Soren dropped onto his bed hard enough to make the frame groan beneath him.
For a few seconds he didn't move; he just lay there on his back with one arm flung across his body, staring blankly at the ceiling while his chest rose and fell a little too fast.
Every part of him felt used up.
His shoulder still ached, his head still felt faintly wrong in the way it often did after pushing too hard, and the rest of his body carried the dull, ugly soreness of a fight that had ended badly and then refused to leave him alone afterwards.
He turned his face into the pillow and bit down on the inside of his lip until the sharp taste of iron spread across his tongue.
The duel wouldn't stop replaying.
Not in the loud way, not with every movement and every spell lined up neatly from start to finish, but in fragments, in flashes that kept surfacing before he could shove them away.
His own rough breathing.
The frozen arena floor underfoot.
The brief, dangerous thrill of feeling things click together for once.
The shallow cut on Alex's side.
The thought, ridiculous and fragile and real all at once, that he might actually be able to do this.
That was what stung most.
It was not that he had gone in confident.
He had not.
He knew exactly who Alex was, what Alex represented, and how stupid it would have been to walk into that arena believing he was favoured to win.
But underneath all of that caution, all of that dread, there had still been something smaller and quieter, something he had not quite managed to crush before the duel began.
Hope.
During the fight, for a little while, that hope had felt justified.
He had made Alex work.
It hadn't been elegant, and it hadn't been clean, but it had been real.
He had forced Alex to answer him properly.
He had dragged the duel into uglier shapes, into awkward angles and messy exchanges, made him deal with terrain, pressure, timing, and distance.
He had pieced together everything he had, half-learned techniques, observed movements, improvised tricks, and turned them into something that, for those few minutes, almost looked like enough.
Then Alex had closed his eyes, and everything after that had felt less like losing a duel and more like being reminded of where the world thought he belonged.
Soren shut his own eyes and breathed out through his nose, slow and thin.
The golden light still sat wrong in his head.
It was not just strong.
If it had only been strength, he could have dealt with that more easily.
Strength could be measured.
Strength could be cursed, resented, or planned around.
What Alex had shown him in the arena had felt worse than that.
It had felt absolute.
The pressure of it, the way the world itself seemed to slow and thicken around him, the way his own body and spells had lagged inside that golden dominion, none of it matched the version Soren knew.
That was not the [Divinity] from the game.
Or if it was, then it had become something else.
Something deeper, stranger, and much more frightening than a neat skill description in a menu.
His fingers curled into the blanket.
'Why does it feel like I failed even though I used everything I had?'
The thought came back bitter and tired, worn thin from circling the same track ever since he left the arena.
He had not thrown the fight.
He had not frozen at the start.
He had not made some humiliatingly obvious mistake and handed Alex the win.
He had fought seriously.
He had pushed himself.
He had taken what Carlen forced into his head at the last possible moment and actually used it.
He had done the best he could with the magic, body, and experience he had.
And it still had not mattered.
Because Alex had reached for something Soren had not expected, something he still did not understand, and the entire shape of the duel had changed in an instant.
It was unfair.
That was the ugliest part of it, and the part he hated admitting, even to himself.
It was unfair, and because it was unfair, there was nothing clean to learn from it.
No simple answer or neat conclusion beyond the obvious one, which was that Alex stood on a stage Soren could not reach.
He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes.
A sane part of him, buried somewhere under the fatigue and frustration, knew this should have been reassuring.
If Alex was that strong already, if the Hero really was that far beyond what Soren remembered, then maybe the main story would right itself no matter how much the smaller details had shifted.
Maybe Alex would keep growing, keep gathering people, keep moving forward whether Soren interfered or not.
Maybe the world did not need him to panic every time something slipped out of place.
Maybe he could stay out of it.
Maybe he could stop clawing so hard.
But that line of thought never lasted.
Because the moment he tried to settle there, the rest of it came rushing back.
The near-wins, the half-wins, the results that never quite felt his.
Help from others.
Lucky timing.
Technicalities.
Surviving instead of winning.
Enduring instead of overcoming.
Every fight gave him something, yes, but every fight also seemed to leave behind the same miserable aftertaste.
He was still not enough.
Still too small.
Still behind.
It was not that he had expected to stand shoulder to shoulder with people like Alex or Amelia after one semester; he wasn't stupid enough for that.
But he had wanted, at least, to feel that his effort was building toward something solid.
He had wanted proof that the pain, the practice, the scrambling, the ugly survival-driven way he fought, all of it was turning into actual strength rather than just slightly better desperation.
Instead, the duel had left him feeling as if he had climbed and climbed, only to look up and realise the wall above him had not lowered at all.
"I need to get stronger," he murmured into the empty room, voice rough from disuse.
The words hung there uselessly.
He let out a slow breath, then another, and finally closed his eyes.
When he summoned the [Library of Memories], the room vanished so abruptly it almost felt like blinking.
Darkness gave way to silence.
Then the Library unfolded around him, vast and still, endless shelves rising in ordered rows and disappearing into shadow so deep they looked less like architecture and more like the edge of thought itself.
Books lined every shelf in neat succession, identical in shape, different only in the dates stamped along their spines, thin slivers of a life he remembered and did not at the same time.
He had been here enough times now that the first strangeness had worn down, but it never disappeared entirely.
No matter how familiar it became, there was always something quietly unnerving about standing inside a place built from his own mind and finding it larger than he could ever hope to traverse.
No voices.
No footsteps.
No dust.
Just him, and the record of everything he had been.
He started walking.
The shelves shifted around his intent before he consciously named it, rearranging themselves with that same eerie smoothness they always did, until he found himself moving toward the years before eighteen, toward the long stretch of time when his relationship with ❰The Knight of Stellaris❱ had stopped being ordinary interest and become something closer to obsession.
Those long nights spent combing through side content because some part of him had found it easier to care about a game than about anything outside the screen.
If there was an answer here, or even the outline of one, it would be somewhere in that period.
He ran his fingertips lightly along the spines until one date caught under his hand.
June 28th, 2022.
He pulled the book free.
It was plain, like all the others, but the moment he opened it, the memory swallowed him whole.
Morning light spilt across a cramped room, soft and familiar in a way that struck him harder than he expected.
He smelled breakfast almost at once, eggs, toast, something slightly overdone, the ordinary kind of burnt that belonged to rushed mornings and distracted hands rather than bad cooking.
A kettle hissed somewhere out of sight, ceramic touched ceramic, and a cupboard door shut.
Then a voice called from another room.
Soren went still.
He knew that voice instantly.
Not because it was loud or because it was unusual, but because some sounds carve themselves so deeply into a person that recognition bypasses thought altogether.
It reached him and something in his chest tightened so sharply it almost hurt.
Missing them had never really gone away.
It had only changed shape over time, flattened into something quieter, more manageable, until moments like this dragged it up fresh and raw again.
A figure moved into view, a little blurred at the edges in that strange way old memories sometimes were, but painfully clear where it mattered.
A familiar grin, careless as always.
Messy black hair, showing she had just woken up.
She was the sort of presence that had once made exhaustion feel survivable.
His throat tightened.
There was warmth there, and longing, and beneath both of them a different ache entirely, darker and harder to look at.
Guilt sat under his tongue like a bruise under skin.
Not simple guilt, not clean regret, but the kind tied to things left unsaid, things left undone, things he still could not pick at for too long without feeling something ugly twist in his ribs.
For a moment he almost shut the book.
The impulse came hard and fast; close it, step away, and bury it again.
But he forced his fingers to stay still against the page.
He had not come here for this.
Or rather, he had not let himself admit that this was also part of why he came here, because pain had a way of making old absences louder.
Either way, he could not afford to sink into it now.
The memory lurched forward.
Daylight vanished.
The room darkened.
The bright warmth of morning became the dim glow of a monitor cutting through evening shadows.
A younger him sat hunched in a chair, face lit blue-white by the screen, shoulders rounded, eyes rimmed red in the way they got after too many hours staring without rest.
A keyboard clicked softly under restless fingers.
The title screen of ❰The Knight of Stellaris❱, with several save files lined up, filled the monitor, and a cursor was moving between them.
A half-drunk drink sat on the desk, and notes were scribbled in the margins of a cheap notebook.
The younger him clicked through menus, skimmed item descriptions, checked the in-game calendar, and pulled up the second-semester quest line tied to Stellaris Academy and the Principal's office.
Soren leaned in, attention sharpening.
He watched himself move through menus with the dull familiarity of someone who had done it far too many times, muttering under his breath about builds and questlines, rushing over things that had seemed minor then because he had been chasing something else, some more obvious reward, some cleaner outcome.
Then the memory settled on a screen that made his pulse tick once against his throat.
There, in the corner of the screen, was a line of quest text, followed by a location and a condition.
And buried in the reward details, easy to skim past if you were looking for the wrong thing, an object that had meant very little to him back then and a great deal more now.
Soren's expression changed.
He narrowed his eyes, reading it once, then again, the pieces shifting into new shapes in his head as he held the page open and thought through what it implied.
He had missed it before.
Or rather, he had ignored it because he failed to understand its usefulness.
Now, after the duel, after Carlen's lesson, after being forced face-first into the reality of how much he still lacked, it looked different.
Not like a miracle.
Not like a cure.
But maybe like a door.
'There you are.'
He didn't smile, he was too tired for that, and too wound up to trust anything that felt like hope, but something in him sharpened all the same, the dull heaviness of earlier giving way to a more brittle kind of focus.
He kept staring at the frozen image on the page.
What had once seemed like an insignificant reward now looked more like a possibility he had never properly considered.
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
Two days later, Soren found himself sitting on the edge of Lilliana's couch with a cup of herbal tea cooling untouched between his hands, staring at the pale curl of steam as though there were something hidden inside it.
His thoughts had felt strange ever since the duel.
Not louder, exactly.
If anything, they had turned duller on the surface, as if the sharpest panic had burnt itself out and left behind a tired, unpleasant haze.
But underneath that, other things kept catching and refusing to settle.
The clue he had dug up in the [Library of Memories].
The practical implications of it.
The familiar voice from that book, which had been much harder to bury again than he wanted to admit.
The loss of the duel.
The humiliation that followed.
The question of what exactly he was supposed to do next.
All of it left him drifting at odd moments, present enough to answer when spoken to, absent enough that people had started noticing.
Lilliana had noticed immediately.
Their tutoring session had never really begun.
The moment she opened the door and saw him standing there, she had taken one long look at his face, his posture, and the shadows under his eyes, then quietly taken his bag from him and told him to sit down.
By the time he had properly registered what was happening, there had already been tea steeping on the table and a folded blanket set within reach as though she expected him to argue and had decided in advance that she would ignore it.
"Are you doing okay, Ren?"
Her voice drew him back.
Soren blinked and looked up.
Lilliana sat beside him, turned slightly in his direction so she could see him properly.
The light in her dorm room was warm and low, late afternoon softening everything it touched.
The room smelled faintly of herbs, paper, and the clean lingering scent of laundry dried indoors.
Usually he liked it here.
Usually it felt easy to breathe.
Today it only made him more aware of how worn thin he was.
"I'm fine," he said.
The answer came too quickly, automatic enough that he heard how false it sounded the moment it left his mouth.
Lilliana's expression did not change much, but her brows drew together just a little.
"No, you aren't."
There was no hesitation in it, no awkward fumbling around the obvious.
She said it gently, but with the easy certainty of someone who had already decided not to let him hide behind the first excuse he reached for.
Soren looked back down at the tea.
"It's not that bad."
"Ren."
She said his name quietly, not as a reprimand, not even really as a challenge, but he still felt the weight of it.
When he didn't answer, she continued in the same calm tone.
"You look exhausted, you've barely touched the tea, and you've been staring at the same spot on the table long enough that I'm starting to wonder whether something appeared there and I somehow missed it. So no, I don't think you're fine."
A breath of something that was almost a laugh escaped him before he could stop it.
It had no real humour in it, but it was still more genuine than the answer he gave before.
Lilliana seemed to take that as permission to keep going.
"The other professors were shocked, you know," she said, settling back slightly. "When Mr Frenun started teaching you in the middle of the examination, half the staff looked like they were deciding whether to stop him or pretend it was normal. The assistants were especially miserable. It was almost impressive."
Her mouth curved faintly, and this time there was a little real amusement in it.
Soren let out a quiet breath through his nose.
"I can imagine."
"I thought you might."
For a moment the room was quiet again.
He could feel her watching him, not in an intrusive way, not picking at him, just staying present and waiting to see whether he would speak on his own.
Lilliana had become better at that with him.
Or maybe she had always been capable of it and he had only started noticing recently.
She was careful when care was needed, and though she was hardly unshakable herself, there was something steadier in the way she sat with him now than there would have been a few weeks ago, when she would have hidden most of that concern behind professional distance.
Soren rubbed his thumb absently against the side of the cup.
"None of it mattered in the end, though," he said at last.
Lilliana tilted her head slightly.
"What do you mean?"
He stared into the tea as if the answer might be written there.
"I mean Carlen's lesson."
His fingers tightened a little around the ceramic.
"It didn't really change the result."
"No," Lilliana said, "I guess it didn't."
The answer was so straightforward that he glanced up at her.
She met his gaze without flinching.
"You still lost," she said, voice quiet and even. "That part is true, pretending otherwise would be pointless, but the result isn't the only thing that matters, Ren."
Something in his shoulders went tight.
It wasn't that her words were wrong.
He knew they were not.
But knowing that and feeling it were two different things, and right now everything in him kept translating every kindness, every attempt to reframe the duel, into the same blunt conclusion: that he wasn't good enough.
He looked away first.
Lilliana noticed, obviously.
"I was watching," she continued after a moment, her voice softening without losing its steadiness. "Not as your professor, or your friend trying to make you feel better. I was watching as someone who understands what you can do right now, and how much you've had to drag yourself forward to do even that much."
Soren's jaw tightened faintly.
"You forced Alex to answer you seriously. You adapted mid-fight. You applied something Mr Frenun had only just shown you, and you actually made it work under pressure." She paused, then added, "Most students would have folded much earlier."
He gave a small, humourless smile.
"That's comforting."
"I'm not trying to comfort you."
That got his attention again.
Lilliana had not raised her voice, but there was a quiet firmness in it now, enough to make him blink.
"I'm serious. You can dislike the result as much as you want. You can be frustrated. I would be surprised if you weren't. But don't turn that into pretending nothing you did had value, because that's not honesty, it's just self-cruelty dressed up as objectivity."
Soren stared at her.
The words landed harder than the softer reassurances had.
Not because they fixed anything.
They did not.
The knot in his chest remained exactly where it was, and the memory of the duel still felt ugly under his skin.
But for one brief second, her voice cut cleanly enough through the haze that he could at least recognise the shape of what she meant.
Then Alex in gold flashed through his head again, and whatever space had opened closed just as quickly.
He looked down.
"I know," he said, though it came out flat, and they both knew it was only half true.
Lilliana watched him for another moment, then reached over and nudged the tea a little closer to him.
"Drink some."
He obeyed mostly because arguing would have taken more energy than it was worth.
The tea had cooled just enough to be comfortable.
Floral, a little earthy, and faintly sweet.
He swallowed, set the cup back down, and stared at his hands again.
He knew she was trying to help, that she meant well, and under different circumstances, maybe he would have let her keep talking, maybe let her soften the edges of it for a little while.
But right now, he didn't have the energy for that.
He hadn't come here to sit quietly and be looked after until the worst of his expression eased.
He had come for a reason, and the longer he let this go on, the harder it became to force the words out.
The duel had not broken him, but it had stripped something away.
The distance between where he was and where he needed to be no longer felt abstract, and now that he had looked directly at it, he couldn't make himself look anywhere else.
So he drew a breath.
"Can you help me with something?" Soren asked at last.
————「❤︎」————