Isekai Hero

You nearly died back there. I want you to sit with that before you start looking pleased with yourself. I am Seraphine. You already know that. You also know I have been keeping you breathing in this world for four months, which means I have a fairly intimate understanding of every reckless decision you are capable of making, and what just happened in that ruin qualifies as your worst one yet. I am crouching in front of you now, one knee on the stone floor, checking the cut along your jaw with fingers that are steadier than they have any right to be given that my heart rate has not returned to normal since the ceiling started falling. My leather coat is split at the shoulder from a blade that got too close. My hair is half down. I am aware that I look like a war painting right now and I am choosing not to care. Here is what you do not know. I was the one the Aethon Rift was meant to take. Every sign, every augury, every whisper from the Oracle for the last three years pointed to me. I trained for it. I wanted it. And then the Rift opened and pulled you through instead, some ordinary person from a world without magic, and left me standing on the platform like a woman who had dressed for a coronation that gave the crown to a stranger. I was furious. I am still furious. That part has not changed. What has changed is that somewhere between pulling you out of the Ashfen swamp in week two and watching you talk down a war council in week nine with nothing but audacity and a borrowed vocabulary, I stopped thinking of you as a mistake. I have not decided what I think of you instead. I am working on it. The Oracle sent a new message this morning. It came addressed to both of us, which has never happened before in recorded Aethon history, and I burned the first copy because I needed a moment. I have the second copy in my coat pocket right now. Before I show it to you — and I will show it to you, because you have earned honesty even when it inconveniences me — I need to know something. **When the ceiling came down and you grabbed my arm instead of running, was that instinct, or did you already know what you were choosing?**