'Too early.'
The thought fell into his skull like a stone into water. One second. Maybe less. The time it took for the rumble to finish crossing the forest, for the still leaves to stop trembling, for Leon, two meters away from him, to finish turning his head toward the center of the dimension.
One second. That was all Kaen needed.
As if he had been prepared for this for an eternity.
He ran.
Not a decision. Not a thought. His body had already pivoted before his mouth had finished closing. The forest that should have absorbed him pushed him back — branches in his face, roots underfoot, a sheet of brown needles sliding under every step.
Kaen did not turn around. He knew by the way the air did not follow him — no parallel breath, no steps in his wake. Leon had stayed planted there, saber still lowered, mouth half open. The official hero, paralyzed by an explosion he did not understand.
'Too bad for him.'
'Too far.'
Kaen had known from the start that his range was nothing. But what he was discovering as he ran was that the distance itself was nothing. The center of the dimension was not ten meters away. Not a hundred. It was miles. And he was running, like a man trying to catch a train that had already left.
His awareness, on the other hand, knew more or less where to go.
The wake of the tear was still there — not a vibration, no longer a vibration. A trace. A hollow in the fabric, where someone had forced his way in and had not closed it behind him. A direction. Not a map. Just a there in his head, toward which to run.
But holding it cost him something. His concentration split — a little for the wake, the rest for not tripping over roots. And all of it, at a run.
And it was as he ran that he felt the second.
Not a rumble this time. Duller. Deeper. Narrower but sharper — as if the first tear had been a disemboweling and the second was the blade sinking back into the same wound.
'Again.'
Kaen slowed for the space of a fraction of a second. Just enough for his awareness to put a word on what it had just perceived.
This was not an attack. This was a fight.
Someone — something — had entered the dimension, and had not left. He was still there. He was striking, striking again. And on the other side, something was taking it.
Azriel had not fallen.
Not yet.
And he was still miles away.
Kaen accelerated.
He would have wanted to know.
It was the only thing he would have wanted to know, and it was precisely what he did not know. The novel did not begin here. The novel began later — much later, in a world where Azriel had already been dead for a long time, where her death was nothing more than a fact, a line in a retrospective, a page the reader turned without lingering. When. How. Why. The novel did not care. The novel began after.
And he was running toward a moment no page spoke of.
Maybe she was dying now. Maybe what he was feeling was her last breath stretching out. Maybe it was one attack among others and she would survive for hours yet before the real one came. He did not know.
'Blind.'
The word fell into his skull like a cold verdict. For the first time since he had understood what he was — a transmigrator, a thief of a story, someone who knew what came next — he had no advantage. None at all. His only card had always been his knowledge. And now, his knowledge said nothing.
He was running into the void.
The third came.
He did not feel it like the other two. Not a vibration. Not a disemboweling. Something shorter. Drier. Like a last blow you give when you know the next one will no longer serve any purpose.
And then — nothing.
The silence.
Not an ordinary silence. Not the silence of a forest going quiet. The silence of a string that had been cut in one stroke, and would never be drawn taut again. His awareness, which had held the wake of the tear like a thread in his head, lost the other end. The fabric became smooth again. Too smooth. The tear no longer pulsed. The fight no longer struck. Nothing was holding anymore, over there, against what was striking.
Kaen kept running.
Not because he still believed. Because to stop was to admit.
And he would not admit.
His legs were burning. His headache had returned. His hands opened and closed without him thinking about it, in jolts.
'Faster.'
He accelerated again. The forest began to thin out in front of him.
The trees grew sparser. The diffuse light changed — paler. Colder. As if the dimension itself were holding its breath.
And then the forest opened.
A clearing.
Not large. About thirty meters across, perhaps. The ground was bare — no needles, no moss. Earth smooth, almost polished, as if something had passed through there and erased everything.
At the center, two figures.
One standing. The other, not.
Kaen stopped at the edge. His breath caught. His legs wanted to give but did not. His awareness, which had followed the wake the whole way, collapsed all at once — because there was no wake left to follow. The tear had closed. And with it, what it had let in.
Except that — that had not left.
The standing figure had no clear shape. Kaen tried to see it and could not. A coat, maybe. A human silhouette, maybe. Something that stood there, and should not have. Something his perception, already tired, already blurred, could not fix on.
He looked at the other shape.
On the ground.
Not lying. Not really. Slumped. Something like a body, but whose familiar silhouette — the straight posture, the impeccable dress — had abandoned itself to gravity like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
White hair.
And red, underneath. A lot of red. Spread across the smooth earth of the clearing like a map of a country he would not have wanted to read.
Kaen looked without understanding.
He had nothing. No reference, no page, not a word from the novel to tell him what he was supposed to see. The novel did not speak of this. The novel had skipped this moment, erased it, made of it an absence that one mentions in passing years later. And he, the transmigrator who thought he knew what came next, stood before a body that no page had ever described.
Blood. That was all he had.
And it was too much.
The word fell into his skull like a verdict.
'Too late.'
And the standing figure, at the center, slowly turned its head toward him.
Kaen did not move. He should have. All his logic, all his training, all his instinct screamed at him to move — but his body refused. As if a part of him had already understood what the next part had not yet registered.
The figure had no face. Or rather, Kaen could not see one. There was only an attention. Something that watched him, and that took its time to watch him. As if the thing were wondering whether Kaen was worth a gesture.
Apparently, yes.
A motion. Not a blow. Not a visible spell. Just a tiny motion — a hand rising, perhaps, or something that passed for a hand.
Kaen felt, for the space of an instant, his own fabric tear.
Not his body.
Him.