He wrote the letter to Sigurd that afternoon, sitting at his desk with the window open and the smell of cut grass drifting in from the grounds below. It did not take long. There was not much to say that the situation did not already say for itself, and Noctis had never been the type to pad a letter with words that were just there to take up space.
To Sigurd Valerius Azor III,
Mother told me this morning. Congratulations to you and Isolde. I mean that without any ceremony attached to it. You will be good at it.
I hope Isolde is well. Pass on my regards to her. Tell her she has my sympathy for having to deal with court opinions on how she should be conducting her pregnancy, because I imagine those have already started.
Write when you can. Not just about this. About everything.
Noctis
He read it back, decided it was fine, sealed it, and gave it to Maren to arrange a courier. She took it without comment, which was her way of approving. If she had disapproved she would have found something nearby to straighten or organize until he asked what was wrong.
With that handled, he had the rest of the afternoon to himself.
He thought about the fort for a while, sitting in the chair by the window. Fort Caldren on the Arnoth. He tried to remember what he knew about that stretch of the border, which was not much. He had studied maps when he was younger out of personal interest more than anything else, the kind of habit left over from a previous life where information felt like something you were supposed to collect. The Arnoth River ran northeast to southwest and served as a natural boundary for about sixty miles before the terrain got complicated and the boundary became more a matter of agreement than geography. Fort Caldren sat roughly in the middle of that stretch. Losing it did not open the border, exactly, but it removed a set of eyes and a position that would be annoying to retake under pressure.
He did not know enough to draw real conclusions. He was also aware that sitting in a chair in his family's estate trying to draw conclusions about a military situation he had no involvement in was not particularly useful. So he stopped, stood up, and went to see what the afternoon had for him.
* * *
The lesson happened the way it usually did, which was that Noctis appeared in the courtyard with a piece of chalk and a flat board he had commissioned from the carpenter two years ago, and within about ten minutes there were children around him. Not because anyone had announced anything. Just because word traveled fast among people who had nothing more pressing to do and something mildly interesting was happening.
There were seven of them today. Pip was there, sitting cross-legged on the ground with his arms folded, doing his best to look like someone who was only here by coincidence. Corin and Dex had shown up together as they always did, already bickering about something that had nothing to do with learning. There were two girls from the kitchen staff, sisters named Tess and Brin, who were eleven and twelve respectively and took everything significantly more seriously than anyone else present. And then there was a quiet boy named Ossian who was fourteen, the son of one of the groundskeepers, and a girl called Midge who was thirteen and had a habit of asking the kind of questions that made everyone else realize they had not been paying attention.
Noctis propped the board against the low wall at the edge of the courtyard, picked up the chalk, and wrote four numbers on it.
"Right. We're doing multiplication today. Who remembers what we covered last time?"
Silence. The specific kind of silence that meant everyone remembered but no one wanted to go first.
"Adding," Tess said eventually.
"Adding," Noctis confirmed. "And subtraction. Good. Multiplication is just adding done faster. If I have four baskets and each basket has six apples, how many apples do I have?"
"Twenty-four," Midge said immediately.
"How did you get there?"
"Six, twelve, eighteen, twenty-four. Four lots of six."
"Exactly. That's it. That's multiplication. Dex, what's three times seven?"
Dex looked like he had been ambushed. He counted on his fingers with the subtlety of someone who believed no one could see him doing it. "Twenty-one."
"Correct. You can use your fingers, I don't care. The point is to get the right answer until it's in your head without needing them."
Dex looked relieved. Corin looked annoyed that Dex had gotten it right.
They went through the basics for a while, Noctis writing problems on the board and calling on people at random, which was the only method that kept everyone in the room mentally. The younger ones needed more time. Ossian was quietly ahead of everyone else and had the good sense not to make it obvious. Pip got three in a row right and tried very hard to look like he had not been paying attention the whole time.
After about half an hour he switched to letters. Grammar was harder to make interesting than numbers because numbers had a clean logic to them, a right answer you could reach and confirm. Grammar had rules and then exceptions to the rules and then exceptions to the exceptions, which he had explained once by saying that language was invented by people who did not agree with each other, which had gotten a laugh and then a genuinely good question from Brin about who had invented writing in the first place.
He had answered that one carefully. He knew the history of writing in his old world well enough. He knew considerably less about how it had developed in this one, so he had stuck to the general principle and moved on.
Today they were working on sentences. Specifically on the difference between a complete sentence and a fragment, which was something that mattered if you were ever going to write a letter or a record or anything that another person needed to read and understand.
"A sentence needs two things," he said, writing on the board. "Something that is doing something, and the thing it is doing. That's it. Everything else is extra."
"What about describing words?" Tess asked.
"Extra. Useful extra. But extra. You can have a perfectly good sentence without them. 'The dog ran.' That's a sentence. 'The large brown dog ran quickly toward the gate' is also a sentence. The describing words help but they're not what makes it a sentence."
"What about 'run,'" Midge said. "Just the word 'run.' Is that a sentence?"
Noctis pointed at her. "Good question. No. Because we don't know what is running. We only have half of what we need."
"What if someone is telling you to run? Like, run, get out of the way?"
He opened his mouth, paused, and then said, "That's actually a valid point. When you're giving a command, the person you're talking to is understood to be the one doing the action even if you don't say it. So technically yes, in that case it counts."
Midge looked pleased with herself. Pip groaned quietly.
They kept going until the light started shifting toward late afternoon gold, the kind of light that meant the day was winding down without quite ending yet. Noctis called it when Corin and Dex started having a conversation with each other that had nothing to do with grammar and everything to do with whether a chicken or a dog would win in a fight, which was a sign that he had lost them.
"Same time in two days," he said. "Think about what a sentence needs. If you can explain it to someone else by then, you understand it."
They dispersed in the loose, unhurried way of people who did not have anywhere urgent to be. Tess and Brin went back toward the kitchen together, already talking. Ossian nodded at him as he passed, which was about as demonstrative as Ossian got. Midge asked one more question about whether animals could have language, he told her that was a longer conversation, and she accepted that with a nod like she was filing it away for later.
Pip lingered for a moment after the others had gone.
"The three times seven," he said. "I already knew that one. I just wanted to see if Dex got it."
"Of course you did," Noctis said.
Pip nodded, satisfied, and headed off toward the stables.
* * *
Dinner was quiet. His mother had a guest, a woman from one of the neighboring estates who visited occasionally and who Noctis had known for years because her presence still required a certain level of polite attention. He managed it. He asked the right questions, contributed to the conversation at the right moments, and finished his meal without incident.
After, he went to his room.
His room was on the second floor of the east wing, which meant the balcony looked out over the grounds and, beyond that, the tree line and then open sky. He had spent a lot of time on that balcony over the years. It was one of those places that had attached itself to his internal sense of home in a way that still caught him off guard sometimes. Not the room itself especially, though it was comfortable enough. Specifically the balcony, and specifically at night.
He leaned on the railing and looked out. The sky was clear and the stars were out in the way they only got when there was no city light to wash them out, which was to say completely, overwhelmingly, in a way he had genuinely not seen until this life. He had grown up in a world where you had to travel to see a sky like this. Here it was just Tuesday.
He thought about the fort again. He had been trying not to, but it kept coming back in the way things did when they were unresolved. Fort Caldren. The Arnoth River. The Dravek Confederacy deciding that this time they were actually going to push instead of posture. He did not know if that was what was happening. The letter had not been clear enough to say. But a garrison post falling was not an accident and it was not a skirmish. Someone had planned it.
He thought about what that meant for him specifically. He had been eighteen for less than a month. In the empire's eyes, in his family's eyes, in anyone's eyes who cared to look, he was of age. He was a Valerius. His brother was the king and his father had served in two military campaigns before handing the throne to Sigurd III and retiring to whatever aging generals did when they stopped being generals. The expectation, unspoken but present, was that Noctis would serve when service was required.
He was not afraid of it exactly. That surprised him a little, examining it. He had spent the first years of his life in this world with a modern man's instinctive aversion to the idea of warfare up close, the visceral version of it, the kind you could not watch from a screen and turn off. But eighteen years of living in a world where it was simply part of the landscape had done something to that. It had not gone away. He still found the whole enterprise wasteful and badly organized in ways that bothered him on a practical level. But the fear of it as a personal event had settled into something quieter. Something he could think about without his chest doing anything unhelpful.
What he felt, more than fear, was a kind of irritation. He had a comfortable life. He had things he was doing. He had a lesson on fractions he had been planning to run next week and a letter coming back from Lord Vane that he would need to respond to and a half-finished bicycle frame in his workshop that he had been making actual progress on. The idea of all of that being interrupted by a war that was probably going to be badly managed felt deeply annoying in a way that he recognized was not the most noble reaction to have.
He almost laughed at himself. Almost.
The night was cool and still. Somewhere in the tree line an owl was doing what owls did. The grounds below were dark and empty, the last of the household staff long since retired. It was the kind of quiet that had taken him years to stop finding unsettling and start finding restful.
He stayed out there for a while, not really thinking about anything in particular anymore, just existing in the way you could at the end of a day that had given you too much to sit with. The pregnancy, the letter, the fort, the lesson, Pip pretending he already knew the answer. A full day. More full than most.
He was about to go back inside when the air in front of him changed.
It started as light. A faint luminescence, circular, appearing in the air about two feet in front of his face. He stepped back immediately, his hand going to the railing behind him. The light was not bright enough to hurt but it was wrong in the specific way that things were wrong in this world when they involved magic, a quality to it that had no natural source, no fire or star or lamp that explained it.
The circle expanded slowly. Lines began to trace themselves inside it, geometric and precise, patterns that branched and intersected with a kind of intentionality that made his stomach drop. He had seen illustrations of elven magic circles in the books his tutors had made him read as a child. He had seen a real one once, from a significant distance, during a demonstration at court three years ago. They looked like this. Exactly like this.
He shoved off the railing and crossed the balcony to the door in three steps, getting his back to something solid and putting distance between himself and whatever was happening. His eyes went to the tree line, the grounds, the sky. Nothing else moving. No one there. The circle just hovered, patient and self-contained, casting a faint pale light on the stone floor of the balcony.
He did not have a weapon on him. He almost never did, this deep into the estate grounds at this hour. He made a quick calculation about whether going back inside to get one was worth taking his eyes off it, decided against it, and stayed where he was.
The circle held its shape for another few seconds. Then it stopped.
The lines that had been tracing elven geometry slowed, flickered, and then began to pull inward. The circular shape compressed, the edges blurring and then sharpening into right angles. Within the span of about four seconds the circle was gone and in its place was a rectangle, floating at eye level, glowing with a soft blue-white light that was clean and flat and completely without the organic texture of any magic Noctis had ever seen demonstrated in this world.
He stared at it.
It was a screen. A holographic screen, or something close enough to the concept that the difference did not matter right now. Flat, rectangular, edges slightly luminous. It looked like something out of a science fiction film or, more specifically, it looked like something out of the kind of novel he had read obsessively in his previous life when he was in his early twenties and had discovered the entire genre of web fiction about people being transported to other worlds and receiving mysterious systems that granted them powers and quest objectives and stat windows.
He was still pressed against his door. His heart was doing something loud. He made it stop, or at least quieter, by taking a breath and looking at the screen properly.
There was text on it. Simple, centered, in a font that was clean and modern and had no business existing in a medieval empire.
[ You have been invited to the Chat Group ]
Below the text were two buttons. Also centered, also clean. One said Accept. The other said Decline.
Noctis looked at the screen for a long moment. He looked at the grounds below, the tree line, the empty dark estate. He looked back at the screen.
"Okay," he said out loud, to no one. "Okay."
In the novels he had read, and he had read a lot of them, this kind of thing went one of two ways. Either the system was benign and came with enormous benefits and the protagonist spent the next several hundred chapters becoming incredibly powerful in interesting and satisfying ways. Or it was something more complicated, something with a cost or a condition attached, something that the protagonist accepted without reading the fine print and spent the next several hundred chapters dealing with the consequences.
He had always found the second type more realistic.
He also knew, standing on a balcony in a medieval empire with a floating holographic screen in front of him, that he was going to press Accept regardless. He had known it the moment he recognized what it was. He was a person who had lived a full life, died, woken up in a completely different world, and spent eighteen years building something new out of the wreckage of everything familiar. Curiosity was not something he had ever been able to switch off. It was probably the thing most intact from his old self.
He crossed the balcony. He raised his hand. The screen was solid-feeling in a way he had not expected, a faint resistance when his fingertip made contact, like pressing against a surface that was there without quite being physical.
He pressed Accept.