Chapter Thirty Three

Mira flicked him in the inner thigh and, although he winced, Adra didn’t stop smiling.

“And you still would have turned me down tonight?” she asked. He was correct, of course, to turn down an upset girl in search of comfort. However, she couldn’t help but notice that he’d made sure to do it in such a way that she knew the door would still be open later.

“I wanted to be your clear-headed choice,” he said, smirk fading. “Humans don’t think well or make good choices in the immediate wake of violence. If you’d come to me again in the morning, I would have been yours for the taking. I’m not that strong or that good.”

She couldn’t help it, she melted. “How did you even find me?” she asked. “And did you really take this job just to seduce your employer’s younger sibling?”

He chuckled. It sounded a touch guilty. Oh no. He really had.

“‘Employer’ is a strong word for my relationship with Lady Vesper,” Adra admitted and eased down onto the mattress next to her. He reached over and drew Mira close. “We agreed that it would be easier for you to believe that I worked for her. I work with Princess Millica as an information broker. Sometimes I provide her and her people with covert security. You never knew me, but Lady Vesper has asked me to provide you with a protection detail when you were in the Capitol.”

“Oh,” Mira blinked. Vesper had never once seemed to entertain the possibility that Violet was the one picking on Cecily. Mira had assumed that was because Vesper believed in and supported her sister, but apparently it was because she’d been having her sister watched.

At least Mira now knew why Andrei’s accusations and the counter-plots of Cecily’s faction in the first game never seemed to affect Violet in any substantial way. Actually, now that she thought of it, she realized that the seemingly random NPCs who would ‘accidentally’ foil the Love Interests attempts to drive Violet off by spilling drinks on her or knocking things out of her hands all wore bowler hats.

She’d dismissed it as lazy character design, or a deliberate creative choice for the ‘members of background’ characters, but in reality that had been ‘Colvin’ watching out for Violet long before he could inject himself into her daily life.

“You’re lucky I’m already in love with you,” she told her husband. “That was creepy. ”

“I am a creepy person,” Adra agreed without taking offense. “As for how I found you, I was imprisoned by the Gods within the Source for a long time following your death as penance for what I’d tried to do when you—when you were taken from me. I was finally released not long ago. The first thing I did was track you to this world.”

“Track me?” Mira frowned. She knew Adra’s perception wasn’t the same as hers. He was an ageless, deathless, and formless expression of living darkness. It went without saying. Still, she didn’t understand how he could follow the path of her soul. Did it leave a trail? “How did you track me?”

Adra dodged her gaze and Mira propped herself up on one elbow, alarmed now. “Adra, how did you follow me?”

“It’s the reason I was imprisoned,” he confessed, mostly to the pillow. “When you broke apart in the dark lake, I tried to use myself to anchor your consciousness, to keep you from—from leaving me. I thought that I could make you a new body, so long as I could retain your soul; a better body, one free of your bonds. If I’d tried it anywhere else, I might have succeeded, but the dark lake was connected to the Source and They saw what I did.”

‘They’ being the Gods.

Mira still didn’t understand divinity very well, which was alright. One wasn’t supposed to, but Mira had a deeper understanding than most. What Adra called the ‘Source’ was what Mira had always privately referred to as the Realm of the Gods.

Every world she’d ever lived in was presided over by a certain group of gods. ‘Presided over’ wasn’t a good way to phrase it. They didn’t rule unless they wanted to and it was rare for a God to be that interested in mortal affairs so they hardly ever did unless they had to. Human beings were about as comprehensible to the Gods as ants were to a human. They perceived humanity more as a macrocosm than a collection of individuals.

Each world had gods that were interested in it as a whole, but every god lived in the same realm and every reality that Mira had lived in was connected to that realm; the plane of existence from which all mana flowed, the one which Adra referred to as the ‘Source.’

The dark lake Mira first died in was located over a deliberate puncture mark in the fabric of that reality that had been made by the Gods in order to let magical energy, raw mana, seep into the world from the Realm of the Gods. She’d seen others like it during her subsequent lives. All worlds with high magic had one somewhere, even if it had long since closed up and been replaced with another one elsewhere, leaving behind only some geographic oddities for future generations to marvel over.

There wasn’t a lot that outright offended the Gods. As terrible as their anger might look to mortals, it really wasn’t much more than a vague annoyance because whenever they expressed their fury they always had a price tag ready to put on their forgiveness, so long as there was a mortal who could withstand the sound of their voices to interpret for the rest of humanity. That was why Melody was so invaluable to the temple; she could hear the Gods’ voices and relay messages, so long as they were brief.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Interfering with a soul’s progress in the rotation between birth, life, and death would do it, though. The reason Mira had never drawn negative attention from the divine was because she still more or less functioned the way she should, from their perspective. So she was a curiosity, but never a problem.

Adra, though, had made himself into a problem.

He chuckled. It was a mirthless little huff of laughter. “They couldn’t kill me. The best they could do was detain me for a while, but not before I saw them release you back into the Circulation. I knew they’d have to release me eventually. I serve my own necessary function.” He did not clarify what that was or to whom. Mira wondered if it had something to do with her own repeating fate as a villainess. Adra had once mentioned that he cycled in and out of various worlds. Was it the same thing?

“They didn’t sever the connection you made between us,” Mira guessed. “That’s how you found me—but, I only woke up as myself a month or so ago. It sounds like you have been here for much longer than that.”

Adra nodded. “It has been several years, but I could sense your soul within Violet and she reminded me of you, when you were a young woman. I knew you would be different in this incarnation, but I wanted whatever I could have of you.”