It began with a cloying sweetness in the air.
Then a choked sound.
Then the wet sensation of liquid running down his torso.
"Huh…?"
Blood. He recognized it from the texture alone, and from that, he recognized the scent; and from the scent, he recognized whose it was.
Seraphine.
'Some kind of new prank?'
His eyelids parted slowly, and what greeted him made him doubt reality.
Seraphine. The woman he had come to love with all his heart, the woman who had made a portion of his sanity dependent on her presence… she was dying in his arms.
He saw it from every angle, every possible vantage point, and his mind refused to accept it. This had to be an illusion, a fabricated reality spun by someone intent on deceiving him. There was no version of events in which Seraphine died while he was still standing.
But even as his mind did its best to deny what was plainly in front of him, his body moved on its own.
Somatic Autonomy engaged at full power, drawing on every ounce of the vast mana available to this body. It spread to her vitals and attempted to artificially revive them. Simultaneously, it accelerated her natural regeneration to absurd levels in a bid to outpace whatever was undoing her.
Even if this was a dream, he wasn't willing to watch her die. So he did everything he could.
Nothing worked. Her body behaved as if it had been dead for some time already… as if what was happening now was simply the final stage of a process that had started long ago and was finally allowed to run its natural course.
When she breathed her last, Ashen's face tightened.
He was sad. But not overwhelmingly so.
To him, this was almost certainly the Liminal Dreamer trait playing tricks. It was one of its worst relapses for sure, but still a hallucination. The real Seraphine was waiting for him somewhere beyond this veil.
'Been a while since it got this bad.'
He waited for the dream to break. That was how it usually went.
A couple of seconds passed.
Then a minute.
'...This is taking longer than usual.'
When two minutes went by, a small, stubborn corner of his mind pushed against the rest and insisted that this was real. He crushed it ruthlessly.
Three minutes.
The corpse hadn't dissolved. The illusion… hadn't lifted.
.
.
.
'...Not an illusion?'
Drip... Drip…
"..."
"Ah."
Before the world lost its meaning entirely, a white glow burst forth; blindingly bright even to his supernatural senses. He closed his eyes on instinct.
When he opened them again and recognized where he was, life reclaimed its meaning.
"My lord, it is to my utmost happiness to see you awake at last."
He discovered that he was back.
⛧ ⛧ ⛧
'Did I go back in time? Or is this also an illusion? Maybe the last three months never happened at all and were only a figment of my imagination.'
He shut every conjecture down before it could spiral and returned himself to the present.
His gaze settled on the head maid, bowing deeply in her usual reverence.
"Should I bring food for you, my Lord? You must be hungry after such a long slumber."
'Her words and manners are exactly the same as last time.'
Based on his senses and the available information, time had genuinely wound back. But the last thing he trusted right now was his own senses. The previous illusion was too fresh for that.
A final test was necessary.
"My consort... when does she arrive?"
"In a couple of hours, my lord."
"...then I shall wait until then."
⛧
⛧
⛧
"Hehe~ I'm so glad you're here with me, Ash."
"Me too, Sera…" Ashen caressed her hair slowly, and she blissfully enjoyed it. "Me too."
She had no idea how much he meant it.
It didn't take long for him to accept that he had landed back at the very beginning; three months in the past, precisely at the first moment he had possessed this body. Accepting something as impossible as time regression was, surprisingly, effortless.
This wasn't his first redo. Twin Souls had made sure he understood that such things were possible.
⛧ ⛧ ⛧
After securing Seraphine, the days passed almost exactly as they had the first time. Ashen made sure of that, going as far as pretending to react with fresh surprise whenever she discovered something new, performing the responses she expected without letting her see the fabrication behind them.
He did it for one reason.
What if the vision he had seen wasn't a hallucination?
If there was even one chance in a million that it was real, he was willing to deceive her to prevent it. Following the original timeline's steps guaranteed at least three months before whatever that was would occur. That was three months to find a solution.
He also gave up sleeping whenever they lay down together at night. The image of her corpse visited him every time he tried, and he couldn't afford to let his guard down regardless. Fortunately, his vampire physiology allowed him to function without rest as long as he had blood.
Speaking of which, one small deviation from the first time was Seraphine's diet. Having seen how much she loved his blood and how little she tolerated the castle's food, he couldn't bring himself to make her wait. He introduced her to it sooner.
Which was why she was currently using his thigh as a seat while eagerly sucking on his thumb, both hands wrapped around his arm with fingers pressed white at the tips, as though afraid her meal might be snatched away at any moment.
He looked at her anxious posture and felt a faint smile surface. 'Like a baby. How cute.'
He let her drink until a satisfied expression settled across her features and she released his finger on her own.
In the background, Somatic Autonomy continued its silent work, scanning her body inch by inch, searching for any biological explanation for what he had witnessed.
It found nothing. That absence of information was itself information: the source wasn't biological.
He checked through Mana Authority next. Nothing there either.
That left one remaining category.
A conceptual attack.
Of course, all of this only mattered if what he had seen was real, which was an assumption that remained absurd on its face.
He still didn't know why anyone would target her. The woman whose body she inhabited was an unremarkable nun. Even her current position as the primordial lord's consort amounted to glorified food in the eyes of the truly powerful. There was no obvious reason for someone of that caliber to spend effort on her.
And yet the nagging wouldn't stop.
The troubled expression he had let slip onto his face was caught by Seraphine, still perched on his lap.
"What's wrong?" She tilted her head, curious, but he saw the unspoken worry behind it.
And with that, he remembered something else.
'She had been hiding something from me. Starting a month before it happened.'
The first time around, he had given her space. He had waited, assuming she would speak when she was ready.
This time, he wasn't going to wait.
He had a persistent sense that whatever she was concealing and whatever he had witnessed were not separate things.
'Sorry love.'