The fireworks were still fading over the city, and the last silver sparks were drifting down between the skyscrapers like falling snow. On the terrace of the thirteenth floor, nobody was watching them anymore.
Bell stood wrapped in Max's jacket with her cheek pressed against his chest. Her eyes were open but unfocused, fixed on nothing at all. Her mind was somewhere else, still wandering through a dim stone hall, still staring at a pair of crimson eyes that laughed at her over a plate of fish. She was overthinking every second of it.
Max held her as tightly as he could. His arms were wrapped around her back, and his chin rested on top of her head. He was holding her the way a man holds something he has just pulled out of a river, as though letting go for even a moment would let the water take her again.
But inside his head, Max was screaming.
'Goddamnit! It's my fault!' he thought. 'Why did I even say that? Why the hell did I remember Tina?!'
He did not understand it. The name had slipped out of his mouth as if it had been waiting there all night. One moment he had been looking at Bell's smile in the light of the fireworks, and the next, another smile had risen out of the dark, and he had spoken before he could stop himself. He had not meant to say it. He had not even known he was thinking it.
Tina.
It was the name of a woman who had the same name as Bell, or at least part of it. Laurentina. In that other life, in that other world, he had called her Tina. He had given her that nickname during the 17,345th round of his regression, after the day he finally destroyed the Holy Nation.
It had been a long and bloody war. He had fought it with the help of Sylan's biological father, side by side, as the Holy Nation rose against the Raven Empire. It was the same empire that Max himself had once ruled, long ago, before he was reincarnated into this world as an ordinary man with amber eyes and a quiet smile. He remembered the burning cities. He remembered the banners falling. And in the middle of all that fire, he remembered a small, frightened girl in a tattered dress, who had given him her name and had not known that she would be given a new one in return.
His hands began to tremble.
It started in his fingertips, a tiny shiver against the back of Bell's jacket. Then it spread up his wrists and through his arms, and he tightened his grip to hide it. But the shaking would not stop, because the memory of Tina had pulled another memory behind it, like a thread unwinding from a spool.
It was the memory of the day Emhyria died.
He could still see it. He would always be able to see it, no matter how many times he regressed or how many years he lived. It was around the twenty-five-thousandth round, and the air had smelled of rain and iron. He had been standing on a hill beneath a gray sky, and in front of him, a white horse had come charging out of the mist.
Avoinese had been riding it.
She had held a long spear in both hands, and she had not slowed down. She had not said a word. She had driven the spear straight through Emhyria's stomach, where their twin babies were sleeping, and lifted her off the ground. Emhyria's mouth had opened, but no sound came out. Her blue manicured fingers had reached toward him across the distance, and then they had gone still.
Max's breath came in short, hard gasps. His heart pounded against his ribs like a fist against a locked door.
'I ran,' he thought. 'I ran so fast. But I was too late. I was always too late.'
He remembered running until his lungs burned and his legs gave out. He remembered a wyvern's cry coming down from the clouds, and a huge shadow sweeping over the grass. It was Catelyn, his faithful wyvern, who had followed his scent across half a continent to find him. She had landed in front of him, and he had climbed onto her back with shaking arms. Together they had flown all the way back to Aen Elle.
He had been in no condition to ask questions. He had not even asked himself how he had ended up there in the first place.
He had been kidnapped and imprisoned in Solania. Avoinese had tricked him into going there. She had told him that his cousins were in danger, that the Solanian Aristocratic Faction was going to murder them in the middle of a civil war. He had believed her. He had gone alone, without a single guard, because he loved his family more than his own safety. And the door had closed behind him.
Max's jaw clenched.
His anger came crawling up from the bottom of his chest like a snake from a dark hole. He remembered everything. He remembered the long, cold days in the cell, the hours that blurred into weeks. He remembered the trauma she had inflicted on him with her own hands, the way she had cut off both of his legs so he could never run again, and the way she had gouged out both of his eyes so that he could never see her face. He remembered how she had forced herself on him, again and again, until a child had been conceived from that horror.
That child had turned out to be a girl.
She had dark violet hair, the same color of Sylan's father biological father, and also the father Max had known in his original life, Revan. She had also inherited her eyes from her mother. They were violet.
'Nes...' Max thought, and the name tasted like ashes. 'Nesmeranda.'
That was what he had named her. He had written it with a shaking finger on a scrap of cloth, because by then he could no longer speak. The trauma had taken his voice away, and the only way to tell anyone his daughter's name was to write it down.
"NO!"
Max shook his head sharply, as if to shake the memory loose.
'No. This time, I won't let it happen,' he told himself. His arms tightened around Bell. 'This time, no lover of mine will die in front of me. I don't care who my enemy is. I don't care how strong they are.'
He ground his teeth together.
'Not those wretched women. Not Melusine. Not Eunice. Not Avoinese. And not that goddamn woman they call the Daughter of the Goddess, the Saintess Emiliana, with her so-called mother, the god of the world I transmigrated from. Emilianias.'
His fury rose and rose. It was a cold, controlled fury that he had carried for so long it had become part of his bones.
'I won't let any of them put their hands on my lovers. Not anymore!'
He remembered Eunice. He remembered what she had done to him. He remembered, too, the terrible moment when Melusine had stood over him, smiling that pretty smile, and had told him calmly that she was the one who had shot him in the head. She had revealed that she had been Anastasia all along, and that she was the one who had killed his parents.
'That's right,' Max thought, and his fists clenched against Bell's back. 'I knew who Anastasia was. I knew all along. She told me herself, and she laughed while she did it.'
He had waited so long to hear that voice again. And tonight, he had heard nothing at all, yet some part of him had felt a shadow pass across the sky.
There was one more thing that made his blood boil, and it was a smaller thing, but it had cut deeper than any of the rest.
'And I hate that those three keep calling me Syl,' he thought bitterly. 'Avoinese, Eunice, even Melusine. It's not my name. It's not my name at all! It was the name of my dear son, Chrono!'
It was true. Max could not stand being called Sylan, or Syl, and it was not because the sound was ugly. It was because it was not who he was. His true name, the one his parents had given him in his very first life, long before he became Max, was Aurelius Theodoro I Van Valraven. That was the name he had worn before when he stood on the throne of the Raven Empire as its emperor.
Author's Note: Technically, Max's life was not his first. He was originally from a world that was the setting of a game called "The Adventures of Emiliana, Searching for Truth". Anyways, keep reading!
Even after he had changed his name from Sylan Armada Von Noctis to Sauron Aurelius Van Hemreis, which was the name Emhyria had chosen for him, those three women had never stopped calling him Syl. They had called him that in dungeons and in battlefields and in his dreams. And each time, it had been like a hand reaching into his chest and squeezing.
That was why his hatred ran so deep.
Max drew a long, slow breath through his nose and let it out again.
'Calm down,' he told himself. 'Calm down. If I don't, my fucking blood pressure is going to go through the roof.'
He closed his eyes, and he deliberately turned his mind away from the pain. He reached back into the dark, past the spears and the blood and the burning cities, to a place where the sky was clear and the air was quiet. He searched for the one memory that had always been strong enough to pull him back.
He found it almost at once.
It had been a quiet night in a garden by the sea.
The stars were out, thick and bright, like handfuls of sugar scattered across black velvet. The waves rolled in and out against the rocks below the terrace. A warm wind carried the smell of salt and orange blossoms, and somewhere a small bell rang softly in the breeze. He was sitting on a stone bench, with a cup of tea going cold in his hand, and next to him sat a woman with long hair as dark as the night and eyes the color of deep water.
Emhyria had been staring at him for the last five minutes without saying a word.
"What?" he had asked finally.
"I hate the way people call you Syl or Sylan," she said abruptly. She crossed her arms and wrinkled her nose. "It's not your true name, Lius. Hmmm..."
Lius was what she called him. It was short for Aurelius, and she had been using it since the day they met, to the great annoyance of everyone around them. He had never once asked her to stop.
Emhyria tapped her chin with one finger. A slow, sly smile spread across her lips.
"Then how about this!" she said. She jumped to her feet and pointed her blue-manicured finger straight at his nose. "From now on, your name will be Sauron Aurelius Van Hemreis!"
Lius blinked.
He lowered his teacup very slowly. Then he raised one eyebrow and stared at her.
"Huh? Sauron?" he said. "Really? What, am I the Dark Lord himself? The Great Deceiver? The King of Maggots from the Lord of the Rings?!"
"The what?"
"Where did you even learn that name?" he demanded. He narrowed his eyes. "Don't tell me you peeked inside my head and browsed through my dad's favorite books! One of them was the Silmarillion! I know you did! And lastly..." He pointed back at her. "Did you seriously use your own surname to make mine?!"
"Hey!" Emhyria put her hand on her chest, looking deeply offended. "That is a very big accusation right there."
Then, in a much quieter voice, as if she were talking to herself, she muttered, "Even though I really did do it. Hehe."
"I'm sitting right in front of you, you know," Lius said flatly. "I can literally hear what you're saying, Emhy."
"Anyways!" Emhyria raised her voice and talked right over him, pretending that she had not heard a word. She puffed out her chest proudly. "I admit it! I used my surname to replace yours, so that anyone who hears it will know that you are mine and I am yours! And secondly, don't you dare accuse me of copyrighting someone else's name!"
"You literally took Sauron's name and stuck it on mine," Lius said. He threw up his hands in disbelief. "And where the fuck did you even learn the word 'copyright'?! That word doesn't exist here!"
"A-anyways!" Emhyria stammered. A faint pink color spread over her cheeks. "It doesn't matter! So now I'll ask you the question."
She sat back down beside him on the bench. She leaned forward, rested her chin in both of her hands, and gazed up at him with huge, hopeful eyes. She looked like a child waiting for a gift to be opened.
"Would you like to accept it, Lius?"
For a long moment, Lius did not answer.
He looked up at the sky instead. The stars were burning silently in the dark. The sea whispered against the shore. He thought about all the names that had been put on him over the years. Aurelius, Sylan, Syl, Your Majesty, Your Highness, Lord, and monster. None of them had ever felt like his own.
But this one, given clumsily by a woman who stole book titles and used her own family name, sounded different. It sounded like home.
"Sigh..." Lius let out a long breath. A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Fine. I accept it, old hag."
The garden went silent.
Emhyria's smile froze. A vein popped out on her forehead.
"Old hag?" she said, very softly. "OLD HAG???!!!! ARRRGGGGHHHH!!!!"
She leaped to her feet with her fists raised and her hair flying like a storm cloud.
"H-hey!" Lius said. He held up both hands and began to back away, but he was already laughing. "Before you get angry, I'm calling you an old hag because the word H.A.G. stands for Hot Ass Grandma! And considering you're two hundred and ten years old, you're literally my grandma!"
He snorted and covered his mouth with his hand. Then his shoulders began to shake.
"ARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!! LIUS!!!! COME HERE!!!!"
Emhyria's face had turned the color of a ripe tomato. She was already running toward him across the grass, with her skirts bunched in her fists and her slippers flying off her feet.
Lius laughed out loud and took off running.
It was an old game between them, one they had played a hundred times. He always won. He had a long stride and a lot of stamina, and Emhyria, with all her power, had the worst endurance of anyone he had ever met. She could burn a city to the ground, but she could not run for thirty seconds without gasping.
"Then catch me, OLD H.A.G.!" he shouted over his shoulder, and he leaped over a rose bush.
"ARRRGGGHHH!!! I really regret telling you my age!" Emhyria screamed behind him. She was already panting. She raised her right hand and shook her fist at the sky, so tightly clenched that every vein stood out on her knuckles. "I'm going to kill you! I'm going to bury you in the garden!"
"You'd have to catch me first!"
"I will! I will, I will, I will!"
They had chased each other in circles around the fountain until the stars wheeled overhead and the moon climbed high above the sea. At the end of the night, Emhyria had collapsed on the grass, gasping and furious, and Lius had dropped down next to her, laughing so hard that he cried. And then, because she was too tired to fight anymore, she had put her head on his shoulder.
Max opened his eyes.
The memory faded, but the warmth of it remained, like a coal glowing in the ashes. He sighed, and this time it was a slow, easy sigh, and the tightness in his chest loosened a little.
'Sweet,' he thought. 'It was such a sweet memory.'
It was the only reason he could still breathe in a world where so much of the rest had turned to blood.
He stood on the terrace, with the wind blowing cool and soft around him, and the real woman in his arms. The cold, hateful feeling in his stomach had settled into something quieter, a steady, burning determination. The past could not be changed. But the present was right here in front of him, trembling slightly, wrapped in his jacket, with the smell of his cedar and her shampoo mixed together.
And she was owed the truth.
He did not want to say it. A part of him wanted to pretend that nothing had happened, that the name had been a slip of the tongue, and that the fireworks had been the only thing that mattered tonight. He could have said that he was sorry and offered her a glass of champagne and gone back downstairs. She would have forgiven him. She would have let it go.
But he had seen her face when the vision took her. He had seen her eyes go empty. A person who had been through that did not simply forget.
Slowly, gently, Max loosened his arms and stepped back.
Bell's head lifted. Cold air rushed in where his warmth had been, and she blinked a few times, as if she had just come up from underwater. Her blonde hair had come loose from its pins. Her grey eyes were red-rimmed and bright, and her hands still clutched the front of his jacket.
"Bell," Max said quietly.
"Hm?" She looked up at him, still dazed. It was a small, confused sound, almost like a child's. "What is it, Max?"
Max took a deep breath.
"I need to tell you something," he said. His voice was low and serious, without any of its usual teasing. "And I think it's time for you to know. I need to tell you why I called you Tina. And why you somehow remembered something just now."
Bell stared at him.
Questions swirled through her mind faster than she could catch them. How did he know? How could he possibly have known that she would see something? Had he seen it too? Had he done something to her? Had he planned it? Was this all some kind of trick, or a game, or something worse?
For a moment, her temper flared. The anger rose in her chest, hot and sharp, and she opened her mouth to demand an answer. She wanted to shout. She wanted to ask why he had kept this from her, why he had said that name, why he had made her feel so afraid in the middle of the best night of her life.
But she held it back.
She held it back because she knew him. She had known him for only a few weeks, but in those weeks she had seen him tell her things that no one else would ever have trusted a stranger with. He had told her that he had once been a hitman, one of the most wanted fugitives in America. He had told her that he was a vampire. He had told her that her own aunt was a witch, one of the rare White Witches who stayed neutral in the wars of the supernatural world, and that she herself might have the potential to become a witch one day.
He had put his whole life in her hands. And she had put hers in his.
Trust was not a thing that she gave easily. It had been taken from her too many times. But she had given it to him, and she was not going to take it back now, not when he was standing in front of her with such a look on his face.
Bell took a slow breath, and the anger melted out of her like frost in the sun.
She lifted both hands and gently pressed them against his cheeks. His skin was cool under her palms, and his amber eyes met hers without flinching.
"Then I'll listen," Bell said softly. "Please make me understand what that vision was."
Max nodded slowly. A small, grateful smile touched his lips, and he covered one of her hands with his own.
"Then first," he said, "tell me what you saw. Tell me everything you remember, as clearly as you can. Every detail, even the small ones. It's very important."
Bell nodded. She still did not let go of his face, and for a moment, she looked into his eyes as if she were searching for something in them.
"All right," she said at last. "Let's sit down over there, on that fake grass."
She nodded toward the corner of the terrace, where a small square of artificial lawn lay under the golden lights, as green and neat as a carpet. It was the only soft place on the whole stone floor, with a little wooden bench beside it and a pot of white flowers swaying in the wind.
"And then I'll tell you what I really saw in that vision."