The Guild's auxiliary notice board was updated every Thirdday morning, which meant that every Thirdday morning a cluster of low-rank Hunters and support-grade civilians crowded the entrance hall of the Valdenmere branch to read the new postings. Amaron arrived early enough to avoid the cluster, read what he needed, and leave before the crowd thickened into something that required navigating.
The board held the usual assortment — escort requests for merchant caravans, low-grade mana collection contracts in the outer districts, a standing request from a minor noble house for someone to monitor a Grade 1 rift that had appeared in their garden and was apparently doing nothing except existing and making the groundskeeper anxious. Amaron noted three contracts worth pursuing in the next month and committed them to memory without writing anything down.
He was turning to leave when the doors opened and the crowd began filtering in, and the particular arrangement of events that the original story had apparently decided to run on schedule chose this moment to place Livia Jewel directly in his path.
Not deliberately. That was clear immediately. She was moving at the kind of speed that suggested she had somewhere else to be and was already late for it, a leather satchel over one shoulder with papers threatening to escape from the top, her attention split between the door she'd just come through and something in her hand that appeared to be a list written in handwriting so small it required her to hold it at an angle to read. She was sixteen, with the kind of face that defaulted to warmth the way a room defaults to the temperature of the sun coming through its windows — not a studied expression, just the natural resting state of someone who had not yet learned to armor their own affect.
She walked directly into Amaron's left shoulder.
— ◆ —
The collision was minor — she was smaller than him and moving at an angle, so the impact rotated her slightly rather than stopping either of them. Her satchel swung. Two of the escaping papers made their escape. She grabbed for them, missed, and watched them drift to the Guild hall floor with the expression of someone adding this to a list of things going wrong this morning.
Then she looked up at Amaron.
"Oh — sorry, I wasn't — " She stopped. Reconsidered. "Actually I was definitely not watching where I was going. That's entirely my fault. Are you alright?"
Amaron had caught one of the papers on reflex. He held it out.
"Fine," he said.
She took the paper, tucked it back into the satchel with the focused intensity of someone performing triage, and then smiled at him — quickly, genuinely, the smile of a person who defaulted to warmth even in minor inconvenience. "Thank you. I'm looking for the Grade 2 contract postings, do you know if they're on the main board or the secondary one? Nobody at the front desk seems to know and I've already been to three wrong boards this morning."
Amaron looked at her for exactly one second.
In his first life, he had known Livia Jewel the way he knew most of the story's significant figures — by reputation, by observation, by the accumulated record of what she did and what it cost and what it meant. She was a C-rank Hunter from a minor merchant family who had tested into the Guild's accelerated track at sixteen and spent the next decade becoming quietly indispensable to every team she joined. She was also, by the time she was nineteen, the person Elian Solhart looked for first in any room he entered, a fact that Elian himself would have denied for approximately two years before stopping.
She was also, as it turned out, the kind of person who apologized sincerely for bumping into strangers and thanked them for catching falling paper.
"Secondary board," Amaron said. "Left corridor, past the equipment room. The sign is missing but the board is still there."
"Of course it is." She was already moving. "Thank you — really."
She was gone around the corner before he had fully processed the interaction.
— ◆ —
He filed it. Livia Jewel: confirmed present, confirmed schedule-adjacent to original timeline, confirmed personality exactly as remembered. He was turning this over with the detached efficiency of inventory when the Guild hall doors opened again and Elian Solhart walked in.
Of course he did.
Amaron did not move. He was standing near the main board, which was a reasonable place to stand, and moving now would be more conspicuous than staying. He stayed. He watched.
Elian had the same unhurried quality as the market, the same comfortable ownership of whatever space he occupied. He nodded at the desk attendant, who straightened involuntarily, and headed toward the notice boards with the purposeful ease of someone who knew exactly where he was going.
He turned left at the corridor junction.
Toward the secondary board.
Ah. There it is.
— ◆ —
He did not follow them. That would have been surveillance, and surveillance required a reason, and his reason for knowing what was about to happen in that corridor was not something he could explain to anyone, including himself in terms that didn't sound like the premise of a very specific kind of novel.
He knew what happened because he had lived it — at a remove, secondhand, the way you know about things that happen to people you observe without being invited into. Elian would find Livia struggling to read the secondary board in the poor light of the left corridor. He would hold up a mana-light — a small, casual thing, barely an effort at his rank. She would thank him. He would notice her list. They would disagree, briefly and without heat, about the relative merits of two overlapping contracts she was considering. She would make an argument he hadn't considered. He would revise his opinion immediately and without defensiveness, which was one of Elian's more genuinely rare qualities.
They would both take the same contract.
It was, Amaron had always thought, an extremely efficient meet-cute. The story had constructed it with the economy of something that knew exactly what it was doing.
He left through the main doors and stood in the morning air and thought about how the secondary board's sign had been missing for four years because the Guild kept reassigning the person responsible for replacing it, which was the kind of structural incompetence that had genuine downstream consequences when you examined it closely enough.
Then he went to work.
— ◆ —
The cartographer's shop on Mender Lane was owned by a man named Ossian who had been mapping Valdenmere's dungeon-adjacent terrain for thirty years and had opinions about everything. He was a fair employer, which in this context meant he paid on time, did not invent reasons to withhold wages, and only subjected Amaron to his opinions during the periods when no customers required attention.
Today's opinion concerned the Guild's new policy on Grade 1 rift monitoring, which Ossian felt was an overreach, and the declining quality of imported mana ink, which he felt was a scandal, and the fact that three of his survey markers in the southern district had been moved by persons unknown, which he felt was personal.
Amaron copied survey coordinates, filed updated terrain records, and listened with the portion of his attention not occupied by more pressing considerations.
The pressing consideration was this: he had just watched the inciting event of the original story's central romantic arc happen in real time, accidentally, from ten feet away, because Livia Jewel had not been watching where she was going and Elian Solhart kept to a consistent schedule.
He had known this was coming. He had planned for it, in the sense that he had noted it as an event to be aware of and not interfered with, a fixed point in the story's first year that needed to proceed undisturbed.
What he had not planned for was the distinct and faintly absurd experience of standing there while it happened.
It's fine. It's completely fine. It is the story doing what the story does and it has nothing to do with anything.
Ossian said something about mana ink.
"Yes," Amaron said.