Chapter 4: Awakener Guild
Lucus looked at him. The question was simple, but Taros asked it like someone who understood the difference between what circumstances allow and what a person actually wants.
"I want to be in Class B," Lucus said. "At minimum."
Taros picked up his crate. "Then train for the two days ye have before the ceremony. The placement assessment on the first week of classes—they hold a secondary assessment for borderline students. Go in stronger than yer entrance score suggested."
He paused, crate re-balanced on his shoulder. "Taros Blackthorn. I have a shop in the Artificer Row, eastern quarter, near the bridge. Come see me sometime. I'll have use for a lad who can read things correctly."
He walked away before Lucus could respond.
Lucus stood in the street and watched him go. In his world-building notes, Taros Blackthorn had been listed as a potential recurring NPC a Valhalla artificer who served as an information broker and craftsman contact for the main cast. He had been a concept, a placeholder for "the helpful dwarf."
He was, apparently, a real person. With bronze eyes and a belly laugh and a sharp eye for what questions to ask.
Lucus made a note in the notebook: 'Taros Blackthorn: real. Sharper than written. Make contact again before academy.'
Then he thought about something. Frowned. Wrote another note: 'Secondary placement assessment for borderline students. It's not in the novel. It's not something I wrote. Did I just learn something the author didn't know?'
He looked at the note.
He'd always known there were things in this world beyond what he'd written. A story is not a world it's a narrow path through a world, and everything on either side of the path exists whether the story acknowledges it or not.
The world of Blue Star was larger than his novel. It had always been larger. He just hadn't understood, until now, that being here meant standing in the space beyond the path.
He found the Awakener Guild's public hall in the eastern quarter mid-morning.
It wasn't the registered guild branch that required a membership fee and a completed core formation to access.
But the public hall was open to awakened individuals who hadn't yet formed a core, offering basic assessments, skill-check services, and a notice board that served as a combination job listing, dungeon report registry, and general information exchange.
Lucus went in, found a corner seat with a sightline to the main floor, ordered tea from the service window, and watched.
The hall was busy. Nevus City at academy enrollment time meant hundreds of newly arrived students, most of them awakened but unformed, filling the public spaces.
He could identify them by age—the awkward fifteen-to-seventeen range and by the quality of attention they paid to everything around them, the wide-eyed absorption of people encountering the formal awakener world for the first time.
He watched a group of five students near the assessment station.
Three humans, a Beastkin with feline characteristics, a half-elf girl with dark copper hair who stood slightly apart from the group with the careful stillness of someone listening to everything without appearing to.
'Elena Moonshade', he thought immediately.
The recognition hit him harder than he expected—a physical jolt, a kind of vertigo.
Because Elena Moonshade existed in his novel. She was a side character, a supporting lead who appeared in chapters eight through—he counted—approximately chapter forty.
A half-elf girl with copper hair and shadow mana affinity, an extremely rare dark-spectrum element.
In the novel she served as Ethan's quiet information source and occasional battlefield support. Readers had liked her, in the comments he'd gotten during serialization. He'd meant to develop her more.
She was, in real life, smaller than he'd imagined. And the way she stood—that careful stillness—read differently in person.
Not reserved. Alert.
She was reading the room the way he was reading it, cataloguing the people around her without appearing to watch them.
She was also, he noticed, positioned such that she had a sightline to the hall's secondary entrance, the one that opened to the side alley.
Which meant she was making sure she knew where the exits were.
That's not a character detail I wrote', Lucus thought. 'That's instinct. Survival instinct. Why does a fifteen-year-old half-elf girl enter a room and immediately locate the exits?
He filed it under: things the author didn't know.
He was pulling his attention away—reminding himself not to stare, not to draw attention—when the main doors opened and the air in the room changed.
Not dramatically. Not visibly. But Lucus had written enough scenes to understand what it meant when everyone in a space shifted their attention in the same direction simultaneously, the unconscious gravitational pull of a person who occupied more space than their physical body accounted for.
A boy walked in. Approximately seventeen, Lucus's age—Lucas Martin's age—with dark bronze hair worn short and a build that was lean in a way that suggested training rather than youth.
His eyes were a striking electric blue, the kind of color that appeared rarely in the human genetic range and was more commonly associated with a specific type of mana affinity.
He walked through the hall with the ease of someone who had no idea they were being watched, which meant he was either genuinely unaware or so accustomed to it that he'd stopped noticing.
Ethan Von Sliverstel.
The protagonist of the novel Lucus had spent three years writing. The young man destined to become the greatest swordsman in the history of Blue Star, to close the Abyss rifts, to hold the line against the Demon God's advance, to be the reason the world survived the next century.
He was shorter than Lucus had imagined. And he moved to the notice board and started reading the posted dungeon reports with the focused quiet attention of someone doing homework, which was—not what Lucus had expected from his own protagonist.
Then again. Ethan in Arc One was seventeen. Still building. Still becoming. The legend was decades away.
Right now he was just a very focused teenage boy reading dungeon difficulty assessments.
Lucus stood up slowly, left his coins for the tea, and walked out through the main doors before anyone could notice him watching.
On the street, breathing the mana-crystal-tinged air of Nevus City, he made a note: 'Ethan: smaller in person. Quieter. Doing research. He's here two days early to prepare. Of course he is. He's the protagonist.'
He added: 'Elena Moonshade: located exits on entry. Something in her history made that reflexive. Not in the novel. Find out why—carefully.'
Then, below both notes: 'Don't interfere with the plot. Don't insert yourself into their orbit. You're not part of their story. You're a survivor in the margins.'
He closed the notebook.
He had two days before the ceremony and a body with D potential and 340 mana and a unique skill that didn't have a name yet.
Time to figure out what he was actually working with.
To be Continued...