Chapter 584: Unnatural and Wrong

It was a gradual, painful death: sudden and heartbreaking.

When Octavius opened his eyes again he stood only a few paces from three corpses that lay crumpled on the cold mountain ground.

The bodies were grey and already almost claimed by pale moss.

One of them still hung partially upright, an arm pinned to the rock by a bolt that had driven through flesh and bone and lodged itself deep in the stone behind, as though the mountain itself had decided to hold onto this one small piece of the tragedy.

Recognition arrived in a slow, sickening wave that rose from somewhere deep in his core.

These were their bodies.

And this was the night he and his two precious childhood friends had met a gruesome end because of foolishness and a complete lack of foresight.

"Tavi?"

The voice was quiet and careful.

It was the voice of someone who had always known exactly how to speak to him, even when he did not want to be spoken to.

Octavius turned away from the corpses.

The movement felt strange, weightless, as though his body had forgotten what it meant to be anchored to the earth by anything as ordinary as gravity.

A short distance behind him stood a figure he knew very well. Only two people in the world had ever called him by that nickname name. One of them was...

"What is happening, Janin?" Octavius scratched the back of his head, confusion clouding his eyes as his fingers passed through his own hair with a sensation that was not quite touch—more like the memory of touch, faint and fading at the edges. "Why are there two of us? Did... Did we truly die?"

The words felt absurd as soon as they left his mouth, and yet he could not think of any other way to ask the question that was pressing against him.

Janin stood with both arms wrapped around his sister, holding her the way a man might hold something precious that he feared would slip away if he loosened his grip even slightly.

Eve fidgeted restlessly against him, teeth clenched and grinding in a rhythm that spoke of terror too deep for words.

Her entire form trembled with a fear that had not ended when her heart stopped—a fear that seemed to have followed her across whatever threshold they had crossed and now refused to let her go.

All three of them were bluish and faintly transparent, stripped of every material thing—clothing, armor, rings, even the small tokens they had carried for years.

They were nothing but spirit now, exposed and weightless under the open sky, visible in ways they had never been visible before.

"I suppose so," Janin said, frowning as he glanced down at Eve’s terrified face.

His voice carried the weight of someone who had already accepted a truth he wished he could deny, who had moved past shock and into something that looked almost like calm.

He continued; "Something seems to be wrong with Eve... I suspect what killed us terrified her far too much."

The words hung in the cold air between them, and Octavius felt something twist in his chest—something that might have been guilt, or grief, or the two tangled together so tightly they could no longer be separated.

He looked at Eve, at the way her eyes darted from shadow to shadow as though expecting the arrow to come for her again, and he understood, with a clarity that cut deeper than any blade, whose fault it was.

Octavius’s expression softened into something sadder, though puzzlement still dominated the landscape of his face.

The anger he had felt in those final moments—anger at himself, at the world, at the cruel randomness of fate—had drained away, leaving only a hollow ache where certainty used to live.

"Oh, Janin... I am so... so sorry. If I hadn’t..."

The sentence trailed off into silence, because there were too many endings to that apology.

"There is no need to apologize. The damage has already been done." Janin looked at him and managed a small, weary smile—the kind of smile that costs something to produce, that requires reaching past pain to find something worth offering. "We promised to be with you after death, didn’t we?"

The words struck Octavius like a physical blow.

They had been almost certain that death was something that happened to other people.

Octavius’s eyes finally crinkled at the corners.

Tears rose without permission and spilled freely down the translucent planes of his cheeks, catching reflections that should not exist in this place between places, glittering faintly like stars that had fallen from some distant sky.

"...I can’t believe you’d joke... even in death..." His voice roughened, cracking on the edges of words that had to be forced out. "So... What now?"

The question hung in the air, unanswered and unanswerable.

Until it was not.

"What now? You three will go back in time and help me with something important."

The new voice belonged to neither man nor ordinary child.

It carried the high, clear tone of a young boy layered with the deeper undertones of a woman and, beneath that, something distinctly bestial—a vibrating growl that lurked beneath the syllables like a predator.

Both men turned and found him:

A small boy sat on a nearby rock, watching the three flickering spirits with open interest.

His posture was casual and lazy, as though he had been waiting there for some time and had found the waiting pleasant rather than tedious.

He wore short black pants that ended above his knees, a plain long-sleeved white shirt that seemed too clean for this place, and dark suspenders that cut precise lines across his narrow chest.

His feet were bare against the stone, and his toes curled slightly as though he was enjoying the chill.

Everything about him felt slightly dangerous and wrong.

The unnaturally pure white of his hair caught light that did not seem to exist, glowing faintly like moonlight on snow.

His dark eyes each contained two distinct pupils arranged so that together they formed the clean symbol of infinity—a geometry that should not exist in nature, that spoke of something beyond the ordinary rules of flesh and blood.

"Hm... It seems that woman has gone insane from fear," the boy remarked, still seated, gaze drifting briefly toward Eve. "It happens to the best of mortal spirits. She is fine, don’t worry. Just a little shaken by having seen Systēma so unprotected."

Octavius and Janin exchanged a quick look, the kind of look that passes between people who have known each other long enough to communicate without words.

Then both glanced at the trembling Eve still pressed between them, her form flickering like a candle flame in wind.

When they turned back to the boy their expressions had hardened into wary demand—the faces of men who had already lost everything and had nothing left to fear.

"Who are you, and what do you want from us?" Janin asked, pulling his sister more tightly against his chest.

His voice was steady, but Octavius could hear the effort it took to keep it that way.

The boy ignored the question entirely.

His dark double-pupiled eyes had fixed on the arrow still embedded deep in the rock—the arrow that had killed one of them, and had pinned a body to stone like a specimen for study.

"Hehehe. Little Heka is also becoming quite the beast," he said fondly, as though speaking of a beloved pet that had learned a new trick. "Most definitely, it’s Benjamin’s influence. Benjamin is so amazing~"

He giggled then—high and bright, the sound of a teenage girl lost in sudden affection.

The sound was so incongruous, so jarringly out of place in this graveyard of hopes and bodies, that it seemed to echo longer than it should have.

The two men stared. Octavius’s remaining patience frayed, thread by thread, until only anger remained.

"You seem to know a lot, boy," he said, voice rising, the words sharp enough to cut. "So can you tell us what will become of us now?"