Chapter 36: The Map of a Broken World
Ren turned the fragile pages over and over. "I'm a Magic Crow, but I can't even heal a papercut," he whispered, looking at his bandaged hand. "Where is the 'Cure'? Is it on the next page?"
He realized he didn't have a sequence. The first page he had read was Page 48, but the one underneath it was Page 35. Thomas's journal was a jigsaw puzzle of madness and truth. Ren smoothed out Page 35 and began to read the frantic, messy handwriting of a man who didn't know who he was anymore.
*"I have spent my entire life trying to find a way back to our world. I think I was from China... or maybe Pakistan? I remember a flag—green and white—when I died. But then, more memories came, and they were Chinese. It doesn't matter. I never learned English in my old life; I learned it here, from others like us who were hiding in the shadows.
Listen to me: Do not try to go back. There is no door. There is no portal. You are stuck here, so stop dreaming of home and start surviving."*
Ren felt a pang of sadness. Thomas was a man lost between two worlds. He continued reading.
*"There are four main islands in this sea. Three are massive, and one is small. We are on Aethelard. Then there is Onyx Reach, and the most advanced one, The Iron Archipelago—that place is filled with machines and metal.
Then there is the fourth. The small one. The Petrified Land. It is cursed. Vaner ships circle it constantly, maintaining a massive energy shield to keep the Cursed Ferals inside. That shield is powered by a Vane Core. It is the most concentrated energy in existence. If you so much as touch it, you won't just die—you will turn into ash in a single second."*
Ren gulped. Aethelard felt small all of a sudden. But the last paragraph made his heart stop.
"Each of the Big Three islands has a King. But our King, Ziro, is a fraud. He wasn't born into royalty. Fifteen 'Vers' ago—or years, as we used to say—there was a Great War. Back then, Ziro was just a fifteen-year-old boy. His real name was Kaito..."
Ren dropped the paper. His breath became shallow, and the room felt like it was spinning.
"Kaito?" Ren whispered into the empty room. "My big brother... the one who left us when I was a kid. The one who promised to come back for us."
He remembered the day his brother vanished. He was only three or four, but he remembered a tall figure walking away into the mist. He had always hated his brother for abandoning them to poverty, for leaving Hana to suffer.
"No... it can't be him," Ren hissed, his eyes darting back to the paper. "My brother was a coward who ran away. He couldn't be the King of Aethelard."
He picked the page back up, his hands shaking so much he could barely read the last few lines.
"...Kaito was a soldier in that war. He did something terrible to get that throne. He sacrificed everything, including his own blood, to ignite the Vane Core and claim the crown. If you ever meet him, do not call him 'King.' Call him by his true name, and watch his world crumble."
The silence in the room was deafening. Ren looked at the door, knowing Hana was sleeping just a few feet away. If King Ziro was Kaito, then Hana wasn't just a girl from the slums. She was the sister of a King.
And Ren wasn't just a student. He was the brother of a monster.