. He was probably confused at that, not knowing what it entailed. After all, it didn’t sound Dream enough to him.
But rather than lying and making something up, I had already decided to just come clean with it, and let them believe that my Aspect still came under the Domain of Dream.
"What did it take?"
He asked it, still working through his food.
My eyes drifted to Aela, who had gone visibly more attentive, clearly wanting to hear this too.
Thinking back to it for even a second was enough to send a cold jolt down my spine, the memory of it still raw enough to sting. I had spent the whole morning pushing it down and telling myself that was the smart way to handle it.
"I had to accept my fate."
His knife stopped again.
And I understood exactly what I had just said, only half a second too late to take it back. Fate. In a house where the word meant nothing, and something entirely different to me.
So I kept talking, faster than I should have, because the only thing worse than that word having left my mouth was the silence I would leave in its place.
"It gave me a dream," I said. "A different one every time. Each one with its own ending already decided, and every time I tried to get out of it, I got a new one instead."
"Different dreams?" Aela asked, her eyes locked on mine.
Of course. Of course she would want the details.
"It kept happening until I stopped fighting it and accepted it."
"By accepting it," she started carefully, "do you mean..."
She did not finish. Harren’s eyes had settled on me from the side now as he interrupted, his voice loud and almost a bit unsettling.
"What was the dream about?" His eyes locked with mine.
I clenched my fists under the table, and when I finally met his eyes my voice came out colder than I had meant it to.
"The dream of being slaughtered. Every single time I ran, it found me anyway. Until I accepted it."
It came out harsher than I wanted, almost detached from me entirely, and a heavy silence dropped over the table the moment it landed.
I looked back down at my plate and focused on the scrape of my cutlery against it. I could still feel both of them watching me.
"How many times?"
Harren’s voice came from the side, lacking any emotion as always, and underneath it I caught something I could not quite name. Not concern exactly. Something close to it.
"I lost count."
Aela’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth.
Neither of them said anything after that.
We finished the meal in something close to normal quiet. When Harren finally rose, he gave a short nod in my direction and left without another word, his footsteps fading down the hall until the room went quiet again.
Aela lingered at the table, turning her cup slowly between her hands.
"Are you all right?" she asked eventually, her eyes not quite meeting mine, like she was not certain it was the right question but had not found a better one.
I was not sure how to answer that honestly, and I was not sure I wanted to find out what would happen if I tried.
Some part of me still had not caught up to everything I had said out loud a few minutes ago. Admitting it to them had somehow made it more real than living through it had.
"I will be," I said instead, which felt like the closest thing to true.