Corvis Eralith
""Resting will do you only good,"" Great-aunt had said, but there was a little, insignificant, problem.
I couldn't stay still for a full week. Despite every intention, despite Great-aunt's pointed looks and Berna's gentle attempts to pin me to the bed with her massive paws, my body refused to learn the lesson that rest was sometimes necessary.
This life had taught me something that no amount of coaxing could unlearn: stillness was death. Movement was survival. The moment you stopped, the river caught you.
So I found myself in the clearing behind Great-aunt's chalet, the morning air sharp with the promise of snow, my breath fogging in front of me as I swung an axe through another log.
The wood split with a satisfying crack, the sound echoing across the white expanse, and I stacked the pieces with the others, a small mountain of firewood that would keep the chalet warm long after I was gone.
Berna played in the snow behind me. For a creature who had nearly killed me—who had killed me, in a time that never was—she was remarkably playful.
She pounced on drifts, sending plumes of white into the air, then shook herself like a dog, her hazelnut fur scattering snow in all directions. She chased her own tail, which was absurd on a bear her size, and when she caught it she looked so surprised that I had to stop swinging the axe to laugh.
It was strange, seeing her like this. The same paws that had torn through trees now patted at snowflakes with the gentle curiosity of a kitten.
The same jaws that had closed around my throat and beheaded me now held clumps of snow that she tossed into the air and tried to catch.
She was terrifying and ridiculous in equal measure, and I found myself watching her more than I watched the wood I was splitting.
The work was repetitive, which made it perfect for training. I set Manasonar humming in the back of my mind, the technique extending outward in waves, testing, probing, listening.
My focus was Berna. She was a dozen meters away, visible and tangible, and yet when I closed my eyes she was nearly invisible.
Her mana signature was a whisper where it should have been a shout, a shadow where it should have been a flame.
No wonder I hadn't sensed her in the forest. No wonder she had been able to stalk me without my knowing, to appear beside me without warning, to kill me before I even understood what was happening.
This was Guardian Bear training, I realized. This was the legacy of the Titans, the gods who had forged these creatures to stand beside them in battle. Berna could hide herself from almost anything.
And—
The axe paused mid-swing. My concentration shattered, and Manasonar dissolved into silence.
The river.
The thought came unbidden, rising from the depths where I had tried to bury it. I saw myself in that impossible water, saw the body that was mine and not mine, the arms of a young elf in the prime of his life, the legs that had kicked against currents strong enough to swallow cities.
It was still me. Corvis Eralith, grown, matured, the shape of the man I might one day become. Twenty years old, perhaps. The image was already fading, the details dissolving like morning frost, but I remembered the feel of it.
The strength. The certainty. The way the river had recognized me, had known my name, had named me in return.
REtrocurrent.
The word was a key that had turned in a lock I hadn't known existed. It was a gift, or a curse, or something that was both and neither. It was the reason I had returned from the Red Gorge when I should have died.
It was the reason I had opened my eyes in the snow after Berna killed me. It was the reason I was here at all, breathing, living, existing in a world that should have had no place for me.
Fate had given me this. I knew it with the same certainty that I knew my own name, the same certainty that I knew Berna's fur beneath my fingers, the same certainty that I knew the weight of the axe in my hands.
Fate had reached into the machinery of existence and plucked me out, and then it had reached again, and again, and again, until I understood that I was not a random variable in someone else's story. I was the point of the pen. I was the hand that wrote.
The novel had been vague about Fate. Deliberately vague, perhaps, because Arthur was never meant to understand it fully, only to wield it.
But Arthur wasn't here. There was only me, and the river, and the threads I had seen stretching across the celestial vault, golden and infinite and moving.
I knew I had other abilities. I couldn't name them, couldn't describe them, couldn't even prove they existed.
But I knew, with the same bone-deep certainty that told me the sun would rise, that they were there.
Related to the edicts of aether, perhaps. But it wasn't aether I was using. It was something greater. Something that underlay aether the way aether underlay mana and all things.
Fate. The highest edict. The force that wove the threads I had seen stretching across the sky.
I needed to know more. I needed to understand. And there was only one people in all of Dicathen—in all of history—who had ever even remotely understood the nature of Fate.
The Djinn.
Kezess Indrath himself, the Dragon Lord of Epheotus, had learned many secrets of aether and the existence of Fate only by torturing them out of the Djinn.
He had stolen their knowledge, burned their cities, erased their existence from the world—and still, still, he had never truly understood what they had discovered. He had taken their techniques, their artifacts, their lives, but the heart of their knowledge, the understanding of Fate itself—that, he had never been able to grasp.
I could not go to the Relictombs. The thought was a cold weight in my chest, a stone dropped into the stillness of the clearing.
The Relictombs were where the Djinn had hidden their greatest secrets, where Ascenders from Alacrya risked their lives for scraps of power, where Agrona's agents lurked in the shadows, waiting for something they could use.
If I went there, if I brought Berna there, if I attracted the wrong kind of attention—I didn't know how the Relictombs would react.
REtrocurrent was not invincibility. It was a gift, but gifts could be withdrawn. Every death I survived was a gamble, and the house always won eventually.
But the Relictombs were not the only repositories of Djinn knowledge. Dicathen was littered with their ruins—dungeons, temples, cities, all of them crumbling, all of them waiting.
The Red Gorge had proven that. When the Reset had come, when the ancient mechanisms had woken, the dungeon had restored itself. Not completely, not perfectly, but enough. Enough to see what it had once been. Enough to know that there was more buried beneath the mountain, more waiting to be found.
How many dungeons filled the Beast Glades? How many ruins lay scattered across Dicathen, their secrets preserved by aether and time and the stubborn refusal of the Djinn to let their knowledge die?
A whole continent, once home to the most advanced civilization the world had ever seen. If I could find those places, if I could wake them, if I could learn from them—
I gave the axe one final swing. The last log split cleanly, the two halves falling to either side of the stump, and I straightened, wiping sweat from my brow with the back of my hand.
Berna was right behind me.
I jumped. Actually jumped, the axe rising instinctively, and she just sat there, her massive head tilted, her green eyes blinking slowly.
Like a dog. Like a very large, very patient dog who had no idea why her person was being so dramatic.
"Berna." I lowered the axe, my heart still hammering. "You have to stop doing that."
She blinked again, and through the bond I felt her amusement, warm and steady, like the embers of a fire that had been burning for a very long time. She knew exactly what she was doing.
She had been doing it since the moment we bonded, appearing beside me without warning, moving through the forest like a ghost, testing my awareness, my reflexes, my readiness.
And failing. I was always failing.
But that was the point, wasn't it? Berna had spent who knows how long under the yoke of the Vritra, her will bent, her mind clouded, her body turned into a weapon against everything she had been created to protect.
Now she was free, and she was using that freedom to teach me, in her own strange way, the things she had learned in her captivity.
She could hide her mana signature so completely that even Manasonar barely registered her. She could move through the forest without disturbing a single branch, without leaving a single print in the snow.
She could appear beside me, behind me, above me, and I would never know until she chose to let me see.
If I could learn to do the same—
I reached out and placed my hand on her snout. The fur there was soft, surprisingly soft, and she leaned into my touch, her eyes half-closing, a low rumble building in her chest that I had learned to recognize as contentment.
"Berna." My voice was quieter now, the urgency fading. "Was it one of them who did this to you?"
I didn't need to say the name. Through the bond, I felt her response—a growl, low and deep, the same growl she had given when I mentioned the Vritra in the forest.
"And did it happen here?" I pressed. "In the Elshire?"
Another growl. Another confirmation.
I nodded slowly, my hand still resting against her fur. The Elshire Forest was vast, larger than any forest on Earth, a wilderness that stretched from the coast to the mountains, from the borders of Sapin to the edges of the Beast Glades.
Millions of elves called it home, scattered across its groves and clearings, their lives intertwined with the trees, the streams, the ancient rhythms of the wood.
A Vritra could hide here. A Vritra had hidden here.
Of course. I had known, on some level, that Alacrya's influence had already spread through Dicathen. The corruption that had turned Berna into a monster, that had driven her to kill, that had nearly destroyed her—it was not an isolated incident.
I needed to go to the Beast Glades.
The thought settled into me like a stone finding its resting place, heavy and certain. I needed to train, to fight, to push myself against the creatures that lived there, to learn the skills that no amount of practice in the Hallowed Hollow could teach me.
I needed to find the ruins of the Djinn, to wake them if I could, to learn what they had known about Fate and aether and the threads that wove the universe together.
I needed proof—proof of Alacrya's presence, of the Vritra's corruption, of the war that was coming whether anyone believed it or not.
Because the Tri-Union had never been further away.
I had been so focused on my own training that I had let it slip. The bonds between Elenoir and Darv were stronger than ever, thanks to Elder Rahdeas's efforts, to Grandpa's willingness to trust the old dwarf and play diplomat with my parents and all of Elenoir, to the slow, patient work of building something that might one day become a shield.
But Sapin was still distant. Still hostile. Still other.
In the timeline that was, Arthur had saved Tessia from slavers. That act had slowly cracked the wall my Dad had built around his hatred of humanity. It had been the first thread in the tapestry of alliance, the first step toward a united Dicathen.
But Arthur was not here. He had never been here. And without him, Dad had no reason to open his heart to humans. Without him, the Glayders had no reason to look past their own borders. Without him, the Tri-Union was a dream.
Alacrya had not yet been discovered. In the novel, it had been a stroke of luck—Gideon Bastius explained, just a chance encounter.
Here, with Arthur gone, with the threads of Fate rewoven into a pattern I was only beginning to understand, there was no guarantee that discovery would happen at all.
I looked at Berna, at her patient green eyes, at the way her tail wagged slowly back and forth, sweeping the snow behind her.
"Berna." My voice was careful, measured. "Do you want to strike back at them?"
She tilted her head, and through the bond I felt her response—not confusion, but something more complex.
She didn't want to fight. I could feel it in the quiet of her mind, the stillness that had settled there since she broke free of the corruption. She had spent so long fighting, so long being a weapon, that the thought of more battle, more violence, more pain—it exhausted her.
I understood. More than she knew, I understood.
"I'm sorry." I pressed my hand against her fur, and she leaned into me, a low rumble building in her chest that might have been forgiveness or acceptance or simply the pleasure of being touched after so long without. "I've been rushing. We both need to rest."
Her ears perked up. Her tail stopped wagging. And then, with a suddenness that made me laugh despite myself, she bolted.
She ran across the clearing in a burst of speed that should have been impossible for a creature her size, then stopped, turned, and waited, her front paws planted, her rear end raised, her eyes fixed on me with an intensity that could only mean one thing.
She wanted to play.
I sighed. I picked up the stone I had been using to practice my earth magic—a lumpy, misshapen thing that was more rock than sphere, earth was my weakest element. I covered it in snow, the white clinging to its rough surface, and threw.
Berna caught it. Not with her mouth, not like a dog catching a stick, but with her paws. She reared up on her hind legs, her full height suddenly, impossibly vast, and caught the stone against her chest like a goalkeeper defending a goal. Then she tensed, and I knew what was coming.
"Berna!" I yelled, already laughing. "Don't you—"
The stone flew. It was a blur of white and grey, a projectile that should have knocked me flat, should have buried me in the snow, should have reminded me exactly how much stronger she was than I would ever be. I closed my eyes, braced myself—
Nothing.
I opened my eyes. The stone lay at my feet, nestled in the snow, perfectly still. And when I picked it up, I saw that it had changed. The rough edges were gone, the lumpy surface smoothed, the shape corrected. It was a sphere now. Perfect. Round. Polished as if by a master craftsman.
I looked at Berna. She sat in the snow, her tail wagging, her eyes bright, and through the bond I felt her pride. Her smugness.
"You know magic." It wasn't a question.
She growled, and I felt her confirmation, warm and certain. She was a Guardian Bear, forged by Titans, masters of earth and stone. Of course she knew magic.
I threw the stone again. She caught it, bounded back, dropped it at my feet. I threw it again. She chased it, retrieved it, waited for the next.
We fell into a rhythm, the two of us, and I let my mind drift, let the peace of the clearing settle over me like the snow that was beginning to fall again, soft and silent.
I wondered what they would think, back at the Royal Palace. Tessia, with her clever robin, her Coco, her constant bragging about the smartest pet in all of Elenoir.
What would she say when I brought home a Guardian Bear? What would Mom say, with her love of order and propriety? What would Dad say, who had never quite known what to make of his strange, secretive son?
And Grandpa. Grandpa, who had hunted a Shadow Panther alone in these same woods, who had killed it with his bare hands, who had claimed its Beast Will and made it his own. What would he say when he saw the creature that had chosen me?
I threw the stone again, and Berna bounded after it, her tail wagging, her paws kicking up snow, her joy a warmth that filled the bond between us.
I caught the stone she threw back, felt its perfect weight in my palm, and smiled.