Chapter 269: Trish

“Then what would be?”

The archmage’s blind eyes seemed to focus on me, though I knew that was impossible. Still, the weight of his attention pressed against my skin.

He tapped his cane once. Twice. Three times.

“Just like she offered, entertain me,” he said again, but differently this time. Less a demand, more an invitation. “Not with violence. Not with your magic tricks or your borrowed demon. I’ve seen a thousand fire mages. I’ve watched a hundred demonic contracts play out. You think any of that is new to me?”

Evelina’s fingers tightened on my arm. “Then what do you want?”

“A story.”

I blinked. “A story?”

“Surely you have one. Everyone does. The boy who wields strange flames and commands a false hydra. The noblewoman who carries a succubus in her collar and wears her power like a second skin.”

He spread his hands, and for a moment, he looked almost kind.

“How did you become what you are? What do you fear? What do you desire? Those are the things I cannot simply observe. Those are the things you must tell me.”

“You want us to… what? Sit here and share our life stories?”

“If it entertains me, yes.”

“This is insane,” Evelina muttered.

“Probably,” the archmage agreed cheerfully. “But so is building a magical library in the middle of nowhere and populating it with lethal trials for my personal amusement. Insanity is relative.”

I looked at Evelina. She looked at me.

Neither of us wanted to share anything with this ancient, clearly unhinged mage. But the alternative… fighting him, dying here, leaving Kevin and Vivianne to navigate the rest of the trials alone, wasn’t exactly appealing either.

“Fine,” I said. “But you go first.”

The archmage raised what would have been an eyebrow, if he’d had any. “Bold.”

“You said you wanted entertainment. I want to know who I’m talking to. Seems fair.”

For a long moment, I thought he might kill me just for the audacity. The pressure in the room flickered, building and releasing like a held breath. Evelina’s hand slipped from my arm to my hand, her fingers interlacing with mine.

Then the archmage smiled.

“Fair,” he said, settling back into his chair. “I was born four hundred and twenty-seven years ago, in a village that no longer exists. My mother was a washerwoman. My father was a soldier who died before I learned to walk.”

He spoke without nostalgia, without warmth. Just facts, delivered in a voice that had long since made peace with its own history.

“I discovered magic when I was five. Accidentally set fire to the village grain store. They wanted to hang me for witchcraft, but a wandering mage took me in instead. Taught me the basics. Died when I was fifteen, and I’ve been learning on my own ever since.”

“That’s it?” Evelina asked. “That’s your story?”

“I left out the boring parts. The decades of research. The failed experiments. The alliances made and betrayed. The lovers who aged and died while I stayed exactly the same.” He shrugged. “Immortality is lonely, child. That’s the only lesson worth learning.”

He turned his blind gaze to me.

“Now you.”

I took a breath. From the way he spoke about the False Hydra, my magic, and Evelina’s succubus, it was clear those stories likely wouldn’t move him. Far from it…

He didn’t even think our powers were worth his interest. Anything native to this world likely wouldn’t impress him, and even if something did, it would probably steal his breath for only a brief second.

Not exactly the kind of reaction that would keep us alive.

So…

What story could I possibly tell him?

The only thing I could gamble on.

Another world he knew nothing about.

“Trish.”

I said Evelina’s name, and her eyes widened. She knew what I meant. I’d been avoiding it until now, but… in a life-or-death situation, that was no longer an option.

“I understand.”

Trish’s story—well, Evelina’s story, considering they were now the same person, and then mine.

The story of an Earth we had both lived in before coming to this fantasy world.

The archmage’s cane stopped tapping.

For the first time since we’d entered this room, his expression shifted from amused detachment to something else. Curiosity, maybe. Or the faintest stirring of genuine interest.

“Trish,” he repeated, rolling the name across his tongue like a foreign word he was trying to place. “That isn’t a name I managed to find in your memories.”

“It’s not from this world,” I said.

The silence that followed was absolute. Even the distant sound of the garden’s false wind from behind had died.

Evelina’s hand tightened around mine. Her nails pressed crescents into my palm, but she didn’t speak. This was my story to tell, or at least to start. She would fill in the gaps, share the parts I couldn’t using her perspective as Trish.

“Explain,” the archmage said. Not a demand, and quite a question either. Something in between.

“Another world,” I began, “far from here. No magic. No monsters. No gods watching from the heavens or demons whispering in your ear. Just people. Billions of them, living and dying without ever knowing places like this existed.”

“No magic?” The archmage’s brow furrowed. “How did they survive? How did they build anything? How did they—”

“Machines,” Evelina cut in. “They built machines. To fly, to communicate across vast distances, to heal the sick, to kill each other in ways that would make your trials look merciful.”

She spoke with a bitterness that wasn’t entirely her own, or maybe it was. The lines had blurred so much over the years that I couldn’t always tell where Trish ended and Evelina began.

Soul merging was still a strange thing to me, and I couldn’t tell how it worked. In fact, the only people who could probably understand it fully were those who had undergone it themselves.

“Fascinating,” the archmage murmured. “Go on.”

I told him about Earth.

Not everything, there wasn’t time for that, and much of it wouldn’t matter to him anyway. I told him about cities that touched the sky and vehicles that moved without horses or magic. About screens that showed moving pictures and boxes that held all the world’s knowledge. About wars fought with fire that fell from the clouds and plagues that could be stopped with a single needle.

About the loneliness of living in a crowd.

About the hunger for something more.

“When did you leave?” he asked.

“Not by choice,” I said.

A half-truth.

“One day, I was there. After my death, I was here. In this world. In a body that wasn’t mine, with magic I didn’t understand, wearing the face of someone who should have died.”

“And her?” He nodded toward Evelina. “Was she born here?”

“No,” Evelina said. “I was with him. On Earth. And then I arrived here, same as him, but in drastically different ways.”

Evelina’s hair and eye color started to shift the more she spoke.

She was taking the form of Trish.

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