Have you ever noticed the inconsistencies in your life? Not the little ones—the vague déjà vu when someone says something you swear you've heard before. I mean the big ones. The kind of inconsistencies that make your stomach churn, not out of fear, but because they simply shouldn’t be. Like dreaming something only to watch it unfold the next day with eerie precision. Or, say, being run over by a worm—a massive, metallic monstrosity—that by all accounts should not exist in any known layer of reality, least of all in purgatory.

  I spent two centuries in that grey wasteland, died over seventy thousand times, and never—never—saw anything like that worm. It wasn’t the terror of it that haunted me, not really. I’ve been through worse. But it bothered me. Deeply. Like a shard of glass hidden in your boot—quietly cutting at you until it’s too late. The worm was inconsistent with everything I knew about purgatory. And that meant something was wrong.

  But the worm wasn’t the only crack in the mirror.

  There was also magic.

  Magic, as I understood it, was supposed to be universal. Aska certainly believed that much—he pitied me for being unable to use it, and pity was not something he wasted lightly. From everything I had experienced, everyone was theoretically capable of wielding magic to some extent. And yet, as I read more, a different narrative emerged—one that did not match what I knew.

  According to the literature, only about two percent of all beings were magical. The rest either lacked the aptitude or the education to tap into it. That sounded reasonable until you began asking uncomfortable questions—like why those without talent weren’t studied further, or why the percentage was so specific, as if nature herself adhered to bureaucratic quotas.

  Of course, nobles made up the vast majority of mages. They had access to training, time, tutors—fine. But even the books couldn’t agree on why magic worked. One would claim that mana resided in the blood, which at least made sense given my own need to consume it. But others were more abstract, declaring that magic stemmed from the soul—an intangible force wrapped in layers of spiritual nonsense that the authors didn’t seem to understand.

  No matter how deeply I read, the “science” of magic was shallow—murky waters pretending to be deep oceans. I could not find a single, coherent explanation to satisfy the growing hunger in my mind.

  Still, nothing disturbed me quite like the history books.

  Sure, bias in historical accounts is expected. One scholar paints a king as a savior, another as a tyrant—that’s standard fare. Subjective interpretation wasn’t the problem. It was the absence of information that unnerved me. The black holes where context should have been.

  Take King Hannibal the Great, for example. Lived from 885 to 945. A man of alleged greatness who, by every record I could find, lived a life so utterly pedestrian that I began to suspect the scribes were covering something up simply out of embarrassment.

  Hannibal didn’t invent anything. Didn’t unite kingdoms. He wasn’t even particularly cruel or kind. His claim to fame? Climbing some mountains. Yes. Mountains. That was it. You’d think for someone dubbed “the Great,” there’d be more than rock climbing and bad decisions.

  But what truly raised my eyebrows was the timing.

  He lived roughly 215 years ago.

  I am 209 years old.

  You’d think that proximity would make the records sharper, more accurate. And yet, the books treated him like some ancient, legendary figure—blurred at the edges, details smudged like a half-forgotten dream. The record of his life read like a drunk bard’s performance:

  Year 885 – Birth. No celebrations, no prophecy. Just born.

  Year 910 – Crowned king. Got married. Moved into a larger house, I presume.

  Year 930 – First war. Against elves, obviously. Always the elves.

  Year 932 – Peace with said elves. Again, obviously.

  Year 933 – Kills his wife. Because his sister died and he drank too much. Sounds about right.

  Year 934 – Officially begins drinking. As if he wasn’t already.

  Year 936 – Second elf war. Who saw that coming? Oh right—everyone.

  Year 939 – Peace again. I’m sensing a pattern.

  Year 940 – Illness. Marries a second wife.

  Year 941 – Another illness. Another wife. Finally gets a son. Third time’s the charm?

  Year 942 – War again. Of course.

  Year 944 – Random naval empire attacks a few ports. Another war, because why not?

  Year 945 – Dies. No details. Just dies. Curtain closed.

  Why was I the only one who noticed how strangely curated King Hannibal’s life was?

  At first glance, everything seemed ordinary enough. Which monarch doesn’t wage a few wars to keep their ego intact or behead a wife or two to spice up their royal biography? Kings are messy creatures—history is littered with their tantrums carved into stone. And yet, something about Hannibal didn’t sit right with me. Not the facts themselves, but the arrangement of them. As if someone had carefully swept his inconsistencies into the shadows, assuming no one would ever bother looking there.

  The pattern was subtle, but I couldn’t ignore it.

  Who rules uneventfully for two decades, barely making a historical ripple, and then—suddenly—starts declaring war after war, like a senile man who just discovered the concept of conquest? Why does a man live with a wife for twenty-three years and then decide, out of nowhere, that she deserves to die because of grief and alcohol? Even assuming he was unstable, the timing was too convenient. Too neatly abrupt.

  There were only three documented entries for the first 45 years of his life. Just three. A man supposedly destined for greatness spent over four decades doing what? Napping? Playing board games? Even the peasants today were more active than he was before year 930.

  And then there were the others. Hannibal wasn’t alone in this eerie cut. Another king died in 931, and strangely enough, only in his final year of life did he suddenly acquire three children—one legitimate, two born of scandalous dalliances. Before that? He may as well have been a monk. The pattern was undeniable.

  Every ruler, hero, scholar, even scandalous noble I looked up had the same odd trait: their lives only truly began after 930. Before that year, history was foggy, half-formed, and bizarrely silent. Almost like a curtain had been drawn—and someone behind it was editing time with a dull blade.

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  Something happened that year. I was sure of it. Something no book dared to name.

  Naturally, I tried asking the maids. They were sweet, mostly quiet girls who brought me blood I could barely choke down and linens that never lost that peculiar scent of bleach and flowers. Their minds were filled with surface-level knowledge, fairy tales, and gossip—not the kind of people you go to when you're dissecting historical anomalies. But I asked anyway. Polite curiosity, feigned smiles. None of them had even heard of anything unusual in 930.

  Of course not.

  Only a historian would see the gaps.

  And so, I locked myself in my room—willingly. For two full weeks. Surrounded by parchment, second-hand books, and scrawled notes that slowly began to cover every flat surface like creeping ivy. The room was white and quiet, with pale curtains that let in the gentle light of a waxing moon. Occasionally, I was interrupted by a maid delivering food—if you could call thick, lukewarm animal blood food. I swallowed it down, suppressing my revulsion. My body needed it, even if my pride didn’t.

  Arthur never visited. Nor did Mary. Not even Markus, gods forbid. I tried not to be disappointed. Arthur had his hands full preparing for a war I was only tangentially involved in. Still, I had expected some contact—if only to test whether I had gone mad from solitude yet.

  At least the clothing situation had improved. Someone had the foresight to deliver new garments every few days. Always white. Not exactly my aesthetic, but the dress lengths were practical—no unnecessary frills, and thank the stars, no corsets. The shoes were comfortable, finally, and they even gave me a broad straw hat to shield myself from the sun I never asked to see.

  Then, on the fourteenth night—when the stars were sharp and the moon bathed my skin in its cold light—my self-imposed exile ended.

  Arthur came. Unannounced. No knock, no warning—just a door creaking open and a silhouette stepping into my sanctuary of silence.

  Before he could speak a word, I turned from the windowsill where I sat and threw my question at him like a dagger.

  “What happened in the year 930?”

  He blinked. Just once. Furrowed his brow. I expected confusion, or perhaps surprise—but what I got was something far more interesting: nothing. Not a flinch. Not a sideways glance. No immediate mask of guilt or flicker of fear. He simply stared at me, as if I had asked him to recite the contents of an imaginary book.

  “How should I know?” he said.

  His tone wasn’t dismissive. It wasn’t defensive either. It was… vacant. Like someone hearing an unfamiliar word in a familiar language.

  He shook his head slightly, not in denial, but in puzzlement—as if trying to brush off a dream that wouldn’t fade.

  And then, he moved on. Just like that.

  But I didn’t.

  Because if someone like Arthur—so precise, so careful—had no memory of such an obvious historical oddity… that could only mean one thing:

  It wasn’t forgotten.

  It was erased.

  “It is time for war.” He continued, leaving me with no choice but to drop the matter for the time being. If there was one thing I had learned in the past two weeks, it was that it was always time for war.

  War was less of an event and more of a season here—cyclical, predictable, necessary. Just as spring thawed the earth and autumn buried it again, war came with ritualistic certainty. But unlike the aristocrats who sighed and sharpened their quills, or the soldiers who clenched their teeth and prayed to see their families again, I welcomed it.

  More than that—I anticipated it.

  Finally, I could step into chaos, bathe in blood, and feed that ever-humming appetite inside me without apology. No more hiding. No more forced civility under moonlight. On the battlefield, there would be no need for lies. Only instinct. And unhinged violence.

  I turned to Arthur with a quiet smile, a chill curling the corner of my lips as I took in his pale silhouette. Clad in white leather, as always. He wore that colour like a badge, as if its purity could bleach away the stain of his intentions. He was obsessed with it—white clothes, white banners, white warhorses—as though it elevated him above the rest. As though his hands weren’t dipped in the same crimson as mine.

  “Is it, however?” I asked, voice laced with calculated sweetness. “I had hoped I might finally have my own unit.”

  He didn’t look away. Good. That meant he hadn’t forgotten. That meant he’d been expecting this question.

  “You may recruit anyone you wish,” he said evenly, “except the mages.”

  A thousand possibilities bloomed in my mind all at once. It wasn’t his approval that pleased me—it was the freedom. I could handpick creatures of cruelty, survivors, the broken, the brilliant. I could shape them into something terrifying.

  My smile widened, slow and sharp.

  “Perfect,” I murmured. “I’m ready then.”

  “There are two things first.” He reached inside his pristine white jacket and produced a small, elegant box. “A gift.”

  I took it without hesitation. Inside were four delicate lenses, suspended in shimmering liquid.

  Coloured contacts.

  My red irises stared back at me through the transparent fluid. Clever man.

  “I assume you know how to use them?” he asked.

  I gave a small nod, my fingers brushing against the rim of the box. Of course I did. Aska once had me perform as a noble princess with eyes like sunlight—golden, pure, divine. The lenses had been hell to wear for ten hours straight, but I remembered the feeling. The itch behind my lids. The way humans stared, enchanted by something that wasn’t real.

  Still, I acted as if the gift was mundane. As if men handed me rare magical optics every other Tuesday.

  Arthur’s voice drew my attention again. “I’ve ensured the maids will say nothing of your race. But soldiers…” He trailed off, then gestured for me to follow. Soon, we stepped out of the mansion and into the brisk night air. “They’re a different matter.”

  The courtyard was quiet, lit only by flickering torches and the pale moon above. He led me to a large carriage—dark wood, reinforced iron beneath.

  “You’ll sleep here,” he said, tapping the side of it. “With two other female mages. Make yourself familiar with your new home. Find an excuse not to appear during the day.”

  I sighed, already mourning the books I wouldn’t finish tonight. There was no telling what lay ahead, and reading by candlelight in a jostling carriage wasn’t ideal.

  “I need a weapon.”

  I said it flatly, not as a request but a declaration. I could improvise—gods knew I’d done it before—but a kitchen knife only served you well for the first ten seconds of a fight.

  “I assume you use the sword?” he asked. “There’s one in the carriage already. It’s yours.”

  Of course it is, I thought dryly. A standard issue weapon. How generous.

  Still, I didn’t argue. I wasn’t interested in fighting him on the subject—not tonight. He meant well in his own awkward, detached way. That didn’t mean I had to pretend to care.

  I turned without another word, heading back toward the mansion. For a moment, I glanced over my shoulder, expecting to see some flicker of insult on his face. But Arthur remained still, composed as always. If I’d dented his ego, he didn’t show it.

  Inside, the quiet of my room greeted me like an old friend.

  I took stock of what needed packing. The backpack they’d provided was well-made—compact, reinforced, capable of carrying only what mattered. The hard part was choosing.

  A second dress, of course. A practical one.

  Bottles—clean ones—for blood, because gods knew what they’d try to serve me in the field.

  A few of the books I hadn’t yet read—at least two, preferably ones on magical theory or old military campaigns. I ran my hand across the book spines and sighed. There was too much I wanted to bring. Too much I wanted to know. Sadly, Aska couldn’t be here to carry it all for me—or to remind me what truly mattered.

  But I could almost hear her voice, gentle and amused: “If you bring more than you can carry, you’ll just lose it all when the blood starts to fly.”

  Wise words.

  I smiled faintly to myself and began to pack.

  War was coming. And I would enjoy it.