Chapter 128: The Return of the Lost Brother

"Why did you do that?" Celeste asked, bewildered, holding Magna’s bruised foot in her hands.

There was no break, no serious injury, but from jumping off somewhere so high, his foot looked sprained and swollen.

"I just wanted to be sure I’m awake." Magna answered with a sigh, eyeing Celeste with a trace of suspicion. "Am I awake now?"

After jumping out the window, he actually managed to land safely on the stone path below.

However, he hadn’t thought about where he would land before jumping. His right foot came down on a raised edge of stone, twisting his ankle badly from the impact.

The pain felt real, as it always did, but that alone wasn’t enough proof that he wasn’t dreaming again.

"Do you think you’re in a dream right now?" Celeste asked once she’d finished wrapping his swollen ankle, looking at his face with one eyebrow raised.

"I don’t know." Magna looked around, at the shelves full of books, at the study desk covered in papers, and at the window letting in the sunlight. "Am I?"

Celeste was starting to look a little worried too. The boy was acting strange, almost like he’d lost his mind.

It was normal for children to be shaken by a nightmare, but Magna wasn’t an ordinary child, and his reaction to this one wasn’t normal either.

"Can you tell me what your dream was about?" She sat down beside him and began stroking his head.

Magna felt her cold hand running through his hair as usual, relaxing a little as he started to believe he really was awake now.

He started describing his dream to her in full detail.

By the time he finished, Celeste’s face had turned thoughtful.

"It sounds like any other dream," she murmured, though a small doubt lingered inside her.

A dream real enough to make Magna jump out a window just to wake up couldn’t possibly be an ordinary one.

"Go eat your breakfast now. I’ll write to my mother about this. She might know something about it." She smiled, if only to ease her own worry.

Magna nodded, got up from the couch, and walked to the door.

He hesitated for a moment when he looked at it, but opened it nevertheless, leaving to head to the kitchen for breakfast.

Celeste stood there a while, staring at the door with the same thoughtful expression, until a sound tapped against her window.

When she turned to look, she saw a white raven perched outside, a small cylindrical case strapped to its back.

Besides being snow white, even down to its eyes, it was also larger than a normal bird, and its talons looked just like a hawk’s. It was clearly a bird of prey. It didn’t look anything like a harmless little messenger bird.

"A message from the Tower?" Celeste recognized the raven instantly. It was the kind only the Tower used to carry messages.

She opened the window and let the raven in.

The bird landed calmly on her desk. She opened the lid of the cylinder on its back and pulled out the paper inside.

After unrolling it, she first looked at the bottom of the paper, where a gold-colored insignia confirmed that it really was from the Tower.

Next, her gaze turned to the very top, where the words naming the person the message was addressed to caught Celeste completely off guard.

"A message for Titus?" This was the first time the Tower had ever sent a message to her Shadow.

Curious what kind of message had come for her husband, she started reading.

As she read, her expression began to shift.

First a small smile appeared on her lips, then her face turned clearly happy and relieved, and by the time she reached the end of the message, her whole expression had changed to one of shock and disbelief.

"Titus." She called out, her voice coming out a little different than usual, almost like a melody.

Then her shadow trembled slightly, and Titus stepped out of it.

He was wearing his usual daily clothes, a big piece of bread in one hand and a glass full of red juice in the other.

"What happened?" He looked like he’d been in the middle of his breakfast.

Celeste held the paper out to him. "Read this."

A little confused, Titus set down what he was holding on the table, took the paper, and started reading.

At first he was surprised just to see a message addressed to him from the Tower, but once he read the contents, he started to laugh.

"Is this real? My brother actually came back?"

The message had been written directly by his brother. He recognized the handwriting.

He hadn’t seen his brother since childhood, not since he’d been sold to the Tower as a boy, but the two of them had kept in touch through letters over the years, at least until ten years ago, when his brother disappeared on an expedition.

In the letter, his brother wrote that after being trapped for so long in an unknown realm, he had finally escaped.

There was also a fairly long section near the bottom of the letter describing what he had gone through.

Celeste pointed at that part. "Read here."

She looked so serious that the man sensed something was off. He read the paragraph closely, focusing hard.

"We were trapped in a place full of long corridors and rooms, every one of them identical to the last. Doors lined every corridor and every room.

We hoped one of them would lead us out. We tried opening every door we found, again and again, desperate to escape that cursed place.

Every time, however, we found ourselves facing the same endless loop of corridors and rooms. Until at last, we saw a door that was different from all the others.

This time, it wasn’t one we opened ourselves. Someone opened it for us."

Further down the letter, he wrote that once they passed through that door, they suddenly found themselves in the Fairy Hive, another realm.

Though they were confused about how they had crossed from one realm to another like that, the Fairy Hive was a realm they had already explored, so they found the exit from there and finally returned to their world.

Titus read it with a smile on his face, but he felt a little lost, not sure what Celeste was trying to point out to him by showing him this particular part of the letter.

It was certainly priceless information, since it described a realm no one had ever discovered before, but he was fairly sure that wasn’t the reason for her focus and her serious expression.

"Read this part." She pointed to another section with her finger.

When Titus read it, he saw the paragraph described the door in full detail.

"Can’t you just tell me what I’m supposed to be looking at?" Titus asked, helpless.

Celeste sighed, then pointed her finger at the study room door.

When he turned to look where her finger was pointing, his confused expression shifted slightly.

He looked back down at the paper and read the description again, then looked at the study door once more, his eyes going back and forth between the two several times as he checked every detail.

"Isn’t this your study room door?" He finally understood why she was so serious.

The details matched the door of the room they were standing in perfectly.