Elian Solhart was seventeen, and even buying bread he looked like the main character of something.
Amaron noticed him from halfway down the market lane — not because he was looking for him, but because Elian was the kind of person a crowd automatically organized itself around. Not through any deliberate effort on his part. Simply by existing in a space, he created a mild gravitational effect: people turned slightly in his direction, conversations softened when he passed nearby, vendors straightened behind their stalls. He was tall for seventeen, broad-shouldered in the way of someone who had been training seriously for years, with the clean self-possession of a person who had never seriously doubted that the world had a place for him.
His mana signature was, even from this distance, absurd.
Amaron couldn't see it — no one without a detection instrument could, and he was careful not to extend his own mana sense far enough to be noticed — but he could feel the ambient mana in the lane bending subtly toward Elian the way light bends near a significant mass. A B-rank at seventeen was unusual enough to be remarked upon in Guild circles. By nineteen Elian would be A-rank. By twenty-two he would be the first S-rank in forty years.
He was buying a loaf of dark bread and a paper of salted almonds, and the vendor was giving him a discount she hadn't advertised, and Elian was accepting it with a smile that managed to be both genuinely warm and entirely unaware of its own effect.
Amaron bought a handful of dried figs from the stall two down and kept moving.
— ◆ —
He had not planned for today. That was the thing he kept returning to as he navigated the rest of the market with his figs and his careful composure: he had not planned for today.
The Memory Index told him that Elian Solhart frequented the fourth-district market on Sixthday mornings — a habit established in the original timeline that would continue until a Guild scheduling conflict shifted it eighteen months from now. Amaron knew this. He had filed it away as relevant future information, a data point in the long geography of the original story's first year.
What he had not done was account for the fact that knowing someone's schedule and standing twenty feet from them while they bought bread were meaningfully different experiences.
In his first life, Amaron had seen Elian hundreds of times. In briefings, in dungeon corridors, at Guild assembly points. He had always been peripheral to those sightings — part of the background, registered and then forgotten, the way furniture is registered and forgotten. He had watched Elian fight. He had watched him lead. He had watched him make decisions that saved dozens of lives and a few that cost others. He had formed opinions about him — complex, unglamorous opinions — without ever having a direct conversation.
Now he was seventeen years ahead of all of that, and Elian was seventeen years old and buying bread, and something about the gap between those two facts was doing something uncomfortable to Amaron's carefully maintained composure.
He kept walking. He did not look back.
— ◆ —
He had made it to the end of the lane when the sound reached him.
Not loud. That was what made it register — not a shout or a crash, but a sharp exhale and the specific clatter of a market stall's display going over sideways, followed by a silence of the type that forms when bystanders don't yet know if they should intervene. Amaron turned on instinct.
Three stalls back, a man in a grey work coat had a boy pinned against the adjacent wall — not a violent grip, exactly, but a firm one, the man's forearm across the boy's shoulders and his face close and his voice low with the particular controlled anger of someone making a point they'd decided to make regardless of audience. The boy was maybe thirteen, a street kid by the look of his clothes, and he was holding his hands up in the universal gesture of someone who had been caught doing something they were going to deny anyway.
The stall owner — the man in grey — was not in danger. The boy was not in danger, not precisely, but the calculus of the situation had a direction and the direction was toward the kind of scene that ended with a Guard report and a scared child in a holding cell for forty-eight hours while his case got processed.
Amaron took one step toward it.
Then Elian Solhart was already there.
— ◆ —
He hadn't run. That was what Amaron noticed first — Elian had simply moved from his position near the bread vendor to the scene of the incident with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had decided to involve himself and saw no reason to make it dramatic. He stepped between the stall owner and the boy with the ease of someone who had done this before, or who had never considered the possibility that stepping between two people in conflict might not go well for him.
"Hey." His voice was easy. Not confrontational — the tone of someone opening a conversation rather than a dispute. "What happened?"
The stall owner, wrong-footed by the intervention's lack of aggression, began explaining. Loudly. The boy had taken something — a small glass piece from the display, by the look of what had scattered across the cobblestones when the stall went over. The owner had seen him, grabbed him, and here they were.
Elian listened to the whole thing. He did not interrupt. He waited until the owner had reached the end of his grievance, and then he looked at the boy.
"Did you take it?"
The boy hesitated. Then nodded, barely, the kind of nod that tries to be invisible.
Elian reached into his pocket, produced a coin that was notably more than the value of the glass piece, and placed it on the stall owner's remaining display. "For the inconvenience," he said. "And the display." He looked at the boy again. "Come on."
He walked away from the stall owner without waiting to see if the resolution held. The boy, apparently as surprised as everyone else, followed.
Amaron, who had stopped walking and was now standing at the edge of the small crowd that had gathered, watched Elian lead the boy to a quieter section of the lane and crouch down to his eye level. He couldn't hear what was being said. The conversation lasted about two minutes. The boy left looking less scared than he had and more confused, which was probably the right outcome.
Elian straightened, retrieved his bread and almonds from where he'd apparently set them down on a crate before intervening, and resumed his walk down the lane.
He passed within four feet of Amaron.
— ◆ —
Their eyes met for approximately one second.
Amaron was aware of this with a precision that had nothing to do with the moment's actual significance. One second. Elian's gaze passed over him the way it passed over the crates and the vendors and the other bystanders — present, registering, moving on. There was nothing in it. No recognition, no particular attention. Amaron was part of the background, as he always was, as he had spent three weeks carefully ensuring he would remain.
Then Elian was past him, continuing down the lane, already dissolving back into the ordinary motion of the market.
Amaron exhaled slowly through his nose.
He had known, intellectually, that Elian was not a simple person. He had formed that opinion across nine years of observation in his first life — watching a man who was genuinely talented and genuinely kind and genuinely unaware of the radius of consequence his existence projected onto everyone nearby. The boy in the alley would be fine today. Elian had seen to that with the casual competence of someone who considered this a minor errand.
He had also spent Amaron's coin surplus for the week without knowing it, being an F-rank support Hunter's wages what they were, but that was not a thought Amaron was going to spend any energy on.
— ◆ —
He walked home by a different route than he usually took.
Not because he was being followed — he wasn't, he'd checked — but because he needed the extra time to process the adjustment the morning had made to his internal model. He had spent three weeks constructing Elian Solhart as a variable: an element of the original story's architecture, a force to be accounted for and worked around, the protagonist of a narrative Amaron intended to redirect without the protagonist's knowledge.
The variable had just bought a scared child's safety with his grocery money and walked away without looking for credit.
This changed nothing strategically. Amaron knew Elian's virtues. He had always known them. He had also known Elian's blind spots, his loyalties, the specific ways his goodness could be weaponized by people with less of it, the disasters that his confidence would walk him toward in years three and four and seven of the original story. Knowing that a man was good did not mean trusting the story he was at the center of to end well for everyone in it.
It did mean something, though. He was not sure yet what.
He filed it under: complicate later.
— ◆ —
Back in his room, he sat at the desk with the cracked leg and opened the small notebook he had purchased on day two of his second life — plain cover, cheap paper, the kind of thing a cartographer's assistant might carry for work notes. He had been using it to track his training progress in a cipher of his own design, a simple letter-shift that would be meaningless to anyone who found it but readable in seconds to him.
He added a line.
Day 23. First direct proximity to E.S. Behavioral profile consistent with memory. Intervention instinct confirmed active. No recognition. Cover intact.
He considered the last line for a moment, then added one more.
He is exactly who I remember. This is going to be complicated.
He closed the notebook and looked out the window at the afternoon.
The mana in the air moved through him without pause — twenty units a day, every day, whether he sat still or moved or slept or thought about seventeen-year-old boys who bought bread and solved small injustices without breaking stride. The reserve climbed. The control pathways deepened. The plan extended forward in time like a road he had already walked once and was now paving properly.
He was twenty-three days into his second life.
He had not made a single mistake.
He intended to keep it that way.