CHAPTER 53
POV - Azra'il
The parcel arrived wrapped in an almost defensive amount of brown paper and tied with coarse jute string. There was evident haste in the way the knots were tied, but no carelessness; it was the kind of packaging that communicates a deep sense of practical utility layered over any concern for aesthetics. People who use double sailor's knots to seal correspondence generally fall into two categories: port smugglers or academics who fear damp will ruin their notes before they reach their destination. Roxy, without a doubt, belonged to the second.
The messenger delivered the package directly to Rudeus. He didn't need more than half a second to read the sender's name before his face underwent a drastic transformation. His usual expression, that of a boy slightly bored after spending the afternoon trying to explain to Eris why basic arithmetic wasn't a personal conspiracy against her, collapsed instantly. He looked like an archaeologist before a newly discovered tomb that contained, against all expectations, a stock of perfectly preserved and edible honey.
"It's from Roxy!" he announced. His voice rose at least an octave, hitting that pitch he only used when genuinely excited or about to commit some serious social infraction.
We sat on his bed. The mattress sank under our combined weight and that of the parcel now resting between us like a mysterious artefact. Rudeus tore the paper with surgical delicacy, the obsessive precision of someone desperate to see the contents immediately, but terrified of creasing a single millimetre of whatever was inside.
Two objects slid onto the sheet: a piece of parchment folded into three equal parts, and a book, bound in plain leather, with no inscription or ornament on the cover.
Rudeus, predictably, went for the letter as though his life depended on it. I, on the other hand, reached for the book.
He began to read aloud. It had been our silent agreement for years. Rudeus read his part, I absorbed mine, and in the process we split the weight of being alive in that world, where most people our age were still trying to work out how not to bite their own tongues at mealtimes.
(Rudeus. Azra'il.
I received your letter a few weeks ago and took longer than I should have to reply, because I wanted to do it properly, and "properly," in this case, took longer than I expected.)
Rudeus paused, glancing up from the paper for a second to look at the book in my hands with an almost feverish anticipation.
(You mentioned an interest in learning the demon language. I was pleased about that, genuinely pleased, not just politely pleased, because it's a difficult language to study without a teacher, and most of the available materials were written for scholars who already know six other languages before they even get to it. It isn't a good starting point for anyone.)
(So I wrote a coursebook. For the two of you, specifically.)
Rudeus stopped dead. The letter trembled slightly between his fingers. I knew that expression, it was the face of someone who'd just realised they'd received far more generosity than their internal moral accounting considered fair. It's an uncomfortable feeling for people who, like us, tend to calculate the value of things in terms of direct exchange.
I opened the first page of the leather book.
There were no verb declension tables or lists of pronouns. There was just a single long sentence written in Roxy's precise, slanted handwriting, in runic demonic characters, with the phonetic pronunciation and the direct translation right below. Beneath that, in smaller letters, she'd noted:
(Start here. Understand what the sentence means before worrying about why it works this way.)
I flipped through a few more pages, catching the faint scent of ink and cured leather.
〈Eos, pedagogical analysis of the material.〉
[Processing content structure... Complete. The volume shows an 84.2% deviation from conventional linguistic manuals filed in the Boreas family library.]
〈What's your verdict?〉
[Traditional library manuals follow the academic-aristocratic model: they prioritise abstract syntactic structure and mechanical memorisation of grammatical exceptions before allowing the student to formulate a single greeting. It's a method designed to discourage beginners, or to ensure only excessively patient minds survive the process. Roxy Migurdia's method, however, is inductive. She shows the pattern working in practice and only introduces technical nomenclature after visual familiarisation.]
"She's rearranged the whole logic," I commented aloud, my fingers tracing the margin of a page explaining verb conjugation for movement through a practical hunting example. "She presents the whole building block first. Once your brain gets used to its shape, she points out where the joints are. Only on the third or fourth repetition does she bother giving the grammatical rule a formal name."
I closed the book for a moment, just to feel its physical weight. It was light, almost insignificant compared to the gold-bound tomes Philip kept under seven locks, but it carried an intellectual density very few of those pompous books possessed. It was the result of someone who'd actually stopped to think about how a child's brain works, rather than just trying to look clever to their peers.
"It's far more efficient than anything I've read on philology in the last ten lives," I concluded.
Rudeus let out a low sound, an "I know" that came out almost like a sigh. He was still looking at the letter, but his face gave away that he'd already reached the same conclusion, albeit by a purely emotional route. He carried on reading.
(About life here: I'm still going as court mage in the Kingdom of Shirone, which sounds more impressive than it actually is. I spend a good part of my time tutoring one of the princes, called Pax, who has considerable talent and absolutely no interest in using it.)
Rudeus let out a soft snort, anticipating disaster.
(He skips lessons whenever he can. Studies only when he feels like it, which is almost never. And, to top it off, he's a born pervert, the kind who spies through the wrong windows and asks the wrong questions at the wrong moments.)
(Sometimes he reminds me of you, Rudeus.)
Rudeus stopped reading abruptly. His outraged expression was so instant it looked rehearsed. His eyes went wide and he opened his mouth to protest at the inanimate sheet of parchment.
(But only in behaviour,) he continued reading, his voice dropping to a defensive tone as he read the following sentence trying to patch the blow. (Because, unlike him, you did your homework and loved studying. He just laughs and keeps doing the same thing.)
"See?" I remarked, without looking up from Roxy's margin notes. "She acknowledged that you, at least, had academic responsibility and enough cognitive refinement to feel ashamed of your own depravities. That's the most generous compliment she could formulate without compromising her own moral integrity."
"That's still very far from being an acceptable compliment, Azra'il."
"It's the most generous compliment she could manage given the circumstances. Accept the defeat with dignity and move on."
He grumbled something unintelligible about historical injustice, but his eyes soon went back to the page. The reading continued through a few more paragraphs detailing Shirone's bureaucratic routine, council meetings that seemed to have about as much practical use as trying to dry up the ocean with a teaspoon, tedious formal dinners, and the constant battle to keep Prince Pax away from the maids and their knickers. But then, Rudeus's posture changed. His shoulders dropped slightly, and the familiar tension he'd been trying to hide these past few weeks settled back into his neck.
(Tell me: are you two still progressing in magic? I imagine so, given the natural talent you've always had.)
Rudeus went quiet.
It wasn't that productive kind of silence someone has while pondering a complex philosophical question. It was the characteristic silence of when someone, with no intention of hurting you at all, steps with millimetre precision right onto an inflamed wound you've spent years trying to cover with clean bandages.
He wasn't progressing. Since reaching Saint-level in Water magic, the pace of his growth had stalled. For most mages in this world, reaching that tier before they even had facial hair would be the equivalent of becoming a local demigod. But for Rudeus, who carried the neurotic urgency of someone who needed to prove to himself that his second chance at life wasn't being wasted, that mountaintop had turned into an endless, grey plateau. The effort that once produced visible progress now seemed only to keep him in the same place.
He started folding the letter. He did it with meticulous slowness, aligning the edges perfectly, just to give his hands a task that justified the fact he couldn't look at me.
I sat a little closer and, without asking permission, ruffled his hair hard enough to completely mess it up, but carefully enough not to seem like an attack. It's a delicate balance I've developed after dealing with younger siblings across at least three hundred different lives.
"Hey."
"I know I need to keep training," he shot back, before I could even open my mouth. His voice was loaded with that typical defensiveness of someone already demanding more of themselves than good sense would recommend.
"I wasn't going to tell you to train more." I used two fingers to fix a stubborn strand of his hair pointing exactly the wrong way, just to annoy him a little. "I was going to say you suffer from the illusion that every climb is a perfect diagonal line towards the sky. It isn't. Some mountains have miles of flat ground in the middle of the path. You walk, and walk, and wear down your boot soles, and feel like you're going in circles. But you're still up there. You're just crossing the distance needed to reach the next vertical wall."
He kept looking at his own thighs, but the stiffness in his shoulders eased by a fraction.
"Besides," I went on, my tone dropping into that dry pragmatism that tends to disarm excessive drama, "in a few years we'll be going to Ranoa Magic University. There'll be teachers there who've spent their entire lives studying exactly this kind of block. People who've already been through that same plateau and know exactly what kind of push works to get the magic flowing again. You just need the decency to be patient until then. The world won't end if you go a few months without inventing a new apocalyptic spell."
He nodded slowly. His expression was still that of someone not entirely convinced, but who accepted the logic of the argument for lack of a better counterpoint. When it came to Rudeus, getting him to accept a truce with himself for one night was already a monumental victory.
"As for Prince Pax," I changed the subject with all the subtlety of a boulder tumbling down a hill, "I fully agree with Roxy's assessment. He sounds like a young man with an exceptionally detestable personality. The kind of person I'd probably have used as a test subject for new alchemical poisons in some past life of mine."
Rudeus let out a short laugh, the weight finally leaving his eyes. "You don't even know him."
"I don't need to. Roxy's description was surgical. If an education professional of her calibre resorts to the term 'born pervert' in an official letter, the subject in question must be a genuine monument to social inadequacy."
He laughed again, more openly this time, then picked up the coursebook and started leafing through it, muttering a few experimental pronunciations in Demonic. I went on studying the pages, mentally calculating how many sleepless nights, under the weak light of a cheap candle, that flawless handwriting had cost Roxy after spending an entire day dealing with Shirone's spoiled royalty. Devoting time to someone is the single most violent act of generosity there is, because it's the one resource you can never get back.
It was at exactly that moment, as Rudeus's voice was visibly struggling to reproduce the glottal sounds of the demonic dialect, that someone knocked on the door.
Three sharp knocks. Measured, rhythmic, but with that contained urgency screaming: "I am a polite person, but if you don't open this door in the next five seconds, my nervous breakdown will become a public matter."
Rudeus stood up and opened the door.
In the corridor stood Eris's etiquette tutor. A woman of about fifty, whose spine seemed forged from tempered steel and whose clothes never showed a single unwanted crease. Her current expression, however, was that of a general who'd just discovered her supply lines had been cut off by an army of mountain goats. The accumulated stress at her temples was almost visible.
She bowed slightly, maintaining her etiquette even on what appeared to be the worst day of her week.
"Forgive the late intrusion, young masters," she said, her voice trembling slightly beneath the veneer of formality. "But I find myself obliged to request a favour of a rather... urgent nature."
Rudeus and I exchanged a quick glance.
"Go on," I said, gesturing for her to come in, though she preferred to remain on the threshold, as if entering the room of two prodigy children were a security risk she wasn't prepared to take.
She explained the situation. Eris's tenth birthday was approaching. Within this world's social structure, turning ten wasn't merely a change in age's digit; for the nobility, it was the official debut. The moment the region's high nobility would gather in a hall to assess every movement, every tilt of the head, and every dance step of the Boreas heiress. A single postural mistake would be dissected by the court gossips for at least a decade, affecting political alliances and strategic marriages.
And Eris, to summarise the problem generously, danced like someone who considered the waltz a personal declaration of war.
"She simply refuses to follow the set steps," the woman reported, subtly massaging her left temple. "She stamps on her practice partners' feet with a force bordering on deliberate physical aggression. Yesterday, when I tried to correct her on the waltz's tempo, she assured me with utter seriousness that the music was 'trying to trick her' into lowering her guard."
"An understandable tactical analysis, though socially disastrous," I remarked, unable to stop a small smirk from appearing. "Eris doesn't trust anything she can't strike directly."
"Precisely," agreed the tutor, with the air of someone who'd finally found someone who understood her ordeal. "The Boreas lord and lady would like to know whether it might be possible for you to give up part of the time reserved for Lady Eris's theoretical lessons so we might intensify the dance training. At least until the day of the banquet, at the end of the season. I fear that, at the current pace, the family's reputation will be severely compromised before the first refrain."
Rudeus looked at me, waiting for my decision.
"We can give up the time," I replied, shrugging. "I see no use forcing her to memorise regional geography while she's under imminent risk of causing a diplomatic incident in the ballroom itself."
The tutor took a deep breath, her shoulders dropping several centimetres as she expressed her gratitude with a bow considerably lower than her first. She withdrew with the haste of someone who needed to prepare a new war strategy before dawn.
Rudeus closed the door and leant against it, his eyes gleaming at Roxy's coursebook. "Well, that means we'll have more free time these next few weeks. I'm going to use every minute mastering these demonic verbs. What about you? What are you going to do?"
I didn't answer immediately. My mind had already disengaged from the corridor conversation and was operating on a different frequency, one involving probability tables, material analysis, and an empirical correlation I'd been accumulating over centuries.
"I'm thinking about her birthday present," I said.
Rudeus blinked, confused, but his attention was already being pulled back to the notes on possessive pronouns, so he just murmured a sound of agreement and went back to the bed.
While he lost himself in Roxy's words, I leant against the wall and closed my eyes, accessing the records I kept filed at the periphery of my consciousness. There's a rule I've observed across my reincarnations. It isn't a physical law, but its consistency is high enough that I treat it with absolute academic seriousness.
Warrior women. Redheads. Weapons.
Every single time I've encountered that combination of physical and behavioural traits, across any plane of existence, the result has been the same. Give a woman with those traits a piece of jewellery, and she'll probably shove it in a drawer and forget it exists within three days. Give her a well-tempered sword, and she'll look at you as though you'd just revealed the secret to immortality.
〈Eos, confirm the correlation rate based on available history.〉
[Accessing historical files... Selected sample: lives 42, 117, 309, 582, 801, 1305, and 1777. All individuals identified with scarlet or copper-red hair who demonstrated an aptitude for physical combat showed a 100% satisfaction rate when gifted with cutting, piercing, or projectile weaponry. Note: the probability of Eris Boreas Greyrat deviating from this behavioural pattern is 0.02%.]
〈Excellent. I knew my statistical intuition was infallible.〉
[Extremely biased statistical sample based on subjective personal preferences, but, for all practical purposes in this case, the conclusion holds.]
I ignored Eos's digital sarcasm. Eris was a chaotic force trying to fit into a porcelain mould noble society had prepared for her. She hated fancy dresses, loathed the waltz, and considered etiquette a personal insult. But when she held a practice sword, her movements gained a clarity she never showed in any other activity.
She deserved a real blade.
I mentally opened my inventory, that fold in space-time where I kept the remains of a thousand lives the world had forgotten. I began going through the materials like a collector assessing relics from an extinct civilisation.
Mithril. I discarded it almost instantly. Too light, too shiny. It's the kind of metal elves in certain realities used to look elegant while pretending they weren't getting mud on themselves. Eris didn't need ethereal elegance; she needed weight, presence.
Adamantite. I considered it for three seconds before discarding it too. It's an absurdly dense material, practically indestructible. But that was exactly the problem. If I gave Eris a sword that couldn't break under any circumstance, that cut through stone as easily as butter, she'd never learn to respect steel's own limits. She'd become dependent on the weapon, letting the blade do the work her technique should be doing. An indestructible sword breeds negligent warriors.
My mind's eye stopped on a batch of ore I'd kept since my 142nd life, when I worked as a blacksmith-alchemist in the snow-capped peaks of the eastern cultivation sects.
Tiāngōng Spirit Steel.
It was an alloy refined through spiritual cultivation methods, capable of absorbing and resonating with the user's mana flow without losing its physical integrity. It had the flexibility needed to bend under pressure without breaking, and exactly the right hardness to hold its edge even after striking rocky surfaces. Most importantly: it was a metal that "grew" with its bearer. The more internal energy channelled through it over the years, the more stable the blade's molecular structure would become.
[Why not take one of the hundreds of finished swords we have stored in the legendary weapons quadrant? We have at least thirteen that would fit Eris's current physical dimensions perfectly.]
Eos's question was purely logical, but it showed that, for all her processing capacity, she still didn't understand the philosophy of creation.
〈Because those swords belong to ghosts, Eos. They were forged for purposes that have already died, by a version of me that no longer exists. Giving Eris one of those blades would be like giving her a dead person's used clothes. I want every hammer mark on this new sword to be made thinking of her, of her temperament, of the imperfections she still needs to correct.〉
[Understood. Purely sentimental decision detected, but the logic of avoiding dependence on pre-existing legendary weapons is tactically sound.]
〈Precisely. Now, we need a place for the forge. I can't simply conjure a fifteen-hundred-degree furnace in the middle of the Boreas garden. Philip is a tolerant man, but I imagine watching his perfectly trimmed lawn melt under magical heat would exceed the limits of his hospitality.〉
I went to find Philip the following afternoon. His office was a monument to efficient bureaucracy: piles of tax reports organised by date, territorial maps with fine annotations in the margins, and the constant smell of dark leaf tobacco and sealing wax.
He looked up when I knocked twice on the half-open door. He set his quill down on the bronze stand with that deliberate motion of someone used to pausing political reasoning to deal with interruptions.
"Azra'il," he said, tilting his head slightly. "I thought you'd be enjoying the forced recess the etiquette tutor has imposed on your lessons with my daughter."
"I am enjoying it," I replied, approaching the desk unhurried. "But the recess gave me time to think about a personal project. And to carry it out, I need your permission to use an isolated area of the property for the next three weeks."
Philip leant back in his leather chair. His eyes narrowed subtly, that analytical glint of a lord trying to find the second or third motive behind a seemingly simple request from a child he knows isn't an ordinary child.
"An isolated area?" he repeated, drumming his fingers on the desk. "May I ask the purpose of this project? I assume it isn't merely to play hide-and-seek with your brother."
"I want to prepare a present for Eris's tenth birthday."
Philip's fingers stopped drumming.
For a brief second, his calculating nobleman's mask slipped. He said nothing, but the way he looked at me changed completely. I could read the chain of his thoughts as though it were written in bold letters on the wall behind him: he'd expected a request for rare materials, permission to run some dangerous magical experiment, or perhaps an additional commercial concession for our shampoo venture. He'd built an image of me as a cold, precocious, extremely pragmatic strategic ally.
He hadn't expected me to decide to spend several days in manual-labour isolation to make, with my own hands, something for his daughter.
That small request revealed something I rarely let show: that Eris had stopped being merely an element in a necessary equation of coexistence. She'd become someone for whom I was willing to spend the scarcest resource of all.
"I see," he said, his voice dropping into a surprisingly soft tone, stripped of his usual political defensiveness. "There's an old training clearing near the edge of the woods, to the east of the property. It used to be used by my father's personal knights before we built the new courtyard. Nowadays it's abandoned, but the ground is flat and the soil is firm."
"That will do perfectly. I can assure you I won't cause any forest fire that can't be contained with a simple water spell."
Philip let out a short laugh, a genuine sound rarely heard in that office. "Glad to hear it. Forest safety is always a concern where you two are involved."
I gave a formal bow, preparing to leave.
"Azra'il," he called, as my hand was already on the door handle.
I turned.
He was watching me with a discreet, almost fatherly smile, a glimpse of the man he might have been had he not had to carry the weight of the Greyrat surname and the intrigues of a declining family.
"I'm certain Eris will keep this gift for the rest of her life."
"I hope so," I replied, letting a small, rare, genuine smile appear on my lips before closing the door. "After all, it's the first birthday of hers I get to celebrate alongside her."