Free Web NovelChapter 29: Chapter 29: Do You Want to Go Back?
Rain tapped softly against the window.
Not the violent kind of rain that came with storms and split skies apart with thunder, not the sort that carried magic or omens or bloodshed.
Just ordinary drizzling rain.
The kind that turned city lights blurry and made the world outside look softer than it really was.
Celestia sat cross-legged on her bed with her phone in one hand and a blanket thrown over her legs, staring dramatically at the messages flooding her screen.
Mina:
The heavy rain stopped ages ago.
Jay:
If you don’t come now we’re eating without you.
Lena:
You literally planned this outing 😭
Celestia sighed deeply like the burden of existence itself had fallen onto her shoulders.
"I was emotionally prepared to stay home when the heavy rain first started," she announced dramatically to absolutely nobody.
From somewhere downstairs, her mother’s voice floated upward immediately.
"Then emotionally prepare yourself to go outside!"
Celestia gasped.
"How do you always hear me?!"
"Because you inherited my dramatic personality!"
"That sounds like a personal problem!"
Her father laughed somewhere in the background — warm, familiar, automatic in the way certain sounds became after hearing them your entire life.
"Your mother has been standing near the stairs waiting for you to move for twenty minutes," he called up.
"I knew it," Celestia muttered.
The rain continued tapping gently against the glass.
Her room glowed softly in the evening light — warm lamp in the corner, clothes draped carelessly over a chair, music playing low from her speaker.
Home.
Her phone buzzed again.
Jay:
HURRY.
Mina:
If you don’t come in ten minutes we’re posting ugly pictures of you.
Celestia narrowed her eyes at the screen.
"Threats. Amazing."
She finally threw the blanket off herself and stood.
Immediately something slammed dramatically into her legs.
"Zeil!"
The silver dog barked once happily, tail wagging so hard his entire body moved with it. His green eyes gleamed brightly as he circled her excitedly.
"Yes, yes, I know." Celestia crouched down, grabbing his face dramatically between both hands. "You suffered greatly while I was sitting down for twenty minutes."
Zeil licked her cheek instantly.
"Disgusting," she informed him affectionately.
The dog barked again.
Downstairs her mother called, "Don’t forget your umbrella!"
"I won’t!"
"You forgot it yesterday!"
"Urm... I misplaced it!"
"That was careless still!"
Her father laughed again.
Celestia smiled before she could stop herself.
God.
She missed this already, and she hadn’t even left the house yet.
Zeil pushed his head under her hand impatiently, demanding more attention, and she laughed softly, scratching behind his ears.
"You’re clingy today."
His tail wagged harder.
Her phone buzzed once more.
Mina:
MOVE YOUR BODY CELESTIA.
"Oh my God, alright!" she groaned.
She stood, grabbing her jacket from the chair.
Immediately Zeil stood too.
Celestia looked down at him.
"No."
Zeil stared at her.
"No."
The dog wagged his tail harder.
Celestia narrowed her eyes.
Zeil barked once.
"...Fine." She pointed at him accusingly. "But if you embarrass me in public again like last time, I’m pretending I don’t know you."
The dog looked thrilled.
She walked toward the door and he followed immediately at her heels.
"Honestly," she muttered, opening the bedroom door, "you act like I’m going to disappear forever."
The hallway lights glowed warm gold.
The smell of food drifted from downstairs.
Her mother appeared at the bottom of the staircase holding an umbrella.
"There you are." She handed it over with the long-suffering expression of a woman who had raised her daughter long enough to expect nonsense as a default setting. "And take this one properly this time. Don’t abandon it somewhere because you got distracted."
"That happened once."
"It happened four times."
"Really?"
"Yes, really!"
Her father nearly choked laughing.
"Oh, she’s definitely your daughter," he told his wife.
"I know," her mother sighed dramatically. "I’ve accepted my fate."
Celestia grinned.
For one small ordinary moment, everything felt warm.
Safe.
Simple.
Then her mother reached forward suddenly and fixed her hair gently behind her ear.
The movement was so familiar that Celestia almost didn’t notice it.
"Don’t stay out too late," her mother said softly.
"I won’t."
"And text me when you get there."
"I always do."
"You forgot last week."
"Why are both of you attacking me today?"
"Because we love you," her father said immediately.
Celestia rolled her eyes automatically, but something in her chest tightened warmly anyway.
Zeil barked impatiently near the door.
"Yes, alright," she laughed.
"Someone here clearly has very important business outside."
She slipped on her shoes.
Opened the door.
Cool air rushed in carrying the scent of rain and wet pavement.
City lights shimmered against puddles.
Zeil wagged his tail beside her excitedly.
Celestia smiled.
"Okay, Zeil," she said softly.
"Let’s go."
Celestia woke up to birdsong.
Which was wrong, because the last thing she remembered was opening the front door and looking down at her dog.
Celestia opened her eyes slowly.
Sky above her.
Tree branches.
Morning light filtering through the leaves at the particular angle of early sunlight that existed before the world had fully committed to the day.
She woke with tears on her face.
For one terrible second, she could still hear her mother laughing downstairs.
Then even that faded.
She was under a tree.
A large one — old, thick-trunked, ancient enough that its roots twisted through the earth like veins beneath skin.
The ground beneath her was — she realized with some confusion — not exactly the ground. Something had been placed between her and the earth.
A dark garment.
Folded carefully.
Used as padding, essentially.
She looked at it.
Then she looked at herself.
Her left side — where the blade had connected during the ambush, where she had been managing something she had not intended to mention to anyone — was fine. freewebnoveℓ.com
Not improving.
Not healing.
Fine.
The fabric of her dress was still cut, but beneath it her skin was completely unmarked.
No wound.
No bruising.
Nothing.
She pressed her fingers carefully against the spot.
Nothing.
She sat up slowly.
And found herself looking directly at the tip of a sword.
Souldrinker.
Dark metal. Ancient. Hovering approximately three inches from her throat with the steady, unhurried certainty of a hand that did not shake.
Her eyes traveled up the blade.
To the hand holding it.
To the arm.
To the face of the person the arm belonged to.
Drazeil.
He was crouched in front of her — close, within arm’s reach, close enough that she could see the exact quality of his expression clearly.
Not the flat unreadable mask.
Not cold fury.
Something else.
Something she had not seen on his face before — sharp, focused, the expression of someone who had found something they were not expecting and was deciding what to do about it.
His eyes moved to her face.
To the tears on her cheeks.
Something shifted in his expression — brief, contained, the particular discomfort of someone encountering something they had no protocol for.
He did not look away exactly.
He looked elsewhere.
At the sword.
At the space beside her head.
At anything that was not the tears drying against her skin.
He cleared his throat.
Said nothing.
The sword did not move.
"Good morning," Celestia said, confused as to why she had to wake up in this world again.
"Who are you," he said.
She blinked.
"I beg your—"
"Who are you?"
Not a question.
A demand.
The sword remained steady. His eyes locked onto hers now — no longer avoiding the tears, looking past them instead, looking at something underneath them.
"You are not who you say you are."
Celestia looked at him for a long moment.
Then — slowly, deliberately, with the calm of someone who had decided that a sword at her throat was simply another thing to manage — she leaned back against the tree trunk behind her.
Settled.
Folded her hands quietly in her lap.
"Who am I?" she said softly. "If you ask me that question... I don’t think I know anymore."
His eyes narrowed slightly.
"You are not from here," he said.
Not a question either.
She looked at him.
At those heterochromic eyes — one red, one emerald — reading her with the ancient precision of something that had existed long enough to recognize things most people couldn’t see.
She thought about lying.
She thought about the hundred ways she had navigated impossible situations with pleasant smiles and carefully arranged composure.
But she was tired.
She was sitting beneath a tree in Valdenmoor with tears drying on her face and the memory of her mother’s hands over hers fading faster than she wanted it to.
She was simply tired.
"No," she said quietly.
"I am not from here."
The sword did not move.
But something in the hand holding it did — almost imperceptible, the faintest shift of someone receiving confirmation of something they suspected and discovering the truth was somehow stranger than the suspicion itself.
"I am what people call a transmigrator," she said. "Someone who came from another world and woke up inside this body."
She paused.
"This girl’s body. Her name was Celestia too."
A faint exhausted smile touched her lips.
"She looked exactly like me."
Another pause.
"Can you believe my luck."
She looked at him directly when she said that last part.
With tired humor.
With honesty.
Perhaps the most honest thing she had said out loud in weeks.
Drazeil looked back at her.
The sword lowered slowly.
Not fully.
Not sheathed.
But lowered.
Like a concession he was making without admitting he was making it at all.
He moved closer.
Not threatening now.
Studying.
The focused, unsettling study of someone examining something with every sense available to them.
His eyes moved slowly across her face.
Thoroughly.
Carefully.
And she let him look because she was too exhausted to perform composure anymore and because something about being seen — actually seen — even by him, felt less terrible than it usually did.
He was very close.
"If we are this close," she said quietly, "I might think you want to kiss me again."
"Shut up," he said immediately.
But something crossed his expression that was not entirely cold.
Something dangerously close to flustered.
On Drazeil.
Which should have been impossible.
He examined her silently for another long moment.
She watched him think.
Watched him process whatever he had found when he healed her.
Whatever had made him place a sword at her throat.
Whatever had stopped him from simply killing her.
She could practically feel him turning it over with the precise, methodical focus of a mind that did not tolerate loose ends.
"There are two souls in you," he said finally.
She went very still.
"Not two separate souls," he continued quietly. "Two halves. The same soul — split. Divided. Occupying the same body, but not joined."
A pause.
"They refuse to merge."
Celestia looked down at her hands.
Two halves of the same soul.
She turned the idea over carefully.
Thought about the blurry memories that had never fully settled into place.
The feelings that arrived without context — grief she hadn’t earned, love for people she hadn’t met, memories that belonged to another life wearing the same face.
The moments she could no longer tell which Celestia was feeling something.
Her.
Or the girl who had been here first.
"That explains some things," she said softly.
"It is not natural," Drazeil said. "Two halves of the same soul existing in separate worlds does not happen by accident."
She looked at him.
"What does it happen by?" she asked quietly.
For a moment, he said nothing.
Then—
"Design," he said.
The word landed softly between them.
Heavy anyway.
Celestia let it sit there without examining it too closely.
There were only so many enormous things she could process at once, and she was already at capacity.
"As you know," Drazeil said carefully, his voice quieter now, more deliberate, "I am a genie. Certain wishes fall within the scope of what the Pact allows."
She looked at him.
"I have the power," he said slowly, "to send you back. To your world. If that is what you—"
He stopped.
Just...
stopped.
Like something had reached directly into his chest and interrupted whatever words had been about to follow.
He looked away from her.
His jaw tightened.
Celestia watched him quietly.
Watched the interruption.
Watched whatever had stopped him move silently through his expression in the specific way of something he was refusing to show her and failing to hide completely.
"Why did you stop?" she asked softly.
No pressure.
Just curiosity.
He said nothing.
"Drazeil."
He looked back at her.
And then he asked it.
"Do you want to go back?"
Not as a genie clarifying a wish.
Not as an ancient king fulfilling an obligation.
Something else.
Something without a clean name yet.
Something hidden in the stillness of him waiting for her answer.
Something buried behind his eyes.
His eyes.
She looked at his eyes.
For half a heartbeat —
so brief she would later question whether she had imagined it at all —
both irises shifted.
Not red.
Green.
Both of them.
Fully.
Completely green.
Warm in a way she had never seen his eyes look warm before.
Like something ancient and deeply buried had surfaced for half a second before being dragged back down again.
Ba thump.
Her heart.
Ba thump. Ba thump.
Loud.
Unreasonable.
Entirely beyond her control.
She looked at him —
at the question still hanging quietly between them,
at the eyes that were red and emerald once more like nothing had happened,
at the tightness in his jaw,
at the sword he had lowered,
at the man who had stayed beneath a tree all night,
who had healed her wound,
who had discovered two halves of her soul,
and was now asking her —
asking her, not commanding her, not offering freedom as obligation—
Do you want to go back?
She opened her mouth.
