Climbing the stone steps from the ground-floor corridor to his third-floor quarters felt to William like the longest, heaviest march of his entire life.
Every time the thick heel of his leather boot struck the flagstones, the dull thud echoed off the quiet walls like the beat of a funeral drum, reminding him with every single step of what he had left behind on that freezing mountain.
After seventy-two straight hours of breaking a trail through waist-deep snowdrifts and fighting the howling gales of the Impassable Mountain Range, the physical toll had finally caught up with his body. Even with the System's enhanced attributes reinforcing his frame, his leg muscles throbbed with a deep, burning ache, his joints felt stiff as rusted iron, and his bones felt as though they had been filled with molten lead.
Yet that bone-deep physical exhaustion was nothing compared to the suffocating weight pressing down on the center of his chest.
Guilt wasn't just an emotion; it was a parasite that chewed through a man from the inside out.
Dragging his boots down the carpeted hallway of the eastern wing, William kept his eyes fixed on the floor in front of his toes. He didn't look at the woven hunting tapestries lining the stone walls, and he barely registered the warm orange glow of the charcoal braziers placed in the corner alcoves.
Downstairs outside the dining hall, Arthur had clapped him on the shoulder and told him with complete confidence that he hadn't ruined anything.
William knew his best friend meant well. However, William also knew how Arthur's brain worked.
To a cold, calculating strategist with Intelligence 14, trading one witch for another—bringing back Lightning's aerial scouting and Diana Argus's unknown utility while keeping Nightingale alive—looked like a net victory on a balance sheet. As long as Border Town's industrial machine kept moving forward, Arthur could rationalize almost any casualty as an acceptable cost of doing business.
William couldn't think like that. He had never been able to look at living, breathing people as chess pieces.
All he wanted right now was to reach the quiet isolation of his bedroom, slide the heavy iron bolt across the oak door, throw himself face-first onto his mattress, and pull the thick wool blankets over his head. He wanted the dark to swallow him whole. He wanted a few hours where he didn't have to think about the blizzard, where he didn't have to worry about fractured timelines, and above all, where he didn't have to see Wendy's gentle, heart-broken face standing beside that smoking brazier while Cara raved in the dark—trapped under a madwoman's thumb solely because William had lost his nerve outside the tunnel.
Stopping in front of the familiar oak door at the end of the corridor, William leaned forward and rested his forehead against the cool, solid timber for a long second.
Just go to sleep, he told himself, letting out a ragged, trembling sigh through his nose before reaching down to turn the iron handle. Deal with the mess in the morning.
Pushing the door open, he stepped across the threshold and pulled the heavy oak panel shut behind his back with a soft click.
Inside his quarters, the maids hadn't lit the tallow candles on the desk. The bedroom was steeped in a quiet, velvety twilight, lit only by the dying red embers in the small corner hearth and a wide shaft of pale silver moonlight slanting through the leaded-glass window to paint the stone floor.
William took a single heavy step toward his bed, already reaching up with one hand to unfasten the top clasp of his sweat-stained doublet.
Then, his fingers froze on the brass buckle.
Even buried under layers of fatigue and self-reproach, the combat instincts honed by weeks of relentless life-or-death training snapped his nerves taut in less than half a second.
The air in the room wasn't empty.
Someone was breathing near the window.
Whipping his head up, William squinted toward the silver shaft of moonlight—and for a split second, his tired brain genuinely wondered if he had miscounted the doors in the hallway and walked into one of the guest rooms by mistake.
Standing beside the recessed stone window seat, half-draped in the pale glow of the winter moon, was a woman.
She wasn't wearing the frost-stiffened leather armor or the mud-caked white cloak from their trek down the peaks, nor did she smell of cave smoke and iron. Instead, she was dressed in a simple, ankle-length nightdress of clean, unbleached cotton that the castle maids had laid out after drawing her hot bath.
More surprising than her clothes, however, was the air around her.
Every other time William had seen her inside the castle after hours, she had kept one foot inside the monochrome distortion of the Mist World, ready to vanish the instant a shadow moved. Tonight, the veil was completely gone. She stood in the physical world without a single thread of defensive magic hiding her presence.
It was Nightingale.
As soon as William recognized the cascade of damp, wavy golden hair tumbling freely over her shoulders, a sudden jolt ran through his mind, setting the memories of the original story spinning behind his eyes.
Wait... I know this scene, William thought, his heart skipping a beat against his ribs.
In the webnovel he had read back on Earth, right after Nightingale returned from her disastrous fallout with Cara in the mountains, there was a famous midnight scene in the castle. Realizing that the Witch Cooperation Association was broken and that Border Town was the only true hope for her sisters, Nightingale had slipped into Prince Roland's bedroom late at night, dropped to one knee, and sworn her formal oath of loyalty as his personal blade.
Yet right now, Prince Roland was two doors down the hall, probably still drinking dark beer by his fireplace or sketching cannon barrels.
Nightingale hadn't gone to the Prince's room.
She had come here—waiting quietly in the moonlight for him.
Out of all the wild changes he and Arthur had caused since dropping into the mud of Graycastle, this was one alteration that didn't bring a single ounce of regret.
Hearing the click of the door latch behind him, Nightingale turned her head away from the snowy windowpane and looked straight at him.
William's breath caught halfway up his throat.
Over the past three days on the mountain, he had mostly seen her with a white hood pulled low over her brow, her cheeks smudged with cave ash and her lips chapped from the freezing gale. Now, after a hot bath and a few hours of warmth, seeing her standing barefoot in the moonlight took the wind right out of his chest.
Her skin looked like warm porcelain against the dark stone wall, her sharp, aristocratic features softened by the silver light, and her deep blue eyes shone with a clarity that made it impossible to look away.
Pushing herself gracefully off the stone sill, Nightingale began to walk slowly across the wool rug toward him.
Her bare feet made zero sound against the floor, only the soft rustle of her cotton hem whispering in the quiet room. There was none of her usual playful teasing on her lips tonight, nor the cold, guarded mask of a shadow assassin. Instead, her posture carried the quiet, unshakable gravity of a woman who had crossed a bridge and burned it behind her.
Forgetting how tired his legs were, William stood completely still by the door, watching her approach with a mute, almost breathless respect.
Three paces in front of him, directly in the center of the silver moonlight pouring through the window, Nightingale came to a stop.
The atmosphere inside the quiet bedroom seemed to thicken instantly, charged with an ancient, ceremonial weight.
Raising her right hand to chest height, Nightingale flicked her wrist. Cold steel caught the moonbeams with a sharp blue glint as her silver-plated dagger materialized smoothly from her personal storage ring into her fingers.
Then, before William could ask what she was doing, Nightingale drew her left foot back and lowered herself slowly to the floor.
It was a movement of breathtaking grace—blending every ounce of the highborn court etiquette she had learned as a noble daughter in the capital with the lethal poise of a veteran combat witch.
Dropping onto one knee on the rough wool rug right in front of his boots, she flipped the dagger deftly between her fingers. Ignoring the razor-sharp edge, she wrapped both bare palms directly around the naked steel blade and raised the leather-wrapped hilt upward with both hands, offering the weapon to him in the oldest, most sacred vow of fealty known to the Four Kingdoms.
Tilting her head back so the moonlight fell across her face, she locked her clear blue eyes onto his and spoke.
Her voice wasn't the hushed whisper she used in the shadows; it rang out steady, formal, and vibrating with a fierce emotion that made the four stone walls of the bedroom feel like a cathedral.
— "William... I, Veronica, known in the dark as Nightingale, offer you my blade and my word," — she began, her voice unwavering in the stillness. — "For as long as you stand as a shelter to witches, and for as long as your heart remains true... my life belongs to your command. Whether you call upon me to stand in the snow as your shield against the beasts of the north, or send me into the night as your hidden dagger to slit the throats of your enemies."
Her fingers tightened around the flat of the silver steel as her gaze burned into his.
— "I will walk where you point without doubt and without regret, until my final breath leaves my chest and my blood dries upon the stones. This I swear to you tonight."
When the last syllable faded, the silence inside the room was so complete that William could hear the soft hiss of snow brushing against the outside of the window glass.
A profound, electric shiver ran all the way up William's spine, raising the hairs along his forearms.
Looking down at the woman kneeling at his feet—a proud former noblewoman and the deadliest witch assassin in the kingdom, offering her freedom and her very life into his hands without a single condition attached—brought a hot, tight knot straight into William's throat.
A small, self-deprecating smile touched the corner of his mouth.
Look at yourself, Will, he thought, his chest aching with a mixture of deep humility and wonder. Who the hell are you to have someone like her kneel in front of you?
He wasn't a prince of the Wimbledon bloodline. He didn't have centuries of royal heritage, a castle of his own, or Arthur's terrifying genius. Back on Earth, he had just been an ordinary guy who liked martial arts and video games, thrown into this medieval meat grinder by a freak accident and gifted a body that could punch through walls.
According to every custom of Graycastle, the next step of this ritual was set in stone. He was supposed to stand tall above her, take the dagger by the hilt, tap the flat of the blade lightly against her left and right shoulders, and accept her into his service as a lord accepts a sworn retainer.
Yet the mere thought of standing over Veronica while she bowed her head at his boots felt completely wrong to him.
He didn't want to be a feudal lord, and he sure as hell didn't want Nightingale to be his servant.
Moving slowly, William took half a step forward.
Instead of reaching down to take the dagger hilt from above, he bent both of his aching knees and lowered himself straight down onto the wool rug directly in front of her, bringing his eyes down to the exact same level as hers.
Nightingale's blue eyes widened slightly, her breath hitching in surprise at the sudden breach of every noble protocol she had been raised to respect.
Raising both of his wide, calloused hands, William gently closed his warm fingers entirely around her smaller hands where they gripped the cold steel of the blade.
Slowly, firmly, he guided her hands and the dagger back toward her own chest.
— "Put the knife away, Veronica," — William said softly, his low, raspy voice carrying an honesty that stripped away every layer of ceremony between them. — "I don't ever want to see you on your knees in front of me, and I don't need an ancient oath to tie you to my side."
Waiting until she loosened her grip and let the dagger vanish back into her ring, William released her hands, stayed kneeling right in front of her on the floor, and looked straight into her eyes.
— "I'm not a king, and I'm definitely not some infallible hero," — William continued quietly. — "You've already seen me lose my temper, you've seen me make mistakes, and if we keep fighting this war together, you're going to see plenty more of my flaws. If—after seeing the mess of a man I really am, after watching me stumble and get back up—you still choose to stay by my side tomorrow, and the day after that... then that choice means ten times more to me than any formal vow you could swear on a blade tonight."
Finishing his words, William held his open right hand out between them, palm turned slightly inward.
He wasn't offering the back of his hand for a vassal to kiss. He was holding out his hand the way a soldier reaches out to a partner he trusts with his life.
Nightingale stared down at his calloused palm in the moonlight, her heart hammering so hard against her ribs she was sure he could hear it.
A sudden, overwhelming warmth surged up from her chest, stinging the backs of her eyes.
For twenty-two years, everyone who had ever looked at her had wanted to own a piece of her. Her noble father had viewed her as a political marriage chip until her magic ruined her value; the Church had hunted her as an abomination; and Cara had used her for five years as an obedient knife in the dark, only to chain her to a post the first time she spoke her own mind.
Now, the strongest warrior she had ever met—a man who could tear hybrid monsters apart with his bare hands—was kneeling on the floor at eye level with her, turning down her submission and asking only that she walk beside him as an equal.
A smile broke across Nightingale's face, so genuine, bright, and radiant that it seemed to banish the shadows from the corners of the room.
Raising her right hand, she placed her palm squarely against his and closed her fingers around his grip in a firm, unbreakable shake.
— "Partners, then," — she whispered.
William squeezed her hand gently and stood up, drawing her to her feet along with him until the two of them stood less than a foot apart in the quiet silver light.
For a few seconds, neither of them let go.
Yet as Nightingale looked up into William's face from that close distance, the bright smile on her lips slowly softened and faded.
She didn't even need to open her Mist vision to see it. Even though his grip was warm and his words had come straight from the heart, the dark, suffocating storm cloud that had followed him all the way down from the mountain peaks was still sitting heavy behind his eyes. His broad shoulders were still tight, curved slightly inward as if he were carrying an invisible ton of rock on his back.
Taking half a step closer instead of pulling away, Nightingale raised her free hand and rested her fingers lightly against his forearm.
— "William... talk to me," — she said softly, dropping every trace of formality from her voice. — "Three days ago, you walked into a hall of sixty hostile witches alone, shattered a God's Stone in your bare hand, and pulled me straight out of the fire. You brought Lightning and Diana safely through a blizzard that would have killed normal men. Yet ever since we stepped out of that gorge on the mountain, you've been looking at the ground as if someone died. What is eating you alive inside?"
William's throat bobbed as he swallowed hard.
He turned his head slightly, looking past her shoulder toward the dark glass of the window where white snowflakes were still swirling through the night.
Part of him wanted to brush it off—to repeat what he had told her outside the cave about adrenaline crashing, or give her a tough-guy grin and say he was just tired.
Yet he couldn't do it. Not only would her magic see straight through a lie in half a second, but lying to her face right after asking her to be his equal felt like the worst kind of cowardice.
Letting go of her hand, William turned and walked three heavy steps over to the side of his bed. Sitting down hard on the edge of the mattress, he braced his elbows on his knees, dropped his head forward, and buried his face in both hands.
— "I screwed everything up up there, Veronica," — William muttered, his voice rough and muffled behind his palms. — "Wendy is still sitting inside that cave tonight... and it's entirely my fault."
By the window, Nightingale's brow furrowed in confusion. Walking quietly across the rug, she sat down on the edge of the mattress right beside his hip, close enough that her cotton skirt brushed his knee.
— "What are you talking about?" — Nightingale asked gently. — "You heard what happened in the hall. Wendy stepped in front of the hot iron to save my life, yes, though she told Cara flat out that she wasn't going to leave the Association. Wendy has spent five years taking care of those girls; she wasn't ready to abandon them based on one speech. How could her staying behind possibly be your fault?"
William lowered his hands slowly from his face, staring down at the cracks between the flagstones with bloodshot, frustrated eyes.
Downstairs, he hadn't been able to have this conversation with Arthur because Arthur only cared about the strategic scoreboard. Here in the dark, sitting beside the woman who loved Wendy like a sister, the secret he had been carrying around for weeks finally cracked open.
He had to choose his words carefully so he wouldn't trigger any weird paranoia about other universes, yet he couldn't hold the truth back anymore.
— "Veronica... remember those 'prophetic books' from the Fjord Islands that Arthur and I told the Prince about?" — William began, his voice low and tight as he stared at his own knuckles. — "Those books didn't just have recipes for cement and steam engines. They had a record of the future—a detailed history of how events in this region were supposed to play out."
Beside him, Nightingale went very still, listening intently to every word.
— "In the history written in that book... I wasn't supposed to be standing outside that tunnel three nights ago," — William confessed, a bitter tremor entering his voice. — "You were supposed to go back to the mountain camp alone. Just like three nights ago, Cara would have poisoned you, tied you to that post with the God's Stone, and threatened you with the red-hot iron. And just like three nights ago, Wendy would have stepped in front of you to stop her."
William clenched his hands together between his knees.
— "Only in the original course of events, because nobody came bursting through the tunnel when Cara started screaming... Cara didn't stop," — William said, his voice dropping to a raw whisper. — "In her blind rage at being defied by her most loyal sister, Cara ordered her midnight-blue vipers to attack Wendy directly. One of those lethal bleeding snakes sank its fangs deep into Wendy's arm right in front of the whole camp."
Nightingale sucked in a sharp, silent breath, her blue eyes widening as the horrifying mental image of gentle Wendy writhing on the gravel floor with internal-bleeding venom in her veins flashed through her head.
— "That attack—watching the Mentor she had worshipped for five years try to murder her in cold blood—was the exact moment the illusion shattered for Wendy," — William pressed on, his chest heaving as the words poured out. — "During the chaos that followed, you got the stone off your neck, grabbed a dying, bleeding Wendy onto your back, and carried her through the blizzard all the way to Border Town so Nana could save her life! That was how Wendy was supposed to break free from Cara and come here!"
Raising his right fist, William brought it down hard against his own thigh with a dull thud.
— "And I ruined it!" — he hissed through clenched teeth. — "Because I couldn't stand waiting out in the snow when I heard Cara scream, I panicked and charged in ten seconds too early! I knocked Cara flat on her back before she could summon the snake to bite Wendy! Because I stopped the attack, Wendy never saw Cara cross that final line! Her loyalty didn't break, so she chose to stay behind!"
He turned his head to look at Nightingale, his dark eyes filled with genuine torment.
— "Don't you see what I did, Veronica?!" — William said, his voice cracking. — "By saving Wendy from getting bitten three nights ago, I trapped her in that cave with a lunatic! Within a few weeks, the worst of the winter demons are going to attack that mountain! What if Wendy and the other sisters get torn to pieces in the snow next month because I jumped in too early and rewrote her fate?!"
Finishing his confession, William sat back with his chest heaving, bracing himself for the fallout.
He fully expected Nightingale's expression to freeze over—for her to pull away from him on the mattress, furious that his reckless interference had left her beloved older sister trapped on a doomed mountain.
Instead, soft, warm fingers brushed lightly against the stubble on his jaw.
Reaching up with her right hand, Nightingale gently cupped the side of his cheek and turned his head until he had no choice except to look straight into her eyes.
There wasn't a single trace of anger, blame, or horror on her face.
Looking back at him under the silver moonlight were eyes filled with a deep, aching tenderness—and a faint, almost exasperated smile that looked as though she were listening to a foolish boy blame himself for the rain.
— "William... let me ask you one simple question," — Nightingale said, her voice quiet and steady in the dark room.
William blinked, his jaw still tight.
— "Suppose you had remembered that 'prophecy' while you were crouched outside in the snow three nights ago," — Nightingale murmured, her thumb brushing slowly across his cheekbone. — "Suppose you had walked quietly down the tunnel, peeked from the shadows behind the stalagmites, and watched Cara hold that white-hot poker three inches from my eye. Suppose you had stood there watching in silence, waiting for Cara to summon a deadly viper to sink its fangs into Wendy's arm, waiting for Wendy to choke on her own blood and suffer three days of agony in a blizzard just so she would 'learn her lesson' and come to Border Town..."
Nightingale tilted her head slightly, her blue eyes locking onto his.
— "Tell me the truth, William. Even if you knew for a fact that letting Wendy get poisoned would bring her to Border Town... would you have stood there in the dark and let that snake bite her?"
— "Hell no!" — William shot back instantly, his eyes flaring wide with indignation at the very thought. — "Are you crazy?! Why would I stand around watching a harmless woman get poisoned half to death right in front of me?! Even if I knew the book word for word at that second, I still would have knocked Cara's teeth in before she laid a finger on either of you!"
The smile on Nightingale's face bloomed into something radiant, warm, and utterly breathtaking.
— "There is your answer," — Nightingale said softly, every syllable falling over the raw ache in his chest like cool water on a burn. — "You would have charged in and stopped that snake no matter what, William—because that is who you are. You aren't a cold machine that trades a friend's blood for a convenient political outcome. And the fact that you refused to let me or Wendy get hurt is the exact reason I just knelt on that floor for you."
Leaning in a few inches closer on the edge of the mattress, she kept one warm palm against his cheek while sliding her other hand down to cover the white-knuckled fist resting on his knee.
— "Stop telling yourself that you ruined Wendy's life," — Nightingale told him, her voice firm with unassailable logic and quiet affection. — "Wendy isn't a helpless child, and she isn't a puppet written on a page in your book. She is a grown woman who chose to stay in that cave of her own free will because her heart is too kind to abandon the younger sisters while Cara is hurt. That was her choice, William—not yours."
Slowly, gently, her fingers pried open his clenched fist on his knee, smoothing out his tense knuckles one by one.
— "Do you really think Wendy would rather be sitting in this castle tonight at the price of having her arm rotted by venom and watching the woman she respected turn into a sister-killer?" — Nightingale asked quietly. — "All you did three nights ago was save my eyes from a red-hot iron, spare Wendy from a horrific poisoning, and save Diana and Lightning from freezing in the dark."
Brick by heavy brick, the suffocating wall of guilt that William had been building around his own heart for seventy-two hours began to crack and crumble under the simple honesty of her words.
He parted his lips, trying to muster one last argument about the demons coming down from the northern peaks and how dangerous the mountain was going to get, yet Nightingale gently pressed two fingers against his lips to stop him.
— "When a knight sees someone about to be struck down in front of him, he steps in and blocks the blade. That is what you did tonight," — she whispered, lowering her fingers back to hold his hand. — "As for the demons and the rest of the camp... tomorrow isn't written in stone yet. Now that we have Lightning to watch the mountain from the sky, and Arthur and the Prince planning our next move, we will find another way to get Wendy and the girls out before the worst of the winter hits. You don't have to carry the weight of the whole world and everyone else's choices on your back, William. Neither of us is a god. Carrying our own choices is heavy enough."
Sitting in the quiet gloom of the moonlit room, feeling the warmth of her hand wrapped around his fingers and listening to the woman he had risked everything for forgive him for a crime that existed only in his head, the iron band clamped around William's chest finally snapped.
He closed his eyes and let out a long, deep, shuddering breath that seemed to empty three days of freezing mountain air right out of the bottom of his lungs.
With that single exhale, the nausea in his stomach vanished, and the crushing tension in his shoulders melted away into the quiet night.
He didn't try to say anything else, and Nightingale didn't ask him any more questions about where his strange books had come from. Turning his palm over on his knee, William simply laced his fingers firmly through hers and leaned his shoulder lightly against hers.
Side by side on the edge of the bed, the weary commander and the shadow assassin sat together in the peaceful quiet of the room. Outside the thick stone walls of the keep, the winter gale continued to howl across the dark frontier; inside, anchored by the warmth of the hand resting in his, William finally let the ghosts of the old story go and came home to the world right in front of him.