Corvis Eralith
The words hung in the warm, firelit air not like a decree of Fate, a verdict passed on my secret soul.
"Yes, Corvis. I know you are reincarnated."
A violent tremor seized me, starting deep in my newly forged core and radiating outward until my small hands shook visibly where they clutched the fabric of my trousers.
I couldn't stop it. It was the tremor of a foundation cracking. Elder Rinia's gaze held me, a tranquil, inescapable force. Her expression was a landscape I couldn't navigate—a base layer of profound pity, overlaid with endless patience, but beneath it, something else glimmered: a sharp, incisive recognition, as if she were not looking at a child, but at a complicated knot in the tapestry she spent her life studying.
It wasn't hostility. It was something more unnerving: complete, unblinking awareness.
My eyes darted to the door, a lifeline to the mundane world where my grandfather, the legendary Virion Eralith, was just outside, an unknowing guardian of a normalcy that had just been obliterated.
The terrorof his face if—when—he learned. The love in his eyes turning to confusion, then to betrayal, then to grief for the grandson he thought he had.
"If it is Virion you are afraid of, I haven't told anyone," Rinia said, her voice still that soft, rustling-leaf tone.
She misinterpreted my fear, grounding it in a social consequence, not the existential one that was freezing my blood.
"I… know that," I stammered, the words automatic, a pathetic attempt to sound in control.
But I did know. The Rinia of the story was a vault. She hoarded truths like a Dragon hoards power, spending her precious life-force only in catastrophic moments.
She had waited years to even hint at her power to Arthur, and even then, she spoke in riddles wrapped in warnings.
The fact she was speaking so plainly now, to a three-year-old, was itself a screaming alarm. This was unprecedented. This was totally off-script.
What was my move? Flight? The absurdity was a bitter taste. A three-year-old, even one with a faintly glowing black core nestled in his gut, was no match for the Elshire Forest at night.
My body was small, weak, untested. My mind, for all its stolen and fraudulent knowledge, held no survival skills, only the sterile data of a reader.
And the thought of my parents' faces—Mom's gentle concern crumbling into heartbreak, Dad's stern love hardening into desperate confusion—pinned me to the spot more effectively than any spell.
I was trapped not by walls, but by the very love I was trying to protect.
Rinia's smile softened further, the lines around her multihued eyes deepening. "Listen, Corvis," she began, leaning forward slightly, her posture inviting a confidence. "Whatever is passing through your mind, I harbour no ill intentions toward you, nor I desire to."
The assurance, meant to calm, only agitated the storm within. If not ill intentions, then what? Why break the silence?
"Then why are you speaking to me like this?" I asked, my voice thin and reedy. "Wouldn't it be better to keep quiet?"
The question was a plea. Leave me in my haunted silence. Let me play my part. By the story's timeline, a conversation of this magnitude shouldn't happen for a decade at least!
And the cost… every vision aged her, drained her. She was supposed to be saving her strength, hoarding every second of her finite life for the pivotal moments with Arthur.
Why was she wasting this irreplaceable resource on me?
"On one, selfish, side, maybe it would be better. For you, for me, for the family," she conceded, a bittersweet hum escaping her lips, a sound full of the weight of countless such calculated silences. "However, we can't afford this."
We. The word was a shackle. It bound my Fate to hers, to the family's, to the continent's. Before I could form a protest, she leaned closer, the scent of dried sage and old parchment enveloping me.
"You might be wondering how I know you are a reincarnate," she said, and for a dizzying second, I feared she would see through the final layer—that I wasn't just a reincarnate from a world like King Grey's, but a reader, a meta-cancer in the body of her world. "That's because I am a diviner, a seer."
A shockwave of relief, so potent it was dizzying, washed over me. She saw the what, but not the specifics. She saw a displaced soul, not a walking, talking spoiler.
She thought I was like Arthur—a soul from a parallel world, stumbling in blind. Not a soul who knew the name of every major player and the date of every coming catastrophe.
The distinction was my last, fragile shield. I clung to it, letting a convincingly confused expression crumple my features. The panic was real, but I channeled it into the performance of a lost child.
"I don't follow," I whispered, layering innocence over my terror.
"Magic, Corvis, can do a lot of things. One of these is allowing diviners like me to gaze at the future," she explained, her tone pedagogical, as if instructing any young elf in the basics of our world.
She was offering a simplified truth, a safe version. She wouldn't mention aether, the true fabric of Fate. Not with the ever-present, invisible threat of Asuran attention.
"I can't tell you much, Corvis, as that would hinder the same future I am trying to avoid," she continued, and the echo of her canonical words to Arthur sent another chill down my spine. "Change, Corvis, is coming for us all. Not only for our family, not for Elenoir, but for all of Dicathen."
I nodded, a stiff, wooden motion. This I knew. This was the dread that colored my every waking moment.
Then she delivered the line that stopped the world.
"And you seem to be at the centre of it all."
The air vanished from the room. No, it vanished from my lungs, from the universe. The words were wrong. They were a sacred script placed in the wrong actor's hands.
They belonged to Arthur Leywin. They were the burden of the protagonist, the anchor of the narrative.
To hear them directed at me was not the validation of some sort of delusional dream; it was a cosmic error, a horrifying transposition of roles.
I am not the centre, I screamed inside my skull. I am a footnote, a side character, an imposter trying to nudge the true hero onto his path! I am not strong enough! I am not brave enough! I am a coward with a library in his head, not a king with a sword in his hand!
The sheer, utter wrongness of it must have been painted across my face in stark, neon horror. Rinia saw it, of course she did. Her expression gentled into something that looked like remorse.
"I know… I am sorry I have to tell you this," she said, the apology sincere, heavy with the cost of foresight. "But I can tell you that I don't care about who you were." She offered a soft, genuine smile, the kind meant to bridge an abyss. "I still see you as my grandnephew."
I shook my head, a frantic, denying motion. Her words were a comfort I couldn't accept because I understood their context.
In the story, her trust in Arthur was a calculated and desperate gamble. She bet her knowledge, her guidance, eventually her very life, on him.
That she was making a similar overture to me now, so early, with such devastating clarity, could only mean one thing: the tapestry of Fate had shifted in a catastrophic way.
The worst-case scenario my mind had been too timid to fully articulate now took center stage, whispering a single, devastating question.
My voice, when I found it, was a broken thing, fumbling over familial titles.
"Elde—Aunt… Rinia…" I swallowed, the dryness of my throat painful. "I need to know something. I really, really need to."
Her multicolored eyes held mine, a silent promise. "I will try to answer as much as I can."
The name burst from me, charged with all my hope, my dread, my entire understanding of this world's salvation. "You know about Arthur Leywin, right? Right?!"
I searched her face, desperately, for any flicker—recognition, shock, even the guarded knowing she'd shown me. What I saw instead was a blank page. Pure, unfeigned puzzlement. Her head tilted a fraction, the firelight catching the silver in her hair.
"Arthur… Leywin?" she repeated, testing the syllables. They sounded foreign on her tongue, a human name with no weight, no resonance in her visions. "No, I don't know anyone named Arthur Leywin. Or 'Leywin,' if that's what you're asking."
The floor didn't just drop away; the entire universe did. The foundations of my reality, already strained, gave way completely. The mental shelf holding every plan, every desperate idea built upon the certainty of Arthur's existence, shattered.
In that void, there was no room for secondary questions—about Mordain Asclepius, about phoenixes, about verifying the broader lore. The linchpin was gone. The protagonist was absent.
The narrative I had used as my bible, my map, and my shield was null and void.
"There must be a mista—" The words tore from me as a half-shout, a denial of the abyss that had opened.
Logic fled. I lunged forward from the couch with the desperate, grasping need of someone trying to physically stop a world from dissolving.
My hand reached out to clutch, to anchor myself to her, to make her see, to make her remember the name that was supposed to be written in the very stars.
At that exact moment, the door swung open.
A blast of cool, night-tinged air swept in, carrying the scent of pine and damp earth. And there stood Grandpa Virion, his arms laden with neatly split logs, his sharp eyes taking in the scene in an instant: me, half-launched from my seat, face undoubtedly a mask of tear-streaked panic and world-ending shock; and Rinia, leaning forward, her expression one of ancient, weary compassion.
"What happened here?" Grandpa's voice boomed into the tense silence, a mixture of amused curiosity and that underlying, veteran's suspicion that missed nothing. He stepped inside, kicking the door shut with his heel. "Don't scare the boy, you hag. I don't want my grandson to be traumatised by his own Great-aunt."
Time, which had seemed frozen, now snapped forward at a breakneck pace. The performance of a lifetime was demanded in a split second. Rinia moved with the fluid grace of decades of practice.
Her hand, which had been resting on her knee, lifted and descended onto my head in a motion that was both claiming and concealing.
She ruffled my gunmetal hair with a theatrical vigor, mussing it forward so the silver strands fell like a curtain over my eyes, hiding the raw terror and the nascent tears.
"Oh, I was just teasing little Corvis a bit," she said, her voice now light, imbued with a playful, aunt-like mischief that was utterly convincing. "Telling him an old forest tale about the Old Guardian of the Woods. Got a bit carried away with the voices, I'm afraid!"
I complied instantly, ducking my head further, using the gesture to scrub hastily at my eyes with my sleeve, to take one heaving, shuddering breath that I tried to force into stillness.
Grandpa Virion scoffed, the suspicion melting into affectionate exasperation. He crossed the room and dumped the logs with a satisfying clatter next to the hearth.
"Old fool," he grumbled, but there was fondness in it. "Save your scary stories for when they're older and can fight back with pillows." He began to methodically place wood on the fire, his broad back to us.
In that moment, bent under Rinia's hand, hidden by the veil of my own hair, I died a small death.
The world I knew was gone, replaced by a terrifying, uncharted wilderness where the central pillar of hope had never existed.
And I, the fraudulent, frightened soul in a child's body, was now, according to the seer's sight, somehow at the centre of it all.
All that was left was a core of cold, stark terror, and a single, screaming question echoing in the new void: if Arthur isn't coming… then what in all the hells am I supposed to do now?