The first thing I noticed was the ceiling.
It was too high. Vaulted stone and carved at the edges with something that might have been flowers if the craftsman had ever actually seen one, lit by the pale grey crawl of early morning through a window that was also too tall, too narrow, and fitted with actual iron latticework.
I stared at it for a long time.
Then I sat up, looked at my hands, unfamiliar hands, longer fingers than I was used to, a small scar on the left knuckle I had no memory of earning — and thought, very calmly, oh no.
Not oh no in the way you think it when you've locked your keys in the car. More in the way you think it when you're standing on train tracks and you've just registered the vibration in the rails.
I knew this room.
Not because I'd been here before. I hadn't — this body hadn't, anyway. I knew it the way you know a film set you've watched a hundred times in the background of someone else's scene. The writing desk in the corner with the brass inkwell. The wardrobe that was slightly too large for the space it occupied. The Von Vülsturgen family crest embroidered on the blanket currently pooled around my waist, a silver bird on dark blue that I'd seen exactly once in a game menu, listed under Minor Noble Families of the Veldran Empire — No Routes Available.
No routes available.
That had been the full extent of Aldric — William — Von Vülsturgen's existence in Celestial Hearts. A name in a menu. Background texture. The kind of NPC that existed to make the world feel populated and never once had a line of dialogue.
I swung my legs off the bed and sat there on the edge of it, feet on cold stone, and did a very thorough mental accounting of my situation.
My name — my real name, the one attached to three years of saved game files and an embarrassing number of completed routes — was gone. I couldn't feel it anymore, the way you can't feel a tooth after the anaesthetic kicks in. I knew it had existed. I couldn't reach it.
What I could reach, with perfect and merciless clarity, was everything else.
Every route. Every chapter. Every branching dialogue tree and hidden event flag and optional scene I'd unlocked by saying the right thing to the right person at the right time. The entire architecture of Celestial Hearts sat in my head like a building I'd helped construct, and I was now apparently living in its foundations.
I knew what year it was. I knew what month. I knew that in approximately six weeks the Royal Veldran Academy would open its doors for the new term, and a minor noble girl named Lotte Mevaine would arrive and accidentally begin the chain of events that the game had been built around.
I knew all four love interest routes by heart. I'd completed them all. Some of them twice.
I knew exactly what happened to Vieira De Valdecroix at the end of every single one.
I stood up. Found my footing on unfamiliar legs — slightly taller than I was used to, which was disorienting in a way I hadn't anticipated — and walked to the window. The view was a courtyard I recognised from the game's title screen, grey stone and early mist and a garden that was trying its best.
Six weeks.
In six weeks the story started. In six weeks Lotte arrived and the plot clicked into motion and somewhere on the academy grounds, Vieira De Valdecroix would begin doing what she always did — building toward an ending that I had watched play out more times than I could count, in four different variations, all of them wrong.
I pressed my hand flat against the cold glass and looked out at the courtyard and thought about the last time I'd sat in front of my screen at two in the morning watching her bad ending for the fourth time, that specific scene where she stands alone in the hearing chamber and there is nobody — not one person — in her corner.
I had closed the game. I had sat in the dark for a while. And I had thought, for the first time, 'what if someone had just chosen her.'
Well.
Here I was.
I had no status worth mentioning, no political leverage, no special abilities, no system prompt floating helpfully in my peripheral vision offering me stat bonuses or quest markers. I was a background NPC in someone else's story with a scar on my knuckle and six weeks to figure out how to matter.
I pushed off the window.
'Fine,' I thought. 'I've played this game before.'
'This time I'm not watching.'