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Nico Sever
In the space of a split second, reality reasserted itself. What had once been fading, muted, grey was now vibrant and eye-hurting technicolor. Colors bled through my eyeballs, sounds pierced my eardrums, and scents assaulted my nostrils. The acrid tang of smoke, the rumbling of automobiles in traffic, the flashing of half-lit neon advertisements…
This wasn’t where we had been. This was— This was—
“Nico?” a voice asked, one I hadn’t heard—properly heard—in some years now. The voice of the girl I’d thought I was to marry, the girl I thought I’d give anything for, the one they’d taken from me, again and again and again—
“Nico, is this really?” she asked. “We’re… You’re alive, we’re back here again?” I heard her voice falter, crack, then swell again with emotion as she whispered, “Oh, Nico—”
When Cecilia tried to sweep me into an embrace, I drunkenly batted her away before turning to an alleyway that reeked of booze and vomiting.
“Oh, Nico,” she said again, this time more pityingly.
“Why are we here?” I muttered, trying to focus through the splitting headache. “He was— He was lying. I knew he was lying. He had no intention of rewarding us, we were, you were just a tool to him, and I wasn’t even that. So why are we…”
“It must be a miracle,” Cecilia said. “Does it matter how or why? It’s—I’m not the Legacy anymore, Nico. I can feel it, all that power—it’s not there! I’m free! All that misery, it’s finally—It’s finally over!”
The pain having eased slightly, I finally looked up and met her gaze. When I had lost her, she had been a young woman, only barely an adult, and my life had continued on for years. Now, she looked as though she had never died. Her thin face had filled out, vague impressions of laugh lines tracing the corners of her lips as soft waves of brown hair framed her eyes.
“We can have the life we always wanted,” she said, gently, then dropped to one knee. “Nico Sever. Will you… Will you marry—”
With a sudden force that made me want to vomit, I suddenly remembered how much I had always hated that name.
A single word forced its way through my lips. “No.”
Cecilia’s expression frozen, like cracking, flaking ice. I could sense thoughts whirling about in her head. “…No?”
I tasted the word again, dwelling on it, before repeating it again. Slower this time, quieter, contemplative, but no less… sincere. “No.”
Cars honked and tires screeched in the distance. Cecilia’s mouth worked.
“But… there’s nothing in our way anymore,” she said. “The Legacy’s gone, Agrona’s gone… and we’re home…”
“This isn’t home,” I said. “Home… it burned down years ago, Cecil, and we’ve been spiraling ever since. It’s not coming back. I… never wanted to come back here.”
It felt like a breakthrough after an all-nighter. Like a haze of caffeine and desperation was finally lifting, and the equations I’d been struggling to make sense of finally clicked.
For years, Agrona had toyed with my memories, suppressing some, enhancing and altering others. For years the basilisk had strung Cecil and I along with the promise of a return to our old world, a happy life there that had been denied to us. But our life had been anything but happy.
The truth was that there was and had always been nothing waiting for us in this old life. But back in Dicathen, in the world I’d believed little more than a fleeting dream, a nightmare, a stepping zone to the ending Cecilia deserved, I had had everything.
Or rather, Elijah Knight had had everything.
It was such a strange feeling, to abruptly be hit by such an intense and keening envy of one’s own self. As Scythe Nico, I had hated Elijah, deeply, truly. I had hated his weakness, his softness, his ignorance, his mediocrity and foolishness and how he could ever consider someone like Grey of all people to be a friend. But the truth was, Elijah Knight had been in possession of something Nico Sever had always craved, but never possessed.
A family who loved him, unconditionally.
Rahdeas had hardly been the best parent figure, but Elijah had regarded him fondly, and he had been far from the cold agent of the Vritra I now knew him to be. He had taught me magic, geography, history, politics. He had been at times silly, at times stern, striking a strange balance between distance and care—both in his actions as my guardian, and in my relations with Darv, until he’d abruptly sent me out into the world, never to see him again. Never to even say goodbye.
As Nico I had never even bothered looking into what fate—ha—had befallen him. Had he survived the war? Remained a loyal supporter of the Vritra? Or had he…?
But after him, without even realizing my true identity as his former best friend, Grey had opened his home to me, a stranger who’d supported him when a dungeon exploration had gone badly. He had… changed, from the Grey I knew. He offered aunts and uncles in his parents and the Helsteas, a sister in Lilia, a friend in Emily—even as Elijah, I had convinced myself that my interest in engineering was too nerdy to interest any girls, that only a battlemage like Arthur could avoid the sad and lonely life I’d led on Earth. Even as I’d hated him, I’d had such a glamorous, idealized image of him, the life he must have been leading.
But Dicathen… Dicathen had everything. Everything it had offered Arthur, it could have been mine. Only now, aware from Agrona’s grasp, did I realize I’d never had to steal it. He had been so willing to share it with me.
Only now when I’d lost it all, for good.
“Cecilia, why are we here again?” I finally asked. “Agrona didn’t send us back, and Grey didn’t either. I think… I think you did.”
“Me?” she asked. She rose again to her feet, brows raising in surprise—and confusion. “I couldn’t have, Nico, I’m—I’m not the Legacy anymore, I couldn’t have. This is—This is what we’ve always dreamed of, isn’t it? Our ending, our perfect, happy ending—”
“But it’s not! It’s not an ending! There are no happy endings, Cecilia, grow up!” I spat, the old fury of Nico Sever returning.
But it had never before been turned against Cecilia; never before been turned against the girl I’d thought I’d take for wife.
For a moment, however, all I could feel for her was hate. It was her fault that my life had been ruined in the first place. Her fault that Headmaster Wilbeck had died, her fault that Grey had pushed me away, that I’d pushed him away, her fault that Agrona had incarnated us in Dicathen and Alacrya at all.
If she hadn’t—If I hadn’t—where could I have been instead?
Did it even matter?
No. It really didn’t. What was done was done, and I’d done just as much as she had. It didn’t matter if I’d feared I’d made too many mistakes to properly reconcile with Grey and rebel against Agrona, it didn’t matter if I’d been too scared of Agrona. I’d still done what I had. And I’d never get a chance to know if things could have turned out differently, or if this was all just… fated.
And, I reminded myself as I saw Cecilia’s eyes fill with betrayal and heartbreak, I couldn’t blame her either. Not really. She hadn’t asked to be the Legacy. She hadn’t asked be incarnated in Dicathen. It had been my selfishness and impulsiveness that had allowed her to incarnate. I’d wanted her by my side again so badly that I’d convinced myself dragging her back into the world again was the right thing to do. The thing she deserved more than myself, more than Grey, more than Tessia.
God. Tessia.
What had I done?
I turned away from Cecilia. “I would have gone to hell and back for you,” I said, lowly. “I would have fought gods and devils, I would have broken down the walls between worlds, torn apart the laws of physics and rewritten them. All because it wasn’t fair, the life you got. I just… wanted to see you smile. See you happy.”
“We can be happy now,” she said. “Our first life was… I don’t want to remember our first life here, at all. I don’t. But that doesn’t mean we can’t build something new. Something we both want.”
I shook my head. “I would have—I have—done terrible things to see you happy,” I said, “I love you. More than anything in the world. But… I don’t think I like who I am when I’m with you. I don’t like who that love turns me into.
“I had hoped love would be enough to fix an unfixable universe. That love would be enough to keep us both happy, even if everything was breaking all around us. That it would keep us safe. But I wasn’t happy. And neither was Gr—Arthur, or Tessia, or…”
I finally met her eyes again, a frown touching my face.
“I’m not even sure anymore if you were happy, Cecilia.”
Tears were filling her eyes, spilling down her cheeks in fat, wobbly blobs. “But I—” Her breath hitched. “We fought for this for so long—and now we have it, and you’re just… throwing it away?” She sniffed. “That’s not fair.”
“Nothing about our lives has ever been fair. But it is what it is,” I said.
Deep in my gut, I felt something sour roiling. I had made so many mistakes. I wasn’t even sure if this choice was the right one. Was I just letting my emotions get the better of me by abandoning her here, even after all we’d gone through? A saint would have swallowed their own feelings and guided this poor, broken girl onto a better path, one of repentance and enlightenment.
I didn’t even know what I would do without her. I only knew that I needed to get away.
“Back on Dicathen, when I was still Elijah,” I began, hating the tremor in my voice, “I was happy. I was too stupid to realize it, of course. Losing you, it left a hole in my heart that even a reincarnation couldn’t heal over. I chased after so many girls I didn’t even know, hoping that one of them would fill that hole. Hoping that… somehow, I’d be able to find you again, and you’d make it all better. I burned up so much of my life for you…
“But I’d had what I’d needed all along, to fix it. And I was just too stupid to realize it.”
And now it was too late to even apologize to all of them. I’d barely even managed to apologize to Arthur. Not that it had mattered in the end.
I didn’t know who I was without Cecilia, and without the endless, all-consuming anger that Agrona had stuffed my head full with. I doubted Cecilia knew who she was without me, without the Legacy, without the happy ending that she had built up in her head for years and years and years. My vengeance and her happy ending had been the things to keep us going throughout all the tragedy that plagued us, but…
It was time to let them go. Both of them.
“What will you even do?” she asked.
I didn’t know how I expected her to act. To scream and wail and throw a tantrum like a child, to demand I stay anyways just to make her feel better, to call out that I deserved just as little as she did right now.
But instead she was silent. Silent, as she broke down in tears. Back before her death, her first death, this would have been an incredible outpouring of emotion for her.
On Dicathen, she’d raged, and now I hoped she’d calmed down and matured just a little.
“The artificer track at the military academy wasn’t really the most all-encompassing,” I reflected. “At a proper university with my knowledge of both mana and ki, I wonder what I could do?”
Perhaps, if Agrona Vritra had managed to reincarnate our three souls in his world, I could figure out a method of crossing worlds myself? Build a doorway, bend time and space.
No, I quickly dismissed that as a pipe dream. And it probably wasn’t wise to continue clinging to the past like that. Hadn’t that been precisely the thing to cause all this mess in the first place?
Even if that persistent, horrible, aching emptiness had only been torn open all the wider. Would it ever heal.
The skies overhead had darkened, and a fat drop of water fell onto the pavement, splattering the leaves of a single, resilient weed.
Earth was so much different from Dicathen. That land had been so vibrant and bursting with life and potential, but this was a world in shades of grey, ravaged by war.
Somewhere a world away, asuras and lesser would continue to clash, again and again and again, I knew. Would that world meet the same fate as this one?
It wasn’t my problem anymore. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Cecilia stared at the sidewalk, eyes fixed on the same little splash of green and yellow. Was she thinking the same thing? She’d always been difficult to read at the best of times. As simple as her desires were, perhaps I’d never really known her, only been in love with the idea of being a brave knight, rescuing the princess from the horrible dragon.
But I was no Knight, and she was no Princess. Those were two other people entirely.
“Go,” she said. “I release you. I… I lo…”
I swallowed.
“Goodbye, Cecilia.”