I woke up before the knock.
That surprised me. I'd expected to drift — to get a few more minutes of blank, merciful unconsciousness before the world remembered I existed. Instead I came up fast and clean, like something in this body didn't know how to sleep lightly. Eyes open. Aware. The stone ceiling of Kaelen Solace's bedroom staring back at me in the pale grey light of early morning.
I lay there for a moment.
Right, I thought. This is real.
I'd half-convinced myself during the night that it wasn't. That I'd wake up on the floor of my apartment with a controller-shaped bruise on my hip and a very embarrassing near-death experience to quietly never tell anyone about. Instead I woke up in a bed worth more than my entire previous life, in a body that fit like a suit cut for someone else's posture, with a dark mark crawling up the back of my right hand and two runes sitting in my chest like stones dropped into still water.
I sat up slowly.
The room looked different in daylight. Less dramatic, more real — the kind of real that has dust on the windowsill and a half-burned candle that nobody replaced. I could hear the house around me, the particular silence of a large building in the early morning, that specific quality of quiet that meant staff already moving two floors down, footsteps being carefully moderated.
I looked at my hand.
The Decay rune was still there. Of course it was. In the morning light it looked less like a bruise and more like ink that had soaked too deep — branching lines across the back of my knuckles, faint enough that you might miss it in poor lighting, obvious enough once you knew to look. I turned my hand over. Palm side was clean.
I could feel it.
That was the part I hadn't fully processed last night. It wasn't just a mark. It was present — a low, persistent awareness sitting at the edge of my senses like a word on the tip of your tongue. Not threatening, not painful. Just there. Like a second set of eyes that didn't open but could.
And beneath it, the other one.
Mine.
I prodded at it carefully, the way you might test a bruise. It didn't respond — just sat there, coiled and quiet, giving nothing away. Reality manipulation. In theory. In practice I had no idea what that meant yet and absolutely no intention of finding out by accident.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood.
The floor was cold through the thin soles of — I looked down — very expensive sleeping clothes that Kaelen apparently wore with the casual disregard of someone who had never once considered what things cost. I crossed to the window and looked out.
Grounds. Formal, obsessively maintained, the kind of landscaping that existed to communicate wealth rather than pleasure. Iron fence in the distance. A grey sky threatening rain that had been threatening it all night without following through.
The Solace estate.
I knew it from the game — had navigated it in two separate chapters, once during Kaelen's backstory segment and once during the confrontation scene where the protagonist came here looking for answers. I knew the layout better than I had any right to. I knew which corridors the staff avoided. I knew where the family kept the important documents. I knew that Kaelen's older sister had an office on the third floor facing east and a standing habit of arriving at her brother's door without warning when she had something to say.
Which was why, when the knock came — sharp, three times, no pause — I wasn't startled.
I was just not ready.
"Kaelen."
The door opened before I answered. Of course it did. I turned around.
She was tall. That was the first thing — taller than I'd pictured from the game's character art, with the same severe bone structure as the portrait in the hall but animated in a way the portrait wasn't, sharpened by genuine irritation into something that had an edge. Dark hair pulled back. Academy teaching robes, formal, the kind worn when you wanted your authority visible. She was already looking at me like she was deciding which version of this conversation to have.
She went with the direct one.
"Mara Holt," she said. "Third-year. Commoner scholarship. She was in the infirmary until an hour ago with two fractured fingers and bruising across her ribs." She crossed her arms. "Her hands, Kaelen. She's a runic inscriptionist. Do you understand what fractured fingers mean for someone who inscribes for a living?"
I understood perfectly.
The problem was that Kaelen hadn't cared. I could feel it — not a thought exactly, more like an absence where concern should have been, a gap in the emotional architecture of this body where normal human empathy had been carefully excised over years of trauma twisted inward and outward in equal measure. It wasn't malice in the active sense. It was something worse. Indifference that had calcified into instinct.
My own reaction — the part of me that was still Eren, still a person who had spent his previous life being aggressively average and harmlessly unremarkable — was quietly horrified.
I kept my face still.
"And?" I said.
Wrong. I knew it was wrong the moment it left my mouth — not because it was out of character, it was exactly in character, which was the problem — but because Lyane's expression shifted in a specific way. Not angrier. Worse than angrier. Tired. The particular tiredness of someone who has had this exact exchange too many times and stopped being surprised by it.
"She's a friend of mine," Lyane said. "Which you know. Which is why you did it."
I hadn't known that. The game hadn't mentioned it.
I filed it away and kept my mouth shut, which Kaelen would have read as disinterest and happened to also be me buying time to think.
"I've already spoken to the administration," she continued. "You'll cover her medical costs. Fully. And you will not go near her again." She paused. "I'm not asking."
The Decay rune pulsed once, faint, like something in this body registering the proximity of confrontation and noting it for later. I pressed it down, hard, before it could do anything more interesting than pulse.
"Fine," I said.
Lyane studied me for a moment. I got the sense she'd been prepared for more resistance — that the flatness of my answer had thrown her rhythm slightly. She recalibrated.
"The academy term starts in four days," she said. "I'd suggest using them to reflect on whether you want this year to go the same way as the last one." She turned toward the door. "Breakfast is in an hour. Father won't be there. Don't be late."
She left without closing the door all the way.
I stood in the middle of the room and breathed.
Mara Holt, I thought. Runic inscriptionist. Lyane's friend. Fractured fingers.
I looked at my right hand. The mark on the back of it sat quiet in the morning light, patient as something that knew it had time.
I had four days before the academy. Four days to figure out how to exist inside a life built by someone I didn't want to be, carrying his damage and his reputation and his rune that rotted things at the edges, in a world barreling toward a darkness I knew the ending of.
Four days was not a lot of time.
Alright, I thought. Start with breakfast. Don't be late.
I found the wardrobe and started getting dressed.
Somewhere on the third floor, Lyane Solace stood in her office and stared out the window for a long time before she sat down.