CHAPTER 118: FRANTIC THOUGHTS

I stared at the feather.

It stared back. Or at least, that was the illusion my mind had conjured, because no reasonable person ever expects an inanimate object to hold the kind of silent menace usually reserved for knife-wielding maniacs in alleyways.

Yet there it sat, perched on the rough wooden table of the library’s makeshift room, black as the midnight of my worst regrets, gleaming faintly as if mocking me with its smug sheen. If feathers could smirk, this one was practically reciting poetry about my inadequacy.

I had tried, saints know I had tried, to dismiss it as just a feather. A thing birds made when they got tired of their plumage or decided the world needed more soft quills clogging up gutters.

But no. This was not some ordinary pigeon’s leavings. This was a statement. It had been left in the grass after the Man in White’s collapse, sharp as ink against the pale morning, as though some unseen hand had decided to brand the moment with a souvenir.

I hated it. I hated how it gleamed in the lantern light. I hated how it sat on the table like the centerpiece of my impending doom. Most of all, I hated how, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t stop glancing at it every five seconds as though it might flap its way into my soul.

"Stop glaring at it," Rodrick mumbled, his head slumped heavily against my shoulder.

"I’m not glaring," I said. "I’m simply... observing with hostile intent."

"That’s glaring."

"Semantics."

On my other side of me, Nara shifted in his sleep, his smaller frame tucked between us, his breath warm against my sleeve. He had insisted on keeping vigil with me but, predictably, had succumbed to unconsciousness within minutes.

Now he slept as though the apocalypse had been rescheduled and the only item left on his agenda was nestling as close as possible against my ribs.

It was almost sweet, if you ignored the fact that my arm was going numb and the feather was still plotting my murder.

I let my gaze wander around the cramped room. The shelves sagged under the weight of too many mismatched supplies: bandages beside atlases, rations beside treatises on forgotten kings. Lanterns swung lazily from hooks, their light painting everything in tired amber. The scent of old paper clung stubbornly beneath the fresher tang of sweat and damp wool.

All of it was noise, background filler, the world’s attempt at convincing me that things were still ordinary. But my mind refused to obey. My mind was circling the feather like a drunk circling a bar fight he knows he’s about to lose.

Could it be his? My sponsor’s? The thought kept gnawing at me, little teeth biting down on whatever tatters of calm I had left. A black feather, left behind as the Man in White bled and crumpled. Coincidence? Perhaps. But saints preserve me, I had stopped believing in coincidence the day I picked up this pen.

If my sponsor had been the one to attack him, what then? What was I supposed to do with that? March up to him, wave the feather in his smug little face, and demand answers?

As if he would ever answer me in plain words rather than cryptic riddles designed to make me doubt my own literacy. No, I would be left gnawing at the mystery like a dog at a bone, the marrow forever out of reach.

I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead, willing the thoughts away.

The Man in White, naturally, refused even now to speak of the matter. He had brushed off my questions with silence, or worse, that hollow laugh that felt less like amusement and more like resignation disguised as humor. Which meant I had nothing to cling to except paranoia. Lovely.

I tilted my head back, staring at the cracked ceiling beams. "This is fine," I muttered to myself. "Everything is fine. Just me, my cursed pen, my cursed stopwatch, my cursed sponsor, and one decorative cursed feather. Who needs therapy when you can collect ominous objects like they’re trading cards?"

Rodrick grunted in his sleep and shifted closer. His hair tickled my jaw, his breath warm against my neck. Nara made a soft sound, burrowing deeper. For a moment, I let myself breathe. For a moment, I allowed the warmth of their presence to thaw the ice in my chest. Perhaps if I sat still long enough, the feather would lose interest and leave me alone.

But the world has never been so kind.

Because beyond the feather, beyond the paranoia, loomed the next inevitable mountain: the final bracket.

I sighed, long and loud, the kind of sigh that made my ribs ache. The preliminaries had been a carnival of absurdity so far, but the final bracket was where absurdity sharpened into something lethal.

This was where the true monsters strutted, the kingpieces on the board, the giants that made the rest of us look like children cosplaying at war.

Even if we survived the last stage of the preliminaries, the bracket would kill us in spirit if not in body. I knew this. Saints, I knew it too well.

I had come far, I reminded myself. My natural aptitude with incarnate magic, my quick learning, my ability to adapt under pressure—all respectable qualities. Enough, perhaps, to scrape me up to a Knight-Class mage, if we were being generous.

But then there was my pen. My blessed, cursed, ink-stained miracle. With that in my hand, alongside the stopwatch I had recently regained, I reckoned I fell somewhere within Bishop-Class, maybe higher, if I was willing to gamble my soul on it.

The thought made me both giddy and nauseous. It was like realizing your rusty knife could occasionally perform the duties of a guillotine, provided you angled it just so.

Still, I couldn’t afford to rely solely on such a mindset. Power on paper meant nothing if the enemy refused to play by the rules.

Which brought me, inevitably, to the parade of elephants in the room. Four of them, to be precise, and each one eager to trample me flat.

First was the Lady of Fangs.

In her base form she was probably an Upper-Bishop, maybe brushing Rook-Class mage if we were being cruel about her diet. I had marked her twice, and saints bless her arrogance, she had all but invited me to try for the third.

However, if we ever met again in the final bracket, I knew she wouldn’t be so arrogant. Next time, she would be hunting me with every fang bared, every ounce of cunning sharpened to a knife’s edge.

And if she embraced her full vampiric form again... well. Let’s just say the words "massive problem" fail to capture the poetry of being outclassed so completely. She wouldn’t just topple me. She would drown me in my own inadequacy and call it a victory toast.

The fear of her wrath didn’t even compare to the thought of the king-class mage wandering freely, unattached, unrestrained. Just thinking of him made my lungs tighten. King-class. The kind of rank that bends the world around it, that laughs at armies, that turns tournaments into stages for idle warm-ups. Facing him would not be a fight. It would be suicide dressed in the guise of bravery.

However, all hope was not lost as there was still The Man in White.

I did not like admitting it, but facts rarely care about my preferences. He had stood against the Lady of Fangs at her full power and had deterred her with that strange ability of his. That placed him in the realm of King-Class, whether he admitted it or not. And if he was hiding his rank, then I could only assume his reasons were sinister, because saints forbid anyone in this world ever tell the truth about their capabilities.

Finally came the fourth elephant: the High Priest of the Southern Sun Cult. A mere rook-class mage by rank, but far more insidious for what lurked behind him. Callow’s words rang in my skull like a curse: how the cult was tied to Japeth of all people. Japeth, the ghost in my past, the shadow clawing at my heels. If he was tugging strings from behind the curtain, then the cult was not merely a nuisance. They were a knife angled at my back, one I could not predict.

The thought of all this made my head spin. It was too much, too heavy, like juggling knives while blindfolded, drunk, and standing on a greased stage.

Beside me, Rodrick’s breathing had slowed into the steady rhythm of deep sleep. Nara too was gone, his face relaxed, his hand twitching faintly against my sleeve as though even in dreams he wanted to hold on.

I exhaled, long and slow. My hand drifted to their heads, ruffling Rodrick’s hair first, then brushing Nara’s curls. The weight in my chest eased, just slightly. In a world bent on crushing me, here were two who leaned into me instead. That counted for something.

"Sleep well," I whispered. "Dream of places without feathers, fangs, or cultists."

Then, as carefully as I could, I slid out from between them, their warmth slipping from my sides like water. They stirred but did not wake, their bodies naturally curling together in my absence.

I stood, stretching stiff limbs, and glanced one last time at the feather on the table. It glinted mockingly, daring me to pick it up.

Not today. Today I would leave it there, sitting smug and silent. Today I would walk out into the library’s corridors, my thoughts a storm of tournaments, kings, and shadows, and I would try—just for a breath—to remember how to laugh in the face of it all.