Chương 36: Chapter 35: The Queen Who Returned

I activated the circle. I was moments away from proving a theory no one else believed possible. Then the light bent. I remember that. The light bent before anything else — before the air pressure changed, before the pop in my ears, before the road appeared beneath my feet. I'd been somewhere else. I'd been — I don't know where I'd been. The geometry had been sound. The mana flow had been stable. There should have been... No. Something else had entered the equation. I was now standing on a road. Dark stone.

Faint steam. Snow clung to the edges, melting where it met the warmth. The mountain ahead—my mountain, our mountain, the one I'd lifted from the earth and anchored in the heavens. And there was a man. Hands on a strange metal object, pushing it. He looked terrible. Exhausted. Shoulders bent. The kind of tired that lives in the bone, not the muscle. He'd been doing this for a long time — I could see it in the way his back curved, the way his feet sat slightly too far apart for balance.

The posture of someone who'd stopped expecting it to get easier and had simply accepted the work. He was also a mage. Two circles. First and... Second? Yes — Second. Faint but present, spinning against the first. Both young. Both new. The body hadn't finished settling around them. He was the weakest adult mage I'd ever seen. He was the only person left on the island. What happened here? Where was everyone? Was I dreaming? I asked him if he spoke Hadran.

It came out before I'd decided to say it — the way words do when you've been alone in silence and suddenly there's a face and your mouth just... starts. He said yes. I almost cried right there. Not because I understood what had happened. I didn't. Not because I was safe. I had no idea if I was. There was someone here. Someone alive. Someone I could speak to. And this stranger on the road was the only person around, I could feel it. Yet all hope wasn't lost, we could communicate. His Hadran was strange, though.

Familiar, but wrong. The pronunciation had drifted, the sounds were different, and I had to concentrate to follow him. When he told me the name of the nearby village, I barely understood him. But I understood enough. I took one of his cores. He had several — small, pebble-sized, loose in his pocket. I chose a good one. The best one. He flinched when I reached for it. I thought about apologizing and decided not to. He'd understand later that I needed it more than he did. Or he wouldn't.

Either way, the stone was more useful in my hand than sitting in his pocket. His reaction, however, was unexpected. The sudden stiffness, the flush creeping across his face, the way he immediately looked somewhere else as if the road had suddenly become fascinating. I had seen soldiers keep their composure under arrows and nobles lie through entire negotiations, but this man was completely defeated by someone reaching into his pocket for a stone. He didn't even know how to react. I found that strangely cute.

I got inside of the object that man was pushing — I didn't have a word for it. A metal room on wheels. Dead, whatever powered it exhausted, and the man who owned it was pushing it by hand across a road I'd built for carriages that ran on mana. Then I realized something. I didn't know his name. I thought back to our conversation. Had he told me? No. Had I asked? Also no. It seemed like an obvious thing to do when meeting someone. Yet somehow, neither of us had managed it. I decided not to mention it.

If he hadn't thought to ask mine either, then we were equally at fault. I carved a circle inside of the stone I had stolen, a push-circle, it came easily as usual. I had carved thousands of circles in my life. My first years had been spent in a small engraving shop, with a borrowed book, empty pockets, and a growing collection of failed experiments. Back when I was still a child, I broke more stones than I successfully carved. I caused more than a few explosions. This one required no thought.

My hand remembered before my mind did. The carriage manufacturers had been good customers once. They needed reliable enchantments, and I had eventually learned how to give them exactly that. The core accepted the spell without complaint. I activated the circle and he almost fell. That was funny. He didn't seem to enjoy it nearly as much as I did, though. He was still trying to catch up, running after the strange carriage while I increased the speed little by little. I could have stopped. I probably should have.

But the expression on his face was priceless. Exhaustion. Confusion. A little bit of disbelief. I hadn't seen someone react so honestly in a very long time. He was cute. He really was. I watched the road. He drove. Slowly — the strange mechanism that normally moved the metal room was no longer functioning. The push-circle kept us moving instead, a constant pressure overcoming the weight and friction of the object beneath us. There was no mystery to it. Force was force. The circle did not care what it pushed.

The mountain was ahead. I could feel the dragon sleeping inside it — a vast, slow presence pressed against the stone like heat against glass. Ancient. Patient. Alive. I touched the mark on my palm without thinking. I through about the road beneath us, it was mine — the same stones, the same warmth. Some of the things I knew were still here. Everyone I'd built it for was not. I desperately tried to hold the tears back, but one still escaped. I didn't want to. I didn't decide to.

One tear slipped across my cheek, and then nothing. The man — Arcene, he said his name was. When it was my turn to give a name, I almost gave him my title. Queen. It had been my name for so long that it felt like part of me. Then I looked through the window. At the empty road. The silent land. The world I no longer understood. I didn't know what had happened to my kingdom. I didn't know where my people were. So I gave him my other name instead. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road.

Support the author by reading it there. The name I carried before the crown. The name of the person beneath it. Ella. Arcene looked away. He didn't say anything. I was grateful for that. The house was his. A style of construction I'd never seen. Materials I didn't recognize. Smooth, thin walls. Windows that slid on rails. A cold box that hummed and kept food preserved through some mechanism that wasn't mana — I'd checked, pressing my awareness into every wall, every corner. No circles. No stones. Just...

something else, pure energy moving around the walls. He'd come from another world that much was clear. Even if he could speak my language, his clothes, his tools, the metal room, everything about him was foreign. Not foreign like a distant kingdom. Foreign like — something from outside the system entirely. And he'd somehow ended up here. On my land, In my village. On my road. In my world. I didn't understand why. He clearly didn't either. Then I met the cat. He was old. Black and grey. Beautiful golden eyes.

I crouched. He came to me — two steps, three, and pressed his forehead into my shin Warm. Purring. The vibration traveled through the bone of my leg into my hip. Just what I needed. I'd had cats at court. Dozens. They'd slept on the throne, on the council table, in the sleeves of my dress. My advisors complained about the fur. I didn't care. This cat chose me in the first thirty seconds. Arcene stared. He said something about a traitor. I laughed. The first night, I took his room. I didn't ask — I had him comply.

What else was he going to do? Object? To me? He also gave me a shirt. It had a weird cat on it. A different cat. None of it made sense it almost looked like an human. He suggested I should wear pants. Poseperous. I was a queen, pants was a concession I wasn't ready to make. The bath was a comfort I simply couldn't skip today. I washed alone. Arcene made a fuss about helping me undress. I didn't understand why. Court had cured me of caring about such things long ago.

More people had seen me naked in a single day than some people would be seen in their entire lives. One man was nothing. Besides, I had a bath to attend. I didn't even bother closing the door completely. I stood in the water and let the heat do its work. And then I cried. Quietly. Without deciding to. Without allowing myself to stop it. Thankfully, the shy man outside didn't see me like this. That would have been far worse than him seeing me without clothes. I had spent the afternoon calling him weird.

But perhaps I was the strange one. Either way, I would never admit I had cried. Having refused to wear pants, I simply draped the towel around myself until we reached the bed. The bed was impossibly soft. Softer than anything I had slept on before. I had never felt anything like it. And yet that night was one of the worst of my life. The first morning, he was gone. I woke in his bed and immediately stole a comb from his bathroom. Compared to the bed, the bathroom was disappointing.

It had clearly been designed for one purpose: cleansing the body. Nothing more. You stood inside it. You washed. You left. No deep water. No heat surrounding you. No quiet moment where the world disappeared and you could simply exist. His people clearly didn't understand the precious things of life. I brushed my hair in silence. No footsteps. No voice. He had left before dawn. I was alone in this place. I stood at the top of the stairs. This was the part no one tells you about waking up alone in a stranger's house.

You don't know the rules. You don't know the routine. You don't know whether the empty kitchen means he is coming back or whether you have been left behind. I had ruled a kingdom. I had commanded armies. Yet I stood at the top of those stairs and felt like a child in someone else's home. He came back with fish. Dead fish in a bucket. He smelled like river and cold air, and he said "morning" like it was a fact rather than a greeting. I immediately had him tie me into my dress.

My court dress had always required two hands for the laces. Normally, that had never been a problem. But this morning, alone in this strange house, it had felt like an impossible trial. He took too long to come home, too long to tie it. His fingers were cautious in a way that was almost endearing. Careful. Like the dress might break. It wouldn't break. But I let him be careful. I think he needed to be. He showed me the study. Books — about half written in Hadran and the other half in Cling. I opened them.

Pages of meticulous illustrations. The creatures of my land. The beasts I had studied, catalogued, and watched change across generations. A portrait of the dragon. A portrait of me. Calm. Painted. Still. I looked at that face for a long time. The woman in the painting looked like someone who still had a place in the world. I learned little that day, except the name of my incompetent successor. So much time had passed since I left. I did not know how much. I did not know what had happened during that absence.

But it was enough to understand one thing. The world had continued without me. I closed the book and went back to the house. That night he showed me a story. Moving pictures — he called them anime, and movies, and the distinction between them seemed to matter to him. I didn't understand the difference. Pictures that moved, voices that spoke, a world projected onto a flat surface. Some were drawn by hand. Some showed real people. He leaned close. Whispered in my ear. Translated." She's waking up in his body.

They're switching places. The red string means — it means fate. Connection. Something you can't break." I watched a girl and a boy trade lives across the width of a country. I watched them search for each other through time and distance and the kind of longing that makes your chest ache. I watched them find each other on the ridge of a crater and forget and almost not remember. Arcene whispered the whole time. His voice low and steady. Patient.

He'd stop when something was happening on screen, let the images carry the weight, then lean in again when context was needed. He was good at it. Not elegant — his Hadran was functional, not poetic — but he chose the right moments. He knew what to explain and what to leave alone. When it was over, the screen went dark. I heard myself say: "More." I didn't mean to say it. I said it anyway. The days folded. I woke. He left. He came back with fish. I ate. He cooked.

I started wearing his clothes more often than I wore mine. Sweatpants were... Fine. They were fine. The girls in his stories wore them constantly. They walked freely, sat however they pleased, crossed their legs without worrying about their posture. The dress was beautiful, and I loved it, but I was not going to wear it every day. Especially since Arcene seemed far more concerned with the fact that I was wearing it than with appreciating the craftsmanship. The screens. I quickly became obsessed with them.

He had a library of stories. Thousands. Animated and otherwise. A whole world's worth of fiction stored inside a box that hummed and connected to a flat surface of light. I watched everything. I didn't sleep much — I never had. At court, I had spent nights designing circles, refining infrastructure, arguing with officials who could never agree quickly enough. Now I sat in his room — my room, I had taken it and I was keeping it — and watched a world I had never heard of tell itself stories. I learned his language.

Not well — not enough to speak. But enough. The shape of sentences. The rhythm of conversation. Which words meant what when the characters pointed and picked things up and opened doors. He'd given me a smaller screen. An old one. Slow. Loaded with everything. I could also reach the entire library from the larger one mounted on the wall, right from the comfort of the bed. I didn't tell him how much I watched.

Though he probably heard it through the ceiling anyway — the faint voices playing late into the night, every night. I pretended not to notice. I watched stories about people falling in love, and stories about people going to war, and stories about people cooking food I'd never tasted. I watched a story about a girl who commanded the wind. I stopped that one halfway through and sat with it for a long time. There were also stories created around other... more private human interests.

At first, I didn't understand the appeal They seemed strange. They were far less subtle than the other stories I had watched. Almost shockingly so. Compared to the other stories I had watched, they seemed to care little about characters, worlds, or anything beyond the obvious. But after watching more of them, I started understanding. Humans had always been humans. They always had desires they did not openly discuss. I understood why people watched them. The meals were simple. Mostly fish. Sometimes meat.

Enough to survive, but nothing that felt like a life. I didn't blame Arcene for it. Winter was not the season for abundance, and he was alone. Keeping himself fed was already an achievement. But I missed something. Fresh vegetables. I voiced my concerns, especially regarding the increasingly unfortunate state of my digestion. Arcene listened. Unfortunately, he had no immediate solution. Then Arcene showed me the seeds. He had kept them in his garage from a project he had abandoned.

Small things, forgotten in the dark. I held them in my hand for a long time. They were not much. But they were alive. I planted them. And every morning, I checked them before anything else. The pond was my idea. I'd seen similar things in his stories — channels, irrigation, water sitting beside growing things. None of it was new to me. But it would be useful for the crops. So I decided to make one beside the river. I didn't bother asking Arcene's opinion.

He had given me the seeds, but he didn't seem particularly interested in the garden itself. He stayed nearby while I worked, watching quietly. After a while, he finally spoke.

"You don't need a shovel?" he asked. I looked at him. Then at the pond. Then at the pebble.

"You're silly," I said. He was silly. And kind. And weak. And trying. He'd given me his room, his shirt and half his fish every day. Right now he was all I had. I was still working at the pond when I felt the fight. His mana signature — familiar now, after a week of sensing it move through the house, the streets, the river path — suddenly flared in short, jagged bursts. Lightning. His own design. Crude, but functional. I recognized the pattern immediately. I dismissed it at first.

A forest creature at this weak should not have been a threat to him. But the bursts changed. They became frantic. His mana was no longer controlled. No longer deliberate. Panic. He wasn't moving toward the village. He wasn't retreating properly. He was simply running. I stood up. I moved. The forest closed around me. Trees — young, pale, barely taller than my waist in places. I followed the lightning bursts, the desperate flickering of his mana. When I found him. The creature was already moving to strike.

My circle fired before I consciously formed the thought. The force caught it mid-leap, twisted it sideways, and threw it into a tree twenty feet away. The branch broke. I felt it snap. No. I grabbed Arcene's arm. He was shaking. His whole body trembled with the aftermath of someone who had just realized he was still alive. His shoulder was injured. His mana was nearly empty. His face was white.

"Move." And we ran. The treeline broke. Cobblestones. The village. My village. I stood beside him and looked at the forest. The ground had been trembling. The vibration had traveled all the way here — the forest's anger, the response to damage. A broken branch. Living wood. Arcene straightened. Looked at me. I looked at him. He was weak. Walking on legs that hadn't finished learning how to be a mage's. He was a mage, that much was true. But his application was terrible.

He had walked into the forest without sensing, without awareness, without any idea what was above him until it was already on him. And he'd survived. Barely. Through luck. He was brave But bravery without competence was just recklessness.

"You're weak," I told him. He blinked.

"Thank you." I didn't soften it. He needed to hear it. He needed to hear it from someone. If I wanted him to survive what was coming, I would have to teach him.