Christopher Astra had many opinions about Fatebound
Most of them were not kind.
The writing was, to put it generously, an acquired taste. The kind of prose that read like someone had given a very enthusiastic twelve-year-old a dictionary and told them to go wild.
Fatebound had the narrative elegance of a man tripping down a flight of stairs, and somehow, impossibly, sticking the landing every single time.
The dialogue was wooden. The descriptions were overwrought. There was a scene in volume three where the author had used the word "azure" eleven times in a single chapter. Christopher had counted.
And yet.
He stood in the snack aisle of a Family Mart at eleven in the evening, a bag of shrimp crackers tucked under one arm and his phone in his other hand, absolutely riveted.
Demon's Descent was the best story he had ever read in his life, and he was deeply, personally offended by that fact.
The plot was the kind that shouldn't work. It had every cliché in the book, a chosen protagonist, a world of ranked power, ancient mysteries, political intrigue, a school arc that had somehow stretched across four volumes.
On paper it sounded like the sort of thing you rolled your eyes at. In practice, Fatebound had somehow woven those pieces together into something so genuinely compelling that Christopher had pulled three all-nighters in a row when he first started reading it, which was not something he was proud of given that he was twenty-two and had a thesis to finish.
He was probably the only person on the planet who read it, which was a genuine tragedy. The cover art was bad.
The title font looked like it had been chosen by someone who had just discovered WordArt. The summary on the site read like a ransom note. It scared away every reasonable person before they got to chapter one.
Their loss, Christopher supposed, grabbing a second bag of crackers.
He scrolled to the bottom of the latest update, re-reading the last few paragraphs with a growing sense of disbelief.
Chris Black, the protagonist, had done it again.
He had found Luther Astra, the man responsible for no fewer than six mass casualties across three separate arcs, a man who had personally ordered the deaths of thousands of people with casual indifference, a man who had spent the better part of two volumes being built up as one of the story's central threats, and he had looked him in the eye and said, with complete sincerity, that he forgave him.
Just like that.
Forgiven.
Christopher stared at his phone screen for a long moment.
He looked up at the fluorescent lights of the Family Mart ceiling. He looked back down at his phone. He put the shrimp crackers in his basket.
He picked up a can of canned coffee, thought about it, and put it back. He picked up a different canned coffee. He put that one back too. He stood very still.
"Luther Astra," he said, quietly, to no one.
He scrolled back up and re-read the scene. Maybe he had missed something. Maybe there was a nuance he had glossed over, some foreshadowing that made the forgiveness feel earned rather than like a narrative cop-out of the highest order.
He had not missed anything. There was no nuance. Chris Black had simply decided, in the middle of what should have been a confrontation, that Luther Astra's tragic backstory outweighed the several thousand people he had watched die and chosen not to stop.
He dropped his basket on the counter, nodding to the bored clerk who didn't look up from his own phone, and pulled out his wallet.
"Should've just cut his head off," he muttered, mostly to himself. "No hesitation. No speech. No dove wing nonsense. Just done."
The clerk glanced up at him.
"Novel," Christopher said.
The clerk looked back down at his phone without a word. Fair enough.
He paid, tucked his bag under his arm, and pushed through the glass door out into the night.
The air was warm for the season, the street quiet except for the distant sound of a convenience store jingle leaking from somewhere down the block.
He checked his phone again out of habit, though there was nothing new to check. He had finished the chapter.
He was going to have to wait another week, probably two, for Fatebound to update again, and in the meantime he was going to have to sit with the knowledge that Luther Astra, mass murderer, was alive and presumably being reformed somewhere off-panel.
It was genuinely upsetting.
He started walking.
The street was nearly empty at this hour, which was the part of Japan he had never quite gotten used to even after a year of his master's program.
Back home there was always noise, always someone somewhere making a scene. Here, at eleven on a weeknight, the streets were quiet enough that he could hear his own footsteps, which gave him more time than he wanted to continue thinking about Demon's Descent.
The thing was, and this was what frustrated him the most, Luther Astra was a genuinely compelling villain. That was the problem.
Every choice he made tracked. Every atrocity had a logic behind it, cold and warped but consistent. He was the kind of character that, in a different story, might have been the protagonist.
Which was precisely why he deserved consequences.
Mercy was a fine thing in life. In fiction, when you had spent four volumes establishing a character as the embodiment of deliberate, calculated evil, mercy needed to be earned. It needed to cost something.
It needed to mean something. Chris just handing it over because he had a kind soul and a tragic backstory to point at felt like Fateborn losing their nerve at the critical moment.
He rounded the corner, still muttering under his breath about narrative accountability, and that was when he heard it.
A child's voice. High and sharp and frightened, the particular pitch of someone who hadn't yet learned to swallow their fear quietly.
Christopher looked up.
The kid was maybe eight or nine, standing at the edge of the crosswalk, one foot already off the curb.
He had clearly been chasing something, a phone maybe, or a bag, something that had rolled or blown into the street, and he was leaning out to get it without looking.
Without looking, because a car was coming. A truck, actually, big and moving far too fast for a residential street at this hour, headlights sweeping around the bend ahead of it.
It happened in the span of about two seconds.
Christopher's body moved before his brain had finished processing the situation. He covered the distance between himself and the kid faster than he would have thought his legs capable of, grabbed the boy by the back of his jacket, and yanked.
They stumbled back together onto the curb. The truck blew past, close enough that Christopher felt the air displacement against his face, a hot rush of displaced wind that ruffled his hair and smelled of diesel.
The bag of snacks fell from under his arm and scattered across the pavement.
He stood there for a moment, the kid pressed against his side, both of them breathing.
"You okay?" he managed.
The boy nodded, wide-eyed, not speaking yet.
Christopher exhaled. His hands were shaking slightly, the adrenaline working its way through his system.
He crouched down to look at the kid properly, checking for anything wrong, and the boy stared back at him with the enormous eyes of someone who had just understood, at a very fundamental level, that something bad had almost happened.
"Don't chase things into the road," Christopher said. It came out gentler than he intended. "Whatever it was isn't worth it."
He straightened up. He was going to walk the kid to wherever he needed to be, flag down someone, find a parent, do the responsible thing.
He had just worked out that the boy was probably headed to the Family Mart he had come from when the truck came back.
He heard it before he saw it. The same engine, the same speed, but now from the wrong direction, from behind them, and when he turned the headlights were already on him.
There was no good explanation for it. A drunk driver didn't execute a clean u-turn and aim for a specific person on a specific empty street.
A brake failure didn't target. But he didn't have time to think about explanations because the truck was coming and the kid was still right there beside him and he had about one second to do something useful with his life.
He shoved the boy sideways into the narrow alcove of a shuttered shop front, hard enough that the kid hit the wall and yelped, and threw himself in the opposite direction.
The truck clipped the edge of the curb where they had been standing and kept going, scraping concrete, and Christopher hit the ground rolling, which hurt considerably more than it looked like it did in films.
He came up on his hands and knees, breathing hard, palms scraped raw. The kid was still in the alcove, pressed flat, staring at him.
"Stay there," Christopher said.
He stood up. His phone had fallen out of his pocket somewhere. His snacks were completely destroyed.
He was trying to figure out what exactly was happening, whether this was some kind of targeted thing, whether he had stumbled into something, whether the driver was simply catastrophically incompetent, when the sound changed.
Not the truck this time. Something higher, sharper, a sound he recognized distantly from films and games and every piece of media he had consumed in his entire life but had absolutely no reference for in reality.
He had enough time to look up.
The last thought Christopher Astra had, in his life as Christopher Astra, was that this was a deeply unreasonable way for the evening to go.
Then the world went white.
---
Regulus Astra woke up from his nap, well more so from a state of unconsciousness, but that was besides the point.
His body ached, badly. And his mind was painstakingly numb.
The morning light was already gone, faint moonlight passing through the curtains, pale and grey-blue.
He stared up at the ceiling of his bedroom in the Astra estate, which was high and carved and genuinely beautiful.
Yet its beauty could not grasp his attention for too long, and his mind lingered back to the knowledge he had learned less than an few hours ago.
The knowledge of his past life. The knowledge of the world he was currently inhabiting.
The first thing he had done was curse out his unfortunate way of dying, before that unconsciousness had took him.
Then he was here, layinh in his bed with his whole body hurting in ways they had never done before.
He had the memories of a man he had lived as, a man who had ambitions, his dreams, a family and a life of his own.
A man who had read a silly little novel, all of it, every badly written volume, and those memories sat alongside seventeen years of being Regulus Astra.
It was a deeply strange way to exist.
He sat up slowly. The room was the same as it always was, precisely arranged in the way that noble households arranged things, every object in its correct place. He had grown up in this room. He knew every corner of it.
He also knew what happened to it in volume six, which was not a thing he enjoyed knowing.
He rubbed his face with both hands and tried, as he did every morning, to think about this calmly and rationally.
He was Regulus Astra. He was seventeen years old. He was the second son of Count Aldric Astra, and today was the day he left for Central Academy, which was both the most significant thing that had happened to him in this life and a thing he had, in another life, read about in a work of serialized fiction so poorly written that he had once composed a three-paragraph mental review of a single sentence's grammatical failures.
The thing causing his nerves wasn't the academy, far from it. He was in fact very likely going to do way better with the new knowledge he had received.
No, that was not what was making his hands grip the edge of the mattress.
He looked at the wall opposite his bed, where a portrait hung of the Astra family, a formal commissioned thing done when he was twelve.
His father, severe and composed. His mother. Him, standing slightly apart in the way he always stood slightly apart.
And his brother.
Luther Astra stood at the center of the portrait the way he stood at the center of most rooms, effortlessly, without trying, the kind of presence that simply organized the space around it.
He was seven years older than Regulus. He had his father's jawline and his mother's eyes and a smile that had always managed to be genuine even when he clearly had better things to be doing.
He had taught Regulus to ride when Regulus was six. He had sat with him through the fever that had laid him out for a week at age nine and read to him until he fell asleep, badly, but was making a genuine effort.
He was, by every measure that mattered to Regulus personally, a good person. Or so he had thought.
He was also, according to the plot of Demon's Descent, a novel he had read in his past life, a soon to be mass murderer.
Regulus had learned of this five hours ago, since the memories had surfaced properly.
He had spent all the time he had been conscious to not think about it.
It was easier when it was abstract, when it was just a plot point in a story, when Luther was just a character in a narrative that Regulus happened to be living inside.
It was considerably less easy right now.
Because the chapter he had read, the last chapter of Demon's Descent before his life as Christopher Astra had ended with a degree of dramatic irony that he still wasn't entirely over, had revealed something that he had not known before.
Had not been told before. Fatebound, in their characteristic fashion, had buried it in a piece of dialogue so clunky it almost disguised the significance.
Luther Astra, the Circle's most prominent member, had joined them for a reason. A catalyst. The event that had pushed him from a man with dangerous beliefs to a man willing to act on them.
The death of his younger brother. Or in simpler terms, The Death of Regulus Astra. The death of Him.