Morning had barely reached Mors, the last of the darkness still hanging over the town while the streets beyond the inn remained mostly empty. I had woken before everyone else because, before we returned to the capital, I needed to find the protagonist and somehow convince him to come with me.
By now, he should have taken his first Trial. Bleeding Crimson began three years from this point, when he turned twenty-one and entered Reliqua, but I had still planned the broad shape of the years before it: receiving his Mark at eighteen, quietly growing stronger, and working beneath the man who would eventually guide him.
Now I intended to pull him away from all of that before it had even begun.
At least nobody across two worlds knew him better than I did. I had written him, built him piece by piece, and shaped him into the perfect version of everything I had once wished I could be.
The harder problem would be explaining to Ressa and Harren why I had returned from a religious visit carrying an orphan nobody in House Claiom had ever heard of.
That could become tomorrow’s disaster.
For now, I had to find him.
The air was colder than in Lucidia, brisk enough to bite through my clothes as I moved towards the edge of town. Mors was small, existing largely because it was the nearest settlement to the Temple of Dream, and the single-storey brick buildings still carried wounds from the disaster that had struck years ago.
A Tale-grade Rift had opened here and remained active for too long, allowing a horde of Hollows to pour through and tear across the town. It was a miracle Mors survived at all.
That was the day the protagonist lost his parents and swore to stand against everything Crimson had brought into the world, never knowing that Crimson had not been the enemy he believed it was.
The damage remained visible everywhere I looked, and an uncomfortable sense of responsibility followed me through it. Perhaps it should have. I had decided this town needed a tragedy long before any of its people had been given a choice in the matter.
I kept moving. Better to find him, gain his agreement, and return before Ressa or the guards realised I had slipped away and began asking questions I had no intention of answering.
Within a few minutes, I reached the point where the marketplace ended and the houses began. Some life had started appearing in the streets as early risers made their way out for the day, but when I looked at the countless homes sprawled haphazardly ahead of me, I realised something painfully obvious.
I had no actual idea where to find him.
An old man sat on the porch of one of the nearest houses, a wooden cup held between both hands while his eyes remained lowered towards it.
The old man looked up as I approached, his heavy eyes moving over me without any hurry before pausing on my clothes. Word of the Claiom carriage had probably travelled through the entire town by now, so he had to know who stood before him.
Yet nothing in his expression changed.
"Hello, elder."
He coughed before replying, his voice rough enough that it took a second to understand him.
"My lord. Is there something I can do for you?"
A small smile appeared on his face as he said it, though it did not come anywhere close to reaching his eyes.
"I was looking for where the Idun family lived."
The name reached him.
I felt him stiffen slightly, though nothing in his expression moved. For a moment, he only looked back down at the cup in his hands.
"They do not live anywhere anymore, my lord."
"I was looking for their son."
He stopped.
His eyes searched mine again, this time with something quieter sitting behind them.
"Did you know him, my lord?"
His voice had lowered until it was almost too quiet to catch.
I gave a small nod, though I did not know what words I could give him.
The old man nodded slowly, as though he had taken my silence for an answer.
"Good boy," he muttered, more to himself than to me. "Too good for what this place did to him."
My chest tightened at the words.
Then his head turned slightly to my right, towards a thin dirt path running out between the houses and leading towards the edge of town, where the land overlooked the sea.
I turned back to him, but his eyes were already down on the cup again.
"Thank you, elder."
My body was moving before the words of thanks had fully left me. The path grew quieter with every step, the town falling away until no buildings remained and an unease I could not explain began tightening somewhere inside me.
My pace quickened before I noticed it. Then I was running, forcing the unfamiliar body forward while my heart hammered against my chest and some part of me refused to understand what the old man had meant.
The trees finally opened before me, revealing the sea stretching beyond them, and my feet came to an abrupt stop.
A patch of land stood ahead, narrow and uneven as it reached towards the cliff’s edge, while countless graves covered it from end to end.
Some were bunched close together, others stood farther apart and entirely alone, their stones worn down by years of wind and rain.
My mind went blank.
No thought passed through me at all.
I did not even realise when my body began moving again, my eyes locked on one stone sitting farther out than the rest, close enough to the edge that the ground beyond it fell away into open air.
It looked wrong there.
Like it did not belong among the other graves and had been forced into place anyway.
My heartbeat picked up.
The rush of my pulse throbbed through my head.
My feet stopped before it.
Erel Idun.
Before I knew it, I had crashed to my knees, the impact breaking the silence across the whole clearing.
"No. No, no, no."
"This cannot be happening."
The voice tore out of me, thin and high enough that I did not recognise it as mine.
"No fucking way."
I leaned forward and collapsed over my own knees, my fists rising and crashing into the ground again and again, the pain of it not even reaching me.
Because it was not only this.
I had been holding everything up for two days on nothing but this.
I had been murdered on a roof by a man I wrote into existence, and I had held.
I had woken up inside a body that was not mine, in a world I had written, and I had held.
I had been handed a Domain that did not exist in anything I ever wrote, and I had held.
Every single time, I had held because I had one thing.
Find the boy.
Guide him.
Let him do the rest.
That had been all of it.
That had been every plan I had.
I stayed on my knees at the edge of that cliff, in a world I had built, doomed, and abandoned, staring at the grave of the only person who had ever been supposed to fix any of it.
But he was gone.
My protagonist is already dead.