The city did not look different after everything that had happened.
That was the first thing Erdin Vale noticed.
Valenreach still breathed in layers steel and stone stacked upon one another, neon reflections sliding across rain-slick streets, people moving with purpose or desperation depending on the hour. Crimes still happened. Laws still bent. Authority still arrived late or not at all, life continued.
Ella did not.
Erdin stood at the edge of a pedestrian bridge, hands resting on the cold metal railing, eyes unfocused as traffic passed below him in blurred streaks of white and red. He had been standing there for a while. Long enough that his legs should have ached, they didn't.
People passed him without looking. A few glanced his way, then quickly looked elsewhere. Some recognized him. He could tell by the way their expressions shifted uncertainty first, then something closer to unease.
"That's him, the one from VEIL."
"The guy who let her die."
He did not correct them, he rarely corrected anyone anymore.
Two years.. that was how long it had been since the night everything stopped making sense.
Two years since VEIL had quietly removed his name from active rosters, since the evaluations, the white rooms, the questions that were less about answers and more about confirmation.
They had never asked him why he stopped the incantation, they only asked why he could.
Erdin exhaled slowly and stepped away from the railing.
His apartment was exactly as he'd left it that morning which meant sterile, quiet, and untouched by anything that suggested attachment. The lights turned on automatically when he entered. He didn't bother turning them off again. He liked knowing the room was bright. Darkness invited thoughts that didn't need encouragement.
He removed his coat, folded it with mechanical precision, and placed it on the chair.
Then he sat on the bed, the silence pressed in.
This was the part people didn't understand. They imagined grief as something violent screaming, crying, collapsing to the floor. They imagined rage, denial, bargaining.
Erdin felt none of that, what he felt was weight.
A constant, dull pressure behind his eyes. A sensation like something unfinished resting inside his chest, not bleeding, not healing just there.
He reached for the notebook on his desk.
The pages were filled with runes, spell matrices, annotations layered atop annotations. Arkana work. Clean. Precise. Logical. Magic reduced to structure so that emotion wouldn't interfere.
Ella's handwriting appeared between his own in places. Softer strokes. Slightly slanted.
"This one's clever, you don't need to apologize for being better, stop doubting yourself."
His fingers trembled, just barely.
"Today," he said quietly, voice flat, "you'd be twenty-two."
He waited.. nothing happened.
He closed the notebook and set it down carefully, as if it might break.
That night replayed itself often, though never in full. His mind avoided it the way a tongue avoided a cracked tooth. But fragments surfaced whether he wanted them to or not.
The way Ella had smiled at him, blood already soaking through her uniform.
Do it, she had said.
Finish it.
He hadn't, not because he was weak, but because the spell he was forming would have erased everything in its path including her.
They called it a mistake.
VEIL's final report labeled it emotional interference.
Erdin labeled it choice.
A knock sounded at his door.
He froze.. it took a moment for him to realize the sound was real.
Another knock followed, sharper this time.
He stood slowly, opened the door.
No one was there.
Only a folded piece of paper lay on the floor, perfectly aligned with the threshold.
He stared at it for several seconds before picking it up.
There was no Magia signature.
Just words.
"You hesitated because you are human."
His breath caught, the handwriting was unfamiliar.
He closed the door and leaned against it, staring at the note.
"Human."
That word had been used against him more than any other.
Too human to serve VEIL.
Too human to be reliable.
Too human to be trusted with power.
He slid down the door until he was sitting on the floor, back pressed against the wood.
His head tipped forward.
For the first time since Ella's death, his chest tightened painfully.
"I didn't hesitate," he whispered.
The room did not argue.. but something else did.
The air shifted subtle, almost imperceptible, something quieter. Deeper. Like reality itself pausing to listen.
Erdin lifted his head.
The walls looked the same. The room felt the same.
But the space between things felt wrong, as if the world had briefly acknowledged him.
He stood abruptly.
"No," he said, more firmly now. "I'm not unstable."
His reflection in the mirror met his gaze.
Calm. Pale. Gray-eyed.
Not broken.
People said he was dangerous because he didn't react the way they expected.
They never asked themselves what kind of world required someone to stop being human to be considered sane.
Erdin Vale picked up the note and folded it carefully.
Whatever this was coincidence, provocation, or something else entirely it had found him during the interval between who he had been and who he was becoming.
And for the first time since Ella died, the silence did not feel empty.
It felt observant..