I didn't sleep that night either.
But this time it wasn't fear keeping me up. It was something worse.
"Confusion."
I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying the banquet in my head like a madman rewinding the same scene over and over looking for the frame where everything went wrong.
Except — nothing went wrong. That was the problem.
She didn't threaten me. She didn't test me. She didn't place a blade against my throat or give me one of those smiles that said ""I know seventeen ways to kill you with this dessert fork.""
She said ""I don't dislike it.""
What does that "mean?"
I turned over. Punched the pillow into a different shape. It didn't help.
In the novel, Adrienne Dragonart was a monster. Beautiful, brilliant, terrifying — a woman who perfected the sword to the point where even the protagonist, blessed with every cheat the author could invent, had to watch his step around her. She killed her fiancé. She admitted it. Casually.
And tonight she told me she was sorry about my mother.
"Was it a lie?" It didn't feel like one. The flicker in her expression — that tiny, barely-there crack in her composure — that wasn't something you could fake. Not even her.
"Or maybe she's just that good at faking it."
I turned over again. The pillow was a lost cause.
Here's what I knew for certain: Adrienne would eventually kill me. The novel said so.
The protagonist confirmed it. It was a fact, like gravity, or the sun rising, or Sebastian having a generic name.
Here's what I "didn't" know: when. Why. And whether the woman I met tonight was the same woman who would do it.
Because the Adrienne in the novel — the one who confessed to the protagonist about her dead fiancé — she said it with indifference. Like it barely registered. A footnote in her story.
The Adrienne I met tonight asked me if I wanted to run. And when I said I had nowhere to go, she smiled like she understood.
"Like she'd asked herself the same question."
I sat up.
This was dangerous. Not the "she's going to kill me" kind of dangerous — I was used to that by now. This was the "I'm starting to see her as a person" kind of dangerous. That was worse. You can run from a monster. You can't run from someone you empathize with.
"Stop it. Focus. You need a plan."
The engagement was set. Breaking it off directly wasn't an option — I'd tried to formulate that speech and even my "rehearsal" sounded like a suicide note. Avoiding her wouldn't work either; now that we were publicly engaged, the court would push us together at every opportunity.
I needed help. Someone strong. Someone who understood this world's plot better than I did — or at least, someone who "would" understand it, once fate kicked their story into gear.
I needed the protagonist.
---
His name was Elian.
I'd read about him in the novel — well, the chapters I'd managed to finish before dying, anyway. He was the heart of the story. The one the author clearly loved most. Every arc bent toward him eventually, every character's fate tangled with his sooner or later.
But at the start of the novel, Elian wasn't a hero. He was a healer. A priest at a run-down church on the outskirts of the capital, orphaned as an infant and raised by an old cleric who'd found him on the steps. When the old man died, Elian inherited nothing — no money, no family, no name worth carrying. Just a gift for healing that the church was "very" happy to exploit.
In the novel, the author described it in a single paragraph. A quick backstory. Tragic but efficient — just enough to make you root for him before the real plot started.
But I wasn't reading a novel anymore.
I was "in" one. And that single paragraph was a real person, living a real life, being used by people who should have protected him.
"Funny how tragedies are easier to swallow when they're just words on a screen."
I swung my legs off the bed.
"Rumia."
A beat. Then, from outside the door — she must have been standing there. Did she ever sleep?
"Yes, young master?"
"I need to visit the Church of Solene today. The one near the eastern market district."
A pause.
"That is... not a place frequented by nobility, young master."
"Good. Then no one will bother me."
"May I ask why?"
"Prayer."
"...You've never prayed a day in your life, young master."
"Rumia, a man who is engaged to the Princess of this kingdom has "plenty" to pray about."
She couldn't argue with that.
---
The Church of Solene sat at the end of a narrow street that the capital had quietly decided to forget.
The buildings on either side leaned inward like tired old men propping each other up. The cobblestones were cracked and uneven, patched in places with packed dirt. The smell was — well, it was honest. Sweat, smoke, bread from a nearby stall, and beneath it all, the faint iron tang of poverty that no amount of incense could cover.
The church itself was modest. Stone walls that had once been white, a wooden door that had once had hinges that worked properly, and a bell tower that I suspected hadn't rung in years because the bell itself was probably sold off for copper.
A line of people stretched from the door halfway down the street.
They weren't here for prayer.
I watched from across the road, hood pulled low, as a heavyset cleric in clean robes — conspicuously clean, the kind of clean that money buys — stood at the entrance collecting coins. Behind him, through the open door, I could see a figure moving between rows of the sick and injured.
"Three silver for a standard healing. Five for bones. Seven for anything internal. Payment upfront, no exceptions."
Three silver. For a "healing." The people in this line were laborers, washerwomen, dockworkers. Three silver was a week's wages. Some of them were holding their coins like they were holding their own blood — because they were. That money was food. Rent. Their children's meals.
And the cleric collected it with the bored efficiency of a man who'd stopped seeing faces a long time ago.
I felt something tighten in my chest. An old feeling. One I recognized.
"White walls. The smell of antiseptic. Doctors who spoke about me in the third person while I was lying right there. "The patient's prognosis is—" I had a name. I had a name and none of you ever used it."
I unclenched my jaw. I hadn't realized I'd been clenching it.
"Calm down. You're not there anymore. This isn't your fight."
Except — I walked past the cleric, who opened his mouth to demand payment.
"I'm not here for healing."
"Then you're not—"
I pulled back my hood just enough to show the crest on my collar. The count's sigil. Minor nobility, sure, but nobility was nobility in a district like this. The cleric's mouth closed so fast his teeth clicked.
"Of course, my lord. Please, go right in."
"Amazing how money and status work the same way everywhere. Even across lives."
---
Inside, the church was dim and warm, lit by candles that had burned down to nubs and hadn't been replaced. Rows of simple wooden pews had been pushed to the walls to make room for bedrolls and thin mattresses. It smelled like herbs and sweat and something faintly sweet — healing magic. I recognized it from the novel's descriptions, but experiencing it in person was different.
It felt like standing in sunlight on a cold day. Gentle. Unearned. Like warmth that had been given freely, not bought.
And in the middle of it all — him.
Elian.
He was younger than I expected. My age, maybe a year older, but he looked younger because of how he carried himself — slightly hunched, like he was trying to take up less space. Brown hair that needed cutting, falling across a face that was too thin. Eyes the color of warm earth — soft, focused, kind in a way that made you want to look away because you didn't deserve to be looked at like that.
He was kneeling beside an old woman, both hands cupped around her swollen wrist. A faint golden light pulsed between his palms, steady as a heartbeat. The old woman's face, tight with pain a moment ago, slowly relaxed.
"There," Elian said. His voice was quiet. Not shy — quiet. Like someone who had learned that the world listened more when you didn't shout. "The swelling should go down by tonight. Try not to use it too much for a few days."
"Thank you, dear." The old woman patted his cheek with her good hand. "You're too good to us."
He smiled. Not the performative kind — the kind that starts in the eyes and barely reaches the mouth. Like he'd forgotten that smiling was supposed to be for "other" people to see.
"It's nothing."
It wasn't nothing. I could see the fatigue in him even from across the room. The slight tremor in his hands as he pulled them back. The way he braced himself on the pew before standing, like his legs weren't entirely sure they wanted to cooperate.
He'd been healing all day. Probably every day. Pouring himself out like water from a jug that no one bothered to refill.
"The church takes advantage of him to collect money for healing."
It was one thing to read that sentence. It was another to watch it happen. To see a boy my age work himself hollow so that a man in clean robes could collect silver at the door.
I stood there, in the back of the church, watching the protagonist of the story I'd once read for entertainment — and I felt something I hadn't expected.
Not admiration. Not pity.
"Anger."
Not at Elian. At everything around him. At the clerics who profited from his gift. At the system that took an orphan with a kind heart and ground him into a tool. At the world — this one, my old one, apparently they were all the same — that looked at a good person and thought: ""How can I use this?""
"I came here to ask for his help."
I watched him move to the next patient. An injured child, maybe six years old, clutching a bandaged arm and trying very hard not to cry. Elian knelt down, said something I couldn't hear, and the child laughed. "Laughed." Through pain and fear and whatever small tragedy had brought a six-year-old to a church floor — this stranger made him laugh.
"I came here to use him, too."
The thought hit me like cold water.
I'd walked in here with a plan: find the protagonist, befriend him, leverage his future power to help me survive. A transaction dressed up as friendship. Exactly the kind of thing the church was doing to him right now, just with a different currency.
"You're no different, are you?"
I leaned against the back wall and closed my eyes.
"No. I am different. Because I know what I'm doing is selfish — and I'm going to do something about it."
---
I waited.
The line thinned as the afternoon wore on. Patients came and went — healed, grateful, lighter. Elian didn't stop. Didn't take a break. The clerics rotated shifts at the door; he didn't rotate anything.
By the time the last patient left, the sun was low and orange through the church's narrow windows. Elian sat on the edge of a pew, head bowed, hands on his knees. His fingers were still trembling.
I approached.
"Excuse me."
He looked up. Blinked. Took in the coat, the crest, the fact that I was clearly out of place in this church in the same way a cat is out of place in water.
"Are you hurt?" he asked. Immediately. Before hello, before "who are you," his first instinct was to ask if I needed healing.
"This guy."
"No. I'm not hurt. I just — I saw what you do here. The healing."
"Oh." A flicker of something crossed his face. Wariness, maybe. People in positions of power noticing him probably never meant anything good. "If you're here about the church's services, Brother Maren handles the—"
"I'm not here about the services. I'm here about you."
He went very still.
"Great job, Naive. That sounded incredibly ominous. "I'm here about you." What are you, a debt collector? A kidnapper? Try again."
"That came out wrong. I mean — I saw you healing those people. All day. Without rest. And I noticed the church charges three silver per healing."
"...Yes?"
"How much of that goes to you?"
Silence.
He didn't answer, but his expression did. The way his eyes dropped to his hands. The way his shoulders curved inward, just slightly, like a door closing.
"Zero. The answer is zero."
"I thought so," I said quietly.
"They provide me with food and shelter," Elian said. It came out rehearsed. A line he'd told himself so many times it had worn smooth. "Father Aldric took me in when I had nothing. The church raised me. This is the least I can—"
"Father Aldric passed away two years ago."
He stopped.
"The man at the door collecting silver isn't Father Aldric. He's Brother Maren. And the roof over your head has a hole in it — I could see the sky through it from the back pew — while his robes look like they were tailored last week."
I didn't say it with anger. I wasn't trying to lecture him. I said it the way you'd point out a wound someone had been ignoring — carefully, because you knew it hurt.
Elian stared at me for a long moment.
"Why do you care?"
Good question. The honest answer was complicated: "because I read your story and I know you deserve better. Because I watched you make a crying child laugh and it reminded me of every nurse who was kind to me when no one else was. Because I came here to use you and I can't stomach it anymore."
But I couldn't say any of that.
So I said something simpler.
"Because someone should."
---
I didn't ask him for help.
Not today. It wasn't the right time, and even if it had been, I couldn't bring myself to do it. Not after watching him give everything he had to a room full of strangers while the people who were supposed to care for him counted coins.
Instead, I did something impulsive. Something stupid, probably. Something the old Naive — the careful, calculating, survival-first Naive — would have slapped me for.
I left twenty gold coins on the pew beside him before I walked out.
Twenty gold was nothing to a count's household. It was everything to a church in the eastern market district. It was enough to fix the roof, replace the candles, buy medicine that didn't rely on one boy draining himself dry.
I didn't leave my name. Didn't explain. Just set the pouch down, said "for the church," and walked out before he could refuse.
It wasn't a strategy. It wasn't the first move in some master plan to win the protagonist's loyalty.
It was just... the right thing to do.
"Look at me. Two lives in, and I'm finally acting like a decent person. Only took dying once."
I pulled my hood up and stepped back into the narrow street.
The evening air was warm. Summer, still. No chill at all.
And yet — for the first time since I'd arrived in this world — something in my chest felt a little less cold.
---
On the walk home, my brain — that relentless, anxious, never-shuts-up organ — started working again.
"Okay. So you didn't ask for help. That's fine. That's actually better. You don't walk up to someone being exploited and say "hey, can you also do something for me?" That's what a villain does. That's what Brother Maren does."
"But you still need him."
"Not today. Not as a transaction. But eventually — you need the protagonist of this story on your side. Because when the real threats come, when the plot kicks in, when the Pseudo Gods and the succession war and whatever else the author had planned start bearing down — you can't survive alone."
"Adrienne has her memories and her sword."
"Father has his strength and his reputation."
"You have... novel knowledge that runs out at chapter 247 because the author was on a cliffhanger. And a maid who judges you silently. And now, maybe, a connection to a boy in a church who doesn't even know he's the most important person in the world yet."
"It's not much."
"But it's a start."
I stopped at the corner of the main avenue, where the poor district gave way to the merchant quarter, where the merchant quarter gave way to the noble quarter, where everything got progressively cleaner and colder.
"Step one: survive the engagement. Status — somehow, improbably, in progress."
"Step two: find the protagonist. Status — found. Not recruited. But found."
"Step three: ..."
I didn't have a step three yet. But for the first time, that felt okay.
I'd figure it out. Or I wouldn't, and I'd die, and at least this time I'd die knowing I'd done one decent thing with the money I didn't earn.
"Not a bad day, all things considered."
Rumia was waiting at the estate gate. Arms crossed. The expression of a woman who had "questions."
"How was the prayer, young master?"
"Enlightening, Rumia. Truly enlightening."
"You smell like a church."
"That is because I was in a church."
"And the twenty gold missing from the household ledger?"
"How does she already — it's been two hours—"
"A donation. Very spiritual. Tax deductible."
"We don't have taxes, young master."
"Then it's just spiritual."
She stared at me. I stared back.
"...I'll prepare dinner," she said finally.
"You're a saint, Rumia."
""Someone" in this household should be."
---
The report came late that evening. A minor note, buried among intelligence briefings about troop movements and court gossip. My attendant almost didn't mention it.
"The youngest son of the 13th Seat's Rider was seen visiting the Church of Solene in the eastern district today."
I set down my tea.
"The church?"
"Yes, Your Highness. He spent several hours inside. Left a sizable donation. The priests there employ a healer — an orphan boy with an unusual gift."
"Elian."
My fingers tightened around the cup.
In the memories I carried, Elian was the one variable I could never fully predict. Kind to a fault, stubborn beyond reason, and possessed of a power that even the gods eventually took notice of. He was the reason the world survived. He was also the reason it nearly didn't.
And Naive had found him. "Already." Weeks before the plot demanded it. Months before the protagonist's story was supposed to begin.
"How? Why? What does he know?"
A coincidence. It had to be. The son of a count visiting a church — unusual, but not impossible.
But Naive had changed. The reports all agreed on that. Three weeks ago, something shifted. He stopped being timid. Started asking questions. Started "noticing" things.
And now he'd found Elian.
I took a sip of tea. It had gone cold.
"Who are you, Naive?"
"What do you know that you shouldn't?"