The plan was simple: wait eight months.
Kael had confirmed the information without meaning to, but confirming wasn’t the same as changing it.
Damian knew — or thought he knew — exactly when Roderick would act, and a real strategist doesn’t waste an information advantage by moving too soon.
Eight months gave him time to prepare the ground, run a few more Status Analyses on whoever was close to Roderick by then, maybe even plant something that would turn the assassination attempt back on Roderick himself before it even happened.
Eight months was the plan.
The plan lasted six weeks.
Damian was on his way back from the library — another afternoon with Kael, another careful trade of information neither of them fully trusted the other with yet — when he smelled it before he heard anything.
Smoke.
Not fireplace smoke, not kitchen smoke.
A thicker smoke, more chemical, the kind he recognized in a way a seven-year-old’s body shouldn’t recognize anything.
Burning alchemist’s oil.
Someone started this fire on purpose.
And it was coming from exactly the direction of his own room.
He ran — the small body protesting against the speed his mind was demanding of it — and reached the corridor in time to see smoke escaping under the door he himself had shut on his way to the library, hours earlier.
One servant was already shouting for water.
Another was pounding on the locked door — locked from the outside, with a chain Damian had never seen there before.
Locked from the outside.
Someone didn’t just want me dead.
They wanted to make sure I couldn’t get out.
The fire was put out before it spread to the rest of the wing — palace stone didn’t burn easily, and that, ironically, was the only thing that had saved his life.
But when they finally broke the door down, the straw bed had been reduced to ash, the rusted metal chest was blackened, and the ceiling stain that only became a map from a specific angle had vanished under a layer of soot.
If Damian had been in the room — if he’d come back from the library ten minutes earlier, the way he normally did, instead of staying behind arguing over one of Kael’s theories about trade routes that would end up going nowhere — he’d be dead.
Six weeks early.
The answer came that same night, in the form of a Status Analysis Damian spent without hesitating, watching from a distance as Roderick was questioned by a guard in the courtyard — not as the main suspect, just another prince being interviewed as routine, because nobody, yet, specifically suspected him.
RODERICK VORN Level: 8 | Class: Warrior (Aspirant) Loyalty: Self-Ambition (64%) | Darius (36%) Threat assessed: High — Imminent Action Detected
Thirty-six percent loyalty to Darius, now.
A month ago, it had been nine.
Something had shifted between the two brothers — and Damian felt his stomach tighten with the realization that maybe it wasn’t Roderick acting alone, driven by badly-contained rage and sloppy swordwork.
Maybe it was Darius, using Roderick as a disposable tool, moving up a plan that had already been in motion before Damian ever confirmed its existence to Kael that rainy afternoon.
I didn’t leak that information to Roderick.
I leaked it to Kael.
The thought arrived cold and clear, and Damian stood frozen in the corridor long enough that a guard asked if he was all right.
He wasn’t.
Because there were only two possible explanations for the fire happening six weeks early, right after the library conversation, and neither one was comfortable.
First: it was a coincidence, and the timeline he remembered from some side-quest journal had never been as precise as he wanted to believe — the world diverging again, the same way it had diverged at the fork beneath the Hall of Blades.
Second: Kael had told someone.
Not necessarily out of malice.
Maybe by accident, maybe as part of some calculation of his own Damian didn’t fully understand yet, maybe simply because two people with half the knowledge each are never a match for full trust in each other.
He didn’t know which one was true.
And that uncertainty, more than the fire itself, was the thing that scared him most.
He didn’t confront Kael the next day.
Confronting him too early, without proof, was the kind of mistake that would close off the one new source of information he’d found in months.
Instead, he went to the training yard, where Roderick was still being watched from a distance by suspicious guards, and spent the day’s second Analysis.
RODERICK VORN Level: 8 | Class: Warrior (Aspirant) Loyalty: Self-Ambition (61%) | Darius (39%) Threat assessed: High — Imminent Action Detected
Still climbing.
It was the behavior of a plan still in motion, only temporarily delayed by the first strike’s failure.
There’s going to be a second attempt.
And this time, they’ll know that I know the first one failed — which means the second one will be more careful, and probably faster.
For the first time since waking up in this world, Damian felt the real weight of what it meant to play a strategy game where losing didn’t come with a “load last save” button.
He’d miscalculated.
Not about what would happen — about when.
And in a match where a mistake cost your own life, “when” was, sometimes, more important than “what.”
That night, housed in a temporary room two floors below his own — damper, colder, but at least without ash on the ceiling — Damian went back through his calculations with a discipline that hurt more than the exhaustion did.
Mistake one: I assumed eight months was a fixed number, because it came from a text I treated as scripture.
Should have treated it as an estimate.
Mistake two: I told Kael before knowing whether he’d keep it secret.
Should have tested his trustworthiness with less lethal information first.
Mistake three: I almost died today because I got home ten minutes late, and that wasn’t strategy at all.
That was luck.
And luck isn’t a variable I can plan around.
He closed his eyes, listening to drips from a leak in the roof somewhere above him, and made the only promise that made sense to make to himself in that moment.
I will never again mistake knowledge from another life for certainty.
From now on, every timeline I remember is a hypothesis, not a fact.
And everyone who knows what I know is a risk, no matter how much I like them.
Roderick was still out there, training with rage and bad form, waiting for the next opportunity.
Kael was still in the library, three afternoons a week, waiting for the next conversation.
And somewhere beneath the Hall of Blades, the circle was still waiting too — seven marks already made, and Damian no longer knew, with any real certainty, when the eighth would come.
Days until the Players Arrive: 10,861