"Rebecca?"
"JANE!" she cried out, the name a raw, heartful sob torn from her chest.
It was unbelievable that two such different people could be related, and that it had not even crossed Lucid's mind. Regardless, amidst the confusion and the terrible things he had done and witnessed inside that rift, it was relieving to know something good, something purely positive, had come out of it in the end. 'I will be better next time. I promise,' he vowed silently to himself.
Karmen approached Lucid and stood next to him just outside the garden of the mansion. He was enjoying the sight of the two sisters reunited, a soft, wistful look in his eyes as if it reminded him of a certain past.
Lucid knew what he was thinking about, but he did not mention it. It was not his business now, not one of his personal problems to solve. He trusted that Karmen was strong and willed enough to handle his own grief. After all, if he was not, this town would have long since fallen into the grasp of Materna.
"Lucid," Alice said, her mental voice thoughtful.
"Yes?"
"Is that what human bonds are like?" she asked.
"Well, yes. A family bond that never truly breaks, no matter how much time or distance separates people."
"I see," she replied, her tone contemplative. "Do you think our bond is like that?"
Lucid's internal voice caught in a nonexistent throat. "What makes you ask that?" he asked, answering her question with another.
She chuckled softly, a warm sound in his mind. "Well, after I ushered you to sleep last night, you seemed very close. You were muttering words I did not understand."
"Huh? I went straight to sleep. I do not recall anything!" he said, his mental voice suddenly shaky with embarrassment.
"Very well. I shall not probe any more," she said, but he felt the silent laughter in her tone.
Looking back at Rebecca, the tall woman who had almost crushed him to death, now hugging the little, timid orange haired girl, raised questions. How were they related? One was clearly a demi human with horns and bovine ears, and the other was entirely human. It did not sit right with him, but then again, this was another world with different rules and biological principles. 'Heck, it even has two moons,' he reminded himself.
"Jane, I received news from the guard once that you passed away peacefully," Rebecca said, her voice thick with emotion as she held her sister at arm's length, looking her over. "The report said nothing could be done." She continued, her eyes searching Jane's face.
"Tehehe. Do you think a simple curse could get rid of your sister?" Jane teased lightly, a faint, familiar smile touching her lips.
"No, it is just," Rebecca stammered, overwhelmed. "What have you been doing for these past three years? You could have contacted me. I am still running the tavern father left us with. Father was worried sick for you before he left." Her voice grew upset. "I was too."
Jane looked at her, her face a mixture of sadness and dawning realization. She lifted a hand to her temple, her expression clouding. "I... I.... yesterday I was..." She fell silent for a moment, as if trying to remember something stuck deep inside her head that would not come free. She finally uttered, "I do not remember."
Karmen's eyes lit up with keen intrigue. "Hmm," he murmured under his breath, his analytical mind turning over the puzzle.
Lucid furrowed his brows, though his face was not visible beneath the obscuring mist.
Rebecca briefly showed a look of deep upset, but she quickly masked it with a kind, watery smile. "It is alright. Do not force it. Come visit me when your work here is done. You have no idea how much I have missed you."
Lucid turned to Karmen, curious to ask him something, but he was shocked by what he saw.
Karmen, as stoic as he usually seemed, had a single, clear tear tracing a path down his cheek.
"Crybaby," Lucid muttered without thinking.
"What was that?" Karmen looked at Lucid, his lips parted, his eyes damp with tears as if he had just witnessed a priceless work of art being restored.
Upon seeing his earnest face, Lucid managed a choked cough. This was not the moment to poke fun. Karmen had suffered a great deal, too. "Nothing. It is going to rain soon. Why don't we head inside?"
Karmen nodded, wiping his cheek discreetly with the back of his hand.
The two sisters walked and talked, Jane showing Rebecca around the servant quarters and her small, tidy room. They giggled and made jokes only they understood, the years of separation beginning to melt away.
Lucid and Karmen, on the other hand, lingered in the quiet hallway.
"This is a strange phenomenon," Karmen whispered, his voice low.
"Indeed," Lucid replied.
"Jane was one of our maids who passed away with the rest of my family during the Withering. How is she alive? I looked at her records. All the details, payment transactions, sick leave reports, they are all there, up to a point three years ago. Then nothing. And now, it is as if she has been working here continuously since yesterday."
"Do you recall her dying?" Lucid asked carefully.
"Strangely, no. I do not," Karmen admitted, his brow furrowed in concentration. "I have a clear memory of the funeral, of the household mourning. But the memory feels... flat. Like a story I was told, not something I lived."
Lucid managed a faint sigh. He had an idea. It was the rift. The Omega rift and the trial. He strongly suspected it had something to do with it. In the cycles where Jane died a violent death at Ivy's hands, her fate was altered from the "peaceful passing" of the original timeline. And in the final cycle, when Lucid changed the outcome by saving Karmen's mother, Jane had not been targeted by Ivy at all. She had lived. He had changed the threads of fate, changing the world. Karmen's family was fated to die, and that fate had held true. Jane was never fated to die from the Withering. She only contracted it because Ivy placed it on her. And by letting Ivy believe she had won in some cycles, she had sought no further destruction, already deciding the family was doomed. But in the original timeline, Karmen was obsessively searching for a cure. Ivy, in this new, altered reality, never bothered to survey his family so closely because her primary objective, to break the heir, had already seemingly been achieved with the father's death and Karmen's despair. So how could Jane be alive now, when she was supposed to be dead?
"Just how? This does not make any sense," Lucid muttered.
Alice spoke from within. "Lucid, I think it has to do with the cycle where you revived Karmen's mother. You altered the threads of fate using my chains of envy. That caused a rupture in the pattern woven by Mother Fate."
He thought that could also make sense. If he had caused a rupture inside an already established outcome, that rupture could have reverberated, mending the thread of Jane's death. He also remembered something painfully distant, a lesson from his own world. "But a trial, a rift, should have no influence on the real world. The past, the future. No matter the outcome, if an individual clears it, it should have no lasting effect. I mean, back at that Sentrum rift on by the town's plaza, nothing changed when I came out."
Alice continued patiently. "You used my power, Lucid, in a way I have never seen it used before. You did not just clear a trial but you defended a territory. You asserted a will that contradicted fate itself within that bounded space. That act influenced the threads in a fundamental way. It was not just solving a puzzle. It was rewriting a clause in a contract."
He hit his head lightly against the cool stone wall. It was as if he was experiencing a mental overload, too many concepts from two different worlds colliding.
Karmen looked at Lucid. Though he did not hear the conversation between Alice and Lucid, he had already come to his own conclusion. He had witnessed everything that happened inside the rift, every iteration, from his unique perspective as the 'spectator soul.' How could he not piece the puzzle together?
"My, my. You are one heck of an anomaly," Karmen said, sounding genuinely impressed.
"What?" Lucid uttered, dumbfounded.
"It is because of you. You altered something fundamental. The fact that Jane is here, alive and remembered by her sister, but with a gap in her own memory... it is a direct consequence of your actions in the final confrontation. You did not just save my mother's life in a memory. You salvaged a thread that was supposed to be completely severed. Jane's thread was tangled with ours, a casualty. You untangled it."
Karmen began to explain in rapid, excited detail, theorizing about Fate resonance and existential echoes. He babbled on, and Lucid was lost by the time he reached terms like 'thaumaturgical inertia' and 'paradoxical anchoring.' Alice managed a faint mental groan that was unfitting of her usual formality. Karmen was using sophisticated words, and Lucid was already adrift.
"So that is how it concluded," Karmen said slightly louder, finishing his passionate monologue.
"Yeah. Yeah, you are right," Lucid said reluctantly, as if agreeing to everything he had just said, though he had grasped maybe half of it.
Time passed, and they found themselves back in the study again, the place where they had lived through countless hardships and struggles. Each time they walked in, it gave both Lucid and Karmen a strange sense of foreboding, as if at any minute someone would open the door and deliver the painful news of a passing.
Lucid, inspecting the bookshelves now layered with a fine coat of dust, asked Karmen something that had been nagging him.
"So, Karmen. What happened to Ivy?"
Karmen sat in his leather seat and looked up at the ceiling briefly, as if the answer were written there.
"She took her leave when my older brother, Lyle, passed away. She has not contacted me ever since. The only thing I received was a formal letter expressing her condolences." He looked back at Lucid. "She does not know I have given up searching for a cure. Nor does she know I am aware she is involved with Materna. So I doubt she will return soon, even if they still seek this territory. For now, they seem to believe their work here is done."
"So you passed under their radar while they focus on other things?" Lucid asked.
"That seems to be the case. If they show up again, I will simply act as the broken heir they believed they created. I have plenty of practice with melancholic mannerisms, after all."
"Like Jake?" Lucid mused.
Karmen managed a faint exhalation that was almost a laugh under his breath. He looked at the ornate clock on the wall, and a look of deep sorrow crossed his eyes, there and gone in an instant.
"Lucid."
"Yeah?"
Karmen looked at Lucid directly, his expression shifting to one of serious contemplation.
"How does a trip to the Kingdom of Vex sound to you?"