CHAPTER 16 — “Two Runaways”
Things are weird for a while. Not bad weird, just… weird.
She doesn’t avoid me anymore, which is progress.
But there’s this carefulness between us now.
Like we’re both walking on ice and trying not to crack it.
She’ll start to say something, then stop.
I’ll catch myself staring, then look away.
We’re orbiting each other, closer than before but not quite touching.
Mira, bless her oblivious little heart, doesn’t notice any of it.
“Mr. Flower Man, can Mariella braid my hair?”
“Ask her yourself, kid.”
“I did. She said to ask you.”
“Why would I have an opinion about your hair?”
Mira shrugs. “Grown-ups are weird.”
Can’t argue with that.
It’s a Tuesday—I think, I’ve honestly lost track—when Mariella finally tells me the rest.
We’re sitting on the porch after dinner. Johnson’s sprawled across the steps like a furry roadblock, and the stars are doing their thing overhead. Peaceful. The kind of night that makes you forget the world is full of emperors and betrayal and people who smile while they kill you.
“I was supposed to marry Duke Aldric of the Eastern Reaches,” she says, out of nowhere.
I don’t respond. Just wait.
“He was fifty-three. I was seventeen. Dario arranged it himself—said it would ‘cement our alliance’ with the eastern provinces. Like I was mortar. Like I was just… material.” She pulls her knees up to her chest. “I met him once, at a state dinner. He looked at me like I was a horse he was considering buying. Checked my teeth and everything.”
“He what?”
“Not literally. But close enough.” She laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “I asked Dario to reconsider. Begged, actually. Got down on my knees and everything. You know what he said?”
“What?”
“‘Don’t be dramatic, Mari. It’s unbecoming.’” Her voice changes when she quotes him. Lighter. Smoother. The kind of voice that makes you trust it even when you shouldn’t. “Then he patted my head like I was a dog and walked away.”
“When did you run?”
“The night before my engagement ceremony. They had guards on my door—for my ‘protection,’ obviously—but there’s a servants’ passage behind the wardrobe. Our mother showed it to me when I was little. Emergency exit, she called it. I don’t think she ever thought I’d use it.”
“Where did you go?”
“Everywhere. Nowhere.” She picks at a loose thread on her sleeve. “First few months I just… wandered. Slept in barns, worked for meals, tried to figure out how to be a person without a name or a family or a purpose. It’s harder than you’d think.”
“I know.”
She looks at me. “Right. You do, don’t you?”
“Different circumstances. Same feeling.”
We sit with that for a minute. The shared understanding of being unmade. Of having to rebuild yourself from scratch.
“The first time someone recognized me, I was in a market town about two hundred miles from the capital,” she continues.
“Some merchant who’d been to court, saw my face, started shouting about rewards.
I barely got away. After that, I changed my hair.
Started using my mother’s name. Learned to move every few months before anyone could get too curious. ”
“How long?”
“Almost ten years now.” She sounds tired. Not sleepy-tired. Soul-tired. “Ten years of running. Ten years of never staying anywhere long enough to matter. Never letting anyone close enough to hurt.”
“Until here.”
“Until here.” She looks at me sideways. “You know what’s funny? I came to this village because it was dying. Figured no one would look for me in a place with no future. Planned to stay three months, maybe four, then move on.”
“What changed?”
“You showed up covered in goblin blood with a rabbit on your shoulder and I thought—” She stops.
Shakes her head. “I don’t know what I thought.
That you were interesting, maybe. That you had secrets too.
That for the first time in ten years, someone looked at me like I was a person instead of a puzzle to solve. ”
“I looked at you like you were suspicious.”
“Same thing, coming from you.”
Fair point.
╔═══════════════════════════════════════╗║ RELATIONSHIP STATUS UPDATE ║║ ║║ Mariella Valdris ║║ Trust Level: ███████??? (Increasing) ║║ Secrets Remaining: Few ║║ Emotional Vulnerability: HIGH ║║ ║║ Your Status: ║║ Walls: Crumbling ║║ Denial: Weakening ║║ Feelings You Refuse To Name: Present ║║ ║║ SYSTEM RECOMMENDATION: Just tell her ║║ you like her.
This is painful to ║║ watch. We're a magical framework, ║║ not a dating service, but even we ║║ can see where this is going.
║╚═══════════════════════════════════════╝
The System can mind its own business.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“You’re going to anyway.”
“Probably.” She pulls the loose thread free, rolls it between her fingers. “The woman. Persephone. Did you really love her? Or was it just—I don’t know. Habit? Comfort? The thing you thought you were supposed to feel?”
Heavy question. The kind that deserves an honest answer even though honest answers are terrifying.
“I loved her,” I say. “Really loved her. The kind of love that rewrites your whole brain, makes you stupid, makes you think you’d die for someone.” I pause. “Turns out I was right about that last part.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”
“I know. But I’m still sorry it happened to you.” She looks at me, and there’s something fierce in her expression. “You deserved better. You deserve—” She stops. Looks away. “You deserve someone who sees you. Actually sees you. Not what you can do for them, not what you represent. Just… you.”
The words hang in the air.
I should say something. Something smart or deflecting or sarcastic, the way I always do when conversations get too real. But I’m tired of deflecting. I’m tired of running from things that scare me.
“Mariella.”
“Yeah?”
“I see you too.”
She goes still. For a second I think I’ve made a mistake—pushed too far, said too much—but then she smiles. Small. Real. The kind of smile that reaches her eyes.
“Yeah,” she says softly. “I know.”
We don’t kiss.
I know, I know. That’s the moment, right? Vulnerable conversation, emotional breakthrough, lean in and let the music swell. But real life isn’t like that. Real life is messy and complicated and full of moments that feel significant but don’t resolve into neat conclusions.
So instead we just sit there. Watching the stars. Existing in the same space without any walls between us.
It’s enough.
For now, it’s enough.
The next morning, she’s making breakfast when I come downstairs.
“Eggs?” she asks, like last night didn’t happen. Like we didn’t spend three hours on the porch dismantling each other’s defenses.
“Sure.”
“There’s bread too. Johnson already stole half of it, but there’s some left.”
I look at Johnson, who’s sitting in the corner looking deeply unrepentant. A crumb trail leads directly to his face.
“Taxes,” I say.
“He’s getting more aggressive about it. Yesterday he took an entire chicken leg off Garrett’s plate.”
“Garrett let him?”
“Garrett was laughing too hard to stop him.”
I sit down at the table. She puts a plate in front of me—eggs, toast, some kind of preserves that probably came from Granny Thorn’s terrifying pantry. Domestic. Normal. The kind of morning I never thought I’d have again.
“I want to tell you about my mother,” she says, sitting across from me. “If you want to hear it.”
“I want to hear it.”
So she does.
Her mother’s name was Elena. Elena Voss, before she married into the Valdris family and became Elena Valdris and then became nobody at all, just “the Emperor’s Mother” or “Dario’s Mother” or “that woman who used to be somebody.”
“She was a scholar before she married my father,” Mariella says. “Studied ancient languages at the Academy. She had this theory about the System—that it wasn’t always the way it is now, that someone built it, that there were older versions with different rules. Everyone thought she was crazy.”
I choke on my eggs.
“You okay?”
“Fine,” I manage. “Just—go on.”
“Anyway, she gave all that up when she married Father. ‘A Valdris doesn’t have hobbies,’ he used to say. ‘A Valdris has duties.’ So she became a proper noble wife. Hosted dinners. Raised children. Smiled at the right moments and stayed quiet at the wrong ones.”
“But she didn’t stop thinking.”
“No. She never stopped thinking.” Mariella smiles, sad and proud at the same time. “She kept journals. Hid them in the servants’ passages where no one would look. I found them after she died. Decades of research, all hidden away like contraband.”
“What happened to them?”
“Burned. I burned them.” She sees my expression. “I had to. If Dario found them—if anyone found them—they’d know she was asking questions. They’d know I had them. I couldn’t risk it.”
“Do you remember what they said?”
“Some of it. She thought the System was modified about two hundred years ago. A major update that changed how classes worked, how skills combined, how the whole framework operated. She thought—” Mariella pauses, frowning.
“She thought someone important was erased from history around the same time. Someone powerful. But she could never find proof.”
Two hundred years ago.
When they killed me.
When they performed the Mary Harvest and split my power five ways and rewrote history to make the Legendary Four instead of Five.
Elena Voss figured it out. Or started to. And then she died of a convenient fever.
“Your mother was right,” I say.
“What?”
“About the System. About the erasure. She was right about all of it.”
Mariella stares at me. “How do you—”
“Because I’m the one they erased.”
So I tell her.
Everything.
Not the edited version I gave her before—my wife helped kill me, my party betrayed me, I’m very sad about it. The real version. The full story.
I tell her about the Mary Harvest. About watching my mana drain into the people I trusted while Persephone cried and Dario smiled and Gorath couldn’t even look at me.
I tell her about the vault on Floor 10, the insurance policy I built and forgot.
I tell her about the Fragmented Soul trait and the mana slowly returning to me and what that means for the people who stole it.
I tell her my name.
“Velthar,” she repeats. “The Archmage.”
“Former Archmage. Current farmer. Aspiring revenge-getter.”
“You’re—” She shakes her head. “You’re the fifth member. The one they erased. The one my mother spent years looking for.”
“Guilty.”
“You helped kill the Demon Lord.”
“Did most of the work, actually. But who’s counting.”
She laughs. It’s a weird laugh—half disbelief, half something I can’t identify. “I’ve been living with a legend. A literal legend. And you—you’ve been growing tomatoes.”
“Hey. Those tomatoes are going to be excellent.”
“You’re insane.”
“Probably.” I push my eggs around my plate. “Does it change anything? Knowing who I was?”
She considers this. Really thinks about it, which I appreciate. People who answer too fast usually aren’t being honest.
“No,” she says finally. “It explains some things. The way you fight. The way you talk about magic. Why my brother’s people are sniffing around the dungeon.
But it doesn’t change who you are now. The man who eats Granny Thorn’s soup and lets Mira put flowers in his hair and pretends he doesn’t care about anything while caring about everything. ”
“I don’t—”
“You do. You’re terrible at hiding it.” She reaches across the table, puts her hand over mine. “Velthar. Archmage. Mr. Flower Man. Whatever you want to be called. I’m not going anywhere.”
Her hand is warm.
I turn mine over. Lace our fingers together. It feels like a declaration. Like a promise.
“Two runaways,” I say.
“Two runaways,” she agrees.
Johnson makes a disgusted noise from the corner and leaves the room. Even he has limits, apparently.
We stay like that for a while. Hands linked across the breakfast table. Eggs getting cold. Sun streaming through the window.
It’s not a solution. Dario’s still out there. The Imperial scouts are still sniffing around. Everything I lost is still lost, and everything I need to reclaim is still waiting in the depths of a dungeon I built two hundred years ago.
But for this one moment, sitting in a farmhouse kitchen with a woman who knows all my secrets and hasn’t run away, I let myself feel something other than revenge.
It’s terrifying.
I do it anyway.