It took Damian a month to find an excuse good enough to approach Kael without looking like he was approaching Kael.
The answer, when it came, was so simple he almost got irritated at himself for not thinking of it sooner: the library.
None of the seventeen legitimate siblings ever set foot in there, except when a tutor dragged them in by force.
A library was for people without real power — a place for those who needed to learn things instead of simply being born already owning them.
And that was exactly why, three afternoons a week, it was the one place in the whole palace where Damian saw that thin boy sitting alone, in a corner by the tallest window, reading something held too close to his face for anyone to make out the title.
Damian didn’t approach right away.
He spent two weeks just confirming the pattern — same corner, same time, same hunched posture of someone reading too fast to just be killing time.
Then, on a rainy afternoon that emptied out the rest of the library earlier than usual, he sat down at the next table, opened some book on trade history he had no intention of reading, and waited.
Kael noticed.
Of course he noticed — nobody ever sat next to him by accident in that palace, and both of them knew it.
“You’re the bastard,” Kael said, not looking up from his own book.
It wasn’t hostility.
Just a fact, stated the way one states a fact.
“I am,” Damian answered.
“You’re the brother who isn’t anywhere I know of.”
That made Kael look up.
It was the first time Damian had seen that face up close.
Kael was around ten, plain brown hair, the kind of appearance specifically built to be forgotten in a crowded room.
But the eyes didn’t match the rest.
They were eyes too old for a body that age — the same kind of thing Damian saw in his own reflection, when he let himself look for too long.
“What kind of weird thing is that to say,” Kael said, slowly, testing the ground.
“The kind of thing someone says,” Damian answered, keeping his voice low, casual, eyes still pretending interest in the trade-history book, “when they memorized the names of every one of the King’s legitimate children a long time ago, and then, one day, at a ceremony, hears a name that was never supposed to be on that list.”
The silence that followed lasted long enough for Damian to count seven raindrops hitting the window.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kael said, finally, and his voice carried the exact tremor of someone lying about the one thing that actually mattered.
“That’s fine,” Damian said, and closed the book he wasn’t reading.
“I didn’t know what I was talking about either, my first week here. It was pretty confusing, waking up in a body that wasn’t mine, in a room I recognized in a way I shouldn’t have been able to recognize.”
Kael went so still that, for a second, Damian thought he’d pushed too far, too fast — that he’d just burned the one real advantage he had over this boy, which was the uncertainty of whether he knew or didn’t know.
Then Kael closed his own book.
Slowly.
And, for the first time, looked at Damian not the way one looks at the castle’s unwanted bastard, but the way one looks at someone who might, finally, understand something nobody else in the entire world could understand.
“How many hours,” Kael asked, voice barely above a whisper.
“How many hours did you play?”
Damian felt his own chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
“Eight thousand, four hundred and seventy-two,” he said.
“The Age of Heroes. You?”
Kael shook his head, and for the first time since Damian had sat down, he smiled — a small, tired smile, the kind that only exists between two people who’ve finally stopped pretending in front of each other.
“I never played that game,” Kael said.
“I’ve never heard of The Age of Heroes in my life.”
The floor seemed to shift under Damian’s feet, even sitting down.
“Then how—”
“I don’t know what kind of game this world is to you,” Kael said, leaning forward, voice dropping even lower.
“But to me, this world isn’t a game at all. It’s history. I studied it. Before. At a university, in a world with no magic in it, no system, no Portals. I studied the fall of the Aethon Empire as a historical case study of civilizational collapse caused by an undocumented, unprecedented invasion.”
Damian stayed silent long enough for another raindrop to hit the window.
“You’re not a reincarnated player,” he said, slowly, putting the pieces together as he spoke.
“You’re a historian.”
“A historian who studied the outcome,” Kael said, and there was something bitter in his voice now, something that sounded like years of wasted work.
“I know how this story ends, Damian. I know because it’s already ended, in a book, written by people born after the dust settled. I know which kingdoms fall. I know how many die. I know that the Aethon Empire, whatever it ends up becoming, lasts exactly one hundred and ninety-two years after the Arrival before collapsing again, in a second invasion the books barely document because almost no one survived to write about it.”
Damian felt a cold far more real than the one in the chamber beneath the Hall of Blades.
“You know the future,” he said.
“I only know a script that may or may not be accurate. You know what actually happened.”
“I know what the books say happened,” Kael corrected, with the tired precision of someone who’d spent his whole life — both of them — being corrected by professors for confusing the two.
“And history books are written by whoever won, edited by whoever had an interest in telling it a certain way, and always, always incomplete on the details that actually mattered in the moment they happened. I know the final outcome. I don’t know the path there. You, it seems, know the path, and have no idea what the final outcome actually is.”
The two of them stared at each other, and for the first time since waking up in this world, Damian felt something that wasn’t calculation or strategy.
It was relief — pure, almost embarrassingly intense — at finally sitting across from someone who needed no explanation at all to understand the weight he’d been carrying alone for months.
“This changes everything,” Damian said, more to himself than to Kael.
“It does,” Kael agreed.
“Because together, we know the beginning, the middle, and the end. And nobody else in this entire world, anywhere, has both halves of that information besides the two of us.”
They stayed in the library until the dinner bell rang, trading information with the caution of two generals who haven’t yet decided whether they’re allies or just delaying the moment they discover they’re enemies.
Kael knew names Damian had never heard — names of generals, of treaties, of kingdoms that didn’t even exist yet at this point in the timeline, but that his history books mentioned as future powers.
Damian knew things no history book would ever record — the exact timing of a patrol, the location of a hidden dungeon, the name of a merchant who didn’t yet know he was about to get rich.
Neither of them told the other everything they knew.
That, too, they both understood without needing to say it out loud.
“Why is Roderick going to try to kill you in eight months,” Kael asked, at the end, as they were getting up to leave.
“That’s not in any book I’ve read.”
Damian stopped.
“How do you know he’s going to try to—”
“I didn’t know,” Kael said, and his smile this time carried a thread of malice Damian would learn, in the months to come, to respect and fear in roughly equal measure.
“You just confirmed it.”
Damian looked at him for a long moment.
And then, for the second time that day, felt the floor shift under his own feet — because he’d just discovered, the most expensive way possible, that knowledge from another life was no longer the only advantage that existed in that castle.
Kael knew how to play too.
Days until the Players Arrive: 10,907