The leftover crawfish from the banquet were sitting in the kitchen, completely untouched.
I stared at them for a good ten seconds before I made my decision.
Mine.
And that's how I ended up here — strolling the manor grounds at whatever cursed hour this was, bag of crawfish in hand, sucking the juice out of the tails and feeling absolutely zero shame about it.
In my defense — they're delicious. People in this world just don't know that yet.
Crustaceans as food didn't really catch on until somewhere between the 19th and 20th century, back where I came from. Before that, eating them was considered... not exactly refined. The few delegation members who had tried tonight had that look on their face — that very specific look of someone being polite about something they found privately horrifying.
I understood it. I didn't agree with it, but I understood it.
Their loss.
I stopped under a tree at the edge of the grounds. The moonlight was coming through the branches in that specific way where everything looks silver and slightly unreal, and I stood there sucking on a crawfish tail and looked up at it and thought —
It's actually really beautiful here.
"You know," I said, to no one visible. "If the situation were different, this would almost be nice."
[Hecatia says that it can be nice, if their child would stop walking into disasters.]
[Xipe points out that their avatar walked into the disaster voluntarily.]
[Hecatia tells Xipe that is not helping.]
"Both of you, quiet," I said. "I'm having a moment."
[Loki agrees that the crawfish smell great from up here.]
[Thor hits Loki.]
I pulled another one out of the bag and cracked the shell. The moonlight really was something. I'd been so busy — laboratory, training, delegation, poison, assassins, time stop, dinner conversation — that I hadn't stopped to just stand somewhere and breathe for a while.
This is nice, I thought. This is —
A rustling came from the bushes to my left.
I looked over.
Julius emerged from the treeline with a wooden sword at his side and the very specific expression of a man who had not expected to find anyone here — a sort of arrested 'ah' caught halfway between surprise and the instinct to pretend he hadn't been surprised.
We stared at each other.
I held up the bag.
[ Julius — POV ]
He hadn't been able to sleep.
That part wasn't surprising — he rarely slept well away from Solidana, and tonight had given him considerably more to think about than usual. He had lain in the dark for approximately forty minutes before accepting defeat, strapping on his training clothes, and heading out.
He had almost made it to the grounds when they came at him.
Two of them. Fast, quiet, good — genuinely good, which he noted in that distant professional way even as he reacted. He'd used the necklace, which he disliked doing, which meant exposing a resource he'd rather nobody knew about. The whole thing had lasted less than a minute.
He stood over the second one afterward and breathed and reminded himself that being caught half-asleep in a corridor was not acceptable. He had done better. He had been doing better. Tonight was a lapse.
It won't happen again.
The training grounds were empty and quiet, and Julius had thrown himself into the familiar rhythm of it — form, footwork, breathing — until the noise in his head settled into something manageable. Swing, parry, reset. Swing, parry, reset.
Then he heard it.
A crunching sound.
He stopped. Listened.
There it was again. Somewhere past the tree line, rhythmic and frankly quite loud, the unmistakable sound of someone eating something with great personal satisfaction.
Who—
He followed it. Rounded the tree. Found her.
Josephine von Konrow, standing in a column of moonlight with a cloth bag in one hand and what appeared to be a crustacean tail in the other, looking up at the sky like she owned it.
[ Josephine ]
"You're up late," I said.
"I could say the same." He recovered quickly, I'd give him that. Whatever the 'ah' face had been, it was gone. "I was training."
"At this hour?"
"Couldn't sleep."
Fair. I held the bag out toward him. "Crawfish?"
He looked at it the way the delegation members had looked at the table earlier — that polite-horror expression. "No. Thank you."
"Suit yourself." I went back to the one I was working on. "Sorry if I was too loud."
"It's fine," Julius said. And then didn't leave.
I looked at him sideways. He looked at the training grounds.
The silence stretched out in that particular way of two people who have nothing obviously wrong between them but also haven't agreed on why they're still standing next to each other.
"Can I watch you train?" I asked.
He glanced at me.
"Just curious," I added.
A pause. "...If you'd like."
He went back to the dummy with the wooden sword, and I leaned against the tree and worked through the rest of the bag and watched.
Hm.
He was good. Not in the loud, obvious way Peter was good — no raw power being thrown at the problem, no relying on the strength to make up for anything. Julius was clean. Precise. Every movement exactly where it needed to be, no more, no less, like someone who had learned a long time ago to be efficient because he couldn't always afford to be forceful.
Finesse, I thought. He fights with finesse.
[Tyr says this one was forged properly.]
[Tyr adds that it reminds him of the old northern style — economy of motion. Nothing wasted.]
Agreed. It was actually impressive. Genuinely impressive, which I hadn't expected.
But.
It's not enough.
Not for where he needs to be. Not for a man who, according to my appraisal, was flagged as — I still had to think about that one carefully — the hero. The actual, genuine, capital-H Hero of this story.
I watched him reset his stance and go again. Clean. Controlled. Very good.
Not enough.
And then something clicked.
I stopped chewing.
Wait.
He was the hero. Adele was the heroine. And the thing Adele's arc was currently missing — the thing that had gotten mangled because of everything I'd inadvertently stepped in — was connection. Support. The right people around her at the right time.
What if—
What if I just—
If I pointed them at each other. Properly. Set the conditions for them to become what they were supposed to be to each other — hero and heroine, allies, the axis the story was meant to turn on—
That would correct the course, wouldn't it? That would be making something right instead of making another thing worse—
[Xipe seems interested in where this is going.]
"Give me a second," I muttered.
I reached over, called up a quick cleaning spell — [Clean], small magic, barely anything — and wiped the crawfish juice off my hands and the corner of my mouth. Twisted my hair back and up, tied it, felt it settle.
Julius completed another pass and lowered the sword.
I stepped away from the tree.
"Your Highness," I said. "Would you like to spar?"
He turned. Looked at me — at my hair, at my expression, at the fact that I had apparently just decided something. His eyes did that thing they did sometimes, that quick assessment he probably didn't know was visible.
"...Are you serious?"
"I'm always serious," I said. "Probably"
I grabbed a wooden sword from the rack and gave it a test swing.
Good weight. Balance is decent. Jane's going to be upset when she sees the state of my hair tomorrow but — ponytail's up, hands are clean, this'll do.
I settled into a loose ready position across from Julius and watched him pick up his own sword.
He's good at that part at least.
Even the way he held it — the grip, the shoulder angle, the way his weight distributed across his feet — it was precise. Practiced. And something about the shape of it nagged at me.
I tilted my head slightly.
That's... wait.
The stance. The guard position. The particular angle of the elbow. I'd seen that before. Not from Julius — from the novel. From the accounts of old battles, from the forms etched into the training manuals Josephine had hoarded in her laboratory, from the collected records of every major swordsman across the continent's history.
Ashkart style.
Which — shouldn't that be impossible? Ashkart was the legendary hero of over a thousand years ago. His sword style had supposedly been lost after his death, fragments surviving only in partial manuscripts and second-hand accounts. Every modern style was at best a derivative — an imitation of an imitation, like a copy of a copy getting blurrier each generation.
And yet every sword style I'd encountered since coming to this world had the same root signature running underneath it. Julius had it. Peter had it, buried under all that brute force. Even the assassins tonight had traces of it.
Why is that?
[Tyr says, quietly, that all roads lead back to the first warrior. That Ashkart did not merely invent a style — he invented the shape of the sword itself, and the world learned to hold it from him whether it knew his name or not.]
Hm.
Julius leveled his sword. I leveled mine.
We both felt the air between us shift.
First blow — light. Mine. I wanted to see what he'd do.
He blocked it cleanly. Parried, stepped, came back at the angle I'd left open like he'd spotted it before I'd finished leaving it.
Oh — actually—
I deflected, adjusted, pulled back.
He's fast.
Faster than I'd expected. The next exchange came quick — three strokes, back and forth, nothing landed on either side but I felt it in my wrists. He was reading my movement. Responding, not just reacting.
"How do you know the sword?" he asked, not out of breath, which I noted.
"I wanted to be strong." I stepped back, reset. "So I learned."
Short answer. True answer. The longer version — Josephine spent years swinging a sword alone in the rain to make her family look at her, and then I showed up and inherited all of it — felt like more than the moment called for.
I exhaled. Steadied my breathing into something slower, deeper.
And then I shifted.
It probably looked like nothing from the outside. My posture opened — shoulders loose, sword arm low, weight back on my rear heel in a way that read as casual, almost careless. The kind of stance a trained eye might clock as a mistake. An opening.
It wasn't.
This was the First Form. Ashkart's First Form, the one I'd reconstructed from every fragment and partial record and secondhand account Josephine's laboratory held, the one I'd spent months imitating until it stopped being imitation and started being memory. The open stance that invited attack and punished it.
Julius's eyes moved. He'd clocked the shift.
"If I win," I said, "I'm asking you for a favor."
A beat. Then — the corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smirk. Close enough.
He settled into his own stance — guard up, feet squared, the refined Ashkart derivative that was the Solidana style's backbone.
Alright then.
We moved.
And when we did — I matched his speed. Matched it exactly, so he could feel the ceiling of what he was pushing against, so there was no confusion about the distance between us.
Then three strokes.
Clean. Specific. The First Form doesn't overpower — it redirects, finds the gap in the commitment and steps through it while the opening exists.
Julius hit the ground.
Silence.
He was on one knee, wooden sword dropped, jaw set. Breathing controlled — barely — in the way of someone keeping something very tightly in check.
Uh oh. I knew that look.
"Again," he said.
"You don't have to—"
"Again."
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
He's got that face. The one Peter used to make at me, the one I'd somehow become allergic to — jaw forward, eyes forward, the look of someone who has decided something and is not going to be argued out of it.
"...Fine."
This time was different.
The air changed the moment he raised his sword. Same wooden practice weapon, no aura, no mana — this was a clean duel, nothing external — but something in him settled. Quieted. Like he'd found a register below the one he'd been performing in and dropped into it.
Then —
[ Solidana Royal Blade Arts — Seventh Form: Sovereign's Edge ]
The shift was subtle and complete. The finesse he'd been working with before — already good, already clean — compressed into something smaller and more total. Every movement stripped down to only what it absolutely needed to be. No waste. No flourish. Just the geometry of it, precise as a theorem.
Oh, he's actually serious.
I let him come.
[ Ashkart Style — First Form: The Open Gate ]
The stance opened again — wider this time, full commitment, the form in its truest expression. Not an imitation anymore. Not reconstruction from secondhand records.
Just Ashkart's sword, moving through Josephine's hands, through mine.
We closed the distance.
The sound of the clash echoed off the training ground walls.
And Julius went down.
Not dramatically — not the way it looks in stories. He folded forward, both hands going to his abdomen, sword falling, the air going out of him in a single controlled exhale that he probably didn't mean to make that loudly.
I lowered my sword.
He's going to be fine. He's fine.
I crouched down to his level and waited. He was breathing. Color was okay. The eyes that eventually focused on me were clear, if extremely unhappy about the situation they found themselves in.
Weaker than Peter.
But —
Potential. Real, genuine, this-is-going-somewhere potential. Peter had power and I'd spent months trying to carve precision into it like chipping a statue out of raw stone. Julius already had the precision. What he needed was depth. Foundation. The right person pushing from the right angle at the right time.
The right person, ideally, being Adele.
Which brought me back to the idea that had been sitting in my chest since I watched him at the dummy earlier.
Set them up. Point them at each other. Correct the course.
That's all. That's all I had to do.
"..." I straightened up.
[Eros appears, lounging against a nearby tree like he'd been there the whole time, looking profoundly pleased with himself.]
[Eros says that this was very touching and that proximity is the first step.]
[Eros says that the heart is already asking questions.]
"Absolutely not," I said flatly.
[Eros says that denying it is also a step, technically.]
"I am trying to correct the plot. This is plot correction. It is not—"
[Eros says that plot correction doesn't require one to notice how someone holds a sword.]
"I was observing his technique—"
[Eros points out that she noticed the shoulder angle.]
"That is a technical detail!"
[Eros says the heart notices details.]
"I will find a way to smite you specifically," I said. "I don't care that you're a god. I will figure it out."
[Eros laughs, utterly unimpressed, and disappears.]
I stood in the training ground in the moonlight with a wooden sword at my side and a semiconscious prince on the ground and the residual indignity of losing an argument to the god of love.
I hate this world sometimes.
I looked down at Julius.
"...Don't read into any of that," I said.
He blinked up at me from the ground, probably concussed enough that he'd missed most of it.
Good.